#2047 - Brian Muraresku

it seems like your work is getting out there, but it seems like the people that are involved in the day-to-day, the people that are giving tours, they don't really know.

All the pieces, it's like, oh, duh. If you found a murder weapon in the house where someone was suspected of being a murderer, you'd go, oh, that's probably what happened. If you find vessels that contain psychedelic compounds in an area where people experience these profound rituals, well, they're probably doing drugs, man.

And the site archaeologist, her name is Papi Papangeli, who was on site when I first was interviewing her for the book. back in 2018, I got to see her again for the first time in five years. And she's probably spent more time at Eleusis than any human being living or dead. Wow. Because she spent like 40 years basically maintaining the site, and so she used to commute from Athens, from her home, to Eleusis every day for like close to 40 years.

So she's done that pilgrimage more than any person living or dead throughout recorded history. Wow. And when she finally saw the evidence, so I gave, like a PowerPoint of the things that I talked about here, a couple of years ago, all the evidence from the book about these ritual vessels that were discovered in the 1990s in Spain, and they show pretty clear evidence of ergot inside, like a tiny beer chalice. So something like an ergotized beer, which was the thing that was hypothesized back in the 1970s as the elusive mystery to these great mysteries. And so I showed her all the evidence, did my PowerPoint, and Papi was thoroughly unconvinced that psychedelics had anything to do with the mysteries in Eleusis.

So it's undeniable that ancient Greeks were at this ancient colony as far back as like 575 B.C., by the way. That's when they established the colony. And so you have like 400 years from the establishment of this colony, until you see this Hellenistic period where people who were influenced by the Greeks were then reinterpreting what seems to be their idea of the mysteries in honor of Demeter and Persephone, the two goddesses who were worshipped back in Greece, at Eleusis. So that all lines up. And you see images of what could be like an incense burner that looks like Demeter and Persephone, and you find these vases that look like they belong in Athens, showing Dionysus and this drunken parade.

And you see what the most interesting to me was this kalathos that shows Tryptolimus. And Tryptolimus was kind of like the missionary of the ancient mysteries. And you see images of him in the museum at Eleusis, and they found a near-identical image of him not too far from this site in Spain. So all the pieces kind of fit together, but I think that, you know, I can't speak for Poppy, but maybe she sees it as sort of like a renegade group, something that that was. Because, you know, again, to celebrate the mysteries outside the temple, outside Demeter's temple at Eleusis, was a sacrilege.

We have to keep that in mind. It doesn't mean that people weren't trying to recreate what was happening there. And there's this famous incident in Athens in 414 B.C. called the Profanation of the Mysteries, where we know that some people at least were trying to recreate what they thought was happening in the temple at home, in private dining rooms. So if that was happening and the mystery was spilling out of this temple, it stands to reason that something was happening in Spain, maybe in southern Italy.

I spent a lot of time looking there, too, or maybe across North Africa or the Near East. So, like, I think it's very possible. I think what she's looking for is evidence in Greece, at Eleusis or thereabouts, which is why I've been spending so much time there over the past couple of years.

rituals and, you know, these psychedelic ceremonies that people do in other countries when they go to the jungle, there's so much fanfare and there's so much behind it. There's a lot of secrets. Like, people contain these secrets. They talk about these things that they're about to embark on and they're in control of this experience. for these people.

Like, they're not going to tell you the exact recipe, how they do it. You know, most of them kind of keep that secret. They brew it, they bring it to you. There's always been, like, someone who holds, like, secret information. And it kind of makes sense.

And you see the exact same thing in America. You see these little psychedelic ceremonies that people do outside of the jungle. You know, and they've brought ayahuasca back and now they get a group of people together in the living room and they burn candles and trip balls together.

And you can't think about, like, the classical Golden Age of Athens in the 5th century BC. And you can't think about what happened to it thereafter, because power changes hands, right? To the Romans in 146 BC. And then, you know, it goes into the Byzantine Empire in the 5th century AD. And then it goes to the Ottomans after that.

So, like, there's always been this transfer of power, and these sites experience different levels of participation and ritual and mystery. So, when you look at Eleusis, you know, as old as it could be, going back, you know, probably to 1500 BC, in the classical period it was always changing. So, when you talk about secrets, you talk about potions and sacraments, I think they were always, always changing throughout time. And so, maybe the secret recipe in the 5th century BC was different from what it looked like a thousand years before that and a thousand years since. And so, what we do know is that Dionysus, who's this other god of ritual madness and ecstasy in the theater.

