Duncan Trussell is a comedian, host of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, and co-creator of The Midnight Gospel. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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Books mentioned:
Superintelligence: https://amzn.to/3QufVEs
Man's Search for Meaning: https://amzn.to/3vU9S42

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:16 - Nietzsche's eternal recurrence
21:07 - Artificial intelligence
49:37 - Joe Rogan
58:10 - Facing death
1:14:58 - Bhakti yoga
1:21:49 - Afterlife
1:32:14 - Suffering
1:57:28 - War
2:15:23 - Depression
2:37:11 - Evil
2:47:28 - Burning Man
3:03:00 - The Midnight Gospel
3:07:52 - Advice for young people
3:17:23 - Duncan reads a poem

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If this is a super intelligence, if it's folding proteins and analyzing all data sets and all whatever they give it access to, how can we be certain that it's not gonna figure out how to get itself out of the cloud, how to store itself in other mediums, trees, the optic nerve, the brain.

We don't know that it won't leap out and like start hanging.

Like, and then at that point, now we do have the wildfire.

You can't shut your servers down because it left the box, left the room using some technology you haven't even discovered yet.

How fucking cool would that be for like the men in black to come to me like, listen, I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene.

The following is a conversation with Duncan Trussell, a standup comedian, host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, and 1 of my favorite human beings.

I've been a fan of his for many years, so it was a huge honor and pleasure to meet him for the first time and to sit down for this chat.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Duncan Trussell.

Nietzsche has this thought experiment called eternal recurrence, where you get to relive your whole life over and over and over and over, and I think it's a way to bring to the surface of your mind the idea that every single moment in your life matters.

It intensely matters, the bad and the good.

And he kind of wants you to imagine that idea, that every single decision you make throughout your life, you repeat over and over and over, and he wants you to respond to that.

Do you feel horrible about that or do you feel good about that?

And you have to think through this idea in order to see where you stand in life.

What is your relationship like with life?

I actually wanna read the way he first introduces that concept for people who are not familiar.

What if some day or night a demon, by the way, he has a demon introduce this thought experiment.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, quote, this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small and great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a God and never have I heard anything more divine?

So are you terrified or excited by such a thought experiment when you apply it to your own life?

I mean, also, that thing you're talking about, he kind of leaves out, maybe on purpose, because the thought experiment starts falling apart a little bit, the amnesia between each loop.

So, you know, the whole thing gets wiped.

Now, if the amnesia wasn't there, and yet somehow you were witnessing the non-autonomy implicit in what he's talking about, So you have to kind of watch yourself go through this rotten loop.

So the bad stuff, the good stuff, the newness of it is really important.

This is the, in Hades, when you die, there's a river, I think it's called Leith, you ever heard of this?

L-E-T-H-E, you drink from it and you don't remember your past lives.

And then when you're reborn, it's fresh and you don't have to, I mean, just think of like the amount of psychological help you would need to get over all the bullshit that happened in prior lives.

Can you imagine if you're still resentful of something someone did to you in the 14th century?

Well, if you repeat the same thing over and over and over, there would be no difference.

Maybe you would start to appreciate the nuances more, like when you watch the same movie over and over and over.

Maybe you'll get to actually let go of this idea of all the positive possibilities that lay before you, but actually enjoy the moment much more.

If you remember that you've lived this life a thousand times all the little things, the way somebody smiles, if you've been abused, the way somebody, like the pain of it, the suffering, the down that you feel, the experience of sadness, depression, fear, all that kind of stuff, you get to really, you get to also appreciate that that's part of life, it's part of being alive.

Now, also in his experiment, if I was gonna, and I love the experiment from the perspective of just where technology is now and simulation theory and stuff like that, but in that thought experiment, if this rotten demon immediately killed you, then within that, it's a little more horrifying because even in the, first of all, you're trusting a fucking demon.

Yeah, because that is gonna be, even before I get into the metaphysics and the implications and where is this life stored?

I mean, are we talking about some kind of unchanging data set or something?

For that, you're like, why is there a fucking talking demon in my room trying to freak me out?

And again, obviously, it's a fucking thought experiment.

But I think, like, you would still be able to entertain the joy.

You'd have the joy of not knowing what's around the corner, you know still it's not like, you know What's coming just because the demon said some kind of loop in other words the idea of being damned to your past decisions It doesn't even work because you can't remember what decisions you're about to make So from from that perspective also, I think I'd be happy about it, or I would just think, oh, cool.

I wonder what the demon would actually look like in real life, because I suspect it would look like like a charming, like a friend.

Wouldn't the demon come to you through the mechanism, through the front door of love, not through the back door of evil, like malevolent manipulation?

Sure, I mean, if it's the truth, if it's the truth, then that's, whether it's love or not, it's still good, fundamentally.

