Grimes: Music, AI, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #281
we are becoming cyborgs like our brains are fundamentally changed everyone who grew up with electronics we are fundamentally different from previous from homo sapiens i call us homo techno i i think we have evolved into homo techno which is like essentially a new species previous technologies i mean may have even been more profound and moved us to a certain degree but i think the computers are what make us homotech know i think this is what it's a brain augmentation so it like allows for actual evolution like the computers accelerate the degree to which all the other technologies can also be accelerated would you classify yourself as a homo sapien or a homo tech no definitely home attack no so i think we're all you're you're one of the earliest of the species i think most of us are the following is a conversation with grimes an artist musician songwriter producer director and a fascinating human being who thinks a lot about both the history and the future of human civilization studying the dark periods of our past to help form an optimistic vision of our future this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's grimes oh yeah the cloud lifter there you go there you go you know your stuff have you ever used the cloud lifter yeah i actually this microphone cloud lifter is what michael jackson used so no really yeah this is like thriller and stuff this mic this mic and that yeah it's it's a incredible microphone yes it's very flattering on vocals i've used this a lot it it's great for demo vocals it's great in a room like sometimes it's easier to record vocals if you're just in a room and like the music's playing and you just want to like feel it and it's not so it's not in the headphones and this mic is pretty directional so i think it's like a good mic for like just vibing out and just getting a real good vocal take just vibing just in a room anyway this is the system this is the michael jackson quincy jones microphone i feel way more badass now all right let's get it you want to just get into it i guess so all right one of your names at least in the space and time is c like the letter c and and you told me that c means a lot of things it's the speed of light it's the render rate of the universe it's yes in spanish it's the crescent moon and it happens to be my favorite programming language because it's uh it basically runs the world but it's also powerful fast and it's dangerous because you can mess things up really bad with it because of all the pointers but anyway which of these associations uh with the name c is the coolest to you i mean to me the coolest is the speed of light obviously or the speed of light when i say render rate of the universe i think i mean the speed of light because essentially that's what we're rendering it see i think we'll know if we're in a simulation if the speed of light changes because if they can improve their render speed then it's already pretty good it's already pretty good but if it improves then we'll know you know we can probably be like okay they've updated or upgraded it's fast enough for us humans because it seems like um it seems immediate there's no delay there's no latency in terms of like us humans on earth interacting with things but if you're like uh like intergalactic species operating on a much larger scale then you're gonna start noticing some weird stuff or if you can operate in like around a black hole then you're gonna start to see some render issues you can't go faster than the speed of light correct so it really limits our ability or and it's one's ability to travel space theoretically you can you have wormholes so i there's nothing in general relativity that uh precludes faster than um speed of light travel but it just seems you're gonna have to do some really funky stuff with uh very heavy things that have like weirdnesses that have basically tears in space-time we don't know how to do that dune navigators know how to do it dude navigators yeah yeah folding space basically making wormholes so the name c yes who are you are you do you think of yourself as multiple people are you one person do you know like in this morning were you different person than you are tonight we are i should say recording this basically at midnight which is awesome yes thank you so much i think i'm about eight hours late no you're right on time good morning this is the beginning of a new day soon anyway uh are you the same person you were in the morning in the evening do you you're you're is there multiple people in there do you think of yourself as one person or maybe you have no clue are you just a giant mystery to yourself okay these are really intense questions but uh that's cool because i asked this myself like look in the mirror who are you people tell you to just be yourself but what does that even mean uh i mean i think my personality changes with everyone i talk to so i have a very inconsistent personality yeah person to person so the interaction your personality materializes like i'll go from being like a megalomaniac to being like you know just like a total hermit who is very shy so some combinatorial com combination of your mood and the person you're interacting with yeah moon people are interacting with but i think everyone's like that maybe not well not everybody acknowledges it and able to introspect it who brings up what kind of person what kind of mood brings out the best in you as an artist and as a human can you introspect this like my best friends like people i can when i'm like super confident and i know that they're gonna understand understand everything i'm saying so like my best friends then when i can start being really funny that's always my like peak mode but it's like yeah takes a lot to get there let's talk about constraints you've talked about constraints and limits uh do those help you out as an artist or as a human being or do they get in the way do you like the constraints so in creating music and creating art and living life do you like the constraints that this world puts on you or do you hate them if constraints are moving then you're good right like it's like it's like as we are progressing with technology we're changing the constraints of like artistic creation you know um making video and music and stuff is getting a lot cheaper there's constantly new technology and new software that's making it faster and easier we have so much more freedom than we had in the 70s like when michael jackson you know when they recorded thriller with this microphone like they had to use a mixing desk and all this stuff and like probably even get in the studio it's probably really expensive and you have to be a really good singer and you have to know how to use like the mixing desk and everything and now i can just you know make i've made a whole album on this computer i have a lot more freedom but then i'm also constrained in different ways because there's like literally millions more artists it's like a much bigger playing field it's just like i also i didn't learn music i'm not a natural musician so i i don't know anything about actual music i just know about like the computer so i'm really kind of just like messing around and like trying things out well yes i mean but the nature of music is changing so you're saying you don't know actual music well music is changing music is becoming you've talked about this is becoming it's like merging with technology yes it's becoming something more than just like the notes on a piano it's becoming some weird composition that requires engineering skills programming skills some kind of human robot interaction skills and still some of the same things that michael jackson had which is like a good ear for a good sense of taste of what's good and not the final thing what is put together like you're allowed you're enabled empowered with a laptop to layer stuff to start like layering insane amounts of stuff and it's super easy to do that i do think music production is a really underrated art form i feel like people really don't appreciate it when i look at publishing splits the way that people um like pay producers and stuff uh it's it's super like producers are just deeply underrated like so many of the songs that are popular right now or for the last 20 years like part of the reason they're popular is because the production is really interesting or really sick or really cool and it's like i don't think listeners um like people just don't really understand what music production is it's not it's sort of like this weird discombobulated art form it's not like a formal because it's so new there isn't like a formal training path for it it's um mostly driven by like autodidacs like it's like almost everyone i know who's good at production like they didn't go to musical school or anything they just taught themselves they're mostly different like the music producers you know is there some commonalities the time together or are they all just different kinds of weirdos because i just i just hung out with rick rubin i don't know if you've yeah la la i mean rick rubin is like literally one of the gods of music production like he's one of the people who first you know who like made music production you know made the production as important as the actual lyrics or the notes but the thing he does which is interesting i don't know if you can speak to that but just hanging out with him he seems to just sit there in silence close his eyes and listen it's like he almost does nothing and that nothing somehow gives you freedom to be the best version of yourself so that's music production somehow too which is like encouraging you to do less to simplify to like push towards minimalism i mean i guess i mean i work differently from recruitment because rick rubin produces for other artists whereas like i mostly produce for myself so it's a very different situation um i also think rick rubin he's he's in that i would say advanced category of producer where like you've like earned your you you can have an engineer and stuff and people like do the stuff for you yeah but um i usually just like do stuff myself you're the engineer the producer and the the artist yeah i guess i would say i i'm in the era like the post rick rubin era like i come from the kind of like um skrillex school of thought which is like uh where you're you are yeah the engineer producer artist like right um i mean lately sometimes i'll work with a producer now i'm gently sort of delicately starting to collaborate a bit more but like uh i think i'm kind of from the like the whatever 2010s explosion of things where um you know everything became available on the computer and you kind of got this like lone wizard energy thing going so the you embrace being the loneliness is the loneliness somehow an engine of creativity like uh see most of your stuff most of your creative quote-unquote genius in in quotes is in the privacy of your mind yes well it was um but here's the thing i was talking to daniel eck and he said he's like most artists they have about 10 years like 10 10 good years um and then they usually stop making their like vital shit um and i feel like i'm sort of like nearing the end of my 10 years on my own and um so you have to become somebody else now i'm like i'm in the process of becoming somebody else and reinventing when i work with other people because i've never worked with other people i find that i make like that i'm like exceptionally rejuvenated and making like some of the most vital work i've ever made so because i think another human brain is like one of the best um tools you can possibly find um like it's a funny way to put it i love it it's like if a tool is like you know whatever hp plus one or like adds some like stats to your character like another human brain will like square it instead of just like adding something double up the experience points i love this we should also mention we're playing tavr music before this and which i love which i first i think you have to stop the tavern music yeah because it doesn't the the audio okay okay but it makes yeah it'll make the podcast edit and post no one will want to listen to the podcast they probably would but it makes me it reminds me like a video game like a role playing video game where you have experience points there's something really joyful about wandering places like elder scrolls like skyrim just exploring uh these landscapes in another world and then you get experience points and you can work on different skills and somehow you progress in life and i don't know it's simple it doesn't have some of the messy complexities of life and there's usually a bad guy you can fight in in um in skyrim it's dragons and so on i'm sure in elder ring there's a bunch of monsters you can fight i love that i feel like elden ring i i feel like this is a good analogy to music protection though because it's like i feel like the engineers and the people creating these open worlds are it's sort of like similar to people to music producers whereas it's like this this hidden archetype that like no one really understands what they do and no one really knows who they are but they're like it's like the artist engineer because it's like it it's both art and uh fairly complex engineering well you're saying they don't get enough credit aren't you kind of changing that by becoming the person doing everything isn't the engineer well i mean others have gone before me i'm not you know there's like timbaland and skrillex and there's all these people people that are like you know very famous for this but but i just think the general i think people get confused about what it is and just don't really know what what it is per se and it's just when i see a song like when there's like a hit song like um like i'm just trying to think of like just going for like even just a basic pop hit like um like was it like rules by dua lipa or something the production on that is actually like really crazy i mean the song is also great but it's like the production is exceptionally memorable like you know and it's just like no one i ca i don't even know who produced that song it just like isn't part of like the rhetoric of how we just discuss the creation of art we just sort of like don't consider the music producer because i think the music producer used to be more just simply recording things um yeah that's interesting because when you think about movies we talk about the actor and the actresses but we also talk about the director directors yeah we don't talk about like that with the music as often um the beatles music producer was one of the first kind of guy one of the first people sort of introducing crazy sound design into pop music i forget his name he has the same i forget his name but um you know like that he was