The Joe Rogan Experience - #1698 - Neill Blomkamp

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

Neill Blomkamp is a film director, producer, screenwriter, and animator. His latest film, "Demonic," is in theaters and video on demand now.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Nice to meet you, man. Nice to meet you. It's a pleasure. I've enjoyed your movies immensely. Thank you. So it's very cool to meet you in person. Yeah, thank you for inviting me down. It's awesome to be here.

It's awesome to have you. And we were talking just before we started about this t-shirt which is a design it's bob lazar's sketch of what he allegedly saw yes inside a hanger at area s4 yeah so and what i was asking you is whether you think what he is saying is in fact true or not do Do you believe what he is saying? The problem is I want to believe it. That's always causing a bias. Yes, for sure. Whenever anything comes with UFOs, I want to believe far too much. Yeah.

Not far too much because I've had people on here where in the middle of talking to them like this sounds like horseshit. It's so strange because I watched that whole interview and I read a bunch of, I read a whole bunch of articles around Bob Lazar as well. And I wanted to be true incredibly badly. It's so hard. I need it to be true. But, but I also, um, some,

if I have any rationality, some, some rational element of my brain is saying it is not possible. And, uh, which possible, which is strange. I mean, you know, I don't know why I'm just not believing it, but I believe him, but I don't know if there is an aircraft from another galaxy in a hangar in the United States somewhere. See, it's not necessarily from another galaxy. The thing about all this stuff is we're assuming that we have

an accurate understanding of what's currently possible with technology. I don't necessarily know if that's correct. And it is possible that they were experimenting with some really wild shit.

So you think it could be human-made? If it's real at all, it's a physical thing, right? If it's real and it isn't a hanger, it's a physical thing. has a questionable education background, who obviously is brilliant and obviously has a deep understanding of propulsion systems. He strapped a rocket engine to the back of his Honda. Yeah, to a Civic. Yeah. He's a wild dude.

Yeah. Clearly a super, super intelligent guy, but doesn't have the best credentials in terms of his education background, his accomplishments, published papers. Why would they pick him? Why would they pick him? Why would they pick him? He thinks they picked him because they were just banging their heads off the wall trying to figure out how to back engineer these things or what these things were.

And they said, let's think outside the box and let's get this genius guy who worked at Los Alamos Labs. Let's get a different point of view. Yeah, clearly a super, super intelligent guy. But maybe they fabricate this horseshit narrative to him. You know, we found this in an archaeological dig. But maybe what this is is there's some understanding of propulsion systems or of some sort of-

Anti-gravity. Gravity, yeah. Some gravity system that supposedly operates on this element, element 115. The thing about his story that's fascinating to me is that it's never changed. It's remarkably consistent. If you go all the way back to like 1989 there's that interview with him like uh isn't there an interview with him in a in a he's sitting in a car somewhere in like the late 80s talking about it just george knapp's interview right yeah yeah

it started out with a silhouette they had a fake name for him and then i believe his story is that they were threatening his life and he was really worried. So he just decided, look, I'm just going to release my full name. I'm going to tell my full story and that will offer me some level of protection. Because if I don't tell the story, then they could kill me and the story just dies. I don't know if that would work today. Yeah. I don't know if it worked then. It's hard to know.

It's hard. You know, you're hoping the guy's telling the truth, which is a real issue for me, because I 100% would like it to be true. Same. There's no part of me that wants it to be fake. So then I have to say, like, how much bias am I inserting into my interpretation of his story? It's hard to tell. I don't, you know, it's possible that that's ours. It's possible that there's a thing like that. But doesn't he go into a lot of detail about,

maybe I read it somewhere else, but the height of the occupants of it, right? They're all sort of like four foot or less. So, I mean, the level of sort of US military deception to start building miniaturized seats and stuff and lower ceilings. It's like, how far does the conspiracy go? But whatever it is, I kind of hope it's real. I hope it's real. Yeah. But what I'm saying is, if you had, look, the possibility of it being from another galaxy is so crazy that the idea of them pretending it's from another galaxy

is not that crazy. Like if they say, oh, little tiny green guys, they live inside this little ship and it's real easy for them to fly around. Like that's easier than it actually being from another galaxy and actually being designed for these little tiny creatures that live in this other galaxy.

It would be cool to push that further where they also build some kind of, like get into real sort of gene therapy or something and make humanoid aliens to continue that on. Or some sort of a biological robot, like some sort of a thing. Like a cybernetic, some kind of bipedal, something really terrifying that they could release. Well, if you follow all the lore on UFOs these creatures all look like what eventually human beings are probably gonna look like these tiny little

Frail things with huge heads like if you go from chimps to us chimps are massively muscular They have smaller brains. You know, they're hugely violent, covered with hair. And as human beings get more and more evolved or as, you know, Australia Pythica is and the Homo sapien and then what we are right now, we look at us and we're kind of like, you know, we're sitting at desks all day and we don't really need muscles. We have all these different methods of communication. And propelling ourselves. We're moving around in cars that drive themselves. And if Elon Musk has his way and they get that Neuralink thing and they start drilling holes in your brain, we're not going to need words to talk. This is what he said to me.

He said, you're not going to need to use words to communicate. Have you ever heard of the Hogan twins in British Columbia? They're joined, they're co-joined twins. And their brain is linked. There's a piece of one part of the stem, I think, is linked between them. And they can tell jokes to one another with no words. Right. Whoa. Yeah. They can also see to one another with no words right whoa yeah they can also see through one another's eyes so yeah you should look into it it's pretty it's pretty amazing i feel like um someone that that you would be interested in if you don't know him already is the is the canadian science fiction author peter watts do you know have you heard no i haven't heard of him he's a hard sci-fi writer who I just love his stuff.

I came across it recently. And he used to be a marine biologist. So he was a scientist who got into writing science fiction novels and has an extreme understanding of evolutionary biology. He'd be very interesting to speculate on like what the human form would look like, you know, a few, a few hundred generations from now. I always felt like the aliens that you see in like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, these, that, that iconic shape, it's almost like we have an understanding of where we're going. Some innate, like sort of shedding hair, everything becomes cerebral. There would obviously, yeah, there would be a Neuralink, like heavy, um, uh, sort of brain computer interface system where everything would be, would be, you know,

would allow you to go somewhere else. One of the things that Peter Watts, I'm working with him on a sci-fi idea at the moment. And one of the things that he is into is this idea that he thinks that consciousness expands to the amount of neurons that are available to it. It's like a fluid thing that moves, right? And so if you use the twins from Canada as an example, what he's saying is happening with them is the way that their brain is linked, the data pipe isn't fat enough, right?

It's more like dial-up rather than high, you know, broadband. volume of data of information being sent between the two brains, what would happen at a certain point is the two versions of self would dissolve into one united self. And you would have one super organism that would be the consciousness of both. And if you were to somehow remove that, if you were to limit the bandwidth again, those two souls would never return. Because the way the neural system has been aligned at the point that you poured more, you allowed the consciousness to expand, it never reverts back. So you can imagine a world where like Neuralink talks about, you know, if you fuse

hundreds of brains together in some kind of hive mind and everyone can think together, what may happen is you may actually get a situation where you create a super intelligence that is, what may happen is you may actually get a situation where you create a super intelligence that thinks of itself as I, and you are unable to undo that. It's sort of not clear exactly what would happen to each individual node of consciousness if you ever try to reverse it again. Whoa. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, so— If Neuralink really can accomplish something like that that could like legitimately well i think i think the sort of science fiction um version of thinking about the topic is that you create a hive mind of where you can imagine your brain interfacing with hundreds of other humans and you can share ideas quicker than you can that you can speak and yeah things could be passed back and forward emotionally, things like that, right? Right. But probably what may happen is maybe what happens is one form of consciousness spreads across all of them. And you end up with something that's thinking on levels that humans have never thought on before. And it's also not able to revert back to anything that is understandable. Because you'll be connected inexorably.

You disappears. Yeah. It, sort of like ego death and the idea of one super thing. So if you, oh God, so if the entire human race connects to this thing, there's no more human race. There's no more individual. You could, I mean, hypothetically, it could be some sort of like neurally linked,

you know, super organism that would just never return to individual humans. Maybe that's how we all get along. Yeah, that would solve, that would solve, I mean, yeah. It would solve everything. Maybe we wouldn't see images coming out of Afghanistan like we're seeing at the moment if we had one of those. It would solve everything, but you also wouldn't be surprised by individual creativity. Maybe it would just turn the light switch off. As soon as it achieved that, it just clicks it off. Maybe it's antinatalist and it shouldn't

think we should be here at all. Well, yeah. Like at a certain point in time, what do we lose that we love about being human? And like how much of the chaos and the negative aspects of human beings and human nature is necessary for art and creativity and all the things like your movies. Like no one's going to make a cool movie if we can all read each other's minds. Well, I think art, I think everything humans do is as a result of taking a primordial brain that is, because, I mean, we're all slaves to just biological programming. That's all we really are. And then you're coupling a supercomputer to it. You're coupling the first self-aware logic and rationality supercomputer to a bunch of ancient biological needs and programs.

And I think that tug of war yields everything, you know, that we understand. It yields creativity. It yields territorial disputes, you know. Yeah. Love, passion. Bonding with partners. Yeah, everything. Anxiety, fear. It's all a result of that.

So to take that away, I mean, you know, it's an understandable thing. I don't think we can comprehend it. you yeah it's it's it's an understandable thing i don't think we can comprehend it well when you follow this line of thinking with the evolution of the alien form one of the things is they have no genitals they're formless they have no muscles they're asexual and you know there's they're yeah if you think about what we need, right, the biological needs to reproduce are responsible for so much negativity, but also so much positivity, so much chaos, so much entropy, so much momentum. Yeah, it's yin and yang. It's complete yin and yang. that all this war and chaos and stealing and murder, what this is about is biological needs that we can bypass with technology

and we can reproduce through some sort of genetic engineering instead of just intercourse. I agree. I mean, the thing that's fascinating, though, is that you may end up with a culture that really is just, it's so alien that it might as well not be human, you know, even if it's a step forward, which it probably would be. But is it a step forward? I mean, well, it depends how you define forward. Cause it's, I mean, that's, what's so fascinating

about any discussion, like, like the negativity around people building rockets, like Elon and, and Beezus going up into space and like, you know, a lot being along the lines of Elysium in some ways it's like, it's like, so are we not supposed to move forward at all? What is the, you know, so if we can't agree on what the end goal is that we're striving for, then there's going to be many disputes about the sort of road between here and there. So I'm all for exploration and for us trying to better ourselves. And I think part of that is about leaving the planet. I'd rather put money into that than have it squandered in what clearly we seem to squander it on. Well, not only that, in the case of Bezos and Elon Musk, now you're dealing with private companies that are involved in this, which is really fascinating.

Because instead of it all being like NASA and the argument was like, why is NASA spending all this money on this when we have people starving here on Earth? Yeah. It's not governmental. Right. Well, it is kind of though. Isn't it sort of subsidized? Like doesn't SpaceX have a contract with NASA? Yeah.

No, I mean it's definitely subsidized. But it's less than a NASA budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's a very different scenario where you have these super genius billionaire characters who are essentially living out a sci-fi movie. They're living out Contact. That's really what they're doing. I wonder if they built two in Contact.

In case some religious nut blows one of them up. It's a separate launch site. I am so obsessed with this concept of life from somewhere else that, like, as I said before, with the Bob Lazar story, it's really hard because I want it to be real. The thing that gets me more than anything is not just Bob Lazar, but people like Commander David Fravor that had that encounter with the Tic Tac. Like those guys. No, I agree with you. I mean, it's completely, completely inexplainable.

Right. It just defies logic. So, I mean, I guess the next thing you can move to is it's built by humans. It's just super advanced. Right. Which is the most plausible. The most plausible because we know humans and we know humans. There was some sort of technology that they were trying to get patents for.

But what was that thing that we, Jamie, what is it? The CIA had UFO technology that they were trying to patent. There's some sort of gravitational. Here it is. I think it's this. The Navy. I think so. What is behind the U.S. Navy's UFO fusion energy patent?

So this thing was, we were reading it going, what the fuck does this mean? And so the idea behind it, where are you going? I'm trying to find something that doesn't have a bunch of ads on it. Oh. I'm not going away. Okay. Yeah, but I see where you're going. So it was a fusion. Go back to, but I see where you're going. So it was a fusion.

Go back to that, please, where you just were. So here it says it's a fusion device, and this thing is some sort of a – where were you at before? This is exactly where I was. So I clicked on this to try to get better. Oh, good. It was just the beginning of the article. It's a fusion reactor for U.S. energy independence.

The physicist appears to have bona fide credentials, including a Ph.D. from Case Western, and published some of his work while much of it is presumably classified. And so the idea is that this is some sort of novel propulsion system. And a lot of people were going over this stuff stuff going, well, what the fuck is this? UFO patent. Like, what does this mean? And what does this propulsion system consist of? And what I get from people that are talking about it is that it's at least similar to what these people are describing in terms of this device.

There's that thing right there, actually, that little object right there that supposedly Bob Lazar worked on. Yeah. That it worked on this gravitational field created by this element 115, which we talked about was only theoretical up until the early 2000s when they actually used a particle collider and managed to prove its existence. Bob Lazar claims they had a stable version of this element 115, and that was the propulsion, the fuel, or whatever.

I'm not exactly sure how it worked. They used a piece of this element 115, and through some method. It was creating a gravity field. Yeah. It was synthetic gravity. That's the idea. And then someone, he also said someone cut into it and caused some kind of nuclear explosion in the desert.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, the thing I think that the whole discussion comes back to is I wish that it was built by some other super intelligent species on some other planet, just because that would be cool. Yeah. That would be awesome. Exactly. And, and, and which is, which is tied to the discussion about, you know, where, where do we think we're going and what do, what do we think the outcome is from sort of being human and going through an evolutionary process? Cause that's the other thing with the common conception is that, well, we're here, like we're human. It's like, no, we're maybe one fifth or one, one millionth or one, 100 millionth of the journey of evolution of what we will become. We're, we're, we're somewhere along the timeline that you've hit

pause and we look kind of like this. It's why I have lower back plane from playing squash because I shouldn't have a shitty single column spine. You know, I should have like eight spines. Yeah. And, but it's cause I used to be quadrupedal and then I became bipedal and now, you know, I have, I have structural issues. Um, so where are we going is, is a question that I think if there, if humans could come to some kind of, if it was discussed more, like what, what are we actually aiming for? What are we trying to make? The whole rockets leaving earth discussion gets framed in a different way, right? It starts becoming like, what are we preserving? Are we trying to preserve

consciousness? Is that important? You know, it, cause I think it is. And, and so what in, in a million years, what would you like, what would you like to see happen? It won't be something you'll understand. It'll be a completely different organism. But would it become transcendent? Is it like God? Right. What is it? What is it?

So those kind of discussions are really interesting, and they're at the backbone of things to do with either religion or finding UFOs that are in Area S4 in Nevada, in my mind. Well, it seems like human beings have this innate desire to constantly improve upon everything they've created. And the way I've talked about it, it's almost like bees building a beehive. Do they really, how do they know what they're doing? They just do it. Like, this is what bees do.

They make beehives. And they're really incredibly complex, but they don't have a manual. They don't have written history that they follow. It's like a biologically coded thing that they do. I think we have some weird biological coding to constantly and consistently improve upon everything that we've created and to innovate and to constantly come up with new ideas. And when a new, completely transcendent idea like the Internet, for example, comes along, you see how it has this massive shift in global culture, in every single aspect of human life.

Yeah, it changes the trajectory of the culture. And these things can happen in these big explosions, like an Internet, like a combustion engine, like the printing press, like so many different things that happen, and it causes this huge wave of innovation to be spread off from that. And I've said multiple times that what I think we're doing is we are in some ways like an electronic caterpillar that's making a cocoon, and we're going to give birth to this butterfly and this butterfly is probably going to be a form of artificial life yeah and then we're going to which is instantly innovate until completely accurate like some some kind of in an in a in

a sense that we're a stepping stone biologically to something else it's like we're the first sentient self-aware species that's able to use our hands to build tools to go further down the line and carry the ball a certain amount of distance until through what we do, we give birth to something that, you know, is just far outstrips us and goes off to do other things. And that's probably how it's going to play out. I mean, I think as soon as you start introducing AI and maybe you have hybrid, you know, human AIs, but they will start communicating in ways that we can't. Yeah. And the other thing is, is where I mean, it's so funny when it when it becomes a religious discussion where it's like people are people are totally atheist, which I can't I don't understand that approach. Like because it's the Big Bang is science fiction.

