#584 - Zoltan Istvan

[0] Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] Everybody, Zoltan.

[4] Is that the correct way to say it?

[5] Perfect.

[6] Istvan.

[7] Did I do it right?

[8] Perfect.

[9] Oh, I nailed it.

[10] Now, when you're a guy who's a transhumanism expert and you sound like a robot, your name sounds, I mean, Zoltan, you sound like an evil robot from another planet.

[11] I mean, the name sounds like.

[12] no insult meant no no of course of course you know it's it's a pretty bizarre name esoteric in america uh strangely enough it's the most common hungarian name is it really yeah so like if you say in a movie theater in hungry you get five people to turn around so uh but you know in america yeah it sounds a bit uh sounds a bit spacey so zoltan is like the equivalent of joe exactly because like when someone says joe like if you're a mount in a crowd i assume it's someone else always There's just so many damn joes.

[13] So Zoltan is the Hungarian Joe.

[14] Yeah, and it's, it's amazing.

[15] You say it on the street and you'll get people turning around for sure.

[16] Now, it's a, it's very funny, though, that your name is Zoltan, and you are a transhumanism expert.

[17] I mean, it's the irony cannot be lost on you in that.

[18] No, and a lot of the media points that out, too, because it is, you know, I'm pushing ideas that are pretty bizarre.

[19] They're certainly far out there.

[20] And the name sort of just emphasizes that aspect of it.

[21] What do you think when it comes to this?

[22] So this is a very controversial subject because I think there's a lot of people that are resisting the inevitability of this relationship that we have to technology.

[23] The continuation of this inevitable relationship.

[24] There's a lot of people that, for whatever reason, don't like it.

[25] They want to go back to chop and wood.

[26] and, you know, it just, it seems like there's some people that are digging in their heels when it comes to technological progress.

[27] What do you think is, like, one of the big reasons for that?

[28] Well, I think anything that's foreign to people sort of scares them.

[29] And as human beings, we have a kind of a biological propensity to just take our time in adapting.

[30] And unless it's like a snake in the grass, people don't react really quickly.

[31] people tend to like want to take it all in, discuss it with their family, their friends, government, whatnot.

[32] And so we have this huge, almost I would say a paradigm shift about to occur where, you know, we're doing things like already starting to put microchips in people's heads.

[33] We're, you know, we can take photos from the atmosphere and look at ourselves.

[34] It's like surveillance issues.

[35] I mean, this is all drone use.

[36] I mean, there's a million different things going on with technology and science.

[37] And it's coming so fast so quickly, it's scaring a lot of people.

[38] Um, people that would not normally be so frightened if it was like individually had come at some separate time, but it's just coming all at once.

[39] And, uh, you know, just even looking at the commitment in this room, you know, even 10 years ago, a lot of this wasn't like it was.

[40] And so, uh, you know, if you're not accustomed to it or if you're a little bit afraid of some of that change, you might back off from it and say, well, what is this?

[41] This is too weird.

[42] But, um, you know, for those of us who love it and who see it as very useful and functional and improving well -being and health, This type of technology, this type of change is really great.

[43] Do you have any apprehensions at all about the sort of exponential growth of technology?

[44] Well, I certainly have lots of apprehension.

[45] I think the biggest thing I'm worried about, and you've been hearing about this in the news recently, is artificial intelligence, this idea that there will be another entity on the planet that is smarter or, you know, smarter than us, equal to us, this kind of thing, and could potentially become so much smarter than us in such a short time that it could literally change the way, you know, our Earth actually is.

[46] And if all of a sudden it controls all the machines in this room and all the airplanes and stuff like that, for whatever reason, it could certainly stop the Earth, I'd say, or at least progress as we know it.

[47] Is that a good thing?

[48] Is that a bad thing?

[49] These are very, you know, touchy and difficult questions, but the thing about it is certainly scary.

[50] That's the one thing, and I've kind of agreed with a lot of the experts lately saying that, yeah, we probably need to have some type of oversight.

[51] I was recently at a speaking at an artificial intelligence and singularity conference, and that we were on a panel, there are five experts talking about AI, and someone asked, well, who is regulating artificial intelligence development?

[52] And all the experts had no one said anything, because no one said there really is anything regulating this idea that may be in potentially eight to 12, probably 20 years, there will be this entity that's smarter than us on planet Earth.

[53] That seems a little bit of a disconnect.

[54] I don't really like regulatory things, but maybe for this one is something we'd have to.

[55] So I have a lot of apprehension when it comes to that single concept.

[56] But mostly other technologies, I think as long as historically they're increasing lifespans, they're making people live better.

[57] Poverty is going down across the world because of technology.

[58] So from a statistical point of view, technology is.

[59] helped.

[60] And I'm pretty sure it's going to continue to do that, especially if it's made kind of freely available to everyone.

[61] It seems like there's two schools of thought when it comes to artificial intelligence.

[62] This is the Elon Musk school where he's like, you know, hey, we might be summoning the demon.

[63] I mean, that was his exact quote, which is terrifying.

[64] And then there's the other school of thought where people are saying, like, you don't need to worry about it because they will only react in the way that we program them to react.

[65] That when we create some sort of an artificial life form that will have very strict parameters of what it can, can't do.

[66] You know, we've seen that in science fiction movies before, like they have a protocol, like they can't harm human beings, you know, they have these things that are programmed into their behavior patterns that cannot be overridden.

[67] But I think the real concern, at least my real concern, is that we are giving birth to this new superior form of life.

[68] And then the way I've described it is that we're essentially a caterpillar.

[69] that doesn't recognize that it's going to become a butterfly, that we are toiling away, creating this ant hill or whatever that we're doing.

[70] You know, we're just involved in this constant growth, constant technological innovation process.

[71] And we don't even realize that our whole purpose here was to create this new thing, was to create this new life form.

[72] No, and I'm a big proponent of that entire idea because, as I point out in my, my book, The Transhumus Wager, a lot of what evolution is going towards is not what we think it's going or what we want it to go towards, which is, you know, human beings, family, all the institutions of marriage and stuff like that continuing.

[73] I actually think what evolution has really been leading to is the creation of a really incredible superpower.

[74] I don't want to say God, but something that has omnipotence, something that is omniscient, something that is perfect in in its form, the universe is becoming alive through us.

[75] And, you know, we're very early in the process of that.

[76] I would say we're, you know, I don't know, 5, 10 % along the way.

[77] We're just kind of kids in the universe.

[78] But the idea is eventually artificial intelligence.

[79] And, you know, the way I work through my apprehension of artificial intelligence is that I would like to merge with it.

[80] I would like to have it so that we could connect, you know, through a neural implants or whatever it's going to be into the machines.

[81] So it's not like the machines leave us.

[82] It's like we leave with the machines.

[83] And that's the natural state of evolution.

[84] Therefore, we actually become that.

[85] And it's like you said, you know, the caterpillar idea, where the butterfly actually then becomes something else.

[86] And that's where I see not only humanity going, but also the kind of evolutionary course of the universe, which is sort of moving towards this much more incredible of an intelligence, incredible energy forms, whatever it is that's going to end up, I think we're going to end up being then.

[87] The most important thing is that humans don't miss the train.

[88] I wonder if one of the things that people are concerned with is that we enjoy a lot of our flaws.

[89] And if we keep improving, if technology comes along and gets to the point where a human being becomes free of any irrational thoughts, free of irrational emotions or maybe even any emotions, we're missing out on, rock and roll we're missing out on charles buchowski we're missing out on you know muscle cars all the stupid shit that makes life fun it's going to be like completely irrelevant we're not going to no one's going to be getting drunk no one's going to be making dirty jokes we're going to miss out on like fast food like like ridiculous ice cream sundays you know what i mean it's like there's a lot that we enjoy about life that's ultimately ridiculous and as we continue to you to get smarter and as technology takes us to this point where we can kind of eliminate a lot of the biological protocols that are in place that's that cause these flaws what will we be left with will be these weird robot creatures no and this is one of the most i think important philosophical dilemmas of the kind of thing i just spoke about where we're evolving into some type of incredible intelligence is what if it's super boring you know and what if it's just not much fun and you know so i think what's going to happen is along the way we're going to find out how much we miss you know some as you said the ridiculousness of life you know i also don't know if life can actually evolve and progress just through pure logic or pure rationality i think chance is very important in life and i also think being creative and creative must to some extent involve that ridiculousness at least must involve the question of asking why now it might get more logical and rational as we go forward, but I'm not sure we're ever going to completely be the perfect mathematical model that we would want to be.

[90] I'm not even sure that if we had perfect intelligence, if let's just say hypothetically we became that perfect intelligence, we might purposely sabotage ourselves just so that we always have that element of irrationality in our lives to keep us on the go, to keep us moving forward, to keep us evolving.

[91] So I'm, so that's the first part of that.

[92] I think the second part of what you're speaking about, The interesting thing that I always tell people, because I get asked this question a lot, is that right now our current perception of the universe is pretty limited.

[93] For example, our eyesight can only see about 1 % of the light spectrum.

[94] Our ears can hear far less than 1 % of the sound waves and what's possible in the universe.

[95] So our actual ability to determine what is in the universe is completely limited.

[96] And in fact, so limited that we're just basically getting tiny bits of it.

[97] as we get um as we progress forward i think we're going to have apps uh more applications towards getting a better perception and our senses of what the universe really entails we'll all have night vision we'll have be able to see different types of gases in the air we'll we'll have different types of feelings that are based in with with this these kind of uh hypersenses and that in itself will give us so many new experiences and i try to tell this to people a lot that we're actually going to become much more complex.

[98] We think this is our world around this, but actually, if you and I had bionic eyes, we'd see that there are maybe a billion different organisms in this room that are also interacting with us.

[99] And that's something that I'm not saying it's going to maybe take us down either a smart or a bad path, but it's something that could be different that could take us to other ideas and other ways of experiencing the world that makes it so it's not either boring or makes it So it's not so, you know, so kind of crazy.

[100] Though, you know, I don't think that humans are ever going to, and trans humans, at least, to start with, are going to give up some of the ridiculous aspects of their life because one of the things that motivates us is fun.

[101] And one of the things in human experience that is fun is being ridiculous.

[102] So I think you need that creativity.

[103] You need that creative element in the species.

[104] Yeah, I agree.

[105] I worry about the, there's just a sheer.

[106] amount of data you would have to process if you could see all the gases in the air all the organisms that are in the air um i was camping recently in alaska we're in uh prince of wales which is uh essentially a rainforest it rains all day every day and uh we were in the um like this this area was just constant downpour 100 % humidity and i was in my tent and i turned i had like a little headlamp on i turned the lamp on and looked in the tent and the tent was filled with moisture like little tiny droplets of dew were floating in the air in the entire tent and it made me think like if you could see all the microscopic particles that are in the air constantly i mean you're you're breathing in particulates you're breathing in all sorts of pollutants you're breathing in farts and gases and things from cars and and there's actually organisms in the air i mean there's there's colds that are spread by people coughing they cough it gets in the air and those organisms float into your body and infect you that's why we tell people cover your mouth when you cough you're literally spitting out life forms and then those life forms contaminate other people i worry that that would be like almost too much data the process no i mean imagine if you walk on an airplane and you could see all everything and you see people coughing there's like here's a virus oh there's a virus you know you're right it would be it would be a pretty freaky experience, but I think the thing is we're probably at that point, you're going to have so many connection, either through neural implants or just some type of connection to machines that our data processing is, you know, in our brain and however, whatever kind of servers we're attached to will allow us to, you know, make sense of it all.

[107] Because right now, I know what you're saying, it's like, wow, there's no way I could process it.

[108] Life is already pretty, you know, complicated to process when you're going through a red light or someone's running a red light or something like that.

[109] But hopefully in the future, we'll have all these neural enhancements that will allow us to take that kind of stuff on and take more of it on.

[110] And, you know, there's just so much that's going to happen when we start increasing our own brain power.

[111] You know, for example, when they talk about artificial intelligence, we're talking about something that could be 10 ,000 times smarter than the smartest human being within a year or two of it actually existing just through its upgrading of itself.

[112] time smarter.

[113] And that's just the first year.

[114] Maybe the second or third year, it's hard to know, could become, you know, then the J curve takes off and that's where the singularity idea comes from.

[115] But if we're attached to that and we're able to keep up with that, we're able to kind of process it, then, you know, all these things we start seeing are going to make more sense and we'll have so much more capacity to understand.

[116] I think right now when we try to imagine it, it's like, wow, way too much.

[117] But in the future, I'm hoping that our brains are going to be.

[118] be like, you know, a thousand iPhones just connected and then our ability to make sense of it all.

[119] And that'll, I mean, I look forward to the day when I can see everything.

[120] We'll be able to see, you know, your heartbeat.

[121] I'll be able to see right through the walls, whatever people are doing in the building.

[122] We'll hear the planes.

[123] We'll know it.

[124] You know, everything will, we'll see the airwaves.

[125] Have you seen the movie Lucy?

[126] Yes.

[127] So, you know, she starts getting to that point when she understands everything.

[128] Everything is totally interconnected to her and she has that processing ability.

[129] It doesn't overwhelm her.

[130] in fact, it kind of becomes magical to her, sort of like some kind of saint or some kind of guru.

[131] It just feels the entire universe.

[132] And I'm hopeful that that's what it's going to be like, though I'm not really sure, you know, that may be too optimistic, but hopefully we'll be so interconnected that we'll actually be able to be much more part of the universe in terms of sensing it and feeling and understanding it than we are right now.

[133] That's the big concern that people have is when folks like you say, I'm hopeful.

[134] because you know like you take the Elon Musk possibility the way he's describing it and you take what you're like I'm hopeful and Elon Musk's saying the demons are coming you know it's like well hopefully not that's that that concerns people right no of course and unfortunately you know I always try to back away from any kind of totally qualitative you know totally firm statements because if I say anything other than it's going to happen then all of a sudden you're this guy who's pegged, you know, a definite thing.

[135] And the problem is anything we're talking about in futurist issues is always speculation to some extent.

[136] And no one's ever really got it right.

[137] No, no, and most people are wrong.

[138] The question is, how close are you to getting it right?

[139] If you're 20 % wrong, that's pretty good.

[140] If you're 70, 80 % wrong.

[141] So, you know, futurists try to attempt to speculate based on statistical analysis historical patterns, what things are going to happen.

[142] And then, you know, philosophers just throw out their ideas and hope that some of them stick.

[143] And occasionally one becomes totally accurate and you know that's the way the species moves but when I say hope I'm certainly not trying to pretend that the universe is going to be the way I'm saying it could go very wrong and it could turn out even better than I'm hopeful of and it could just be a lot less magical than I'm hoping you know I've seen some critics some really well educated critics I was reading this piece written by this biologist who was criticizing The whole idea of transhumanism and Kurzweil in particular.

[144] And what he was saying is that essentially we know so little about the human mind already.

[145] And we're still just trying to wrap our heads around the processes that are going on that we're just beginning to understand as far as, you know, synapses, neurons, where memories are stored, how to manipulate them and just the various process of the mind.

[146] And his take on it was that it's so incredibly.

[147] unrealistic that we'll be able to duplicate this by 2045 like that's the idea behind it right to 2045 an issue but my take on that when i was reading his his piece i was saying i think he's being particularly critical of it because he's he's saying that what these guys don't understand about the human mind is that there's just there's all these processes that go on behind the scenes that we still don't have a handle on but my take on it was we don't really have to have a hand on it if we can or handle on it if we can replicate them like if they can replicate it with technology we don't have to know how proteins are processed and all these different various things that create a biological computer which is essentially what a human mind is it's not necessary if we can create something far superior and something that's based entirely on artificial intelligence and artificial technology yeah no and i i i'm you know first off there's a lot of critics out there that are coming at transhumanist ideas, futurist ideas.

[148] And you just have to remember, you know, that we, especially in America, about 85 % of the people are religious Christians.

[149] And a lot of really that far much.

[150] An ABC poll told me 83 % was out, I think, in early 2014.

[151] Do you know what the problem with that is?

[152] I have a whole bit about this in my act.

[153] And it's that only idiots answer polls.

[154] So you're getting 83 % of idiots.

[155] I mean, have you ever answered a poll?

[156] No, I have never answered a poll.

[157] Jamie, have you ever answered a poll?

[158] No, there you go.

[159] I don't think most people answer polls.

[160] No, you're right.

[161] And I think 83 % seems totally high to me. But I think even if it's a lot lower, let's just say it's 50, 60%.

[162] And let's just say, you know, there's another 10 % that are various other religious ideas.

[163] The problem is we've been kind of brought up in a Judeo -Christian or an Abrahamic culture.

[164] We're, you know, we celebrate Christmas, Easter.

[165] There's so much religiosity and basically set into.

[166] place.

[167] And a lot of these ideas, you know, transhumanists, one of their most important goals is that they want to live indefinitely.

[168] That's really the center of a lot of, the most important goals of the next 10, 20, 30 years is they don't want to die.

[169] We want to use technology and science to live, at least have the choice when we're going to die.

[170] And if that sort of flies in the face of so much of the major, the world's major religions, because a lot of it is kind of based on And you want to, you know, be a good person so you can get to that afterlife and have, you know, your either, you know, seven wives or whatever it is that they do.

[171] 72 virgins.

[172] Yeah, whatever it is that they promise you.

[173] But transmits are like, no, actually, this is perfect, what we're here right now, this earth.

[174] And what we'd like to do is just make it so we don't have to leave it.

[175] And we could stay with our families and we could stay with our loved ones and we could continue in our jobs or professions and stuff like that.

[176] And that really conflicts with a lot of the American point.

[177] of view of, you know, how is it that what's going to happen in the future?

[178] I mean, as you probably know, I think it's still 100 % of people in Congress at least are claiming they're religious.

[179] Now, I don't know if it's truly 100 % and how many are pretending, but either way, you still have a president that swears on the Bible to get his job.

[180] These are things that fly in the face to transhumanism.

[181] And I think until that changes, there's going to be a huge amount of critics out there that are saying this is a dangerous idea.

[182] And, you know, you can paint in a different direction, say, well, transhumanism is just a label.

[183] It's just science and technology.

[184] All religious people want that anyways, you know, or at least want some of the benefits.

[185] But I think at some point there will be a clash because when you take death out of the picture, a lot of the main philosophies, a lot of the main ideologies of the religious text fall away, and they're not necessary anymore.

[186] And I think that's going to create a pretty big conflict here in the next five, 10, 15 years.

[187] as we kind of crawl to that spot where a lot of people start realizing, wow, we may not die.

[188] We may live indefinitely.

[189] What does that mean for, you know, the environment?

[190] What does that mean for politics?

[191] What does that mean for countries, globalization and stuff like that, you know, population as well?