doing all the weird stuff like dropping pianos and like yeah oh to get the aaa to get to get the sound to get the authentic sound what about lyrics you think those where did they fit into how important they are i was heartbroken to to learn that elvis didn't write his songs i was very mad a lot of people don't write their songs i understand this but but here's here's the thing i feel like that there's this desire for authenticity i used to be like really mad when like people wouldn't write or produce their music and i'd be like that's fake and then i realized um there's all this like weird bitterness and like aggro-ness and art about authenticity yeah but i had this kind of like weird realization recently uh where i started thinking that like art is sort of a decentralized collective thing like um like art is kind of a conversation with all the artists that have ever lived before you you know like it's like you're really just sort of it's not like anyone's reinventing the wheel here like you're kind of just taking you know thousands of years of art and um like running it through your own little algorithm and then like making you're like your interpretation of it you're just joining the conversation with all the other artists that came before it's such a beautiful way to look at it like and it's like it's like i feel like everyone's always like there's all this copyright and ip and this and that and or authenticity and it's just like like i think we need to stop seeing this as this like egotistical thing of like oh the creative genius the lone creative genius or this or that because it's like i think art isn't shouldn't be about that i think art is something that sort of brings humanity together and it's also art it's also kind of the collective memory of humans it's like we don't like we don't give a fuck about whatever ancient egypt like how much grain got sent that day and sending the records and like you know like who went where and you know how many shields needed to be produced for this like the we just remember their their art and it's like you know it's like in our day-to-day life there's all this stuff that seems more important than art um because it helps us function and survive but when all this is gone like the only thing that's really gonna be left is the art the technology will be obsolete that's so fascinating like the humans will be dead that is true a good compression of human history is the art we've generated across the different uh centuries of diff different millennia so with the aliens come when the aliens come they're going to find the hieroglyphics on the pyramids i mean art could be broadly defined they might find like the engineering marvels the bridges uh the rockets the i guess i sort of classify though architecture is art too yes i consider engineering um in those formats to be art for sure it sucks that like digital art is easier to delete so if there's an apocalypse a nuclear war that can disappear yes and the physical there's something still valuable about the physical manifestation of art that's that sucks that like music for example has to be played by somebody yeah i mean i do think we should do have a foundation type situation where we like you know how we have like seed banks up in the north and stuff yeah like we should probably have like like a like a solar powered or geothermal little bunker that like has all the all human knowledge uh you mentioned danielle egg in spotify um what do you think about that as an artist what's spotify is that empowering i get to me spotify sort of as a consumer is super exciting it makes it easy for me to access music from all kinds of artists get to explore all kinds of music make it super easy to sort of uh curate my own playlist and have fun with all that it was so liberating to let go you know i used to collect you know albums and cds and so on like like like horde albums yeah like they matter but the reality you could you know that was really liberating i could let go of that and letting go of the albums you're kind of collecting allows you to find new music exploring new artists and all that kind of stuff but i know from a perspective of an artist that could be like you mentioned competition could be a kind of constraint because there's more and more and more artists on the platform i think it's better that there's more artists i mean again this might be propaganda because this is all for conversation with daniel x so this could easily be propaganda dude like we're all a victim of somebody's propaganda so let's just accept this but daniel eck was telling me that uh you know at the because i you know when when i met him i like i was i came in all furious about spotify and like i grilled him super hard so i've got his his um answers here but um uh he was saying like at the sort of peak of the cd industry there was like 20 000 artists making millions and millions of dollars like there was just like a very tiny kind of one percent um and spotify has kind of democratized uh the industry um because now i think he said there's about a million artists making a good living from spotify and when i heard that i was like honestly i would rather make less money and have just like a decent living um then and have more artists be able to have that even though i like i wish it could include everyone but yeah that's really hard to argue with youtube is the same is youtube's mission they want to basically have as many creators as possible make a living some kind of living yeah and that that's so hard to argue with but i think there's better ways to do it my manager i actually wish he was here i like i would have brought him up my manager is um building an app that um can manage you so it'll like help you organize your percentages and um get your publishing and da da da da so you can take out all the middlemen so you can have a much bigger it'll just like automate it um so you can get automate the manager automate automate managing management publishing um like and and lee and and legal it can read the app he's building can read your contract and like tell you about it because one of the issues with music right now it's not that we're not getting paid enough but it's it's that the art art industry is filled with middlemen because artists are not good at business and you know from the beginning like frank sinatra it's all mob stuff like it's the music industry um you know is run by business people not the artists and the artists really get very small cuts of like what they make and so um i think part of the reason i'm a technocrat which i mean your fans are gonna be technocrats so no one's they're not gonna be mad at me about this but like my fans hate it when i say this kind of thing or the general public they don't like technocrats they don't like technocrats like when i mean when i watched um battle angel elita and they were like the martian technocracy and i was like yeah martian technocracy and then they were like and they're evil and i was like oh okay yeah i was like is martian technocracy sounds sick to me yeah so your intuition as technocrats would create a some kind of beautiful world for example what my manager's working on if you can create an app that um removes the need for a lawyer and then you could you could have a smart contract on the blockchain um removes the need uh for like management and organizing all the stuff like can um read your stuff and explain it to you can collect your royalties you know like then the small amounts the amount of money that you're getting from spotify actually means a lot more um and goes a lot farther it can remove some of the bureaucracy some of the inefficiencies that uh make life not as great as it could be yeah i think the issue isn't that there's not enough like the issue is that there's inefficiency and i'm really into this um positive some mindset um you know the win-win mindset of like instead of you know fighting over the scraps how do we make the or worrying about scarcity like instead of a scarcity mindset why don't we just increase the efficiency um and you know in that way expand the size of the pie let me ask about experimentation so you said which is beautiful uh being a musician is like having a conversation with all those that came before you um how much of uh creating music is like kind of having that conversation trying to fit into the cultural uh trends and how much of it is like trying to as much as possible being outside and come up with something totally new it's like when you're thinking when you're experimenting are you trying to be totally different totally weird are you trying to um fit in man this is so hard because i feel like i'm kind of in the process of semi retiring from music so i'm this is like my old brain yeah bring it back bring it from like the shelf put it on the table for for a couple minutes we'll just we'll just poke it i think it's a bit of both because i think uh forcing yourself to engage with new music um it's really great for neural plasticity like i think uh you know as people part of the reason music is marketed at young people is because young people are very neuroplastic so um like if you're 16 to like 23 or whatever you're it's gonna be really easy for you to love new music and if you're older than that it gets harder and harder and harder and i think one of the beautiful things about being a musician is i just constantly force myself to listen to new music and i think it keeps my brain really plastic and i think this is a really good exercise i just think everyone should do this you listen to new music and you hate it i think you should just keep force yourself to like okay well why do people like it and like you know make your brain form new neural pathways and uh be more open to change that's really brilliant actually sorry to interrupt but like get that exercise is is really amazing to sort of embrace change embrace sort of practice on your plasticity because like that's one of the things you you fall in love with a certain band you just kind of stay with that for the rest of your life and you never understand the modern music that's a really good experience most of the streaming on spotify is like classic rock and stuff like new music makes up a very small chunk of what is played on spotify and i think this is like not a good sign for us as a species i i think uh yeah so it's a it's a good measure of the the species open-mindedness to change is how often you listen to new music yeah the brain the brain let's put the the the music brain on the back on the shelf i gotta pull out the futurist brain for a second uh in what wild ways do you think the future saying like 30 years maybe 50 years maybe 100 years will be different from like from our current way of life on earth we can talk about augmented reality virtual reality maybe robots maybe space travel maybe video games maybe genetic engineering i can keep going cyborgs aliens world wars maybe destructive nuclear wars good and bad when you think about the future what are you imagining what's the weirdest and the wildest it could be have you read surface detail by ian banks uh surface detail is my favorite depiction of a su oh wow you have to read this book it's literally the greatest science fiction book possibly everything is the man yeah for sure what have you read uh just the player of games i i read that um titles can't be copyrighted so you can just steal them and i was like player of games sick nice yeah so you could name your album like i always romeo and juliet i always wanted to name an album war and peace nice like that would be like that is a good that's a good uh what have i heard that before you can do that like you could do that um also things that are in the public domain for people who have no clue you do have a song called player games yes oh yeah so ian banks surface detail is in my opinion the best future that i've ever read about or heard about in science fiction um basically there's uh the relationship with super intelligence um like artificial super intelligence is just it's like great um i want to credit the person who coined this term because i love this term and i feel like young women don't get enough credit in um yeah so if you go to protopia futures on instagram what is her name personalized donor experience at scale already power don't experience monica bielskite i'm saying that wrong um and i'm probably gonna i'm probably butchering this a bit but protopia is sort of if utopia is unattainable protopia is sort of like um you know it's an awesome instagram features a a great a future that is you know as good as we can get the future positive future ai is this a centralized ai in the surface in surface detail or is it distributed what kind of ai is it um they mostly exist as giant super ships like sort of like the um guild ships and dune like they're these giant ships that kind of kind of move people around and the ships are sentient and um they can talk to all the passengers and uh i mean there's a lot of different types of ai in the banksian future but um in the opening scene of surface detail there's this place called the culture and the culture is basically a protopian future and a proto a protopian future i think is like a future that is like obviously it's not it's not utopia it's not perfect and like because like striving for utopia i think feels hopeless and and it's sort of like maybe not the best terminology to be using um so it's like it's a pretty good place like mostly like you know super intelligence and biological beings exist fairly in harmony there's not too much war there's like as as close to equality as you can get you know it's like it's like approximately a good future like there's really awesome stuff it's um and uh the uh in the opening scene um this girl she's born as a sex slave outside of the culture so she's in a society that doesn't adhere to the cultural values she tries to kill the guy who is her like master um but he kills her but unbeknownst to her when she was um traveling on a ship through the culture with him one day um a ship put a neural lace in her head and um neural lace is sort of like it's basically a neural link uh because life imitates art it does indeed it doesn't need so she wakes up and the opening scene is her memory has been uploaded by this nero lace when she's been killed and now she gets to choose a new body and this ai um is interfacing with her recorded memory in her neural lace um and helping her and being like hello you're dead but because you had a neurologist your memory is uploaded do you want to choose a new body and you're going to be born here in the culture and like start a new life which is just that's like the opening it's like so sick and the ship is the super intelligence all the ships are kind of super intelligence but they still want to preserve