The Joe Rogan Experience - #561 - Bruce Damer

Episode Date: October 14, 2014

Dr. Bruce Damer is a polymath scientist, designer, author and general explorer of liminal realms. He has worked for over a decade in simulation and design of space missions for NASA, develops biochemical models for the origin of life at UC Santa Cruz and collects vintage computers and their history in his DigiBarn computer museum. He has a practice exploring beyond the edges of consciousness to bring back stuff that is meaningful for humanity and the Gaian prerogative. http://www.damer.com http://levityzone.org/

Thanks for doing this, man. My pleasure. I'm very excited. My pleasure, man. All right, here we go. Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

There's only been two people ever that Dennis McKenna has recommended for this podcast, you and Josh Wickerham. So that puts you in very lofty company. Aye, aye, aye. Dahmer, that's the way? Dahmer. Bruce Dahmer. Or if you're French, it's Dahmer.

Is that how your family pronounces it? Is that the correct way? Dahmer is the best. But do your friends call you Dahmer? Does anybody give you full respect in the french heritage no no that's a thousand years ago they gave it up after a while they gave it up after they invaded britain oh 1066 that's clever that's a good move uh you've got a very unusual background man i mean dennis would not stop raving about you and then when i started

doing research on you i was like you were this is the craziest story of all time not not the craziest but it's pretty crazy you were in burning man during katrina with you were partying in burning man with people who work in the pentagon yes when katrina went down yep camp plyagon that is the most ridiculous thing. That gives me great discomfort to know the people who work in the Pentagon are partying at Burning Man. Rocking. We called for Blackhawks, but we got the order denied. But that's a whole other, that's a whole story. Well, when Katrina was happening, you guys were amongst the people that were in burning man the very few that had a

connection to the outside world correct we had a you know where our camp was doing the wi-fi and the internet for burning man for the public and emergency networks the private network and so we had a dish and we could take over satellites so one of our guys took over a recon satellite is that legal is that legal or is that a Pentagon move? It's a Pentagon move. So he took this thing offline. And I'd actually been at a NRO, National Reconnaissance Office. I had been at an NRO launch just the year before.

And then I look over and I see the logo on the laptop. And I say, what are you doing? And then I look over and I see the logo on the laptop. And I say, what are you doing? You know, to this man who remained nameless. And he said, shut up, turned his laptop away. And he pounded in a code and he took this thing offline. And so our Iridium phone rang. You know, this Pentagon wireless satellite phone that's like the general on the other side is saying, what's going on? And basically, he instructed the guy not to answer. So we then had control of this thing, and we could watch

Katrina come in. Whoa. Because the government wasn't doing anything with all these national resource assets to help people. And this was the frustration that he had. He wanted to be evacuated, to be taken out off playa with Blackhawks and heavy-duty helicopters because he had just come back from the Asian tsunami, you know, the Bande Aceh event. And then he went straight to Afghanistan, and then he went to Baghdad, and then he came to Burning Man. I looked at this man's face, and it was deeply you know just unbelievable stress can you imagine this was his job he works on title 10 money doing extreme comms extreme emergency relief efforts and he's invented all this shit like cell phones that come down on parachutes that'll run for a month and people

pick up these cell phones and push a button and there's somebody who speaks tagalog right on right there to say what do you need what are your what's your position whoa isn't that cool that's amazing it's amazing the cell phones run for a month they're like in rubberized cases this guy's invented all this technology so this rubberized case just has a massive battery in it that comes pre-charged yep yep wow so this guy you know really thinking so here here we have a natural disaster happening in our own country you know barreling in nobody at burning man knows about it because there's no cell phone service right then back in 2007 it's barreling in and 2005 rather and we watch it coming in now the the amazing thing is we we saw it you could watch a video from orbit on this screen on this guy's screen and you could watch people walking down

like we saw a levee breach the first levee breach in like the ninth ward or something we saw that on the screen from plot from our camp at burning. So when you say you took over satellites, satellites that are broadcasting, what is it, broadcasting media? Is it news? It's high-res, no, high-res reconnaissance imagery. Okay, so it's a satellite that is like one of those spying on bad guy satellites. Exactly. Whoa. Yeah.

That's deep. We couldn't read. Are you allowed to talk about this? If someone finds out about that, is this an issue? I don't think so. That seems like something that would be really frowned upon. Well, the phone, the Iridium phone kept ringing. Yeah, it's like your dad's calling.

You're having a party. The neighbors are calling your dad going, Hey, man, I don't know what your son's doing, but the lights are on, there's a million people on your front lawn, and the phone just keeps ringing, and you're like, ah. But these guys knew who they're dealing with. This is this innovative genius type guy that is totally respected in the organization. So the general that initiated the inquiry was covering for him. I see.

So the general could then contact Space Command and say, I can't get any information. Oh, okay, okay. I see. He had put the satellite in some kind of fail-safe fallback mode. So they would spend the next several days trying to get back into it. Whoa. And he was just bypassing it and keeping them out. Burn hydrazine and locate stuff on the Playa.

Wow. So how in 2005- He didn't tell me all the details, but he said basically, I'm doing this. Right. What kind of satellite internet connection was available in 2005? It was a very slow upload, a little bit quicker download, but still pretty whack, right? By that time, yeah. The next year, I think they got the big tower on the playa, which had the dish that went right to Gerlach with an OC3 connection.

What does that mean? What did you just say? It's like a really fast, sort of almost like a radar dish. What is Gerlach? Gerlach. Oh, you haven't been out there, huh? No. You know, I love hippies in small doses.

Hippies to me are like pizza. I just can't eat pizza every day for like a month. I was with, but you can hang around Playa Gon, Pentagon people. Yes, I could probably hang around your camp. Billionaire camps with Sherpas. Sherpas. Sherpas, that's the- They brought Sherpas?

No, they're white people. White Sherpas. They brought Sherpas? No, they're white people. White Sherpas. They're servers for the billionaires in their billionaire camps. That's too much. And they have walls of motorhomes around. I want to hang out with the 100,000 air camp. I don't want to hang out with the billionaire camp. I want to hang out with people who are in RVs

and everybody's clean, but I don't need Sherpas. Here's a secret that I'll tell you on air. Oh, well, it won't be a secret. It won't be a secret. Might want to mime it. So Dennis hasn't been to Burning Man. Dennis McCann.

Good. Me and him. Same page. Two old guys who don't want to party with young kids. So I told him to tell you that Dennis would only go to Burning Man if you went. Oh, did you do it the opposite way? You're just playing us against each other? There you go.

Yeah, that doesn't work with me, but thanks. That's sweet. So Gerlach is the... I would go anywhere with him, though. You'd go anywhere with Dennis. Yeah, I really would go with him, just to talk to him for days. Yeah, yeah, he's amazing. The world's most amazing teddy bear.

Yeah, he explained the stoned ape theory in a way that i've never heard anybody explain before with science and the way that psilocybin interacts with the human mind and in a way it was like oh yeah oh that had to be a part of it you know i'm sure there's many factors that led to the the increase in human brain size but when he describes it you're like oh it's fucking mushrooms it has to be and you know we were at a meeting uh an event yesterday where all the psilocybin research was being presented by the the johns hopkins teams and ucla and and uh madison things these people are doing psilocybin funded research to for smoking cessation yes end of life, reduction of anxiety, and PTSD.

And this one young researcher, Matt, that we talked to, he basically said this amazing thing, which was, we're not plugging up neurotransmitter portals to deal with addiction here. We seem to be hitting higher order brain functions, much higher, rather than plugging up your desire for nicotine. When we watch the fMRIs and we put people under the magnet, which means put them in an fMRI, real-time brain scanning, we watch the parts of the brain talking to each other.

Like the default mode network seems to be changed. And is this while you're under, while they're on mushrooms? See, I would have to think that that would... Or psilocybin. Psilocybin. I would have to think that would radically affect your experience. Is an MRI and an fMRI similar? Because I've been in an MRI before.

It was like... If I was on mushrooms and I was in an mri i would freak the fuck out okay yeah i've never been in it just functional mri right you've never been in an mri i was in one less than a year ago i had a an issue with my back and i had a bulging disc in my back so i had to get it examined by an mri and you you lie down on a plank like a little skinny little gurney thing and they roll you into this tube machine that's a giant magnet and all i could think of was some story that i had heard about some kid who died because they left a fire extinguisher in the room and then turned on the MRI and it sucked the fire extinguisher into the magnet

and killed one freak incident out of a billion usage. It was like a torpedo coming through the room. Yeah, it killed somebody. But it's a very claustrophobic and strange experience. You roll into this thing and just lay there. You can't move. And you hear, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. just lay there you can't move and you're hearing and that's going like around your head it's all just echoing around you i mean you get earplugs put earplugs on you close your eyes and just deal with it but it's i would imagine that tripping on

that would be incredibly strange so i would think if fmri is very similar, it's functional MRI, that's what it means, right? Functional MRI. If it's the same machine, that would, I mean, the old adage is, you know, five grams in silent darkness, right? That's what Terrence always described. Terrence McKenna always prescribed. Our buddy. This is like the opposite of five grams in silent darkness. Yeah, this is like, well, maybe they've got it just down to a baseball cap now, you know.

I don't think they do. I don't think they do. I don't think they do. I've had two MRIs, actually, in the past year and a half, so I'm pretty sure. Maybe by the 2050s we'll all be like, this is a theory that I have of where all this is going that I can reveal to you later. Oh, excellent. I'm absolutely interested. interested but what all i was thinking was that the whole uh experience of psilocybin depends very much so on where you're at while you're experiencing it if you're in a beautiful peaceful place like the colors are brighter and you see like all sorts of cool visions and you have this

connection to nature where you feel like you're grounded and but if you were in like some horrible place and you were on psilocybin you would be very sensitive to that you feel like you're grounded. But if you were in some horrible place and you were on psilocybin, you would be very sensitive to that horrible place. I can imagine doing psilocybin and going to a war zone, experiencing war, or anything else horrible like the Cove. What was it? The movie that depicted the Vietnam vets. What was it?

Jacob's Ladder? No, the ones where they got high in Vietnam on acid. the Vietnam vets, you know, what was it? Jacob's Ladder? No, the ones where they got high in Vietnam on acid. Oh, one movie. One movie. Not Apocalypse Now. Yeah, Apocalypse Now. Were they on acid?

Oh, that's right. Martin Sheen was on acid when he did karate in his hotel room and punched the mirror. No, there's a video of British soldiers on acid in the 50s. Remember that? And they're all laughing. Yes. And they can't be made to fear the enemy or put fear into the enemy. Or be a part of any organization. Which is what the British Army was about to become anyway.

Yeah, that's a beautiful video. I love that video. Yeah, that was peace and love before uh the beatles even got rolling in 59 right yeah well it shows you also what a incredible like transformative drug that is and really for the most part all psychedelics have that capacity it's incredibly transformative capacity because you're here you're dealing with people whose job is to kill folks that's what their job is and what are they doing they're giggling and they're falling down and you know they're not thinking about war they're they're like they think everything's preposterous you know and it's it's just amazing

when you look at the the transformation in our culture from the 1950s to 1970 when everything was clamped down on. Yeah. I mean, what a radical couple decades of change. I mean, people don't realize. I mean, I try to explain to people that if you, I'm a technology historian. You know, I have the Digibarn Computer Museum. I've got like 30 tons of vintage computer hardware in the barn. And I've interviewed a thousand people on how did this all happen?

How did the ARPANET get made? How did Apple found and all that sort of stuff? And the years between 1945 and 1970, oh my God, the change that happened. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. And really, if you drive into a neighborhood like even around here, San Fernando Valley, Even around here, San Fernando Valley, houses built in 1962, the only difference in technology is that there's Ethernet. There's a network and there's computers.

Otherwise, a house of 1970 had microwave ovens and a cable TV in the beginning and all that sort of stuff. Not a lot of difference. It's just the digital tech. That's the only really big thing that's come in in and that model has now spread to the whole planet so china did it in shorter time you know and i lived in czechoslovakia and they did the whole transition in like eight years it's incredible south africa did the transition like 15 just boom to our model wow shopping center you know off ramp Wow. Shopping center, off-ramp, wired into the matrix. Consumer culture, boom. The whole world just went bang, bang, bang, adopting that.

It's a very strange time, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And everyone's rushing to that model. I mean, there's no stopping it. Well, everything's tied into it now, too, which is really spooky. You know, I'm absolutely fascinated by ancient cultures, by the idea that there were great civilizations that fell apart. And, like, what caused it? Was it natural disaster?

Was it this? Was it that? And when you look— You had Graham Hancock on last month. Yeah, I've had Graham on a few times. He's awesome. And I've also had Randall Carlson on, who's also really enlightening when it comes to that subject, because he's a true expert in cataclysmic disasters, particularly. The comet. Yes.

The putative comet impact that created all that flooding. Yeah. Amazing. One of his. I mean, he's an expert on pretty much every significant traceable impact. And it's really crazy he can like drive his suv and read land right he can sort of read the yeah what the land's teaching him of what happened well he'll show you some things on satellite images that if you looked at it you would go oh that's just some hills and he'll but the way he describes it he'll draw it out for

you know here's where the crater is and this is where the crater is in the middle of this ocean on this this part of the ocean and if you follow that crater out you realize these are where the waves hit wow and tore the landscape apart like you're looking at a gigantic version of what you see when you see the ocean leave marks on the sand when high tide comes in. But you're seeing this unbelievably extreme version of it that probably happened instantaneously. You remember Jerry Purnell and Larry Niven's sci-fi classic, Lucifer's Hammer? No, I don't.

It was fantastic. It was about a comet impact on the Pacific. And the scene, these are master sci-fi writers. They both live here in the San Fernando Valley. And this wave was 1,200 feet tall. And they describe it coming across the Southland. And there's this surfer. Now, this surfer out on Santa Monica, right, decides to take this wave.

Now, what's happening before the wave arrives is the ocean is roaring at 100 miles an hour out toward the sea. So, this guy's been carried out 40 miles out to sea because this wave is sucking down the coastline. But he knows what is going on because he saw the fireball. He says, I'm going to die anyway. I'm going to try to take this wave. And this is a great sci- sci-fi novel and he does it and what happens is the the wave comes you know across he looks down and he can he's on the face of this wave as it's coming across los angeles and and he's looking down at the city you know

like 800 feet below as this wave is because he is on the face of it and he's managing his board and then he then he looks up and the language is great. It's like, and the first interstate building hit him like a fly swatter, you know. Oh, my God. That's a crazy way to die. And the wave crashed. It went inland to like Palm Springs kind of Indio. That's where, and it created sort of temporary ocean.

What's the name of this book? Lucifer's Hammer. Worth getting? Worth getting. And here's a really... Who wrote it again? Larry Niven and Jerry Pornel. They're the two great hardcore sci-fi writers. And Larry told

me about 15 years ago, he said, let me tell you something. I was in my office when there was this earthquake. Like, you've been in the Southland long enough, right? There's earthquakes every X amount of time, and they do a certain amount of damage. Like, Northridge was big.

But before Northridge, Larry's sitting in his office at like 8 in the morning, and an earthquake hits. I think it was the Whittier quake or something. And the last thing he remembers is a bookshelf coming right at him, right? And he comes to, and he is blacked out. I i mean he's blacked out for a couple hours right and he has his vision comes to he sees a spine of books and one of them says lucifer's hammer hardcover edition and he realizes i was almost killed by my life's work he has and lucifer's hammers knocked him out wow so he bolted the shelf to the wall for the next one that's a good move bolting shelves always good move here um we started this off talking about um being fascinated with ancient civilizations and

the fact that we don't really like we know quite a bit about ancient egypt in in sort of if you look at it the fact that it's 2500 plus bc you know we know quite a bit that's a long time ago and we have some pretty incredible structures that still remain from them which is pretty amazing but no writing i mean just hieroglyphs we don't have books we don't have like the library of alexander was burned to the ground and who knows what was in that you know there's so much lost when it comes to ancient civilizations and one of the things that i worry about is that we're moving everything digital and everything even more than just digital people are storing things like in the cloud like crazy and that

when we get a lucifer's hammer it's all gone right well that's the thing it's if we left behind some flash drives and some hard drives and some old computers and stuff and then everybody else died except for like a few thousand people that live like nomads how long would that stuff even make it how long would it would all be absorbed by the earth right you remember wally trying to get all the trash compacted and everything. And he's choosing things that he would, you know, WALL-E the robot from the movie, the Pixar movie. Oh, okay. And he's like, oh, keep that.

You know, because he's making a library of parts so he can keep himself going. Right. He's keeping himself going for 50,000 years this way. And the shit he's throwing away, like, he does keep an iPod because it plays his favorite movie. You know, and he's able to rig it up. He's robot right he's a little macintosh robot right but it's interesting to see pixar's depiction of what is going to trash and when the earth is so toxic and it's covered with trash and the people have evacuated and are living aboard a ship because the earth's toxified well we're sort of banking on the fact that nothing happens. We have the Georgia Guidestones, which are dubious.