[192] So I think there's going to be a lot of issues with that in the future.

[193] And I think that's where you get a lot of your critics from.

[194] That's fascinating because this guy that I was talking about was not religious at all.

[195] The biologist, he's an atheist.

[196] I think there's a lot of atheists that have issues with the possibility of transhumanism just as much as people who are religious.

[197] But I think there's definitely something to this idea that, you know, no one knows what happens when we die.

[198] And that's confusing.

[199] It causes a lot of conflict.

[200] And we've sort of created placeholders for that.

[201] We've created with religion.

[202] We've created these, whether you believe in religion or not, the reality is no one truly knows what happens when we die.

[203] If you have faith that the religious texts of your choosing are correct, that's all well and good.

[204] But the reality of scientific data is that there's none when it comes to what happens when you die.

[205] There's none as far as like where did your soul, where'd your personality come from?

[206] There's none.

[207] There's no data.

[208] We have no idea.

[209] Is it nature?

[210] Is it nurture?

[211] Is it DNA?

[212] Is it epigenetics?

[213] What creates a person's personality?

[214] Who are you?

[215] What's inside of you?

[216] is there a soul?

[217] All of it's just pure speculation.

[218] Is it consciousness trying to form some rational reason for your existence?

[219] All of its speculation.

[220] So I think when we start talking about circumventing the whole reality of biological death, going around it and coming up with something that allows you to live forever, there's some people that think, well, we might be missing the whole point.

[221] Like this might be a gigantic cycle of life and death and life and death and continual improvement and just like everything else that we see around us, just like our technological improvement is constant and consistent, that might be the same thing with life itself, like with us stepping in and stopping this process with technology in some sort of way.

[222] We might be fucking up the whole process of the universe.

[223] The other hand, it might be, that's the whole reason why we have these thoughts in the first place.

[224] My thought of us being this caterpillar that becomes this butterfly, our whole reason for existential angst, our whole reason for this fear of death.

[225] I remember when I was six, I was seven, seven years old, and I was talking to my parents.

[226] And I was asking them, what happens when you die?

[227] And my stepfather said, it's probably nothing.

[228] It's probably, it's probably, it just, you probably just die and that's it.

[229] And I was crying.

[230] I couldn't wrap my head around it.

[231] But for a seven -year -old, it's terrifying.

[232] And I've said this before, but I'll say it again, everybody likes to go to sleep, but nobody wants to die.

[233] And they're probably incredibly similar.

[234] But this idea of having this impending end to this experience, it might be one of the motivating factors for us to create this artificial life to create this artificial intelligence this thing that we have that freaks us out worrying about death might be part of the motivation for us to transition into something new no in fact i totally agree with you in fact uh my entire book is really based on a very singular moment when the main character basically almost dies and he realizes from that point forward and that's what the so your book is a novel yeah it's a novel but that's exactly what you've said is the transhumus wagers.

[235] Once you realize that, you know, you could die and that's potentially as a seven -year -old child, that's it.

[236] And there's something you can do about it, especially in the 21st century where we have so much science and so much technology at our disposal.

[237] Then you make this kind of wager where you're saying, you know, I'm actually going to dedicate my life to trying to accomplish that because I don't like it that I have to die.

[238] And that's essentially what the transhumanist wager really is.

[239] But I think the interesting thing is that philosophical conundrum of, well, if we take death out of the equation, is life as valuable as it is?

[240] Or are we messing with the mechanism of evolution?

[241] Or are we messing with the mechanism of growth of whatever the universe is going into?

[242] And I intend to, I'm not, you know, as I've said before, I want to live forever, I want to live indefinitely, but I'm not necessarily wanting to have it so that that's a kind of permanent.

[243] I just want the choice.

[244] And that's what I think is most important.

[245] And when I, you know, people, in the transhumanist community, we've actually been shying away from the use of the word immortality anymore because we've realized that a lot, it just kind of scares people.

[246] They really think we mean immortality.

[247] And we don't necessarily.

[248] What we mean is we just want a choice on when and how we're going to live.

[249] And if we're ever going to die, it's under our circumstances.

[250] It's on our terms.

[251] And so I use indefinite lifespans a lot more because that at least lets me say when I might want to end my life if ever and I actually wonder too I thought you know if you're going to live indefinitely you know would God potentially if someone was God would God maybe commit suicide some point because it's this idea no you know if you were if you were God and you had all power is that something that would you know be the thing you wanted and I'm revealing like plots in my sequel but anyways the idea is maybe an omnipotent entity would say to create a cycle of renewal, I will end my existence.

[252] I will commit suicide.

[253] And then the whole system perhaps restarts itself.

[254] As we had talked about earlier, you know, maybe you create parameters in your existence so that all of a sudden you, there is renewal, there is creativity, and it's out of your control.

[255] Sometimes you have to, you know, I know that, for example, day traders, when they're playing stocks, some of them have such problems that they'll purposely set their code so they can't get into their account, but they won't remember it.

[256] They'll just like type it in, type it in short -term memory, and then stop it.

[257] And the way they do this is so they can't trade anymore if they've been losing money and they're having a bad day or something like that.

[258] Friends of mine were doing it in college.

[259] And I sometimes wonder if maybe a grand spiritual entity would do the same thing.

[260] He would program into his own existence problems, issues, as we had talked about, ridiculousness of life, because that's something that keeps us moving forward and maybe god would even program in killing himself or herself itself whatever whoa that is that's a heady concept and i have always wondered why it is that it seems like we need conflict in order to find resolution it's like i think if everybody lived in this perfect state of bliss and this utopian existence we probably never get anything done and one of the reasons why we get things done is because we're constantly worried about overcoming struggle.

[261] We're constantly worried about overcoming potential aggressors or things that could go wrong and overcoming environmental issues that we've created.

[262] And so we're coming up with technological solutions for those things.

[263] For every new power source we come up, whether it's nuclear or whatever, there's always like some sort of a byproduct of that that we have to deal with and some sort of an effect that it's having on the environment that we have to mitigate.

[264] And it seems that this constant yin and yang is sort of built into the universe.

[265] I was telling you about my trip that I had in Alaska where I was camping in the rain.

[266] It was awful.

[267] It was wet and cold.

[268] It was miserable.

[269] But when I came back to L .A., I was so happy.

[270] And I called my friend Steve, who took me on the trip.

[271] And I was like, dude, I have never felt better.

[272] I feel fucking great.

[273] It's like the sun feels good.

[274] It just feels good to be driving.

[275] It feels good to be able to go to a store.

[276] You know, there's so many things about life that are so amazing that I don't necessarily completely appreciate until I go like into the wilderness.

[277] When you go into the wilderness and then you come back, you can really appreciate the city.

[278] And I feel like that these built -in struggles, this yin and this yang of life is why we appreciate things.

[279] Like you don't appreciate really cool people unless you're around a bunch of you know you don't appreciate funny people unless you're around people that have zero sense of humor and then you're around funny people and they just feel so good they warm you up it just feels fun and i really wonder if that is i mean we think of it as just life these are just the realities of life the unfortunate realities of life and one day we're going to get our shit together and we won't have all those bad aspects but is that real i mean or is this like is it all just data?

[280] Is it all just a part of the code?

[281] Is it all just a part of the algorithm that moves whatever we're doing forward?

[282] And that in that sense, you need conflict.

[283] It's built into the system in order to create entropy, in order to create movement, in order to keep everything going so that we eventually make that fucking cocoon and become that butterfly.

[284] Yeah, no, I mean, the conflict question is such an age -old philosophical question because it's like you're always striving for perfection, but when you actually think about perfection in itself, it doesn't sound like the thing you actually might want.

[285] What you really wanted was the journey.

[286] And that's why I think they say, well, journey is, you know, most of the fun or half the fun at least.

[287] And, but I tend to think, you know, as far as we, like from a transmist perspective, since we're so, we're so, I think, minuscule in terms of what we are as entities right now.

[288] You know, our brain power is whatever, our ability.

[289] neurons or how many many billion there are.

[290] But the idea is we could create an earth that's full of servers.

[291] Or as I like to say in some my writings, you know, the Empire State Building could be filled with servers.

[292] And that would be...

[293] You don't mean like waiters.

[294] No, no. No, but, you know, basically computer chips, servers, that kind of thing.

[295] And the thing is we could create something far more complex than the human brain.

[296] And if we're tapped into that, and now we get into something more like the death start, even that's just filled with computer chips and servers.

[297] You know, if we get to something that huge, our intelligence could be millions, millions of times more what it is now.

[298] And if that happens, we have no idea the types of conflicts that would come from that.

[299] We have no idea, maybe the conflicts are also a million times greater.

[300] Maybe conflict is something that you always go through, and maybe you even get to the end of some perfect entity, and you actually can't get in.

[301] you know, or you get stopped by some kind of physical thing that could happen.

[302] It's so, it's awesome to think about it because the bottom line is from a philosophical perspective, currently I can't see a world without conflict.

[303] It just, it would almost be like the world didn't exist.

[304] What makes it exist to us is that we have all these trials.

[305] We have all these tribulations and these things happen to us and we're happy and sad because of it and we feel it because of it and we grow from it.

[306] So it's hard for me to even understand the world.

[307] But I think as we get more complex, I think as we're able to tap our brains into mega -giant machines and increase our intelligence, it will probably become that much more complex.

[308] And I think the conflicts will also become much more complex.

[309] And so I'm not really worried about a universe, at least in the near term, at least in the next 100 years, two, three hundred years, without any conflict because the universe is still so big.

[310] There's all this types of exploration in it.

[311] We have to figure out exactly what pure energy is.

[312] will, you know, will transhuman entities eventually transition into something like that, into subatomic things and whatnot?

[313] And there's so much to explore.

[314] I think it could get, I think we'll probably find that there's a more to explore than we ever thought and will probably be just as lost in the universe and stuck in conflict as we are now, perhaps even more so as we grow more intelligent.

[315] And even if we do create this unbelievably incredibly complex system of, computers that run everything and we've eliminated emotions and we've you know carved out this utopian existence there's still asteroids they're still super volcanoes there's still hurricanes and tsunamis and earthquakes and all sorts of things that we it's not even on the remote horizon us controlling natural disasters not even not not not even for a fraction of the natural disasters that potentially can come our way.

[316] I mean, we're not even considering how to control supervolcanoes.

[317] There's no technology so far.

[318] There's nothing they can do.

[319] And I was reading about, I got on this trip one night.

[320] I'll do this and just really fucks my head up.

[321] And I hate doing it right before I go to bed.

[322] But I got on this trip one night about super volcanoes.

[323] And I started reading all the super volcanoes that exist currently and the reality of what has happened when those have gone off and there's one in indonesia that they believe there's a lot of people that have pointed to as the possibility of why all humans can be traced back to original ancestors that they think that this one that blew somewhere i believe it was like 75 ,000 plus years ago that they think that when this fucker went off it killed most of the people on the planet it's in indonesia it's an enormous it's bigger than yellowstone and they think that the remaining few people repopulated the earth in that the seven plus billion people are directly related to 70 ,000 years ago the survivors of this super volcano.

[324] That's crazy and that's terrifying.

[325] And if that happens again, there's not a damn thing we could do about it right now.

[326] We're constantly worrying about getting faster Wi -Fi and making an electric car that can go more than 300 miles without a recharge.

[327] But the reality of natural disasters is there's always that nature reset button and that nature reset button could come in the form of a five mile wide rock that slammed into the yucatan and killed all the dinosaurs or that gigantic super volcano in indonesia that killed off you know who knows what percentage of the population but they think it could be as much as like killed off everybody but for a thousand people that that's a real possibility that's being bandied about and that's something that we're not going to be able to stop.

[328] No, no, definitely.

[329] You know, I, about two months ago created the Transhumanist Party, which is the kind of first political organization about it.

[330] And the third, we had three main goals.

[331] And the first is try to make it so that everyone can live indefinitely.

[332] The second one is just to spread a kind of a general, like we want people to think positively when they think of technology and science set of being so critical.

[333] But the third one deals with existential risks.

[334] And it amazes me that we spend so much money at a Walmart or a McDonald's or going to Disneyland when we have problems like a super volcano that exist, things that if you think about at late at night, it keeps you up because it's so horrific.

[335] And what's amazing about it is that it's not just super volcano.

[336] It's we've had existential risks facing the planet for, you know, they've happened.

[337] We know they've happened.

[338] We can see that they've happened.

[339] And still, we send such a small amount of government.

[340] budgets towards protecting the species as a whole, when, you know, you would think from an existential risk point of view, it would be the first thing you would probably tackle.

[341] I actually thought this sort of with Ebola.

[342] I thought, you know, I can't believe that we don't spend $100 million and wipe it out.

[343] Why don't we just as a world get together and do it?

[344] It's not like we're, you know, we're worth 200 to 400 trillion, they say, the world.

[345] And it would probably take 50 or 100 million to wipe out the disease.

[346] Why don't we do it?

[347] Why don't we wipe out malaria?

[348] Why we wipe out the things.

[349] Is it really that simple, though?

[350] It's probably not that simple, but no one's tackled it with more than a fraction of that amount.

[351] And I think if you actually put the world's best scientists together and really said, you know what, some things really are scary for the human race.

[352] This is something that we need to go out there and attack first before it gets out of control.

[353] And I just, I find it always so strange that governments don't treat this seriously.

[354] And I think it's because as a politician, you can't, because because it sounds so far -fetched to talk about a five -mile -wide asteroid hitting the Earth.

[355] It sounds like, yeah, yeah, I'll worry about that tomorrow.

[356] But the reality is as soon as something like that happens or a tidal wave happens, for example, and, you know, and kills so many people a few years back, then you start thinking about that.

[357] I think it always takes, like, some kind of giant cataclysmic disaster to actually get people to say, today I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and we're going to actually go out and try to stop some of these things.

[358] And like you said, with super volcanoes, there's nothing we can do.

[359] But certainly with asteroids and stuff like that, there are some things that we can do.

[360] And certainly with diseases, there are things that we can do.

[361] And I'm kind of, you know, I'm always bummed out because I feel like our governments don't treat the risk to the species seriously enough.

[362] They treat, you know, Social Security tax issues and this kind of stuff, you know, it covers the headlines.

[363] But what's really important for the species for all seven, almost eight billion of us soon, is making sure that we don't all go the way.

[364] dinosaurs and that just takes a matter of money and putting some of the best minds to it and saying let's just whatever it is that you guys and girls need to do just please do it the um malaria one is terrifying i was listening to radio lab you've ever listened to that podcast i haven't but i've heard the the name it's a brilliant brilliant podcast that uh i think it's put up by npr i think those are the folks you do it but it um they had an episode where they were talking about mosquitoes and they were talking about malaria and they said that half of the people that have ever since people have been around were killed by malaria.

[365] I've had malaria.

[366] You've had malaria?

[367] Yeah, I've had a whole bunch of...

[368] Oh my God.

[369] When I was 20, I did this long sail trip, and as a result, I got a whole bunch of stuff like hepatitis A, dange fever, malaria.

[370] You got dange fever and malaria?

[371] I had it all at various places.

[372] So I spent about four months in the Solomon Islands, but I also kind of went through the North Pacific Ocean after the South Pacific.

[373] And basically on a sailboat, you're just, you're going to get it unless you're taken.

[374] And I was even taking prophylactic malaria pills when I got malaria, but it doesn't always work.

[375] There's more than chloroquine that you needed.

[376] You needed methylquin and whatnot.

[377] And the problem is it gave me crazy nightmares.

[378] So I didn't take the proper prophylactics.

[379] But I eventually got it, went and tested there and then just sat on my boat for three, four days.

[380] And then I did a methoquine treatment for malaria, which is essentially you take four tablets, times three days, so you take 12 altogether.

[381] And I don't know if you know anything about larium or methylquin, but it gives you, it makes you hypersensitive.

[382] So when you look at a sunset, you get incredibly emotional.

[383] And it's like a great thing to write poetry on.

[384] But it totally messes with you, which is why a lot of people, at least when I was sailing 10 years ago, tried not to take it as a prophylactic.

[385] But so it worked.

[386] I got rid of it.

[387] I was an able -bodied, 22 -year -old, you know, person.

[388] So you're pretty much able to go through a lot of things.

[389] but I have been around a number of villages in that trip where people have died, children die all the time and I still, I'm not sure what the numbers are, but I think it's 750 million people maybe are still dying from malaria a year or have died in the last, I don't know, something crazy.

[390] When you think about it, you think, wow, why don't we just go out there?

[391] I mean, this is why Bill Gates has targeted this as one of his main initiatives with his incredible wealth is to say, God, this is one thing we could literally just take out.

[392] 627 ,000 malaria deaths.

[393] This year.

[394] Yeah.

[395] Whoa.

[396] Yeah.

[397] I mean, it's a huge amount when you think about in terms of it's far more than war.

[398] That's insane.

[399] It's far more than anything else.

[400] And think of like, so we spent all this money on war.

[401] We could, you know, take a little bit of that budget and, you know.

[402] UNICEF has a different number.

[403] They say over a million.

[404] UNICEF says over a million people die malaria every year.

[405] Wow.

[406] So many.

[407] It causes 300 to 500 million infections and over a million deaths.

[408] This is John Hopkins also says that.

[409] So I'm assuming it's probably somewhere around a million.

[410] I think when you're dealing with impoverished countries, right, it's very difficult to keep track, isn't it, of how many people are?

[411] Yeah, no. And I think a lot of the people, like where I got it was there was no telephone in this village.

[412] There was no anything.

[413] I was just anchored off there at a surf spot and I must have gotten it through the time that I was sailing through some of these outer islands.

[414] And there's, you know, maybe once a week there's a boat that comes through with supplies.

[415] But that's why people die from it because there's really nothing there except the basic drugs to, you know, take care of it.

[416] And it doesn't always work and stuff like that.

[417] And there's variations of it as well.

[418] So some people try to just ride it out and not take the drugs because they make you so wacky?

[419] Well, some people actually, once they get it, are too weak to walk into the clinic.

[420] So like in the Solomon Islands, for example, it's just filled with these giant, uh, well, not giant mountains, but there's a lot of hills.

[421] And so you have to kind of cross ravines.

[422] And I was so out.

[423] I mean, I could barely even get up.

[424] I didn't really eat.

[425] I just could drink water and I kind of laid in my, in my bed all day.

[426] And so if you have it and you're an adult, you either have to send one your kids to get it, but you weren't, you're not going to be able to climb a couple miles to go get the medication.

[427] And so if you live in some outer, tribe away from a clinic and most of assault there's i don't know a couple hundred islands in the solomon islands no one has access to it the same thing with poppin new guinea there's not a huge amount of tribes but if you actually try to get anywhere it's all highlands full of snakes or whatnot so even across a mile and that kind of territory is pretty tough stuff so if you have to go 20 miles to get pills it might just be safer to take your bet not use all your energy and and try to ride it out So your immune system is capable of your healthy young 22 -year -old of surviving it sometimes?