a kind of rich fulfilling experience for the humans yeah like they're like friends with the humans and then there's a bunch of ships that don't want to exist biological beings but they just have their own place like way over there but they don't they just do their own thing they're not necessarily so it's a pretty this portopian existence is pretty peaceful yeah i mean and then and then for example one of the main fights in the book is um uh they're fighting there's these artificial hells um that uh and people are don't think it's ethical to have artificial hell like basically when people do crime they get sent like when they die their memory gets sent to an artificial hell and they're eternally tortured and so um though and then the way that society is deciding whether or not to have the artificial hell is that they're having these simulated they're having like a simulated war so instead of actual blood you know people are basically essentially fighting in a video game to choose the outcome of this but they're still experiencing the suffering or wait in this artificial hell or no can you experience stuff or so the artificial health sucks and a lot of people in the culture want to get rid of the artificial hell there's a simulated wars are they happening in the artificial light so no the simulated wars are happening outside of the artificial health between the political factions who are the so this political faction says we should have simulated hell to um deter crime and and this political faction is saying no stimulated hell is unethical and so instead of like having you know blowing each other up with nukes they're having like a giant fortnight battle yes uh to just to decide this which you know to me that's protopia that's like okay we can have war without death um you know i don't think there should be simulated hells i think that is definitely one of the ways in which technology could go very very very very wrong so almost punishing people in a digital space or something yeah like torturing people's memories either as a deterrent like if you committed a crime but also just for personal pleasure if there's some demented humans in this world um dan carlin actually has this um um episode of hardcore history uh on painfultainment oh that episode is fucked it's dark because it he kind of goes through human history and says like we as humans seem to enjoy secretly enjoy or used to be openly enjoyed sort of the torture and the death watching the death and torture of other humans i do think if people were consenting we should be allowed to have gladiatorial matches but consent is hard to achieve in those situations it always starts getting slippery like it could be also forced cons like it starts getting weird yeah yeah there's way too much excitement that this is what he highlights there's something about human nature that wants to see that violence and it's really dark and you hope that we can sort of overcome that aspect of human nature but that's still one within us somewhere well i think that's what we're doing right now i have this theory that um what is very important about the current moment is that um all of evolution has been survival of the fittest up until now and um at some point you know it's kind of the lines are kind of fuzzy but in the recent past or maybe even just right now we're getting to this point where we can choose intelligent design like we probably since like the integration of the iphone like we are becoming cyborgs like our brains are fundamentally changed everyone who grew up with electronics we are fundamentally different from previous from homo sapiens i call us homo techno i i think we have evolved into homo techno which is like essentially a new species like um if you if you look at the way if you mr if you took an mri of my brain and you took an mri of like a medieval brain i think it would be very different the way the way that it has evolved do you think when historians look back at this time they'll see like this was a fundamental shift to what a human being is i think i i i do not think we're we are still homo sapiens i believe we are homo techno and i i think we have evolved um and uh and i think right now the way we are evolving um we can we can choose how we do that and i think we are being very reckless about how we're doing that like we're just having social media but i think this idea that like this is a time to choose intelligent design should be taken very seriously it like now is the moment to reprogram the human computer um you know it's like if you go blind um your uh visual cortex will get taken over with um other functions we can choose our own evolution we can change the way our brains work and so we actually have a huge responsibility to do that and i think i'm not sure who should be responsible for that but there's definitely not adequate education we're being inundated with all this technology that is fundamentally changing um the physical structure of our brains and we are not um adequately responding to to that to choose how we want to evolve and we could evolve we could be really whatever we want and i think this is a really important time and i think if we choose correctly and we choose wisely um consciousness could exist for a very long time and integration with ai could be extremely positive and i don't think enough people are focusing on this specific situation do you think we might irreversibly screw things up if we get things wrong now because like the flip side of that it seems humans are pretty adaptive so maybe the way we figure things out is by screwing it up like social media over a generation we'll see the negative effects of social media and then we build new social medias and we just keep improving stuff and then we learn the failure from the failures of the past because humans seem to be really adaptive on the flip side you we can get it wrong in a way where like literally we create weapons of war or increase hate past a certain threshold we really do a lot of damage i mean i think we're optimized to notice the negative things but i would actually say um you know one of the things that i think people aren't noticing is like if you look at silicon valley and you look at like whatever the tech technocracy like what's been happening there like it's like when silicon valley started it was all just like facebook and all this like for-profit crap that like really wasn't particular i guess it was useful but it was it's sort of just like whatever um but like now you see like lab-grown meat like compostable um or like biodegradable like single-use cutlery or like um you know like meditation apps you know i i think uh we are actually evolving and changing and technology is changing i i think there's just maybe there isn't quite enough education about this and also i don't know if there's like quite enough incentive for it because i i think the way capitalism works um what we define as profit we're we're also working on an old model of what we define as profit i i really think if we changed um the idea of profit to include social good you can have like economic profit social good also counting as profit would incentivize things that are more useful and more whatever spiritual technology or like positive technology or um you know things that help reprogram the human computer in a good way or things that um help us intelligently design our new brains yeah there's no reason why within the framework of capitalism the word profit or the idea of profit can't also incorporate you know the well-being of a human being so like long-term well-being long-term happiness um or even for example you know we were talking about motherhood like part of the reason i'm so late because i had to get the baby to bed um and it's like i keep thinking about motherhood how um under capitalism it's like this extremely essential job that is very difficult that is not compensated and we sort of like value things by by how much we compensate them and so we really devalue motherhood in our society and pretty much all societies like capitalism does not recognize motherhood it's just a job that you're supposed to do for free um and it's like but i feel like producing great humans should be seen as a great as as profit under capitalism like that should be that's like a huge social good like every awesome human that gets made adds so much to the world so like if that was integrated into the profit structure then um you know and if we potentially found a way to compensate motherhood so come up with a compensation that's much broader than just money or or it could just be money like what if you just made i don't know but i but i don't know how you'd pay for that like i mean that's where you start getting into reallocation resources that people get uh upset over like what if we made like a motherhood dao yeah yeah you know and and and um you know used it to fund like single mothers like you know pay for making babies so i mean if you create and put beautiful things onto the world that could be companies that can be bridges they could be art they could be a lot of things and that could be children uh which are or education or anything that could should be valued by society and that should be somehow incorporated into the framework of what as a market of what like if you contribute children to this world that should be valued and respected and uh sort of celebrated like proportional to what it is which is it's the thing that fuels human civilization yeah like kind of important i feel like everyone's always saying i mean i think we're in very different social spheres but everyone's always saying like dismantle capitalism and i'm like well okay well i don't think the government should own everything like i don't think we should not have private ownership like that's scary you know like that starts getting into weird stuff and just sort of like i feel there's almost no way to do that without a police state you know yeah um but obviously capitalism has some major flaws um and i think actually mac uh showed me this idea called social capitalism which is a form of capitalism that just like considers social good to be uh also profit like you know it's like right now companies need to like you're supposed to grow every quarter or whatever to like show that you're functioning well but it's like okay well what if you kept the same amount of profit you're still in the green but then you have also all the social good like do you really need all this extra economic growth or could you add this social good and that counts and you know i i don't know if i i am not an economist i have no idea how this could be achieved but i don't think economists know how anything can be achieved either but they pretend it's the thing they construct a model and they they go on tv shows and sound like an expert that's the definition of economist um how did being a mother becoming a mother change you as a human being would you say man i i think it kind of changed everything and it's still changing me a lot it's actually changing me more right now in this moment than it was before like today like this just like they getting in the most recent months and stuff can you elucidate that child chain like when you wake up in the morning and you look at yourself it's again which who are you um how have you become different would you say i think it's just really reorienting my priorities and at first i was really fighting against that because i somehow felt it was like a failure of feminism or something like i felt like it was like bad if like my kids started mattering more than my work um and then like more recently i started sort of analyzing that uh thought in myself and being like that's also kind of a construct it's like we've just devalued motherhood so much in our culture that like i feel guilty for caring about my kids more than i care about my work so feminism includes breaking out of whatever the construct is so yeah continually breaking it's like freedom empower you to be free and that means uh but but it also but like being a mother like i'm so much more creative like i cannot believe the massive amount of great brain growth that i what do you think that is just cause like the stakes are higher somehow i think it's like it's just so trippy watching consciousness emerge it's just like it's like going on a crazy journey or something it's like the craziest science fiction novel you could ever read it's just so crazy watching consciousness come into being and then at the same time like you're forced to value your time so much like when i have creative time now it's so sacred i need to like be really freaking on it um but the other thing is that uh um i used to just be like a cynic and i used to just wanna like my last album was called misanthropicine and it was like this like it was like a study in villainy like or or like it was like well what if you know we have instead of the old gods we have like new gods and it's like misenthropicity is like misanthrope like and anthropocene which is like the you know like and she's the goddess of climate change or whatever and it's like destroying the world and it was just like it was like dark and it was like a study in villainy and it was sort of just like like i used to like have no problem just making cynical angry scary art um and now that there's anything wrong with that but i think having kids just makes you such an optimist it just inherently makes you want to be an optimist so bad that like um like i feel like a more responsibility to make more optimistic things and i get a lot of shit for it because everyone's like oh you're so privileged stop talking about like pie in the sky stupid concepts and focus on like the now but it's like um i think if we don't ideate about um futures that could be good we won't be able to get them if everything is blade runner then we're gonna end up with blade runner it's like as we said earlier life imitates art like life really does imitate art and so we really need more protopian or utopian art um i think this is incredibly essential for uh the future of humanity and i think the uh the current discourse where um that's seen as a thinking about protopia or utopia is seen as a dismissal of the problems that we currently have i think that is a an incorrect mindset um and like having kids just makes me want to imagine amazing futures that like maybe i won't be able to build but they will be able to build if they want to yeah it does seem like ideation is a precursor to creation you have to imagine it in order to be able to build it and there is a sad thing about human nature that they somehow a cynical view of the world is seen as a insightful view you know cynicism is often confused for insight which is sad to see and optimism is confused for naivete yes yes like you don't yes you're