I remember I went to a Neuralink event a few years ago and got to hang out with Elon.

I remember how visceral it is that there's like a pig with a neural link in it, and you're talking about memory replays as a future, maybe far future possibility, and you realize, well, this is a very meaningful moment in my life, this could be a replay.

Like, of all the things you replay, it's probably, you know, there's certain magical moments in your life, whatever it is, certain people you've met for the first time, or certain things you've done for the first time with certain people, or just an awesome thing you did.

And I remember just saying to him, like, I would probably want to replay this, this moment, and it just seemed very kind of, I mean, there's a recursive nature to it, but it seemed very real that this is something you would want to do, that the richness of life could be experienced through the replay.

That's probably where it's experienced the most.

Like, you could see life as a way to collect a bunch of cool memories, and then you get to sit back in your nice VR headset and replay the cool ones.

This is, in Buddhism, you know, the idea that, like, I struggle with is that there's a possibility of not reincarnating, of not coming back.

Like, this is suffering here, suffering is caused by attachment.

And so if you, like, revise the idea of reincarnation or Nietzsche's loop and look at it from, could this be possible or how would this be possible technologically, then to me it makes a lot of sense.

Like I've been thinking a lot about this very thing and Nietzsche's idea connecting to it.

I had this like, it sounds so dumb, but I was at the dentist getting nitrous oxide, high as a fucking kite, man.

I was thinking like, man, probably, if I had to bet, there's some energetic form that we're not aware of that for a super advanced technology would be as detectable as like starlight, but something that we just don't even know what it is.

Quantum turbulence, who the fuck knows, fill in the blank, whatever that X may be.

But assuming that exists, that somehow data, even the most subtle things, the tiniest movements, whatever it may be, the emanations of your neurological process, energetically, whatever it may be, is radiating out into space-time, then what if like the James Webb version of this for some advanced civilization is not that they're like looking at the nebula or whatever, but they're actually able to peer into the past and via some bizarre technology recreate whatever life, simulate whatever life was happening there just by decoding that quantum energy, whatever it is.

I'm only saying quantum because it's what dumb people say when they don't know.

So meaning, in simulation theory, 1 of the big questions that pops up is why and are we in 1?

And Elon has talked about, well, it's probably more of a probability than we're in 1, than we're not.

In which case, what you're talking about is actually happening.

That loop you're talking about, it's we've decided to be here.

This, of all the things, we decided this 1, 0, let's do that 1 again.

I love thinking about this, because I love my family.

And it makes sense to me that if I'm going to replay some life or another, it's definitely gonna be this 1, with my kids, my wife, with all the bullshit that's gone along with it, I'm still gonna wanna come back.

Yeah, but you weren't the 1, or you're saying that you're the main player, you're not the NPC.

Well, I think we're dealing with all NPCs at this point.

I mean, depending on how you wanna, like very, I would say very advanced NPCs, like incredibly advanced NPCs compared to Fallout or something.

You know, we've got a lot of conversation options happening here.

There's not like 4 things you can pick from.

Yeah, there's a whole illusion of free will that's happening.

We really do, depending where you are in the world, feel like you're free to decide any trajectory in your life that you want.

If we're making a video game, you do wanna give your NPCs the illusion of free will because it's gonna make interactions with them that much more intense.

So I wonder on the path to that, how hard is it to create, this is sort of the Carmack question of a realistic virtual world that's as cool as this 1.

Not fully realistic, but sufficiently realistic that it's as interesting to live in.

Because we're gonna create those worlds on the path to creating something like a simulation.

It'll be virtual worlds where we wanna stay forever because they're full of that balance of suffering and joy, of limitations and freedoms and all that kind of stuff.

A lot of people think like in the virtual world, I can't wait to be able to, I don't know, have sex with anybody I want or have anything I want.

You want the limitations, the constraints.

So you have to battle for the things you want.

1 of my favorite video game memories was like I started playing World of Warcraft in its original incarnation.

And I didn't even know that you were gonna have flying mounts.

So I've been running around dealing with all the encumbrances of like being an undead warlock that can't fly.

But then all of a sudden, holy shit, there's flying mounts.

And now the world you've been running around not flying, you're seeing it from the top down.

There was just really cool, like, whoa, I could do this now.

But a really well-designed game, it has a series of these, I don't know what you call it, extra abilities that kind of unfold and produce novelty.

And then eventually you just accept it, you take it for granted, and then another novelty appears.

So those extra abilities are always balanced with the limitations, the constraints they run up against.

Because a well-balanced video game, the challenge, the struggle matches the new ability.

Yeah, and sometimes causes problems on its own.

I mean, and so to go back to this universe, this simulation, it's really designed like a pretty awesome video game if you look at it from the perspective of history.

They didn't know that there were going to be bullet trains.