It's very weird. It's a key population to 500,000. What's 500 million worldwide or something like that? You know, it's like very, you know, interesting rules to live by, but it doesn't tell you anything about how to set up solar power. You know, what is the internet? How does it connect China to the UK? You know, there's none of that. tell you anything about how to set up solar power you know what is the internet how is it how does it connect china to the uk you know there's none of that well you know here's an interesting thing

for you britain southern britain when rome fell right and the romans left no one was there to maintain lead pipes so the romans invented fantastic bath systems with lead pipes that that could run cold water, hot water, they had valves and everything. And so all this stuff went to potty, and the roads went bluey, and the Roman roads were straight, and they had these mounds on either side that you could have watchers and stuff like that. And it was super high tech, right?

And then Rome went away, and all this stuff just fell into ruin. And the British forgot how to make bricks. So there were no brick buildings. They had to go back to knocking out stone to build the first Christian churches in England were made out of. Because they did not have brick technology. It was gone. Gone. What was a classic example of like what's going on right now is we have so many things that we need. What's going on right now is we have so many things that we need.

Like I had a joke that I was doing about how what I thought happened with Egypt was that the dumb people just out-fucked the smart people and left behind a bunch of shit that they didn't understand. And that if I left you alone in the woods right now with a hatchet, how long before you could send me an email? Right. Like we have so much that we rely on on a daily basis. I mean, you might understand it, but I don't understand it. Most people that use it don't understand it. One of the most terrifying TV shows I've ever seen about this is James Burke's Connections, which came around 1980. And in the first episode, what you see is this British guy.

You know, he's a master presenter, right? And he's walking up to a screen door on a farm. And he's saying, the electricity has been off for a week, two weeks, four weeks. The people are starving. People are trying to leave the city. You escaped the city. You managed to get to this farm. The farm is abandoned, right? You know, it's one of the places you could survive. You're coming up to the door. The people are not there. What do you do? You go, you see there's a milking machine.

You can't use it. There's no electricity. You see everything that you can't use to farm. Even though maybe you understand farming, but modern farming. Then you go up into the attic of the barn and you find a discarded plow from like the 1910s. That is your tool. You have to know how to use that and how to put that onto animals, onto pulling draft animals to break the soil. You're now in the 11th century. If you can't master that plow, if you can't find that plow and know everything there is to do about that technology, you're out of luck.

Everything else is just trash at that point. And that would go away in a thousand years. If that was still left around, a thousand years from now, that would be nothing. No plows and no understanding. So how much do you think happened like that with ancient Egypt? I mean, how much of that stuff stuff just whatever they built or whatever they designed i mean we we're essentially we have like fossil remnants of their civilization we have what what survived in pottery form and in stone form the paper is all gone either burned or

destroyed or thrown in rivers or whatever there's very little that's telling i mean how much of what we have today would be around in just like a thousand years all the computers would be gone cars would be gone you know there's that great tv was it on discovery or history they showed the earth after life after people or something life after people and man you watch manhattan you watch the at 500 years the Brooklyn Bridge finally comes down is it so well built you know the the caissons are incredibly strongly the the cabled highs and everything they figured it would take about 500 years for those cables to rust through and finally the decking whatever is left of it to come down it's nothing yeah that's nothing but that would be the last piece in New

York otherwise this is their skeletal frameworks. The blackberry bushes would come back. The streams would come back in their normal, on Manhattan Island, right? It would just come back. Deer would come back in. And one of the last things would be this Brooklyn Bridge coming down. That is so crazy. But it totally makes sense.

I mean, nothing, none of that stuff lasts. It's not going to last. And we don't build. I mean, the pyram that stuff lasts. It's not going to last. We don't build. I mean, the pyramids. Did you know that the pyramids? I didn't know this. We had this wonderful lecture by an Egyptologist who worked on the Giza Plateau for like 20 years. And he said, we've discovered so many things about the city of artisans and craftsmen and teams that built the pyramids by excavating this massive

area now that they've done. He said, one of the things we discovered is the pyramids were clad with polished limestone. Yeah, and they used it all to make Cairo. They chipped it all away. Yeah, and you find this in vases in China. This stuff was taken off. The pyramids used to be shine. It used to be like a pr The pyramids used to shine. They used to be like a prism. They used to, say, blind you. If you're coming at a certain angle in the desert in the sun, they were just this incredible shining pyramid.

Can you imagine the power on the average nomad seeing that? With a gold cap, too. There was a golden cap to it. A golden cap. Wow. So like our money, you know, with the little I on the top. Yeah. And so people ripped the stuff off and they took it and it's all over the world. Assholes.

Assholes ruin everything. But this guy, he showed us this. Initially, he went to the Giza Plateau in the 70s. He was part of some kind of a cult that believed that pyramids were built by extraterrestrials. And he was literally in this cult. And he went to see it. He was sort of like sent there by the cult. Got so interested in excavation and the reality of trying to really solve it, he sort of left

the cult, went back, got a PhD, and he's been working there for 20 years. And he gave us, oh yeah, it was amazing. And he showed us, he said all the Hollywood mythology of slaves building the pyramids, and it was all completely hooey. Right. Here's the plan of the city, of the artisans and the construction teams and the contractors that built the pyramid. Central Avenue, big hospital complex, the best one in the ancient

world, huge bakery. This bakery would make conical bread loaves that the guys could put a rope around, throw over their backs, and then go up to the job site and they ate the bread. And then he said, we kept cutting down through sand through these clay layers that didn't seem, they shouldn't be there. They're, you know, 20 feet down, and there's a layer of clay. They figured out the clay was from a quarry up the Amazon, up the Nile, rather. You know, wrong brain going to the wrong place. And then they said, well, what on earth is going on?

And so they started excavating horizontally, and they found that these were clay tracks and they said what on earth is this and then they started saying these these clay tracks matter a lot they're not just leftover layers in the desert and then they mapped them out and there was a whole network of them and what they were were low friction slipways. And so they said they put the blocks on some kind of a canvas, on some kind of a thing. They had mastered low friction. They had figured out that clay and a layer, like a micro layer of water on it, creates a hydraulic system that you can move massive tonnage on.

And so they built one of them using the same clay from the same quarry up the Nile they made one they brought all these Cairo University engineering students out or probably mechanical engineering and they put like a multi-ton block on canvas on this track and these guys pulled and they were able to get it up to some speed of like 10 kilometers an hour wow so this is how they moved the volume of the blocks wow amazing incredible and it was probably started out you know they've been building pyramids for a thousand years before that and so there's the famous bending pyramid that's like not collapsed but about to because they didn't understand foundation right because you can't build a

foundation for a pyramid it's on on sand. Most of them were. And by the time of Giza, they'd mastered it. You fill the area with water. You basically pack sand down, huge area, acres and acres, fill it with water, and then teams would go on. They would pack the sand up to the level of the water. Water's flat. Right.

And then when they started laying down their sort of first caissons, that would evenly compress the sand. The key thing is massive compressile strength evenly over the area so that the thing will not bend and fall down. Wow. And they had to do it so accurately that over 2,500,000 blocks, there could be like such little deviations to line up at the top. That's so incredible.

They learned that these guys had mastered a whole field which we lost, which we didn't even know existed, sand hydraulics. So these guys were literally using hydraulic... Sand is a flowing thing. It's like water, right? You have an hourglass.

It looks like water flowing down, but it's sand water right you have an hourglass it looks like water flowing down but it's sand and so to to set keystones they would have a column of sand get the keystone to the top and they would pull plugs out and the sand would come down and the keystone would come down absolutely perfectly in the right place sand hydraulics sand foundations clay for slipways smart dudes isn't it amazing when you say what you said a thousand years like they had been making pyramids for a thousand years we can barely comprehend what a thousand years is a thousand years to us is like if you want to go back to you know 1014 can we even that's like genghis khan times i mean that's comprehend and of course cathedrals yeah took a thousand years to master right so think about the fact that they were

doing that making these things for a thousand years and even though as far as we know they didn't have electronics they didn't have computers they didn't have any of these things they still had the human mind they had the human mind without electricity, without engines. They had contemplative time. Right. And they had a culture that supported it. Well, they also had this incredible connection with the cosmos because of the fact that they weren't dealing with light pollution like we are. We've done a really weird thing in our arrogance.

I mean, it's not arrogant that we did it. We did it out of innovation, out of this burning desire to continually create new and better things. But our cities, which is the giant population centers, we've essentially cut off our view of the cosmos. Yeah. Like almost entirely.

It's incredible. They didn't. And they were entirely invested in not just the cosmos, but their positions in the cosmos, the astrological charts and where things lined up and where, you know, I mean, the shafts in the Great Pyramid that would lead to various constellations. And then the ley lines of Europe. So incredible. Dennis and I in August were running around Machu Picchu.

And he said, we've got to find the observatory. We've got to find the observatory. And he knows this place pretty well. I had a wonderful tour of it from him and we found it. And it has this rock that has all these angled pieces in it. And it's a star mapper, a big, big rock, multi-ton rock, but it's carved if you look this way you're gonna you're gonna position on this star and position on that star and and the and it had a sort of a portal up the top and this is what's remaining of machu picchu's observatory so it's like all these people have this knowledge yeah as long as people stay alive and they keep innovating you know they they do it differently than we're currently experiencing it right now,

but they figure out a way to do it in some really intense, very sophisticated way. And if you compare, what is that, Jamie? That's the observatory, I think. Is that it? Probably, yeah, that looks like it. Wow. And the star map...

Thousands of years ago, right? This is like at least 1,000 years ago, right? This is like 1,500, 1 ago like machu picchu 1500 1400 okay so less less yeah in fact in fact the inca complexes so dennis and i and our group were running around a lot of inca complexes including pisac and the other places and and they those dudes knew how to cut rock so perfectly i mean when they know how they did that you know it's not known they could have used ropes. Haven't you ever watched Ancient Aliens?

You know, I've never seen that. Come on, dude. It was Aliens. I've never seen that. It was Aliens. Everything's Aliens. You've never seen that show? I'm a born skeptic.

I'm a Canadian, so you know how we are. Canadians are more skeptical? Oh, much more. Less religious. Is that what it is? We have basically armchair views of America. Ah. Is that what it is? We have basically armchair views of America. So I grew up watching, all Canadians sort of watch America with exhilaration and horror and admiration. From your porch.

From our porch. Well, you know, they say there's a joke about North America, which is it's a three-story apartment block. In the middle apartment is this out-of-control freaking party and beer bottles and crap being thrown. That's America. In the bottom is Mexico, and all the beer bottles and the crap are falling on that apartment. And up above is Canada, and the Canadians are leaning over the balcony saying, Can you keep it downy? So that's...

The problem is Toronto has Rob Ford. Oh, Toronto has Rob Ford. Yeah, so that's changing. You're getting more American. He'll soon be exported. You think so? You should have him on the show. I would have him on the show.

Absolutely. I'd get him high. Get him high on crack cocaine. I would smoke crack with him just to get him to do it. Right here on the show. That's one drug that really got me in trouble. You helped Graham break his fast. Well, he wanted to.

He kept talking about it. I'm like, you want to try it? He kept looking over your way. I'm like, come on. He was great, though. He took a little baby hit, another little baby hit, and then he was off to the races. You could see it, like the cannabinoids receptors firing and all the words flowing stars in his eyes and yeah he was he became like terence well-oiled

yes yes well it's back to the subject this is it is amazing when you think of the fact that these people did have these incredibly sophisticated societies we just don't recognize them as incredibly sophisticated because they didn't have electricity, because they didn't have the combustion engine. Those are our benchmarks. If you don't have that, you guys are dopes. But meanwhile, the reality is they had some stuff that we still are perplexed by. Some structures that have taken decades upon decades of some of the greatest archaeologists,

geologists, and engineers to try to even get a theory as to how they put these things together and that's all we've got right i mean we've got some pretty good information on a lot of things like you're talking about the sand hydraulics but as far as like the ability to go out and build one right now good fucking luck like at one of these ruins so soon as the the Spanish arrived in the Incan lands, right, what they did was have the Inca knock down their own temples. Oh, God. Right?

And then those stones were carried down. Fucking white people. To build Catholic cathedrals. The next earthquake happened, the Catholic cathedrals were flattened. earthquake happened, the Catholic cathedrals were flattened. And the Incan complex were fine, you know, because there's 12 to 14 degree angles on all the windows. It's built to survive earthquakes for a thousand years. It's incredible. And the water channels that there's been no maintenance for 500 years, they're still pumping out billions of gallons of water for all these farms.

Pete Slauson, Jr.: Amazing. pumping out billions of gallons of water for all these farms amazing amazing and and i stood there in awe of a 30 ton block you could see this this was above cusco and this block was carved like what does that mean angles weird angles but flat faces and then there was a block next to it that was perfectly matched. I mean, no gaps. And then the one down below. I said, the stonemason stood and studied a pile of rocks. And in his head, because he was such a deep, profound, present engineer, expert, he saw the pattern of these rocks and how they could fit together with the least amount of cutting and with perfection.

These guys had this in their heads that they could like, boom, I know, cut that, take that one, that's going to go in the center, and then they had to lift them, and they had to cut them first and then lift them into place. They had to be perfect. So this guy had three-dimensional mental acuity that blows our minds. I mean, any kind of World of Warcraft player couldn't navigate that space. The three-dimensional acuity of these people yeah it it really is incredible when you think of what has all been accomplished long before people invented the internet long before people were you know going to the library to get their books on all this stuff or maybe they were you know library of alexandria of course right yeah but it's it's thought of as primitive

you know we we still think of them as primitive and when you compare the uh the work of like john anthony west and graham hancock and robert shock and all these geologists and people that are pointing to all these erosion marks going you know we might be dealing with some really ancient civilization mixed in with some other civilizations that are like, everyone wants to date Egypt around the same time. But there's a growing movement of people that are saying, you're dealing with some pretty significantly different structures. Like the age of the Sphinx.

Yes. I know Graham covered in your show. Yeah. With him, your last show, which is fascinating. Yeah. Thousands of years of rainfall erosion and the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9000 BC did you know that when I was visiting the Sphinx about 20 years ago our guide said did you know that this thing has

been you know for n thousand years but in the last 15 it has been so damaged by Cairo City Sanitation Department raising the water table. So he said every toilet that flushes in the city of Cairo is taking a chunk out of the interior of the Sphinx. So we are pumping in paraffin wax to keep it from coming apart. So I mean look at the destructive power of our civilization, just haphazard. power of our civilization, just haphazard. And the archaeologist that gave us this tour of the Giza Plateau excavation, he said, look, here's modern Cairo coming up over top of our excavation site. We can't excavate under that. Notice the warren of chaotic streets and bad planning and bad everything. And on top of this beautifully thought out, you know, fully functional city of artisans and construction people,

how have we evolved? Tell us. Isn't that fascinating that this really wacky city is over one of the greatest ancient cities ever? Like Cairo is this crazy chaotic place. Mexico City is another example. Yeah. So how are we evolving exactly?

Well, we're doing something because Mexico City during the Aztecs, if they knew what we know now, or the Incas, they would have known that Cortez was an asshole and they would have shot him and they would have never thought he was a warrior that was part god on a horse. They would have not had any misconceptions about him because they would have known what a horse is right they would have had

the internet would have known what horse shit is well horse shit but yeah literally and figuratively right so here i want to propose you a theory okay that's kind of captivated me and it's partly woo and it's partly science but it'll really that's my favorite stuff it's your favorite stuff i like half a woo so half a woo so yeah you got a t-shirt that has a woo on the front woo on the back so you turn around your woo woo but so that the eleusinian mysteries you know about the eleusinian mysteries yes so they ran for 1700 1800 years they ran they started out before great the greek civilization civilization explain people what it means what it what it was it was a kind of like a burning man or more serious than a burning man was an initiation ceremony that happened at eleusis in greece and it was run by women

sort of high class women they were kind of a monopoly and when they finally got this thing cranked up, because we don't know much about the earlier history, but you can go to the Temple of Eleusis today. It was destroyed in the 4th century by characters that I want to bring up later. This is why we might be still in the culture of the people who destroyed Eleusis. So they built this thing. So the fully powered up Eleusis theme park transformational experience was a thousand person buried temple. Could house a thousand initiates buried under the ground so that people couldn't see out.

So they were totally in an internal process. The initiates came from all over the Mediterranean. They included Roman emperors, philosophers, etc. And you had to go to Eleusis once in your life. Because the thought was you then became a human being. So they came off their boats. They landed. They wore the same garb.

They had a fasting diet. Sound familiar? They had a fasting diet. Sounds like Ramadan. It sounds like what I would say today. It sounds like people who are doing initiatory practice, ayahuasca, for example. People are going to Mecca, too. Same thing.