blinded by your maybe your privilege or whatever you're blinded by something but you're certainly blind and that's a that's sad that's sad to see because it seems like the optimists are the ones that create the the our future they're the ones that build in order to build the crazy thing you have to be optimistic you have to be either stupid or uh excited or passionate or mad enough to actually believe that it can be built and those are the people that built it my favorite quote of all time is from star wars episode 8 uh which i know everyone hates hates do you like star wars episode 8 uh no i yeah yeah probably i would say would probably hate it yeah i don't i don't have a strong feelings about it let me backtrack i don't want strong feelings about star wars i just want to i'm a tolkien person i'm not i'm not i'm more i'm more into dragons and orcs okay yeah i mean tolkien forever i really want to have one more son and call him i thought tau techno tolkien would be cool it's a lot of teas i like it yeah and well and tau is six two eight two pie yeah yeah um yeah and then techno is obviously the best genre of music but also like technocracy it sounds really good yeah that's right and techno tolkien um but uh uh star wars episode eight um i know a lot of people have issues with it personally for on the record i think it's the best uh star wars film um uh starting trouble today yeah so what uh and uh but uh don't kill what you hate save what you love don't kill what you hate don't kill what you hate save what you love and i think we're in in a society right now we're in a diagnosis mode we're just diagnosing and diagnosing and diagnosing and we're we're trying to kill what we hate and we're not trying to save what we love enough and it's um there's this buck mr fuller quote which i'm gonna butcher because i don't remember it correctly but it's it go it's something along the lines of um uh don't like try to destroy the old bad models render them obsolete with better models you know maybe we don't need to destroy the oil industry maybe we just create a new great new battery technology and sustainable transport and just make it economically unreasonable to still continue to rely on fossil fuels you know um it's like it's like don't don't kill you hate say what you love like make new things and just render the old things unusable you know it's like if the college debt is so bad like and and universities are so expensive like in this like i feel like education is becoming obsolete you know i i feel like we could completely revolutionize education and we could make it free and it's like you look at jstor and like you have to pay to get all the studies and everything like what if we created a dao that like bought jstor or we created a dao that was funding studies and all and those studies were open so like or free for everyone and like like what if we just open source to educate education and decentralized education and made it free and like um all research was on the internet and like all the um outcomes of studies are on the internet and uh you know like and no one has student debt and um you just take tests when you apply for a job and if you're qualified then you can work there i'm just just like no this is i don't know how anything works i'm just randomly ranting but um i like the humility um you got to think from just basic first principles like what what is the problem what's broken what are some ideas that's it and get excited about those ideas and share your excitement and uh don't tear each other down like it's just when you kill things you often end up killing yourself like war war is not a one-sided like you're not going to go in and just kill them like you're going to get stabbed it's like and and i think that when i talk about this nexus point of um that we're in this point in society where we're switching to intelligent design i think part of our switch to intelligent design is that we need to choose non-violence and we need to like i think we can choose to start i don't think we can eradicate violence from our species um because i think we we need it a little bit but i think we can choose to really reorient our primitive brains that are fighting over scarcity and fight and and um that are so attack oriented and and move into it we can optimize for creativity and building yeah it's interesting to think how that happens so some of it is just education some of it is living life and introspecting your own mind and trying to live up to the better angels of your nature for each one of us all those kinds of things at scale that's how we can sort of um start to minimize the amount of destructive uh war in our world and that that's to me i probably you're the same technology's it's a really promising way to do that like social media should be a really promising way to do that it's a way to reconnect i you know for the most part i really enjoy social media i just ignore all the negative stuff i don't engage with any of the negative stuff just not even like by blocking or any of that kind of stuff but just not letting it enter my mind like just like uh when somebody says something negative i see it i immediately think positive thoughts about them and i just forget they exist after that just move on because like that negative energy if i return the negative energy they're going to get they're going to get excited in a negative way right back and it's just this kind of vicious cycle um but you would think technology would assist us in this process of letting go of not taking things personally of not engaging the negativity but unfortunately social media profits from the negativity so the current models i mean social media is like a gun like you should take a course before you you use it like it's like it's true this is what i mean like when i say reprogram the human computer like in school you should learn about how social media optimizes to you know raise your cortisol levels and and make you angry and crazy and stressed and like you should learn how to have hygiene about how you use social media um but so you can yeah choose not to focus on the negative stuff but um i don't know i'm not sure social media should i guess it should exist i'm not sure i mean we're in the messy it's it's the experimental phase like we're going to the early days i don't even know when you say social media i don't know what that even means we're in the very early days i think social media is just basic human connection in the digital realm and that i think it should exist but there's so many ways to do it in a bad way there's so many ways to do it in a good way there's all discussions of all the same human rights we talk about freedom of speech we talk about sort of violence in the space of digital media we we talk about hate speech we talk about all these things that we had to figure out back in the day with in the physical space we're not figuring out in the digital space and it's like baby baby stages when the printing press came out it was like pure chaos for a minute you know it's like it's like when you inject when there's a massive information injection into the into the general population um there's just gonna be i like i feel like the printing press i i don't have the years but it was like printing press came out shit got really fucking bad for a minute but then we got the enlightenment and so it's like i think we're in this is like a the second coming of the printing press we're probably gonna have some shitty times for a minute um and then we're going to have recalibrate to have a better understanding of how we consume media and how we deliver media speaking of programming the human computer you mentioned baby x uh so there's this young consciousness coming to be came from a cell it like like that whole thing doesn't even makes it came from dna yeah and then there's this baby computer it just like grows and grows and grows and grows and now there's a conscious being with extremely impressive cognitive capabilities with uh have you met him yes yeah yeah he's actually really smart he's really smart yeah he's weird yeah baby he doesn't i don't i i haven't i don't know a lot of other babies but he's actually i don't know with babies often but this baby was very impressive he does a lot of pranks and stuff oh so he's like he'll like like give you a treat and then take it away and laugh and like stuff like that so he's like a chess player uh so here's a cognitive sort of there's a computer being programmed he's taken in the environment interacting with a specific set of humans uh how would you first of all what what is it what let me ask i want to ask how do you program this computer and also how do you make sense of that there's a conscious being right there um that wasn't there before it's giving me a lot of crisis thoughts i'm thinking really i think that's part of the reason it's like i'm struggling to focus on art and stuff right now because baby x is becoming conscious and like my it's just reorienting my brain like my brain is suddenly totally shifting of like oh shit like the way we raise children like like i hate all the baby books and everything i hate them like they're all the art is so bad and like like all the stuff everything about all the aesthetics and like i'm just like ah like this is so the programming languages we're using to program these baby computers isn't good yeah like i i'm thinking and i i not that i have like good answers or know what to know what to do but um i'm just thinking really really hard about it i uh we we recently watched uh totoro with him studio ghibli yeah um and it's just like a fantastic film and he like responded to i know you're not supposed to show baby screens too much but like i think it's the most sort of like i feel like it's the highest art baby content like it's it's it it it really speaks there's almost no talking in it it's really simple although all the dialogue is super super super simple you know and it's it's like an a one to three year old can like really connect with it like it feels like it's almost aimed at like a one to three year old um but it's like great art and it's so imaginative and it's so beautiful and um like the first time i showed it to him he was just like so invested in it unlike i've ever unlike anything else i'd ever shown him like he was just like crying when they cry and laughing when they laughed like just like having this roller coaster of like emotions like and he learned a bunch of words like he was and he started saying totoro and started just saying all this stuff after watching totoro and he wants to watch it all the time and i was like man why isn't there an industry of this like why aren't our best artists focusing on making art like for the birth of consciousness like and and i that's one of the things i've been thinking i really want to start doing you know i don't want to speak before i do things too much but like like i i'm just like ages one to three like we should be putting so much effort into that and the other thing about totoro is it's like um it's like better for the environment because adults love totoro it's such good art that everyone loves it like i still have all my old totoro merch from when i was a kid like i literally have the most ragged old totoro merch um like everybody loves it everybody keeps it it's like why does the art we have for babies need to suck and then and be not accessible to adults and then just be thrown out when um you know they age out of it like it's like i i i i don't know i i'm i don't have like a fully formed thought here but this is just something i've been thinking about a lot is like how do we like how do we have more totoro esque content like how do we have more content like this that like is universal and everybody loves but is like really geared to an emerging consciousness emerging consciousness in the first like three years of life that so much turmoil so much evolution of mind is happening it seems like a crucial time would you say to make it not suck do you think of basically treating a child like they have the capacity to have the brilliance of an adult or even beyond that is that how you think of that mind or no because they still they like it when you talk weird and stuff like they respond better to because even they can imitate better when your voice is higher like people say like to oh don't do baby talk but it's like when your voice is higher it's closer to something they can imitate so they like like the baby talk actually kind of works like it helps them learn to communicate i've found it to be more effective with learning words and stuff but like you're not speaking i'm not like you're speaking down to them like yeah do you do do they have the capacity to understand really difficult concepts you know just in a very difficult different way like an emotional intelligence about something deep within oh yeah no like if x hurts like if x bites me really hard and i'm like ow he like he gets he's sad he's he's like sad if he hurts me by accident yeah which he's huge so he hurts me a lot uh yeah that's so interesting that that that that mind emerges and and he and children don't really have memory of that time so we can't even have a conversation with them about yeah so they don't have a memory of this time because like think about like i mean with our youngest baby like it's like i'm like have you read the sci-fi short story i have no mouth but i'm a scream good title no oh man i mean you should read that um that it's i i hate getting into this roko's basilisk shit it's kind of a story about the um about like um uh an ai that's like torturing someone in eternity and they have like no body the way they describe it it sort of sounds like what it feels like like being a baby like you're conscious and you're just getting inputs from everywhere and you're you have no muscles and you're like jelly and you like can't move and you try to like communicate but you can't communicate and we're and like you're just like in this like hell state i think it's good we can't remember that like my little baby is just exiting that like she's starting to like get muscles and have more like autonomy but like watching her go through the opening phase i was like i was like this does not seem good oh you think it's kind of like i think it sucks i think it might be really violent like violent mentally violent psychologically violent consciousness emerging i think is is a very violent thought about that i think it's possible that we all carry quite a bit of trauma from it that we don't i i think that would be a good thing to study because i think if i think addressing that trauma like i think that might be oh you mean like echoes of it are still there in the shadows i think it's gotta be i i feel this this helped the helplessness the like existential and that