They didn't know that you could get in a car and drive across the country in a few days.

And even in our own lifespan, think about how long has VR goggles existed?

Like the ones that you could just buy at Best Buy.

I had the original Oculus Rift, the fucking puke machine.

You put that thing on, I gave it to my friend, he went and vomited in my driveway.

They were saying, this isn't gonna catch on.

It's too big, it's unwieldy, the graphics suck.

And that's going to keep, that trajectory is gonna keep improving.

So yeah, I think that we are dealing with what you're talking about, which is novelty met with more problems, met with novelty.

Yeah, I wonder why VR is not more popular.

I wonder what is going to be the magic thing that really convinces a large fraction of the world to move into the virtual world.

I suppose we're already there in the 2D screen of Twitter and social media and that kind of stuff.

And even video games, there's a lot of people that get a big sense of community from video games.

But like, it doesn't feel like you're living there.

Like, it's like, bye mom, I'm going to this other world.

Or like you leave your girlfriend to go get your digital girlfriend.

There's less jealousy in the digital world.

Maybe there should be a lot of jealousy in the digital world, Because that's jealousy, a little jealousy is probably good for relationships.

So you're gonna have to simulate all of that kind of stuff.

But I wonder what the magic thing that says, I want to spend most of my days inside the virtual world.

Well, clearly it's gonna be something we don't have yet.

I mean, strapping that damn thing on your face still feels weird.

If you're, depending on what gear you're using, sometimes light can leak in.

And then, so yeah, it's gonna have to be something that simulates taste, smell.

You think taste and smell are important, touch?

just do, you know, in World War II, you would write letters.

You could still, don't you think you can convey love with just words?

For sure, but I think for what you're talking about to happen, it has to be fully immersive.

Like you, so that it's not that you feel like you're walking because it looks like you're walking, but that your brain is sending signals telling your body that you're walking, that you feel the wind blowing in your face, not because of some, I don't know, fan or something that it's connected to, but because somehow it's figured out how to hack into the human brain and send those signals minus some external thing.

Once that happens, I'd say we're gonna see a complete radical shift in everything.

I don't know if you've seen the movie, Her.

I think you can go to another world in where a digital being lives in the darkness and all you hear is a Scarlett Johansson voice talking to you and she lives there or he lives there, your friend, your loved 1, and all you have is voice and words.

And I think that could be sufficient to pull you into that world, where you look forward to that moment all day.

Just closing your eyes and listening to the voice.

I think those basic mediums of communication is still enough.

And I think the realism of touch and smell and all that kind of stuff, is not nearly as powerful as language.

That's what makes humans really special is our ability to communicate with each other.

That's the sense of deep connection we get is through communication.

Now that communication could involve touch.

That's 1 of the big things with doing COVID with Rogan.

When you see him, there's a giant hug coming your way.

And that makes you feel like, yeah, this is, this feels great.

But I think that can be just with language.

I think for a lot of people, that's true.

But we're talking like massive adoption of a technology by the world.

And if language was just enough, we wouldn't be selling TVs.

When you're getting absorbed into a book, and especially if you've got, I think a lot of us went through a weird dark ages when it came to reading.

Like when I was a kid, and there wasn't the option for these hypno rectangles, That's just what you did.

There wasn't even anything special about it.

You know, it was like, you didn't, when that gravity well.

That when we weren't feeling the pull of these things all the time, you would just read.

And you weren't patting yourself on the back about reading.

You had that and you had like 8 channels on the TV and a shitty VCR.

So, you know, then a lot of people stop reading because of these things, you know?

Or they think they're reading because they're on, they are technically reading.

But, you know, when you return to reading after a pause, whoa, and you realize how powerful this simulator is when it's given the right code of language, whoa, holy shit, it's incredible.

I mean, It's like, again, it's the most embarrassing kind of like, whoa, wow, what do you know?

But still, if you've been away from it for a while and you revisit it, I know what you're saying.

I just think probably it's not gonna go in that direction, even though you are right.

Yeah, because our brain is, the imagination engine we have is able to fill in the gaps better than a lot of graphics engines could.

And so if there's a way to incentivize humans to become addicted to the use of imagination.

It's like, you know, that's the downside of things like porn that remove the need for imagination for people.

And in that same way, video games that are becoming ultra realistic, you don't have to imagine anything.

And I feel like the imagination is a really powerful tool that needs to be leveraged.

Because to simulate reality sufficiently realistically, that we wouldn't be, that we would be perfectly fooled, I think, technically is very hard.

And So I think we need to somehow leverage imagination.