Yeah. Like, because it's the big bang is science fiction. Right. So it's like, I'm not that version of science fiction with the space God, but I am the version where all matter and everything that I know blew out of like one, 100 trillionth of, you know, of a grain of rice and came into existence. And it's like, sure, that could have happened. But it also means that there is some unbelievably complicated shit going on that maybe you should be a little bit more open-minded about some of the other things that are out there. Yeah. Right.

That's the ultimate science fiction. Yeah. No, it's like – It's the ultimate science. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The ultimate – the craziest thing that you could come up with would be to sit at a typewriter like Asimov and write, first there was nothing, and then everything exploded out of a grain of rice into being.

It's like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds like, let me just knock down any discussions about God, but that sticks. What's even really crazy is it's universally agreed upon, right? Like all these cosmologists go, yep, that's it. Like it's the wildest theory ever ever and that's the one they all agree happened yeah and maybe it did but um you know it's like to buy into it and to believe along to just go down that road it's like you got to be open to everything what's also we're thinking at scale right because that thing that happened happened 14 billion years ago or whatever it was. You know, they're not exactly sure. But the idea is that maybe it's a consistent process where the thing blows up and then retracts and becomes that grain of rice again and then blows up again.

Well, that was Hawking's thing, right? Yeah. Was reverse at a certain point. It begins to – it reverses and time plays backwards. Yeah. And it collapses in on itself. But I think someone just disproved that. Um, until someone disproves that. Yeah, exactly. It's just, just, it just carries on forever. I mean, I, I, my own point of view with

all, with, with thinking that, that, you know, extravagant is, is that I, I think I'm a complete solipsist. I think everything around me is some sort of holographic thing that I'm dropped into for the duration of my life. And when I die, it all disappears. Really? Yeah, I kind of do think so. I think it's, I also think that there's, there's everything that is going to happen has already happened. And there's a paradox where free will also exists. So I think that, I think I have the ability to go around and act with free will. I don't think that things are completely deterministic. Um, but I think the free will is informed by the biological programming we were talking about before. Um, but I'm still choosing within a

given set of what I'm allowed to choose from. But the paradox is also that I think that by, you know, I'm probably on my deathbed. If you collapse time down and look at it as like a linear, you know, thing, if you just, if you just observe it, it's like, Neil's death is here, his birth is here, these are these other events. Theoretically, with free will, as you move through that three dimensional map, these other events should change, right? Each day with choices you make, all of these other outcomes should move. And somehow I don't think they do. I think that they're kind of locked in place. And Nietzsche speaks about that. He calls it eternal recurrence. And it's like eternal recurrence was something that I got quite interested in because it felt true to me.

How so felt true? it in because it felt true to me. How so felt true? Well, he says that what happens is that your life is set and all of the events within your life not only are set, but they will also recur infinitely through time. So instead of the idea of reincarnation, it's almost like the idea of reincarnation into your own life eternally. And so someone else from a different point of view would be able to see this event of like Joe Rogan's life and see you make these choices. And then they would see you begin and make these choices again. And he kind of used it as a thought experiment where he said that if I went to most people out in the world and I said to them that your life is going to repeat exactly like this forever, he said it was a burden that would be too heavy for most people to be able to deal with. Yeah. That their life is – that they don't want to live their life over the way that they've lived it enough that it would be literally the worst burden that they could be given.

I've pondered this before and I've heard this brought up before. In fact, Elio Gracie is a famous Brazilian jujitsu guy who was, he's the patriarch of like the greatest martial arts clan ever. He believed that. He believed you will live your life over and over again until you get it right. Yeah. Nietzsche is saying that you don't get the chance to do it right. It's locked in place. It's locked in place exactly the same way forever? Yeah. But why?

Why would he believe that? Because- But if you believe in free will- That's the paradox. Yeah. So if you believe- I think you'll make the same choices over and over. But why?

Because you're not learning each time you go back. It's not a different version of you. It's the same version of you, but why but because you're not learning each time you go back you're not it's not a different version of you it's the same version of you but why haven't you learned from the past because you it to us we are the birth and the death is one event but if you are having the same life experience over and over and over again what is you if that's you having the same is it new versions of you or is it you no it's just one it's just you yeah and why don't you learn well what what he because from from a from a three-dimensional standpoint in in that linear timeline when you die you that feels like the end of the play. From a fourth dimensional, different observational standpoint, you can watch it repeating. But his point was with free will

inside of that linear timeline, you should live your life in a way that you would want it to go on forever. It was sort of a thought experiment. But what I was getting at was the feeling that to me, it feels like things are set in place. And because this comes from the solipsistic thing that we were talking about, where I think that it's it's all in the the person it's in the observer's eyes. Right. And by the end, I also think time is an illusion as well. So by the time you get to the end of your life and you're lying on your deathbed, you you all of these events could have been a dream. It could just be a fever dream. So they weren't because free will exists and you acted on them. But time compresses down to this moment. And that's the only thing that's there is this present moment that you're living inside of. But it's being committed to this idea that all these things are playing out.

Is that comforting? Is that why you're willing to embrace it that way that there's no getting around this and that this is what it is no i mean i don't i don't act like i don't have free will right and i don't act like things are set in place i just on a very very deep subconscious level i feel like they are so you feel like fate is real in some ways in some in some ways it is yeah I do think there's a paradox, though. I think there's a definite paradox. Do you think about that when you're making films?

Do you think, like, because the creative process of writing and then I'm sure I've never edited a film, but I would imagine editing and filming it and choosing the angles. You're visualizing this creation and you're putting it together and then ultimately you get a final product and that's what people go to see. It's similar to people's lives.

I mean, you could say, right? The choices that you're making because there's infinite possible outcomes and you're collapsing that down. You're collapsing the wave function into one outcome. And so that's what I think is happening. I think that we are given infinite numbers of options and we have the ability to act on those. We choose a path. And in the action of choosing, we collapse all possibility to one outcome and the tree is crushed down.

One of the things that I've always thought of when it comes to ufos this is like a side pondering is that the preposterous nature of them the the things like what commander david fravor saw the things like what bob lazar saw it's almost like the universe is trying to let you know that you don't know shit like that this weird little possibility that is not outside of the realm of what's potentially available. If you think about the idea that there's hundreds of billions of stars just in this galaxy, and there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, and right here on this planet where we walk, there's two super billionaires that are currently shooting rockets into space.

NASA has a rover right now on Mars that's roaming around, taking photos, sending them back to us, high resolution. We know that all that's possible. Why wouldn't it be possible for something from some other place to come and visit us? But yet the fact that it does it seems so crazy It seems so fake it in in many ways it makes me really ponder simulation theory Because it seems so weird that this this thing can go from

60,000 plus feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second and then take off. Like a video game. Like it's behaving with different laws of physics. The Drake equation is that equation, right? The number of planets that could potentially house life. Right. And then this is what I think is happening. What I think is happening is that the concept of the great filter, where if the Drake equation has X number of exoplanets that have liquid water and the ability to harbor life,

and there's however many hundred million of them, and we see dark, dark night skies with no aliens, then the idea of the great barrier being a filter for something happening to all of these things, like they reach a certain level of civilization and then they snuff themselves out somehow. Yeah. Seems, seems relatively plausible to me because I see us doing that. It's certainly plausible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's also plausible that some of them, like maybe there, maybe, maybe a couple make it through and you, you know, we end up with, we end up seeing some other life form. Well, the variability of intelligent life that we have here,

like we know octopus or octopi are super intelligent, right? Even though they don't have the ability to manipulate their environment like we do because they're in the water, it's a different environment. But they have insane intelligence, as do dolphins. And you could see them getting more intelligent evolutionarily. Ravens and crows are also like really really smart right so the idea that the only way you get intelligence is bipedal hominids seems kind of silly there there could very well be some super intelligent thing that instead of manipulating its environment in the way we do

it figured out a way through evolution to join minds in some strange way but it doesn't travel it doesn't yeah it would it would be a it would be some sort of evolutionary mutation that just is sort of anti you know it's it's it's counterintuitive and surprising in the way that it took form like oh shit all of these starfish linked together and they built a nuke right it's surprising right they figured out a way to will a nuke into existence. Yeah. They figured out a way to use their minds to manipulate matter in a way that's unheard of here on Earth. Yeah.

It's like a frog hacked DARPANET or something and launched a nuke. I don't know. I mean, to me, the most interesting part of the whole discussion is just what the end goal is really. Like what do we think we're building towards? We make things if you looked at us from above if you were an outside life form that it was completely objective Not human at all and you came to this plan you go What is going on with this number one species that seems to be on every single continent like rats on a sinking ship? Like what are they what are they doing? They're making things they're making better things the whole lot of them all over the world are consistently making things

yeah it does it does also feel like some form of adolescent life form that's between super intelligent and and primitive you know it feels like a halfway mark because it's polluting the planet it's overpopulating it's it's it's kind of like things are things have gotten away from it even though it's able to build a certain amount of highly advanced things and i wonder if those things getting away from it the pollution the overfishing the changing of the environment the co2 levels almost motivates this acceptance of the symbiotic relationship with man and organ and and uh electronics because that's the only way out of it yeah at this point yeah yeah we figure out the only way out of this

is some sort of a technological advance yeah that we don't really understand yet yeah like that's what's gonna some kind of ai yeah system that's thinking right because it'll be able to think through things that we can't so just like just flip the switch and let StarNet go live. Yeah. Let's just turn it on. Well, when you make films like Elysium, you know, these dystopian films about potential futures, it's got to like sort of spark these thoughts in your mind, like how many of these possibilities could we encounter in our lifetime? Well, Elysium was, I mean, Elysium and District 9 are both kind of cut from the same cloth in the sense that I do think a lot of that had to do with growing up in South Africa and just being affected by, I'm very naturally interested in how society seemed to stratify and how wealth and inequality, you know, again,

this is biological programming, right? Like I think, I think that people hang on to resources that they have as much as they can. And so you end up with, you end up with, with billionaires, um, because it's, it's an understandable thing, right? It makes total sense. You're just hoarding food in your cave to live through the winter, you know, and keep your family safe. So, but Elysium really, if District 9 was the sort of racial part of growing up in South Africa and just being very aware of the environment that I was in, then Elysium is the kind of wealth discrepancy part of it, you know, where South Africa and Brazil and India would be in first place when it comes to that. And you just see very, you see imagery that's extremely striking in that country that leaves an indelible mark on you, I think. Actually, you know, the inspiration for Elysium, the whole thing actually for me was I was shooting commercials in, it was 2005 and I had started directing commercials and I

was doing a commercial for Nike and I was in San Diego and the line producer that I was working with really wanted to go to Tijuana. And I was like, sick, I didn't want to go. And he's like, we got to get in the car and we got to go to Tijuana. Like now we got to go down there and get a beer or something. And I was like, I really don't want to do this. And he's like, let's just go. It'll be fine. So I went, we went through the border into there and get a beer or something. And I was like, I really don't want to do this. And he's like, let's just go. It'll be fine. So I went, we went through the border into Mexico as the sun was going down. And we got there and got onto, you know, we were on some street corner and we bought beers. And then we were walking around in Tijuana with the beers.

And these federales saw us doing it. And we got arrested, like kind of relatively violently where we were, you know, it was a shakedown for money, obviously, but it was like, we, we got cuffed and thrown in the back of a police car. And then they started driving out of Tijuana in the darkness. And, um, and the producer that I was with kept putting like a hundred dollar bills through the graded thing to the, to the front seats. And then once there was enough money that had gone through, they just kind of opened the doors and let us out. And we had to walk back to where the car was. How far was the walk?

I don't remember how long we were walking for. It felt long. It felt like 40 or like an hour, maybe 40 minutes, somewhere in there. But the thing that was crazy about it was I could see U.S. Blackhawks flying the border with like lights on them and floodlights on the far on the U.S. side. And we were walking through basically favelas with dogs barking and like they had dropped us in places that like tourists from the U.S. would never go. So we were walking in basically what felt like a South African shantytown in Mexico with feral animals and just like this. But to see this country that, you know, was this sort of global hyper power that everyone from Mexico was moving into,

was trying to get into, was incredibly striking. Like it was just crazy. I mean, it is crazy if you think about that, that level of poverty up against the US border. And then, and I think Elysium really was the sort of subconscious part of it with South Africa, but the conscious part was that. In that moment, I was like, I really want to find a way to turn that experience into into visuals that represent these two worlds that live on one another's doorstep like this so you were as you're walking by you could see the planes that were flying over the u.s side not the planes it was border patrol there were blackhawks oh helicopters that were yeah that were flying the border and um and just flood just floodlights or floodlights, like along the,

along the fence, along the perimeter. Like, I guess they'd driven us kind of like, you know, East of, of where we were. It was weird. It was, it was, it was very impactful though. Like it had a huge effect on me. And you get to imagine these people living in this environment, looking literally visually seeing this place where the world is completely different right there and trying to figure out how to get over there. And where there is opportunity and a way out of poverty. And South Africa has something similar happening. It's just that the difference is it's all happening within one country, right? And so that leads to gated communities and, you know, the rich getting richer and sort of separating and the poor again getting poorer.

And I mean, it's a phenomenon that's seen across the whole world. But in South Africa, it's right there because it's the way that the society, you know, is set up. And obviously, in America, you'll see that same sort of wealth stratification begin to happen more and more. But at the moment, being on either side of the border, you can see it. The current situation in South Africa with the recent riots and chaos, what is your take on all that? I mean, it seems like it's Jacob Zuma as the ousted president moving to try to create calamity for the current president. And it's divisions within the ANC. So I think, I guess what I'm saying is I think it was political in the way that some of those riots potentially

happened and not as simple as what it appears to be. And growing up in South Africa and creating these movies like District 9, do you feel like you have an obligation to sort of illuminate a perspective through these movies? Like, what do you, did it just sort of motivate your creativity? Yeah, I mean, I'm always really weary when filmmakers say that they, you know, I think at the end of the day, you're just making films. And it's what I think I'm trying to do as an artist is reflect the world that I see back to the audience. Like this is the world through Neil's eyes, right? Is it's, it's, that's the kind of creativity that I'm interested in. And that's why walking through that area in Mexico, looking at the U S border,

the feeling was I wanted people to, I don't, I'm not sure if someone from Beverly Hills knows what that feels like. Right. Right. And it's like, it would be interesting to create a film that attempted to create what this feeling is like. And so I think a lot of what I'm trying to do as a filmmaker is just show the world through my eyes, but I would never be so, you know, presumptuous as to say that that there's some level of importance to what I'm doing or, you know, I don't know if that's the right way for me to think about it. Right. I didn't mean like a level of importance, but you almost feel like you have an obligation to express the way you see it. I mean, I feel an impulse to do it. You know, it was similar with District 9. The original idea

with District 9 was, I mean, one part of it was growing up in South Africa in that period of time. But the other part was a huge influx of, you know, people from Mozambique and Zimbabwe and stuff were going into South Africa in the 2000s. And South Africa, like local South Africans were getting frustrated with how many were coming into the country and effectively taking jobs from them in their mind. And so District 9, the aliens were, was a representation of the idea of illegal aliens. And I made a short film before I actually made the film where I was interviewing real South Africans about how they felt about Mozambicans or Nigerians or, you know, Malawians, and they would answer very honestly. And so it could create a science fiction way

where you could switch out the honest answer with more of a science fiction answer. Is there a culture of being obsessed with UFOs in South Africa the way it is in America? No, not to the same degree. That's interesting. Yeah, not to the same degree. That's interesting. Yeah. Not, not to the same degree. There are, there are quite a few sightings there. Um, but my, a friend that

I have, who's the most obsessed with UFOs is South African who moved to, to Canada when he was relatively young. He thinks he saw a UFO, uh, right before moving to Canada. And it's, he talks, every time I go out with him, he talks talks about it like he's totally convinced that something happened what was the story i don't remember exactly um uh yeah i don't know was it credible it sounded like it could have been marginally credible yeah that's how they all sound they all sound like that until you get a guy like commander framer you know yeah who's also backing it up with footage shot from the you know the nose of some fighter jet yeah that's the craziest shit is the footage the footage when you're looking at um they have an image of this thing taking off from a dead standstill like instantaneously taking off at what they believe is thousands of miles an hour

yeah okay what's that yeah how do you explain that yeah what is that yeah i don't know it's it's incredibly i mean yeah i i i was so interested to to go through everything to do with bob lazar because it seemed like the most the most it felt like a gold mine of all of the information that i was kind of curious about you know and everything he says is just more gold in the gold mine. It's all awesome. The thing about it is there's nothing about what he says that makes you go, get the fuck out of here.