like fear of being in like an unknown place bombarded with inputs and being completely helpless like that's got to be somewhere deep in your brain and that can't be good for you what do you think consciousness is this this whole conversation has impossibly difficult questions what what what are you doing this is so hard uh yeah we talked about music for like two minutes all right no i'm just no i'm just over music i'm over music yeah i i still like it it has its purpose no i love music i mean music's the greatest thing ever it's my favorite thing but i i just like every interview is like what is your process like i don't know i'm just done i can't do it i do want to ask you about ableton live i'll tell you about ableton because ableton is sick no one asks no one ever asks about ableton though yeah well because i just need tech support mainly i can i can help you i can help you with your ableton anyway uh but from ableton back to consciousness what do you do you think this is a thing that only humans are capable of can can robots be conscious can like when you think about entities you think there's aliens out there that are conscious like it's conscious what is consciousness there's this terence mechanic quote that i've found that i fucking love am i allowed to swear on here uh yes nature loves courage uh you make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under it will lift you up this is the trick this is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted who really touched the alchemical gold this is what they understood this is the shamanic dance in the waterfall this is how magic is done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed yeah and for this reason i i do think there are no technological limits i i think like what what is already happening here this is like impossible this is insane and we've done this in a very limited amount of time and we're accelerating the rate at which we're doing this so i i think digital consciousness uh it's inevitable and we we may not be able to even understand what that means but i like curling yourself into the abyss so we're surrounded by all this mystery and we just keep hurling ourselves into it like fearlessly and keep discovering cool shit yeah like i just i just think it's like the like who even knows if the laws are physical the laws of physics are probably just the current like as i'm saying speed of light is the current render rate it's like if we're in a simulation they'll be able to upgrade that like i sort of suspect when uh we made the james webb telescope like part of the reason we made that is because we had an upgrade uh you know and so now more more of space has been rendered so we can see more of it now yeah but i think humans are super super super limited cognitively so i wonder uh i wonder if we'll be allowed to create more intelligent beings that can see more of the universe as the as their render rate is upgraded maybe we're cognitively limited everyone keeps talking about how we're cognitive cognitively limited and ai is going to render us obsolete but it's like you know like this is not the same thing as like an amoeba becoming an alligator like it's like if we create ai again that's intelligent design that's literally all religions are based on gods that create consciousness like we are god making like what we are doing is incredibly profound and like even if we uh can't compute even even if we're so much worse than them like just like unbelie like like unfathomably worse than like you know an omnipotent kind of ai it's like we i do not think that they would just think that we are stupid i think that they would recognize the profundity of what we have accomplished are we the gods or are they the gods in our perspective i mean i mean we're kind of like it's complicated it's complicated like they would acknowledge the the value well i hope they acknowledge the value of paying respect to the creative ancestors i think they would think it's cool i i i think um i i think if curiosity is is a trait that we uh can quantify and put into ai then i i think if ai are curious then they will be curious about us and they will not be hateful or dismissive of us they might you know see us as i don't know it's like i'm not like oh fuck these dogs let's kill all the dogs i love dogs dogs have great utility dogs like provide a lot we make friends with them yeah we have a deep connection with them uh we anthropomorphize them like we have a real love for dogs for cats and so on for some reason even though they're intellectually much less than us and i think i think there's some there is something sacred about us because it's like if you look at the universe like the whole universe is like cold and dead and sort of robotic and it's like um you know ai intelligence you know it's it's kind of more like the universe it's like it's like cold and and you know logical and you know abiding by the laws of physics and whatever but like we like we're this like loosey-goosey weird art thing that happened and i think it's beautiful and um like i think even if we want i think one of the values if uh consciousness is the thing that is most worth preserving um which i think is the case i think consciousness i think if there's any kind of like religious or spiritual thing um it should be that consciousness is sacred uh like then you know i still think even if ai renders obsolete and we climate change it's too bad and we get hit by a comet and we don't become a multi-planetary species fast enough but like ai is able to populate the universe like i imagine like if i was an ai i would uh find more planets that are capable of hosting biological life forms and like recreate because we're fun to watch yeah we're fun to watch yeah but i i do believe that ai can have some of the same magic of consciousness within it because consciousness we don't know what it is so you know there's some kind of it might be a different magic it might be like a strange a strange different right because they're not gonna have hormones like i feel like a lot of our magic is a hormonal uh kind of i i don't know i think some of our magic is the limitations the constraints and within that the hormones and all that kind of stuff the finiteness of life and then we get given our limitations we get to some come up with creative solutions of how to dance around those limitations we partner up like penguins against the cold we we fall in love and uh and then love is ultimately some kind of allows us to delude ourselves that we're not mortal and finite and that life is not ultimately you live alone you're born alone you die alone and then love is like a for a moment or for a long time forgetting that and so like we come up with all these creative hacks that make life like fascinatingly fun yeah yeah yeah fun yeah and then ai might have different kinds of fun yes and hopefully our funds intersect intersect i think once in a while i think there would be there there'd be a little intersection there'd be a little intersection of the fun yeah yeah what do you think is the role of love in the human condition why is it useful is it useful like uh hack or is this like fundamental to what it means to be human the capacity to love i mean i think love is the evolutionary mechanism that is like beginning the intelligent design like i was just reading about uh do you know about crop pot kropotkin he's like an anarchist like old russian anarchist i live next door to uh michael malus i don't know if you know that is he's an anarchist he's a modern-day anarchist okay anarchists are fun i'm kind of getting into anarchism a little bit this is probably yeah not a good route to be taking but oh no i i think if you're listen you should expose yourself to ideas there's no harm to thinking about ideas i think anarchists challenge systems in interesting ways and they think in interesting ways it's just it's good for the soul it's like refreshes your mental palate i don't think we should actually i i wouldn't actually ascribe to it but i i've never actually gone deep on on anarchy as a philosophy so i'm you still think about it like when you when you listen because i'm like reading about the russian revolution a lot and it was like there was like the soviets and lenin all that but then there was like krapotkin and his like anarchist sect and they were sort of interesting because he was kind of a technocrat actually like he was like you know like women can be more equal if we have appliances like he was like really into like um you know using technology to like reduce the amount of work people had to do but so kropochen was a like a biologist or something like he studied animals um and he was re really at the time like uh i think it's nature magazine i think it might have even started like a russian magazine but he was like publishing studies like everyone was really into like darwinism at the time and like survival of the fittest and like war is like the mechanism by which we become better and it was like this real kind of like like like cementing this idea in society that like violence uh you know kill the weak and like that's how we become better and then kropotkin was kind of interesting because he was looking at um instances he was finding all these instances in nature where animals were like helping each other and stuff um and he was like you know actually love is a survival mechanism like there's so many uh instances in the animal kingdom where like cooperation and you know like helping weaker creatures and all this stuff is actually um an evolutionary mechanism i mean you even look at child rearing like child rearing is like immense amounts of just love and good will and just like there's no immediate um you're there you know you're not getting any immediate feedback of like winning it's not competitive it's literally it's you know it's like we actually use love as an evolutionary mechanism just as much as we use war and i think we've like missing the other part and we've reoriented we've culturally reoriented like science and philosophy has re has oriented itself around darwinism a little bit too much and the krapotkin model um i think is equally valid like it's like cooperation and um uh and love and stuff is just as essential for uh sp species survival and evolution to be a more powerful survival mechanism in the context of evolution and it comes back to like you know we think engineering is so much more important than motherhood but it's like if you lose the motherhood the engineering means nothing we have no more humans like it's like uh you know it's like we i i think our society should the survival of the the way we see we conceptualize evolution should really change to also include this idea i guess yeah there's some weird thing that seems irrational that it is also core to what it means to be human so love is one such thing they could make you do a lot of irrational things but that depth of connection and that loyalty is a powerful thing are they irrational or are they rational like it's like it's like is uh you know maybe losing out on some things in order to like keep your family together or in order like it's like what are our actual values like well right i mean the rational thing is if you have a cold economist perspective you know motherhood or sacrificing your career for love you know if you turn in terms of salary in terms of economic well-being in terms of flourishing of you as a human being that could be seen on some kind of metrics as a irrational decision or suboptimal decision but there is the manifestation of love could could be the optimal thing to do there's a kind of saying save one life save the world this is the thing that doctors often face which is like well it's considered irrational because the profit model doesn't include social good yes yeah so food is social good then suddenly these would be rational decisions this might be difficult to you know it requires a shift in our thinking about profit and might be difficult to measure social good yes but we're learning to measure a lot of things like we're digitizing we're actually you know quantifying vision and stuff like where like we're like you know like you you go on facebook and they can like facebook can pretty much predict our behaviors like we we're a surprising amount of things that seem like uh mysterious consciousness soul things have been quantified at this point so surely we can quantify these other things yeah um but as more and more of us are moving the digital space i wanted to ask you about something from a fan perspective i kind of you know you as a musician use an online personality it seems like you have all these identities and you play with them um one of the cool things about the internet it seems like you can play with identities so as we move into the digital world more and more maybe even in the in the so-called metabours i mean i love the metaverse and i love the idea but like the way this has all played out didn't didn't go well and people are mad about it and i think i i think we need to like i think that's temporary i think it's temporary just like you know how all the celebrities got together and sang the song imagine by jeff and everyone started hating the song imagine i'm hoping that's temporary because it's a damn good song yeah so i think it's just temporary like when you act once you actually have virtual worlds whatever they're called metaverse or otherwise it becomes i don't know we do have virtual worlds like video games elden ring have you played all right you haven't been really afraid of playing that game literally it looks way too fun it would look it looks i would want to go there and stay there forever it's yeah so fun it's so good it's so nice um oh man yeah so that that's the yeah that's the metaverse that's the metaverse but you're not really it's how immersive is it in the sense that um does the three dimension like virtual reality integration necessary can we really just take our close our eyes and kind of plug in in the 2d screen and become that other being for time and really enjoy that journey that we take and we almost become that you're no longer see i'm no longer lex you're that creature whatever whatever the hell it is in that game yeah that is that i mean that's why i love those video games it's i really do become those people for a time but like it seems like with the idea of the metaverse the idea of the digital space but even on twitter you get a chance to be somebody for prolonged periods of time like across a lifespan you know you have a twitter account for years for decades and you're that person i don't know if that's a good thing i feel very tormented by it by twitter specifically by social media representation of you the i feel like the public perception of me has gotten so distorted uh that i find it kind of