Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. TRAIN BY DAY. JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY NIGHT. All day.
Good to see you.
You too. Thanks for having me.
How many podcasts have you done?
I don't know. I don't know the count, but maybe tens.
Well, when we were talking, we were talking in the lobby. I was like this good dude would be a good guess because we were talking about ancient Hindu scriptures where you were talking to me about something that sounds like a nuclear bomb.
I need to know more about this.
Yeah. So um the brahmastra is part of the mahabarat.
I mean you've talked about Mahabharat in a bunch and
Yeah. Yeah. So the mahabharat is one of the two Hindu epics. The other one is Ramayan. But Mahabarat's more interesting. It's more complicated. It's like a lot of different stories interled together. And um the brahmastra is the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.
It's described as a weapon of like mass destruction going to inhalate like human population. Should not be used at any cost. There's like a moral contract. Like you clearly have to be, you know, violating so many things at a deeply moral level to even like wield it. And um it's not actually accessible to most warriors. There's probably like two warriors in the world in that era who were allowed to use it. And um it has to be passed through special access like a teacher has to like pass it on to you the secret to use it almost like a new think of it as like the equivalent of a nuclear code, right? And um Arjuna had it uh this character in Mahabharat called Arjuna. Um he was allowed to use it. Um and then this other person was this basically Arjuna had a teacher named Drona and um Drona had a son named Ashwatama and um Ashwatama was always jealous of Arjuna. Arjuna was not Drona's son but he was his model disciple and so Drona passed on the secret of the brahmastra to him and um Drona's son also wanted it but because it was his son he also passed on the secret to his son even though the son wasn't as good as Arjuna and at there was the during the war Arjuna and fought on the opposite sides and his dad died Asham was that the teacher died in the war and so the son got mad and like unleashed the brahmastra and uh Lord Krishna had to come and save the planet to not not get that destruction force.
How old is the Mahabraata?
Again, there's a lot of different opinions on this so I don't actually know for sure. My understanding is at least 1,500 to 2,500 years old. Like 1,500 years ago is the minimum. 2,500 years ago is the maximum. So it happened in some period in that thousand-year time frame. And um there's still like it's still unclear if like a lot of it is just like you know been mythologized. Um and what actually happened was just a war between kins. Uh there were two groups of people. The Pandavas and the Kauravas and um you know each side thought they were fighting for their own rights and justice but um at the end of the day you can crudely understand it as like essentially fight for the kingdom. Um basically there were like there there was a previous generation and two brothers and they and both the brothers had a bunch of kids and those kids were warring to get the next in line and um that ended up being like a massive war and a bunch of other allies fought on each sides and um so many amazing weapons were used as part of the war and a lot of these weapons are like extremely like described in extreme level of detail that is pretty incredible like the there's a lot of detail around like targeted weapons so you could precisely identify a target and just shoot at that.
does it explain like what the weapon is?
Yeah. So there's one weapon called the Dastra where you can just specifically target any any particular person or group and it would just automatically direct itself and do it almost like a semi-autonomous weapon. And then Lord Krishna had this um weapon called the Sudarshan chakra. It's basically a discus and then you can just release it and it'll go and specifically identify somebody and chop up their head and come back to you right. It self-directs itself. So my what I was amazed by is how um interesting it is in terms of um all the autonomy in the weapons semi-autonomy or autonomy where the weapons could just be directed at people or like directed at you know a group of soldiers and it would just go and do its job and come back to the wielder and um there were so many different astras. Brahmastra is obviously the ultimate the hydrogen bomb equivalent and all of these are described in a lot of detail and like who has access to it and of course it's it's mythologized. So it's described as this like these arrows in your like back of your uh shoulders, but you could you could understand it as like you know somebody having just access to a lot of weapons and then um whoever was powerful would go capture and colonize and like gain power and um essentially a a fight between a group of cousins. That that's the bottom line of that story. Now, if we think of history as this linear progression from caveman to us, Yeah. and we hear about autonomous weapons that were written in the Mahabharata somewhere around 2,000 plus years ago, we go, well, a mythology.