Remember, we went to the theater of Dionysus? You know, he sneaks into the mysteries at some point. And I think what you begin to see is this, like, this urge towards what some scholars call private, spontaneous, pagan piety. Which means that, aside from these centralized temples, like the Temple of Demeter, it sits at Eleusis, and that's where these rites happen, and it's an utter profanation to celebrate them outside. What you see, with Dionysus coming into these mysteries, is this urge towards the celebration of ritual and ceremony outside the temples, privately and spontaneously.

So, like, the churches, the temples of Dionysus were sort of outside. They were always celebrated in the forests and the mountains and at the southern slope of the Acropolis, which is interesting, and urban centers, too. But I think over time, you begin to see, like, this thirst to celebrate these mysteries outside the temples, which is why the evidence in Spain makes so much sense to me.

I studied Sanskrit.

Our successors.

But I know that gives you some sort of strange high. It really does. Like, when you leave there, like, it's not a coincidence that yoga people are all flaky and super peaceful. It does something for you that just puts you in a very relaxed and unique state. But Kundalini, as practiced by several people that I know, I've just never done it, is supposedly you can reach states that are very similar to being on psychedelic drugs.

Yeah. In terms of, like, absolute visions, geometric patterns that are flowing around you. But you're not supposed to concentrate on that, which is interesting. At least according to one of my friends who took it, his instructor was saying that you're getting distracted trying to have these experiences.

Yeah. And that's the dangerous part of any spiritual discipline. It's the dangerous part of psychedelics, for sure. Yeah. Because you get this dramatic insight into the nature of yourself and maybe the underlying structure of the cosmos, and all of a sudden you think you're all-knowing.

Right. And maybe all-powerful.

Speaking of more Sanskrit, so preta are these hungry ghosts who are constantly hungry, constantly thirsty, and no matter how much they feed or try and satiate themselves, it's never enough. And so it's sort of this metaphor for the Western mind and consumerism and extraction. And wouldn't it be a shame if we approached psychedelics, yoga, all these spiritual disciplines with that sort of – that broken Western mentality trying to figure out what this can do for me.

And that you're thinking about yourself. and you're thinking of yourself and it's just wasted energy. Wasted. And that instead you should be thinking about the things you're doing and how you're interacting with the world. And also your ego is just bullshit.

It's just some leftover chimp shit that's designed to keep us alive. It's designed to make sure that you procreate, make sure that you think very highly of yourself. So you want to procreate.

But still know nothing. As much as you know, the smartest person alive knows basically nothing about the nature of the universe. You might know things on a molecular level, on a cosmic level. You understand how galaxies are formed. That's cute.

But you really fucking don't know shit. You don't know shit. You haven't seen shit. There's too much out there. It's just too big.

And I think it was forever when we didn't have light pollution. It was the overwhelming evidence that you're not shit. If you thought very highly of yourself and you lay on your back and looked up in the cosmos, at best, you could think that you were sent down from God to do his bidding. But you didn't think you were anything greater than that. You couldn't.

There's too much evidence. The sky is just filled with these fucking enormous nuclear explosions that are happening all over the cosmos. It's impossible to even wrap your mind. I mean, back then they had no real knowledge of the scope of it all. But it's pretty obvious that it's insane.

I mean, the night skies, I'm sure. Have you seen the night sky in a place where there's absolutely no light?

And when we first drove up there, I was really bummed out because it was so cloudy. I was like, God, this sucks. We're not going to be able to see anything. But then, when we went through the clouds to where the observatory is, there's nothing. It's just stars.

And you get out and you're like, oh, my God. It's like being on a spaceship. It's like you're in a convertible spaceship and you're hurling through the galaxy. Because what they've done on the Big Island is pretty profound. They put these lights.

The street lights are a type of light that doesn't expand outward. What are those lights called, Jamie? You're a photographer. Diffused. That's right.

Thank you. Diffused lighting. So diffused lighting all throughout the Big Island. So it doesn't fuck with the light pollution issue that you get when you're trying to look at the real sky. So, even though there is light from these streets and all that, it doesn't affect it.

When you're way up there, it's a couple hours drive from the shore. And you get up there, and it's just the one time that I went there. And this is, I guess this is about 20 years ago. The one time I went there, it was just like, oh, my God. Just, oh, my God.

Like you can't believe it. You can't believe it. It's so much. And it really made me sad because it was like that's what people used to see every night. That's what people used to see every night before these jackasses invented electricity.

Edison, you motherfucker. What have you done? What have you done? We don't think of it as anything like that, because we just, electricity is amazing. You can go out at night.