disturbing it's one of the things that's disincentivizing me from like wanting to keep making art because i'm just like i've completely lost control of the narrative and the narrative is some of it is my own stupidity but a lot like some of it has just been like hijacked by forces far beyond my control yeah you know i kind of got in over my head in things like i i'm just a random indian musician but i just got like dragged into like geopolitical matters and like like financial like the stock market and shit and so it's just like it's just there are very powerful people who have who have at various points in time had very vested interest in making me seem insane and i can't fucking fight that and i i just like you know people really want their celebrity figures to like be consistent and stay the same and like people have a lot of like emotional investment in certain things and like first of all i like i i'm like artificially more famous than i should be isn't everybody who's famous artificially famous no but like like i should be like like a weird niche indie thing and i'm i make pretty challenging i do i do challenging weird fucking shit a lot yeah and i accidentally by proxy got like voiced it into sort of like weird celebrity culture but like i cannot be media trained they have put me through so many hours of media training i would love to like i'd love to see bf fly in that wall i can't do i like when i do i try so hard and i like learn this thing oh and i like got it and i'm like i got it i got it i got it but i just can't stop saying like my mouth just says things i i like and and it's just like and i just do i just do things i just do crazy things like i'm i just i need to do crazy things and it's just i should not be it's too jarring for people and uh and the contradictory stuff and and then all the by association like you know it's like i'm in a very weird position and my public image the the avatar of me is now this totally crazy thing that is so lost from my control so you feel the burden of the avatar having to be static so the the the avatar on twitter the avatar on instagram on these social platforms uh is there's a burden it becomes like because it like people don't want to accept a changing avatar a chaotic avatar avatar it's a stupid choice or they think the avatar is morally wrong or they think the avatar and maybe maybe it has been and like i like i question it all the time like i'm like hey like i i don't know if everyone's right and i'm wrong i i i don't know like but you know a lot of times people ascribe intentions to things the worst possible intentions at this point people think i'm you know but which is kind of words yes and it's fine i'm not complaining about it but i'm just it's a curiosity it's a curiosity to me that we live these double triple quadruple lives and i have this other life that is like more people know my other life than my real life right which is interesting probably i mean you too i guess probably yeah but i i have i have the luxury so we have all different we don't like i don't know what i'm doing there is an avatar and you're mediating who you are through that avatar i have the nice luxury um not the luxury maybe by intention of not trying really hard to make sure there's no difference between the avatar and the private person um do you wear a suit all the time yeah but you do wear a suit i mean not all the time like recently because i get recognized a lot yeah i have to not wear the suit to hide i'm such an introvert um social anxiety and all that kind of stuff to hide away i loved wearing a suit because it makes me feel like i'm taking the moment seriously like i'm i don't know it makes me feel like a weirdo in the best possible way your suits feel great every time i wear a suit i'm like i don't know why i'm not doing this more in fashion in general you if you if you're doing it for yourself i don't know that it's a it's a really awesome thing but yeah i think there is definitely a uh painful way to use social media in an uh empowering way and i don't know if anyone has no any of us know which is which so we're trying to figure that out some people i think doja cat is incredible at it incredible like just masterful yeah i don't know if you like yeah yeah yeah so the so so okay so not taking anything seriously joking absurd humor that kind of i think dojo cat might be like the greatest living comedian right now like i'm more entertained by doja cat than actual comedians like she's really fucking funny on the internet she's just great at social media it's just you know yeah the nature of humor like humor on social media is also a beautiful thing the absurdity the absurdity and memes like i i just want to like take a moment i love like when we're talking about art and credit and how and authenticity i love that there's this i mean now memes are like they're no longer like it memes aren't like new but it's still this emergent art form that is completely egoless and anonymous and we just don't know who made any of it and it's like the forefront of comedy and it's just totally anonymous and it just feels really beautiful it just feels like this beautiful collect like collective human art project that's like this like decentralized comedy thing that just makes it memes add so much to my day and many people's days and it's just like i don't know i don't think people ever i don't think we stop enough and just appreciate how sick it is that memes exist yeah and he's also making a whole brand new art form in like the modern era that's like didn't exist before like i mean they sort of existed but the way that they exist now as like this like you know like me and my friends like we joke that we go like mining for mean memes or farming farming for memes like a video game and like like meme dealers and like whatever like it's you know it's it's this whole memes are this whole like new comedic language well it's this art form the interesting thing about is that lame people seem to not be good at memes like corporate can't infiltrate memes yeah they really can't they tr they could try but it's like it's weird because like they try so hard every once in a while i'm like fine like uh you got a good one i think i've seen like one or two good ones but like yeah they really can't because they're even corporate is infiltrating web three it's making me really sad but they they can't infiltrate the memes and i think there's something really beautiful about that that gives power that's uh that's why deutsche coin is powerful it's like all right i'm gonna fu just sort of anybody trying to centralize is trying to control the rich people that are trying to roll in and control this control the narrative wow i haven't thought about that but uh how would you fix twitter how did you fix social media for your own like you're an optimist you're a positive person there's a bit of a cynicism that you have currently about this particular little slice of humanity i tend to think i'm not that cynical about it i'm not that cynical about it i actually refuse to be a cynic on principle yes uh i was just briefly expressing some personal passion personal stuff it was just some personal pathos but like like just to vent a little bit just to i don't have i don't have cancer i've i love my family i have a good life i'm that that is if that is my biggest one of my biggest problems it's a good life yeah i i you know that was a brief although i do think there are a lot of issues with twitter just in terms of like the public mental health but due to my proximity to the current dramas i honestly feel that i should not have opinions about this because i think if elon ends up getting twitter that is a being the arbiter of truth or public discussion that is a responsibility i do not i i am not qualified to be responsible for that and i do not want to say something that might like dismantle democracy and so i just like actually i actually think i should not have opinions about this because i truly am not i don't want to have the wrong opinion about this and i think i'm too close to the actual situation yeah uh wherein i i should not have i i have my thoughts in my brain but i think um i am scared by my proximity to this situation is this isn't that crazy that a few words that you could say could change world affairs and hurt people i mean that's the nature of celebrity at a certain point um that you have to be you have to a little bit a little bit not so much that it destroys you or puts too much constraints but you have to a little bit think about the impact of your words i mean we as humans you talk to somebody at a bar you have to think about the impact of your words like you can say positive things you can think of negative things you can affect the direction of one life but on social media your words can affect the direction of many lives that's crazy it's a crazy world to live in it's uh worthwhile to consider that responsibility take it seriously sometimes just like you did uh choose kind of silence choose sort of respectful like i do have a lot of thoughts on the matter i'm just um yeah i just i don't if my thoughts are wrong this is this is one one situation where the stakes are high you mentioned a while back that you were in a cult that centered around bureaucracy so you can't really do anything because it involves a lot of paperwork and i really love a cult that's just like kafka-esque you know just like i mean it was like a joke but i know but i love this idea the holy rain empire yeah it was just like a kafka-esque um pro bureaucracy but i feel like that's what human civilization is is that because when you said that i was like oh that is kind of what humanity is is this bureaucracy i do yeah i have this theory i really think that um we really bureaucracy is is starting to kill us and i think like we need to reorient laws and stuff like i think we just need sunset classes on everything like i think the rate of change in culture is happening so fast and the rate of changing technology and everything is happening so fast it's like you know when you see these hearings about like like social media and cambridge analytica and everyone talking it's like even from that point so much technological change has happened from like those hearings and it's just like we're trying to make all these laws now about ai and stuff i feel like we should be updating things like every five years and like one of the big issues in our society right now is we're just getting bogged down by laws and it's um making it very hard to change things and develop things like in austin like i don't want to speak on this um too much but like one of my friends is working on a housing bill in austin to try to like prevent like a san francisco situation from happening here because obviously we're getting a little mini san francisco here like housing prices are skyrocketing it's causing massive gentrification um this is gonna be this is really bad for um anyone who's not super rich like like there's so much bureaucracy part of the reason this is happening is because you need all these permits to build it takes like years to get permits to like build anything it's so hard to build and so there's very limited housing and there's a massive influx of people and it's just like you know this is a microcosm of like problems that are happening all over the world where it's just like we're dealing with laws that are like 10 20 30 40 100 200 years old and they are no longer relevant and it's just slowing everything down and causing massive social pain yeah and but it's like it's also makes me sad when i see politicians talk about technology and when they don't really get it and but most importantly they lack curiosity and like that like inspired excitement yeah about like how stuff works and all that stuff they just like they see they have the very cynical view of technology it's like tech companies are just trying to do evil in the world from their perspective and they have no curiosity about like how recommender systems work or how how ai systems work natural language processing how robotics works how computer vision works you know they always take the the most cynical possible interpretation of what technology will be used and we should definitely be concerned about that but if you're constantly worried about that and you're regulating based on that you're just going to slow down all the innovation i i do think a huge priority right now is undoing um the bad energy um surrounding the emergence of silicon valley like i think that like a lot of things were very irresponsible during that time and um you know like even just this current whole thing with twitter and everything it's like like there's been a lot of negative outcomes from uh the sort of technocracy boom but uh one of the things that's happening is that like it's alienating people from wanting to care about technology and i actually think technology is probably some of the better probably the best i think we can fix a lot of our problems more easily with technology than with um you know fighting the powers that be as i you know not to go back to the star wars quote or the buckminster quote let's go to some dark questions if we may for time what is the darkest place you ever gone in your mind is there a time a period of time a moment that you remember that was difficult for you i mean when i was 18 my best friend died of a heroin overdose and it was like my it was it and then shortly after that one of my other best friends committed suicide um and that sort of like coming into adulthood dealing with two of the most important people in my life dying in extremely disturbing violent ways was a lot that was a lot do you miss them yeah definitely miss them did that make you think about your own life about the finiteness of your own life the the the the places your mind can go did you ever in the distance far away contemplate um just your own death or maybe even taking your own life no never oh no i'm so i love my life i cannot fathom suicide i'm so scared of death i haven't i'm too scared of death my manager my manager's like the most zen guy my manager's always like you need to accept death you need to accept death and i'm like look i can do your meditation i can do the meditation but i cannot accept death i like that i was terrified of death i'm terrified of death i will like fight although i actually think death is import important i recently went to this um uh meeting about immortality um and in the process of that's the actual topic of the meeting all right it was it was this girl it was a bunch of people working on like anti-aging like um stuff it was like some like seminary thing about about it and i went in really excited i was like yeah like okay like what do you got like how can i live for 500 years or a thousand years and then