They're wearing the same clothes. Exactly. Bring them down. And so the initiants would walk through villages, and the villagers would come out. And their job was to catcall, to swear and bring the people down. Say, oh, you've got a big nose. to swear and bring the people down, say, oh, you've got a big nose. So if it's a noble person who has a lot of wealth,

they're getting screamed at by villagers and they get knocked back to knock their ego out and to dissolve them, basically a boundary dissolution exercise. They were walking next to fields which had wheat, which had tiny mushroom-like purple. It's a perpia. A brain is shot today. But it was basically a rust that would grow on the wheat that was used to make the kykeon drink

that would be given to the initiants after nine days or eight or nine days. So this is like some ergot-based thing? Ergot-based. It was an an ergotamine sort of an ergot based. How do we know this? Because I thought that was like a giant mystery as to what they were taking. Like some folks thought that it was psilocybin. Some people felt it was an ergot beer. There was some sort of an ergot beer. I mean, Hoffman's book, he talks about it probably being an ergot beer of some sort. Right. But there was definitely an initiate potion that was extremely powerful. But what makes you think that it was what you're saying?

Because you can find this, you know, in the area of Eleusis today, you can find, and I'm no expert. I mean, you should have an expert on this on the show. I've read a number of books about this. But when I piece this together, so there's a fantastic book called Psychedelia by Patrick Lundborg that came out last year. He passed away, unfortunately, the author. He's quite a young man. But in the first chapter, he details this. And what he says is the initiates would come in.

They would go into the temple. They were on this fasting diet. The temple, the people who were running the temple, it was sound and music, it was olfactory, smoke, color, and they were driven to this intense state, and then they were given the kykeon. And I think they, you know, Greek philosophers and others have written about their experience at Eleusis, and they would emerge really in an incredible, maybe they got incredibly high, maybe their boundaries were dissolved,

but they emerged with visionary, coming back with vision of what to do, what to do in their world. And when they went home, they boarded their ships and whatnot. And they went home, and what did we see happening in that period? Greek theater,

mathematics, the academy, road construction, you know, hydraulics, the idea of a city, organizational structure, the republic, the idea of polity, the idea of representation. And the Eleusinian Mystery School was just one of many that were going on but Eleusis was a big deal right Eleusis was was destroyed partly in some periods and then a Roman emperor would would reboot it and and finally and I think it was the end of the fourth century coming in from the north were sort of the savage Germanic tribes that were basically taking out the whole Western Roman Empire. And guess who was coming in from the East? Black-robed Christians who were described as, you know, cranky fellows with a real sort

of obsessive, perfectionist, reductionist kind of negative. They were described as really nasty characters. They formed this compact, and together they destroyed the temple of Eleusis. So my woo-woo theory is, are we living in an inferior culture that has no initiation? Replacing initiation, powerful initiation, with what? You know, all these other structures of abuse and usury, church structures, corporate structures, commercial structures, are we juvenile? You know, are we, were we made juvenile by the fact that we didn't have a powerful initiatory experience that dissolved our boundaries, that opened us to

vision, that made us human beings? I certainly think that's very arguable. It makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you compare our resources to their resources, what we've accomplished and what we've managed to fuck up in comparison to what they managed to create with no combustion engine, with no hydraulics. Of course, they had slave cultures and

there were a lot of... Here's the other thing, and you should ask Graham when he's next on it. I'd love to hear his response to this. What did you have before the rise of civilization, especially in the Mediterranean? You had the upper Paleolithic. You had village cultures, tribal cultures. You had quite a bit of conflict, but quite a bit of advancement.

But that was thousands and thousands of years. And then suddenly, and for sure they had some kind of initiatory experience for their youth, especially for young men, because as we know, you know, in cultures of indigenous cultures that still have an initiatory practice. indigenous cultures that still have an initiatory practice i think that's a very important part of like life having some very clear like graduation process exactly and we have it throughout schools we have it in grade school we have it in martial arts martial arts is one you know jujitsu and martial arts is where we're bringing it back right strong initiation yes because you know you probably see this because the people that haven't had that they they cruise oh they're lost and they you

know the ones that have been very parent you know pampered and helicopter parenting we all talk about this and they're now talking about the hoop jumping circus train circus pig kids that upper middle class parents say jump through this hoop jump through this hoop you know they're three or four years old and they're jumping through these hoops because why because they're being prepped to get into top level universities right and so they jump through all these hoops and there's a professor at harvard written the book about all this and he said he's watched in his incoming classes of these kids that are really good at achieving the goals, but they can't deal with ambiguity, they can't

deal with irony, they can't deal with creativity. They're just living outside the box. Right. So they're going to jump to the investment bank, but they're not very functional. So because they've not had a practice of initiation, they've not had a leveling practice, a boundary dissolving practice. They've been in this programmatic evolution. And it's dangerous. Yeah, I think that there should be some sort of graduation process for various stages in your life that sort of establish the fact that you've learned from your mistakes.

You've grown. You've achieved. And you've gotten through some. You've overcome some adversity. And you're here. I got it through scouting in Canada because we had total wilderness situations where a bunch of us almost died a couple times. You know, we were out in 45 below cracking cold January, and we were in a snowshoe hike with 60 pounds of birch bark logs in our backpacks to toughen ourselves up. We were no adults, and we were climbing over a mountain range, and the cold snap came in, and I remember, like I said, we are this close to hypothermic, somebody dying in our group of like six or eight of us,

or 14 years old, whatever, because i went out to take a leak one night and you can imagine you're wearing jeans i mean this is the 70s you know we don't have proper clothes even and i took i sat down on this rock and i took a leak and then i came back past in the next day i mean my piss was freezing on the way out and i realized it's a dead stallion it's frozen solid wild horse frozen solid you know dead you thought it was a rock i thought it was right i sat on it and we saw wolves and they were really skinny you know in the distance and we realized we are really close to this is you know if and and somebody goes into hypothermic shock in that environment you're done you're done and another time we were hiking on the

west coast trail in vancouver island we made a wrong turn and the whole group we found ourselves You're done. You're done. And another time we were hiking on the West Coast Trail in Vancouver Island. We made a wrong turn. And the whole group, we found ourselves in this rock outcropping with a tide coming in and storm surge. And we had to cling on to this thing all night. I mean, we couldn't set up any kind of camp. And it was like those were important experiences. Yeah, rites of passage, overcoming adversity, all those different things. I think they should probably be engineered into our cultures and our communities.

I have a theory that goes along with your theory. I think your theory is probably absolutely correct that, you know, we are a, in some ways, less sophisticated or less advanced society. At least less, we're most certainly more materialistic right most certainly more dependent upon the internet and most certainly more dependent upon computers technology I have a theory about people and this it's a very it's very shaky but here's my theory my theory is I think that everything is natural and I think that all behavior like wolves chasing out the beta and the alpha taking over. I think like, you know, birds of prey feasting on other birds and bears eating salmon and all these complex ecosystems that we see all over the world, we just accept them as being natural because they're a part of the world that we didn't alter. But ourselves, we don't look as natural because we've altered ourselves.

But I think we are entirely natural. And I think our society and our civilization and our, as fucked up as it is, it's also natural. And I think the purpose that it serves is we live to give birth to technology. Marshall McLuhan said that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world and i think that what we are doing right now by our obsession with the newest greatest iphone elon musk just released a tesla that goes zero to 60 in two seconds oh my god it's amazing i have to have it and by continuing to be obsessed with acquiring the latest and

greatest gadgets we push that innovation further and further we fuel it with money and that eventually it's going to give birth to an artificial life form it's inevitable and i think it will give birth to the next thing and i think we are like a caterpillar that is becoming a butterfly and we have no idea what we're doing. We're just in the middle of doing it and we're just like, oh, it was so much better back in the old days when we chopped wood. And the reason why we think that is because we know inevitably that we are, we're not going to last. We know that it's just a matter of X amount of time before we're outdated. Well, here's something, a nugget to add, and I believe you're right.

And here's a nugget to add for you that goes back to our deepest history. This goes to my practice. I do what I call endogenous visioning. Sometimes in science it's called thought experiments or Gedanken experiments. But I can close my eyes, mostly closed eyes, and I could go into worlds. And that's what I've been using to design the spacecraft for NASA and origin of life. I work in the origin of life field, and I sort of visualize molecular storms and flows and all that stuff, because I have this

practice of just doing it and not taking anything, just doing it. And what happened about two years ago, I was reading an article in Science that all it was an article was about is, like, we found a femur bone that was this small, you know, just a few, like a portion of a centimeter, a few millimeters, it's like quarter of an inch long or half an inch long. And it's a femur bone from the ancestors of all monkeys, primates, lemurs, all of them. All of us dudes. It's our common ancestor. It's 55 million years old.

And then they had an artist's conception of this thing that would have been about two inches long. And they said, well, our ancestor lived in the forest canopy and ate insects. We were insectivores. So I closed my eyes and I said, okay, I want to go back there. I want to do an endogenous thought experiment in science and see what comes in from the ether. What was our life like then? Because that's a big clue of who we are and where we're going. And I had this go into a kind of a dream state,

sort of meditation and breath work and whatnot. I go into the dream state and I see this branch at dawn and there's a ball, a ball of us all clumped together. Because insectivores, they protect each other by going close, warmth and all that stuff. And I watched as this young proto-primate pulled herself away from the ball. The story always comes to me to do this kind of shit. And she's creeping out on the limb at dawn. Why? Because she sees a glistening globule of something. And why is this important? Because that's sugar. That's tree sap that comes out at night. And the diet of these insectivores are leaves and flowers and stuff and catching like a dragonfly, which is a major kill for protein, and sucking down tree sap. So it's a fries, a burger, and a shake diet.

That's our diet. That's an insectivore diet. And she's creeping out on the limb and she's sucking down this globule of sweet. And one eye is looking back to see if somebody in the community notices her because she'll get busted. Sound familiar? scale pattern, this trippy pattern of color. She doesn't know what it is, but what it is, it's a tree snake. And the tree snake was this sole giant predator that survived the impact in Mexico that killed the dinosaurs. And then we rose after that, although we may have been earlier. The tree snake is on the branch waiting for her, waiting for her. And so she's getting high on all this sugar because we still get high on sugar. Here we are drinking our coffees, right, with our sugar. And she's watching that.

And that tree, that pattern of scales has evolved to mesmerize her. It's totally there to captivate her. Why? Because the head is under the branch. The head is about to come up. If she doesn't snap out of it and leap back, it will snap her ass down. So this happened for tens of millions of years. This is co-evolution. What I believe from that vision that I had was, I said, oh my god, this is why we're mesmerized by screens. We're the only animal that's mesmerized by the screen of a phone or, you know, texture patterns, movies, moving images. It's totally hardwired into us.

We're also terrified of snakes. I mean, we have a hardwired circuit in our brain that if you see something that looks like a snake, you just jump involuntarily. Right? That's in there, too. I thought, that serpent on that limb that co-evolved our brain to vision, that gave us color vision, that gave us 3D high acuity vision that we were talking about the ancient peoples, because we could see incredible pattern.

Why? Because we evolved for 30 million years with those guys we had to solve that problem in evolution for 30 million years that's a lot of time it's a lot of programming it's a lot of brain development because the ones that got snapped down weren't as good it's all good old-fashioned darwinian evolution and i sometimes have these conversations with what i call the madre so i know Nature or the Gaian Planetary Plant Bolas. And I said to her at one point, I said, you use this technique to evolve us, to evolve our vision,

so we could drive cars and we could create media and all this sort of stuff. But it is now coiled around the planet. Technology is coiled around the planet, squeezing out the lifeblood of the planet. And I asked her, does this bother you? And she said, no, as long as you do the prerogative of my prerogative, of life's prerogative, find me a new home. I must make a copy. That's what life does. This planet is a womb and it's a tomb.

Okay, this is all just a crazy vision you had, correct? This is crazy vision stuff. It's a womb and a tomb. It's a womb and a tomb. Find me a new home. You're talking about space travel, interplanetary space travel. Yeah, and what we've done as a species, so I do a lot of this work for NASA of designing strange spacecraft and architecture. What exactly is your educational background when it comes to that stuff?

That stuff, it was, you know, it started out as good old USC Trojan, you know, graduating in electrical engineering in the 80s. But, of course, there was hardly any software out at that time. And I was trying to do artificial life in 1987. Can you imagine this? On computers at USC connected to the ARP arpanet and it was too soon so i restarted it 22 years later and i made a project called the evo grid but it was too freaking soon so i so you're kind of like the like the virtual reality people were also too soon they were and And in 1993, 1994, we all read Snow Crash and we read Neuromancer and all those sorts of things. And we watched Minority Report and all that sort of stuff.

But I actually started organizations to kickstart virtual worlds on the internet. In 94, 95, we had the first conference. I wrote a book called Avatars and helped to network together and get all these people in the same room that were building avatar cyberspace and three-dimensional you move through and you see objects fish and people and whatever and they talk to you and etc etc and that's how I got connected with Terrence Terrence McKenna. Terence was fascinated by that. And I was the go-to guy, so he came. He came to the farm and sat at our little table, and I put him into these virtual

worlds. But it was an amazingly powerful medium. And then we spun that medium into all this work for NASA for 12 years, using virtual worlds to model the surface of Mars, for example, and a rover, and how it would work, the rigid body dynamics of wheels driving, and bulldozers on the moon, and stuff like that. And how do we build moon bases? But we could use 3D graphics, you know, the serpent again, our ability to create these worlds, to figure out how a vehicle would work on another planet before we built bent any metal. But it turns out, coming back to the life propagation thing, if you go to the Curiosity rover or the two rovers on Mars, and you take a screw gun if you were

there, you know, hopefully the vehicles are dead so you're not caught on camera, but you drop the belly pan off of them. Inside, there's a dozen species of bacteria that are just there for the ride. They're inside the vehicles. They can't be knocked out in any clean room. And they're dry, but they're alive. So there's life on Mars. It just happens to be in the bodies of our spacecraft. So there's no way to avoid that?

Really no way. There's no way to. And there's certain species of bacteria that will always be present? And in fact, the JPL vacuum chamber and where they do the final prep for some of these missions, they found that because they had created the vacuum chamber and the clean rooms, certain types of bacteria evolved to be good at living in those. So they were already good at hitching a ride. So, of course, they're inside the vehicle and they're on Mars.

Now, outside of the vehicle, there's radiation and stuff that make it impossible for them to really spread and get into soils and stuff. stuff well there was a um a fascinating um podcast from radio lab about the galapagos island and about um how many invasive species have found their way into the galapagos even from just the heels of people's feet um having seeds ground into their the pattern of their shoes and that sometimes these seeds will get into these grounds and then these invasive species will start growing. This is Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. He says, life will find a way out. Something like that. What they were trying to say is that there really is no clean.

There's no clean. And this idea that you're not going to, that a human being entering into some particular environment is going to not leave a footprint. Like, it's not happening. Just by virtue of you being there, your bacteria, your diseases. And we're carrying around single-celled organisms and bacteria to help us digest food and stuff. And the body load of that stuff outnumbers the number of humans that have ever lived. Right. You know, we're just, in some some sense here's a joke for you so we

come we rise we don't do the deed we don't create life off the planet we just sort of go away planet goes on runs down five billion years from now the sun is a is a red giant and it's expanding and and we come the earth comes and it scrapes the outer corona and it starts breaking apart because that's probably what would happen. And the crust comes apart. Now, of course, we know that bacteria can survive in all these crustal rocks and maybe travel to other solar systems. But my prediction is the surface bacteria will say, hey, guys, and the ones that are five kilometers down or three miles down said, hey, guys, listen. And the ones that are five kilometers down or three miles down said, hey, guys, listen, around a billion years ago or 600 million years ago, there was all this surface gigantic plants and whales and dinosaurs and stuff. And there was one species that did technology and even took it out a little bit.

And then they just blew it and went away. And the five kilometer deep bacteria will say, you're kidding that was going on no one told us you know that all was happening on the surface we're we're used to just being bacteria on planets that never go any further than just the bacteria phase well the primary idea about how life gets moved around about the galaxy is asteroidal impacts, right? Like the idea of panspermia, like that much of what is life-sustaining exists on asteroids, like amino acids and water. It was a theory put forth, I think, in the 70s first.

It was initially sort of panned. But now we're discovering meteorites that have come from mars and landed on ice caps on earth and go in and realize no it's quite possible that things hitched a ride and that mars would have cooled sooner had a liquid ocean sort of more stable environment sooner than earth would have so if life arose on mars and got some impacts and blew off some crustal material, then we could be all Martians. Yeah. Yeah, that was the idea, right?

Well, if that's the case, I mean, isn't the rover just a very microscopic form of that? I mean, it's not an asteroid, but it is a plant, something that came from one body and is now occupying another body and it has life on it. So here's the other part of the story. So perhaps, and this is all woo-woo, but the bacteria in the Mars rovers are communicating with the Mars bacteria and saying, listen, you know, we got life started on the Earth. We went up to a certain point where we had trilobites and we had deep swimming things and they weren't really evolving.