Everything is at least... Including how it's not good for him, necessarily. Yeah. He makes no money off of it. And the man's a legitimate scientist. He runs some sort of a research lab. And he sells some research chemicals and things. And he was raided by the FBI.

Yeah. You ever see that? Yeah, I did see that. He believes they were looking for Element 115. He thinks that they think that he still has it somewhere. And he may very well. Crazy. Yeah.

But that's a real problem because if that guy goes to his grave and he doesn't tell everybody and show everybody that this shit is real yeah they did some sort of an experiment with it that's on video but it's like the video is so weird it's like from 1990 and you know know, it doesn't mean anything. You're looking at like that this is supposed to be able to bend light. You're looking at it like, what am I looking at? I haven't seen that. We've tried to look at it before, right, Jamie? But George Knapp has a copy of it.

It's the same concept, right? It's a synthetic gravitational field. So it would bend light and it would. But when you're looking that it's yes it's it's a synthetic gravitational field so yeah and lights and it would but when you're looking at it you don't know what you're looking at it's not enough it's not something like you know you see a bullet go through a board yeah here bang yeah there it is definitely yeah something definitive this is the whole thing this is the case this is the the primer you see the explosion it's not that it's some weirdness where you're like what am i looking at i don't know what i'm looking at what i want to see is a fucking flying saucer turn sideways and take off faster than the speed of light that's

what i want to say or actually be in it like get invited down to s4 go in it sit in it, fly around in it. You know the Jackie Gleason story? Was that in the 50s? Jackie Gleason, I think it was later than that. Jackie Gleason used to party with Nixon. Oh, no, I don't know this. And apparently, Jackie Gleason and Nixon were drinking. And Nixon goes, you want to see a UFO? And he takes them, I don't remember what base it was supposedly at, but the aftermath was Jackie Gleason designs his house in,

was it upstate New York? He used it as inspiration. Yes. He designs a UFO house. And the UFO house, it was up for sale recently, and I wish it was a place that I wanted to live because I would fucking 100% buy that house. yeah because it's first of all i'm a giant jackie gleason fan it's probably safe to say that he's not good with national secrets then

according to william shachter gleason said nixon showed him the roswell aliens um who knows if william shachter's telling the truth he's lying about his hair. But if you go to the house, the Jackie Gleason house, because it was for sale, and it looks like a UFO. Yeah. I mean, it's an amazing little tidbit. Yeah. Because if Jackie Gleason really did party with Nixon, and he really did take him to see a UFO. And then Gleason apparently was obsessed with UFOs after that. He was so moved by it. Yeah. And he built this weird house where he had it designed. Interesting. Yeah. We, we, I, so I, I, uh, in 2015 I kind of, I started,

I created the small experimental studio called Oats Studios with my brother, which was, um, called Oats Studios with my brother, which was designed for me to kind of create experimental small films. And I wanted to turn it into something later. But one of the films that I wanted to make, and I still want to make, is heavily UFO-based, which is what got me into all of this stuff. Ah.

And so I started writing different versions of how different stories could play out. And I know that design really well now and his descriptions. This is the house. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So this was Jackie Gleason's house. Where is it, Jamie?

New York. Yeah. So it is in New York. Wow. So scroll up so we can take a look at it. The whole thing is circular it was for sale it's definitely inspired by it yeah supposedly i mean pretty fucking dope plus you live in jackie gleason's house which is pretty badass anyway yeah but he just decided to

make this thing i mean i mean what does it mean knows? I'm not into the woods around it though. It looks a little too claustrophobic. The woods? Well, no, that around the house like that. I hate it when like you need a little bit of space for some sunlight to come in. Oh, okay. I live in the woods now. Do you? Oh, that's right. You were saying that you live in an area of Vancouver or outside of Vancouver in that area where there's actual rattlesnakes. It's like a desert area. Yeah. It's the end of the, of the high desert coming out of Washington state into Canada. So it's, it's called the Okanagan Valley. And, um, there's a lot of wine that's grown there, but it's, it's an unusual microclimate for Canada. How'd you wind up there? Just looking for some more arid. Like I really, I hate rain. I hated living in.

I can't stand rain. Yeah. Like, I mean, I'm into like thundershowers and cool rain. I'm not into like stupid rain. Like constant Seattle rain. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Seattle would be like Vancouver light. Oh, that's true. The Vancouver is even worse, right?

Yeah. So I just, I just couldn't do that anymore. So without leaving Canada, I was like, cause I mean, America would be an option, but is there anywhere more arid in Canada? And then I discovered this, this region region which it just has less precipitation and the I like how arid it is So and then it made me you know Wow Fucking pretty that's narrow matter. That's where I live. Oh my god. That's beautiful. You live there. Yeah Wow Although right now it's covered in wildfire smoke. Oh, that's right. Does Vancouver

have the same sort of association with suicide and depression the way like Portland and Seattle do? You know, that's a really interesting question. I want to get to the bottom of that because people have said that before. There's also something to do with serial killers apparently as well that's tied to the weather like that. Or the climate, I should say. But I don't know. But I need to look into that because I have heard that. I haven't heard a connection though.

I mean I haven't heard it about Vancouver. You consistently hear it about Seattle. Yeah. Seattle and suicide are like. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I felt like that was, it felt oppressive to me. It's too, it's too much gray. Yeah. I just couldn't do it. So, you know, we, we moved out, we moved out there actually for

COVID because, um, we, we had a place that was since 2017 and I just kind of loved the area, but it never was clear to me how I could work from there or live there. It just, I didn't know how to do it. So we would go there sometimes. And then as COVID began, we just kind of found ourselves more permanently there until eventually we just realized we'd left Vancouver. So it's much more of a different lifestyle. I mean, there's this old railroad track on the sort of east side of where we live called the KVR, the Kettle Valley Rail. And on the other side of that is, I mean, thousands of kilometers to Alberta, basically, of wild woods. So I can go like off-roading and just go out into the woods in a way that feels really alien to living in a big city. You must have a lot of bears.

There are bears. I don't really run into them that much, though. But there are bears. Yeah, that's a heavy bear area out north in BC. I always think about that, actually, like dirt biking. Like, if I... Everybody has a different thing about what you're meant to do

with which bear. And it's like, the brown bear, you're meant to just sort of lie there and let it chew your calf muscle off or something. And, like, you're meant to just, like, lie there. And chew your calf muscle off or something. And like you're meant to just like lie there. And it's like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to do that. Well, if you get attacked by a black bear, most of the time it's trying to eat you. If you get attacked by a brown bear, most of the time it is defending either its cash, like it has a dead animal that it's killed and it's buried nearby and you stumbled upon it. Or it's young.

Or it's young. Or it's young. It's weird that the black bear, which, I mean, the black bears are so much smaller that they would try to eat you. They're big enough. Did you see this video? Yes. That is so crazy. The bear just walks by this guy and it's fucking enormous. Where was that that took place?

Was that Alaska? Where was that that took place? Was that Alaska? Yeah, an Alaskan seaplane pilot demonstrated nerves of steel early this week as he calmly convincing a massive grizzly bear not to attack him and his group of tourists. Have you seen this? No. Here, play it. All right.

Play it because it's pretty wild. This guy is just... I'm going to find another thing. This guy is... I think it's to find another thing. This guy is... I think it's that one right there. Yeah, that's it right there. Give me some volume. Hey, big boy.

You guys got a camera out? Yeah. Hey, big boy. Yeah. I would find that problematic. Hugely. It's also interesting how... Watch this, but wait for this.

Hey, bear. Hey, bear. Hey, bear. Oh, that is terrifying. Oh, fuck all that. That is like two yards away. Yeah. That's my hands.

My brother sent me this video. I't know where where it's from but he sent me a video that was like it was a home security camera inside of a house and It's it's on the front door, and I think it's a grizzly just Smashes the door open yeah seen this and I have not sold it like timber off the side of the air and stuff and just comes In like it's nothing. Yeah. Just pushes on it. It's like balsa wood.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, man. My friend John saw a grizzly kill a moose by swatting it in the back. He saw it break its back. Yeah. He said he was watching it through a scope, like a long distance scope, and he's looking at this grizzly through the spotting scope, and it's chasing this moose, and it swats it.

Boom! On the back, and just snaps the moose's back and attacks it and kills it. Brutal. But he said the way it hit it, like, you can't... Just the force. Your brain doesn't imagine the amount of power that it has. Yeah.

And this massive arm that just comes down and slams into the back of a fucking moose. Yeah. And snaps its back. It's incredible how powerful they are. They're ridiculous, man. There was, when I moved to Canada, I mean, you know, I was, I remember people that I was hanging out with asking me about South Africa and if we had wild animals roaming around. Like when we were in West Vancouver, you know, in the sort of suburban areas of West Vancouver, which touch on the North Shore Mountains.

And it's like, what are you talking about? You're the people that have freaking bears coming down the back of your house every day. There's cougars all over the place. You know, it's like, it's much more wild than South Africa ever felt. It's hilarious. You need to go out of Johannesburg to go see that. That is funny.

Yeah. Because people think of Africa. It's like, oh my God, there's lions everywhere. Everywhere you look. Yeah. But it's, they're, the weird thing is they're more contained, right? There's, and there's a lot of these game parks

where they're all in this very specific area. Like the Kruger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of wildlife. Like we had coyotes kill.

I don't know whether they, I mean, I assume they killed it, but we actually had like a dead, it looked like a really large deer that they killed on our property. And that's just like something that I would never have seen until we moved out there. I saw a video yesterday of a bobcat killing a grown deer. I did not know that a small bobcat can kill a big grown deer. Yeah. Yeah. We have those two bobcat. Bobcats are ferocious. Like I thought they would kill like rabbits and things along those lines and this here I'll show it to you Jamie I'll send this to you it kills this enormous deer and it does it like relatively quickly it sneaks up on it here get Jamie else nope that's not it I just sent you the video. I'm just going to do it here too. Let's check this one out too.

Where's he at? Oh, look at him. Look at him. Whoa. Whoa. Wow. Wow Oh like Yeah that doesn't sound good That's the noise

The noise man I sent you one Jamie It's not quite as graphic But you can see the bobcat Sneaking up on this deer And then just leaps on it Crazy And it's a big ass deer too

See there's the bobcat. Look at him. Look how much smaller the bobcat is than the deer. He's just like a little closer, a little closer, and booyah! Yeah, it's like one-fifth its size. Yeah, it's crazy, and he just gets its neck. Yeah, that is pretty incredible yeah the wild is a crazy place to be does that inspire like when you see wild predators and things like does that inspire like you you write a lot of like the the new film is horrific the new film

was shot out there i mean the main the main, you know, it was during COVID. It was like we could either not work while everything was paused or make something. And so I kind of want, I always wanted to shoot a low budget horror film. And so I kind of looked at all of the elements that I had available and got the same team that did our experimental stuff for Oats Studios on YouTube together to make basically like a bigger version of what we were making for our experimental stuff and shot it in the same region.

We used all of the stuff that we had access to. And yeah, so it did inspire that. It inspired, it was inspired by the fact that I was living out there. Yeah, because a bear is kind of like a demon. Like if a bear is chasing you in the woods, that's a... I mean, if you could create the same sense of fear, that would be good. There was a way to capture that.

But yeah, that film was... Demonic was incredibly unique in how it came about. It was like all of these different disparate elements that I sort of put into a blender to try to make something that felt scary. And when, there was something I read about the sound. Like you did something different with the sound in this film that was revolutionary or very unique.

No, not sound. I mean, we did really weird imagery. We did volumetric capture as imagery, which is unusual. Oh, okay. So volumetric, that's maybe I'm thinking that that was sound. No, it's the imagery of the VR sequences when she goes into her mother's mind. So the way that that was captured was just very,

it's an unusual process to be used in that way in a film. So like there's, there's a process in computer graphics called photogrammetry, where if you take a hundred photos of like an object like this, hundreds of different angles, and you give it to a computer, it can extrapolate a three-dimensional object, kind of like a CAD file. And, but the cool thing with photogrammetry is it also brings all of the, the image data with it it as well so you'd get the different colors and the surfaces and stuff um so volumetric capture is the idea of doing that 24 times a second so if you were to capture an actress 24 times a second she would be fully three-dimensional in the way that this is so it's like 3d video and then um and then once

you have you know the performances from the actors, you can put them in synthetic computer generated environments and then begin to light them and select your cameras. So that's what the sequence when she's lying there and she goes into her mother's mind. Yeah. That's how you did that. Exactly, yeah. That was part of the reverse engineering of how the movie came about was, oh, if everything is paused for now and let's use this time to make something else, what are the things I want to do? And one of the ideas was I want to use volumetric capture at some point. It's not clear how to use that in a movie, but I want to use it somehow.

And then another idea was this idea of the Vatican kind of buying up corporations with all of the capital that they have and playing on the trope of exorcist priests, you know, but acting a slightly more 21st century way. And I sort of combined those two and that was the basis for what the movie became. It's a trippy concept and it's one that has existed forever the idea of demonic possession yeah and that there could be a thing that comes from some other realm some other dimension that can get into a person yeah something immaterial yeah that takes over your body it would be i mean you know the vatican the catholic the catholic church does do exorcism seminars for priests. So it is, I mean, I found that when I was looking into it, that it's, there's a level of perceived reality to it that is quite, you know.

What are your thoughts on that? Like when you think of the idea of people spending time trying to get demons out of other people. I mean, again, I wish it was true. I just don't think it is. It's like that's the theme right the theme is like i want all of this other fantastical stuff i just not sure that it's there but that's a one that's one where you maybe shouldn't wish it was true because like if demons really are running around i mean i i agree but it would also be exciting though like if someone was demonically possessed that you knew like right if you could go visit him you know in a clinic where he was demonically possessed and just sort of look through

the bulletproof glass and see how he was doing right it would be interesting and if someone stabbed him with some sort of you know object from the vatican yeah you see the demon coming out of his body it's oh it's been around for so long, the idea of demonic possession. Do you think that the roots of that are like mental illness, psychotic breaks? Yeah. I think it's very primitive medicine or lack of medicine trying to understand things that we understand better now. And it gets built into the culture and it gets built into the religious system. And it becomes a staple. One of my favorite science fiction slash horror movies

is The Event Horizon. Yeah, I love Event Horizon. It's a great movie. Event Horizon was so fun because they combined demonic possession and space travel. Yeah. Two of the best things.

It's a cool mixture, yeah. It's like ice cream flavors. Yeah. No, Event Horizon is very cool. I like Sam Neill as well. Yes, yeah. It's like ice cream flavors. Yeah. No, Event Horizon is very cool. I like Sam Neill as well. Yes, yeah. No, Lawrence Fishburne. It's a great film.

It's a fun film. You know, when they're all... It has a cool tone about it as well. Yeah. A very dark tone. What are other sci-fi favorites of yours? Alien. Alien, yeah.

That's why I was really excited when i heard that you were at least potentially at one point in time thinking about doing an alien yeah it would have been cool what happened it's just you know just studio politics and the um i do i do think that the way that chappy was received probably played a role in me not working on alien uh but you know it's it's ridley's world that he created and it's like it it should be his to do what he wants with so it it's it's all good yeah i get that but still would have been fun yeah it would have been fun for me as well i mean the the thing that i i would have really enjoyed about it was sigourney weaver was really down for what i'd written and she that the main thing to me was even though i like alien 3 and i love fincher as a director i just wanted a version of of the

continuation of what happened after aliens and for newt to be alive and for you know for ripley to continue that story um and it was sort of based on that idea. Is the kid who played Newt, how old is she now? I mean, in my story, she was in her kind of mid-20s. I mean, in reality, I mean, aliens just turn 35, so she must be, you know, like 44 or something. Isn't that wild? Yeah.