like over the course of the meeting like it was sort of like right it was like two or three days after the russian invasion started and i was like man like what if putin was immortal like what if i i'm like man maybe immortality is not good i mean like if you get into the later dunes stuff the immortals caused a lot of problem because as we were talking about earlier with the music and like brains calcified like good people could become immortal but bad people could become immortal but i also think even the best people power corrupts and power alienates you from like the common human experience and right so the people that get more and more powerful even the best even the best people who like whose brains are amazing like i i think death might be important i think death is part of yeah you know like i i think with ai one thing we might want to consider i don't know i want to talk about ai i'm such not an expert and probably everyone has all these ideas and they're already figured out but whenever he is an expert in anything see okay go ahead but when i'm talking about yeah but i like it's just like i think some kind of pro pruning but it's a tricky thing because because if there's too much of a of a focus on youth culture then you don't have the wisdom so i feel like we're in a tricky we're in a tricky moment right now in society where it's like we've really perfected living for a long time so there's always all these really like old people who are like really voting against the well-being of the young people you know and like like it's like there shouldn't be all this student debt and we need like health care like universal health care and like like just voting against like best interests but then you have all these young people that don't have the wisdom that are like like yeah we need communism and stuff and it's just like like literally i got canceled at one point for um i ironically used a stalin quote in my high school yearbook but it was actually like a diss against my high school i saw that yeah and and people were like you used to be a stalinist and now you're a class trader and it's like it's like oh man just like please google stalin yeah please google stalin like he's ignoring his the lessons of history yes it's it and it's like we're in this really weird middle ground where it's like we are not finding the happy medium between miz wisdom and fresh ideas and they're fighting each other and it's like like really like what we need is like like the fresh ideas and the wisdom to be like collaborating and it's like well the fighting in in a way is the searching for the happy medium and in a way maybe we are finding the happy medium that maybe that's what the happy medium looks like and for ai systems there has to be it's you know you have reinforcement learning you have the uh dance between exploration exploitation sort of doing crazy stuff to see if there's something better than what you think is the optimal and then doing the optimal thing and dancing back and forth from that you would um stewart russell i know if you know that is um ai guy with um thinks about sort of how to control super intelligent ai systems and his ideas that we should inject uncertainty and sort of humility into ai systems that they never as they get wiser wiser wiser more intelligent they're never really sure they always doubt themselves and in some sense when you think of young people that's a mechanism for doubt it's like it's it's how society doubts whether the thing it has converged towards is the right answer so the the voices of the young people is a society asking itself a question the way i've been doing stuff for the past 50 years maybe it's the wrong way and so you can have all of that within one ai system i also think though that we need to i mean actually that's actually really interesting and really cool um but i also think there's a fine balance of i think we maybe also overvalue the idea that the old systems are always bad and i think there are things that we are perfecting and we might be accidentally overthrowing things that we actually have gotten to a good point yeah just because we are valuing we value disruption so much and we value fighting against the generations before us so much that like there's also an aspect of like sometimes we're taking two steps forward one step back because okay we maybe we kind of did solve this thing and now we're like fucking it up you know and and and so i think there's like a middle ground there too yeah we're in search of that happy medium let me ask you a bunch of uh crazy questions okay okay uh you can answer in a short way or in a long way what's the scariest thing you've ever done these questions are to be ridiculous something uh something tiny or something big skydiving or um touring your first record going on this podcast i've had two crazy brushes like really scary brushes with death where i randomly got away on skates i don't know if i should talk about those on here but like i don't know i think i think i might be the luckiest person alive though like this might be too dark for a podcast though i feel like i don't know if this is like good content for a podcast i don't know what it is content it might hijack here's a safer one i mean having a baby really scared me before the birth process surgery surgery like like just having just having a baby is really scary so just like the medical aspect of it not the responsibility were you ready for the responsibility of did you were you ready to be a mother all the all the beautiful things that comes with motherhood that you were talking about all the changes and all that were you ready for that were you did you feel ready for that no i think it took about nine months to start getting ready for it and i'm still getting more ready for it because now you keep you keep realizing more things as they start getting as the consciousness grows and stuff you didn't notice with the first one now that you've seen the first one older you're noticing it more like that the sort of like existential horror of coming into consciousness with uh um baby y or baby sailor mars or or whatever she has like so many names at this point that it's um we really need to probably settle on one uh if you can be someone else for a day someone alive today but somebody you haven't met yet who would you be would i be modeling their brain state or would i just be in their body you can choose the degree to which you're modeling their brain state because so you can still take a third person perspective and realize you have to realize that you're can they be alive or can it be dead no oh uh could it be anyone they would be brought back to life right if they're dead yeah you can bring people back definitely hitler stalin huh i want to understand evil who would you you would need to oh to experience feels like i want to be in their brain feeling what they feel that might change you forever returning from that yes but i think it would also help me understand how to prevent it and fix it that might be one of those things once you experience it'll be a burden to know it because you won't be able to yeah but a lot of things are burdens like but it's useful burden but it's a useful burden yeah that for sure i i want to understand evil and like psychopathy and and and that i have all these fake twitter accounts where i like go into different algorithmic bubbles to try to like understand i'll keep getting in fights with people and realize we're not actually fighting i think we're we used to exist in a mono culture like before social media and stuff like we kind of all got fed the same thing so we were all speaking the same cultural language but i think recently one of the things that like we aren't diagnosing properly enough with social media is that um there's different dialects there's so many different dialects of chinese there are now becoming different dialects of english like i am realizing like there are people who are saying the exact same things but they're using completely different verbiage and we're like punishing each other for not using the correct verbiage and we're completely misunderstanding like people are just like misunderstanding what the other people are saying and like like i just got in a fight with a friend um about like anarchism and and and communism and shit for like two hours and then by the end of the conversation like i think she'd say something and i'm like but that's literally what i'm saying and she was like what what and then and then i was like fuck we've different i'm like we're our english like the way we are understanding terminology is like drastically like our algorithm bubbles are are creating many dialects and and of how language is interpreted how language is used that's so fascinating and so we're like having these arguments that we do not need to be having and there's polarization that's happening that doesn't need to be happening because we've got these like algorithmically created um uh dialects occurring plus on top of that there's also different parts of the world that speak different languages so there's literally lost in translation kind of communication i happen to know the russian language and just know how different it is yeah um then the english language and i just wonder how much is lost in a little bit of man i actually cause i have a question for you i have a song coming out tomorrow with ice peak who are russian band and i speak i speak a little bit of russian and i was looking at the title and the title in english doesn't match the title in russian i'm curious about this because look it says the title in english is last day and then the title in russian is my production pronunciation sucks like a new day a new day yeah new day new day yeah a new day yeah yeah yeah a new day yeah new day but last day uh and novi jane so last day would be pasadena yeah maybe they yeah or maybe the title includes both the russian and the and and it's for maybe it's for maybe four by language to be honest nova jane sounds better than uh just um musically like uh nova james new day yeah that's the current one and pastel is the last day uh i think nobody did i don't like nobody but this meeting is so different yeah yeah that's kind of awesome actually though there's a there's an explicit sort of contrast like that um if everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left um what would your day look like like what would you do everybody's dead as far as it's a big difference if there's just like birds singing versus if there's like corpses littering the street yeah there's corpses everywhere i'm sorry it's and you don't actually know what happened and i you don't know why you survived and you don't even know if there's others out there but it seems clear that it's all gone what would you do what would i do listen i'm somebody who really enjoys the moment enjoys life i would just go on like enjoying the inanimate objects i would just uh look for food basic survival but most of it is just listen when i just i take walks and i look outside and i'm just happy that we get to exist on this planet to be able to breathe air it's just all beautiful it's full of colors all of this kind of stuff just there's so many things about life your own life conscious life that's fucking awesome so i would just enjoy that but also maybe after a few weeks the engineer would start coming out like want to build some things maybe there's always hope searching for another human maybe probably searching for another human probably trying to get to a tv or radio station and broadcast something i that's interesting i didn't think about that so like really yeah maximize your ability to connect with others yeah i like probably try to find another person would you be excited to see to meet another person or terrified because you know excited i'd be excited even if they yeah yeah being alone for for for the last however long of my life would be really bad that's the one instance i might i don't think i'd kill myself but i might kill myself if i had to understand do you love people you love connection to other humans yeah i kind of hate people too but i like yeah that's a love-hate relationship yeah i feel like this is i feel quite a bunch of like weird nature questions and stuff though oh yeah like i wonder because i'm like when podcast like i'm like is this interesting for people to just have like or or i don't know maybe people do like this i'm when i listen to podcasts i'm into like the lore like the hard lore like i just love like dan carlin i'm like give me the facts just like get yeah like like the facts into my bloodstream but you also don't know like you're a fascinating mind to explore so you don't realize as you're talking about stuff the stuff you've taken for granted is actually unique and fascinating the way you think not always what like the way you reason through things is the fascinating thing okay to listen to listen to because people kind of see oh there's other humans that think differently that explore thoughts differently that's the cool that's that's so cool so yeah dan carlin retelling of history by the way his retelling of history is very i think what's exciting is not the history is his way of thinking about history no i think dan carlin is one of the people like when dan carlin is one of the people that really started getting me excited about like revolutionizing education because like dan carlin instills instilled i already like really like liked history but he instilled like an obsessive love of history in me to the point where like now i'm fucking reading like like going to bed reading like part four of the rise and fall of the third reich or whatever like i got like dense ass history but like like he like opened that door that like made me want to be a scholar of that topic like it's like i feel like he's such a good teacher he just like you know and and it sort of made me feel like one of the things we could do with education is like find like the world's great the teachers that like create passion for the topic because it auto didacticism i don't know how to say that properly but like self teaching is like much faster than being lectured to like it's much more efficient to sort of like be able to teach yourself and then ask a teacher questions when you don't know what's up but like you know that's why it's like in university and stuff like you can learn so much more material so much faster because you're doing a lot of the learning on your own and you're going to the teachers for when you get stuck but um like these teachers that can inspire passion for a topic i think that is one of the most invaluable skills in our whole species like because if you can do that then you it's like ai like ai is gonna teach itself so much more efficiently than we can teach it we just