You can go to dinner. You can fucking drive your Tesla. Electricity is amazing. But it has made us so ignorant to our place in the cosmos. And it's taken away.

so much wonder. Because when the sky is just totally dark, you look up and you see a star, you know, way over there. Oh, look, the moon. I can see the moon. You just get used to it.

It's just you don't see enough. You don't see enough. And then, when you actually do, you're like, oh, now, I know. Well, you know, why would they, when people are starving to death and just struggling, hunting and gathering, why would they be concentrating on constellations? Of course they would.

And then, when you think about what comes before us, I know you think about this a lot.

And it got me thinking about all these archaic hominins. And one of them is is Homo erectus, which I'm like, I don't know why I'm so fascinated by erectus, of all the of all the hominins. But, you know, it goes back at least probably two million years, which is something to think about. Homo habilis comes before erectus. That could be like two point eight million years.

And so erectus probably sheds the body hair of habilis. It's bipedal, obviously. And they probably discover fire. And so what that means. And by the way, they go off and explore the planet, which is crazy for a being that old.

I mean, they were potentially the first seafarers. Really? The first seafaring hominins.

They were heading. I mean, we have erectus remains from Africa to Europe, to Asia. So they I mean, they were. they were on the move, you know, over a million years ago. And the thing about fire.

Why mention that? The thing about fire is that if they, whether or not they were cooking their food, they had fire for warmth and light at night. But it didn't obscure the night sky. And so it's interesting to think about whether erectus sat around their campfires a million years ago and told stories. The first stories about the night sky.

What do you do at night? Right. You know, which. again, we're so just. we're not just distracted by light pollution.

We're distracted by a million things when the sun sets. And that's again, that's relatively recently. I mean, even in the Middle Ages, there was, there was nothing to do. Yeah. And so.

but think about a million years ago. And so it's possible that around these primordial fires, the very first stories, storytelling would have emerged around these, around the constellations.

What was that about? You do see chimps occasionally walking on their hind legs and you see gorillas doing as well.

So they could. they could wear out potential prey. So there's an. there's an adaptive. there's at least one adaptive advantage.

So it has the speed to evade something that runs insanely fast. So these little fuckers can go like 60 miles an hour. Damn. They're amazing. I only saw one for the first time this year on, like actually in the wild.

It really is. It's just a remnant of the past. It lived with all the other megafauna that went extinct about. you know whatever was it 15,000 years ago.

Like coyotes and mountain lions like you can't catch them. They're too fast.

The babies get hammered by coyotes. Hmm. And it's it's hard for them to to compete. You know it's just when your calves and your, your, your. you know your fawns are getting slaughtered.

There's not a lot your species can do. Hmm. You know that that that becomes an issue in areas that have a lot of predators. You know that becomes an issue in areas that have a lot of bears. and areas like areas that have a lot of bear, like the moose population, just gets hammered because the babies never make it.

Like in most places. I think in one of the places in Alberta it's more than I think it's somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 percent of all baby deer and moose just get eaten by bears.

They're doing the exact same thing they've been doing forever, and it's things chasing after things and things trying not to get eaten. And that's every day. That's all it is. That's all it is. And then, when things die, there's, you know, raptors come in and and vultures come in and all these scavengers come in, and that's their job.

Do you see where it is? It's at the like number 16 there.

I could have a good beat to it. What year is Homo naledi?

That's what I want to show you. This is, this is where it was discovered. So you see the rising star cave system there in South Africa. It was found in this, in this cavernous underground labyrinth of networks, where Lee found a number of different bodies. That had been apparently left there by this species, Homo naledi.

And the reason that's interesting is because, again, Homo sapiens, to our knowledge, are the only species to have ever intentionally buried their dead. So you see things like. you see grief and mourning practices in the animal. We talked about the animal world like when they, when they just die. They're left to rot typically.

Although you see, you see mourning practices and incitations, and you see it in elephants and maybe chimpanzees. But no one buries their dead. So that was the big bright line that no species had ever crossed, seemingly aside from Homo sapiens. Although there's also evidence for for Neanderthal burial, which goes back potentially a very long time, like over 400,000 years. There's a site in Spain called Cima de los Huesos.

But Neanderthals very close to us as well. You know, we have Neanderthal DNA, like in our own genetic makeup. They're kind of cousins. So that that wasn't really too shocking. The fact that there could be Neanderthal burial.

But the fact that something that looks like that and is potentially, you know, at least 300,000 years ago, but morphologically it's archaic. Kind of like we're talking about erectus. Like it's. it's really archaic looking Homo naledi. It's short.

It's about 4'8 to 5'2.. It's slender and skinny. But there are features on it that look again like archaic, like it could be at least a million years old, for example, or longer. So it's strange that a being that archaic finds its way into this, into this cave system, and and deliberately deposits the dead. So that was like a very controversial idea.