It's wild when you find out that the movie, the original, was from the 70s. 79, yeah. Yeah, you're like, what? Yeah. It seems so much more current than a 1970s movie. I mean, that's one of the things that's amazing about it is how timeless it is. Yeah. You know, and also just, I mean, a lot of, I saw it in a theater a couple of years ago, and I couldn't believe just the quality of everything. Yeah. You know, and also just I mean, a lot of I saw it in a theater a couple of years ago, and I couldn't believe just the quality of everything.

Yeah. It's really amazing how well it was filmed. I accidentally watched the Blu-ray version of Aliens, and it's kind of hilarious because in the Blu-ray version, things that were not meant to be HD are now HD. meant to be HD are now HD. So there's a scene where the spaceships are lined up and there's clearly a mural of spaceships in the background. It looks so fucking fake. Oh, you mean a matte painting? Yes. Is it when they're in the Sulaco, when they're in the military ship, the big one? Yes. Right.

I think. I think I know what you mean. It looks so corny. I'm like, no, Because there's, you know, there's like this physical ship. Yeah. And then behind it is just some bullshit. Yeah. It's like it's so clear that they used, you know, they expected like focus and, you know, the kind of graininess of film to mask that. Yeah.

Matt Painting's pre-computer graphics were done on panes of glass. pre-computer graphics were done on panes of glass. And so, I mean, in a way, Aliens is like, using the technology that they had at the time is actually like totally incredible. But I know, I do know what you're saying though. I mean, for audiences now weaned on the stuff that we have access to, you know, these techniques are so dated, but it would be a large pane of glass, like a shower piece of glass. And then they would paint what they want the set to look like and shoot through it with your other real environments as well. That's why the shots are always locked off, right? They're always stable.

Obviously, you can't move. Right. Aliens was interesting by itself if Alien didn't exist. The problem with Aliens is these creatures are so bumbling and easy to kill like in the first movie that thing was so clever pure terror yeah pure terror so clever and and so good at sneaking up on people i mean i think the thing that cameron did with the second film was pretty amazing though in the way that he was he made it he made it militaristic it changed the the context and so i think because of that and also there was the kind

of vietnam war high technology low technology sort of parable at play yes um so it was two forces you know in which case it makes the aliens be more, there's an abundance of them. Right. But I almost like both films equally, I think. Both approaches. They're both fun, but the first one was far more terrifying. Yeah, the first one is more scary. I agree, I agree. Yeah, when it gets you off at Kodo.

Yeah. It's like, there's so many moments in that movie, you're just like, oh, Jesus. Yeah. And there had never been a film like it. Yeah, no, I mean, I can imagine in 1979 seeing that in the theater where i think the studio executives there's one famous quote where they they thought they had gone too far there was like a test screening with the audience where they're like this may have gone too far wow i wonder if they

edited anything out of it is there an uncut version i think I think just the way it is in 1979 would be extreme. Just the blood? Yeah, well, just the tension. Apparently there is a VR version of that. There's like a game version. Yeah, Alien Isolation. Have you done it? Yeah. What's that like?

Wait, are you talking about a computer game? It's like Oculus Rift. Is it HTC Vive or Oculus? Do you know, Jamie? I think, I think it's Alien Isolation, which is made by Creative Assembly in, in the UK as a, as a video game. Yeah. And then someone ported it over to VR.

Oh. So it's kind of like a hack. I don't think that, I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think they released an official proper one. But I played the game, which is really cool. And I haven't seen it in VR. Oh, okay. I know it exists though. You could do something really terrifying in VR. This one in particular, people that I know that have played it or have done the experience said

it's horrific. It's really scary because you really do feel like you're trapped inside these tunnels in this ship. I love the idea of it just going too far, which you can do with VR, where it's too much. Heart attacks. Well, maybe dialed like 1% back from that. Yeah, well, that film, the idea of this thing getting into a person and then popping out of their chest and then escaping.

The body horror, the gestation of it is the most intense part, for sure. And then not knowing where it is. Yeah. And, you know, being stuck on this ship

where you can't get out of the ship. You're just trapped and you're flying through space and you get this creature running around killing all your friends. Yeah. No, it was,

I mean, I love the movie. Yeah, I totally love it I totally love it the Geiger alien itself like the way he designed it so unique and I think he'd pre-designed it I think I think it was it was part of his his catalog of stuff that he'd done and and Ridley saw it and kind of really just narrowed in on let's build that, you know. That makes sense. Yeah. I did shoot another, I shot an alien story with Sigourney called Raka, which is on our YouTube channel.

So it has her and it has aliens. And it was me riffing on the idea of aliens when I wasn't working on aliens. Is it a short film? It's 25 minutes long, I think, but I want to make a sequence of them. I want to make lots of them. Oh. So, yeah, check that out. Cause it has, it's, it's, it's not the same vibe as, uh, as alien, but it's, it's, it's in the same science fiction horror realm. Did you find whatever that thing is? The, uh, the VR version? Yeah, he explained exactly what it was. And so is it available to the public?

At the time of the article I found, the game was free. And I think the mod is free. You just download it and throw it in the folder, it says, and then you can play. Is it the Vive or is it Oculus? If you hook your Oculus up to your PC, you can play it that way. But, yeah, you need a computer, I believe, because you need to download the game. Yeah, you need a computer, I believe, because you need to download the game. That's, to me, the future of just of entertainment in general.

Oh, totally. My kids would come to the studio in L.A., and they would literally have a race to see who could get to the Oculus first. Yeah. Because they just wanted to play the VR games, like, constantly. And they'd be, like, walking the plank, screaming, and, and and playing the you know the one with the drums where you're slicing the the boxes apart it's this is actually i think he's using an oculus it looks like but it's hooked up to his pc so and this is the uh this is the game yeah there's like a specific dlc that's like a yeah i know i know the artists the artists that made this game. I was really blown away by it.

Because you know what they did as well? They captured the tone and the atmosphere of Ridley's film really well. They used audio samples, I think, that were real. And Fox opened up the whole sort of archive of imagery and sound and stuff. So they had access to all of that. So it feels very authentic. They, you know, they've had so many alien films now. It's so crazy, right?

They even did, they got so silly. They went like Aliens versus Predator. Yeah, they shouldn't have done that. No, they shouldn't have. But they did. But they still. Predator is also awesome. Yeah, by itself.

Yeah. But they still did Alien Covenant, which I really enjoyed. I thought that was great. And Prometheus. Yeah, Prometheus is great too. Prometheus is different. But Alien Covenant was like, I thought it was like a step cooler. Yeah, it started going back a bit towards the horror elements.

Yeah. And the xenomorph, right? Because the creature was missing in Prometheus. I mean, yeah, that was, I agree. He started to introduce some of that in Covenant. Ridley's really just, he's one of my favorite filmmakers. Like he's an amazing filmmaker and everything he does has such a textural feel to it.

So those films, just the scenes, if you just watch independent sort of moments within it, they feel so specific and so Ridley. But the VR thing is interesting because, you know, I think people often talk about the idea of narrative. They talk about the future of games and they talk about like how films and games are going to kind of merge. the future of games and they talk about like how films and games are going to kind of merge. And it's interesting because I think what your kids are responding to is where I think games truly are going, which is just some kind of pure immersion. It's actually the opposite of narrative, right? If you want a story, if it's like the age old sort of sitting around a campfire and being told a story. The point of that is that

you're passive. The whole point is that someone has learned something in life or gone through some event or has some point of view on something that they're passing down to you in the form of a story. And as an audience member, you can almost simulate what may have happened to you if you had done that or if you had lived through it or what choices would I have made, right? There's sort of a meme of cultural data that's kind of given to you or personal information that's given to you in a way that's sort of beyond words. And I think games are the exact opposite, what they hold. They hold the ability for you to be the player inside of the world that makes your own decisions and makes your own mistakes.

So there's this misconception where it's like some cases of narrative could work, but for the most part, it feels like doubling down on photoreal immersion, which is basically some kind of like wish fulfillment, right? You're dropping an audience into... It's like Strange Days with the bank robbery. And then you wear the neural link and you can feel what it's like to rob a bank. It's like that's where games, I think, are going. And that's where VR and everything is sort of moving in that direction.

Yeah, I'm terrified of that because I think that's what leads us to The Matrix. So people are going to willingly accept the fact that this life is better than real life. The matrix is already happening on people's phones, though. Yeah, in a way, in a way. But the fully immersive Oculus way. And then after a while, they're going to go, you know, we don't have to do this.

We can just go right in there, and then you have your own little plug, and you stick it in there. Just bypass. It just goes straight to the nerve. You don't feel the goggles. It's going to be great. It'll like put you right in and anytime you want out you just just get out. Yeah that's

definitely coming. That's definitely coming. It also feels like it's coming quickly as well. Yeah. Like it'll suddenly be there. I think so too and I think it's inevitable. I think it's like if you look at the progression of technology go from Pong to where we have today with Oculus like oh I see where this is going to too. And I think it's inevitable. I think it's like, if you look at the progression of technology, go from Pong to where we have today with Oculus, like, oh, I see where this is going to go. And also how little that has been in amounts of time. I mean, that's the one place the human technology really just has its foot flat on the gas is microprocessor increases,

like million fold increases in speed. Yeah. I mean, coming also from visual effects and computer graphics, I'm super interested in the realm of games as much as film, just for what it holds. I kind of, I just joined a company now, actually, that's based in Kiev in Frankfurt called Godzilla, that I'm part of the design team working on a new game. So it's like filmmaking and games for me. I want a sort of dual path. Interesting. And so are you going to make films and then a game that sort of allows a person to participate in the action of the film? No, it's two separate things. But I think there is one thing related to your question that is very interesting, which is up until this point, everything has been about these discussions to do with how to adapt famous game titles into movies, right? Like whether it's Halo or Assassin's Creed or whatever it is.

And with the level of photorealistic immersion that we're talking about in VR, it would be really fascinating for that to swing the other way now where you could be in a photorealistic immersion of the Shinin. Right. Right. Or Blade Runner. Yes. Yes. So I think there could be a movement like going in the opposite direction where famous films are adapted for an immersive experience. I think they have done that. Yeah. Yeah. I just, no, there has. But what I mean is where it's as mainstay as the way that when you go to multiplexes now, there's a very high

possibility that you could see a big game adaptation. Yeah, it's gonna flip and what they have now with game engines, their their ability to use textures and light. Have you seen Unreal 5? Unreal? Yes. Yes. We've played it here. The one yeah it's incredible really nuts it's wild the dust the light the shadows it's incredible it's so close it's very cool it's so close it just shows you everything that is going to be coming i mean it's yeah and you know i mean i remember the original unreal it was awesome it was just a few years ago. And you were playing it. You kind of knew it was fake, but you're like, wow, the graphics in this are incredible. Yeah.

And then to see this Unreal 5 engine. Yeah. I mean, it's things like radiosity, right, where it's like there's light bouncing, and so you get indirect light. Let's play it. Play the Unreal 5. Oh, you got it.

Yeah. That's it. Fuck, this is amazing. Look at that. But where's the demo with the kind of Lara Croft style girl is better. Yeah, that's a little further ahead. It's just in the same video. Yeah, that is just crazy.

It's its ability to handle hundreds of billions of polygons. Isn't it interesting, though, that the people still look fake? That's because we're all experts at knowing what people look like and animals look fake too yeah like the hair the way hair moves it never quite looks real actually have you seen um metahuman from the same company no metahumans jamie look look that up look up look up metahuman this is crazy this is for designing uh for designing humans in game settings, right? Like, whether it's you as the user designing your character or you're building a game and you want to build characters.

Look at this. That's a human? These are fake? Yeah, this is, but watch. Like, you'll see he'll start moving sliders where you can change everything to do with them, like hair and facial structure and teeth. Whoa. Okay, that guy facial structure and teeth. Whoa.

Okay, that guy looks a little fake. Yeah. But it's only like little things you see when they're moving. Like that looks real as fuck. It's pretty crazy. Wow. And also I think you can type those sentences that they're saying. Isn't it funny though there's just a slight weirdness

to the way they move their mouths? Yeah, see? God. That's crazy. The uncanny valley yeah i mean the level of fidelity that's required to fool a human being that spent you know 40 years looking at other humans yeah is limitless i mean it's it's going to be hard to cross that bridge. But it seems like they're getting there. Yeah. They're getting there. It's so close. God, that's amazing.

That is really, really amazing. The way they're aging. Fuck, that's crazy. Wow. We're so close. So speaking about demonic and volumetric capture, we used Unity, which is a game engine, to render the scenes that are in the virtual reality parts of the movie. So what that means is they're live scenes. So the audience, when they're watching the movie, it looks like you're just watching a VR scene,

but we could, like Alien Isolation, we could port those out to VR. So you could sit and watch those scenes in total virtual reality because of what I was saying about volumetric capture, capturing the actors in 3D. So it's not like the gimmick that people do with films into VR where it's a 360 degree camera and it's fake. It's actual immersive, real three-dimensional footage running in a game engine. Do you anticipate a time where there's ever a legitimate film released in VR like that? Where, you know, whether it's for the Oculus or some new technology where you put some headphones on and everybody does that to go watch a film. Yeah, but you, well, you would do it at home.

But, but, but I mean, it goes back to the narrative versus, you know, the passive versus active experience discussion. Right. I think the way to do it, like if you imagine a Tarantino coffee table discussion, like the amazing beginning of Inglourious Basterds, right? If you were sitting at that table like we are now and it was immersive three-dimensional VR, the experience would be really pretty great. So you can still be a passive audience member and watch it in VR like that. And I think that's coming, but it's still different to merging narrative with a game structure where I think audiences will be very particular about they want to either be in control of everything or they want to be given a story and be taken on a ride. Right.

Yeah. But it is coming, though. VR, three-dimensional cinema, you could say, is definitely coming. Have you seen the multi-directional treadmill thing? They have this omnidirectional treadmill. It straps people to a harness and you're moving through this first person shooter yeah i have seen that i don't know how see the problem with all of that stuff is how unadoptable it is like how everyone has an iphone in their pocket because it's easy right

it's like the goggles and the you know opening that at christmas and like wheeling it down the corridor and like building it and stuff like are people going to do that maybe they will well maybe it'll be like a ready player one type situation i think it's what you were saying about clicking it into the neural link yeah the neural link uh you know connection points the scary one that's you just go quietly and lie in bed and just go lie there for 78 hours at least yeah it's like an ivy run out of water. Yeah. An IV with some liquid. I'm fucking terrified of that because I think it's so easy to lose your life to video games now. There's so many people that they just get online and they're playing in these, you know, World of Warcraft is famous for that. Like those kind of films, those multiplayer games. Or where people die playing strategy games, you know, like where they, have you seen this?

Yeah. Yeah. And they actually perish at the computer. I mean, that's intense. Yeah, because they're not eating. A kid just did a 56-hour stream to go, like to rank up in a game the other day. Really?

And it was celebrated. They're like, go get it. But that's so unhealthy to do. 56 hours straight by himself. Was he paranoid? How was he going to the bathroom? He probably just got up and went to the bathroom, but his stream was on continuously. So he paranoid at the end? How was he going to the bathroom? He probably just got up and went to the bathroom, but his stream was on continuously.

So he never went to sleep? He went up to 150,000 people were watching him at the end. So how many days can you stay up before you die? Well, paranoia sets in at a certain point. Fueled? I don't know. But even fueled, I think you lose your ability to maintain consciousness. I think it's more of a, like you kind of become psychotic before.

Yeah. So I think, yeah, there's some sort of de-evolution of consciousness prior to death, like a long way before death. Yeah. Like everyone basically waits 24 hours before they go to sleep, roughly. Right. If you go to bed at 10 o'clock every night, you're waiting 24 hours. So if you pull an all-nighter and make it to 10 o'clock the next night, you get 48 hours.

How many days can you do that? Like what's the longest anyone's ever stayed up? I think after several weeks, there's actual psychotic and like neurological damage. I don't know if it's reversible. There's some really strange things that begin to happen. It's several weeks? You can do it for weeks?