But if not, if there's been some sort of rise and fall of civilization, if there has been catastrophic, whatever it is, asteroid impacts, shifting of the poles, whatever it is, it's caused great disasters. You can imagine that these people are remembering a time where there was some sort of very advanced civilization. And this is what they're describing. Like if you knew for a fact that there had been a great advanced technologically advanced civilization when we have evidence that they had some technology like the pyramids of Giza and stuff like that, how did you do that? I don't know how there's some technology involved, right?
But we don't have evidence of the technology. But if we did, if we knew, you would look at the Mahabharata and go, 'Oh, this is history.' They're just explaining it in a kind of crude contemporary way for the time. Arrows instead of, you know, semi-autonomous drones with exploding heads on them. I mean, that's what we have now. All those things that they're describing, hydrogen bomb, semi-autonomous and autonomous drones. I mean, they have autonomous fighter jets now. like they don't need people anymore. We're in that era right now. So when you read about something like that from the Mahabharata, you go like okay what what was really going on?
Exactly. Yeah. I mean that's always been my fascination with with those epics and uh the level of detail with which they described all these weapons and who had access uh different levels of access the status required to have access and um uh how it was used in the wars um different formations of the soldiers like they had all these like crazy formation structures like forming the army like a lotus forming the army like a um you know there something called a chakravyuha like a like literally like it has to have concentric circles. So you cannot like actually get into the innermost circle without going through the outer circles and then you can get killed by each of the flanks whenever you're trying to enter in. And the secret of how to actually break into these vyuha, vyuha means formations, u was only known to a few people. And um it's incredible like you could say, okay, like somebody had to be extremely skillful to have that sort of like visualizations and imaginations of describing a story like that. And obviously Tolkien has done an amazing job with Lord of the Rings, you know, and creating so much detail at the same time like a lot of it actually coming through in real life in some form. Again, not exactly the same weapons but similar style makes you wonder was there actually something around then and uh people have tried excavations in all these areas. There's like two main areas in the Mahabharata. Hastinapur was the name of the kingdom and people have done excavations around there and have like found some artifacts that might date back to those years. But uh there are also some details that are described in the epics that don't quite align with reality. For example, all the men, all the main warriors in in that era were described as like very tall, very big um 7 8 ft, whatever, you know, I don't even know exact numbers, but um but um studies by archaeologists also say that people who lived in those years in in those regions were probably not more than 6 ft tall. So it's not clear exactly like what happened, what was correct, what was not correct. And you know, we just have to keep probing more. But I find the idea fascinating to think of like what could have existed in sacred texts that was only partially communicated to the next generation and having a lot of like reinterpretations. Another thing that is very interesting to think about is Vedic math. So um the basically Vedic math is like a branch of mathematics that you know some people in India are grown up learning like I I I read it myself too and uh some people actually practice it just to be sharper at mental math for doing their exams like GMAT and things like that GRE and um um it has like a line in the Vedas that says oh like one from the last digit two from the first digit whatever you know so many different ways of multiplying two different numbers like 97 * 96. Oh, like subtract the last two digits, put it in the right, multiply the first digits, put it in the left. That's that's the result. And um then you you wonder like, oh wait, the Rigveda is so old. It's as old as it's is the oldest sacred text out there. How is it describing computation? That feels very unreal. Like do they actually know or understand advanced forms of computation even back in those days?
and how old is rig beta?
I don't exactly know how old it is.
Why don't we put that in perplexity? Let's find out.
Yeah, it is technically the oldest sacred text out there.
And so what's interesting is I wonder how old the stories were by the time they were written down. like how much of it is relayed person to person for years and years just like the Bible before it's ever actually written down. Scholars usually date the composition of the Rigveda to about 1500 to,200 B.CE. So its oldest layer is roughly 3,200 to 3,700 years old today. Like every ancient culture has a story of a flood. every everyone they all have an apocalyptic flood.