[428] I think it's just luck.

[429] So, for example, I was already on chloroquine at the time.

[430] So I already had some resistance to a certain type of malaria.

[431] Oh, I see.

[432] But once I had tested for it, because I got, basically, I got feverish and all this.

[433] And I went and tested before I was got really bad.

[434] And they said, yeah, it looks like you have it at this little clinic.

[435] And so, and I was too far away to sail to anywhere.

[436] And at the time, I didn't have any real services to be air evacuated out.

[437] And also, you know, I had been sailing three, four years already.

[438] You don't, you can't leave your trip.

[439] I had a whole bunch of incidences.

[440] You can't leave your boat every time something goes wrong.

[441] You just got to deal with it.

[442] And so I just went back and took this larium treatment.

[443] And so I had the cure for it.

[444] And the cure is, at least in the Solomon Islands at the time, was you take this regimen of larium, 12 tablets over three days.

[445] And that should, that should take care of it.

[446] What a crazy trip you went.

[447] on man you you you you sail for three or four years so no i sail for actually around seven yeah and it was left from uh from los angeles and went through the south pacific spent four years there and continued and across the indian ocean and uh mediterranean so i i'd done some crazy stuff a lot of that stuff was when i was working um for the national geographic channel so i was kind of set up where i would go and do short uh three to five minute um kind of filler documentaries in between the longer segments of a news show that they had.

[448] And so I'd stop places and film and, and I'd create these three to five minute news pieces.

[449] Wow.

[450] It's really fun stuff.

[451] Did some crazy, crazy fun stories, but, you know, weird stuff.

[452] Yeah, I would imagine that would be an insane life of adventure.

[453] All those years on a sailboat, just sailing around and in the South Pacific as well.

[454] You know, the South Pacific was the best part because I wasn't working at.

[455] at the time.

[456] It was later that I started actually working and doing the National Geographic stuff.

[457] And that was great too.

[458] But the South Pacific, I was just there with about 500 books.

[459] I spent literally four years in the South Pacific, including the time I was at the Salman's.

[460] The Salman's starts getting into the North Pacific.

[461] And yeah, what a wonderful time.

[462] I was 21, just finished school and I was sailing around and reading books on the ocean.

[463] Yeah, a couple times I had girlfriends come with me and, you know, for a month or two.

[464] And so it was really like uh i was a surfer and uh i was a paraglider and uh so i would do just all sorts of activities all the time and spearfishing i was what a lie it was hard to talk about because it's like i have kids now and i'm married in the house and all this so i'm probably can never go back shit god damn it go back to the days of youth wandering around i want to go back on in the pacific fucking sailing going by the wind oh glorious yeah so it was uh those were the days that's kind of the opposite of transhumanism though isn't it it it is and um and i was very low tech at the time you know when i first started sailing they didn't even have GPS they we i used a sexton for the first few years oh you used one of those crazy that's christopher columbus things that's all they had only the military had access to the GPS system then so no one you didn't private people weren't allowed to have it yet i had a GPS system on my phone or my car that was cd rom driven and it was in I want to say the early 2000s or maybe even the late 90s.

[465] It was somewhere around 2000 -ish, and I got one of the first ones, and it was such an inaccurate piece of shit.

[466] And it was really slow, and it was only good for California.

[467] Like, I had to stick the CD in.

[468] Like, there was a slot that it would go into.

[469] It's so hard to imagine a world where GPS didn't exist, let alone be on a boat.

[470] traveling around the world on this boat with no GPS.

[471] That, to me, it's just incredible.

[472] Oh, it was really, it was fun.

[473] You know, the sex and thing is so awesome because you actually use the stars to navigate.

[474] Same stars we teach kids, you know, like to my daughters, I'll point out and be like, you know.

[475] And the whole life was so magical.

[476] I mean, it's still cool.

[477] I loved what I'm doing now.

[478] But there was something much more human and just youthful about that entire period of my life.

[479] Human.

[480] Isn't that a strange word that you just used?

[481] Yeah, I'm not sure.

[482] What is human?

[483] Your whole thing is transhumanism.

[484] And you're talking about this incredibly low -tech adventure as being one of the highlights of your life.

[485] So I'll tell you exactly how that switched.

[486] After most of the sail trip, I was actually covering a story in Vietnam for the National Geographic Channel.

[487] We were covering a story on bomb diggers.

[488] And what they do, is, and there's about, I think, five to 15, 10%, it's hard to know exactly, but at least 5 % of the American bombs dropped by America in Vietnam never exploded.

[489] So what you have is you have millions of tons of metal lying around the jungles just sitting there.

[490] Overgrowth is all around them.

[491] And most of the rice farmers market make a dollar a day.

[492] So ultimately what's happened is a huge community of farmers have said, well, why don't we salvage the metal, sell the metal and we'll make 10 times what we would make in a season in farming.

[493] The problem is that the DMZ, the demilitarized zone and quite a bit of parts of Vietnam are filled with landmines and dealing with these unexploded bombs, some of them that are as long as this table are not pretty close to it, are incredibly dangerous because you have to dismantle it and take the metal to a dealer in the city and whatnot.

[494] So a lot of these bomb hunters, what they call themselves, and there might be 10 ,000 of them in Vietnam, end up losing their lives are losing their legs on landmines.

[495] And so I went to cover the story because it's an awesome story, totally fascinating.

[496] But I had a very close incident on one of my final days when I was covering the story, Cameron Hand, is my guide came from behind me. We're walking on a trail.

[497] A guide came from behind me. I had stepped off the trail to look at an impression because the way you can tell where these unexploded bombs came is that a part of the jungle, there's an impression in the earth.

[498] And he came and tackled me. And I said, dude, I'm holding my camera.

[499] You know, so we all went down.

[500] And then he pointed out, he said, look, right here.

[501] And in the ground, there was this, like, little silver thing.

[502] And a little black thing, actually.

[503] And he said, it's probably a landmine.

[504] And you almost stepped on it.

[505] And I just kind of sat there.

[506] And I thought, wow, that's a little too freaky for me. I had already, like, in the years preceding this, I had had all my diseases on the sailboat.

[507] I had been to a number of war zones.

[508] I just about a year earlier had a huge kind of, bunch of incidents in the Kashmir, uh, Indian Pakistan conflict, which I covered.

[509] I did a humanitarian kind of war piece there.

[510] And I was the van the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm 28 years old.

[511] I've been doing crazy things for huge amounts of time and getting very lucky.

[512] Uh, it just, there was a, uh, there was a I was working at this nonprofit organization, Cambodia, called Wild Aid, and we were doing undercover work to busting poachers.

[513] You know, we were literally, I'd go with a team of militia, we were a nonprofit, and we'd go into places and free live animals that had been confiscated for food, and we'd, you know, literally arrest poachers because they have, you know, China and Cambodia have this illegal poaching system.

[514] but it was like I had just come from about a month of doing that and it was like a little bit too much for me all you know it was just too much danger too much hecking this so the landmine incident was the one in my mind that changed it and I said I went home and that's when I essentially began working on the book and the transhumanist which has sort of launched me into this this public career of promoting transhumanism I'd always been a transhumanist I don't someone who you know wants to use technology and science to upgrade myself but this was the time that I made it personal This is the time that I said, you know, I'm done having fun and just writing journalistic stories.

[515] I'm now going to actually dedicate my life to something that means a lot to me because I don't want to ever have to be facing death.

[516] You know, the landmine certainly would have killed me, I think, or at least maimed me to such a, you know, you almost always lose legs.

[517] And it was just a little too much for me. So I came back and that's heard of how my career or the trajectory of transhumanism for me took on this quite public role.

[518] wow wow um that that is first of all it's incredibly terrifying to think that there's that many landmines still in vietnam i've read that before and i kind of put it aside i guess in the back of my mind but those poor people that live there i mean the vietnam war is just such an unbelievably fucked up time in history but it's so incredible how peaceful the vietnamese are and how like forgiving and accepting the Vietnamese people are about us invading or I shouldn't say us you know the the troops of the 1960s and 70s invading Vietnam and all the horrific things that happen there but that that the fact that no one's freaking out that there's that many bombs that just occasionally go off and kill some poor farmer I know I think America should go in there and clean it up fuck yeah you know because it's ridiculous the amount of bombs that are there are such a staggering number you could never clear it up with 10 ,000 Vietnamese farmers who have given up their fields and again it's happening all over the country now in Cambodian Laos bomb diggers are it's an entire culture mostly young kids and a lot of my documentary was on actually filming the amputees that lost their legs or arms when something went wrong and your viewers can watch this the National Geographic video is still up on this one.

[519] What's it called?

[520] I think it's just you would Google Zoltan Ishvon slash Vietnam and go to YouTube and it'll it'll appear um it's it's called bomb diggers but or just vietnam bomb diggers just a it's a four minute clip but it shows like you know what what these people go through on a daily basis they just go out with a shovel they go out with metal detectors and they're like did did did did and every step they take is freak yeah for a whole week i was freaked out it was like because the DMZ is just filled with no one's been there there's no villages in that immediate area because it's just too dangerous to live Some people, you know.

[521] So there's thousands of those.

[522] Thousands and thousands.

[523] And what's worse is that bomb digging is attracting a younger generation, and they make so much more money than rice farming, like literally a hundred times.

[524] If you find one six -foot bomb, you can feed your family for a year.

[525] Wow.

[526] And you could find it in one day.

[527] So in one day's worth of work, you can make more than you could in an entire season.

[528] So the bomb, is just the metal of the bomb or the bomb itself unexploded?

[529] No, it's just the metal.

[530] they dismantle it and they sell the metal.

[531] Because they're only making $1 day and they're farming.

[532] So they're so, they're so poor, you know.

[533] And they're very like, you nailed it.

[534] They're totally nice people.

[535] They were happy to help me with my story.

[536] But they're, the whole thing is so bizarre.

[537] That's incredible.

[538] And what do they do?

[539] How do they dismantle these things?

[540] So they have experts.

[541] If they find a big one, they carry it into their village.

[542] And this is another problem.

[543] Oh, they fucking pick it up?

[544] Yes, yes.

[545] That's the whole point.

[546] problem.

[547] And then they hammer it apart.

[548] Oh, my God.

[549] Yeah, it's crazy.

[550] And sometimes like half villages go up when they make a mistake.

[551] This has been a problem that's happened in Laos is, like, so yeah, it's a couple of documentaries have now been made since I did this and I think in 2002, 2003, but a couple real documentaries because now there are nonprofits dedicated to saying, hey, don't go bomb digging that you might make a fortune in a day.

[552] You might change your family, your wealth of your family.

[553] But it's worth it because look every for every 10 people that go out two or three end up with amputees or some end up completely dead and stuff like that and so much more dangerous than just farming and has there been any effort whatsoever by the United States government to go in there and clean it up you know so I did the story a long time ago and that point there wasn't much they just gave a lot of I think money to make up for it but I actually don't know what's going on now I know that the nonprofits have been working on trying to get them money God Just, it's so hard to think about.

[554] It's so hard to think that you're not responsible for all the bombs that you left behind it.

[555] That wouldn't be one of the first things the United States deals with.

[556] And how difficult would it be to do a sweep of the entire country and find all the bombs?

[557] Well, the problem is like in the area, the DMZ is all pretty big hills.

[558] So it's almost impossible.

[559] You couldn't be able to get tractors up there.

[560] It's just there's too much vegetation and everything's overgrown so nobody knows what to do.

[561] It would be much easier just to throw.

[562] a lot of money at it and uh and try to you know get the u .n or somebody to go in there and sweep through it with metal detectors yeah but what the fuck man i mean how how is it possible that they have just left all that shit there that's just that's so dark they bomb so much of the country it's really like it's such a staggering it's just when you actually study the numbers of how much they dropped i think they drop more i'm not a hundred percent of this fact but i believe they drop more bombs in Vietnam than all other wars or something like that combined of the amount of like bombs and because at the time that's all they did and you know and when you think about it's just literally millions and millions and millions of bombs and tons of bombs and of course a huge percentage that just never explodes so wow that's terrifying to think that that could be there a hundred years from now yeah there still potentially could be deaths and your kid could step on one or it could just, you know, it might be just ready to, there's probably doesn't, you know, I don't know, thousands of them then are just ready to be ticked off for one reason, one missed wire or something like that.

[563] I don't know.

[564] But it's a, it's a serious problem.

[565] And every, if you look in the news, every now and then, you'll say, oh, another explosion happened here.

[566] And again, it's also not, it's also quite substantial in Cambodia parts that were bombed there and, and whatnot.

[567] And then they have all the internal wars, you know, some of the countries, it's not just us had bombed.

[568] It's some of the other countries that, you know, North of bomb you know these kind of things so uh there's a lot of unexploded stuff all over so you see this bomb you almost step on it and then a switch goes off and you decide to to change your focus yeah so i uh i had been interested in transhumanism from the time i was in college we were given an essay on cryonics um you know this the the field where you actually put dead people into some type of freezing compound, and then in hopes in 20, 30 years, you'll be able to have the science to regenerate them and reanimate them.

[569] And our English class was asked to write an essay on it and then debate it.

[570] And so it was the very first time I was introduced to it at about age 20.

[571] And I started reading about transhumanism and sort of fell in love with this concept of using science and technology to become superhumans.

[572] You know, just we don't need to worry about death.

[573] We don't need to worry about disease.

[574] We don't need to worry about, you know, the kind of things that plague are biological beings.

[575] We can use science and technology to overcome it all.

[576] So I spent, you know, a lot of the next 10 years, as I was sailing, just kind of reading about it, being into it without doing anything about it.

[577] But then after this instant, I came back and began working on the Transhumus Wager, which is a novel about transhumanums.

[578] It's kind of an epic.

[579] And it took me many years to write the book because it.

[580] it's a pretty long, complex, philosophical novel.

[581] It's at least 30 % of the book is pure philosophy.

[582] So while it's a novel, it's not a novel in the sense of you just read it and storyline.

[583] It's actually huge amounts of just pure academic philosophy going through it.

[584] And the book did really well.

[585] And, you know, I've been talking ever since about it.

[586] And it's gotten me in a lot of trouble because it's pretty controversial.

[587] In what way?

[588] Well, essentially the main character, Jethro Knights, he says he will do anything to live indefinitely.

[589] And so naturally the book goes out of its way to create an environment where he can't do what he wants.

[590] He's fighting against religious entities in America that are saying we don't like transhumanism.

[591] We don't want it as part of anywhere in America.

[592] So they sort of outlawed.

[593] And so he kind of becomes a sort of a terrorist for his own ideas.

[594] But the problem is he'll take it to all these.

[595] extremes.

[596] And in the end, he forms his own nation called Transhumania, a floating sea -steading platform.

[597] And I'm a volunteer ambassador at the Seasetting Institute.

[598] I know you've done something about.

[599] We had Joe Corcoran.

[600] Yeah, yeah.

[601] And so I kind of did a big, about a third of the book discussed the seesteading where 10 ,000 of some of the smartest scientists in the world work on creating the ability to live indefinitely.

[602] But then the world says, no, no, no, this is not right.

[603] And they say, we're going to take over your country.

[604] And Jethel says, no, we're going to start a world war.

[605] And we have the technology to do that.

[606] And he ends up defeating the planet and making it into a transhumanist -minded planet.

[607] What kind of crazy fucking thoughts are going on in your head, sir?

[608] So he uses authoritarian ideas.

[609] And this has been the controversy of the book, is that a lot of the transhumanists, especially the older ones, said, hey, we like it that you're writing about transhumanism, but we don't like that you're you're taking to such extremes but jethro is a militant leader he's a he wants to his ideas to spread and they want to keep taking away from them they also in the book kill his wife and do all sorts of other things so it's a novel where it's an epic from kind of his early childhood to the end or near the end of his life where he transforms the world against everyone's will and what makes the book controversial is that nobody likes jethro he's sort of this incredibly arrogant machine -like human being, yet he's the good guy of the book.

[610] And yet you sort of cheer for him because, you know, he's, even though he's sort of, uh, authoritarian, he's sort of, you would like him because he's driven.

[611] He's like the greatest fighter you've ever met who just he's not, don't tell me about rules this.

[612] I'm just the best fighter, you know, and on one hand, that's very admirable.

[613] On the other hand, we have rules for a reason, but Jethro breaks them to get what he wants.

[614] And he made the transmiss wager where he really like, he says i'll put anything i'll do anything to achieve it and that's where the controversy comes in because clearly if we all did anything we wanted we'd be uh in a in a pretty hectic place both politically government you know with society all these different things and so i uh the book has won a lot of praise and just as much criticism and there if you look at the the amazon reviews it's like an e there's like a huge amount of one stars and a huge amount of five stars but not much the middle.

[615] And nobody said, you know, everyone hates the book because they call it, you know, they say, well, this is an evil character.

[616] And, and, you know, the people that like it say, no, this is a character who actually wants to fight for what he believes in.

[617] And, you know, revolutionary leaders are sort of like that.

[618] They, they just, they take us to different places and they use different methods that, you know, certainly are questionable, but again, it's a fictional novel, and you can take it for what the art is worth.

[619] Well, this is where it gets complicated, because you are planning on actually running for president on a transhumanism platform.

[620] Now, when you've written a book about a world war that gets started by a good guy with a transhumanism agenda, and now you're wanting to run for president, people go, this Zoltan guy, this motherfucker, think about his name.

[621] He's name is Zoltan, and he wants to run the planet, and he wants to be a transhumanism.

[622] He wants to be a robot.

[623] You're turning into a robot that's going to start a world war to run the planet.

[624] Yes.

[625] That's obviously not true.

[626] No, no. And of course, that is the most difficult question I'm going to be asked probably a lot as I move forward with the whole.

[627] You're really going to do this?

[628] Yeah, yeah.

[629] No, I mean, it's already said.

[630] I've sort of staked my entire reputation on at this point.

[631] We have some big, big publicity events.

[632] But do you think that you could possibly win?

[633] So I don't think I could win this time around.

[634] I think there's virtually no chance.

[635] I think if you look at how far the transhumanity.

[636] party might do by 2020, 2020, where I would potentially do it again, I think we might have a much better chance of making a dent.

[637] Now, I don't want to be unrealistic and say that we could actually win or that I could win the presidency or anything like that.

[638] But I am definitely advocating for a run that's taking all my time.

[639] Like, I'm literally dedicating now, you know, all my waking hours towards this party.

[640] Really?

[641] All the infrastructure takes, it's really complicated.