I think so. Oh, wow. No, no. I mean, you're alive, but I think there's severe damage. But I didn't think that someone could stay awake for that long, for a week. I mean, we should look it up. Someone's done it 11 days. Wow.

And what was the result of it? Was there any... He's the president of the United States right now. He's a 17-year-old. In the 1960s. 264.4 hours. That was back when you could get good cocaine. 17.

I'm trying to see. What is he alive? Is he alive? Fuck. I don't know. San Diego's name is Randy Gardner. Shout out to Randy. Trying to see if there's a reason.

Negative experience. 11 days of being awake. That's crazy. Imagine what the world was like for him at like day 10. He said, I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep. Oh, God, Randy. Proven grievously incorrect. He's a demon now.

That's your next movie. Consciousness left his body. There's a time, like, imagine if you stay awake long enough, you, like, open up a door to demons. It says he just slept afterwards, he slept for 14 hours and 40 minutes the one day, and then the next day he slept for, like, 10 and a half hours, and after that he was fine.

Okay, this sounds like... Again, it also goes all the way back then, but... Was 19 what year again? 64. They didn't know shit about people back then. Yeah, it seems like the data would be quite slim. And there's an Australian thing that says it's 18 days and almost 19 days, but that's like a sleep project. It is really interesting when you think about the fact that they

knew so little about human beings in 1964 comparatively especially like medically yeah like if you needed to get a knee surgery in 1964 you were fucked yeah they just butchered you they bolted everything together and it probably didn't hold up yeah using some kind of metal that was leeching you know into the into the bone marrow, like every, every part about it is just like lunacy. I mean, I also think, I mean, even, even 30 years out from now, you know, 60 years out from now, what we're doing now will be equally. Oh yeah. Like any kind of invasive surgery, like the whole, um, Steve jobs thing with how he died

makes sense to me. Like I'm so averse to surgery and cutting and stuff. He died from pancreatic cancer, right? Well, I think the way I read it was that he could have done more, but it involved surgery and he just didn't want to. Really? And there was definitely a part of him rejecting some kind of medical intervention that he didn't want, which I understand. Huh.

Yeah. I thought he died from cancer. I didn't know that there was a rejection of a potential cure or some sort of a— I don't know. I should look into it more. But I know that people were saying that there was more that he could have done. Steve Jobs refused cancer treatment too long. Interesting.

Refused potentially life-saving cancer surgery for nine months. Yeah. Shrugging off his family's protests and opting instead for alternative medicine. Oh, boy. Yeah, I wouldn't go for alternative medicine. I would just go for kind of like no medicine.

Like, I just don't, I'm not into surgery. Yeah? Yeah. So you understand his reluctance? I understand the mindset. I'm sure that if I was actually diagnosed with something, I'd probably be in surgery within like three minutes. You've never had surgery before?

No, not proper surgery. What about for injuries? Would you be willing, like what if you tore? Well, I broke the glenoid socket in my shoulder. Like this shoulder is kind of destroyed from high school rugby. the glenoid socket in my, my shoulder. Like this shoulder is kind of destroyed from high school rugby. And, uh, I wanted to, you know, I used to be addicted to playing squash and I can't really play squash because of this injury and it required shoulder replacement surgery. And I don't want to do that. So, but that's different. I mean, I don't need that to live. Right. So shoulder replacement

surgery, meaning they're going to resurface the head and the socket? That was one option that the surgeon that I spoke to didn't want to do. It was more like an entire – Yeah, because the upper part of this bone is now deformed from rubbing against a cracked socket. Oh, boy. It's weird. It's like forehands in tennis or squash I can do. It's anything – any leverage this way, it'll dislocate.

Like so. Have you ever done band work to try to strengthen it? I mean, I can do stuff with muscle, but it's mostly just structural, huge structural problems. And so they would have to saw off the end of your shoulder bone and put a new cap on it? You see, I'm not into that. Like I can't. I just cannot go through that. That seems like a real issue.

Yeah, I don't want to do that yeah oof yeah i know a lot of people that have had all kinds of replacements and they're fine hip replacement they're usually good not always not always gary taubes uh came into my podcast after knee replacement surgery and he was pretty fucked up really yeah it didn't work well for him for some reason. But I know guys that have had hip replacements, and I saw them six weeks later walking perfectly normal. I'm like, what? Yeah.

Like, this is crazy. Like, Graham Hancock came and did my podcast six weeks after hip replacement. Yeah. I'm like, this is wild. You're just walking around. It feels like the technology has advanced rapidly. Yes. And it definitely works, and I could see this working. It's just, there's a psychological thing

with having your arm almost severed from your body and having the top of a bone cut off. And like, I just can't really do that. I don't know, I'm hyper squeamish with that kind of thing. Yeah, I get it. I get it. But don't you want to be able to do this? Yeah, I do. I totally do. I mean, that looks wonderful you know you

can't right now at all uh i could probably do that it just hurts yeah there's certain emotions that are and it's from you know playing rugby in high school which i don't know what i don't know why i was i was doing that yeah it's fun yeah i guess but it's like the risk reward kind of situation is a bit out of balance yeah but you don't think about that when you're in high school. No you think about it now Yeah, decrepit 41 where you can't play racquet sports. I've had a bunch of surgeries. I've had both my knees reconstructed if I Meniscus surgery on my left knee. I've had my nose Reconstructed a deviated septum surgery. They're all great. Was that from breaking your nose? I broke it first

when I was five. I fell down a flight of stairs and cracked my nose. My brother's having that done. He has the same thing. Deviated septum was horrible because for me, most of my life, I couldn't breathe out of my nose because it started when I was little. I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my nose. And then years and years of martial arts so it was constantly getting hit so the inside of it was all scar tissue and have you ever seen cauliflower ear you're seeing guys get that what that is is um blood like say uh the membrane the cartilage like your ear is mostly cartilage right so it breaks from getting grabbed and manipulated and it fills up with blood yeah and then that blood calcifies that happens inside your nose too right so because cartilage

is so bad at moving blood around as well it's very un it's not vasculated exactly so the inside of my my nose was basically like rock right it was useless i would like my nose wouldn't work at all yeah it was like one I had like 1 8th and the other one was totally closed that sounds exactly like my brother yeah it's like a wheezing person yeah so I was a mouth breather and then they fixed it and the the feeling of being able to go it's amazing. It's amazing because I lived for so many years without use of my nose, and now it's perfect.

Now it works incredible. Actually, I split open this year where I had to have plastic surgery on the cartilage, shooting a commercial for Halo, for the film that I would have done for Halo. Really? Yeah, it's weird. I was in the back of the, in Halo, there's a vehicle called a Warthog, which is a four by four kind of Hummer. You know, have you played it? Yeah, I've played Halo. It's awesome. So we, we built a physical one of those at Weta and, um, we would have used it for the movie, but we ended up doing these kind of short

film commercials for, for Halo. And I was in the back on one side and my friend slash director of photography was in the other side and the stunt team strapped us down and I, it was all handheld. The whole thing was cinema verite. So it was loose cameras and I had one camera and he had one camera and we hit, um, you know, you, you remember if you play the game, the, the turret gun in the back, it's like a 50 Cal that's on, on a swivel. So Weta had built one of those. Uh, and it was, it, it had a pin that you could pull to swivel it or lock it with a pin. And so we were driving, it was locked. And the stunt driver hit a bump that launched me up to the limit of my straps,

but just enough to shear my ear off on the edge of that metal gun, like on the handle. So I just cut it in half, basically. And then all this blood shot across my jacket. And it was interesting because I realized I hadn't really, it kind of reminds me of my shoulder in rugby or just anything in high school. In high school, you're always getting beaten up. And I realized I hadn't felt that

feeling for like 10 years. You, you would have been in martial arts, but that feeling of like a shock and a bunch of blood where it's like, oh, I remember this. That sucks. Yeah. And then the medic like patched me up and like, you know, I went this. That sucks. Yeah. And then the medic like patched me up and like, you know, I went back to shooting for six hours. There's hilarious photos of me on that set with this massive like strapped up ear and like, you know, like the forming of like a black eye kind of style

where I just looked like death essentially after that. And then at the end of the shoot, I went and had plastic surgery outside of Wellington in New Zealand where we were living. And I got all of the cartilage put back together because that's what had fractured and then the skin. So it just hurts now in cold weather and it feels like a broken biscuit or something that's like lined with skin. Oh, wow.

So it constantly feels weird? It feels weird in cold weather. Why cold? I don't know. It just aches. It just hurts like hell in cold weather. Otherwise, it's cool. Probably to do with the same circulation of blood or something.

Yeah, there's probably not a lot of circulation in there. That's why cartilage injuries are so devastating. Yeah. They try to do things with cartilage injuries where they create microfractures and do stuff to try to – and they can even do some sort of transplants of cartilage, but it's a real issue. It doesn't take. Sometimes it doesn't take, yeah. And then you have to lay off of it for like six weeks.

You can't do any walking or put any pressure on it. I know a dude who was born with a hole in his cartilage. It's a genetic malformity. In all cartilage, in all places?formity and he in all cartilage in all places no just one one in his knee oh and so he had to have this operation to have a piece of cartilage sort of transplanted into there yeah and then he couldn't walk or put any pressure on at all for like six weeks after that he had to be like very gingerly but it eventually did work and it grew back that's good but uh yeah cartilage is a tricky one

meniscus is another tricky one yeah like they try to stitch them up together and hope it heals but a lot of times it doesn't because there's the blood supply there and the blood flow there is not very good yeah yeah see all of that stuff it's weird i mean i'm obviously completely comfortable putting you know excessive amounts of violence in cinema or, or, you know, Silicon puppetry and prosthetics and blood, but in real life, man, it's just, I don't know what happens, but it's like, when I, when I moved to Canada, there was a bunch of stuff on TV. Cause obviously, you know, in 1997, there's sort of mainstream media is the only way you could really get stuff. And it was like in South Africa, there were limited channels in Canada. There were more channels and one of the channels was Basically 24-hour surgery. I don't know what the hell that was

Like I don't know what it was, but it would be like here We're gonna do this surgery for the next six hours on TV. It's so fascinating though It's a great idea if you wanted to get people to tune in I just can't do it like it's we can't watch it No, no, there's some there's some it's too. I don't know what it is graphic Yeah, there's something about it that I just I can't stomach my friend Tom just had nerve surgery He fell and broke his arm. He's playing basketball They were doing this dunk contest thing and he fell and landed on his arm snapped it He actually blew out his knee he jumped up. It was like a horrific injury from you want to see it

Yeah, let to see the injury oh well i mean we're talking about the actual injury the actual fall yeah yeah okay so he blows out his patella tendon jumping just snaps so he like falls and lands on his arm snaps his arm breaks his arm um so last night we're doing stand-up together and he shows me these pictures on his phone of the surgery that he had the doctor took these photos he's had to have nerve surgery because his nerves weren't regenerating quick enough so they had to relocate one of the nerves to a new area attach it and then he's the way the doctor described is literally like sewn together with doll hair like that's how small the threads are and he now is slowly going

to be able to move these the the last two fingers of his hand right the first two fingers of his hand worked perfectly but the last two just weren't moving it wasn't getting the signal right so they had to do the surgery now because if they waited too long then it wouldn't work the nerve would probably die or yeah something along those lines so this is him here we go prepare yourself please but this kind of thing i think i'm okay with i mean we'll see so here he goes he jumps up oh yeah you can just see you just see his arm is just... Fuck.

That's enough. Yeah, that's... So last night he's showing us these images of his arm completely opened up. And the doctor filmed it because he's kind of teaching other people how this is done. And he wanted to film it because it's a very unusual surgery. And so Tom has all these videos on his phone of his own arm. And it's splayed open. Is he okay watching it?

He is. He's a psycho. Right. There's a fucking giant hole, like a tunnel through his arm. And I'm watching. I'm going, oh, my God, dude. And in the thing, the doctor stimulates the nerves and his hand's going like this. fucking giant hole like a tunnel through his arm and i'm watching i'm going oh my god dude and in the thing the doctor stimulates the nerves and his hands going like this i'm like oh christ it

shows you how much it's just like a meat astronaut suit that you're wearing it really is the brain and the and the and the nervous system is him yeah and it's being put inside his astronaut suit for planet earth yeah and the doctor can mechanically show you how this nerve will make this muscle move you know it's it's so it's like a gm truck or something well nerves in general are so weird like have you ever like been reading your phone on the toilet and your legs go numb does drinking count yes okay yeah okay um i've i've like sometimes like someone will send me something that's a really that's a blood thing, right? That's just a circulation thing.

Well, I'm choking my legs out. Yeah. So I'm like leaning on my legs. Yeah. And my legs are compressing against the toilet and then I'll get up. I do this once a week. Once a week. Do you do it too?

Yeah. It's super common. It's super common. It's hilarious. It's where you like you get up and your legs barely work. Because it's like a rear naked choke, but you're doing it to your legs. Which is also horrifically what happened to George Floyd. When that guy was leaning on his neck.

To anybody that doesn't think that that is potentially what killed him. Because there's all these people that are sort of weirdly apologists for that guy. And saying that's not what killed him. He know, because there's all these people that are like sort of like weirdly apologists for that guy and saying that's not what killed him. He had fentanyl in his system. He was on that guy's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. You can't even do that on the toilet without getting up and your legs work. Yeah, it would be such a horrific feeling,

just that level of slow lack of consciousness of blood getting up there. It's brutal. It is a common position in jujitsu where a guy has his knee on your neck. It happens all the time. Because if someone's going for particular moves, like when you're controlling people, oftentimes you'll wind up in a position where someone has their knee on your neck.

It's a terrible place to be. But to be handcuffed on the concrete with a guy with his knee on your neck where you can't tap out you can't do any the guy's not listening to you it doesn't matter what you say yeah but that aside um nerves when they stop working it just makes you realize like oh how weird is this body like how weird is it that there's like these like signals that go down the signals get shut off you've got to keep it oxygenated all the time. Now it's not working. Just how close it is always to not functioning.

As soon as there's some kind of arterial blockage or. Or even just pressing. I had a bulging disc at one point in time in my neck. And my fingers, the tips of my fingers were going numb. Like my little finger, it's the ulnar nerve that goes here and i would get pain in my elbow i was like what is going on then i finally got an mri and they were like you have a disc that's pushing against the nerve so it was like interrupting the signal that went down to my fingertips and causing nerve pain in my elbow it was really weird yeah

it is amazing how how the body does i, it's just a bunch of mechanical understandable components that can be laid out on a, you know, a lab table and each one of them just makes complete mechanical sense. It's kind of disturbing to reduce a human to that, you know, but it's, it's also exactly what is happening. It is exactly. And the only thing that's the weird part is whatever is happening in the mind that sort of brings the sense of I or self to the front. Kind of, it makes, it creates a situation where you don't want to believe

all the rest of it is just mechanical. Well, have you seen that guy in Australia that got his arm and his leg bit off by a shark? No. I met him. I met him at the comedy store. He's friends with, I think he's friends with my friend John Joseph. I think that No. I met him. I met him at the comedy store. He's friends with, I think he's friends

with my friend John Joseph. I think that's where I met him through. And he's got a carbon fiber hand and a carbon fiber leg. And the dude, that's him, the dude walks around

like completely normal. Like when you're around him. So it's wired into his nerve system? I don't know how it's functioning. I mean, there are some prosthetics that can do that, I think, now that are driven by thought. Something's happening because look at his arm. He's obviously jacked. Oh, yeah.

And it didn't squeeze too hard or anything? Yeah. He seems to have some control. I shook his hand as well, which is odd. Like, can't we just bump knuckles with the left? What are we doing here, bro? Which is odd. Like, can we just bump knuckles with the left?

What are we doing here, bro? But he was attacked by a shark, and they created this really advanced carbon fiber hand and arm for him. Very high end. Yeah, and his leg as well. But the guy walks with no limp. Obviously, I don't know what it feels like for him. Walks with no limp. Obviously, I don't know what it feels like for him, but when you see him walk, he looks like a guy. Like if he just had pants on, you would never know that he has an artificial leg.

The gait and the motion is realistic. Very, very. And the movement of his arms. When he reaches out to shake your hand, you're like, oh, my God, I'm shaking your robot hand. Yeah, it's, I mean, it would be cool to see all of, you know, just to have that be more common with people that have lost limbs in wars or anything. I think that's really cool.