Mahabharat had the same thing
Mahabharat had the same thing where there was a big almost like a tsunami like thing I don't exactly know what it was called but that was the collapse of Lord Krishna's kingdom Dvaraka after the war a lot of people died but some people survived and even those who survived got wiped out by a calamity or or like some kind of like a um fight among themselves and um most of the people who participated in that era actually died.
Here it is. The primordial, how do you say it? Manu. Manu flood. Classic Hindu great flood myth where the righteous king Manu is warned by a divine fish about an imminent deluge that will destroy humanity. He builds a boat, loads it with his family, seeds and animals, ties it to the horn of the god in fish form which tows the boat to safety until the waters recede and the world is repopulated. They all have the same story. That's what's really crazy.
There is a concept in Hindu philosophy called the yugas.
I'm reading a book about it right now.
Yeah. Yeah. So there's different yugas and yugas are like thousands of years and the concept is that the yugas keep cycling around and so like uh we are in the Kali Yuga right now and before that was a Dwapara Yuga that's when most of Mahabharat happened and before that there was a Treta where the Ramayan happened and before that there was another Yuga.
What is next after Kali Yuga?
There is nothing next after Kali Yuga. It goes back to the first one. I forget the name of the first Yuga.
Because the interpretation that I'm reading is that we're not in Kali Yuga anymore and that Kali Yuga ended in the 1900s and Dwapara Yuga started then.
No, no, we are in Kali Yuga right now. 100%.
So why do people have different interpretations? There is that true? There is a specific guru that has this interpretation that Kali Yuga ended in the 1900s. Interesting. And that we're moving on.
But I don't know who's right because it's an enormous cycle, right? The cycles of humanity. Thousands of years. And so these are the four yugas.
So why do people have different interpretations? Let me tell you the book I'm reading. Young Jamie, it is by a guy named David Steinmetz. The book is called The Yugas. Interesting.
Yeah. I mean the problem is when someone's got their own interpretation or some guru's interpretation, it doesn't totally align. It's hard to know who's right and who's wrong.
Yeah. Keys understanding our hidden past, emerging energy, age, and enlightened future. So that go back up to that again. So this is in the description. See what it says that where it says in 1894 an Indian sage gave us an explanation not only for our hidden past but for the trends of today and for future enlightenment. So there's like one guy's interpretation that this guy is going off of.
I guess the difference might be that he thinks the yuga cycle is 24,000 years whereas I think it's probably much longer than that.
Four yugas together is 4,320,000 years.
You know what's really nutty? One of the really nutty things is both in the ancient Sumerian texts and in some of the ancient Egyptian texts, there's depictions before the flood of people who reigned for thousands of years as kings. And it's common. It's referenced multiple times in different scripts that are from different parts of Sumeria. It's really weird because they take it as established history once it gets to a certain age once they get into like whatever the age is where they can verify that this person was the king for a certain period of time. But it's all in the same text as people that reigned for 6,000 years. It really one just wipes out the whole thing.
Yeah. And um I mean this is also somewhat like tangentially related to um the Fermi paradox, you know like if if you assume all these things are happening on earth itself that entire civilizations are getting wiped out, and we always wonder where are the aliens. There are different arguments that like okay like the reason we haven't quite found them is because the great filter exists. There is one entertaining theory that almost all civilizations end up advancing technologically a lot and either a calamity wipes them out or they build some misaligned AGI and then AGI wipes them out and because of that they never actually end up being visible. Or the other theory is that we haven't built the Von Neumann probes to actually go find them. Both are plausible. There's no clear way to know unless we actually send out enough probes.
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There's a bunch of possibilities. I mean there's almost too many to count but there's the possibility that they are observing and that they don't want to interfere and that we are on some sort of evolutionary cycle of cultural evolution civilization evolution.