[642] I mean, I basically have working with advisors, I'm working on the different – there's so many logistical things that one has to do, including just dealing with taxes for an entity like this and registration process, a manifesto.

[643] But in the next week or two, most of the infrastructure will be in place.

[644] We already have a lot of it in.

[645] We have a number of officers now.

[646] And we're going for it.

[647] I mean, I'm going to stake everything I have on it.

[648] My wife has given the approval, which is important because I got two kids and her, and we're going to do a lot of campaigning.

[649] We're going to, we have some great events.

[650] In fact, I'll probably hopefully be down in a few weeks to L .A. to start a documentary on it, which has a great budget, by the way.

[651] And so I think there will be a lot of things coming out about the Transhumanist Party that are going to work really in the favor of getting people to think about what would it mean to have a political, you know, person running who actually wants to use technology and science to change politics, not just, you know, oh, politics.

[652] Let's dabble a little bit in science policy.

[653] But I actually want to use technology and science to dominate politics.

[654] I think we can solve most of humanity's problems and run a much better country if we put politics, medicine, and technology sort of at the forefront of the government.

[655] Currently, we're at the forefront as a lot of other issues that defense and, you know, I don't know, taxes.

[656] And all that stuff is very important, of course.

[657] But I'm an idealist.

[658] like to make it so that we can everyone can live longer everyone has the choice to potentially not die i'm pretty convinced that if we put a trillion dollars towards um conquering death we would probably achieve it most experts actually feel that way too that the amount of money that's actually going into life extension science right now is so small literally hundreds of millions but if we actually could quadruple or maybe make it 20 times that we could take the 20 30 year window and make it into 10 years.

[659] And that's one of the platforms is that we're going to, you know, of the parties to say, well, we're going to take money from our wars, our far off wars, and put it directly towards important things, education, science and technology, and also life extension science.

[660] So, but to end your, your, you're, you're, you're somewhat dangerous question for me publicly.

[661] Um, I am distancing myself from the book because it was, it was a moment of writing something very artistic and trying to write something very philosophical.

[662] But the philosophy of Jethronites does not work in a political campaign.

[663] And I'm doing my best to disassociate myself from his ways, even though I'm the creator of the philosophy and I'm, you know, the one who sort of spent all these years developing it.

[664] But it would never work.

[665] It would never work in America as we are today.

[666] We live in a country that's very free.

[667] There aren't a bunch of religious people trying to stamp out transhumanism.

[668] In the book, he lives in a war environment.

[669] That's part of why he fights back with war.

[670] So luckily, you know, we live in a pretty awesome country.

[671] You can mostly do what you want.

[672] And I'd like to convince people to do a lot more than just building bombs and some of the crazy things that they do and spend it towards science and technology.

[673] And hoping that everyone will eventually like it.

[674] Everyone will eventually live better.

[675] Everyone will eventually kind of be taken to a new era where, you know, their families and their loved ones don't have to die.

[676] We have all the benefits of technology, like we don't have traffic in L .A., like I told you.

[677] I mean, these are kind of things, you know, driverless cars that are going to improve everything.

[678] And I think if more people embrace technology, we might go a lot further as a species and also as a country.

[679] The obvious question, when you say if people live forever or people could get to a point where they don't die, we can conquer death.

[680] We have too many people.

[681] There's seven billion people on the planet, right?

[682] Is that what the number is now?

[683] Yeah, I think it's, and it's going up fast.

[684] Yeah, it's going up fast.

[685] Los Angeles, as you said, we were talking on the way about you traveling on the way over here, how difficult it was to get here because the traffic is so bad.

[686] You know, there's 20 plus million people in Los Angeles.

[687] What happens if they keep having babies and no one dies?

[688] Yeah, so, you know, this is one of the most challenging questions and most challenging ideas about the problem with.

[689] transhumanism right now is when we advocate for technology and science to change people's lives and make them live longer and better, the first question, everyone says, well, hey, man, we got environmental problems in the world.

[690] And I agree, we do.

[691] I'm a believer in some of the climate change problems.

[692] I'm a believer in, you know, overpopulation.

[693] I'm not going to in any way try deny some of these things.

[694] I actually think the science stands pretty strongly for it.

[695] The question, though, is whether tackling that broadly, tackling environmental problems with the kind of ideas that we're trying to do right now, less population, recycling, and, you know, and stuff like, you know, just the basic things.

[696] We're trying to empower ourselves to be a more green world.

[697] I'm not 100 % sure that that is the accurate, or that is the very best path we can take.

[698] Now, this gets kind of speculative, and I don't actually.

[699] this necessarily as as a kind of a political platform, but I'm pretty quite pretty convinced that within 25 to 50 years, people will start downloading their consciousness into machines and stuff like that.

[700] So there's this idea that maybe we'll start using a lot less resources a hundred years from now.

[701] Because people will live in digital lives and virtual lives.

[702] You know, maybe we'll all live, maybe the entire population will fit into that Empire State building that is full of servers, as we had discussed.

[703] And maybe the Earth will have a chance to grow back or come back to what, you know, it's formed.

[704] But that's not the, you know, that's just one of the kind of speculative ideas that transhumanists might use to counter some of the criticism that we get about environmental problems.

[705] I'm personally, what I'm for is for a lot of the green technology.

[706] That's the stuff I want to see.

[707] I want to see solar power increase.

[708] I want to see money going towards that.

[709] I want to see money going towards the windmills.

[710] I want to see money going towards the green types of technologies.

[711] that not only can make a whole new generation of wealthy people and give millions of jobs to people, but it can also at the same time help the planet.

[712] So, you know, I take this twofold approach.

[713] One is very speculative in the future.

[714] There'll be space exploration and all these other things.

[715] We might figure out ways that don't make us so dependent on the planet.

[716] But the more important way is that we're going to spend money on the type of technologies that really make the planet better.

[717] You know, get people to move into cities, make them greener.

[718] leave open spaces alone.

[719] And I'm a big animal advocate as well.

[720] I've worked with wildlife.

[721] A lot of my National Geographic work was with wildlife.

[722] So I'd love to see the species replenished.

[723] I'd love to see it so that we can actually go to national parks and have the kinds of things that we all hope for.

[724] Where you see deer and you could take your children out there and especially in Africa with so much poaching and stuff like that.

[725] Of course, you know, in America we do a pretty good job with protecting our wildlife.

[726] But I'd like to see us be more of a leader on the international front saying, we actually need to stop it.

[727] It's crazy that the tiger population is literally on the edge of extinction, literally gone.

[728] There are more tigers in Texas than there are in the wild.

[729] Isn't that incredible?

[730] It's sad.

[731] It's terrible because they're an important part of the ecosystem in all the places they're at.

[732] And one of the stories we covered was the Siamese crocodile when I was in Cambodia.

[733] and there's a couple in captivity, but basically the last time someone saw one was like 13 years ago in the wild.

[734] And so it's gone.

[735] You know, it's essentially gone.

[736] And when you think about it, you're like, well, that's a certain species just basically gone.

[737] And why is it gone?

[738] Well, people are making boots and stuff out of its tails and whatnot.

[739] So I would like to advocate for policies that kind of make that happen less and generally increase our environmental consciousness with money.

[740] Instead of building bombs, hey, let's spend it on building electric cars.

[741] Let's spend it on other ideas, even more unique ideas than that.

[742] Well, there's a lot of things to discuss there.

[743] First of all, the beginning of this you were talking about downloading consciousness into computers.

[744] So you're kind of advocating a non -biological life.

[745] You're kind of advocating life inside of a server, a virtual life, and that that would be the future of life.

[746] that is really hard for people to conceptualize.

[747] It's really hard for the average person who just likes to go on Facebook every now and then post pictures of their dog with a fucking bow in her head.

[748] You know what I mean?

[749] Like one day you're going to live in a computer.

[750] Like that's going to, it won't be just your photos in a computer.

[751] Your mind, your consciousness will live in a computer.

[752] Your body will die and you will exist in ones and zeros in some sort of a program.

[753] Like that to a lot of people that doesn't, seem like life, it could get to a point in our lifetimes where it is indistinguishable from life.

[754] And that is, in fact, one of the freakiest ideas that's bandied about today by people far more intelligent than me. This is not my own philosophical stoner ramblings, but the concept of living right now in some sort of a computer simulation.

[755] And this has been discussed ad nauseum amongst physicists and science.

[756] scientists that we're going to come, there's going to come a point in time where we will be able to create some sort of a virtual life that is absolutely indistinguishable from the life that you and I are experiencing right now.

[757] If that's the case, how do we know we're not already in it?

[758] You know, that's the big mind fuck, right?

[759] That's the big mind fuck when it comes to quantum theory and when when people start talking about virtual realities is that we may already be in one.

[760] I did my senior thesis that, you know, university on brains in a vat exact same concept so i'm it was i spent like a whole month writing a 24 page paper it's crazy in fact after writing the paper i was like it took me like a week to even become normal again because you can't you can't choose right and that scares me you know you can't say i'm not in one or i am in one right and um yeah it's it's a totally freaky concept not only that you you can't say it and it's going to happen if we don't if that supervolcano doesn't blow, if we don't get hit by the meteor, there's going to come a point in time if technology continues to increase, whether it's 50 years from now or 100 years from now or a thousand years from now, our ability to control reality itself will reach some sort of an epic point where we can create a virtual reality.

[761] I'm sure you've messed around with Oculus Rift.

[762] I have.

[763] I haven't tried the new one.

[764] I tried, my friend Duncan is, he's got the old model and now he has a new model he has the developers kit and uh the old one i put on it was all pixelated and weird but it gave you the sense like wow this is kind of freaky he called me up he went to some sort of a virtual conference that they had in los angeles and he called me up just ranting and screaming it's over man this is bigger than the printing press this is bigger than the internet like this is it's fucking over we're gonna this is gonna be reality and he was just freaking out so much so that I'm scared to go and try this this headset on but he was talking about going into some virtual room where there's a person playing the piano and you you interact with them and you feel like you're in the room with them and he said it was the freakiest thing he's ever experienced in his life because it's all in like 4k HD super like like really really clear video and they apparently the way they do it they put cameras all over the person's body when they film this cameras on your hands cameras on your legs so everywhere you look they have it covered and it's just a matter of the processing power of being able to keep up with all the different potential views that you have same as when you're going into a computer 3g generated world like a a video game like quake or something like that where you're going down corridors and you could look up and look down they have it like that but they have it in complete three -dimensional HD video to the point where it is It's indistinguishable from actually looking at these things in real life.

[765] And that's just now.

[766] I mean, what is that going to be like 50 years from now?

[767] When they figure out how to do something on your head where they put, you know, electrodes or something where they can stimulate parts of your mind that can give you the sensations of the feel of the wooden floor giving slightly under your feet, the texture of a wall as you run your fingers, by it.

[768] You'll be able to feel that on your fingertips.

[769] And then a thousand years from that, what happens then?

[770] What happens then?

[771] What happens then?

[772] What happens then?

[773] It keeps going and going and going and going.

[774] And if you extrapolate, if you look at where we are now and you look at the future, it's almost impossible for us to not reach a point where we're indistinguishable, where reality and virtual reality are indistinguishable from each other.

[775] No, I couldn't agree more.

[776] And if you try that stuff on, it's sort of like the landmine thing.

[777] Once you've tried that on it really is such a freaky thing that you realize oh this is here today okay it's not perfect but in 10 15 years it's common it's common and um i think a lot of i think a lot of younger people get that because they ever have tried it or they're cool with it they grew up like my uh my 11 month old uh or 10 month old daughter is already quite she's already pretty quite good at using like the iPad and skipping through things she doesn't know what the apps mean yet but she's only 11 month.

[778] And she's just growing up with this technology.

[779] And so for her, I think, to put on whatever virtual reality setup it's going to be in 10 years or 15 years is not going to even dent her.

[780] She's not going to be scared of it.

[781] She's going to be have heard the word.

[782] She's going to be have heard transhumanism for the last 10 years.

[783] It'll be like stepping in, you know, I think when people first talked about cars, they must have thought, well, how weird.

[784] What do you mean we're going to get rid of the horse?

[785] And then the next generation thought, well, I can't believe you guys were in a horse.

[786] And sort of like the way we talk about either fax machines now or you know, the new generation is going to take it and run with it and they're not going to be afraid of it at all.

[787] I think it's people our age that are already still, we're like a little skeptical.

[788] And then it's people above us that are really still out there and they have to actually test it to see it.

[789] But in 15 years, no matter who test it, it's going to be so real.

[790] I think the philosophical dilemma there is that people are going to say, well, it's not really.

[791] real life and people like myself are going to say, well, why not?

[792] You know, what makes that real knife just because it's created, you know, through a machine?

[793] What's to say this isn't created through a machine?

[794] You know, what's to say this is so different?

[795] You, I can touch something in there and it feels maybe even more real than it does now.

[796] You know, maybe the touching of wood there, as we had talked about, if you have sensors on your fingers, it's not just touching wood.

[797] We'll be able to determine the strength of that wood.

[798] I can't, you know, we can do all these things right now.

[799] But for example, I'm writing an article right now on blind people using artificial robotic eyes, bionic eyes to see.

[800] And they're now basically kind of doing a surgery where they put something into your eye and then they can program it through these goggles that you wear.

[801] And blind people can now effectively see.

[802] So it's like like the character on Star Trek.

[803] Yes, exactly.

[804] That's exactly what it looks like, too.

[805] it.

[806] It's called, I think the Argus 2 is one of the latest ones.

[807] But the point, though, is that part of my articles, what are they doing now?

[808] Because last year, they went from, like, black and white to upgrading the eyes to color.

[809] They can program in the certain types of lights that hit color into your nerve cells.

[810] But soon, they're going to start programming things like we talked about gases or, you know, eventually it's just a matter of the machinery will be able to have whatever capabilities you can give it.

[811] It's not a, you know, we're not limited anymore.

[812] Our eye are limited to its biology.

[813] But if we have something robotic that ties into the nervous system, our nervous system can understand anything.

[814] The reason we don't see much more than we see is because our eyeballs are, frankly, they're quite poor.

[815] When you think about what kind of mechanisms are out there that can really be attached inside there.

[816] And so the articles about what is the future, the 10 -year future of bionic eyes.

[817] And I'm a pretty big believer that within 10 years, we'll have bionic eyes that are almost equivalent of the human eye and probably within 15 or 20 years people will start replacing one of their eyes for the bionic one and the reason they'll do so is because like I said you're going to it's not just seeing one percent of the universe anymore the the computers and the programs and the devices will be able to see far more you're going to be able to see through walls you're going to be able to see and this is this is stuff companies are like literally working on right now I mean it's this is blind people have already seen this happened in 2012 and 2013 now they're starting to upgrade the software.

[818] And you know what happens when they start upgrading things.

[819] Then it's like, okay, we got the apparatus in place.

[820] Now let's see what kind of magic this can do.

[821] And this is just the eyeball.

[822] The same thing's happening with the human heart.

[823] The same thing's going to be happening with the ear.

[824] Very soon we're going to be replacing parts in ourselves and going for upgrades.

[825] And our lives are going to become much more complex, better, live longer, but also experience will be different.

[826] Experience will be sort of like virtual reality.

[827] It's such a different experience that once you've gone through it, you realize it's kind of, you know, I've heard you talk a little bit about drugs in the show, and I'm a big proponent of experimental drugs myself.

[828] I think it's, I think it's quite great for, for kids to do all sorts of stuff, including adults.

[829] Well, you just fucked up your presidential chances right there, pal.

[830] No, no way.

[831] I think it's great for kids to do drugs.

[832] Well, no, I don't mean, I don't mean kids i mean you know uh 20 somethings 21 year olds and above those youngans yeah uh where i'm 40 i guess kids are anything you know in their 20s you stay kids are in their 30s right yeah fucking kids those wacky kids but but ultimately you know whether we like it or not and whether you know again i'm not running on some presidential campaign to try to be the the guy who pretends these things it's i'm luckily not at that point yet maybe in eight years i'll have to watch a lot more what i say but right now i'm a big i don't think you will.

[833] I think eight years from now, we're going to be able to know exactly what you mean without you even having to say it.

[834] I think eight years from now, we're going to have such amazing access to each other's minds that the walls are getting closer and closer.

[835] Possibly.

[836] Yeah, I don't think you're going to have to worry about people lying anymore.

[837] Well, that would be great, because then we can't, we can know when they're pretending stuff.

[838] Yeah.

[839] And the truth is, I think all of us, and many of your listeners, we all realize that there are lots of things out there that the government considers illegal, considers terrible, that have been very useful for artists, creative types, and basically people in general to expand their consciousness.

[840] And I think, you know, the technology will be also some new form of enabling us to expand our consciousness.

[841] Like I said, if we have a bionic eye and it allows us to see different things, that's got to mess with our consciousness in some way.

[842] And you can combine that with all sorts of things.

[843] And I'm a big advocate in doing anything, as long as it doesn't harm someone else, I think it's open game.

[844] I agree, and I think that when you think about the possibility of improving our organs, I think we could also look at the natural world and what we know about, like, for instance, like what dogs can smell, like the incredible ability that some animals have to see things.

[845] Like my friend Matt, he lives in Alaska, and we were talking this weekend about fishing, and he was saying that sometimes when they fish, they'll catch sharks, and when they pull them out of the ocean, like they'll catch them accidentally when they're fishing for halibut.

[846] And when they release them, they're on the surface of the water and eagles can see them from a mile away.

[847] They can see a fish just swimming on the surface of the water from a mile away and they'll just show up.

[848] They show up and they grab it.

[849] It's like their eyes.

[850] Like our vision of what that could be, but think about like you can see a fire in the distance and aunt has no fucking idea that fires out there.

[851] You know, Jamie was showing me this photo of, there was a huge fire last night in Los Angeles, and from a distance it looked like a bomb had gone off.

[852] It looked like a missile.

[853] It hit some apartment building.

[854] It was a huge, huge fire.

[855] Melted signs that we were saying on the 110.

[856] Now, we can see that, but to a worm, they have no fucking idea that's going on.

[857] So we already know that biologically there are animals that have organs that work far better than the ones that we have.

[858] So we're completely aware that their ability to smell things, their ability to hear things.

[859] I mean, you can just like ruffle your fingers together slightly across the room and my cat's ear will like turn like that.

[860] Like she can hear shit that I could even hope to hear in a million years.

[861] We know those organs exist.

[862] We know that their capacities are far beyond anything that we have.

[863] And if we start giving people cat eyes and cat ears and dog noses and, you know, the ability to do that.

[864] I mean, we will radically transform human existence just based on not even fantastical, like, science fiction versions of these organs, but organs that we know exist in the biological world.

[865] No, 100%.

[866] You know, so my article's, one of the funniest things about the article is that it's quite possible within 10 years, a blind person will see.