So we ordered an airstrike, knocked them back. And then we got things on land that crawled, but they just basically all they did was eat and shit, you know, and they got big and whatever, but they weren't going anywhere. So we ordered another airstrike, kill off the dinosaurs. And now we've got this new thing, these primate things, but we don't know if they're really going to go anywhere. So we just might order one more airstrike and start with arachnids. Let's do spiders the next time. We got to find one that's going to do the job of getting life spread, you know. So you think that that's where our primary objective is, to get off this planet and spread

life throughout the galaxy? I think that life is so powerful. I mean, life, it pushes into new environments. You know, it went from early thermal springs on volcanic islands, and it figured out, this is the work I'm doing with my colleagues at UC Santa Cruz and NASA and elsewhere, is to try to figure out a model of how life started in those volcanic springs in those early, and we've come up with a model. We've just actually submitted our paper this week

on that model. But life pushes its way in. Life had to learn in that model to survive in the oceans, and then it could spread in these little bubbles that are like pre, you know, early life, really fragile and don't have much of a genome, but they can persist long enough they can get to the next island. You know, life will find a way, like Jeff Goldblum said. But look at where life has gone. I mean, it's incredible. As you say, if we are the spreading wings of the living system, we're a magnificent creation of that. I mean, we have the potential to spread life everywhere. And one of the other projects I'm working on is asteroid capture and retrieval, if you want to hear about that. Yeah, sure. That's a mechanism to actually spread life in a large scale, you know, even though it's indirect. So, you know, nobody's going to fund a project to

spread life into the solar system. We're not so visionary. You know, we're pretty pedestrian and we do things for business reasons or whatever. So there's this whole new space movement that's come up, you know, SpaceX, Elon Musk, all these private entrepreneurs. They're proposing how to get to Mars and stuff, right? NASA's still in the game, even though they can't launch people. You know, they're going to be using SpaceX in a few years. So NASA's put out this call for, well, let's see, what can we do with the human crew? Well, we can, back in 2007, when they were going to shut down the shuttle program that was on the books, I worked with a team that worked with headquarters to design what's possibly the very first, you know, we can even bring up that video, how to get people to an asteroid,

how to land a human crew using the hardware that NASA wanted to build, which was called Constellation at the time. And it turns out it's a tricky thing, you know. Who is it, the movie, the Deep Impact movie you mentioned? There was Bruce Willis. He had one, and the other one was Morgan Freeman. There was two. There was Deep Impact, and then there was Armageddon.

Armageddon. So what we said is, you know, that's all well and good, but how do you really do it? And it turns out that an asteroid, even if it's a half a mile long, has almost no gravity. So you're not actually going to this is your video that this is it jamie's put up here jamie has put it up so it has almost no gravity so it's very difficult to land on so that's a really big object but and it's going what like 45 000 miles an hour or something like that and it's rotating and it's you know so it's spinning and it's moving and it's moving so here's our craft so it's like a football it's moving. So here's our craft coming down. It's like a football.

We call it like a space potato. So here we're coming down and we're using our radar to try to find a spot that might not be so crumbly because these are often rubble piles. And this is going to be people going to land on these things? So this is a human mission. So see the ring of airbags that allows a soft contact. The vehicle's under thrust and it's, watch this. Here comes penetrometers coming out. What is a penetrometer?

It's like a boom, penetrates on the edge of a rope. And the penetrometers are to try to grapple the surface so you've got tension. If you've got tension on three or four of your lines, like a rock climber, you've got stability. So it actually digs into the surface to hold it in place. Digs into the surface like an anchor. And here are the guys coming out. Notice they're floating. They're coming out on handrails.

They've got a nice earth flag there saluting. This is our design from 2007, which was done for a NASA headquarters study for the administrator, actually. And anyway, so that was done. I unembargoed it. So it was so controversial at the time, because the whole Bush agenda was to go back to the moon. And this was like another target. And I thought, you know, we need to go somewhere else. If human beings are going to ever go to Mars, why don't we go to an asteroid? You know, this was running around the community. There's sort of an asteroid underground. And, you know, our center director was one of those dudes. And I was sitting in his

office, and he's a two-star general. He said, well, you can go public with it because you can't get fired. You know, you're not a civil servant. So I did. So I lined up space.com and CNET and, you know, popular science was on the cover of Popular Science. And we put that out. We said, here's our study. Here's how we grapple. You know, we dock with an asteroid and we get a human crew, et cetera, et cetera. And that kind of goes into a black hole because, you know, NASA sort of got that kind of institutional thing where they do a lot of studies. But we had done it in public.

And it actually shaped, it pushed the space industry. Because I forgot about it. It was 2007. I said, oh, you know, it's out there. If you Google humans on an asteroid, it'll come up. But it turns out people were watching that and looking at that. We just put it out there. And a guy at, I think it was JPL, saw that back in the day.

And then he designed the next mission. He was sort of an outsider. He was a student at the time. And he said, wow, this is really cool. We should be doing it as an agency. And he came up with, couldn't we bring an asteroid closer to the Earth so the crew doesn't have to go so far? Wait, what? Like pull it closer to Earth?

Pull it closer to Earth. That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Small one. Small disaster or to happen. Small one. Small disaster or small asteroid? Small asteroid. But you can land on it. You could go and sample it like a geologist with your hammers. How big are you talking about when you say small?

Literally pretty small, between like 12 feet and 30 feet long. And you could land on something 30 feet long? You couldn't land on that. You couldn't do what we just saw. Right. But the human crew could park next to it. What's called proximity ops. Yeah, it could park way downstream, turn off its hydrazine jets, and send astronauts over to sample it.

But how do you move something like that, say, to the orbit of the moon, which would be a safer place? Put a moon around the moon. the orbit of the moon which would be a safer place put a moon around the moon so nasa had initiated that challenge based on this work which bounced off this this guy who said we need to bring an asteroid in the moon and they now they have that as a direction so a colleague and me designed a whole system to do that a system to put an asteroid in orbit around the moon. And here's the neat thing about it. Here's the problem. You go out to one of these asteroids, it's a rubble pile.

Most of the ones that we're really interested in for science, right, for sampling, they're 5 billion years old, they're 4 billion years old. They're collected rubble piles of pieces of the early solar system. So they're fragile. And why do we know this? The asteroid that came in over Russia, the asteroid that came in over Africa last year, broke up at a certain altitude. So we know what pressure took to break it up. So we know how much you got to push it to break the thing up, because the atmosphere did that. And then it comes in in pieces and rains down down but isn't the concern that you can't predict what happens when you break them up and then you might deal with a bunch of giant rocks hurtling towards earth yeah and that's

why it's really hard to do asteroid deflection by some kind of explosive and you really don't want to ever do that they want to just be able to push it or put some kind of a webbing on it that changes the uh if you put a drag right if you put a webbing on it that changes the drag, right? If you put a webbing on it, they may just come apart. Right. You can use something called gravity tractoring, which was developed by Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lew and the separate work that we were doing with them, this idea of flying a spacecraft alongside something

and gradually the gravity will change the orbit. What is the purpose of going to an asteroid though or especially a human mission like what would be the benefit of having people go as opposed to having some remote vehicle because it seems like as we get better and better with remote technology it would be like a lot more efficient it would save lives and well here's here's the we we were asking that same question so initially initially NASA said, we want to do science. We want to take samples off of something that's as old as the Earth or older. Because then for origin of life research, which I'm involved in, I could get a few pounds of this material out from under the space crust that's on it.

That has protected it for 5 billion years or four billion years that material is precious because it was what was raining down in the skies of the early earth it was coming down to the little ponds where life may have started it's like spinning a refrigerator all this time right so it's really precious for science and figuring out how the solar system came together so our design was to go out to the asteroid up to a thousand tons. They're all rotating. They spin one time a minute, something like that, half a rotation a minute. Put a balloon around it. Just extend this air beam. I don't know if you've ever done any helium balloon, like high altitude flight.

No, I haven't. Oh, they're incredible. I mean, Julian Knott, who lives out in Santa Barbara, is perhaps the greatest designer of these kind of balloons. And he's on our team for this proposal. And he said, look, what you do is you extend these air beams. You know, like the balloons you have at circuses, the guy just like blows up a long balloon and makes a dog out of it for your kid, right?

Air beams, they're the rigid part. So you literally go out to the asteroid using xenon gas. You fill these airbeams and they pull your fabric out. And there's a folder of a bunch of images of this called Shepard. And it will capture the asteroid. Here it's kind of come out. There we go. You can see that.

It's hard to. So this is a balloon. This is literally a balloon. It captures the asteroid. So the asteroid is now inside it, and it's tumbling. It's rotating. And there's the air beams, those blue things. This is how the capture works.

And here's the airflow. We may leave it on that one, and we can explain what we're doing. It turns out that if you inject gas into this balloon, you will gradually slow the tumbling of the asteroid to stop it. Now it's stopped. They've solved one of the big problems of capturing asteroids is to get rid of this spin and tumbling. Because if you can't, there's all these powerful forces.

If you tried to put a net around that, it would just come apart or tear your spacecraft to pieces. Okay, so you put a bubble on it, you capture an asteroid, now what? Now what, as you'll notice in our little drawing there, we start shooting waves of xenon gas at the back end of it, which puts a force on it. Not a force to break it up, but enough force to shove it. force on it. Not enough force to break it up, but enough force to shove it. And then we use the same xenon gas in our motor to keep up with it as it moves. And we can use like

sail power. This is like a sailing ship. We can use sail power, moving gas to change its orbit and to retrieve it and move it into some other part of the solar system. Is this potential technology to avoid gigantic asteroid impacts on Earth, or is it just too small? This is too small. So this is only for examining old rocks. For examining old rocks.

But it turns out that when we were investigating this further, we thought, wait a minute, what if we had a piece of a comet? You know, comets are coming in the Pleiades meteor shower, and the landids that come in and they give you this nice light show in the summer. That's all valuable volatiles. That's water, that's methane, all this wonderful stuff. What if you had a chunk of a comet that had all these gases coming off? You know, the Rosetta mission the Europeans are doing right now, they're orbiting one

of these gigantic comets that has these geysers coming out. That's thrust. That's like a rocket thrust. What if you could capture a small comet from further out, put your balloon around it, stop it rotating, capture all the stuff coming off, and use it for your engine? You could then create a moving chunk of the early solar system. Okay, outside of what if we did this and what if we did that, and being able to do it would be cool and everything like that,

what would be the benefit of getting some 5 billion-year-old rock out of space? And again, why would you want to do it with people? Why wouldn't you want to do it remotely with machines? Well, here's where the people come in. So if you can move basically a wet space rock, capture all the gases coming out of it, concentrate the gases in your tanks, a human crew can dock with it, say you move it to Mars, move it to Mars orbit, move it to the lunar orbit. Now you've got a gas station in orbit.

You've got a gas station somewhere in the solar system full of exactly the material you need to get a human crew. They dock with it. When they get there, they refill their tanks. They now have their return fuel to go back to Earth. And then they fuel their lander. And they go down. They don't have to carry that stuff.

You have gas stations. You have a sustainable spaceflight system. That sounds beautiful but if you don't send people out there you don't need that so you're saying we would do this because when the people were out there that way we would have power but if you don't need people out there you don't need this power and what would be the benefit of having these people out there other than the fact that you could do it I think because we're you know we're an exploring species we're eventually gonna want to do it right but wouldn't aren't we exploring remotely with the rover aren't we exploring remotely with Voyager yeah we're still exploring but

like the proposition of going to Mars is so unbelievably unattractive to me like when i hear that a hundred thousand people signed up for mars i'm like well that's a hundred thousand people that would just drink drano those are a hundred thousand people that would dive into a volcano if you put a camera on them right i mean what the fuck are they doing why do they want to go to mars it's the shittiest neighborhood ever on earth imagine going to some unbelievably un un unpopulated inhospitable environment on earth would you go there would you go to some place where you're like sleeping on the edge of a volcano breathing cosmic gases through a fucking giant mask because you you can't breathe the air you have to have some air tanks and you have all this gear just

keep you alive you'd be like fuck no why would I do that when I could live in Hawaii? Right. Why would I do that when I can be in San Diego? You wouldn't, right? Right. So why would you go to fucking Mars? Except that there are some people, there are some crazy people that really want to see this new shit.

The people that pay the $20 million to go to the space station, they're going to be paying $50 million at some point to go around the moon i mean if you talk to the people who went is that what's gonna cost per person 50 million is that the idea i've heard it thrown around but only rich assholes are gonna be able to afford going around the moon then well it's like in the days of great exploration i mean rich assholes fund a darwin's is it gonna be like cell phones where it starts off with rich assholes? Like Michael Douglas on Wall Street with the big brick phone. Yeah, that huge. And then eventually

on the Miracle Mile show. Yeah, you go to third world countries and everybody has a cell phone. Exactly. Is it going to be like that? It's going to be like that. Is that true though? Because it's very disturbing to me that people aren't more up in arms about the loss of the space shuttle and about the loss of lack of funding from NASA.

That was crazy. It's so, but it's so confusing because every movie from when I was a kid or even television shows, do you remember space 1999? Yeah. That was 1999. Right. We were living in space. Yep. 1999.

Yeah. You know, what happened? How is it 2014? And we don't even have an active space program. We don't. And because there's fundamental problems with the economics like even spacex so spacex what they did what elon did down in el segundo here he said okay what we're going to do is make a low-cost launcher we're going to have the same engines on the second stage as we have in the first stage not two freaking types of engines with lockheed martin and Boeing's launchers, like, they're so complicated.

Why? Because they're government contractors. They're going to bill a lot more money. They're going to overbill the government for each launch. So you think that's what it was? Oh, it's incredible. So it stifled innovation, the fact that they were getting money from the government. Yeah, because it was government contractors.

So what the government did in the 1920s, when aviation was just starting out, So what the government did in the 1920s, when aviation was just starting out, they gave these contracts to these little fabric air companies to run postal mail. They invented air mail. And so they said, well, we'll create a new kind of mail called air mail for the post office. It doesn't go by horse and buggy or train or whatever. And these little companies got enough finance from that that they started running airmail around. And they became Continental Airlines and United Airlines. And all of them came out of that thing by moving it to private enterprise.

So what NASA did, and it's great wisdom. Sometimes it has great wisdom. It created a program in the 2000s, in the aughts, to do this. So you've got SpaceX now and you've got orbital sciences. But they're not inventing much in the way of new tech. and the aughts to do this. So you've got SpaceX now, and you've got orbital sciences. At least, but they're not inventing much in the way of new tech. They're inventing a reliable low-cost launcher, just like the Soviets had in the 60s and still have, Proton. Low-cost, made on an assembly line.

You look at the Ergomash factory in Russia that makes the Soviet boosters and how they make this the soyuze craft it's like henry ford's zemmeline low cost high reliability you know so we had lost that culture and now it's coming back with space access but the economics are still really rotten so it's coming back because of private funding in the private sector private sector yeah because of competition because of competition and innovation coming from Silicon Valley and other brains than people who, you know, work for large aerospace companies. So it's kind of another example of bureaucracy and government sort of getting in the way of progress. Well, in this case, they got out of the way of progress and they said,

well, we're losing the shuttle anyway. We'll create this small program, relatively small, where we'll fund the winners of the competition. So somebody, it was kind of like the X Prize, right? This idea of challenges and prizes and the DARPA Prize. And that's created a huge amount of innovation. That's really worked. That's been a government thing that worked. Because they said, well, create a new astronaut glove or a self-driving robot that can track the edge of the highway.

But so much military technology came out of the Apollo missions. I mean, so much from the space race between us versus the Soviets, so much innovation came out of it. And so much of it was very valuable as far as military. I don't understand why that didn't continue. It seems like that would be a no-brainer. That would be a very important part of what the military would want. And who gets more money than the military?

The military gets ungodly sums of cash. They get ungodly. They're really, really inefficient at delivering programs, right? They have a high cancel rate. And when they cancel a program, it's $100 billion of loss. But they seem like they've just stopped. They have a high cancel rate, and when they cancel a program, it's $100 billion of loss. But they seem like they've just stopped. And what the military has done, what the DOD has done is the same thing NASA is doing.

The public sector, chip manufacturers, everything from laptops to whatever, are so much more advanced than what the Pentagon or NASA can make, that they just use off-the-shelf. It's called COTS, commercial off the shelf. And so they're not innovating. They're just using laptops, you know, and they're using standard stuff they're getting from industry because industry is so far ahead. Back in the 50s, they were ahead. Right.

In the 60s. Now industry is so freaking far ahead, like Tesla's batteries. I mean, who can, nobody's going to create something as superior as that. Right. Or not anytime in the near future. Not in the future. Yeah. Everyone's going to create something as superior as that. Right. Or not anytime in the near future. Not in the future. Yeah, everyone's going to just buy those standard parts. Do you think that there is a way that we can kind of get back on track because of the private sector being involved in space travel and we can really start seeing manned space travel?

Mm-hmm. Like, we really can sort of, like, make up for that hiccup where we thought we would be in 2014. Where the shuttle would be reusable and it would only cost $50 million each time. Like, what was the original movie Alien? What year was that based in? Oh, God. Was it 82? No, no, no.

Or 79? Yeah, it was 79. But what was it based on? It was based on not that far in the future. Right, right. It was based on like 2020 or something goofy like that, right? Wasn't it? And, you know, Blade Runner was supposed to be like 2019, Los Angeles raining and cyborgs and stuff.