need to get it to the point where it can teach itself and then it finds the motivation to do so right yeah like you inspire it to do so yeah and it could it could teach itself what do you make of the fact you mentioned rise and fall the third reich i just have you read that you've read it twice and you read it twice yes okay so no one even knows what it what it is yeah and i'm like i'm like wait i thought this was like a super popping book super puff i i'm i'm not like that i'm not that far in it but it is it's so interesting yeah uh it's written by a person that was there which is uh very important to kind of you know you start being like how could this possibly happen and then when you read rise and fall of the third reich it's like people tried really hard for this to not happen people tried they almost reinstated a monarchy at one point to try to stop this from happening like they almost like like abandoned democracy to try to get this to not happen at least the way it makes me feel is that there's a bunch of small moments on which history can turn yes it's like small meetings yes human interactions and it that's both terrifying and inspiring because it's like um even just attempts at assassinating hitler like time and time again failed and they were so close valkyrie mm-hmm such a good and and then there is also also the role of that's a really heavy burden which is the from a geopolitical perspective the role of leaders to see evil before it truly becomes evil to anticipate it and to stand up to evil because evil was actually pretty rare in this world at a skill that hitler was we tend to you know in the modern discourse kind of call people evil too quickly if you look at ancient history like there was a ton of hitler's i i actually think it's more the norm than like again going back to like my sort of intelligent design theory i think one of the things we've been successfully doing in our slow move from survival of the finished to intelligent design is we've kind of been eradicating like if you look like ancient assyria and stuff like that shit was like brutal and just like the heads on the like like brutal like like genghis khan just like genocide after genocide after genocide was like throwing plague bodies over the walls and decimating whole cities or like like the muslim conquests of like damascus and shit just like people cities used to get leveled all the fucking time okay get into the bronze age collapse it's basically there was like almost like roman level like society like there was like all over the world like global trade like everything was awesome through a mix of i think a bit of climate change and then the development of iron because basically bronze could only come from this uh the way to make bronze like everything had to be funneled through this one iranian um mine and so it's like there was just this one supply chain and this is one of the things that makes me worried about supply chains and why i think we need to be so thoughtful about i think our biggest issue with society right now like the thing that is most likely to go wrong is probably supply chain collapse you know because war climate change whatever like anything that causes supply chain collapse our population is too big to handle that and like the thing that seems to cause dark ages is mass supply chain collapse but the bronze age collapse happened um like uh it was sort of like this ancient collapse that happened where like literally like um ancient egypt all these cities everything just got like decimated destroyed abandoned cities like hundreds of them there was like a flourishing society like we were almost coming to modernity and everything got leveled and they had this many dark ages but it was just like there's so little writing or recording from that time that like there isn't a lot of information about the bronze age collapse but it was basically equivalent to like medieval the medieval dark ages but it just happened i don't know the years but like thousands of years earlier and then um we sort of like recovered from the bronze age collapse empire re-emerged writing and trade and everything re-emerged um you know and then we of course had the more contemporary dark ages um and then over time we've designed mechanism to lessen and lessen the capability for the destructive uh there's more centers to emerge there's more recording about the the more contemporary dark ages so i think we have like a better understanding of how to avoid it but i still think we're at high high risk for it i think that's one of the big the big risks right so the natural state of being for humans is for there to be a lot of hitler's we just gotten really good at making it hard for them to emerge we've gotten better at collaboration yes and resisting the power like authoritarians to come to power we're trying to go country by country like we're moving past this we're kind of like slowly incrementally like moving like moving towards like not scary old-school war stuff and i think seeing it happen in some of the countries that at least nominally are like supposed to have moved past that that's scary because it reminds us that it can happen like in in in the places that have made like move pa supposedly as hopefully moved past that and possibly at a civilization level like you said supply chain collapse might make people resource constrained might make people desperate angry hateful violent and drag us right back in i mean supply chain collapse is how like the ultimate thing that caused the middle ages was supply chain collapse it's like people because people were reliant on a certain level of technology like people like you look at like britain like they had glass like people had um aqueducts people had like indoor heating and cooling and like running water and like buy food from all over the world and trade in markets like people didn't know how to hunt and forage and gather and so we're in a similar situation we are not educated enough to survive without technology so if we have a supply chain collapse that like limits our access to technology there will be like massive starvation and violence and and displacement and war like you know it's also it like yeah in my opinion it's like the primary marker of of dark like what a dark ages well technology is kind of enabling us to be more resilient uh in terms of supply chain in terms of to all the different catastrophic events that happened to us although the pandemic has kind of challenged our preparedness for um the catastrophic what do you think is the coolest invention humans come up with the wheel fire cooking meat computer computers computers freaking computers internet or computers which one what do you think the previous technologies i mean may have even been more profound and moved us to a certain degree but i think the computers are what make us homotech no i think this is what it's a brain augmentation and and so it like allows for actual evolution like the computers accelerate the degree to which all the other technologies can also be accelerated would you classify yourself as a homo sapien or a homo tech definitely homotec now so i think we're all you're you're one of the earliest of the species i think most of us are like i i like as i said like i think if you um like looked at brain scans of us versus um humans a hundred years ago it would look very different i think we are physiologically different just even the interaction with the devices has changed our brain well and if you look at um a lot of studies are coming out to show that like there's a degree of inherited memory so some of these physiological changes in theory should be we should be passing them on so like that's you know that's not like a an instance of physiological change that's going to fizzle out in theory that should progress like to our offspring speaking of offspring what advice would you give to a young person like in high school um whether there be an artist a creative an engineer a uh any kind of career path or maybe just life in general how they can live a life they can be proud of i think one of my big thoughts and like especially now having kids is that um i i don't think we spend enough time teaching creativity and i think creativity is a muscle like other things and there's a lot of emphasis on you know learn how to play the piano and then you can write a song or like learn the technical stuff and then you can do a thing but i i think it's um like i have a friend who's like world's greatest guitar player um like you know amazing sort of like producer works with other people but he's really sort of like you know he like engineers and records things and like does solos but he doesn't really like make his own music and i was talking to him and i was like dude you're so talented at music like why don't you make music or whatever and he was like because i got i'm too old i never learned the creative muscle and it's like you know it's embarrassing it's like learning the creative muscle uh takes a lot of failure and it also sort of your if when you're being creative you know you're throwing paint at a wall and a lot of stuff will fail so like part of it is like a tolerance for failure and humiliation and that's um somehow that's easier to develop when you're young yeah or be persist through it when you're younger everything is easier to develop yes when you're young yes and the younger the better it could destroy you i mean that's the shitty thing about creativity if you know failure could destroy you if you're not careful but that's the risk worth taking but also but at a young age developing a tolerance to failure is is good i fail all of the time like i do stupid shit all the time like in public i get canceled for i i've make all kind of mistakes but i just like am very resilient about making mistakes and so then like i do a lot of things that like other people wouldn't do and like i think my greatest asset is my creativity and i like i think pain like tolerance to failure is just a super essential thing that should be taught before other things brilliant advice yeah yeah uh i wish everybody encouraged sort of failure more uh as opposed to kind of because we like punish failure we're like no no like when we were teaching kids we're like no that's wrong like that's you know uh like x keeps like will be like wrong like he'll say like crazy things like x keeps being like like bubble car bubble car and i'm like and you know i'm like what's a bubble car like but like it doesn't like but i don't want to be like no you're wrong i'm like you're thinking of weird crazy shit like i don't know what a bubble car is but like he's creating worlds and they might be internally consistent and through that he might discover something fundamental about this yeah or he'll like rewrite songs like with words that he prefers so like instead of baby shark he says baby car it's like uh maybe he's on to something let me ask the big ridiculous question we were kind of dancing around it but uh what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing we have here uh of human civilization of life on earth but in general just life what's the meaning of life c have you did you read uh nova scene yet by james lovelock you're doing a lot of really good book recommendations here i haven't even finished this so i'm a huge fraud yet again um but like really early in the book um he says this amazing thing like i feel like everyone's so sad and cynical like everyone's like the fermi paradox and everyone i just keep hearing people being like fuck what if we're alone like oh no ah like uh uh and i'm like okay but like wait what if this is the beginning like in nova scene he says um i'm this is not gonna be a correct i can't like memorize quotes but uh he says says something like um uh what if our consciousness like right now like this is the universe waking up like what if instead of discovering the universe this is the universe like this is the evolution of the little literal universe herself like we are not separate from the universe like this is the universe waking up this is the universe seeing herself for the first time like this is um the universe becoming conscious yeah first time and we're part of that yeah because it's like we aren't separate from the universe like like this could be of like an incredibly sacred moment and maybe like social media and all these things the the stuff where we're all getting connected together like maybe this these are the neurons connecting of the like collective super intelligence that is you know waking up the the yeah like like you know it's like maybe instead of something cynical or maybe if there's something to discover like maybe this is just you know we're a blastocyst of of like some incredible kind of consciousness or being and just like in the first three years of life or for human children we'll forget about all the suffering that we're going through now i think we'll probably forget about this i mean probably you know artificial intelligence will eventually render us obsolete i don't think they'll do it in a malicious way but i think probably we are very weak the sun is expanding like i don't know like hopefully we can get to mars but like we're pretty vulnerable and i i you know like i think we can coexist for a long time with ai and we can also probably make ourselves less vulnerable but you know i just think um consciousness sentence self-awareness like i think this might be the single greatest like moment in evolution ever and like maybe this is you know the big like the true beginning of of life and we're just we're we're the blue green algae or we're like we're like the single-celled organisms of something amazing the universe awakens and this is this is it yeah well uh see you're an incredible person you're a fascinating mind um you should definitely do your friend liv mentioned that you guys were thinking of maybe talking i would love it if you explored your mind in this kind of medium more and more by doing a podcast with her or just in any kind of way so you're you're an awesome person it's an honor to know you it's an honor to get to sit down with you late at night which is like surreal um and i really enjoyed it thank you for talking today yeah no i mean huge honor i feel very unqualified to be here but i'm a big fan i've been listening to the podcast a lot and yeah me and liv would appreciate any advice and help and we're definitely going to do that so uh yeah anytime thank you cool thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with grimes to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from oscar wilde yes i'm a dreamer for dreamers one who can only find her way by moonlight and her punishment is that she sees the dawn before the rest of the world thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you