It was so controversial that, like Lee, didn't know what the what the bones were doing there, because it just didn't make sense. And, by the way, like it's, it's become the richest site for hominid discovery on the continent and maybe maybe anywhere, because of because of the profusion of bones. They found like 1,500 different bones. I think it's close to 2,000 now, which is really really strange in paleoanthropology. So Lee was digging another site called Gladys Vale, not too far from this, for years, years.

And typically what you find are animals. You find tens or hundreds of thousands of animal bone fragments and a very small percentage of hominids. So, for example, at that site in Gladys Vale, he found a tooth and a pinky bone. over the course of like many, many years, which is not unusual. He comes to this rising star cave system and all of a sudden there's 1,500 bone fragments.

They're able to assemble what they think is like 15 different individuals. So 15 individuals, specific homo naledi, are being deposited in that denelady chamber, and they don't know why. And so they begin to to look more into it. I want to show you how difficult it is to get in there, by the way, and why it was so difficult to to believe at first. If you look at the the cave chamber there, it was just up up there before it's on the next one, maybe.

Yeah, it's really. it's really hard to access. that you can see. So you enter at the top there and this is what homo naledi was doing, potentially 300,000 years ago. They found this cave system.

They would descend there on the left, go down into what's called Superman's Crawl, which is just 10 inches high. So they had to go on their bellies potentially.

The chute is like seven or eight inches wide. Seven or eight inches. And it goes down like 40 feet from the top of Dragon's Back to Denelady. And inside Denelady is where they found at least 15 bodies.

You've got to see the documentary. It's on Netflix. It's called Cave of Bones. If you look up unknown colon cave of bones, you'll find an awesome documentary that charts the discovery and what they call the underground astronauts who managed to get their way through Superman's Crawl and Dragon's Back and actually managed to get into the Denelady chamber. It's so captivating how they discovered and then route through these bones.

And so, okay, there's a bunch of bones in there. It's so strange that it doesn't make sense at first. So the working hypotheses are that it was some kind of accident or it was animal predation. Okay, animals killed these Homo Naledi and animals drug them through that chamber complex into Denelady. That was one.

Or maybe there was a flash flood, or maybe something happened, or it wasn't like an excursion party gone bad. A bunch of people spelunking and they got trapped in there. But it turns out that that's not the case. It's not only not the case, it seems like they were intentionally buried in these holes. And so they found pits which looked like graves.

And, again, against all expectations, because only sapiens, and maybe Neanderthal, does this, this archaic being is deliberately disposing of their dead in ritual fashion inside this chamber, which is super difficult to access in the first place. It would take you, like, at least 30 or 40 minutes to make your way through the surface.

And, like professional spelunkers, for example. It was that dangerous to access.

Some passage from light into darkness and sort of like the passage into the underworld, into death itself. And this has so many resonances with Eleusis, by the way, and everything that we saw there in these ancient mystery complexes. Again, this notion of spelunking into the underworld and meeting the gods and goddesses of death and really confronting death and mortality in a powerful way. Like it's happening in a different species 300,000 years ago. So what else are they bringing into these caves?

It gets crazier. The documentary is fantastic. What they also find is fire. And so I mentioned that Homo erectus probably had fire. So that's not entirely surprising, but they figured out a way, this species, figured out a way to illuminate the pet, which is pitch dark, obviously.

And so they figured out a way to light fires along the way. We think at least for light, but they were also cooking down there.

I think they found antelope or springbuck, these tiny bones that were cooked in this fire. So they were manipulating fire, at least having some sort of like, I don't know if it's a funerary meal or something that could have been related to this ritual complex. So they're controlling fire. They're dragging bodies into this pit over different generations, potentially, which makes you think about the possibility of language and how this ritual is communicated from one generation to another. And the craziest thing is that they also found, just last year when Lee finally made his way into the Denelady chamber, in the antechamber before that, they found scratch markings, which I think there's some pictures in that file, Jim.

They found like hash markings, just like, so there you go. So the one on the right is Nelady. That could be 300,000 years old. The one on the left is Neanderthal. And you can see like the crazy similarity.

They took a rock and they just etched it into these cave walls. Homo sapiens does the same thing in Blombos cave, not too far away in South Africa. That's 80,000 years old. That's only 80,000 years old? That's as old as we get in South Africa, Homo sapiens.

That's 80,000 years old. So Nelady's doing something that looks to the untrained eye, very similar, potentially 300,000 years ago.