Well, isn't that still possible? I mean, what we were talking about before about the creation of artificial life and the exponential growth of technology, if you factor in all those things, it might not be 2019, but it might be 2029. I mean, they very well may have artificial life that's indistinguishable from you or I in another two or three decades. That's very possible, right? No. No, it's not? It's really not. I've spent at least 10 years trying to figure out why technology and biology are counterposed systems. Why one doesn't do the other very well.

So, for example, I do a talk now and then at the Singularity University. I haven't been there for a couple of years, but my talk is why the idea of a singularity is really not possible. Not possible? Not possible with the technology we have now. Yeah, but what does that mean? the idea of a singularity is really not possible. And I can show... Not possible? Not possible with the technology we have now. Yeah, but what does that mean? I mean, when you say not possible,

if things continue to go along the same exponential rate of progress, right? If it continues to go, it sort of, I mean, has to reach some sort of an end point, right? I mean, it has to continue to innovate, continue to grow, as long as we have the physical materials, right? Terrence thought that. Terrence read a lot of science articles and popular science journals. And I remember sitting with him in his house in Hawaii, up half the night, trying to explain to Terrence why this idea was not feasible. Why is that?

Well, Terrence, you see, we just done a whole virtual world thing. I said, Terrence, the virtual world that we just were in, it's a cardboard cutout. There's nothing in it. It's just polygons rendered in a scene by a serial processor that's getting bits from a server, and it's all extremely fragile. It looks realistic to us, but it's a complete cardboard cutout. And on the other hand, if you look down from Terrence's house down to Captain Cook, and you looked at the Pacific Ocean, I said, you take a glass full of water from that ocean,

and what the heck is going on in that glass full of water in computational terms is just mind-blowing. It's a computational superpower. And, in fact, that glass of water could not be simulated accurately by all the computers we've ever built, all running at once. Not today, but couldn't it be a thousand years from now? Isn't that possible? Possibly. If we continue to stay alive and innovation continues to push the boundaries of what's possible as far as computing. I mean, you can only imagine what we're capable of 100 years from now. But the thing is, what we're building, say, for instance, the steam engine, right?

The steam engine was large bore diameter pistons, right? Starting in the 1820s and whatnot. They got smaller and smaller and better and better. So we got motors, we got locomotives, and we got gasoline. But the piston and camshaft model is still what drives your Tesla. Well, maybe not because it doesn't have pistons in it. Right, no, that's an electric motor. It's a completely different thing, right?

Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. It got miniaturized. It got better and better. But it was stuck in a rigid framework of what its limitations were. Computers are also stuck in that framework. So, for example, John von Neumann, when he designed the von Neumann machine in Princeton in 1948, 49, and they built this first really reliable, no patch cord, lots of registers and memory and vacuum tubes and drums and shit. They got all working by 1952, and then they gave the plans away. Well, von Neumann, the creator of

this, wrote, this is a contingency architecture. This is just to get something to actually work and not break down in 20 minutes and do something, but it is in no way a strong architecture, especially when it comes to dealing with natural systems. But haven't they overcome a lot of that, at least in theory, with quantum computing? That's all, I'm not sold on that at all. I think that those are extremely specialized, very, very small processes that we don't really even understand what's going on. But doesn't it open up the potential? I mean, if you go back to the invention of the steam engine and you compare it with a Tesla, and you look at the X amount of hundred of years plus of innovation that led to this incredible leap in technology,

wouldn't you just extrapolate and say, like, what we have today? You can't possibly say that, like, flash drives and three gigabyte processors is the end-all be-all. If we can't do it with that, we're never going to be able to do it. But isn't it true that perhaps in the year 2050, there will be a computer with a serial processor, maybe lots of, like, it might have a thousand CPUs or more, but it's still doing the same thing. Why? Because it's tied to legacy. Why does it have to be? Why does it have to be doing the same thing that it's doing now? If quantum computing really does turn out to pan out. Because it has to run Microsoft Word.

Why does it have to run Microsoft Word? Because those are the forces that are driving evolution. Sort of, but I mean, look, Microsoft Word today has almost no relation to Microsoft Word of Windows 95. I mean, like Microsoft Word today has almost no relation to Microsoft Word of Windows 95. I mean, it's barely connectable. It's actually slower. Well, it does a lot more though, right? It does more of it.

Yeah. I mean, bloatware. Bloatware. So I've got a 1990 First 386 computer running Windows 3.1 in the Digibarn. I'm afraid Chris McGuire had one of those. He kept that shit deep into the 90s, 3.1 in the digital mcguire had one of those he kept that shit deep into the 90s man he had it in like 97 90 80 kept that oh my god windows 3.1 i booted this up the other day it comes up bam it's so fast i'm running word i'm running everything i'm doing email in aol like so quick and then i go then I go to my modern machine, which is 10,000 times more powerful,

and it's like, oh, my God, another processor glitch has happened and the wheel of laconic process is happening and Windows are painting slowly because there's this bloat layer upon layer upon layer of crap. You really have that much of a heart? What do you run? Do you run Windows or Unix or what do you run? It's ridiculous. I mean'm i'm running uh vms like i run different machines virtual machines you run like windows on top of a mac platform that kind of a thing and i have tweaked and i go into

all these forums and it's like oh you know windows 7 not on a vm has all these incredible problems with a search indexer. You've got to stop this because it will totally choke the operating system. You've got to stop that. You've got to do this. So you have to – it's like an automobile in 1910 where you had to be a mechanic to keep it working efficiently. This stuff is so bad. But you're running some really complicated stuff, though, if you're running virtual machines.

Well, I'm running – You're essentially running a hard – you're running virtual machines well you're running uh you're essentially running a heart you're running an operating system then you're running another operating system on your operating system that's operating simultaneously and that's a lot of resources but it's using the same hardware right but what it exposes is the incredibly how incredibly poor we are as a species at writing software that's good and it stays stable so this is just just super duper complex i mean i don't have a problem with things crashing i mean if you compare it to like what windows 95 used to be like windows 95 used to get that blue screen to death all the time my favorite story is if we're halfway between earth and the stars you know like we're

halfway to alpha centauri and the 3,000 crew are in their deep sleep and suddenly they're all woken up. They're getting out of their vessels and they go and they look at the screens on the bridge and they're all blue. And it says, press control, alt, delete. You will lose all data.

And we realized we were running DOS underneath all of this technology. Layer upon layer. They'll all be doomed. I'm really confused about your idea because you seem to think that things were better off when they were really clunky and they couldn't run as much software and the software wasn't as complex. For example, Windows XP. Like, when they discontinued support of XP, oh, my God, and you found out there were millions and millions of companies that were just totally dependent on it, saying, this is so robust. This is such good software.

And since XP, of course, they went to, you know, Vista, which was a disaster, and Windows 7 was sort of a recovery, and then Windows 8 was sort of a disaster. Now, of course, the evolution of Mac OS is maybe a little different. It's fantastic. It's fantastic. Mac OS is so much better than it ever was back in the days, the pre-Intel days. Yeah, before Rhapsody and before Mach and Unix, it was just a kludge. The Mac OS didn't have primped multitasking. Right, no memory protection.

No memory protection, all that stuff. I stayed away from Macs until the Unix got onto the platform. Yeah, when 10 came along. When 10 came along. But if you look at how can we be so bad, and we're spending the maximum amount of cash, and only one or two companies and one or two OS efforts make something that's good. We're not really good at software, actually.

You're talking crazy. You have an extreme pessimistic attitude towards innovation. I've grown up in the software business. And, well, you know, seeing how things actually get done. And then you meet a futurist or a popularizer who comes up with this wild thing, and you say, no one's working on the project for one you know there's no investment going into say putting consciousness in computers and does that i always ask the question do those putting consciousness into computers we're talking

about a completely different thing now you're talking about software development first and you cited well soft software writing creating you cited one excellent operating system, Mac OS, which exists right now. I mean, we are. You say no one is writing it, but it's there. I'm on it right now. It's fantastic. But it's doing stuff that has been done for 35 years in different operating systems in different ways. But that's one of the big things that happened when the transfer to OS X came is that there was this big, you to get rid of all the old software because all the legacy software was no longer useful you couldn't use it

because it was running on a completely different platform so that right there sort of contradicts your idea doesn't it but the thing is if you talk to somebody say in 1990 right uh well uh you know where will software evolution be in 2015? They probably would, just like you're disappointed with the space program, right? It's disappointing in the software business. Is it? The software business is grinding away. This is what Jaron Lanier talks about.

He wrote this thing called Half a Manifesto about 10 years ago, which is like, we are so burdened by legacy and poor practices that we just add, we're building like a tower of Babel. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. But we add layer upon layer upon layer without thinking. So we're not building great pyramids at Kesa. We're building some kind of a tower of Babel of technology that's really patchworked together. Maybe you just know more about it than I do, because when I look at it objectively as someone who's not involved in the

industry, all I'm seeing is continual innovation. All I'm seeing is things getting better, crisper, move better, boot up faster, crash less. I agree with you in that when we went to, say, the iPad and mobile devices, they could throw away all that legacy. Just say, just

throw it. No more compact disks. Yeah, throw it in the trash no more file systems and layer and then we'll build a brand new operating system running on flash memory and get rid of the crap and we'll even have new ways to do applications when that happened it was like a huge breath of fresh air i was like oh there isn't 500000 features to my mail program. It just does mail. And we maybe dumbed it down. We made it super simple to get away from our natural tendency to. So the space station is a good example.

Space station is so complicated, right? It has 15 nations or 13 nations. There's 150 kinds of connectors on it, right? It is designed to be remotely run without any crew. That was one of the initial design criteria, that we should be able to completely remotely run the space station. So it has laptops and ancient computers and huge millions of lines of code to run the space station. So it's a huge cost. It's a huge burden to keep that thing running. Go back to Skylab.

You know, you're old enough to probably remember. Skylab was a tin can. It was an upper stage of a Saturn V, the beautiful Saturn V, the most reliable booster in history thrown away. So one of the last ones they launched, the upper stage, was a tin can, space station, solar panels, super simple, huge interior space. Guys could run around it. Remember how they could run?

And, you know, a beautiful model of a space station that didn't require more than 30% of crew time to sort of keep maintenance going. On the International Space Station, the crew are overwhelmed with maintenance chores. It's so complicated. So we built something. And I asked a friend at NASA, I said, what if you put boosters on the space station and tried to send it to Mars to carry a crew?

He said, they'd be dead in a month because we're constantly having to send up parts and repair shit that's breaking. It is not a sustainable platform. Currently. Currently, without a huge amount of maintenance and resupply and constant management. Right.

Like an operating system. I'm confused by your pessimism, though. Because it seems to me that if you want to nitpick and focus on this blip in time, this one blip in time where there may be peaks and valleys in innovation, ultimately, it seems to be sort of inexorably moving towards progress or moving towards complexity right would you agree with that but the progress say toward uh having something as good as biology how biology operates operating in technology is a big challenge. Yeah. Technology is just, I mean, the biology of a cell and how a cell metabolizes products, how it manages its energy, it has its feedback.

You know, a cell is like a huge cityscape working. It works 99.999% of the time. Otherwise, you'd be just mush flowing on the ground. But aren't we talking about biological processes like processing proteins and things along those lines and yeah exactly that won't necessarily be necessary if you have something artificial silicon based something that's running on electricity and technology and lithium ion batteries here's the problem it's based on too weak of a model of physics in what way so here's and here's the here's the metaphor that i use And this is why computer people hate this idea.

What idea? The idea that life is based on probabilistic events. So here's how you digest sugar. Say you take a nice big bolus of sugar into your body. The sugar molecule will come into your cell at some point somewhere it will hit this molecular storm of shit going on mostly water molecules it will ricochet around the cell hitting just about every other molecule that it can in the cell for a second second and a half two seconds until it hits it hits exactly the right place on a molecule that has a pocket

that the sugar fits in perfectly, and that thing will cause it to band and go click, click, and make it into a polysaccharide, which is an important, valuable thing. But it's all done through what's known as a probabilistic stochastic process. It's completely nuts, but that's how nature is. And so when you compare that process to the way a computer would work so a computer designer would say well i'm that's dumb that's a whole lot of wasted you know steps and computation i'll just build a assembly line we'll take that sugar in and along the assembly line and we'll hit my thing and we'll digest it immediately well it turns out if you do things like that,

they're so rigid that they break almost immediately in real world and nature. But isn't this if you're imitating biological synthesis or biological life? And why would you do that if you're creating something artificial? All you need to do to create an artificial person is have it behave, think react like a person it doesn't need to process proteins i mean these are all that's legacy isn't that like being tied to legacy what do you throw away from what a person is how do you define say consciousness or i don't think you would call it a person at all right why would you call it a person i mean not throwing it away what i'm talking about

is creating something completely unique it wouldn't have to be a duplicate of a person all we'd have to do is look like one right but then we're building cardboard simulacra again that really aren't the real thing if you sent that person in the new york subway system that robotic entity it would be soon overwhelmed with stimulus and programs and conditions that- Unless you programmed it for it. Unless you built human being 1.0 and you found the flaws and then built 2.0 and found the flaws and keep going the same way we've described already with operating systems from 1995,

a mere blip in time to 2014 and the massive amount of progress has been made since then if you did that with computer generated or Electronically generated whatever you want to call artificial life forms that we've created I mean it just stands to reason given enough time no asteroids no super volcanoes no Ebola Humans are gonna get there. I Think it's a harder problem than we can suppose, like Terrence would say. It's really hard because we don't understand how basic biology really

functions. We don't understand, for example, well, here's another example. The neuron, you know, 10,000 connections, and the body, and the sodium channel, and there's all these things that come out, and, you know, the neurotransmitters are generated into this pole and they carry the signal and everything.

The neuron is so freaking big. I do something called molecular dynamics simulation. Our team has done that, where you're just simulating a molecule's wiggling movement, right? And they're doing this now for protein folding, where they get 10,000 atoms all arranged in the right place in the simulation in the computer so that it behaves like a real protein would do, which is fold into all this weird geometry. So they have to simulate the protein being slammed by water all the time. It's this crazy process. It might take those guys a month of computation on a computer with 10 000 processors to simulate a couple of nanoseconds of that action because otherwise the simulated protein just doesn't

behave like it really does in nature you it's that hard right so i i think we're in agreement that replicating absolute biological processes would be insanely difficult and may take forever. But my question is, why is that necessary to create something new that can think for itself? Because here's the problem. If you created something very small, for example, not a human walking around the New York subway system, but something, what world does it live in? It lives in a, if it's a robot, say it's a little insectoid robot, what world does it have to live in? What do you mean it's living in this world?

What do you mean? Well, if it lives, say, on a factory floor. A good example. Factory floor robots are really getting good. They can carry shit around. They can track spots on the floor. Right. And they can do all kinds of shit.

But if they ever go out in the parking, if you put them out in the parking lot, where they're out of their very controlled, they're in a virtual world when they're in a factory and they see tape and marks and barcodes and all kinds of things that create the mental model inside the robot. But if it goes into nature and the chaos of the natural world

and vehicles moving around and stuff like that. You know, the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is all these great teams making robots or self-driving, they found out real fast that we're, you know, this is hard. Currently. This is super hard. Currently hard. But isn't the new Tesla D, you could phone home with this thing and it would literally drive to you. And I heard a rumor, by rumor by the way this is maybe a

a google car you know self-driving google car that on the 880 um there was a a google self-driving car scene that had an irish setter sitting you're done you're a dog owner right right it was sitting in the passenger seat there was no one else in it. And the cops were told about this. People were calling this. There's this car. There's this Irish setter who's driving this car. And the cops come up, and there's an Irish setter sitting in the seat, and there's no one else.

And they follow it, and it goes to a veterinarian's office. And the door opens, and the dog goes into the veterinarian office and this is the rumor that i'd heard was somebody just didn't have time they put the car the dog in the car and they sent it to the vet's office you know which was totally in violation of you know any kind of but maybe doesn't that story doesn't that story itself disprove this notion that it's too difficult to do something like this when you're dealing with the real world and all the variables and all the moving parts? I mean, you just talked about a dog driving a fucking car. I mean, that's kind of it right now, and this is only 2014. But, you know, in Wuppertal in Germany in the 19th century, they were doing remote control trains. They were doing trains that would go on the track, track to an electrical signal, stop, pick people up.

I mean, this stuff is actually pretty easy. Okay. But that's not, we're talking about a road, though. That's not a track. The difference between that and a living system is those are fixed function algorithms that are doing edge tracing on the edge of a highway saying, where's the right line and where's the yellow line? And they're getting a GPS signal. And if you look at the code, it's not very big. You know, if it was very big and complicated, it probably wouldn't work. So these Google engineers have made something pretty elegant that has fuzzy logic and everything.