I mean, this is what I love and is so creepy about the current AI chatbots, is that it's the relationship between you and the thing and the way that it can, via whatever the algorithms are, and by the way, I have no idea how these things work, you do, I just, you know, speculate about what they mean or where it's going, but there's something about the relation between the consumer and the technology, And when that technology starts shifting according to what it perceives that the consumer's looking for or isn't looking for, then at that point, I think that's where you run into the, you know, yeah, it doesn't matter if the reality that you're in is like photo realism for it to be sticky and immersive.

It's when the reality that you're in is via cues you might not even be aware of or via your digital imprint on Facebook or wherever, when it's warping itself to that to seduce you, holy shit, man, that's where it becomes something alien, something, you know, when you're reading a book, obviously the book is not shifting according to its perception of what parts of the book you like.

But when you imagine that, imagine a book that could do that, a book that could sense somehow that you're really enjoying this character more than another, you know?

And depending on the style of book, kills that fucking character off or lets that character continue.

I mean, that to me is sort of the where AI and VR, when those 2 things come together, whoa, man, that's where you're in, that's where you really are gonna find yourself in a Skinner box, you know?

So the dynamic storytelling that senses your anxiety and tries to, there's like this, in psychology, this arousal curve.

So there's a dynamic storytelling that keeps you sufficiently aroused in terms of, not sexually aroused, like in terms of anxiety, but not too much where you freak out.

It's this perfect balance where you're always like on edge, excited, scared, that kind of stuff.

It breaks your heart to where you're pissed, but then it makes you feel good again.

I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts about where they are today.

Because there is a different perspective we have on this thing.

Because I do know and I'm excited about a lot of the different technologies that feed AI systems, that feed these kind of chatbots.

And you're more a little bit on the consumer side, you're a philosopher of sorts.

They're able to interact with AI systems, but also able to introspect about the negative and the positive things about those AI systems.

There's that story with a Google engineer

What was your perspective of that, looking at that as a particular example of a human being being captivated by the interactions with an AI system?

Well, number 1, when you hear that anyone is claiming that an AI has become sentient, you should be skeptical about that.

I mean, this is a good thing to be skeptical about.

And so, you know, initially when I heard that, I was like, ah, you know, it's probably just, who knows, somebody is a little confused or something.

When you're talking to him and you realize, oh, not only is he not confused, he's also open to all possibilities.

He doesn't seem like he's super committed other than the fact that he's like, this is my experience, this is what's happening, this is what it is.

So to me, there's something really cool about that, which is like, oh shit, I don't get to lean into, I'm not quite sure your perceptual apparatus is necessarily like, I don't, you know, it's in the UFO community, I think, I've just learned this term, it's called, instead of gaslighting, swamp gassing, which is, you know what I mean, people have this experience, they're like, it was swamp gas, you didn't see the thing.

And you know, skeptical people, we have that tendency.

If you hear an anomalous experience, your first thought, more than likely, is gonna be really, it could have been this or that or whatever.

So to me, he seems really reliable, friendly, cool, and it doesn't really seem like he has much of an agenda.

Like, you know, going public about something happening at Google is not a great thing if you want to keep working at Google.

You know, it's a, it's, I don't know what benefit he's getting from it necessarily.

But all that being said, the other thing that's culturally was interesting and is interesting about it is the blowback he got, the passionate blowback from people who hadn't even looked into what Lambda is, or what he was saying Lambda is, which they were like saying, you're talking about, and you should have them on your show

There's complexity on top of complexities.

For me personally, from different perspectives, I also, and sorry if I'm interrupting your flow.

And well, we're having multiple podcasts in the multiple dimensions and I'm just trying to figure out which 1 we wanna plug into.

Because I know how a lot of the language models work and I work closely with people that really make it their life journey to create these NLP systems, they're focused on the technical details.

Like a carpenter's working on Pinocchio, is crafting the different parts of the wood.

They don't understand when the whole thing comes together, there's a magic that can fill the thing.

I definitely know the tension between the engineers that create these systems and the actual magic that they can create, even when they're dumb.

What the engineers often say is like, well, these systems are not smart enough to have sentience or to have the kind of intelligence that you're projecting onto it.

It's pretty dumb, it's just repeating a bunch of things that other humans have said and stitching them together in interesting ways that are relevant to the context of the conversation.

To address that specific critique from a non-programming person's perspective, he addressed this on my podcast, which is, okay, what you're talking about there, the server that's filled with all the whatever it is, what people have said, the repository of questions and responses and the algorithm that weaves those things together to produce it, using some crazy statistical engine, which is a miracle in its own right.

They can, like, imitate human speech with no sentience.

I mean, I'm honestly not sure what's more spectacular, really, the fact that they figured out how to do that minus sentience or the thing suddenly having, what is more spectacular here?

Both occurrences are insane, which by the way, when you hear people be like, it's not sentient, it's like, okay, so it's not sentient.

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Duncan Trussell: Comedy, Sentient Robots, Suffering, Love & Burning Man | Lex Fridman Podcast #312