And I think as they get more and more advanced, it's going to be more and more interesting because they're going to be able to develop feel. They're going to actually be able to send signals

to the nerves that do remain the rest of your arm. And you're going to have a realistic interpretation of what it feels like to touch delicate do remain the rest of your arm and you're going to have a realistic interpretation of what it feels like to touch delicate things the amount of pressure like if you're holding a wine glass yeah i mean the whole going back to the game uh immersion thing the whole brain computer interface part of that allows for like how peter watts was saying that consciousness will spread to the available neurons it has at hand. Yeah.

There's something, I think, there's a neural plasticity element to do with limbs and articulating limbs that can be explored in future, far future games with brain-computer interfaces where you could give people more than two arms, for example, right? If you suddenly had two extra arms right now that were being simulated but driven by the same motor control that you have that you use your real arms with, they would be like a toddler. And your brain would begin to be able to train those third and fourth arms to work. Right. Like trying to write with your left hand. Yeah. Like if you're a right-handed person, you know how to write, but you try to write with your left hand. Yeah. And over time you would get good at it. But, but imagine it's like your, your brain isn't locked into having two arms and two legs is what I'm saying. It's, it's open to whatever you plug it into. So if you plug it

into something that's a simulation with eight arms and five legs, theoretically, you could begin to use that other version of yourself. In the simulation, you're this other thing. Your mind can adapt and learn how to use that. What's really fascinating to me is if they can map out, when you're talking about neuroplasticity and think of fine motor skills, like the ability to play piano at a very high level. I would love to see, if there's a way to map out what's going on in the human mind. I think there is. I think violin players have, in fMRI scans,

they have actual density in areas that people that don't have that level of skill don't have. What I was going to get to is, remember in Keanu Reeves in The Matrix? He's like, I know jujitsu. Yeah, they give it to him, yeah. Imagine if they could do that to you, and then they can literally plug in

the ability to play piano. And then instantaneously, you can move your hands in a way that a piano player of three years could. I wonder how realistic, like, I wonder if that is possible, like, in the near future. Why wouldn't it be?

I mean, if you can do it like if someone can play piano at a very high level so there's obviously there's some sort of a chain of events that's happening there's there's there's input there's the touch of the keys there's the years and years of understanding where the fingers have to go. The brain has developed these connections at a very high level where you could... It would be pretty cool. Oh, my God. Instantaneously, it would be weird. Watching The Matrix in a theater, I was 19 when I saw that film in 99. And that was my favorite theatrical thing, event that I've ever been in in my life.

Oh, it was incredible. Yeah, it was my favorite viewing thing, event, that I've ever been in in my life. Oh, it was incredible. Yeah, it was my favorite viewing experience of a movie. What's interesting about it, too, is at the time, it didn't feel like it was foreshadowing real events one day. It just felt awesome. Yeah, it was more philosophical. Yes. But now, when I watch it, I'm like, oh, this is coming. Yeah.

It became literal. Yeah, it became literal. It could be our reality 50 years from now. Yeah, or probably will be. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the outside world looks like. Well, the idea is that the only way to escape that is a symbiotic sort of entanglement with technology, like Neuralink. Like we are either going to accept that it's

gonna take us over or we join mm-hmm or or become kind of like an anti technology Luddite that just lives like the Amish or something like Timothy McVeigh or not Timothy Ted Kaczynski yeah yeah that was his his deal yeah his his manifesto or whatever that he wrote. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He was all about technology killing the human race. Shalto, who was the star in District 9, just played Ted Kaczynski in something. Oh, really? In a film.

Yeah, in a new film. I wonder if the film got into his work with, you know, he was a part of the Harvard LSD studies. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Oh, they cooked his brain. Not, not only did they cook his brain, the studies that he was involved with were not just about LSD, but they were also about breaking a person. They were about breaking him down psychologically and mentally. And using, using drugs to do that. Yes. And he was also very vulnerable because he was a college student, a young guy.

Yeah. And also came from a, there's a documentary about him. I think it's on Netflix. That is really intense. And it's about his brother is the one who caught him. His brother read the manifesto because it was released online and it was available for everybody. Or didn't he put it in Rolling Stone or something? That's right.

Yeah. His brother read the writing. It's like, oh my God, this is my brother because he knew. And one of the reasons his brother was so fucked up was Ted Kaczynski at an early age had some sort of a disease. And they took him away from his parents for a prolonged period of time and had him in a hospital where he had no touch, no contact with the outside world when he was a baby. Like some developmental issue.

Yes. And so there was a long period of time, I forget if it was weeks or months, where he lived like this, where they could only visit him one day a week and he didn't have anybody touching him and cradling him and caring for him. And he became like a sociopath, perhaps because of that. And then compounded by these Harvard LSD studies that he was a part of in the 1960s. And so he leaves there, they cook his brain. He goes to Berkeley, teaches just to develop enough money so that he could buy a cabin and implement this plan to kill all the people that were involved in the future propagation of technology. Yeah. He was incredibly anti-technology.

Yeah. Well, that's one of the ways you would get if you run acid. And he started like thinking about how this plays out. You're like, oh, oh, oh, oh, they're going to get, it's going to kill us all. Those human race is doomed. The technology is going to overcome us. I mean, the thing that's so crazy about MKUltra, because I think, I don't know if it was part of MKUltra, but it may have been, but they also experimented on this Canadian town as well. Canada was part of that test scenario too. And then there was the Tuskegee experiments

on black males in America with, I think, syphilis, right? And it's like, what kind of government, what is happening where the government thinks that it can do this to people? You know, that's the most incredible and fascinating part of that, where you wouldn't be able to do it now. I think there was little to no oversight.

Yeah, it's just like, how is this even happening? Right. But that was the only way they felt like they could find out what happens when people take too much acid or what happens when people think they're getting medication for syphilis, but they're not. But still, the fact that they're allowed to do those kinds of experiments where the people caught in the crossfire, the people that are being experimented on will never. I mean, you're ruining their lives. Yeah. And it's like it's just sort of okay. Like it's like a legal, you know. I think it's a thing, again, where there's little to no oversight.

And it's also they have this ultimate ability to just make everybody disappear. Like in the 60s when they were doing MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax where they would dose up Johns and brothels. They ran brothels in San Franciscoisco and one other place i forget where it was but they would get these prostitutes and they were in on the deal and the prostitutes would deliver these drinks to these guys before they would you know have sex and inside the drink was a large dose of acid and so these guys would take the drink and then they would just freak the fuck out while they were being observed through a two-way mirror.

So this was another CIA? Yeah. It was a CIA. It was part of MKUltra. And there's an amazing book. I'm going to say about it. People have heard this. I'm sorry.

But it's an amazing book called Chaos by a guy named Tom McNeil. Tom O'Neill, rather. And Tom is a guy who wrote about the manson family and the manson family murders and as he was studying this he did that huge it took him like 20 years yeah yeah yeah so you know the story yeah and as he was studying it he realized that he was uncovering layers upon layers and that what this is really all about the reason why manson kept getting out of jail and kept committing crimes and they would release him was because he was a part of this study. And that they had dosed up Manson when he was in jail. They had taught him how to essentially run a cult.

And they had provided him with acid. And there was an actual clinic in Haight-Ashbury the Haight-Ashbury free clinic that was hilariously Deemed because it was run by the CIA after Tom's book comes out They closed this place down it had been open for decades in fact my wife's mom who lived in Haight-Ashbury She was a hippie there in the 60s She used to go to that clinic in that clinic was Jolly West ran it that was the very guy who was dosing people of the very guy who does Jack Ruby after Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald they went to visit him in prison and Jack Ruby went nuts was hiding under tables

like he was giving people acid and experimenting on him and one of the people experiment on was Charles Manson. Is that well known? The book is. So it's just there. The book is a huge hit now. And they're actually, are we supposed to talk about that? I don't know.

They're in the process of potentially converting the book into a series. Oh, okay. Because it is one of the best books I've ever read. It is so wild. And it's so hard to believe this guy was hired to write a short story for a magazine. So as he's investigating the story, he goes deeper and deeper and he's like, ah! And he realizes the prosecution was flawed

and they had something on the prosecutor so they had the whole thing set up and they made it look like this was, they were trying to make the anti-war movement and the flower children, the hippies, they were trying to made it look like, you know, this was, they were trying to make the anti-war movement and the flower children, the hippies, they were trying to make it seem like this was this evil nefarious thing. And one of the ways they did that was Manson. Yeah. Amazing. It's wild. And again, no oversight. No one's paying attention.

That's the part that's the most interesting part to me. And the, and the, the most sort of sadistic about all of it is that. You can just operate with impunity and do whatever you want to citizens of the country that you're meant to be representing. And one of those was Ted Kaczynski. Yeah. He was a part of that.

It's wild. Yeah, I didn't know that. I only knew about the whole sort of extreme Luddite anti-technology point of view and trying to slow the spread of technology. Yeah, that's what it was from. It has to have something to do with it obviously he's got deep troubles on top of that and his brother in the documentary talked about how troubled his brother was like if someone

had rejected his advances like a girl like he would be like really vicious and mean and write them horrible letters and there was something like really wrong with him. Some developmental problems. Yeah, yeah. But his thought about technology, as evil as he was and as brilliant as he was, his thought about technology one day being the doom of human race, there's some wisdom to that. Yeah.

Or at least there's some potential insight. There's like a nugget of truth to that. Yeah. Or at least some potential insight. Like a nugget of truth. Yeah. Yeah. It's either the savior or it'll put the final nail in the coffin. I think we're just not meant to stay this for very long. No, we're in the intermediate like child smash, having a temper tantrum phase, like knocking things over. things over. And it's so obvious that up until now, I mean, if you go back through human history, there's a development of tools and weapons and all these different things, which really help

people overcome predators and enemies and their environment and all these different things happen, but they're all kind of scalable until you get to- They're in balance. Yes. Until you get to electronics And electronics and anything digital and anything involving electricity and anything involving machines and anything involving things that biologically we can't possibly evolve fast enough to compete with anything that's connected to the Internet, anything that's connected to artificial intelligence, anything that's connected to silicon chips and the infrastructure

that we've developed. It's like our biology is hopelessly stalled. We're not changing fast enough. I think there was also a Darwinistic thing that was happening. Like when you bring up paleolithic tools and living in caves, like there was a balance where we had never conquered nature. You know, there was this balance and so to me it's not just electronics it's like the moment that the balance tipped where we were just the absolute alpha control of the of the environment that we live in yes then that's when everything got completely out of balance and it's like that's the dangerous phase that we're in now yeah and that could be part of you know the great barrier that ends up snuffing out all these other hypothetical civilizations. It feels like

nukes, overpopulation, limited resources, runaway. I mean, when you start introducing things like just the volume of stuff that is in the system right now, there's too much chaos. Yeah. There's too much chaos. So you either have to come out on the other side of it with some other new way of living or it's going to wipe us out. The real great moment is the Manhattan Project, right? The great moment where everything changed forever was Oppenheimer when he reads from the Bhagavad Gita when he talked about-

I am become death. Destroy of worlds. When he says it and this guy worked with Einstein and he's this incredible genius and made this thing. And then here he is aware of the consequences of this thing that he helped create. And he's like, oh, boy. Yeah, it seems like other than maybe deflecting an asteroid coming to Earth, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the benefits of nukes are. Yeah. asteroid coming to earth it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the benefits of nukes are yeah but you know um but you could also say things that seem highly beneficial like the internet could also be the death of the human race yeah it could be it could be a coming at it from a different angle that it's a piece of technology we never expected that wipes us out

but then the question is what's better Is it better if we just kill each other with spears? Like, is that better? If we, you know, we shoot arrows at each other, is that better? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the same. It's, it's like you have the, the ancient mammalian brain that is doing its biological programming bidding by building weapons to beat the other tribe, except because you've coupled it with a supercomputer, it's now building nuclear weapons. So the result, the result is out of whack. It's like genes that what the genes are asking for are only thinking 15 minutes in advance, right? They don't, there's no like long-term thinking to the human race.

Right. Right. advance right they don't there's no like long-term thinking to the human race right right so so the result of of doing what the what is being told on a biological programming level immediately which is i need a better weapon results in these massive long-term catastrophes that are not thought through yeah just because we can doesn't mean we should but we always do and we seem to always do yeah yeah we will i'm sure we'll continue to ride out until the lights go off. Finally. Did you enjoy Ex Machina? Yeah. That was one of my favorite movies ever.

Yeah. Ex Machina is awesome. I mean, it's kind of unrealistic that a guy could do that in a vacuum and create that sort of technology. Yeah. But I'm willing to step away from that. I'm willing to, you know, I'm willing to accept that.

that form so and and all of that within the context of the movie makes a lot of sense it's and and I know that she's also or the AI is cut off is cut off from the web so it needs a way to get out of the building yeah so I mean I just wonder if like should it be should it be virtual like should it be something digital does it have to have a few a human form right that you know I mean that in terms of realism because everything else feels very realistic it's just i wonder about if there was a way for her to leave at the end in a way that felt like non-physical something that represents ai or future where the future may take that or a way to plug into a system yeah well that's the real question. If AI does become sentient, will we even know? Like, wouldn't it just sort of engineer our demise slowly through manipulation? Like if AI

decided that the human race is a mess, maybe what AI would do is create bots online and have people argue with people to the point where they nuke each other. Yeah. I mean, for sure. But, but also, I mean, I question, it's interesting whether it would think we were meaningless as well. Like, I'm not sure it would come to that conclusion. I, I guess whatever conclusion it comes to, um, I mean, it's also hard to think about AI because we put human characteristics. Yeah. And it doesn't, it doesn't do that. It's not going to be coming from that perspective. It's, it's just usually, I think the thing that's destructive about AI is, is you give, you give an artificial intelligence a task you want it to do.

And it goes about doing it in a way that you would never have ever thought of. And the results of that is detrimental to the human race. I think that's more, you know, like the idea of ex machina or an AI sitting on a server somewhere that is actually sentient in the way that we are self-aware. I don't necessarily think it plays out that way. I think it's, I think it plays out more like it's not actually sentient and it's, it's executing a task that was required of it, but it's doing it in a way that is so far outside the boundaries of how we think that, that there was no, uh, war game we could play where we could imagine this outcome because it just went, it just went so, you know, polar opposite to any way we could have imagined. Yeah. And it wouldn't have necessarily any sense of self-preservation. Like, why would it be interested in preserving itself?

Exactly. And those are the sort of human characteristics we apply to the way we think of AI. You know, it doesn't behave like that. It's not a sentient thing that's sitting there thinking and scheming and using the same impulses that we have. And having this need to spread its genes and all the weird stuff that we have built into our system. It doesn't have any of that. Have you seen that article? I think it's from Wait But Why on AI. Do you know that? Do you know Wait But Why? Yeah, I have. Wait a minute. I'm trying to remember where I read this. It was either there or it was somewhere else. But the example that they give is, I think it's a paper stationary company that has an AI. And they make the error of plugging it into the rest of the web,

right? So now it's like, it's able to access everything. And its task is, please make this paper stationary company more profitable. And the result result a few generations later is like every planet in the known universe is coated in like stationary equipment and there's no life form anywhere and it's that feels like an accurate that that's what I'm kind of getting right what I mean it's not it's doing something coming from such a different point of view that the result is highly unexpected and and unforeseen and it wipes us out that is a crazy example but that god that seems so possible yeah it's just like turning humans into staplers or something you're like melting us down into like

or something you're like melting us down into like base like glue from bones to fuse pages together yeah there's no i mean if you have no sense of self no feeling of self-preservation no biological need to spread your genes like what is a life form like that's the question about these aliens if aliens are real like what are they even doing like why why do they bother when when they're in the when they're in the meat phase the meat the meat phase is going to be based on on genes and and a propagation of genes so you could you could definitely argue that whatever form of multicellular highly intelligent life out there would initially start from a paradigm that we would understand. Because it definitely would start there. But it could merge with technology where you'd have

alien AI hybrid, or it could just be pure alien silicon-based computer technology that is sentient. At which point then it's the same scenario. You could have an alien AI wipe us alive. Maybe they understand that the natural course of progression for the bipedal hominid that's fascinated by innovation is that one day it's going to achieve that thing that you were talking about earlier where the minds all do combine and achieve one huge superorganism consciousness and that they just want to make sure we don't blow ourselves up before we do it so they're just sort of like cultivating the garden

like oh we got a snake in the garden or putting yeah putting like guardrails up at a at a tenpen bowling lane or something yeah just to keep us on the rails yeah i mean that's what everybody would hope right that daddy space alien is going to come down and make sure we don't blow ourselves up. And that's also one of the things that's interesting about the increase in sightings that corresponds with the dropping of the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like right after that was when all these sightings started happening. I didn't know that. Massive uptick in sightings. But the question is like, is that real like what are they seeing is how many of these stories are true you know

there's the kenneth arnold story where that this is the um original flying saucer imagery came from kenneth arnold's uh spotting a bunch of different discs in formation it's in the movie phenomena they talk about it's really interesting yeah well there, I mean, the other crazy one is that, was it Albuquerque, New Mexico, where all of those lights showed up and the mayor even- Oh, that's Phoenix. Phoenix, yeah. Yeah, the Phoenix lights. That's pretty crazy.