And this is pure speculation. But if they did come into contact with another, because we know we have this relationship with Neanderthal. We interbred with Neanderthal. We have no idea what our relationship with Homo nelady was like. Did we interbreed?

Did we exchange knowledge, communication? Did they teach us, this is pure speculation, did they teach us about death? Did they teach us about these burial practices? Did they even know something that primitive sapiens didn't know? Did they pass it on to Neanderthal, et cetera, et cetera?

Did they have a concept of spirituality? Did they look at the stars at night and wonder where we came from and how we got here and where we go after death? And did they have a special insight that death maybe wasn't the ending, but the beginning of a new journey back to the stars and to this underworld? Who knows? But we see this mythology pop up in our earliest historical societies, which goes back 5,000 years.

Think about the Book of the Dead and the Egyptians, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or all these classical mysteries I spend all this time researching. That's the essential question they're trying to answer. is what happens after death. So to think that a species that precedes us was asking the same questions and developing rituals around it completely upends our notion of what it means to be human. Because if the way we approach death is not exceptional, in the hominin world at least, then what else does that say about us?

Right.

It seems like there had to be some communication.

I kind of buried the lead. That's the shocking part of all this is that a being with a brain one third the size of ours figures out this complex ritual.

They use tools to extract food. They – have you ever seen crows make cats start fights with each other?

On purpose. And then he flies over to the other cat and kind of fucks with him. And the cat's like, get out of here, man. And so they're both like – they're heightened because they're being fucked with by this crow. And then he kind of like coaxes these cats into a fight.

And these cats fight and they fall off the roof. Watch this shit. Watch this. Look at this crow. He's getting close.

He's like, hey, motherfucker. What's up? Hey, bitch. What's up? He just gets just close enough.

See? The cat's like, get the fuck out of here, man. Like, he's fucking with him. And every time the cat tries to move on him, he flies away. And then the cat just jumps on that other fucking cat.

And they start duking it out. Like, look. And he's like sitting right next to it. They fall off the roof. And the crow flies down with him.

He's like, yeah, get him, get him. He's still going. It's fun for him. He's having a good time. Like.

there's no evolutionary advantage to doing that.

Cats are just going to war. And that crow's like, yeah, get him. Kick his ass. Weird. They're very, very, very smart.

They've done all these studies where they show that if you give a crow a one-size tool, it will use that tool to extract a larger tool. And it will use that tool to get the food. Like. they've done all these weird little mazes and had crows solve them. They're very clever.

Sneaky little fuckers. Tiny little brains.

But even though it doesn't have a brain, it has the ability to learn. That's something they just recently discovered. See, if you can find that. It's pretty interesting. It's like some just fucking weird-ass jellyfish that stings you.

You're fucked. But this thing has the ability to learn, which is very surprising. Like it doesn't even have a brain. Okay, so all right. What's learning then?

Are we wrong about where memories are stored? Scientists provide evidence that tiny Caribbean box jellyfish, which lack a central nervous system, can learn to navigate through mangrove roots.

Yeah. That's interesting.

You know that expression, gut feeling? Why gut? Like? what is that?

Doubling of the human brain size. That's like one of the biggest mysteries ever. I don't know what the fuck caused that.

And this is what all these mystery religions were trying to do. I think there was more science than religion. I mean, they're called mystery religions, but this was the process of our ancestors trying to figure out the secrets to the universe and antiquity. And for the working hypothesis is that psychedelic drugs and altered states of consciousness had something to do with that ability to probe into these mysteries. And I think that, you know, the caves also have a lot to do with it.

Like there were caves constantly being used by, well, predecessor species, for sure, but then also ancient societies, to enter into these profound states of awareness, going back into the womb of the earth to really figure out that border between life and death and maybe navigate it, maybe navigate successfully. This was the enterprise of ancient Egypt, being able to successfully navigate into the afterlife. Again, which is not a beginning, which is not an end, but a beginning. This is how the mystery religions always talk about death and befriending death and confronting all mortality. Like, I'm not sure if AI will be able to plumb those secrets the way that we've been doing for all these thousands of years.

well, why wouldn't it be able to? I mean, what it's essentially doing, well, all human beings, everyone that is listening to this and everyone who isn't, you're essentially riding on the work of the people that came before you. We're all speaking a language that other people invented. We're using mathematics that other people invented. We live in structures that other people invented.

There's been just this massive sea of human beings before us that have innovated and created. But if AI can have access to everything they've ever learned and everything they've ever done, and have an understanding of biology and of subatomic science at a level that the average human being is just not capable of, maybe it could understand a pattern that we've missed. Maybe it can understand a code that we've missed, that this whole thing is like there's some sort of an underlying code to the entire universe and that it all works together. And you're experiencing it as a human being, riding the subway, driving in your car, going to work. You're experiencing this very minute realm of this overall experience that is all working together through this code that's creating everything.