They've got it to work. something pretty elegant that has fuzzy logic and everything they've got it to work this has been tried since the 1930s with the radio control cars that had radios on the front and back control the distance and they've they've got it to work but is this anything close to what life can do no the adaptability of what like no but but neither was the initial combustion engine even close to what the Saturn V rocket was. Like, neither was the original Model T in comparison to a Tesla. I mean, doesn't that just stand to reason that constant innovation? I agree with you, except that when I see really sci-fi things come in that are just, because I'm an engineer fundamentally, and when I see stuff that's like, oh my God, I can't even imagine how to get there, because they're not even defining their terms.

Right. They're not defining their terms, and no one's working on the project. So I'll give you one example of how hard this stuff is. So Terrence and I would have these conversations about what he called novelty. You remember he used to say, can crescents into novelty? So, you know, Terrence left us in the year 2000, you know, saw the millennium. If you define it as the year 2000, people say it restarted 2001. But Terrence was talking about all this stuff, and I would say that's pretty obvious to myself

that things get novel. How do they get novel? And for years and years, I worked on this project called the Evolution Grid. What we did was try to say, let's simulate actual chemistry inside the computer and see if we can see novelty accreting. And how does it do it?

And in 2011, after running a year of simulations, partly at UC San Diego and up in my barn, if you can believe that, with old servers all wired together, we found this staircasing formula that was a way that nature forms structures, in this case, bonds form between these virtual molecules and doesn't break them. They don't just all go back to mush. And it was this staircasing thing. I said, oh my God, you know, this took eight months of computation to find this method by which perhaps the universe accretes novelty and holds on to it. So I sort of did a virtual call to Terence and I said, we found the formula.

I call it the cosmic wiggle. And he calls this stuff like the cosmic giggle. I don't know if you remember from some of his talks. I said, we found the cosmic wiggle. But in the process of doing that, what I learned was, holy shit, the basis for life, which is this massive, huge engine of stochastic probabilistic storm that's going on that literally ratchets and rocks everything from jujitsu matches to the jet airplane is a powerful system it's not at the basis of computing computing is this delicate little thing like we'll take a number and we'll do a thing with it and we'll spread it out here. But nature is this massive machine. So perhaps the future, and this is where we would come together,

is a merger between computing and natural systems. So this is a project that I'm calling the Genesis Engine Project. And it's having a computer control trillions of chemical experiments all going at once and looking at them, selecting them and saying, these are more powerful experiments and it can do search through molecular space. I just talked to a guy from Google about this and he was like, oh, molecular search. We're interested in that. We're not just limited in our searches to, you know, the best bread recipes.

No, we would like to search in molecule space. And I talked to our neighbor, and we have a place in New Jersey, and he's like a head researcher at Glaxo, and he said, this is incredibly valuable. If you can actually use molecules to do the walking, run a trillion experiments at once and pick the best ones and then run a trillion more experiments and walk through chemical space, at once and pick the best ones and then run a trillion more experiments and walk through chemical space, we can figure out how to make a pharmaceutical in the least amount of steps.

You can simulate, you can create new materials. And we'll have a hybrid digital and natural analog computer for the first time in this 21st century. Well, now you're really confusing me because now you seem to think that innovation is going to reach some new plateau. If we do that, if we're able to hybridize, I think we're going to make the leaps that you are talking about, Joe. If we can do this hybrid, if we can harness nature. So where's your pessimism line? What do you... I'm an engineer, so I know what it takes to build these things. And so I don't want to really oversell that by a certain date, we're going to have a singularity of some sort. Yeah, I think that certain date stuff is always a goof.

It's a goof. Ray Kurzweil wants to do it now with 2045 and the 2045 initiative. It's moved out to 2045. Yeah, I think they're being silly by doing that. And I think it does the whole idea of exponential increase in technology. It does that whole idea of disservice by pretending that anybody... First of all, nobody's ever fucking predicted anything. Right.

Right. Nobody's ever nailed it. I mean, there's been some fascinating H.G. Wells predictions that sort of came true. But no one said, like, on November 19th, 1972, there's going to be a telephone that does this. And it's never happened. It's never happened. on November 19th, 1972, there's going to be a telephone that does this. And it's never happened. It's never happened. Like, that's what,

that December 21st, 2012, drove me fucking crazy. It drove me fucking crazy because, first of all, it was intoxicating, and then it was maddening, and then it became ridiculous. And as the day rolled around, I did an end of the world show.

You did. On December 21st, 2012. I have to go listen to that. Doug Stanhope and Joey Diaz and my friends honey honey this band and we did this show uh we did it live at the wiltern it's not it doesn't it exists anywhere oh it was just a comedy show just a live show it's a comedy show yeah we just thought the asteroid was going to hit or the mines were to come back or the aliens

were going to land or whatever the fuck was going to happen nothing happened of course you know i was in the uh down underneath grand central station Station in New York City with a friend of mine. He's kind of a psychedelic comic. What's his name? Oh, God, what's his name again? What kind of a friend is this? Oh, brain is fried. He's an absolutely wonderful guy.

Yeah, great guy. What's his fucking name? No one's going to find him. Seven billion people in the planet. Seven billion people. We laughed our way through the day, like you guys were doing at the Wiltern. We just told jokes. And we said, we got to get less serious.

Well, it's just this idea of picking a day is so goofy. Like, I had Daniel Pinchbeck on the podcast once, and he was saying that it's definitely going to change the world. Do you know that December 21st, 2012, something's definitely going to happen. It's absolutely definitely going to change the world. I was like, what are you talking about? No, no. What are you fucking, how can you say that?

You can't say that. You can't, you can't. You can never say that. You can never say a date. Well, here's, Joe, here's a real cool one for you. I have some of the last Terrence McKenna papers. You know, Terrence's archive was destroyed in a fire in 2007. Yeah, what happened there?

That was his, he lives in a rainforest how the fuck did a fire destroy everything after he died the papers went to esalen where you just were on the big sur coast and they stored him at their in-town office in monterey and a quizno sub shop i kid you not had some kind of electrical issue burned a whole city block down and the Esalen office and Terrence's papers. Oh, my God. But didn't his place in Hawaii burn, too? No, no. It's still there.

Oh, okay. Absolutely, yeah. Who owns that? You know, I don't know. I think it was sold recently. Jesus Christ. Who bought that fucking thing? God damn, I would love to have that place.

So those archives were lost. And as soon as that happened, I heard somebody called me and I called Lorenzo, Lorenzo Haggerty, our dear friend. Love that dude. Love that dude. And I said, Lorenzo, the elves have removed the incriminating evidence again. That's hilarious. We have to rebuild Terrence McKenna from extant material. So it's like a Grateful Dead show thing.

Send in your cassettes. Well, one of his most problematic theories was that novelty theory. The idea that December 21st, 2012, there was going to be some point of infinite novelty and he thought it was going to be a time machine perhaps. Based on the I Ching. Yeah. So I got a packet of papers in the mail that I came through another archivist because I'm also handling Timothy Leary's, the remnants of Timothy Leary's library right now.

We're trying to scan the news archive and whatever, but this packet of material, 15 years of letters. And there was a Time Wave Zero edition in a little binder or whatever with Terrence's little writing on it. And there was a post-it note where Terrence has scribbled something, and then at the bottom he says, December 21st. Yes, yes, yes. On the bottom of this Post-it note, 1989. And so I scanned that sucker in and put it online in December of 2012. I said, here is the nefarious Post-it note

where Terrence finally settled on this date, at least for Terrence. You know, Arguelles, so say Arguelles had been involved in this too. And of course, but it says it comes down to this post-it note. And I wanted to put that up to sort of show the absurdity of this is a guy that doesn't really, you know, Terrence wasn't a technologist and you know he was a visionary thinker we love him i mean he was an amazing dude we love to listen to him but i think you're right i think he was off the rails on he put too much into that one thing and not only that didn't he

move the goal posts like at one point in time it wasn't december 21st it was like november something and he changed it he changed it and he was trying to fit the data to the curve, but he wasn't really an expert in trends in history, and how can you match trends in history to anything anyway? I would listen to him talk about that. That's the one thing that I had to shut off. I've listened to pretty much everything that he's ever done, all the Lorenzo archives, all the stuff that Jan Ervin put up way back in the day.

Listen to Podcast 316 in the salon, because that one, we kind of take this thing apart. And I met with Ralph Abraham. We meet, you know, once a year kind of thing. And in 2011, I was setting up to do a program called Terrence 2012 about the life of Terrence McKenna. And I met with Ralph, and I said, tell me, Ralph, what was going on in the late 90s? Because, you know, they're the trial law, Ralph Rupert, who was just on your show, Ralph Abraham and Terrence. And Ralph said, we kind of were getting fed up because Terrence was just spinning these stories and we didn't think they had any basis. And so at the 1998 trial logs,

you know, the trial logs where they all met and they talked together at UC Santa Cruz, he said, if you listen to that, Rupert and I set a trap for Terrence. We trapped him over and over again. And we basically, for an hour, he was squirming and he was pretty, you know, pretty uncomfortable. So I pull out our cassette tape of that and we have digitized it. And sure and behold, and you'll hear this within Podcast 360 and what Rupert says, Terrence is talking about, you know, the internet will come to consciousness in 20 minutes or less, you know, it will be an AI that will no longer need

us. And so Rupert was ready for that and said, Terrence, I've heard, you know, Rupert's voice, you had him here and I've heard Rupert's voice, you had him here, and I've heard 10 versions of this story. And in the last version, it was an AI coming out of a time portal, because they're not going to let him get away with this. And Terrence is such a good Irishman, right? He's such good on storytelling, and he's good with, and he says, and that too, that's going to happen too.

But at the end of that, it's very, very heartfelt and kind of, because Terrence realizes his friends have kind of drawn a line in the sand. And the last thing he says in that trialogue is, well, we want prophets, but we don't want false prophets. So, you know, I think the story was the thing at that point. So do you think that he just got carried away with it? Like, is it, I mean, obviously, he, like you and I, like everyone we know, is flawed as a person. And he also, part of the reason why he was this visionary, sort of out of the box thinker this guy who had this really an incredible way of describing potential possibilities was that his mind was prone to going on these little weird journeys and took a lot of chances and maybe might have been married to a few of these chances

that maybe shouldn't have yeah yeah dennis dennis was in the introduction i think to the second version of invisible landscape dennis is writing you, this is what we went through when we were in our 20s, and we've learned something since then. We don't really, you know, I don't believe this anymore. And, you know, I think it's almost like, and this could happen to any of us, we get attached to story. It's our shtick. It's our comedy act.

It's our thing we do. You know, it's our conspiracy theory. It's the thing we do. You know, it's our conspiracy theory. It's the thing that brings people into the seats. It fills the theaters. And if it's paying your bills and it gives you self-worth and whatnot, you can get really attached to that story. were so fascinating compelling and to listen to him talk about the positive benefits of psychedelics what he thinks the potential that psychedelics hold and what he thinks about psychedelic culture and there's so much fascinating absolutely fascinating i love him out of him he was terence for me i can tell you and i only knew him the last couple of years we didn't know he was on

his way out frankly you know we did this whole fantastic thing with we brought virtual worlds to his house in Hawaii off his satellite his dish and he was placed into a world and he became his own ghost the avatar was fantastic and I was looking forward to a long association with him and we were planning to do an Esalen workshop where he and I could do pieces of the same puzzle like I could do like the deep tech and weird ideas and stuff but it was based on science and tech and some visionary thinking and he would come in from his history side and it loses and all that stuff and we were gonna just go on the road and then he had a grand mal seizure two months later and was horrific and we saw him last in

September 99 and was like a goodbye event that was held. If he was around today, is there sufficient medical advances that would have helped him? You know, a glial blastoma multiforme, they're so rare and they have a really bad prognosis. I mean, he had gamma knife surgery and I think it was November. I mean, Eric Davis's last interview, the interview Eric Davis is wonderful. I mean, Eric Davis's last interview, the interview with Eric Davis is wonderful. From Hawaii, right? From Hawaii. Actually, it might have been on the mainland.

You hear a lot of dishes in the background. That wouldn't be the model for it. He might have been in Occidental during that one after the surgery. But he's so beautifully cogent and coherent. I mean, he's a master. He's so in his heart. He's so brilliant. And, you know, he's on all these He's so in his heart. He's so brilliant. And, you know, he's on all these anti-seizure drugs and everything.

One of the things he does say, which is, he said, you need to rethink this thing. Because I'm in altered spaces because I'm on massive medications because I have a brain disease. And there are people walking around that are certifiably in altered states, and we shouldn't just privilege psychedelics. There are so many avenues into alternate realities that allowed us to see the world, and I've just experienced them. And that's part of what my mission in the world is to say, don't privilege these substances, because then they become crutches. Terrence used to say, you can't do this on the natch. But I've since met a lot of people that are going to profound spaces through other means.

Yeah, I think he was a bit, I think he was a little hasty in his proclamation that this is incapable, this is impossible under natural conditions. Because I have a friend who has had psychedelic experiences. He's not averse to it. He's a regular marijuana user. And he's also a Kundalini expert. And he's become a Kundalini expert since I've known him. So over the last 10 years, he's been practicing. I've known him. So over the last 10 years, he's been practicing. I've known him for about 10 years.

He's been practicing Kundalini, uh, very, very intensely over the past four or five. And since then he says, he goes, I have deep DMT experiences while doing Kundalini. And I have no reason to doubt him.

I have another friend who does a different type of medication, some, some sort of, uh, it's, it's not Kundalini, but some sort of, sort's not Kundalini, but some sort of meditation.

And he also says that he's like, I have legit, full-blown psychedelic experiences. Yeah, and I think, I'm starting to research this, and I'm actually going to be working on a book on this thing because I keep running into these people. And I call it, you know, we call it endogenous. So I'm using the term endo, endo beings or endo voyaging or whatever, using your own endogenous ability because I do it. I think it's just unbelievably difficult to do.

And I think some people are just lazy. I think that's really a part of it. It's also a physical effort. There's a lot of people that are investing a tremendous amount of time in thinking, calculation, postulating. But the physical effort of meditation is beyond them. And that's one of the things that McKenna talked about, Terrence talked about all the time, how boring meditation was. It's incredibly boring. I just had a flash insight, Joe. To come back to the original theme that we're talking about, why did the ancients could do this amazing stuff that we're

now discovering that's like incredibly high tech because they weren't distracted what could they do it's true no internet no twitter yeah and check their facebook every 10 minutes they they could a guy could look at a pile of rocks and see the full structure of the pyramid in his in his head or her head with water flows. And they perhaps, because they're not so distracted in their stimulus response, cortisol being shot and interrupts and, you know, to-do lists and whatnot, just massively distracted, those guys were using full power of this endogenous power. And maybe Eleusis was unlocking that.

It's also possible that they didn't have the like predetermined limitations that we have when we consider like what normal states of consciousness exist we have this idea no this exists and then if you want more than that you got to take acid if you want more than that you got to get on Prozac if you want more than this you know you have to be drunk you have to be this you have to be that right so we have these preconceived notions about altered really an consciousness. Brilliant insight. And we're so channeled and managed in technologically driving. Like driving here, I mean, we drove down the back of California from Santa Cruz.

It's some of the most beautiful landscape. Amazing. And Gail and I were looking at this glowing light coming off the ocean like what you saw at Big sir those dudes i mean we get a little snatch of it but we don't have the full experience we're not standing on the shore smelling the plants in a full body of health being impacted by those photons coming giving us an enlightened states because we're driving past it and we're watching our time and you know our gas levels and whatnot and we're out of tune we're not present i've talked about this many times on the podcast i had a really life-changing experience that had nothing to do with drugs and it was i went to uh the big island i went to the

keck observatory wow and um just went because i was on vacation with my family there and we went to the uh there's two levels to the observatory. There's the main observatory, and then there's the visitor's area. And the visitor's area just have a bunch of telescopes set out. It's pretty cool. But it's so high that it's above the clouds. Did you have a clouded area?

Was it clear? It was totally clear. Well, it was cloudy below us, which was fascinating. We were bummed out. We were like, oh, man, we're going to hit clouds. We're not going to see anything. But we actually drove through the clouds and because they have the

diffused lighting all over the big island to protect the observatory from light pollution, man, the view was stunning. Unbelievably stunning. The Milky Way was so bright and clear and there were so many stars in the sky and it was a perfect night. I went back

recently and I made a mistake and went back when it was a perfect night. I went back recently and I made a mistake and went back when it was a full moon. It was actually a super moon. It was awful. It was like the August super moon? Mm-hmm. August, it was the moon. It was still beautiful and amazing

and still like, wow, that's a planet floating above us, but nothing like the first trip. And that trip, being there and seeing those stars, you got to think, that is what early man saw every day right they were just awash in the mystery that is the sky and they paid attention so much they knew

its shape they knew about the wobble of the earth they knew about the procession of the equinoxes they had it mapped out i mean there's so much that they had figured out that the equinox procession is like, what, 26,000 years? Somehow or another, these people had figured a lot of that out a long time ago. And it may have been just total presence and that they built the model in their head with their own DMT, if you would call it that, or endogenously, or who knows. I'm sure they took drugs, too. I'm sure that was a part of it. It was that as well. Here's another good one.