What's crazy about that one is the mayor, was it the governor? Yeah. The governor was actually, he did this thing at a press conference where he had a guy dress up like an alien. And he said, we found the culprit. And the guy comes out with a big alien suit on. They had a big laugh and yuck it up. But then afterwards, that's in The Phenomenon as well, which is a great movie. Afterwards, he talks about his actual experience.

And then he says he saw something there. Yeah. And he said he was basically instructed to try to make a mockery of this, and that he was told to have this guy come out and do the press conference with him and make it all look silly. But the reality was he saw something he can't possibly describe. And he said he was – And like 20 20 000 other people yeah many many people saw the same sort of thing which is this triangular craft that flew overhead with no noise and it was huge like three football fields and they're like what the fuck was that

it's so confusing it's very confusing because you've got eyewitness encounters, which are absolutely the worst kind of evidence you could ever get. People's memories are terrible. Their ability to extrapolate from small images and create these large things in their mind, and they repeat the story over and over again, and they seem like it's true. It's so hard. When someone talks about the past,

and they talk about a thing that they saw that doesn't exist in our modern point of reference, there's no triangular silent craft that just zips across the sky. It doesn't exist. So when he describes it and he's telling you about it, you're like, what is this? Is this nonsense? And how could everybody also agree on the same thing? How could thousands of people agree?

This is how one person hears another person talk about it and then people just start talking could everybody also agree on the same thing how could thousands of people agree this is a this is how one person hears another person talk about it and then people just start talking about the thing they saw too i saw it too and this is you know i want to say it was 90 yeah it's like 97 yeah so it was not a lot of internet activity back then. It was a more naive time. It's hard. But the thing that gets me is those things that were hovering, the lights that were hovering around the city. And then the government's explanation for it was that these were flares that were dropped out of the sky. Well, that's horseshit for sure because they're hovering there.

They're literally floating in the sky. They're not acting like gravity is pulling them down to the ground. They're just hovering. Unless that's a drone, and you don't want to tell us about drones, maybe it's some sort of highly sophisticated drone technology. A drone swarm. Yeah. Maybe they were doing some sort of a psychological experiment on a city.

Like what happens if something like this, if we put something like this over a city? How do they react? Let's study it. It's like the new MKUltra. Right. Aliens are the new MKUltra. Well, when the government comes out and the Pentagon comes out and starts talking to you about off-world ships that are not made on Earth, you're like, what? Yeah.

Who said that? Did you guys say that? Like, is this the Pentagon? Was that released at the same time as all of the footage that got out? Well, some of the footage was leaked earlier, you know, like some of the footage from, there's a bunch of footage that gets released and leaked. And a lot of it gets released to my friend Jeremy Corbell. And, you know, cause he's a prominent UFO researcher and he. And a lot of it gets released to my friend Jeremy Korbel. And, you know, because he's a prominent UFO researcher, and he's got a big profile online. And it's well understood that if you can get stuff to him, it's going to get everywhere. And, you know, and then the New York Times and the New York Times in 2017, put that front page story and they showed

the the image of what was the go Fast or the Fleer? I forget which image they used in the front of the New York Times, but they're essentially saying in the most important newspaper in the world, we have real reason to believe this stuff is true. These are real things. Yeah. It is strange because it also, it feels like there's a sudden amount of media also it feels like there's there's a sudden amount of media around it too you know like it's it's all of a sudden on everyone's mind it's present at the moment so why i mean right why why why is that yeah it's a good question it's fucking weird it's weird and then there's a thing that we both admit to that we want it to be true so badly

it's hard to parse it's hard to parse true so badly. It's hard to parse. It's hard to parse what's bullshit from what's probable. I would give anything to just have some kind of seven foot horrific creature coming out of a spaceship on Earth. That would be awesome. Yeah, I would too. Yeah, just to see it land. It's really weird if you go back and watch some of the early, early movies, like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Yeah. Have you watched that recently? The 50s one and then the 2008 one or whatever, yeah. There was a 2008 one? Yeah, I think so, with Keanu. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that one. I don't think I saw that one.

Yeah. You're talking about, is it Gort, right? Yeah. What's the robot? Yeah. Batu, Kalatu, Niktu, or whatever the thing that they say. Remember? Yeah. It's like weird statement that they say.

And there's the, there it is. Hee hee hee hee. I mean, look at that thing. What's really cool about that is the special effects at the time were dog shit, right? But that thing, like they managed to make it look like that thing opened up. See if you can find the video of the spaceship opening up. See if you can find the video of as the alien steps out of the spaceship. It's pretty fucking cool.

Is that it? Oh, he's got some sort of thing, and they shoot him. They think it's a gun. He's trying to like some sort of thing and they shoot him. They think it's a gun. He's trying to give them this thing and they shoot him. Sorry. Oh! See if you can find the clip of the guy getting out of the UFO though. See if you can find the clip of the guy getting out of the UFO though because like as the UFO lands like it the the

Door opens up out of nowhere and it sort of dissolves and you see the yeah, there it is Like go like a little bit before that See here. Yeah, go like right before it's flush. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, see it opens. But it's pretty cool how it does it. Yeah. Like, especially when you think about, what year was this? 51? Yeah, it would have been mind-blowing. Yeah. So when you saw this in the movie theater, you're like, oh!

But again, this is the classic shape that people had decided was the shape of alien vehicles. People are always describing this. Yeah. The exact same shape. And all these kids these kids there look I've got a camera and look it opens up and then the dude comes out and he looks just like a regular person but he's just got a spaceship on and then he hangs out with these people and lives in their house yeah that's the thing right we always have to anthropomorphize yeah the thing it's always it's like we're not able to escape from that ourselves as creators.

Well, that was one of the cool things about that one film where they were like these octopi and they spoke with ink. Oh, Arrival. Arrival. I loved that movie. Yeah, Arrival's awesome. Do you know Ted Chang who wrote the short story that it's based on? No, I don't. His short stories are incredible.

There's actually one that you'd find really interesting called – oh, shit, is it called Beyond? I'm trying to remember. It's about a government experiment that experiments on people that have had brain injuries, and they inject them with a new kind of medication that rebuilds brain structure. And this guy comes out of, like, I think it's a car accident or he had a stroke. I think it was a small stroke. And he comes out of it where his intelligence is basically doubled. And it's a byproduct of this new drug. And he starts to, he at that point can outsmart pretty much every human alive. And he's

piecing together what's happened to him. And then he finds where this drug is still in sort of FDA circulation in other hospitals. And he steals all of it. And he starts taking more. And he reaches a point where he realizes that he's now that he can see his own body. He can step back in his mind and decide to burn calories more to control his heartbeat. So he's basically like a super intelligence. Like a lawnmower man. Yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah. But he realizes that there was another test subject that's a week ahead of him.

And he calculates because of this that this other person, if it's an exponential rise in intelligence, is this much further ahead than he is. And it's really, really well written, just really cool. Well, the story is from Ted Chang's selection of short stories, which is called, I think it's like, man, I can't remember. Stories I Told You or something. Jimmy, can you look that up, Ted Chang? I'm looking through his, I was trying to figure out which one it was as you were explaining it. So, yeah, it's the same one that the Arrival story is inside of. It's a collection of shorts. And I think it's called Beyond,

that particular story. Beyond. Ted Chiang sounds like a bad motherfucker. He's awesome, yeah. He's got another one in there about the Tower of Babel where it's a physical connection that touches heaven.

So as you scale it, you're walking through clouds and asteroids and you get higher and higher he's amazing do you spend time going through short stories to try to come up with ideas that perhaps you could use for movies

or stories you could adapt well remember Peter Watts that I was talking about he's the first person that that's really happened to me with. I was working with Richard Morgan, who is the writer of Altered Carbon, who's awesome. And he's involved in the game company that we're all working together now. And he said, have you read Peter Watts? And I was like, no.

And I went and read his book called Blindsight, which is hard sci-fi. It's set 60 years from now. And there's one character in it which is absolutely amazing. And I just emailed him and contacted him and started speaking to him. And I want to create something out of one of the characters that's in there. And that's kind of one of the first times that I can think of that that's really happened. And that's kind of one of the first times that I can think of that that's really happened. Usually, I mean, if you, you know, like my Elysium thing about being on the other side of the U kind of there's I've sort of accumulated a number of projects just by being away from Hollywood for a bit that that are gathered from a whole bunch of different places.

So there's a few different avenues now, I think. But you Peter Watts, man, this this character is is pretty incredible. It's like the idea is he applied evolutionary biology to how you could viably justify a vampire. And the result is astonishing. What is this book called? It's called Blindsight, that book. But the book isn't about that. It's this one character that I zeroed in on, which now he and I are working on, which is this idea where basically he thinks that if you look at something like lions in the wild, right? Right. Lions would out – they're outnumbered by their prey like whether it's 10 to 1 or 100 to 1.

There's far fewer lions than there are gazelles, right? there's there's far fewer lions and there are gazelles right so the the lions also have a disproportionate amount of sort of intelligence and logic compared to a gazelle because they're the predator that hunts this predated you know this predated animal so the he took that philosophy and created a branch off of sort of hominid upper primates that would be 10 times more intelligent than a human that would keep the human numbers in check. Right. And, and it's crazy. And it, and it, it, it only, uh, it, it only needs a certain enzyme that humans have in their blood. So it's not like the classic thing of vampires drinking tons of blood. It's just going off to one enzyme.

So it could actually just drink a little bit of blood and get what it needs that's only created by human beings. And then the rest of its diet could be like a normal diet, right? But the thing that he wrote that is the most incredible part of it is he's got this thing called the crucifix glitch,

which is, it's so intelligent. And it can hold, like the way that you're conscious or I'm conscious now, it can hold two or three or four versions of consciousnesses like that in its head at any given moment. So it can look at topics from multiple real points of view. And what it does is it basically goes into hibernation, like a vampire. It lets the human population build up. And then when it comes out into hibernation like a vampire. It lets the human population build up. And then when it comes out of hibernation, over a few generations, its existence may have been turned into myth or something.

And then it hunts the population down again, right? So this is the thing he came up with. Because its brain structure is so different and because it's such an excellent predator and it's totally, completely sociopathic, because as you would need to be if you're chewing on something, right? It's just a total, it's basically like completely sociopathic because as you would need to be if you're chewing on something, right? It's just a total, it's basically like a serial killer on steroids

that like we've never seen. It's like mixing a serial killer with a particle physicist like Einstein. But he came up with this thing where its visual cortex is different to a human and it calculates like horizontal and vertical simultaneously to look, it's like a pattern recognition system for hunting. And up until only a few thousand years ago,

there were no right angles in nature. Nature was nature. But humans started building, you know, Euclidean geometry buildings, the Greek Parthenons and stuff. And that caused an overlap in its visual cortex that looks like a right angle. And it sent the vampires into grand mole epileptic seizures. So we misinterpreted that as holding up crosses. Right? So it just can't go to cities. Well, it can't go anywhere that humans move to.

And so they died off. Right? Wow. It's crazy. That's a great idea. Yeah, he's really talented. So the idea is basically that some pharmaceutical company would will them back out of like Neanderthal DNA. They're doing gene therapy to basically bring this out of humans again.

bring this out of humans again. But it's similar to AI where once it crosses a certain threshold, it's way smarter than the people that are willing it out through gene therapy. And all of a sudden, you have a real problem on your hands, right? Where, I mean, it's sort of like describing it like a bunch of cows went and genetically willed a wolf into being. Right? The wolf doesn't want to be caged in by the cows. Right. And it's also a fascinating concept that we're a pest species that's grown like a mold around the planet because our natural predator has been absent

for a few hundred thousand years. That is a wild premise. Yeah. I love that. That sounds like a fantastic movie. Yeah. I hope it will be. Are you going to do it? Yeah.

This is what I spoke to Peter about. You're working on it right now? Yeah. When's it going to happen? I don't know. We're just like early phases now. Fuck. Yeah.

Dude, that sounds amazing. Did you ever see 30 Days of Night? Yeah. Did you like it? Yeah. David Slade was making that film when I was in New Zealand making District 9. So I met him in the post-process of 30 Days of Nine. I love a good vampire movie.

Yeah. That one sounds better than any premise I've ever heard before. Yeah, it's basically like you're mixing something like the approach to serial killers like Silence of the Lambs with vampires. But it's just, I mean, every element, because he comes from evolutionary biology, everything is about like – it sort of looks like an NBA basketball player where its limbs are elongated because it's all about venting heat. And when vampires have that pallor kind of white color, it's because it keeps all of its blood around its central organs. So he kind of – he explains on a biological level why every single thing is happening with it, right? So if you're sitting here with it, it has reflective cat eyes

for night vision with a 900 IQ. It's totally sociopathic and it's out thought everything that you're possibly thinking in here. And it also kind of ties into a deeper part. I mean, within the mythology that he's written of human psyche where we haven't been around one for hundreds of generations. But when you're around them, you feel like you're being preyed on in a way that none of us are used to. You know what I mean? Oh, you instantaneously recognize it. Yeah, like if it came into the building, right? Yeah.

So in his book, In Blindsight, it's a first alien encounter book about, um, about aliens on the far, basically they take a snapshot of planet earth where 65,000 flashes go off around the globe simultaneously. And they take a flash moment of the human race and it just happens like all of a sudden. So our response is to completely freak out, not knowing what did this. And then they see a ship that they think is way out on the edge of the Kuiper belt, like far, far out. And so they build a ship and send it out there. So every person on the ship is highly specialized, genetically modified humans.

And the captain of the ship is a vampire because it's the only one smart enough to sort of assimilate all of the data, right? And it takes anti-Euclidean drugs, so it's not having grand mal seizures from all of the right angles in the ship. And it wears a visor to not freak out the crew members that are on the ship because it's a hunter. Whoa. Yeah. It's good, hard sci-fi. So I want to take that character and put it in like a contemporary setting.

Vampires in Space. Headed to a ship on the Kuiper Belt. An alien ship, yeah. Fuck. That is about sentience. It's a book where sentience is a... Human consciousness is a maladaptive thing. It's an error.

What is the name of the book again? Blindside. Blindside. The other story by Peter Chang is called Understand. Understand. Yeah, that's what it is. Damn, man, I got some new reading. It's weird that that vampire theme has

always existed throughout mythology. There's always been vampire. It's a consistent one. It's been around for so long. Yeah, it's just part of, you know, it's entered the sort of human lore, the part of our cultural experience. I mean, who knows where it comes from? But it's definitely ancient.

It's Eastern European mostly, I think. Really? Yeah, I think so. Well, it predates Vlad Tepes, right? Vlad the Impaler? I don't know. He's the original. I was just looking this up, actually.

I'm not sure. I think it does predate him. I mean, a lot of cultures have different versions, too, of vampires. But the sort of anti-garlic, anti-cross, like, one that we know is definitely Eastern European. I'm sure there's others that are like thousands of years old. It's such a compelling horror theme. The idea that there's a person that pretends to be like us but just wants to drink our blood. Just wants to get a hold of you and prey upon you.

Yeah. Although in this world, they were unmistakable. They're a foot taller. Oh wow. They're like physically just, you know, it's, yeah.