[867] better than a normal biological person where they'll have the ability to see you know 150 miles and they'll have ability to see various tiny things that are the human eye could never see that that's how far technology has come where a blind person has better sight than a real person now it's not here but it's definitely probably going to happen within the next decade well i have reading glasses these little little glasses as i'm 47 and as i've gotten older one of the things that's happened is most likely from fucking staring at screens all the time my close -up vision is starting to suck.

[868] Like when I, I can, I can read, like, my iPhone.

[869] I can read it fine, no, no issues at all.

[870] But when I start reading small print, like a small website or something like that, like I need to put on the reading glasses.

[871] And there are one and a half what regular vision is.

[872] Like, so it's one plus 50.

[873] That's like robotics.

[874] I mean, this is like, this is technology.

[875] I'm putting something over my eyes that changes my eyes.

[876] Right now it just goes.

[877] over.

[878] And some people, they get LASIC.

[879] They change their actual lens.

[880] They cut it.

[881] They do it with technology.

[882] They change the form of it.

[883] And then some people get artificial lenses put in when they have issues or, you know, they get injuries.

[884] And I know fighters who've forgotten artificial lenses put into their eyes.

[885] It's going to, it's going to creep up on us, I think.

[886] It's like people with hearing aids and, you know, some folks have artificial hips.

[887] I have a friend who was an artificial hip.

[888] I have another friend who has an artificial knee.

[889] You know, and These are becoming more and more commonplace where they are taking parts that are not working well anymore and replacing them with robotics.

[890] Yeah, I was just doing an article.

[891] Apparently, I think, around 300 ,000 people in the world have this cochlear implant, which is actually inside.

[892] And that's 300 ,000 is not like 300.

[893] I mean, that's a huge number around the world that are having hearing problems that have this that decided to undergo a surgery that involves their skull and head, essentially.

[894] and have this implanted.

[895] That's great because, and those people apparently hear far better and, you know, now.

[896] Society is changing.

[897] It's just going to take, it's going to take interviews like this where people hear about it.

[898] And, you know, if you hear about enough times, all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, I know someone else did that or this, that, you know.

[899] And eventually everyone will sort of hopefully start to say, well, this is great, you know.

[900] And I think the big thing is really getting a lot more government funding for kind of these kinds of things because, you know, sometimes it seems so speculative, but if we improve the world and improve people's, you know, biological beings and their livelihoods, it's hard to argue with that kind of logic.

[901] It's just, it's getting better.

[902] It is getting better.

[903] And as we said, when it comes to technology, if we don't blow ourselves up or the universe doesn't set a rock our way, it seems inevitable that we'll continue this progress.

[904] It just seems inevitable.

[905] And I think there's a certain duty that we have, especially folks like you have, that have the scientific know -how or knowledge and the information, to inform people that this process is underway.

[906] And better prepare yourself because there's no getting away from it.

[907] As long as we are human beings, we are never satisfied.

[908] There's a horsepower revolution right now with cars.

[909] It's gotten completely at hand and totally ridiculous.

[910] I don't know if you're aware, if you're a car person, but in performance cars, they've reached this staggering level of performance at the highest end.

[911] They have an American car now called a Challenger Hellcat.

[912] I drove one when I was in Denver.

[913] It has 707 horsepower.

[914] It's fucking insane.

[915] And it is a run -of -the -mill, not run -of -the -mill, but it's a standard production car.

[916] You get it from a Chrysler dealership or you go to a Dodge dealership.

[917] You pick up an SRT Challenger.

[918] You drive it off the lot.

[919] You don't need to go to some flight school.

[920] You don't need to show any incredible proficiency with high performance engines.

[921] And they have cars now that regularly hit zero to 60 in less than three seconds.

[922] Less than three seconds, and they're going 60 miles an hour.

[923] That's insane.

[924] I mean, this is far faster than race cars of a couple of decades ago.

[925] And it's going to get faster and faster and faster.

[926] And eventually, we're all going to be driving.

[927] like Formula One race cars around.

[928] I mean, it's going to be that bizarre.

[929] And it exists in everything.

[930] We're seeing it now in internet speeds.

[931] We're seeing it in processor speeds and computers.

[932] When they eventually do go public with quantum computing, it's going to reach an entirely new level.

[933] I don't even understand quantum computing.

[934] I've read several articles on it.

[935] Tried to wrap my head around what the fuck it means.

[936] I don't get it.

[937] But apparently, in my crude understanding.

[938] of it is they're going to be able to create computers that aren't just 10 times stronger than the you know this MacBook I'm using but a million times or 10 million times or 100 million times where they have processing power that is literally unimaginable like we will get to a point again whether it's 100 years or 500 years from now we're going to get to a point where we are masters of the universe, where we literally become gods.

[939] We become an entity that has the ability to manipulate all matter all the time.

[940] And my issue with that is when this gets into the hands of everyday folks, we have a problem already in this country with guns, and the problem is mostly people with mental health.

[941] The gun problem in this country is not nearly as bad as people think it is.

[942] This is what I mean by that.

[943] There are 350 million people in this country.

[944] The amount of actual mass shootings we have is very rare when you consider how many people have guns.

[945] It's a mental health issue.

[946] But the issue is you're giving one individual who is mentally ill. They have the ability to get in control of this device, a gun, which can cause all sorts of incredible damage.

[947] What happens when it's not, you're not talking about a gun.

[948] You're talking about something that manipulates matter.

[949] You're talking about something that has the ability to radically transform the environment in some sort of a way that this responsibility can't be, it can't be over -emphasized.

[950] We could get to a point where an average human being has the ability to create worlds.

[951] The average human being has the ability to completely alter life as we know it for everyone else who exists on this planet.

[952] Whether that's 1 ,000 years from now, whether that's 500 years from now, if we keep going, these technologies will eventually get into the hands of regular people.

[953] How do we stop that?

[954] I mean, how do we stop, is the real question, do we concentrate on mental health?

[955] Do we concentrate on getting people to live in harmony and in peace before we create all these technologies?

[956] or do we sort of figure it out as we go along and have it catch up?

[957] Well, you know, that's a lot of question.

[958] No, no, but again, this is, you know, back to why I was trying to do the Transhumanist Party is that I'm trying to introduce these concepts into politics because, for example, I just was reading an article and they said, you know, the average kid can go spend $1 ,000 on eBay and create this kind of very professional microbiology lab in his bedroom where he could then launch potentially very dangerous diseases, if he knows what he's doing.

[959] And I thought that $1 ,000, you know, 20 years ago, that would have been $100 ,000.

[960] So no one would have had access to it, you know.

[961] And these are the kind of things where I don't think a lot of governmental agencies, politicians are actually thinking about, they're just saying, oh, we'll push that off to some other day because it's so crazy.

[962] But it's really not that crazy anymore.

[963] What's happening is more and more people are getting more and more access to power.

[964] And that's why hackers, for example, might be able to at some point in the future bring down entire systems if they're able to do that.

[965] So, you know, your questions on how do we stop that?

[966] Do we try to make everyone, you know, live in harmony?

[967] I'm not a big believer of that because to make them live in harmony is probably to, we've tried that for ages, you know, programs that make everyone live better.

[968] We're too competitive as a species.

[969] I think you need to use technology to not only advance the species, but sort of to protect the species.

[970] And this is difficult because I try to hold some libertarian values.

[971] And those values include not impeding technology or not impeding the right to use the things you want.

[972] But I think that technology can really help guide us if we use it.

[973] Like everyone talks about surveillance, for example, and how, you know, all of a sudden we live in this great surveillance world where everything we're doing is tracked and watched and there's all these cameras.

[974] But the reality is actually, if you look at it, a lot of the surveillance has made the world safer and better for our children, for ourselves.

[975] And yet we still, a lot of us have the freedoms that I think we all wanted.

[976] I mean, I still feel like a very free person almost all the time, not happy paying taxes, whatever, everyone else the same way.

[977] But the bottom line is we live in a pretty free world.

[978] And technology has made it safer at the same time without really compromising our freedoms.

[979] I think we can continue going down that path where we can use technology to continue to monitor people, monitor the kinds of things that make it very dangerous for an individual to get, you know, some type of power in his hands that we can remake universes or whatever, or just the microbiology lab where he creates a virus and then releases it into the water supply.

[980] I think we can use technology to stop that, but at the same time, I think we can use technology to grow the species as a whole.

[981] That's a very fine balance because we're probably going to have to give up some freedoms.

[982] We're probably going to have to accept that this idea of absolutely no government or this idea of too much government, you know, governments are going to have to change as technology grows.

[983] Technology is going to be leading governments from here on out.

[984] It's government's going to have to look to technology to find their solutions, not, oh, well, let's use technology.

[985] on occasion to solve this.

[986] Technology is in the driver's seat.

[987] And I don't think a lot of people realize that anymore.

[988] They think they're in the driver's seat or they think we can still control that all.

[989] But the reality is our life is so determined by the amount of structure that progress and technology has put in our lives, it's no escaping it anymore.

[990] And yet it's done very good things.

[991] So I think we need to continue with it and put more of our faith into it.

[992] And that might mean, you know, more regulation.

[993] more observance, more tracking.

[994] Eventually, we're all going to be interconnected with chips.

[995] So this idea of, you had mentioned early, you know, maybe in 10 years you'll all be able to read my thoughts.

[996] I have recently put on some of the head reading equipment and done a few articles on it.

[997] The brainwave reading stuff is fascinating.

[998] A Singularity University professor Jose Cordero, we were at the World Future Society in Florida a few months ago speaking together, and he said, Zolt, spoken language won't be here in 20 years.

[999] he said spoken language won't be here so i did an article on that and he said look brainwave he works at singularity university he's a professor there and brainwave technology is increasing so quickly in the last two years it's jumped in another two years it's going to jump in 10 years we're going to have the ability and you know just last year or i guess it's about eight months ago uh a man in a person in india and a person in france had the telepathy thoughts they were without saying a word to each other he said hello and the other one said chow and that's just the start in five years everything is going to can you explain that technology to folks sure so basically it uses this e gg technology which is a very complicated word to say but i'll just say it's that technology and essentially the brain creates certain types of waves when you have certain types of thoughts in various places of the body and various places of the brain and the head gear you have can read it And it knows based on algorithms based on a lot of repetitious practices.

[1000] If you're thinking like fly a helicopter, for example, the army is working in flying helicopters with using these brainwave headsets, it knows lift, it knows turn left, it knows turn right, based on the soldiers, you know, repeated like saying, okay, experimenting and saying, okay, this always means the same thing.

[1001] Right.

[1002] And they've put it so good together that they know when you say hello and they know when you say goodbye now.

[1003] And if you just can send that to another person and then it can stimulate that person the same way, it's able to, in a very basic level right now, tell that person that what you feel or what you actually said, except it comes through in that feeling and your thoughts.

[1004] And I'm not, I'm not a scientist, I'm not doing it very eloquently, but that's the basic structure of it.

[1005] And the idea is, eventually we'll have signals going in and signals coming out that ultimately can make us hear these things in our head.

[1006] You know, I mean, we're hearing stuff in our head right now, but we're doing through our senses.

[1007] but if we bypass the census and just go right to the neurons and stimulate them, it'd be the same thing.

[1008] And that's essentially what they're trying to do with that type of technology.

[1009] It's very primitive right now, but it's growing so fast.

[1010] And there's a huge amount of people that think the brainwave reading headsets will become the next iPhone technology, which is, you know, why do we need an iPhone when you can just wear this little device in your head and you're like, tell your, you know, tell your wife this or tell you, you know, I want to take out pizza here, or I want to reserve a flight.

[1011] you know, we're going to have Siri that's going to be much more improved in a few years.

[1012] And all these things will be digitally just done through your thoughts.

[1013] So, you know, this Singularity professor, who I totally believe, said, we probably won't be speaking to each other.

[1014] We'll be at a conference and everyone will be plugged in and you'll be thinking these things because it's a lot easier just to think it.

[1015] And, you know, is it that different than what we're doing right now with our headsets?

[1016] Like I said, the ears, the interface, but if you just go right to brainwaves and stimulate those places in the brain that know how to recognize it, we'll learn this new form of communication.

[1017] My article is based on whether we'll need second languages, because Google Translate already translates things instantaneously.

[1018] So, and I suffer through six years of Spanish, and I've been working on trying to teach my daughter Chinese and Spanish right now.

[1019] And my wife and her are like, yes, we must go through it.

[1020] But I said, well, do we really need to?

[1021] What if we all have headsets that do instant translations with anyone on the planet through our thoughts?

[1022] You know, and this is the kind of thinking where it's like, wow, that's real transhuman thinking because maybe all second languages will die out.

[1023] We'll just go to one language.

[1024] In my book, I talk about Lojbond, which is this, there's various types of languages out there that are better for communicating scientific ideas or logical ideas.

[1025] And they don't consider, you know, English has all sorts of imperfections in it.

[1026] And that's why it's sometimes difficult to learn.

[1027] And most languages have imperfections.

[1028] But a couple of scientists have worked on other forms of languages that are much more easier, for example, to program into a computer.

[1029] There's types of languages that a computer can process a lot more simply than, for example, English if you're trying to teach a computer a language.

[1030] And because, you know, there's feminist and masculine types of endings and things like that that can trick things if they're irregular.

[1031] but certain languages don't have any irregular things.

[1032] And so scientists have worked on these languages.

[1033] But the idea is that eventually we might arrive in 20 years at a perfect language that we'll all use.

[1034] Our communication will be a lot quicker, more expedient, simpler, and it'll all be done through brainwaves.

[1035] And, you know, the world will be a very different place.

[1036] I mean, think of it without just one single language just thinking about things.

[1037] So it'll be some sort of Tower of Babel -type shit.

[1038] We're going to have that inside of our head with some technologically created translation device that allows us to utilize this universal language that computers create.

[1039] I feel so dumb.

[1040] Just listening to this, my mouth is starting to unconsciously go slack.

[1041] I'm glazing over.

[1042] And I talk about it, but I don't know any of the ins and ounce of it because the kind of, you know, the question of like how technically do they do this, the scientists that are working on this have spent their entire lives on this.

[1043] And the other scientists that are trying to, look into it don't even know what they're doing and they're experts on it and then you have people like myself discussing it's it's amazing but you know it's true that it happened and that's i think the more important thing is that they're developing these things and especially these brainwave reading technologies there's now a number of companies that are selling it i'm sure at the local target and uh you know that's it's already here wow god that is so crazy it's just so hard to wrap the mind the potential of something like that.

[1044] Some sort of an ability, I mean, if you think about, like, what, originally what Morse code was, did -de -de -de -d -d -de -d -de -d -d -d -d -d -d -d -d - and now, you know, you send a text message.

[1045] And now you can talk on your phone and send a text message.

[1046] I have, you know, they have that Google Voice thing that you can, or, not Google Voice.

[1047] But you could use Google Voice does work, where you could ask, you know, Google questions.

[1048] but I have this application on my phone with the iPhone.

[1049] It's a notepad.

[1050] And when I have ideas, when I'm in my car, I just talk to the phone and it transcribes it.

[1051] And it's almost perfect, except for weird words that it doesn't understand.

[1052] Generally speaking, like if you said to it, concentrate on new technology that makes sure that people can see like Eagles.

[1053] It'll do that and make it perfect.

[1054] Have you ever messed with it?

[1055] no i haven't but i've i've seen it like watch this we'll do it right now because it's just it's just so crazy how good it's gotten like you just press this little button right here concentrate on new technology that allows people to see as well as eagles do bam perfect absolutely perfect absolutely perfect and i just talked like a normal person i talked like i would normally if i was trying to you know send a message to someone i was trying to communicate to someone and it takes it and it's doing it right now while I'm doing that.

[1056] Wow.

[1057] That's incredible.

[1058] You should type in the Google the mind wave reading post photos to Twitter.

[1059] You know, they now have devices where you can actually post directly to Twitter and Facebook by thinking it based on those devices I was just telling you about.

[1060] That's incredible.

[1061] My thought was the difference between Morse code, which they created a language.

[1062] they had to create a certain amount of sounds that mean an s a certain amount of sounds that mean a zero you know there's all these different or an oh rather there's all these different sounds that correspond with letters and then you had to piece that together and create a language out of it or create a word out of it now you're able to just say the word and it transcribes it but eventually if this technology comes to fruition and you'll have a thought and that thought will be transcribed to a universal language.

[1063] It's someone in India, someone in Zaire, someone in South America, anyone anywhere, no matter what they speak, will use this language.

[1064] And it's possible that there won't be any other languages other than this.

[1065] You know, like, we used to, cursive used to be standard.

[1066] I mean, I had alert it growing up.

[1067] My kids don't know it.

[1068] They don't know what it is.

[1069] My daughter's six, and they don't teach cursive anymore.

[1070] It's gone.

[1071] Yeah.

[1072] And they're going to, typing will be gone too.

[1073] Typing probably by the time my 11 -month -old gets to six, I'm wondering if they're going to even do typing because a lot of it will eventually just be what you said, verbally speaking or thinking.

[1074] You know, and it's all, it's amazing.

[1075] All these technologies that we thought were so breakthrough eventually get to a point when they're so obsolete and you think.

[1076] And then you try to tell a younger person what it was like and they just look at you like, I don't get it.

[1077] Why did you do that?

[1078] Do you have a voice navigation system on your car?

[1079] No, I just use everything on my iPhone.

[1080] For a transhumanist, I'm not very high tech with any of that side.

[1081] I just like talking about it.

[1082] No, but I don't actually have that much technology in my house.

[1083] In fact, we don't even have a television.

[1084] You don't have a television.

[1085] No, you know, we just...

[1086] How do you watch TV then?

[1087] We don't have TV.

[1088] We just, we watch DVDs and stuff like...

[1089] On what?

[1090] on a computer no we have a big giant screen we just don't we have no tv whatsoever not even local access oh i see so you have a big tv you just don't have cable or satellite yeah yeah so we just use the internet we just use the internet for everything and it's just kind of like it's funny because i think tv is one of those things were for 30 40 50 years it was such a mainstay and then all of a sudden you're trying to teach your kids and say well they hear it at school and they're like, well, we don't have it.

[1091] It's not nearly necessary anymore, you know.

[1092] And eventually, I'm not even sure a big giant screen TV will be necessary.

[1093] It might just be, well, I guess one thing that you carry around or an iPad or something like that.

[1094] I mean, it's constantly in flux.

[1095] And that's the great thing about it.

[1096] It's just constantly changing.

[1097] I mean, yeah, I wonder if, you know, if in five years you'll be using a laptop for what you're doing now, might just be using, probably be something more projected from a hologram or something like that from the ceiling.