Our friend Andrew was commissioned. He's an incredible painter, and he was commissioned to paint the caves of Lascaux, Andrew Johnstone, a complete reconstruction of an on, like a surface that was the same rock face, but it was for like a restaurant or something. Oh, wow.

And so he got all these, you know, different, you can't go in there, right? Because people's breath will destroy it. But he started to paint this. You're going to really tune into this. He started to paint this inside this restaurant with the rock face, and he was painting the copy of it. And he would go out at night because he had to paint at night because the restaurant was in business.

And he would just, you know, have his break and whatever. And he started to study the sky. And he would go back and paint more of the bull's horns and the running this and that. And he would go back. And after all this time, he started, wait a minute. I'm seeing Lascaux in the sky, but it's a little different. And he would go back and look at, he was reconstructing Lascaux from the lowest detail and he said this is a freaking star map this is a star map and he actually submitted a publication to an archaeological journal i don't know how is it reviewed you know

i don't know what happened i think it wasn't reviewed well because i don't think that it's in the literature and I'm not seeing it. Now, of course, the stars are in a slightly different position, right? The constellations were, but you know, does it, it's fricking powerful. But isn't it one of those things where you can

kind of see patterns if you want to? Like, oh, I see a bull. I mean, we have, there's some patterns like the Big Dipper, like, oh, it's Big Dipper. Right. But when you, when you see all the stars behind it, can't you just make up your own fucking patterns? You know? Right.

What the Big Dipper represents to me is like an established pattern that you know exists. So you can call it the Big Dipper and say it's a Dipper. But what it is is just, oh, that's that. There they are. There they are. Yeah, good point. Good point. And if you, you know, oh, I see a bull.

Well, you're fucking painting a bull, dude. Right. Of course you're seeing a bull in the sky. Right. Right. Could be a good point. Plus you're fucking painting a bull, dude. You know, of course you're seeing a bull in the sky. Right. Right. Could be a good point. Plus, you're fucking sniffing paint all day. You're out of your head.

Right. Going outside. You're delusional. You're tired. Right. You know, could be a lot of things going on there, which is why it wasn't reviewed very well. Yeah, maybe not.

He blew his wig and started writing a paper on it, and everybody's like, okay, how much paint do you use? What kind of paint are you using? How close are you to this paint then we get we run into the reductionist mind of science yes of course it's and and it's born to critique right it has to right it has to you know there's so much fuckery you have to you have to because it's it's one of the only human enterprise that is making progress well think about your friend that you were talking about that was in a fucking cult that thought that aliens made the pyramids. That led him to actual science.

The science actually set him free from the cult. It did. It did indeed. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole reason why it has to question everything. It has to go, okay, what did you see up there, this guy? Yeah. Why are you sniffing paint, pal?

That's right. You know, the cults can waste a lot of minds and a lot of lives. And that's... Charismatic leaders are very dangerous. Yeah. Especially when they want to lead. That's right. You know, the cults can waste a lot of minds and a lot of lives. Charismatic leaders are very dangerous, especially when they want to lead. And also, I think that the intoxicating nature of being that leader. What do you think of, you know, they talk about sociopathy and psychopathy and that that's a certain percentage of the population is lacking a brain region. that's a certain percentage of the population is lacking a brain region that just doesn't have it when they put the fMRI system together. There's no empathic part of the brain. Do you think, I'm asking you on the air here, I mean this sounds like a eugenics kind of a thing, but do you think a future society or future earth ought to screen people when they're young, kids when they're young,

earth ought to screen people when they're young kids when they're young to find out if their potential psychopaths and sociopaths and give them different trainings and not allow them say to run armies and countries and stuff like that because they're just not going to have the empathic response like if you had poor vision you shouldn't pilot an airliner for example it's a physiological thing that makes you kind of not suited for certain kinds of jobs i think if it can be proven that this is like there's an undeniable correlation between this particular area of the brain and lacking empathy and that you cannot be a good leader you cannot be a good but there's so many factors like saying that someone can't be if they lack empathy they can't be a good leader, but what if those same? Factors that led them to lack empathy also led them to lack a certain amount of ego

hmm that would kind of fuck up being a leader or Let they they lacked a certain amount of need to be charismatic They lacked a certain amount of need to be charismatic or desire to have all these people follow you. Like certain high functioning autistic folks have incredible skills in a lot of areas that maybe people that have extreme connections to emotions or to social interaction might not develop. So I don't necessarily know that we understand all the potential possibilities when it comes to human interaction. You're messing with that. There's this weird range of what is a person. Right. And to say that, but there's also people that have taken those psychopath tests and, you know, well, technically I'm supposed to be a psychopath.

Meanwhile, I'm a functioning, rational rational normal member of my community i'm a loving father and a husband and um everything's great so what the fuck like why does this test say i'm a psycho right i don't know i don't know if we really haven't nailed yet really the problem comes when we get psychopaths doing really terrible shit like dictators and stuff like that and we can't get rid of them you know and then the damage isn't being done and we can't do any and what what makes them a psychopath in the first place like a perfect example is saddam hussein's children who were notoriously evil like what uday and kuse whatever their names were were two of the most horrific human beings that we've ever seen come out of the

the the you know the the brood of a dictator. I mean, he developed some unbelievably evil children. Now, why is it that they were evil? Is it the environment? Is it nurture? Is it nature? Is it genetics? Is it epigenetics?

Like, what is it that is it just being unbelievably spoiled because you have ultimate power from the time you're a child and you're essentially royalty? What is it? what causes that you know it's it's possible that our survival as a species is going to come down to how well we and healthily we manage our our children i mean ultimately if we're if we're not doing that then like if for instance you were building a mars colony was going to have 250 people in it and they're going to have children or whatever. You know that if you get one kind of crazy revolutionary leader that does the whole charismatic thing and whatever, and then there's a shooting thing, it's going to shoot a hole through the dome and everyone's going to die. So you can't ever afford that.

So you have this careful management of human psychology within that colony to make sure it's healthy and watch those processes. And to some extent, the Scandinavians did this a thousand years ago. The Scandinavians, the Vikings, when they had their war parties, the leader of the war party that would go and invade East Anglia or all the way to Greenland, Labrador and whatnot, they called these guys the Berserker Kings. And these guys were put in charge and they would go and they would do terrible shit. I mean, they would terrorize and murder and whatnot. But when they settled East Anglia, when they built York, Yorick, right, they excavated it. Well, the Vikings are now settled. So the Berserker King,

thank you very much. You've done your job. You get the nice little grass hut at the edge of town. And you're off duty because we can't afford that now. We have to build a community. So what would they do with him? They'd retire them off. Retire them off.

And how do you keep them from killing people? I'm going nutty. Nobody would follow him. It was the rules. It was the way that they did it. So when you look at how sane Scandinavia is today, maybe they got all that out of their system. I don't know.

That's a funny, that's a very funny thought. Who knows, right? Who knows? Who knows? I think it's also, there is a potential for technology to play a part in all this. I think that one of the things that's coming out with technology is access to information.

And access to information, not just current information, but maybe even future. Like, the ability to read minds, to read thoughts, to read... Look, fMRI, although it's been widely criticized, has been used to convict people of crimes.

In India, there's a woman who was convicted of murder because she had what they describe as functional knowledge of a crime scene. And this has been widely discredited, and it's very controversial. What happened? I don't know. I don't know the whole story, but it was for a television show that I was doing for SyFy. We interviewed a neurologist or a neuroscientist and she was describing how this

in in our country would never work but in these other countries where maybe they don't have uh as much of an either as much of an understanding or they were able to manipulate their courts into thinking that this was far more definitive and conclusive than it really is. But the point being that this is just the tip of the iceberg, right? And if they continue to get better at this, and if this human technological symbiotic relationship takes place to the point where we essentially, our memories especially, right? They're pretty piss poor.

Right. But if we can turn our memories into some digital archive that you can access, it will, then we're going to know, I'm going to look in your head and I'm going to know what's going on. Right. I'm going to be able to tap into it. We'll be connected the same way we're connected with Wi-Fi. The same way our cell phones are connected to the cellular network, there'll be some sort of a

network of information exchange between all people. And if that's the case, deception will be almost impossible. Right. Motivations will be crystal clear. And you're going to know who's full of shit. It's going to be a fucking bad day for a lot of idiots out there. Right. There's a lot of assholes out there that have been

leading along idiots and they believe in these people, you know, whether it's cult members or whatever. You remember in Kubrick's film 2001, in the beginning when there's the pre-human. The monkeys. The monkeys. Monolith. And they're sitting at dawn and they're sitting like in this kind of cliff area and they're looking at each other, right? They're looking at each other.

and they're looking at each other, right? They're looking at each other. I never forgot that scene because it's the scene before they get attacked by that other group that comes in. But they're looking at each other and they're nonverbal, right? They're not communicating. They don't have, like, to-do lists and emails and shit going on. They're just there. And to me, like Kubrick was trying to show that they're in a group intelligence,

that just by eye gaze they could tell what the state is and then they share that state. Because if somebody, in such an intense environment, I mean, if you have nefarious purposes or, you know, you're going to look away and you're going to have that whole thing. So maybe that's the way we were before we came into mind, before all this stuff came in, civilization, mind, to-do list, hierarchies, and whatnot.

We were, there was no way for us, like the way we're looking now at each other, we're really connected. Maybe it's peaks and valleys of perceptions. Maybe the pre-communicative apes, where they didn't have verbal communication or language or anything, maybe they had this sort of intuitive sense of each other,

and then that was all lost with email and Twitter, and then it'll come back with some new technology that takes it to a far deeper level. And what I think, and this is my woo-woo theory, is that it looses... Woo-woo! Woo-woo! Yeah, woo-woo warning.

It looses by packing those thousand initiates into that buried temple and subjecting them to sound and music and, you know, some kind of a potion. Sounds like a rave. Yeah, it was like intense. But these people were fashioned. They were fashioned into new beings in that experience. Couldn't it have been a group mind fashioning? Couldn't it have been, group mind fashioning? Couldn't it have been returning that? And when we sit in medicine circles today, when we do jujitsu, when we do group yoga or intense things or intense ordeal things that people are seeking out now for deep connection, to remove isolation from other people, meditations, all these practices are this yearning to get back to where we were.

You know, we didn't feel isolated from others and that we were in a group mind. And that's the future of evolution of our communities. And we may need the shaman to come around. You know, in the upper Paleolithic, you know, those communities were pretty helpful. That was a pretty functional world. I mean, you know, coming into, you know, the Karnak and the Stonehenge and the Ley Lines and the incredible world of even Celtic Europe was incredibly together. There was, Celtic Europe is like the European Union now. Celtic Europe had medical practices and common laws and the Druids

could come and if there was a battle about to occur between Celtic peoples, the Druids had the power to walk down that line and decide whether the battle should happen or not. Because there was an authority. So this whole idea of the civilization of the European Union after 2,000 years of Roman interstitian war, barbarian warfare, Christian, religious and whatnot, is they've returned to the Celtic model. They've returned in a sense to the upper Paleolithic model of civilization, of civil societies and not beating each other in and doing common currency,

common exchange, common health. So maybe that is coming back. That is returning. And we're shucking off the culture that came and destroyed Elusis. Well, I think there's definitely a feeling amongst a lot of folks that the standard model, the cubicle life, retirement at 65, is not just unappealing, not just unrewarding. It's serfdom, the old serfdom model. It's slavery. It's a form of slavery that's voluntary. I mean, you're connecting to a machine.

You're giving your body, literally. You're giving your health. You're giving your spinal fluid. Your soul, your creativity are very essence. Your body literally is like giving into your chair, and your back is being compressed, and your discs are bulging, and your feet are going numb. I mean, your body is being sucked down into this your mind's turned into a stimulus response piece of jello and i think that's what a lot of this yoga this this renaissance of meditation that a

lot of people are experiencing especially yoga i mean yoga was never this popular when i was right it's incredibly popular now and as the the rise of technological connection electronic connections with each other has also facilitated the rise of like and you know crossfit these people wanting to do things that are physical physical i on friday i did a pretty long float in our we have a wonderful there you go by the way they've offered you a free float if you come up to the santa cruz mountains our friends that sounds like a long trip for a float i got one in my basement you got one in there this is a beautiful flotation what's the name of the company give it up cloud nine oh okay i've heard of them yeah that's great jay and shanti and

they have a fantastic property and i went there for a float. And I tell you, you know, it's incredible because it's like doing, you know, a psychedelic. Yes. In that, or doing deep meditation or doing, but the flotation tank is, I think, better. Because I process all my brain shit, like for the first hour or something. And this probably happens to you it just grinds through and it's like i'm having these repeated thoughts of my mind or my ego is grinding through and grinding through and finally it quiets finally it's quiet and i don't have stimulus on my body because i'm in a flotation tank and i maybe have my head held up or whatever and i start not knowing my body where it is and i'm free i'm

liberated and then i can do the deep work and my god i mean the next day this is why i was able to finish those two scientific papers because i floated and i lost all that 2 000 years of or for me it was months and months of being in my head. I mean, it's such a powerful tool. It's an amazing tool. And it's really bizarre to me that this was something that was kind of forgotten for a long time. I didn't understand when I first discovered the tank. Well, I first saw it in altered states when I was in high school,

that amazing movie with William Hurt where he turns into, he drank ayahuasca and became some freak animal. You know, Crazy movie. It really does not hold up. Don't watch it again. Don't try to watch it in 2004. It's a piece of shit. Oh, it's so bad.

It's so bad. People have watched it and laughed at me. Like, you fucking like this movie? My bro, I was 14, okay? It was a long time ago. But point is, I didn't experience it until 2002 and when I first did it There's a place in Burbank called soothing solutions I was a place where I did it the first time I did it

I wanted to do it forever and I found a place they've had it and I was like How is this not popular and then when I started talking about it? Everybody's like wow you're always talking about this thing like you're the guy who talks about the tank I'm like, how are you hearing about this from a goddamn comedian like how is this not how's the president not on television saying we need to create a more introspective calmer society and one of the things we're going to do is we're going to wheel out isolation tanks all over the nation i mean oh wow it would be a beautiful thing bring them to high schools community centers universities This will accelerate thinking.

It's one of the best tools for personal evolution I've ever experienced. I do the exact same thing, as you said. For me, it's the first X amount of minutes is all just going over my own bullshit. It's slowly but surely. Because I do it so often, I've gotten quicker with that. It's gotten down to like 20 minutes. But it's just I get in there and I go, here we go here we go i gotta go through all this stupid shit yeah let's clean all this out yeah but perspective enhancing like you know like no matter how hectic and weird

my life is when i get into that thing and then i get out i'm like it's all right it's okay you're like uh the best hippie of the 60s saying, the world's beautiful. It's so important for me because I'm always juggling like five different jobs. I'm doing a million things too many. Yeah. And, you know, my back, I put my freaking back out. So I go on the float and it's like the first hour. It's just so painful.

And it slowly like separates. Yeah. It relaxes. And it's like I can barely do this and then barely put my hands down. And then I say, wait a minute, my body can take any position. So I let my body take its own position. It moves itself around until I'm not in pain anymore. Yeah.

And then by the time I got out, the pain was down like 80%. Yeah, it is an unbelievable tool tool and it's just weird to me how uncommon it is as terence is how do they keep the lid on this they don't you know it's the other thing that terence says the man sometimes people do the man's work for the man like no one's putting keeping the lid on isolation tanks it's just no one talked about it for whatever reason. It's just life is tough. People have mortgages. They have student loans. There's a lot of work that has to be done.

The lawn has to be mowed. You've got to raise your kids. There's a lot of shit going on. It's hard. The servitude thing. We were talking before the podcast about chairs, this weird chair that I have, this saddle chair. Do you use an

ergonomic chair when you uh when you do your writing you know i my neighbor and i made this chair we took this body built chair from the plug for you from texas that's used by surgeons by brain surgeons it tilts forward it has incredible supports and we made an extension arm that holds the keyboard above my lap and the mouse exactly in the right place so just right where your arms hang right where my arms hang and then i can roll back from the screen so i'm much farther from the screen so i don't get that myopic kind of early vision vision loss that's me i got that chair yeah yeah and so i've been using that chair for 20 years but now what i'm finding, just even reaching for the mouse is creating repetitive strain injury for me.

So you're going to get one of them helmets where you can move around with your eyes? Unfortunately, I'm back on a laptop where I don't have to do any motion until my friend told me. He says, you're an idiot. Fred's an asshole. Right away, you're an idiot? I'm an idiot. He's an asshole. But I have my own podcast called The Levity Zone, and I do lots of editing.

You know, I know that you just go straight out, but I'm like a craftsman. We have different musicians in each episode for The Levity Zone, levityzone.org. Say it again? Levityzone.org. Levityzone.org. And it's the world needs more. We have plenty of novelty. We need more levity.