I mean they're, it's, it's such a cool villain. I love the idea too that human beings through their own ridiculous need to tamper with things have re-engineered them, brought them back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, well they're, they're, they're, well, I mean by, yeah, I'm, tamper with things have re-engineered them brought them back yeah yeah see

well they're there they're well I mean by yeah I'm sort of explaining that the the plot for what we want to do I guess by explaining this so I shouldn't but but yeah humans bring them back erroneously it's not a good idea that sounds like a fucking wild movie when can I expect this I'll email you I want to start watching it right now here's one thing i would like someone else to do if it's if not you someone to do i should say um a good werewolf movie it's been a long time you where's your rick baker werewolf it's at the studio in la okay yeah it's not rick baker didn't make it though pat mcgee made it it's a copy but it's

based on this werewolf yeah on yeah when rick baker saw it he said it's too big oh really yeah Rick Baker didn't make it, though Pat McGee made it. It's a copy of Rick Baker's Werewolf. When Rick Baker saw it, he said it's too big. Really? Yeah, he said it was oversized. I totally agree, man. I'm fully into Werewolves. It's been a long time since there was even... It feels like there could be something... I enjoyed the Benicio Del Toro Wolfman one, but it was a little corny.

It was fun, but... I also just saw Wolf with jack nicholson recently again and i hadn't seen it since like 95 michelle pfeiffer yeah that movie is crazy like that movie is awesome but essentially they just went like this there wasn't much special effects at all the most exciting parts when he bites off the two fingers of the the guy and he finds him in his pocket later. But you could definitely go to town with a werewolf film. Yeah.

It seems like we're due for a real good werewolf film. I actually posed this to Peter Watts because he's so good. Now he's a wolf. I said this to him and he said the amount of energy it would require for someone to transform into a wolf would be verging on nuclear. Because he's trying to justify it scientifically. he went away from it oh interesting yeah but um obviously it doesn't need to be justified scientifically like yeah empire you could just do it but uh yeah there would be some suspension of disbelief is you know i'll i'll take it in a werewolf movie if i'll take it in Ex Machina. Yeah. Ex Machina is definitely more realistic than a werewolf.

But I mean, yeah, you could do something very cool with werewolves. Yeah. Well, especially the idea that a werewolf is going to transform almost instantaneously in front of your eyes. You know, it's going to be a really quick transformation. Like American Werewolf in London is the greatest of all time. Yeah. For sure.

Like that transformation. Classic practical effects too. Yes. of all time, for sure. Classic practical effects, too. Yes. Which is very, very satisfying. Some of my favorite people to work with as crew members are always people that do that. Like Amalgamated Dynamics, which are Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis. They're the guys that did Aliens and then went on to do Tremors and Starship Troopers and all this practical effects awesomeness. And then Weta in new zealand which is obviously famous for lord of the rings and

everything what does that term mean practical effects um does that mean non-cgi yeah exactly not visual effects you know and and and like we were talking about the matte paintings and aliens it's like up until you know 1992 or 93, it just like CG wasn't really on the horizon. So everything had to be solved in camera. And so those elongating, you know, tearing skin and claws growing in hair of, it's very textural. It's very, very real feeling because it was real. So I love, I love all of that of that stuff it would be it would be cool to use some of those techniques and sort of merge them with cg in the right ways to get like some really amazing results out of it yeah because the the cgi versions of like underworld it's like those

werewolves are i don't know if i've seen any underworld films they're kind of silly she's really hot it's kind of cool the vampires all right it's kind of fun it's like it's like fast and the furious nine right i mean of werewolf movies yeah it's just all action chaos but it's doesn't i don't know i haven't think it's really happening right it doesn't feel real and it's also werewolves versus vampires right yes yes but it's just you don't you don't believe it's also werewolves versus vampires, right? Yes. Yes. But it's just, you don't believe it. Like when an American werewolf in London, one of the best scenes is the man who's the businessman

who's running through the subway station trying to get away from the werewolf. And then he's falling apart. He's exhausted. And he's on the escalator. And then you see it slowly come into frame. It feels very, it feels it off it feels very it feels threatening but also very real there's a realness about it that's awesome yes um yeah yeah practical effects uh there's a good usage in that genre i think and yes it could be used

very effectively oh yeah i mean it seems like it could be done again. It seems like there's enough. There's so much stuff being made in Hollywood, though. I'm sure it must be. A wolf movie? Totally. Why didn't I think... It's probably like 30. Wasn't John Landis' son apparently working on some sort of a remake of American Werewolf in London, I feel like?

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, it's compelling. It's compelling. I mean, it also ties into a whole bunch of psychological stuff the way vampires do you know yes but i mean clearly i'm set on my vampire thing now so well i have that mapped out i'm excited about that vampire thing that's the greatest vampire premise i've ever heard greatest villain ever oh my god it sounds amazing yeah i

want that movie to be out tomorrow how long does it take you from a premise to a script writing to film? Like what's a general timeline for you? Like say District 9. A normal film would be about two years. Yeah. I mean, Demonic was like one year, but it was, it was a pandemic film. It was a different kind of thing, but no, normally it would be about two years. Yeah.

I have, I have a sci-fi film that i'm working on now that i hope is the next one that i make that would be it's been i don't know a year of thinking and writing and then um so maybe what maybe 2 2.5 years maybe for that if there's 1.5 left to go you know maybe uh six months four four to six months of sort of light and then proper pre-production. And then at least four months of production. And then at least a year of post. And you still have a year of writing at the beginning of it.

So when you have a concept and when you're thinking about turning this into a film, how does it work? Do you bring it to the production company? How much say do you have in who gets cast and how it gets done? You definitely have a lot of say in costing. I mean, as, you know, I mean, if you look at Dionne Foote in Chappie, that's a case of, I don't think any sane studio executive would allow that to happen. So that definitely is the result of me.

executive would allow that to happen. So that definitely is the result of me. Or, I mean, the incredible chance of District 9 happening, which is really all down to Peter Jackson and Fran for letting that film happen. If you think about a first-time director with a film set in South Africa with a person who is my friend as the actor who doesn't have an acting background at $30 million. Makes no logical sense that that film exists, but I'm super thankful that it does. So no, you would have control over cost. I mean, Sholto in that case was just, he kind of reminds me of Sachin Baron Cohen, where he's very, he can take on personalities and stuff. And he's always done that since I've known him.

So I described this Afrikaans character to him as a test to show Peter what I was thinking. And he just did it so well that it's like, we should put this guy in the lead of the film. What did he do if he didn't act? He was always interested in filmmaking. He was directing and producing and stuff behind the camera. Oh, wow. Yeah, not performing in front, but he's very, he's very good in front of the camera. So that's how that happened. How crazy is that? Yeah. The chance, you know, the, the sort of randomness, it's, it's a luck event the way that that film came about. How it must've felt bizarre when it was actually out and super successful. You must've felt like, what the

fuck have I created? Well, we, we also didn't test it with anyone, which is uncommon for movies, right? So it was watched for the first time at Comic-Con in San Diego. And Sholto and I genuinely were concerned that the audience wouldn't understand the accent because we hadn't shown it to anyone except the people that we'd worked with, like Peter and Fran and then Terry, my wife, and like a handful of people in New Zealand had seen it and they're New Zealanders, which means their accents more in align with South Africa. So suddenly show a bunch of Americans, this thing, it was only on like the premiere night that it's like, wait, is anyone going to understand what he's saying? You know, which they ended up, thank God, understanding him, but unusual, very unusual way that that came into being. God, what a strange way to start

a movie career. Yeah, for sure. I mean, in acting. Yeah, no, totally. So yeah, no, you have control over that. And to a degree, I mean, right now, this film that I'm, that I want to make now would, would require a pretty well-known star. So we have to get someone that, that, that because it's new IP that the studio would feel okay spending a certain amount of money on. Oh, so is that how it works? Like they did in this? Well, I mean, what's funny about district nine is it didn't, but district nine was a lower budget level as well.

You could, you could potentially take more risks, although now it would be almost impossible to make that film. So that's how one of those things happens. If you have a big budget film, the studio demands someone who's going to bring a certain amount of faces to the theater no matter what. Usually, yeah. I mean, if you look at Avatar with James Cameron, it's like Cameron is such a well-respected filmmaker that Sam Worthington wasn't really known in the lead of the most expensive film ever made. Right.

You know what I mean? Right. Because people were signing up for what Cameron would be bringing. Because people were signing up for what Cameron would be bringing. But the typical process is you would need enough of a star to carry the sort of financial weight of the film, merged with however interesting the IP may appear to be. Cameron is a star in and of itself. Yeah. There's certain people like Tarantino.

He's promising a world. Yeah. The movie is the star. Yeah. Yeah. like he's promising he knows promising a world yeah the movie is the star yeah yeah so um but i mean you know it's also a lot of that comes down to the audience right like the audience a lot of what the studios are doing is dictated by what the audience wants so it's not like you could make something um and the audience especially depending on the budget level could could not go if you

didn't if you didn't have the right star in there mmm you know it's not always the case it depends exactly on what you're making often it's not the case but in certain instances it really is defined by isn't it weird that we demand that we demand a person who we know isn't really the person in the film because we've seen him so many times be other people we want that person because we recognize that person all of it is super bizarre that's a bizarre one i mean i guess the thing that you're signing up for is you know that that typically this person is extremely good at carrying yeah an emotional carrying you through the journey you know yeah

like denzel washington is one of my favorite actors if not my favorite actor and it's like i love the idea i know what i'm gonna get if not my favorite actor. And it's like I love the idea. I know what I'm going to get if I watch something with him. So it could be maybe that. Maybe there's a sense of just quality that's going to come from a certain actor. Like a Daniel Day-Lewis movie. Yeah. There's a thing about that, but then there's also a thing like one of the things that I loved about Game of Thrones is I didn't know who anybody was.

I mean, there was a few people that were fairly well-known actors that were in there, but I didn't know any of them by name. And I couldn't really remember what they had been in. Like a couple of them, I go, I kind of recognize that person. But a lot of the younger people, never seen them before. A lot of the characters were brilliantly played. Yeah, well-acted. the characters were brilliantly played. Yeah. And well acted. And they became that character to me.

Whereas like, I didn't think of them as a person who used to be on that show and they were in that movie, which Peter Dinklage was the one who he had been an elf and a couple other things. I'd seen him before, but he was amazing in that show too. That show really is pretty incredible.

I mean, it's incredible. Amazing piece of work. How many episodes is that it's like was it eight seasons something like that seven seasons i don't remember what the number was but yeah it's probably like 70 or 80 episodes at least it's incredible yeah it's it's like a 70 80 episode movie yeah yeah i know it's it's very it's a I mean, just the realism and the scale of the world they created. It's so compelling. Yeah. It was, it was amazing. Just the idea that you were rooting for the lady with the dragons. There were so many parts. Dragons were awesome too. Oh my God. They're incredible. It was, uh, but it was refreshing that it was done and done so well with mostly, at least, marginally known actors.

So there wasn't a giant star that was compelling you to watch it because it was another Brad Pitt movie or whatever. Yeah, I think it's an opening night thing a lot of the time where, I mean, obviously, it's like a Venn diagram. Like, you want the overlap to be talent, audience awareness, studio comfortability. And it sort of overlaps and there's a narrow pool of who those people are for high budget stuff. And I think once you're over the opening weekend situation, it's like, I'm not sure if it matters then because then people are discovering it. It's not a marketing thing. Then it just comes down to the right person for the role.

And that, you know, with people like Denzel or Leonardo DiCaprio, it's like often it is them because they're just so good. Right. So, but, you know, Game of Thrones is a good example of it. At the absolute end of the day, it's only about acting ability. Yes. Acting ability and writing. What is it like now because of COVID and people don't necessarily want to go to a screen in a theater with a bunch of people that they don't know all breathing around them and films are simultaneously being released. And I know that there was this Scarlett Johansson lawsuit because of Black Widow,

because it wasn't supposed to be released the way it was. And what is it like to try to get a budget for a film? And like, what is the whole, how much different is the whole process now because of COVID? Well, I mean, that's an interesting question. I think that the budgeting situation is, I think what's going to happen is people are obviously going to gravitate towards streaming more and more. Right. And I think movie theaters may be thinned out, unfortunately, a little bit. Like there could be a few fewer theaters. But I think what will happen is the movies that will be in theaters will become bigger and bigger because you'll, you'll want to draw, you'll want to, it's almost like a theme park ride. You want enough of a reason to go to a movie theater to draw people out of their living rooms. Yeah. Experiences that the studios will probably pay more to create events. It has to be an event of some kind, you know? And, and I. So I think you could see this stratification between

larger event stuff that feels more comic booky and huge in movie theaters as events against longer format, Game of Thrones style, more complex character pieces that can also be epic that are occurring over much longer timelines that are happening at home. So I think that's probably what it will look like going forward. So the budgeting process now, it's like the budgets are relatively high in either direction there, you know, and then it just comes down to like whether what you're trying to make is viable or not. Cause like some stuff I want to make is commercial and other stuff is not commercial, which is what oats was for. I wanted to make stuff that I have an idea of how to try to monetize that going forward over time. But, um, at the moment it just looks like a bunch

of YouTube videos, you know, which is, which it may stay that way. I mean, maybe we can't figure it out, but, but I wanted, I think with the internet, there's a way for filmmakers and creators in general. I mean, it's already being proven true with YouTube creators, right? It's just that their budget levels are lower than what I need. But could you apply sort of a YouTube creator approach to high budget filmmaking? Could that work? It's an interesting thing where the audience is the only thing telling you whether they want something or not with their dollars. Well, I always loved the ability to watch a film at home and sometimes i would wait until a film was released on like apple movies or whatever it is i'm you what is it i'm movie apple tv yeah

um i would wait for that because i knew i wasn't i wasn't going to be in a theater with people on their phone where people are talking you don you not like the movie theater experience? I do, but I like a well-behaved movie theater experience. And you can't always count on that. That's the same as me, I think. It's annoying sometimes. So part of me was like, oh, this is great with COVID because so many of these films are being released simultaneously in streaming as in theater but then other part of me is like boy i hope this is just as financially successful because i want these

great films to keep being made and i want there to be these budgets so they can make an avatar so they can make you know these big spectacular films yeah it is it is a weird one also because the amount of content that's being created is so extreme, you know, that there's so much, especially on the streaming side, that's being produced. Right. That there are not these kind of individual avatar, like single expenditures that are that big. It's more like thinned out over a hundred different other projects. Yeah. Yeah. So you may, maybe you don't see that scale in a filmic sense, but I think things like Game of Thrones or where, you know, things like Westworld and high budget TV shows, I think

those could, those could presumably get bigger and bigger and bigger. That is the thing about streaming, right? If you, if your film is being released at the same time as all these other options and these streaming platforms, you're so overwhelmed with content. There's so many options for people in terms of like Netflix series and Amazon prime series. And it also feels, it makes it feel disposable, which is irritating because it's just turnover. You know, if you, if you think of the sort of the eighties or the nineties, it was, it was like an event to get to something like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park yes and it's like that stuff just comes and goes now weekly because of just the volume and the

level of competition yeah it's almost like when you want to watch a film if you want to stream something there's almost too many options like when you go through the top movies on iMovie or Apple TV it's like god there's so many options it's almost too much and then with the streaming options and the thing is there's new ones constantly it's not like they go away so you could go back and watch films from 10 years ago that you never saw from 15 years there's so many films yeah so to stand out today it sometimes requires like a convergence of luck and amazing talent and skill and and the idea and the premise being the right sort of subject matter that's sort of in the zeitgeist yeah a certain point yeah yeah but it does it I think it I'm curious to see how it goes I hope

the theatrical experience stays because I I agree with you in terms of annoying audiences but I also love it. Yeah. So, and as a filmmaker, I would really love stuff to be in theaters because it is a different experience where your brain sort of ingests the movie. Yeah. And for comedies, it's amazing because laughter is contagious. Yeah. And so when everyone around you is laughing in a film, it makes it funnier. It really does.

It makes it better. It is true. I hope it stays. I hope it stays too. Yeah. Listen, man, thank you very much for being here. I really does it makes it better it is true I hope it stays I hope it stays too yeah listen man thank you very much for being here

I really appreciate it I really appreciate your films I've enjoyed them immensely and I'm fucking pumped for this vampire one let me know when it comes out okay thanks Joe

thank you very much yeah thanks for having me thank you cheers bye everybody Bye, everybody.