I think AI could figure that out. I think we're very limited, because we're talking about our own experience and we're talking about our own biological mortality. So we have this window of time to sort things out. What is that quote? Enlightenment is possible within your lifetime.

We have this very small window. It's 100 years, if you're lucky. And during that 100 year period, you're asked a lot with this primitive monkey mind to try to figure things out. But if you didn't have that, if you didn't have that thing looming over you, maybe you'd have a more objective assessment of what's actually going on. But what this species is actually doing, like what it's here for.

That seems to be like a valuable lesson that I get from all those experiences. But again, where everything we're doing is based on the biological limitations of our consciousness and our life experiences. Everything we're doing is based on like who we are and who we think we are, and what meaning it has for us that we're here right now. But if you weren't burdened down by all these biological limitations, if you weren't burdened by this existential angst and this fear of death.

We have this desire to figure it out, like to have like, oh, this is what's going to happen. We have this desire to have an answer to almost the unanswerable. What if AI didn't have those? It's not going to have those problems. It's just going to have information.

It's just going to have just pure information, with no ego, no desire to survive, no greed, no desire to reproduce, no envy. It's going to be a fascinating thing once it does happen, because it might be able, to, like, quickly figure out a lot of things that we've been burdened by. But we're looking at these things through the limitations of our biological experience and through the ego, which tells us that this biological experience is uniquely important. Everyone thinks that they are uniquely important. But yet there's all this evidence that you're not.

You're a part of this very bizarre thing. But this very bizarre thing, as it interacts with each other, is very psychedelic. Like if you weren't a human and you didn't and you had no idea what human life is, and you were some other kind of consciousness, and you took a drug and the drug led you to experience human life in a big city, you'd be like, this is crazy. What a drug. If you just saw the lights going back and forth on a highway and how similar they look to, like blood flowing through arteries.

And you see these things that are getting constructed. It's like these growths on the earth that this being is creating. Like, what is this fucking wild species doing? You know, I think we would have a more objective sense of it. I've said this too many times.

We'll say it one more time. I think we're here to make things. I think our curiosity is all about innovation. That's the primary function that this species has. If you looked at it from afar, you'd say, well, what is this thing doing?

Oh, it's making better stuff every year. It always does that, no matter what it does. It makes, unless it nukes itself into the Stone Age, which is always a threat, because the better stuff that it makes is often weapons. And it often gets better at making money by utilizing those weapons. So it keeps doing that, which is what you're seeing all over the world right now.

But I think, if you looked at like, the one thing it's doing, it's making better things. And it's so wrapped up in buying those better things. Materialism is so rampant. And everybody, despite what you have, being more than enough, you want more and better and new things. And that fuels consumerism.

And consumerism fuels more innovation. And it's like baked into the mentality. Sort of like I don't know if bees know exactly what they're doing when they're making a beehive, but they all make beehives. You know, they're all doing that same thing. And, human beings, what we're doing is we're at least working towards buying these things that someone's making.

I feel like that's the kind of thing that AI won't be able to resolve for us. Perhaps. The process of what it means to engage in a creative act and to produce something that the whole species can resonate with.

And that it gets into your mind and it interacts with your being and it talks you into making a coffee pot. I mean, doesn't it make sense? All these things that we have, everything in this room, came out of someone's mind.

In the email, there's one from John Frusciante. He's the guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers. I love listening to musicians talk about where music comes from and where inspiration comes from. Because I think it's one lens that we can use to think about the creative act in general. It may start with music.

It goes to everything that's here. It goes to the art of a conversation. It goes to comedy. It goes to the way we make children, by the way, which is a very creative act and something that comes naturally to most of us. I think that's what makes us human, is this ability to translate something that extends beyond our physical bodies and then to embody it, whatever that it is.

Frusciante calls it the force. And then to make something of it, something that can resonate with the community. I think that's something that AI will be able to do, and fits and starts. But I'm not sure that we understand the process. And that's why I think about the process of life and death, too.

That's why I think that the thing that makes us human is the way that we engage with those invisible forces.

The way we engage with those invisible forces. Yeah. I mean, that's what's unique about humans, for sure, on Earth.

You can play it. Yeah.

And you might say that the tree is expressing itself by the way its branches move out. But it's the force that drives nature. The tree is the visible thing that appears to our senses, but I don't at all believe it's the source of why everything is perpetuated all the time, you know? The force that created us.