[1098] Yeah, I've seen those, and I've seen the new watches that exist on like a little bit of a Fitbit thing, and it projects an image on your wrist, and you could touch it and play with it the same way that you would, like a touch screen on an actual phone.

[1099] I mean, this phone that I have now, I got this big iPhone.

[1100] I have an iPhone, and I also have this big Samsung Galaxy S5.

[1101] And with both of them, they're so big and so good that oftentimes I go on the road.

[1102] I don't use a laptop anymore.

[1103] I answer all my emails on this, on the Samsung, and it's just, it's plenty big for images.

[1104] It's plenty big for web surfing.

[1105] The only reason I even use a laptop is because the companies make it so none of their programs actually work with each other, and sometimes the laptop is the only way to make it, you know, with the software.

[1106] Like flash and stuff like that.

[1107] Yeah, and they do that purposely because they want you to buy as many gadgets as possible.

[1108] But, you know, eventually they'll, you know, I heard something like 30 years worth their technology now fits into an iPhone, you know, 30 years because you can watch movies on it, you can music on it, you can do all your, if you're in math class, you can do your calculators and stuff like that.

[1109] And television is now on an iPhone.

[1110] So that's how small it's gone.

[1111] But I bet in another 30 years, it's going to get to something you're going to size your thumbnail and inside your head.

[1112] And, you know, we'll have all this recording will be done with no equipment, just probably be big, giant tables.

[1113] Yeah, I remember my first computer.

[1114] I had some crappy Mac that I bought.

[1115] that I don't even think it had a one -gigabyte hard drive.

[1116] I mean, I don't think they existed back then.

[1117] I got a computer in 1994 from Comp USA, which doesn't even exist anymore.

[1118] And I think, I'm pretty sure it was less than one gigabyte.

[1119] And then I remember in the future, I ordered a computer that had a four -gibite hard drive.

[1120] And I'm like, this is fucking crazy, four gigabytes.

[1121] Now my phone is 128 gigabytes.

[1122] And it's this little tiny, narrow thing.

[1123] This has a case on it, and it's narrow.

[1124] And it just slides right into your pocket.

[1125] It's got 128 gigs.

[1126] You know, in this one, the Samsung has cards.

[1127] You slide in new ones.

[1128] You can stick in 64 gigs, 128 gigs.

[1129] You can just keep sticking in little tiny SD cards.

[1130] They're so small, and they're 128 gigs.

[1131] I mean, it doesn't even make sense anymore.

[1132] And, you know, with the cloud, the cloud is definitely where the future is.

[1133] it's it's it's not there's going to be no more gigabytes on our phones everything will just be interconnected we'll all have these floating big giant databases above us and uh i already um use the cloud for a lot of my stuff because uh i do a lot of videos and photos of the kids and it just adds up too much space on the actual phone and and and i realized that you know you could run programs you can just run entire computers in the cloud now just you know it's just all about the new programs coming out and the eventually everything will just be probably a hologram screen connected to somewhere way up there.

[1134] I mean, it's obviously metaphorical, but we'll be interconnected that way without actually even having much of a device.

[1135] So, yeah, it's, it's, and that's probably five years away, that what I'm speaking about.

[1136] I mean, I think the cloud is probably one of the most heavily invested things of gadget technology that they're trying to do right now.

[1137] And eventually we'll all be interconnected.

[1138] The story I just did on artificial hearts, you know, It's such an interesting story because they just did the second completely robotic artificial heart surgery on a patient in France.

[1139] And robotic hearts have been around for 10 or 15 years, or maybe even 20, but they were always a way to keep someone alive until they found a transplant heart.

[1140] But they're now starting to do robotic hearts that replace the real heart, and that's it.

[1141] That's the only heart that person's going to have for the rest of his life or her life.

[1142] It's so far been two guys.

[1143] And so we've, just in the last 12 months, we've crossed that with now robotic hearts are no longer just a temporary replacement.

[1144] They are the final replacement.

[1145] And they're all Wi -Fi.

[1146] And they all have Wi -Fi things about it.

[1147] And my article is like, if you want to be in a fight, you could pump up your heart, you know, with your cell phone.

[1148] For example, if you're in the ring, and then you could fight that much better if I'm a surfer in big waves.

[1149] Or if you want to meditate or sleep, you know, you could put it up.

[1150] the sleepboats, your heart goes slower.

[1151] You know, instead of, these are the ways you're going to be able to control the technology in your life.

[1152] And the interesting thing I found about the story I did was Dick Cheney, the former vice president, had this kind of little device that was attached to one of his, the valves and his heart.

[1153] And I don't know if you'd read, but he was actually afraid of terrorist attacks because that was Wi -Fi controlled as well.

[1154] That was an episode of Homeland.

[1155] Yeah, yeah.

[1156] You know, they used that kind of technology to hack into someone's heart.

[1157] So the technology is coming.

[1158] It's crazy, but they're going to start doing that.

[1159] And people are actually really worrying about that kind of stuff, too.

[1160] It's actually here today.

[1161] And so, you know, it's just a totally brave new world, but it's also pretty awesome because when you think of the possibilities of having a robotic heart and now you want to go, for example, you want to be a go free diving.

[1162] I like free diving.

[1163] And you want to go down as far as you can, maybe a couple hundred feet.

[1164] This is the kind of time you could program your heart to actually work with you.

[1165] Like I said, do you want to sleep or do yoga or even have sex?

[1166] You know, I mean, all of a sudden you could program your heart to be a different person than you might have been normally.

[1167] Well, that was one of the things in Transcendental Man, where they were talking about the potential using nanobots or artificial blood cells that you'd be able to hold your breath underwater for an hour.

[1168] Just, you know, just using these artificial blood cells that get created.

[1169] they just yeah this last year was one of the big things for that where they now have some kind of injection when for example someone has been drowned for 30 minutes and they can inject it into your blood supply it's one of the first things they're trying to put forth that they can now do in an accent like that but it works in the same way where it allows you to hold oxygen in your body a lot longer than you normally would have and so of course yeah you know one of my very first opening articles after the book was on the transhumanist Olympics And this is this idea that instead of having so many strict regulations regarding drug control and what technology you can use during real competition, why not make a competition where you anything goes, where weightlifters can use any types of enhancers and, you know, and athletes can use any type of technology than they get their hands on.

[1170] And, you know, it's crazy because, for example, if you did this thing with, you know, the oxygen cells, maybe all swim races will be underwater.

[1171] It's considered that, you know, all the sun you can, but no one can go underwater long enough.

[1172] That's why sometimes when you see backstrokers, they used to be a swimmer, they kick as far as they can underwater because they can go faster.

[1173] There's less resistance.

[1174] Problem is no one can hold their breath long enough.

[1175] Right.

[1176] And so all of a sudden, if you could do that, it could change the face of swimming.

[1177] And the same thing can happen with almost any sport that you think of, especially powerlifting when you actually need just a burst of energy.

[1178] Instead of lifting what they're lifting now, they might be able to live three or four times that with steroids that are just designed for it to give you 10 seconds of just pure rage.

[1179] But the problem with that is what we look for in competition, what we look for in sports is someone transcending the ability of the average person with discipline and focus and drive and will, that they work really hard and concentrate really hard on their technique.

[1180] And then they get to some point where they're a Michael Jordan or some, you know, Olympic power lifter.

[1181] If you could just program it in, what would be the point of watching it?

[1182] We would like eliminate a lot of the really magical moments in sport, because we're going to create a bunch of super athletes.

[1183] But on the other hand, if you don't do it, you know, my take on it is going to be that we're going to be able to manipulate biological bodies in a way where you're going to be able to literally create an incredible Hulk.

[1184] Like someone is going to be that.

[1185] And if we're watching athletes that are totally natural and have all these limitations but your mailman can jump over your fucking house like we're going to be bored with regular sports they're not going to have the ability but who's going to watch football if everybody's the Hulk you know i mean if if you have a team of 16 hulks on one side and 16 hulks on the other and it's all about moving a ball across a line me what kind of a fucking world are we going to be living in well and i think that's you know from just even a commercial perspective that's why I like the idea of having two separate types of sporting endeavors.

[1186] For example, you have the stuff we have now, because I totally agree with you.

[1187] I've been an athlete my whole life, did water polo through college and stuff like that.

[1188] The idea is, you're right, the whole point of it is that I work my butt off and I got, I was good at it, you know, but it's kind of cheating if someone gets to take a drug just because the scientist developed it and he had more money and you know, to do it.

[1189] And then they're better.

[1190] And that's why I think maybe two fields could be created like one transhumanist Olympics, one Olympics, uh, whatever it is sporting.

[1191] People would cheat that the regular people would pretend they're not transhumanists and they would cheat.

[1192] I mean, that's what you have in.

[1193] I mean, that was the big argument about Lance Armstrong.

[1194] Lance Armstrong got busted cheating and then they, they, you know, took away his tour de France wins.

[1195] But if you want to go back to the person that hasn't tested positive for drugs on the tour de France, you've got to go back to like 17th place because everybody was cheating.

[1196] So it gets to this point where like, is it cheating if everybody's cheating or is it just some unfortunate aspect of this competition that people don't admit what they need to do in order to be able to race like this?

[1197] Well, I think everything will, if you go the transhumanist competition route, everything will sort of become like race car competition where you have a really good driver, but then you have engineers behind him that make.

[1198] the vehicle so that he can get that far and and that's part of the cool thing is like you're like well he has this engineer from Porsche or whatever and they become sort of celebrities or you know in the transhumanist olympics world I think scientists would maybe become celebrities as much as or you know becomes popular figures because you would really say well ah he's the one who made this athlete and this athlete this athlete do all those records so it would be kind of different you know I think maybe even a different word should be used it wouldn't be sports anymore it might be something new Right.

[1199] Because it would be something so different.

[1200] You would be taking the coaches and the engineers and scientists behind that athlete to a whole other level.

[1201] Yeah, man. I don't know.

[1202] What would that be?

[1203] I mean, I think part of what we love about sports is the fact that we know it's so difficult to become a great athlete.

[1204] It involves, like, the dedication of, like, go back to the movie Rocky.

[1205] Like, one of the things that people loved about it was that he got up when he was tired, he hit that alarm clock, he drank the raw eggs, he went jogging.

[1206] You know, he was doing all these things that he didn't want to do to push his body to reach this level of fitness that allowed him to go and fight Apollo Creed, you know, a guy who really, you know, was out of his league.

[1207] He rose the occasion with hard will and heart and will and determination and hard work.

[1208] That's like what excites us about sports, is that we know it's hard to do.

[1209] If it becomes easy to do, I mean, if the average person can go to some transhumanism clinic and get a short, shot of nanobots and become, you know, some ultraman, some, some, some person that has capabilities far beyond the normal biological body.

[1210] We, you know, we might lose interest.

[1211] We might lose interest in.

[1212] No, you're right.

[1213] But, you know, the problem is what you said, and you nailed right in the head when you said, well, what, what are you going to do?

[1214] And the mailman is a better basketball player than Michael Jordan, just because he's on these, you know, he's taking these things.

[1215] or, you know, a 10 -year -old who puts on a certain exoskeleton suit just runs as faster than a horse.

[1216] And then, you know, it doesn't matter what if you're an Olympia sprinter.

[1217] I'm sorry, but aren't sports kind of silly in that sense?

[1218] I mean, we're concentrating on this thing that we talk about, this competition aspect of our lives.

[1219] But if we reach some incredible transcendent point in the physical abilities of people because of technology, does it really does the sport really matter anymore i mean it's kind of a silly thing to concentrate on about this being the one thing that we're going to lose like who gives a shit if that ball goes in that net you know like he made a basket woo -woo does it really change the world no or is it far more impressive that the average person no longer has the limitations that the biological body yeah no i mean i i i think to some extent probably well you know i guess one has to be careful I don't think sports will fade away because sports has become one of the greatest methods that people use to become great.

[1220] You know, that it's one of the inspiring events that we have as a species that brings us together.

[1221] And so it's hard to see that going away.

[1222] But I guess if everyone has access to this incredible technology, they may not be necessarily like so involved.

[1223] You know, right now, for example, the Super Bowl is one of America's big giant events.

[1224] I never, I don't really understand why it's that way.

[1225] but it's hard to see that changing anytime soon, even if we get really crazy access to technology.

[1226] Somehow that's become kind of part of our culture, this type of competitive, friendly competitive endeavors that we do.

[1227] The World Cup just came, and I remember that was like, when do you actually have so many people all thinking of the same thing?

[1228] Isn't like steroids and even supplements to that?

[1229] to a certain extent, aren't they essentially like low -level engineering of the human body?

[1230] I mean, it's like a low -level genetic engineering.

[1231] I mean, that's what you're doing when you're adding steroids.

[1232] You're adding a chemical to a system that forces that system perform in an exemplary matter that's really not possible without the steroids.

[1233] No, it's totally.

[1234] I think it's technology.

[1235] Yeah, and it's, they may say it's unnatural, but what is unnatural, I mean, in today's day and age, I mean.

[1236] Toothpace is unnatural.

[1237] Shit.

[1238] Everything's unnatural.

[1239] natural.

[1240] Well, I mean, everything, you're creating it.

[1241] It's true.

[1242] So, but from a, where the fuck did that come from?

[1243] Well, from a certain perspective, everything is kind of like, you know, if it comes from certain elements, it's, it's there.

[1244] It's natural.

[1245] Use it.

[1246] Use it if it's useful and functional.

[1247] Well, isn't everything that human beings create, in fact, natural because we are natural.

[1248] And we have, we have a built -in curiosity and a built -in thirst and hunger for innovation.

[1249] That is, I mean, how much different is that than a natural animal that forges for food?

[1250] I mean, that is what they do.

[1251] I mean, it is natural that they dig a hole in the ground and find the roots that they're looking for, the animals that they want to eat.

[1252] All these things are natural.

[1253] And that's why I, you know, I've been, everyone says, oh, you know, Zoltan, the transhumanism stuff you're doing is so unnatural.

[1254] And I say, actually, it's potentially the most natural thing that, you know, we have done.

[1255] Becoming robots might actually be an incredibly natural process for human beings one day.

[1256] And, you know, that's just, it's evolution.

[1257] so how can it not be a natural thing?

[1258] But, you know, just, it's all perception.

[1259] And if people want to twist it and say, oh, it's just too weird for me, it's not in any way that it's just too weird for them.

[1260] It's not in any, like, big statements saying that it's unnatural for us to transform ourselves, whether we're creating steroids, whether we're putting microchips inside our head, or whether we're just putting on an exoskeleton suit and climbing Mount Everest.

[1261] I mean, these are, they're always going to be natural things.

[1262] I wish people would see that technology more as a natural.

[1263] phenomenon rather than some type of like outside thing that comes in as an alien and that we're slowly started using you know I think if you had told someone a century ago hey we're all going to be interconnected on this cell phone and this on this internet we're going to be doing video conferencing across the oceans people would have looked at you and said he's not mental problems you know it's crazy and now everyone does it I mean I know they have cell phones in some of the poorest villages in Africa um it's incredible how far it's come and it there's nothing unnatural about it's it's in fact it's just amazing stuff that's going to keep getting more amazing that's the one thing that gives me the most hope about technology is that somehow or another it will raise up the level of uh the quality of life for people that live in poor areas and you're the the cell phone is a perfect example of that it used to be gordon gecko on the beach with that big ass brick phone in you know in wall street And that was like, wow, this guy's got access to a phone and he's walking on the beach.

[1264] This is super high tech.

[1265] And now, you know, I've been to Brazil and seen people in the favelas in these poor neighborhoods that have cell phones and have smartphones.

[1266] They have iPhones or Android phones.

[1267] And this is becoming more and more prevalent all throughout the world in Africa and all these different places.

[1268] I think the quality of life and as far as the access to health care, as far as the ability of.

[1269] to communicate with each other as far as the access to modern comforts.

[1270] That's the one thing that gives me the most hope about the exponential growth of technology is that I hope it elevates the quality of life for the people that are stuck in the lowest 1%, 5%, 10%, whatever it is in the world, that slowly that life will be a far better, far less suffering, far, far easier existence, and that they, in fact, with this technology, can concentrate on other things because the technology frees up a lot of resources and it'll allow them to raise up their quality of life raise up their education raise up their health care raise up their government like all of these things will in fact raise the we look at Africa as a perfect example we look at the Congo which is this incredibly rich area in terms of resources but incredibly poor in terms of the quality of life for the people that live there and if we could somehow or another raise that up where, like, the people that live in the Congo have the same quality of life as the people that live in the average American city.

[1271] You'd have a radically different world, a radically different world.

[1272] I mean, it would change everything.

[1273] Like, that could be one of the biggest changes that technology brings in the world, the elevation of the quality of life of the average person on the planet.

[1274] No, and I totally agree.

[1275] In fact, it's one of the big reasons I'm such a big proponent or promoter of the internet, because the one thing the internet is done.

[1276] I did a huge amount of reporting, I think 13 or 14, you know, Muslim or Middle Eastern countries for National Geographic.

[1277] I went to various places.

[1278] And the great thing about the internet is it's offered a sense of democracy.

[1279] And even though a lot of those places still don't really had it, this is why we had some of the uprisings, I think recently, is that you get enough people on the internet and they find out things.

[1280] They're like, wow, this is what some person is doing in Los Angeles.

[1281] Why don't we do that?

[1282] here.

[1283] And that's happened because there's computers or cell phones that are slowly appearing in these places that never had access to that.

[1284] It's inevitable to stay in your culture, especially if it's kind of some type of authoritarian culture, if you have access to that kind of information, because it makes you upset and you're going to revolt.

[1285] And that's brilliant.

[1286] That's why cell phones are so important.

[1287] And just even regarding the malaria thing we talked about earlier in the Solomon Islands, one of the reasons so many people die from malaria is they can't get access to the drugs.

[1288] But if you can call someone and have them a healthy person make the walk over the mountain, they can bring you the drugs.

[1289] But the problem is in the past, there's been no way to call.

[1290] There's no telephone lines, but cell phones have enabled that to happen.

[1291] Cell phones is one the main reasons that a lot of villages in Africa, I'm sorry, a lot of villages in Africa have cell phones for this reason, for literally medical reasons, so that people can come in and take out sick people when otherwise they have to walk days just to get into, you know, to get them to help.

[1292] And so, I mean, this kind of technology is literally changing the face of how especially poor people live and making them live better, longer.

[1293] And so that mortality rates are just, everything's getting better.

[1294] And I'm totally hopeful that tech, everyone says, oh, you know, big brother for technology or, you know, it's a new world order.

[1295] I have a lot of conspiracy theorists that always leave me threats.

[1296] But I keep saying that, you know.

[1297] They leave you threats?