And one of the things about this the crazy ages that comes from the Sumerian text and from the ancient hieroglyphs that depict the Zeppeti, how do you say it? Zeppeti? Either way, you're dealing with these kings that reign for thousands and thousands of years. Well, you know, David Sinclair is in the middle of this research now that they're working on life extension drugs that are actionable.
Yeah. That's it. Zeppeti.
Yeah, I've heard of that.
So these, but this is what's so weird. If they look at hieroglyphs, they get to a certain point and they're like, 'Oh, Khufu, he was real. This guy was real. All these people were real.' But then they get back to these guys that reigned for thousands of years and they go, 'Oh, that was bullshit.' But why is it that all these people have these stories that align with this timeline that's pre flood? It's all like the same story. And then if you're talking about these ancient Hindu scriptures that are discussing technology that seems remarkably similar to technology that we have today. The vimanas or flying cars basically, and probably what we're going to have 100 years from now or whatever, or we could have gone that way in the past. And it's very entertaining to think of like, let's say something happens to us, right? Would people really believe you were launching reusable rockets, or making FaceTime calls to people in Australia? Even fundamental things like all we're doing today. I think it's all incredible. There's a lot of things that could be just technological ideas or maybe people actually had it and the knowledge of it was lost and not documented, so we are skeptical if they ever had it. And so we end up reinventing it in different forms again and again and we keep cycling through this process.
Well, it also could be that this is the natural progression of human curiosity. The human curiosity and ingenuity always moves into these very particular ways like what's the best way to defeat my enemies. Yeah. If we're always going to be territorial primates, we're always going to want to defeat our enemies. We're always going to protect ourselves from being invaded. So we're going to make better and better technological innovation, it just goes down the same path. Oh, we figure out bullets. Oh, we figure out nuclear bombs. Well, we don't even have to use an actual plane, we can use an autonomous drone and that delivers it. And then scale upwards and onwards and AI and and then also life extension. So, if these people were able to make the pyramids like, you know, there's a lot of speculation as to the timeline of the pyramids, but let's just say they really built it 2,500 BC. What the fuck were they using? Like what were you? What did you do? How did you get these stones down from the mountains that were 500 miles away?
How about this one? How about these temples that they find in India that are carved entirely out of one piece of stone? What did you do? How did you do that? How long ago did this happen? How many of them were buried and then they had to uncover them and then figure out like what is this? Who made it? There's no timeline. No one really knows. There's no evidence of tools that were capable of doing this kind of work back then. And they're huge and beautiful and perfect. And they have acoustic properties and the geometry is fantastic.
It's not just that. All of these temples were actually built not just, they were specifically the locations for them were picked out so that you get the right seismic vibrations over there in terms of proximity to the ocean, the gravitational waves from the sun and the moon. People actually made that level. Look at this man. Imagine the undertaking of carving that temple out of the side of a giant piece of rock. You screw up one thing and it's over. There's no simulations. You just have to build it. Well, what did they have? This is the question. Imagine today if we had to do this. It's possible. It can be done. But imagine what kind of technology would we need to map it out to make sure that it was all precise, that it all aligns. It's precise within millimeters from point to point and everything is done out of one piece of stone. What did they do? Was it chisels? Did you do that with chisels? That's crazy. How many times you have to sharpen your chisel? That's nuts. Or do you have something completely different? Because some of the more intricate ones, see if you can find these. Some of the crazy ones inside these temples, there's sculptures that are three-dimensional and they're carved like inside of the sculpture. So, there's an outer area and then there are all these openings and inside it's highly detailed. How'd you even reach in there? It just says they use chisels and hammers and careful geometric planning. I don't think that's possible. People try to do that and they see how much work someone could do in 12 hours with a hammer and they get nowhere, let alone perfect and looking good.