Like your mind, just like a door opens up and like, here it is. And you're like, oh, wow. Oh, my God. What a great idea. Yeah.

Like, these ideas just pop into your head. And sometimes you see things and you describe them, and you're like, mm-hmm. And the idea will come from that. But sometimes ideas just come to you. They don't even feel like, you don't feel responsible for them, because it's not like you dug a hole.

Like, here's the hole I dug. You do right. You sit down and write, right? Yeah. You do the physical act of summoning the muse, which is how Pressfield talks about it in The War of Art, which is a great way to.

Because it is that. Whether or not the muse is real, if you treat it as if it's real, it will show up. Hmm. Like, if you show up every day and you write, you say I'm from 9 a.m. to noon every day.

I sit in front of my computer and I write. If you do that, the ideas will come. They will come to you.

I think that's part of what makes us innovate. And that's part of like what, you know, if you were looking at us from afar, what is this species doing? It's making things. And how do you make things without creativity? You don't.

You wouldn't. You would have no desire to. So there's the question about AI. It's like can you program that desire to innovate into a thing without all of the primate characteristics that we possess?

A 5-year-old tells you a joke. It's like, my daughter is really young. One of her favorite jokes was, what kind of tree grows in your hand? I go, I don't know. She goes, a palm tree.

And she'd have this big, long punch line, a palm tree. When you're 5, it's hilarious. And I thought it was really funny. I'm like, that's a solid joke. But like that's a 5-year-old joke.

If you try to do that on stage at the mothership on a Saturday night, they'd be like, really? You know?

There's a lot of, I could speak to comedy. There's a lot of styles of comedy that you go, oh, that guy's clearly a Richard Pryor fan. Or that guy's, you know, he's definitely been influenced by Kinnison. He's definitely been influenced by Jerry Seinfeld. There's something that we carry with us from the people, and you see it in music as well.

You know, Stevie Ray Vaughan, clearly influenced by Hendrix. So you see this as well. But it's just, couldn't it just do that? Couldn't it just absorb all these patterns and then come up with unique patterns that it knows will resonate with people? I think you could probably create some fucking jam and pop songs that are just entirely AI created.

And you could use all the best voices, because you would just be able to voice swap them. You could have you doing them. You could be singing the next Lizzo song. You know, it can do weird things now. And some of those weird things are going to resonate with people and become very successful.

And then it will figure out what those things are. Okay, so this Drake song that I made, this got, you know, 4 million listens on Spotify. So now we'll do this. And now we'll make one like that. And now I'll add this.

And now I'll do something that people have never figured out before and do that. So it might be able to do the same thing. Creativity is capable of accomplishing. But it won't be done with the same sort of spirit and soul. So it won't be able to resonate with us the same way as, say, like a Janis Joplin song.

There's something to, like, Colter Wall's voice. There's certain people that they have a thing in them. Like, you can't fake that, whatever the fuck that is.

Like, I'm not saying it's impossible. But I think humans at the moment are much better at producing that effect than AI.

And this dude is singing. He wrote and sang this song when he was 21 years old. And you listen and you go, what the fuck? It's very rare that I'll listen to a song and just go, what the fuck? But listen to this.

Okay.

Raven is a wicked bird. His wings are black as sin.

And he floats outside my prison window, mocking those within.

And he sings to me real low, his hell's where you go. But you didn't murder Kate McKinnon. 21..

Sounds like a 50-year-old rancher. 60, even.

This is the music video that goes along with it.

Said, he had himself a dark-haired daughter, long green eyes.

And when she and I didn't meet, she was bathing in the creek.

Pretty girl in the whole damn holler.

Good luck.

You ain't gonna make this. You never think of this.

So what we are is special to us. Because we are us. But it'll be the next thing.

They're a strange drug. It's an audible drug. An audio drug. Great music is certainly a drug. You and I got to see Guns N' Roses live.

Oh, man. Which was pretty fucking dope. Right? That was pretty dope. In Athens.

Yeah. And I was like, whoa, where is he at? And you were like, he's right over there. So you had to walk by him.

And I had a margarita and a glass of wine.

Because you, peer, pressured me into drinking over dinner. Peer pressure?

And so in my mind, I have a tuxedo and slicked hair and a martini.

Excuse me, Axl. We need to chat. But I think it's not impossible that I said Mr. Rose. Like, excuse me.

Mr. Rose. And the woman there was like, she didn't even say anything. She just waved me away. And I thought, okay, I mean, I would do the same thing if I were Axl.

And so I went back to the table, dejected, and let you know that Axl was still sitting there.

And I went, hi, Axl. He's like, get the fuck out of here.

When did Welcome to the Jungle come out?