[1298] Oh, they leave me threats because I'm, you know, now saying a lot of stuff, like I advocate for using microchips and people's heads and using technology as means to improve life.

[1299] But they think it's all part of the elite trying to control us.

[1300] And I always say them, but the fact is that all people around the world are getting more and more access to this technology, that's improving their lives.

[1301] You know, if that's what the elite do, I'm not saying there's elite behind anything, but if that's what they do, then that's a good thing.

[1302] because it's happened that way.

[1303] It's not an elite thing.

[1304] It just happens to be that it costs a lot of money to develop technology at first.

[1305] And it takes a few years to trickle down.

[1306] Maybe it takes a few decades.

[1307] But history has shown that most technology has trickled down from wherever it came from and that some of the poorest people in the world have access to a lot of the development that has come through the pipeline.

[1308] A few weeks ago, I debated John Zerzan.

[1309] And he's the leading philosopher of the anarcho, kind of capitalistic, well, he's a, he's basically an anti -civilization philosopher.

[1310] He really advocates for going back to an entirely primitive lifestyle.

[1311] And we had a debate at Stanford University.

[1312] And it went well, he's a nice guy.

[1313] But he represents kind of the anarchists.

[1314] And my book has some anarchist themes, so I can't completely disassociate my.

[1315] myself from some of the radical and revolutionary ideas that are there.

[1316] But at the same time, he advocates for things that would absolutely harm some of the poorest people in the world, harm basically everyone by giving up the things that have made us live longer and better.

[1317] When you actually, my wife is a doctor, so she's done a lot of work in Africa, when you take away technology and medicine and, you know, modern science from the people, especially the poorest people, they have a very hard time surviving.

[1318] They go right back to the way a lot of tribal people had lived for long times where people die from a cavity.

[1319] People die from the simplest of infections.

[1320] We now have ways to deal with all of that.

[1321] So lifespans are growing, growing, and not just growing in America.

[1322] They're growing all around the world.

[1323] They're growing Africa and they're getting better so what does this guy want what does he want to happen so um like a primitive way of life like yeah yeah so he advocates he says that all harm came from basically the development of technology and and kind of um basically when we lived in tribes and we were in very communal tribes we were much happier as human beings i've heard this shit so many times before it drives me bananas.

[1324] What's this dude's name?

[1325] John Zerzan.

[1326] Spell his last name?

[1327] Z -E -R -Z -A -N.

[1328] And we literally just had a big kind of public debate at Stanford University recently, and it went well, but it was a little bit crazy.

[1329] The anarchist outnumbered the transhumanist in the auditorium, like, four to one.

[1330] It was a little bit sketchy, actually.

[1331] They're the black block guys.

[1332] You know, the guys that go through the Oakland riots, or when you have riots, and they put on the black stuff, the black masks, and whatnot.

[1333] not.

[1334] Oh, you know, whenever you see like the, the world trade organization, the people that kind of go, those, they're called black block people.

[1335] They usually, they try to make themselves completely anonymous.

[1336] And anyways, there are some of those guys there.

[1337] And it was a little bit sketchy because it was, it was a pretty heated.

[1338] These guys think that all transhumanists are aiming to turn the world into robots.

[1339] So they actually feel quite angry.

[1340] They, they're like, you want to kill us by making us become different types of entities.

[1341] And transhumus say, well, you guys want to kill us by taking us back to a domestic, you know, into this kind of very primitive lifestyle.

[1342] Well, most of us couldn't survive because we'd all starve.

[1343] There's not enough hunter and gathering.

[1344] So they want to hunt?

[1345] Yes, they want to take us back essentially to a hunter and gatherer a lifestyle.

[1346] And that's, that's their platform?

[1347] Yes, that's 100 % of their platform.

[1348] The whole world?

[1349] Hunter and gatherer?

[1350] 100 % in the whole world.

[1351] Well, that doesn't work with seven billion people.

[1352] No, no, I know that.

[1353] And they, they know that too.

[1354] Yet they, they, they advocate in the same way that, like, some people advocate things that they're trying to make a point that technology has made human beings unhappy.

[1355] And our point is that technology has made human beings live better and longer and happier.

[1356] And so they advocate for that.

[1357] And it's a pretty big movement.

[1358] I mean, there's certainly a lot bigger than transhumans.

[1359] So all these guys, they hunt for their own food, they grow their own vegetables.

[1360] No, they're all hypocrites in that sense.

[1361] And because even, and this is not criticism of their and um there's really no way for for example for to even get uh mr zerzan to a debate he had to fly in from oregon he had to we you know we that's hilarious we use speakers you know i mean stuff like that he wears clothes but he has a watch so anyways john sirzan is the uh he's the he was the confident of the unabomber and that's why he he's kind of taken over the unabomber's position he knew the unabomber he knew he was he was a good friend of his who was there during the entire court proceedings.

[1362] Oh, fucking Christ.

[1363] So this is why I had a lot of threats because, you know, when you're debating him, you're sort of debating some of the ideas of the Unabomber who still has a large following.

[1364] Well, you know, the Unabomber, they screwed his mind up in the Harvard LSD studies.

[1365] I actually don't know that much about him.

[1366] Oh, my God.

[1367] He was a part of those original LSD studies, and I believe it was the 60s before they made LSD illegal.

[1368] And they fucking torch that guy's brain.

[1369] I mean, they, they, they, Harvard did a. bunch, a series of experiments on people with LSD and the results of those experiments are all classified.

[1370] But there's a documentary called The Net that went into great detail.

[1371] I believe it was a German documentary that talked about, but it's very public, it's public knowledge that he was involved in the Harvard LSD studies.

[1372] And it's very likely that they cooked his fucking brain with extraordinarily, extraordinarily large doses of LSD in these clinical settings.

[1373] And who knows what kind of fucking test they ran on these guys.

[1374] But he came out of that, went to Berkeley and made enough money essentially teaching just to be able to build this house, this little small cabin up in the woods, and start his plan to murder people who were involved in the creation of technology.

[1375] I mean, the fact that anybody could leave out that, just look only purely at his philosophy and leave out the fact that they cook this guy's brain on acid and who knows what kind of dosages.

[1376] I mean, if you go back to some of the studies they did in 1950s with soldiers and they did studies with housewives, there was varying doses.

[1377] Like, you know, they would give people a couple, you know, like what would be, you know, the average hit, what you would call a couple hits of acid.

[1378] I don't know what the actual dosage would be, but they would give them a hundred hits.

[1379] Oh, wow.

[1380] That's totally different.

[1381] They would cook their fucking brain with this stuff.

[1382] And this guy came out of those studies.

[1383] And there's a direct link.

[1384] There has to be.

[1385] I mean, there's a direct link to several people that have undergone large doses of LSD and severely diminished mental capacities afterwards.

[1386] Severely diminished abilities to rationalize reality to view the world through the same lens that they had before they took it.

[1387] It really can fuck people's head up.

[1388] And this guy was one of them.

[1389] So the fact that this Zerzan guy is a proponent of Kaczynski's ideas.

[1390] Yeah, I mean, if you look at the worst -case scenario, you know, the I -Robot scenario, the, you know, summoning the demon scenario, it's put, there is some potential that we could be doing something horribly bad by creating accelerating technology.

[1391] But if we don't, what are we doing?

[1392] We're limiting ourselves to being animals.

[1393] Well, let's throw away fucking weapons.

[1394] Let's kill things with our face like Jaguars do.

[1395] You know, you want to go super low tech because everything is technology.

[1396] No, he fucking stone axe is technology.

[1397] So he doesn't, it's funny enough, he doesn't even advocate for a lot of, he says domestic, John Zerzan, and he doesn't, so he was really good friends with Kaczynski for a while, and then they had a falling out.

[1398] And in the process, Zerzan has become kind of the leader of that movement since Kaczyki has been in prison.

[1399] Well, we're probably not representing his ideas accurately, but, but, but so Zerzan essentially, you know, I think he knows what he's advocating would kill billions of people.

[1400] However, I think, you know, his main message is that technology, because, for example, he blames, he says school shootings are a result, the increase of school shootings in America are a result of our discontent with technology.

[1401] And these are one of some of the things we debated about it at Stanford.

[1402] And I disagree.

[1403] I think there are anomalies in the system.

[1404] They're mental health issues.

[1405] Yeah, there are, exactly.

[1406] and mental health issues happen for a number of reasons and, you know, perhaps the most, you know, if everyone has, people with mental health have access to guns, it just goes wrong sometimes.

[1407] And then the media explodes it and, you know, but ultimately I think, you know, and a lot of people feel the same way that Zerzan's ideas are way out there and he's not taking in the whole picture, which is what I feel.

[1408] But at the same time, you know, he's in charge now, or at least he's written a number of books where a lot of people follow for potentially millions of anarchists around the world that are taking very serious issue with.

[1409] And so they have kind of, there are some of those same people that are now, I think they attacked recently a Google bus.

[1410] And there's been some other attacks, including physical attacks?

[1411] I'm not exactly sure what happened with the Google bus.

[1412] I think there was some physical attacks with it.

[1413] but they're basically, you know, it's combined with the Occupy movements.

[1414] It's all those sort of fringe groups are starting to say, well, there's too much surveillance, there's too much government, there's too much this, there's too much technology involved.

[1415] And of course, transhumanists are pitted sort of against it all saying, actually, technology is improving the lives of everyone.

[1416] And you guys couldn't even send your text or do arrange any of your movements without all this happening, without all this technology.

[1417] So what's happened is ever since that moment, I have been sort of under attack as the guy who went against Sarzan.

[1418] And we're probably going to actually have another public debate because him and I liked each other.

[1419] We were fine talking to each other.

[1420] Yet we represent totally extremes.

[1421] And he really does advocate going back to a truly hunter -gatherer life.

[1422] But he doesn't do that himself.

[1423] No, he doesn't hunt.

[1424] Well, I grow my own food.

[1425] vegetables I have chickens that I get eggs from and I hunt but I just don't think you can have it's not for everybody people don't want to my friend Steve Ronella who's the host of the show meat eater it's a hunting show he has a really great point he's like we've a lot a society has come up with all sorts of methods where we don't have to do everything we don't have to be responsible for eliminating our own waste for getting rid of our own garbage we don't to be responsible for digging a hole and burying it.

[1426] We don't have to be responsible for our own sewage system.

[1427] We don't have to do that anymore.

[1428] Society's figured out a way.

[1429] Like, there's nothing wrong with a supermarket.

[1430] His idea is that, yeah, there is a disconnect when you just pick up a piece of meat that's, you know, neatly wrapped in saran wrap and a little foam, you know, tray.

[1431] But that's a part of progress.

[1432] It's a part of civilization.

[1433] You can go back to hunting if you want.

[1434] It is an option.

[1435] But it's very difficult to do.

[1436] and most people are not going to do it.

[1437] And that's the reality.

[1438] I like it.

[1439] I like doing it.

[1440] It makes me feel connected to what I'm eating.

[1441] But you don't have to do it.

[1442] There's nothing wrong with going to the supermarket.

[1443] You know, and this idea that we need to go back to a hunter -gatherer lifestyle, this is a short -sighted idea because that life fucking sucked.

[1444] You know, people die.

[1445] They broke their legs and they were dead.

[1446] They got a cavity and they die from cavities.

[1447] I mean, it's just.

[1448] Infections, skin infections, dead.

[1449] You know, you had an open wound, dead, septic, dead.

[1450] you know no antibiotics no all that's technology it's i i find that incredibly short -sighted no and i am i have had the luck and one of the uh ways i actually even got involved in national geographic was i had visited a tribe in vanuatu on my sail trip um and i was the very first uh foreigner in this tribe in 1995 and they had never i think only two or three people had actually been off the hill or off the mountain there are a couple of mountains i to get through in this mountain range and been to the ocean and seen even a town.

[1451] So most of the people had never seen anyone outside of people in their village.

[1452] And so I was the very first one to actually get access into this.

[1453] And I went back later for National Geographic and filmed them.

[1454] But I have actually seen firsthand a truly indigenous and authentic tribe.

[1455] And almost about 40 % of the kids do not live until they're like 12th or 13.

[1456] year because they die from various things.

[1457] That's no way to run a society when you're losing almost half of your population, people you love, because of stupid things, snake bites, malaria, disease, you know, I mean, stuff that we can deal with.

[1458] Well, that's why primitive societies are so into fertility rituals.

[1459] They had an incredible infant mortality rate.

[1460] It was just ridiculous.

[1461] Yeah, no. I mean, so much death.

[1462] And it's not a place to be happy.

[1463] It's not a place.

[1464] It's, it's a, you know, I remember I've never been in that village.

[1465] I've been there a couple times, never been in that village when it wasn't in a state of morning.

[1466] It's always in a state of morning morning.

[1467] Their rights lay at last months.

[1468] It's, they're never going to be in a not state of morning because someone is always dying.

[1469] And when you have a society like that, it's incredibly difficult to come up with technological innovation because you're constantly worried about staying alive, feeding your family, fighting off the enemy, whether it's an animal or nature, whatever it is.

[1470] Yeah, no, totally.

[1471] And this is, it's like, you know, in our debate.

[1472] I talked about this, said, but this is what is so great about, you know, our society is that we have time, leisure time to dedicate to the things that matter to us.

[1473] For example, you know, you get a cavity, you can replace it with a fake tooth and there, look, now you can eat steak again, you know, as opposed to, well, you've lost all your teeth, now you're stuck eating shrubs or whatever it is.

[1474] You know what I mean?

[1475] Can't really eat shrubs.

[1476] Well, that's the worst thing you can eat.

[1477] Or whatever.

[1478] Chewing a shrub with your gum.

[1479] Yeah, I know what you're saying, though.

[1480] I know exactly what you're saying.

[1481] It's like, I think people, they fuck up with this either or thing.

[1482] They fuck up this black and white.

[1483] They go way too far.

[1484] It's not a black and white issue.

[1485] It's like, it is complex.

[1486] And we all have a limited amount of technology that we must use to exist in this world today.

[1487] Whether it's clothes, if you live in a cold environment, that is technology.

[1488] Whether it's a vehicle, a house, all these things.

[1489] These are human creations and human innovation.

[1490] A fucking house itself is a human creation.

[1491] And if you want to live in a house, then you want technology.

[1492] I mean, that's reality.

[1493] Do you not like insulation?

[1494] Well, guess what?

[1495] Insulation was created by humans.

[1496] What are you going to use a lighter?

[1497] Guess what that is?

[1498] Fuckface.

[1499] That's technology.

[1500] Right.

[1501] You're going to start all your fire with Flint?

[1502] Of course.

[1503] Because if you're not, you're a hypocrite.

[1504] Yeah.

[1505] No, of course.

[1506] And that's the problem with those perspectives, and they are taking the either or instead of saying, well, what is the middle ground?

[1507] And I think, you know, I guess it's important also that transhumanists take us.

[1508] step back and try to work with other groups and say, well, there are times, and I agreed with a few of his points, there are times that technology does alienate us or make us forget some of the better parts that we've just talked about, like, well, do we really want to live in a universe that's totally robotic?

[1509] Maybe it's boring.

[1510] So there are, we do need to keep some of the ridiculousness, as we discussed in our lives or some of the, the chaos.

[1511] But an advocation for going, or just to advocate going backwards to such an extreme, it was such a far -fetched idea.

[1512] But, you know, I think, like I said, it's a big movement and there's a lot of people that have gone down that path.

[1513] Well, there's nothing wrong with it for the individual that's involved in that movement.

[1514] If you want, look, there's plenty of area in Alaska.

[1515] If you so choose to go and get some land and build a house and live off the land and live a subsistence living, If that's for you, you can do that, man. You can do that.

[1516] You can live like that.

[1517] And there's a bunch of shows dedicated to the people that do it, you know, life below zero.

[1518] One of my favorite ones.

[1519] It's fine.

[1520] You can do that.

[1521] There's nothing wrong with that.

[1522] But to think that society has to do that, too.

[1523] Man, you're digging your heels in on a process that is impossible to slow down.

[1524] It's, yeah, the train left a long time.

[1525] There's no changing this.

[1526] I mean, this is what we're about now.

[1527] It's what we've been about since they invented metal.

[1528] You know, it's been a slow process that comes.

[1529] combustion engine, tires, roads, all of it is almost an unstoppable process.

[1530] 3D printing is fascinating to me. And that was one of the things I wanted to bring up when it came to Africa when you were talking about the ability to use cell phones, to get medicine.

[1531] I'm fascinated by the ability to actually produce things that produce things in, like things that are necessary for survival in these villages.

[1532] The ability to, instead of have goods shipped in, to produce.

[1533] them and ultimately maybe even possibly produce medicine if technology continues to improve to produce whatever nanobots that we're going to be able to inject into our bodies to have that a machine that makes those things so that you can literally fix people on the spot in any remote location with these these types of technologies i mean i think that's something that we we have to look forward to if eventually you can have uh something that fits in a backpack that you can take anywhere in the world that's controlled by some type of wireless signals and you could probe you're like you know what I need something for this person because they broke their leg and make it right there in the spot I mean imagine what it would do for huge spots of the population that are actually don't have access to that type and I mean you could create the malaria medicine right on there so I mean it absolutely stands to change the world and I think 3D printing is probably one of the most exciting things that have happened in this decade so far as far as things in the press and things that we're looking forward to.

[1534] And I think it has the possibility of totally transforming manufacturing itself.

[1535] There might come a time when everyone in their house has one and anything that you need, whether it's a lava lamp or a table or, I mean, you'll be able to create parts of it or create it and put it together and everything will come with plans.

[1536] Look at what we can do now with printers with photograph printers.

[1537] They can print these beautiful, high -resolution photographs from a cell phone.

[1538] You take your cell phone, I don't know how many fucking megapixels these things have now, but this new iPhone, the lens and the camera on them, it's beautiful.

[1539] So you take these incredibly rich pictures, and then you print them in this large photo and put it on a frame, and you would never know if you looked at that frame photo that that came off of a regular computer printer from a cell phone.

[1540] I mean, it's amazing.

[1541] and this is something that just didn't exist 10, 15, 20 years ago.

[1542] It's just the technology wasn't available 20 years ago.

[1543] 10 years ago, they looked like shit.

[1544] Today, they look amazing.

[1545] Totally.

[1546] And, you know, in the future, you're going to probably print them in your frame and put them right there on your desk and you're done.

[1547] You know, I mean, it's...

[1548] Well, it's going to be a hologram.

[1549] Yeah, you're right.

[1550] You know, it's going to already be that, which is crazy.

[1551] Have you seen this new technology that they're using?

[1552] What was that shit called?

[1553] with the little elephant in the guy's hand.

[1554] Oh, yeah.

[1555] That was with the one we did with Lewis from Unbox Therapy.