L-E-V-I-T-Y, zone. So you're in the zone when you're listening to these shows. levityzone.org. And so I do tons of editing. And he said, you fool. You need to get a Kensington trackball so you're just moving your thumb, not your arm. All editors are using track balls right four buttons and i finally got religion and i'm finally not using well mac has a uh they have like a key like this

track pad yeah it's a larger version of it that's what i use it's amazing i use that to move the tracks back and forward okay and then i use the other hand on the kensington to go cut pace cut page oh okay you're doing great yeah it's totally great yeah well you also have probably have uh keystrokes like pre-programmed on that thing and the buttons yeah that helps copy paste mark slide you know collect the tracks i love the trackpad once i switch to it on a um on a home computer on an iMac i would never go back to a mouse yeah except for gaming but i can't game anymore because I get obsessed. By the way, at the Digibarn Museum, we got a new artifact, Doug Engelbart's mouse.

Who's Doug Engelbart? He and Bill English created the mouse and the first online system in the mid-'60s, and Doug had something called the Mother of All Demos, which happened on December 9, 1968, and it totally revolutionized what computing was going to be. He was like in this hall in San Francisco using a mouse, and a cursor was going on the screen. He was opening windows and clicking. Oh, so it was like the first graphic user interface was 68?

Yep, mother of all demos. Is that it? That's the mouse? I don't have that one, but I've got a, if you look up mother of all demos, don't have that one but i've got a uh if you look up mother of all demos um you'll see the one that came into the digibarn looks exactly like the one that doug is using in the demo now there were several of them made so we don't know but this it has the round buttons has a great big case on it and a key set so that see he had he didn't have to go to the keyboard. He had this cord keyboard. Look at that. Yeah, there they are.

I had three buttons. Meanwhile, Apple had one button deep into the 2000s. That's probably from my collection, but that's an Alto mouse from the 70s. Wow. 70s? Yeah, do Mother of All Demos, and you'll probably find the video of it. Is it true that Xerox created the user interface and that Apple copied Xerox and then ultimately Microsoft copied Apple? It was kind of passed from one to the other. SRI, Stanford Research Institute, did this Doug Engelbart NLS fantastic demo,

and everybody watched it and go, oh, my God, and this totally changed computing into a human thing rather than data processing and batch. And, you know, it became, no, we're visual. This is a tool for our minds. It's a tool for – This is it right here? Yeah, this is it.

It's an hour and a half long, though. Yeah, scroll around and you can see Doug. You can see Doug. Oh, there he is. Oh, wow. I see that thing on the right. And what year is this? See that?

1968. 68. So look at that. That looks exactly like the mouse that's at the DigiBarn right now. That's remarkably similar to what a lot of people use today. And look at the keyboard. And I think Steelcase or somebody did that thing. And the key set allows you to chord key movements like accelerated things.

Wow. And then on screen, he has clickable text. He's got a video window that a guy appears from SRI transmitted live video. Look at this. Look at this. That's him? Yeah, that's one of the engineers at SRI. So he's got live video on

a screen yeah that's insane and this is this is 68 and this is 68 is live video on a screen yeah and this is beamed in a big auditorium in san francisco at a conference and everybody in the audience is going oh my god this is computing this is this is interacting with people and so he's clicking see the cursor you can just sort of barely see it he's moving around he's clicking on things they're pulling up data they're doing searches and that's a recipe lists and so everybody looked at this and said oh my god and so xerox palo alto research center kind of had a bunch of people from doug's group and then they built the first network personal computer or the ethernet all that stuff in the 70s. And you're right. You know, InWalk, Steve Jobs, and the group, and they kind of went,

oh, my God, that's the future of computing. And they created the Lisa and the Macintosh. And Bill Gates and the company looked at the Xerox Star and Alto. And Gerald Simoni, who was at Park, came to Microsoft and created Microsoft Word based on him creating the first word processor at Park. Wow. And then made a billion dollars, right, and everything.

But no, I mean, Xerox really did invent the future under Bob Taylor's leadership in the 70s. They just created the future, right? How did they drop the ball and go to copy machines? Well, you know, it was a company full of copier heads that didn't understand what they were looking at. I guess, right? And so it walked out the door adobe came out of that well how about everybody in ibm in the 19 whatever it was when they said no one's gonna want a computer in their house yeah what a fuck up yeah that's like the biggest bad call ever right i mean there were all these

predictions that yeah completely ridiculous completely ridiculous in retrospect but how could anybody know that's isn't that always the point is that like like we're talking about you can't predict a 2012 or a 2040 yeah you're just not going to not going no one's gonna see it I am gonna have some ideas but the ultimately the thing itself like no one ever thought the internet was going to be like facebook or message boards or you know twitter social media interaction the way we we experience today it's so unbelievably bizarre this connection that we have to each other it's so intense and and and no one saw it coming like for instance um just yesterday morning I got up and, holy shit, I'm going to be on Joe Rogan.

I'm going to just at least post your beautiful red face logo into my Facebook page and put it on a bunch of groups. It's available on a mug. It's available on a mug. So I just put this up. I put this up just on Facebook. I only got 3,000 or 4,000 followers, but this thing just went bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And people, you know, there's probably a ton of listeners that there wouldn't have been just because of one little thing I did. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. I'm sure. Well, it's one of those things, too, that I love the fact that someone could listen to this and go, hey, you know, Bruce Dahmer is on this podcast. You got to check this out here's a link and then boom and then boom and then someone retweets it and it gets retweeted a thousand times and sent to facebook and someone sends it an email and it's it's yeah it's i mean it's almost like we're back we're back in that little group of 2001 apes looking at each other. But what we're looking, we're sending the whole of our culture and technology in each gaze.

It's amazing. I mean, if you could be some kind of super being and watch the mind of humanity from orbit and study it as a thing that's coming alive and it's moving and it's getting connected. I mean, it'd be better than any trip experience i mean just in truth you know i'm looking up at the night sky or doing the work in origin of life i'm looking at molecular streams and looking through microscopes on lipid chemistry and it's like this most amazing universe of just lipids moving around on a slide and then look at the internet this is the greatest time in the history of, I mean, and, you know, the people talk about rare Earths.

You know, how rare are we? You know, the Drake equation, which shows solar systems that would have planets and the planets that would be in the right habitable zone and have to develop intelligent life. And we had just the right asteroid impacts to come in and spin the disk and say, start again, do it again. And we rose. I mean, what's the chance of us-ness being out there?

How many of them are there? Well, isn't the ultimate mindfuck the concept of infinity? Because the way I've heard it described is that if infinity exists and they believe it does that means the universe is so huge that everything that's ever happened on earth in the exact same order has happened an infinite number of times somewhere else well i had i once had a kind of a conversation with the universe and i i asked it so i i went through a thought experiment where i went through the origin of life. You know, I just loaded my mind with everything I could do, and I went through and saw it.

I was, like, supercharged on all this stuff, on my meditation and my thought experiments. And I came out screaming. You know, I came into the division of the first protocell. And while it was happening, I looked around and I saw all this crazy molecular stuff going on, which gave me the vision to work backwards to create the model that we're just publishing now. But I felt, and this is kind of heretical, but I couldn't see that it was all mechanical. You know, it seemed like there was something doing it. I mean, it was so complex. You know, it seemed like there was something doing it. I mean, it was so complex.

So in this thought experiment, I sat up straight and I said, I want to ask one more question. If there's something before life, if there was intelligence that did this, can I see it? I think when you ask the ineffable these questions, ineffable just get pissed off with questions sometimes. And the ineffable, what it did in my consciousness is I was looking out into the night sky, into the darkness, and it resolved into a star field. And those star fields have resolved into gas clouds and galaxies. And then the whole thing came rushing and just slammed into my consciousness and sort of knocked me down and what the answer was is you silly monkey the universe is big enough to have agency it grew big enough from the big bang it grew along the probability streams so that this happened that's the answer there's one concept concept that I can kind of understand infinity.

I can kind of understand a lot of the concepts of the cosmos. But the Big Bang, just I hear it and it goes in one ear and it goes out the other and it's just some words. It's just some shit that's typed out. It's just an idea that someone has that i can't conceptualize it doesn't my brain is too fucking dumb it just doesn't doesn't process it i i got a vision of it because it's it's hard for me too i mean the vision that i got i was sitting there in bed asking the question Can I see back? So I wanted to see back. And what came in my head were three buckets. And inside the three buckets were three blobs. And one of the blobs is super low probability of ever happening.

Probability buckets. And the others are kind of like ordinary probabilities. And then there's a third bucket. Second bucket has a super low probability blob. And the third bucket has the low probability blob. And the intelligence that was communicating to me to teach me said, watch me. Bing, bing, bing. So when you say this, though, I'm sorry to interrupt you.

So what the intelligence showed me, because I was asking the question, getting the thought experiment back, was saying, I can trigger the lowest probability events. One after the other after the other. And I said, well, okay. And it said, watch me. I will rotate them towards you. So the buckets are all lined up. And you say, you see the path through the low probability events? I say, yes, I do.

It says, watch this. And the path went all the way back to cosmogenesis. And I went, oh, my God. He says, watch this. And the path went all the way back to Cosmogenesis. And I went, oh, my God. You know, this energy was pouring through, super low probability. And then the entity said, watch this. And I was pulled back, and I saw trillions of these tracers coming from the singularity, from the Big Bang. And the answer was, that is the power, the power to trigger the lowest probability events

in all directions, and that is the power. You know, away from mundanity, please. But you're saying that, you know, you're communicating with an entity, and you're saying, you know, this thing that's communicating with you. This is more likely your imagination, no? Well, sometimes it is imagination on steroids.

Sometimes the stuff comes in. It's like your friend you were talking about. Stuff comes in. I don't know where from. You know, Einstein, for example, used to do this. Einstein would be having his coffee in his Swiss cafe, pondering about can light go faster? You know, is there a constant in the speed of light?

And one night he just sort of sat down, closed his eyes, and suddenly he was in this endogenous world. And you can read about this. He called it Gedanken experiments, thought experiments. He would say, I'm going to try to understand this. But he would open himself to anything. And what came into Einstein's mind was he became like a train. He was like mounted onto a train, and there was another train coming down the track, and they each had beams. It was at night, and the light was streaming out. And he said, but how can I be the photon going toward that other photon,

and the photons are going twice the speed of light relative to each other? And then he had these credible insights about, no, it's possible if you have different frames of reference. It's possible it's space change. You know, the whole special and general theory of relativity came out from these thought experiments that he did that he didn't quite know where they came from. They just sort of poured into him.

Then he had to interpret it into mathematics and into testable theories. Well, where do any ideas come from, though, really? Why consider the possibility that they're coming from entities? Why not just think this is your mind, your imagination, just contemplating possibilities? And here's where I think, you know, this is a really big woo-woo model. It's this woo and woo on the front of the T-shirt here. I think that somehow our minds, when we're open and we're in a state of not distraction, our boundaries are dissolved and we're in a clear state,

that our minds are big enough computational engines to resonate with a whole lot of shit non-locally. So you believe in non-local intelligence? You think that, like, perhaps there's some sort of a universal intelligence out there that you can tune into? I think that in some way, like, for example, if you trace all of the neuronal pathways down all the synapses and across all the gaps, backwards and forwards in your mind, and you can look this up online, the number of those tracers, those unique strings, is larger or equivalent or larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe. Now, all countable objects in the universe. It's just huge. The combinatorials are huge because the brain's this network, and soon it ramps up.

So your brain, it's like an informational system, a coding system that if you could activate this pathway and that little variation of that pathway, it's actually bigger than the universe. And of course it's in the universe too. It's not bigger than itself. too. It's not bigger than itself. But then you have the idea of non-locality, where everything talks to everything non-locally, you know, and instantly. This is Bell's theorem and all these sorts of things. And so could it be that there's some, and this is a total woo-woo hand-waving thing, could it be that your mind really fully activated, really fully present through your filters, through your training, whether you're a Roman Catholic or you're a skeptical whatever, stuff can come in that's resonating from some field, another intelligence, objects, patterns,

stuff in time and history beyond what our little reductionist kind of mechanical thinking gives us that could we be resonating with real shit that's out there that's beyond what our training is but it'll be filtered through our training so all you're sort of tapping into some incredible ultimate potential like some ultimate potential for accessing information and and possibilities for for possibilities as far as connections possibilities as far as like putting things together in your head and and proposing the various scenarios that maybe wouldn't be available if you impose limitations on where they came from yeah if you try to figure out with your training in your to-do list and your algorithms, you'd never get there. So you literally have to blow your mind completely open.

You know, Graham Hancock gave a fantastic example on your show with him last month, which was a telescope, remember that, needs to change the shape of the lens in order for you to resolve and see stars and galaxies. shape of the lands in order for you to resolve and see stars and galaxies right so those people who never use telescopes say well you shouldn't have to perturb the mind to see what's out there well they've never looked through a telescope right so we should as a species realize we need to perturb our minds i always have a huge problem with people that say you shouldn't perturb the mind because i don't see the negative impact of perturbing the mind and i see a massive amount of positive and then i see these people saying you shouldn't perturb the mind and they haven't perturbed the mind so i'm like well what are you talking about like anyone who says that like psychedelic

experiences are not valuable and hasn't had psychedelic experience i'm like okay we're just going around circles here we're talking crazy like you don't know whether they're valuable. Like, you're just totally guessing. Or they've never floated. Yeah. Or they've never done meditation. But what I think the beauty of psychedelic experience, the actual taking of a psychedelic is, is that it's undeniable.

I mean, mushrooms work on everybody. DMT works. Well, some people, some weird freak people apparently don't have dmt experiences i don't know the problem is it's so illegal and it's so it's so difficult to tell i don't think strassman had any people that didn't uh find uh an impact for the intravenous dmt studies that he did at university of new mexico but i think that people that say it's not valuable and haven't experienced it, you're discounting just thousands, millions, perhaps, of people who have had incredibly valuable experiences doing it. And you're saying you don't need it. Like, you know, you're scared.

You're scared. All these tribal cultures that needed, that used that to initiate people into humanity, into human beingness. that use that to initiate people into humanity, into human beingness. And I think from then, then your idea of endogenous access, it becomes, it becomes very attractive. And it also becomes more plausible because people know that these states are,

are reachable. Because I think without knowing, like I remember the first time I had any psychedelic experience, the first really big one was a five MEO. I had a small mushroom experience, but the five MEO psychedelic experience, the first really big one was a 5-MeO. I had a small mushroom experience, but the 5-MeO DMT experience. After that, I can remember really clearly thinking, well, now that I know that this is a possibility, I have to kind of rethink my spectrum.

Everything. And so then one could see reaching these incredible states through some sort of endogenous method that maybe perhaps you would have never even given it the chance before. or initiate our experience, they're trying to take those unformed youths that think they know everything, right? And they're exposing them to something so massive that forces them to challenge their own internal state and come to terms with fears or other things and broaden themselves out. They're weaving their weft as a human being. When they come out of that, they're a member of the community and they're trustable and they look each other in the eye and they have the depths. They're not children anymore, not juvenile anymore. And this is perhaps what was stolen from us when we lost our initiatory rights. It was taken away by priests. It was

taken away by corporations. Or maybe it's just a blip. I mean, maybe it's not taken away. Maybe it's just in our context of our lives. We look at a thousand years being so long, but in the universe, it's nothing. It's a nothing. And if this state, the life of the earth, it's a nothing. So we're like, it's been taken away from us.

Like, now we're talking about it. It's not going anywhere. It's back. Yeah, we're celebrating its return. Yeah. Listen, we're out out of time but this is an amazing conversation we could have a hundred of these I think we really good we could go we could take the what-if train to the end of Mars and back and I would like to come back and bring you a bunch of artifacts yeah that original mouse that you can you can play with on the show I would love that I would love that. I would love that.

And where can people find out more about you? Damer.com. Damer.com. D-A-M-E-R.com. And Facebook. Facebook, I'm Bruce Damer. Twitter, I'm B. Damer. On YouTube, Bruce Digi.

But it's all there. And levityzone.org. We rebuilt the site just for you, Joe, last week. It's all new WordPress theme. Oh, you were worried about the impact? Yeah, we put it on new servers. We're going to crash the shit out of that website right now. Let's crash it, levityzone.org.

And if anybody wants to reach me, it's easy, bruceatdamer.com. You just made a huge mistake. That's a tremendous mistake. Prepare for a tsunami of dicks coming your way. And who knows what kind of photographs. Could be a disaster. Could be a disaster. Yeah, filter those out.

You might. Too bad it's live. I should have stopped you. Anyway. So the podcast, though, is available on iTunes? Is it available? It's on iTunes. Everything?

Everything. And SoundCloud. And one more time, the name of the podcast? LevityZone. It's on iTunes. Everything. And SoundCloud. And one more time, the name of the podcast? LevityZone. LevityZone.org. Ladies and gentlemen. .org or.com

or wherever it is. Bruce Dahmer, ladies and gentlemen. Excellent podcast. Dennis McKenna is so right about you. That was awesome. Thank you very much.

Thank you, sir. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Joe. A lot of podcasts this week, folks. Paul Stanley on Wednesday from KISS. We're going to have

a lot of fun. And more. And more. And more! See you soon.