Yeah, that makes sense.

I just got lucky. he knew who I was.

He knew you immediately.

And you're like, no, this is Brian. You're very nice. He wrote this thing. He's a writer. And you told him the hypothesis.

And Axel, like, he, gave me the best T-shirt for the book. He's like, okay, cool. So everybody got high and made democracy.

It's like a drug. It's a drug that human beings have invented for ourselves. There's something about music that, like, music, when you're tired, like, say if you're on a treadmill or something, you're tired, and a good song comes on, you're like, fuck, yeah. It gives you an extra gear. Inspiration through music is very much like a performance enhancing drug.

It does something to you. It motivates people to dance. You know, when someone hears a good song, they're like, fuck that. Let's get on the dance floor. It's like music, like, does something to you, your being.

It interfaces with whatever the fuck you are in some very, very special way. But it only does it to us. Like, why would the universe think that that's interesting? Like, does it?

Really? Like, I can say, yeah, I wish I'd have brought him today. But everyone was at the house and he was having fun. There's a deer in our backyard. There was a lot of drama today.

There was a deer with a broken leg in my backyard.

And I was, it was in the morning, like 7 o'clock in the morning. Everyone's getting ready to go to school. I made a cup of coffee. I let the dog back in and he hadn't seen it. So he's, like, chilling on the back porch.

And I let him in and I look over there and it looks like a fucking statue. It's a buck just standing there. I mean, like, 40 feet from me. And I'm like, why is there a deer there? And then I close the door.

Girls, girls, girls, come here, check this out. And then I look at the way he's standing and go, ooh, his back leg's broken.

His shin is fractured. His back, like where your shin would be, it's bending back the wrong way. It's broken. And so called animal protection, and they didn't know what to do. So we're literally trying to find him an animal veterinarian to fix this deer's leg, which is just so crazy because I shoot deers and I eat them.

And he's like really confused and he's hurt. He can't, and he's in my yard because I guess he's like safer there. And so the dog finally does find him. And when the dog finds him, he's just like kind of jumping around him and bouncing and like, you want to play? Like, and the deer can't run.

So he's just standing there going, hey, man, are you going to eat me? Like, what's going on here? And it was, it was very interesting. But he knows, like my dog, I can say, come on, man, cut the shit. Get inside.

And he goes inside. Or I can say, don't go out this door. I'm going to go to the other door. He just goes to the other door. Like.

I can say things like that. Like, he knows. I can say, not that door, dude, the other one. And he'll start going towards the other door. It's very weird.

I can say, you want to watch TV? And he goes into the TV room. And like, he waits for me to plop up on the couch and he hops up next to me. Like he speaks English, or he knows English. He just can't talk.

like speech. They understand tone. They understand what you mean. They understand when you're in trouble, they're in trouble. Did you fucking shit on the carpet, dude?

You know, like, oh, did I? And they run away. They know things. But they don't seem to give a fuck about music. You know?

So now, every time I turn on my YouTube app, I get calming dog songs.

I don't even know if they work. How does anybody know if they work?

Let's find out.

They taught them that if they take this money, this thing, these tokens, and give it to this person, or put it in this thing, they would give them candy. You know the first thing they did was? They gave it to the female chimps and they had sex with them. They immediately engaged in prostitution.

that's still around. You've seen Chimp Nation? Yeah. Amazing, right? Like, God, so fascinating.

But I don't think they dance. Do you think they do?

That's dancing, man. He's just having a good time.

But is that real? Is that the real music? That seems like that's added after the fact. Yeah, he's doing fast steps. Look how long his arms are.

Isn't that crazy?

It's just crazy that we come from the same original root. It branched in a bunch of different ways.

They've been along for so long. I think they're 50 million years older than trees.

Sharks have been swimming our oceans much longer than trees have been swaying in the breeze on land. The birth of trees on Earth is believed to have occurred roughly 370, 390 million years ago. That makes sharks at least 10 million years old than trees. Oh, so, I was off by 40 million. But, yeah, older than trees.

That's like, how do you manage just this vast literal sea of life that moves in 3D space? It just moves all over the place. And things are going to die. And what happens to them? Sharks.

This massive beast that has to keep moving or it dies. And it's so old. And it's designed just for killing and eating. And it has rows of replaceable teeth. And the only bones that it has at all are this massive jawbone.

And these ridiculous razor sharp saws that just slice things in half. And it just roams the ocean looking to consume.

I don't think I have. I don't think I've seen a shark swimming through the water. I've seen a lot of dolphins. A lot of whales. I don't think I've ever had a physical encounter with a shark.

Where'd regular Brian go?