[1556] I'll find it.

[1557] Yeah, find it.

[1558] I don't know if you even know about this, but there's some incredible...

[1559] Is that Google that's working on that?

[1560] Yeah.

[1561] Some insane new technology that allows them to project 3D images that are moving with shadows on your hand.

[1562] Like what we had in Star Wars...

[1563] You haven't seen this?

[1564] No, I don't think so.

[1565] How dare you?

[1566] Magic Leap is what it's good.

[1567] Magic Leap.

[1568] Put this up, put this up so he can get a look at this.

[1569] But there's a website that shows some of the demos of what's going to be capable, what's going to be possible with this technology.

[1570] But it's unbelievable.

[1571] There's one that really gets me because I have daughters and there's a tiny ballerina dancing on this girl's bed.

[1572] I mean, look at this.

[1573] Oh, wow, that's brilliant.

[1574] Yeah.

[1575] There's this guy has this for folks listening to this, Magic Leap.

[1576] L -E -A -P is the name of this technology.

[1577] You can Google it.

[1578] This guy has his hands open, and there is a small elephant floating and dancing in his hands.

[1579] And they're going to be able to project things that aren't really there out in the world and have, you know, floating dragons.

[1580] I mean, they're going to be, like, there's a picture here we're looking out of these kids, looking at these beautiful seahorses that are floating above their desk in their classroom.

[1581] This one gets me. This little girl watching a ballerina dance on her bed.

[1582] I don't know what the projection mechanism is, what the technology is involved in, like, what, you know, is it, where does it come from?

[1583] I'm not sure.

[1584] But, God, it looks insane.

[1585] It looks incredible.

[1586] I mean, imagine all the billboards that are all going to be taken down.

[1587] You're just going to project stuff.

[1588] Yeah.

[1589] But that's going to just cause car crashes everywhere.

[1590] Exactly.

[1591] You know, I mean, is that a real elephant?

[1592] No, it's not an elephant.

[1593] It's fucking, it's that magic leap shit.

[1594] Yeah, I mean, there's a whole host of problems.

[1595] No, I mean, it will change the entire world of advertising.

[1596] It's just like, you know, the whole thing because you'll just be like, but then it'll change the entire thing.

[1597] I haven't seen that yet.

[1598] I'm surprised.

[1599] When did that come out?

[1600] It's pretty recent.

[1601] Yeah, this month.

[1602] Okay.

[1603] How dare you not be on the cutting edge.

[1604] You're the transhumanism guy.

[1605] Working too hard, I think.

[1606] I think so.

[1607] You got to get on the Twitter with the young kids today.

[1608] Well, we didn't find out about it, too, Lewis came on and explain it to us.

[1609] But it's, it's mind -blowing.

[1610] And this is, obviously, look.

[1611] look, you're pretty in tune with this stuff, and you weren't aware of this.

[1612] And, I mean, how many other technologies are on the verge of announcing that these guys have been working on for years and, you know, these folks are about to put out and just we're not, we're not aware of yet.

[1613] When that came out, I was like, oh, this is one of those leaps that I never saw coming.

[1614] You know, you're looking at that guy's hands.

[1615] If that's real, if that's a working model, and that's not a CGI representation of what they're actually going to be able to do, that's mind -blowing stuff.

[1616] Totally, totally.

[1617] I hope it's not like the hoverboard thing where, you know, they were, did you see the hoverboard commercial that came out?

[1618] Yes.

[1619] And it was like, it was like, oh, you know, but then it ended up not being real.

[1620] But then I think in the last few months, they actually did do one that was sort of real.

[1621] Sort of.

[1622] Yeah.

[1623] But it's, I'm a surfer and a skateboarder, so I look forward to that kind of thing.

[1624] It just sounds like, it's something I dreamt of, you know, when I was a young kid.

[1625] I think it's going to be like a combination of like that hoverboard technology along with those scooters.

[1626] What are those things called?

[1627] Those gyroscope scooters.

[1628] You know, I'm talking.

[1629] What are those goddamn thing?

[1630] Segways.

[1631] Yeah, those segways.

[1632] Have you ever ridden a segue?

[1633] No. They're amazing.

[1634] Kevin James, a good buddy of mine, and he was doing that movie, Paul Blart Mallcop, and, you know, in that movie, he's riding around in this silly segue, and he got one because of it.

[1635] He's like, dude, they are amazing.

[1636] And I was like, yeah, you're riding a scooter.

[1637] Is that really fun?

[1638] But I rode one.

[1639] I'm like, this is incredible.

[1640] You lean forward to make it go, and you lean back to make it stop.

[1641] you turn like you shift your weight to turn with it it's they're amazing i mean they're really amazing i know they they haven't like you can just rent them for a vacation you know vacation they're really fun man the problem is when they run out of batteries you're fucked because like george bush was on one it went out of batteries you went flying over the top of it because it's just stops and it just falls down so like when the batteries out like you fucking tilt forward and fall flat on your face because the gyroscope is somehow another balancing your weight out like as you're moving with this thing, it's sort of correcting, like, going back and forth with you.

[1642] And when it runs out of batteries, it just stops.

[1643] How long do they go?

[1644] Just a good question.

[1645] I don't know.

[1646] And how long can those Teslas go?

[1647] And they, even those things, I mean, those are amazing, but they're only good for like 300 miles on the highway.

[1648] Right, right.

[1649] Yeah.

[1650] The electric car thing is going to be, I mean, they're going to, don't they accelerate far quicker than, like a horsepower engine?

[1651] Not quicker, but comparable.

[1652] Like we're talking about horsepower wars.

[1653] Like these new Teslas, the Tesla Model D, I believe it's comparable to like a really high -end, like a sports car right now.

[1654] Like I think they're doing zero to 60 in under four seconds.

[1655] That ability with an electric car, and especially because I think they have four -wheel drives, there's not as much traction issues as they have with some two -wheel drive cars.

[1656] it's they're getting there you know and it's also they don't have gears the way like you have to go first gear second gear they just go you know because it doesn't have a combustion engine doesn't have to sort of regulate the power through a transmission the same way is a completely different kind of transmission so it's all it's all pretty amazing stuff so you know i used to race motorcycles growing up and i've been following a little bit of the electric motorcycle market too which is slowly developing i didn't even know about that but it's not nearly as complex and I don't know if anyone's making any money yet but they're of course trying to do the same types of things and they're trying to do the same types of things with all sorts of vehicles now including watercraft vehicles and boats and stuff like that and so the entire market it could literally change and you know one of the technologies i love most is the exoskeleton technology yeah because i have a feeling that within five years now i think panasonic is releasing its first exoskeleton commercially in the next few months, at least according to some articles I did.

[1657] And it's post -costs around $5 ,000.

[1658] I don't know how many are going to be available.

[1659] I'm not sure if it's even on schedule right now, but it was a few months ago.

[1660] And apparently you're going to be able to walk a little bit on and lift some very heavy stuff, but I'm assuming within five years you'll be able to run and play sports and think of some of the activity.

[1661] First off, it's going to change the way a lot of old, unfit, obese people handle their existence because either a lot of them can't go outside right now or a lot of them can't get to the, go from the bathroom to the refrigerator comfortably.

[1662] If you're wearing one of these things, it's going to be a lot easier for a lot of unfit people to move.

[1663] So that could revolutionize America, especially since we have so much obesity and diabetes and stuff like that.

[1664] But I'm pretty sure in five years you're going to see a lot more sporting events, like things like people running with it.

[1665] And that'll be, you know, you just look outside, people will be jogging in their exoskeleton suits.

[1666] And they're probably going to be very soon able to jog as quickly as maybe horses or even as one day.

[1667] They'll probably be able to outrun Cheetahs.

[1668] It's really just a matter of, of technology.

[1669] You know, fuck.

[1670] Don't Cheetahs go like 55, 60 miles an hour?

[1671] Something crazy like that?

[1672] Something crazy.

[1673] And that might be 20 years out.

[1674] But the thing is the great thing about the exoskeleton technology.

[1675] that it offers the ability for a lot of people to use it.

[1676] So, you know, some technologies, like only 10 % of the population would actually use it.

[1677] But exoskeleton technology will get a huge amount.

[1678] We'll become probably a, you know, a multi -billion dollar industry very quickly.

[1679] It already is, I think.

[1680] I wore one of the cruder ones.

[1681] I shouldn't say cruder, but it's a fairly prototypical model.

[1682] And there was a show that I did for sci -fi called Joe Rogan Questions Everything.

[1683] And one of them, we went to this place and I put this suit on and it kind of walks with you.

[1684] It kind of like makes your legs walk.

[1685] And for people, we had a guy who was paralyzed from the waist down and he used this and you could walk around with it.

[1686] But it's attached, a tether to this power pack and it's very large and bulky.

[1687] No, they're totally bulky still.

[1688] Yeah, but they're going to be smaller and smaller and the power supply is going to be smaller and smaller.

[1689] And as battery technology continues to evolve, that's when things are going to get stranger and stranger.

[1690] And Harvard right now is working on a soft one, like a soft exoskeleton suit.

[1691] And one of the reasons they're working on is for military people that are carrying these really heavy backpacks.

[1692] And it's not supposed to be something sort of like the steel one where it helps you to walk.

[1693] It's, I mean, it helps you to walk, but it's not supposed to be like you can lift stuff with it.

[1694] It's just supposed to help you go much further distances without getting tired.

[1695] So it's like adding 20, 30 % of your walking capacity to you.

[1696] And they're a prey, you know, I've seen already the test on them in Harvard.

[1697] And it's pretty brilliant.

[1698] Have you heard about this armor that Harvard, that hardens on impact?

[1699] It's the Harvard exoskeleton.

[1700] Oh, wow.

[1701] What are we seeing here?

[1702] I'm walking in it.

[1703] Yeah, this is the soft one.

[1704] Wow, that's incredible.

[1705] And this is the one I think that will really catch on because people are going to be a little bit afraid of the metal thing to get into.

[1706] But this is one that I think, you know, a lot of people say, hey, it's just like a dress.

[1707] It's an outfit.

[1708] It's a jogging outfit.

[1709] Yeah.

[1710] And some of the tests that they're doing with this stuff is super cute.

[1711] And so this makes you stronger and it can make you faster.

[1712] And you got a little fanny pack back there with some batteries on it.

[1713] Yeah, and that the battery packs are going to get smaller and smaller.

[1714] And that's so interesting as these people are working on this technology, the people that are working on battery technology will develop smaller and smaller batteries.

[1715] And it will get to a point where they all work together and just create.

[1716] these things that we just can't even wrap our hands around right now.

[1717] Yeah, well, I mean, I look for it.

[1718] Because I've been a motorcycle rider most of my life, I think the exoskeleton business is very similar to kind of like, you know, what motorcycle riding is to me. It's recreational.

[1719] So if you could put on an exoskeleton suit and go play different types of sports or go climbing, you know, and stuff like that, you might find yourself able to do things that you never would have done before and have, you know, more strength, and more endurance and stuff like that.

[1720] So I think an entire recreational, like, you know, enterprise is going to occur because of it where people start using exoskeleton technology in the same way that they would use recreational motorcycles or recreational boats where we now go do exoskeleton things together.

[1721] Right.

[1722] You know, we climb mountains.

[1723] We climb cliffs.

[1724] We never would have been able to climb just because we can lift ourselves and we have grip that we never would have had.

[1725] Let's play catch with a boulder.

[1726] Yeah, exactly.

[1727] You know, that's crazy stuff like that.

[1728] No, but I mean, it's pretty, it could change, I think, a lot of recreational things.

[1729] And I'm, you know, I think it's also, like I said, it's going to be so much money to be made in it that the technology is going to grow a lot quicker than perhaps other fields.

[1730] So I'm totally excited about it because, as I told my wife, I wrote one of my articles, I want one for Christmas.

[1731] I want the first one coming out.

[1732] They're pretty expensive, so I'm not.

[1733] Have you heard of this artificial skin that they've developed that's bulletproof that's made out of spider silk it's it's a it's an artificial skin that they believe they're going to be able to put on human beings it's going to make people bulletproof you know i've heard of the artificial skin i haven't heard the bulletproof there's an article on discovery dot com if you want to go if you want to google it for the folks who are listening to here bulletproof skin made from spider silk this is so crazy spiders are coming to the aid of burn victims this is one of the things that they've figured out a way to use spider silk and combine it in some sort of a way to create artificial skin.

[1734] And so this Dutch artist, along with forensic genomics, genomics consortium in the Netherlands, created a swatch, a swatch, right?

[1735] That's how you said, of nearly bulletproof skin made from spider silk and human skin cells.

[1736] The project takes its name from the maximum weight and velocity, a type 1 bulletproof.

[1737] A bulletproof vest can withstand from a 22 caliber long rifle bullet.

[1738] So this is the image that you're looking at it.

[1739] That's a bullet that's headed towards this piece of artificial skin that they've created.

[1740] And the idea is as this technology grows, you're eventually going to be able to replace human skin with artificial skin that's bulletproof.

[1741] What?

[1742] Oh, that's awesome.

[1743] That's another like, wow, look, now nothing happened to me. Yeah, you can - Oh, car accent, I didn't even get scratched.

[1744] Yeah, you'd be fine.

[1745] I mean, and it's going to come a point in time where we're going to see people removing their parts and changing, exchanging them.

[1746] You can see the impact of this.

[1747] Watch, show this again, Jamie.

[1748] You can see the impact of this.

[1749] It's so great.

[1750] This is a new scientist of this bullet hitting this spider silk skin.

[1751] And look, it just bounces it out.

[1752] I mean, you see the impact of the bullet, but it doesn't break.

[1753] the skin, which is just fucking insane.

[1754] I mean, it's an artificial skin that you're going to be able to replace your skin with someday.

[1755] I can't, I can't imagine.

[1756] I mean, I literally can't imagine.

[1757] I mean, it's hitting it.

[1758] You're still going to have to deal with the impact of the bullet.

[1759] When there was that other stuff that I was talking about, this armor that they've created for motorcycle riders that hardens on impact.

[1760] You can mush it in your hand.

[1761] It's pliable.

[1762] until it receives an impact and they do a demo with it where they have a hammer and they're playing with it and towing it and mushing it and then he hits it with a hammer and it's hard as a rock.

[1763] So you could have this armor on, fall off your motorcycle, and it protects you, like as if you're covered in an incredibly hard like polymer shell or something like that.

[1764] That sounds similar.

[1765] They, you know, they now have the bicycle helmets that inflate when you fall.

[1766] It knows through a balance and that you can, like if you're going to fall and there's going to be an impact it inflates like very instantaneous sort of like an airbag so that you can you wear it around your collar and it's just like something right here and it's go oh so it protects your neck yeah and i felt like um one of my articles i mentioned it because i thought with um aerial skiing where they're doing like four or five jumps if you know you're going to blow it it could just you know right at the last moment a full body thing it's you know this kind of technology that kind of like blow up stuff could protect us from a lot of things you know in the the future i suppose we could wear suits that protect us from our own idiocy yeah well i mean what if the entire you know i don't know if it would work for something like airplanes or something but eventually we want to get to that point when we are invincible really nothing we can do can harm us and uh that that's going to be great i'm that's why i said this this stuff jane you're showing on the screen this is this uh this is this impact stuff so see you see this guy's moving it around but now watch when he hits it with this hammer nothing wow just it's just showing how pliable it is.

[1767] Yeah.

[1768] I don't think that's the same stuff.

[1769] I don't know if that's the same one.

[1770] The one that I saw when he hits it, it's harder to rock.

[1771] But I mean, it might be just a different kind of impact -resistant.

[1772] Because that, like, it gave in a little bit.

[1773] The stuff that I saw, he hit it with a hammer and it just like, dunk.

[1774] Like, he was playing with it.

[1775] It was pliable.

[1776] And then when you hit it with a hammer, it's just hard.

[1777] Bang.

[1778] You know, there's just a million things coming, for sure.

[1779] A million.

[1780] Totally.

[1781] And it's great, because it's just going to make us all safer without, and make us, you know, we're going to be able to do crazier things.

[1782] I think that's one of the things I've loved seeing about, and you've seen this in sports in the last 10, 20 years.

[1783] They're doing stuff when we were kids like bicycle riding, you know, I can't believe they're doing double, triple stuff, flips and stuff.

[1784] And, you know, even in surfing, the stuff they're doing, the waves they're riding now, you would have thought would have just killed everyone, but they do it.

[1785] And, you know, that's one of the great things about a lot of the technologies.

[1786] It just allows us to do new things we never thought possible and push ourselves to new limits.

[1787] And I think the future is probably a lot bigger than the past has been.

[1788] So there's going to be a lot more craziness that we all see in full.

[1789] I think every day there's so many companies working on the weirdest stuff.

[1790] Yeah, I agree.

[1791] I think we could probably do another podcast in six months and everything we're talking about today will be obsolete.

[1792] You know, there'd probably be some new stuff six months down the line.

[1793] And that's a big part of what exponential growth is about, right?

[1794] It's like the growth happens so quickly that as time goes on, it happens quickly.

[1795] quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker.

[1796] Yeah, until it's just, you know, and then you say six months.

[1797] It could be three months the time after and then one and a half.

[1798] Of course, that's pretty quick, but eventually it will be like that.

[1799] Eventually it'll just be the spike is straight up.

[1800] And, you know, I'm not, it's hard, it seems almost impossible to think like that.

[1801] But when you actually look at the modeling, it actually is like that.

[1802] There are huge amounts of new companies working on stuff every day.

[1803] They get an idea, they think something else, they get funding and they just, you know.

[1804] it's crazy where are we living man yeah it's it is crazy and it's getting crazier totally and changing rapidly and and uh becoming more brilliant i think as as the as the days go by i agree listen this has been a fascinating conversation i really appreciate you coming on the podcast um uh if people want to reach you on twitter it's zoltan underscore istvon i s t van uh website um it's uh well there's two of There's a transhumanist party .org, and then there's, you can either go to Zoltanishtvan .com.

[1805] And your book, the novel?

[1806] My novel is the Transhumanist Wager, and you can get it on Amazon.

[1807] The Kindle's only 99 cents right now.

[1808] There's a special, and then there's also a paperback copy if your readers want to get it.

[1809] Beautiful.

[1810] Listen, thank you very much.

[1811] I really appreciate you coming on.

[1812] It was really fascinating conversation.

[1813] Let's do it again.

[1814] Absolutely.

[1815] Thanks so much.

[1816] It was fascinating.

[1817] Let's do it again six months when the world's gone to come even crazier.

[1818] Absolutely.

[1819] Thank you.

[1820] Appreciate it, man. Thank you very much.

[1821] All right, folks.

[1822] We'll see you soon.

[1823] Bye.

[1824] Big kiss.