Yeah, it's nuts, man. And there's a lot of evidence of stuff like that all over the world, which is really weird. You have the stuff in Peru like Sacsayhuaman. When you look at these stones and it looks like they're melted into place and they're 900 tons. How did you even get it up there? How'd you get it there? How'd you align it perfectly? Built in only 18 years. How do they know that? Because it's attributed to one king. King Krishna the 1, 756 to 773 CE. Maybe. I mean, how do you know though? Different historian accounts are all muddled up.
But yeah, it goes back to the thing you were saying. What is one thing that's common across all these different ages is human curiosity. So, I would love to get your take on this. I've been toying with this idea called a curiosity premium which is the most effective people, the most successful people have always been the most curious people, the ones who have been good at asking the best questions and they tend to do better in every aspect of their life. You're a good example of that. So that's why I would love to get your take on this. And the reason I believe that is because long-term people who continuously ask questions tend to do better. They make more money. They have a higher quality of life. They're happy. They have more compounding relationships. People find them more interesting. And so they compound their relationships over time. And so naturally they end up succeeding. But their spirit of inquiry, their intrinsic curiosity doesn't actually stop once they succeed. It only channelizes it even more. And so that's why it keeps compounding. And I would argue that it's the only quality that makes us really human in this world where we can seek a lot of information, get information way faster than ever before. It feels like that's the one universal human quality that's existed since ancient time since the oldest text. In fact, in the Rigveda, you're explicitly encouraged to seek wisdom more than wealth. And it's not just an idea specific to Hinduism. That specific idea exists in the Bible, exists in the Quran, exists in the Torah. It's not that seeking wealth is admonished by religious texts. It's actually that it's more important to seek wisdom. And you're a good example of that. Sure, you have a very large podcast but the way you're running it is like you're just curious about a lot of things and asking a lot of questions. I think that's the one quality that's very important. So I feel like it's the oldest thing, the only thing that we've known since ancient time: being curious.
Well, I think it's stimulating to people. Genuine curiosity is stimulating to other people. When someone is genuinely curious about something, I become curious about it. I think it's contagious. And I think that it's also an authentic quality. There's something about really wanting to know something and being interested in something. If you're curious, generally you're going to ask more questions about something so you have a deeper understanding of it. So if you're trying to do whatever you're trying to do, a sport, a game, you'll probably get better at it because you're more curious. Instead of just assuming things, you'll ask more questions. You'll reexamine things. It's one of the most important human qualities. And to me, it's one of the most attractive human qualities. When I meet curious people, I'm always interested. I'm always like, 'Tell me what you're curious about.' And I'll tell you what I'm curious about. Let's talk. And this podcast started out genuinely because of, well, it was a lot of just talking shit with friends, but it also led into one of my very first guests, actual guests, was Graham Hancock. And it's just because I was curious because I had read Fingerprints of the Gods and I'd seen him talk. I'm like, I want to know what do you know? What do you think's going on? And he's another guy incredibly curious and absolutely fascinated with his takes on ancient history. He has been talking about this subject a long time. When he first wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, I think it came out in like 97 or 98. I remember reading it and so many of my educated friends said this is bullshit, why are you paying attention to this? More and more as time goes on, it's been proven that he's correct. The timelines shifted back from the publication of that book, the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and the surrounding area. Like it's like, okay, now we realize there was some crazy shit going on at the very least 11,000 years ago. So we pushed civilization back 5,000 years. So this is just what we found now. And we keep finding things. Keep digging. Keep looking. And then you see the stuff that they're finding underneath the pyramid with this radio tomography where they're looking under the pyramid that it seems there are structures under the pyramid. You've seen that stuff?
I had the scientist that's involved in it. He's an Italian guy, Filippo Bondi, and he came on the podcast. Wonderful accent. Almost as good as yours. It was amazing. He's describing the use of this stuff and that they've used it successfully on known areas in pyramids and other structures. In fact, in Italy, there is a particle collider that is underneath a mountain. Using this technology which is satellite based technology, they get an accurate description of this particle collider that is 1,200 meters underground. It's deep under stone. And they can give you the dimensions of this particle collider. They have an image of it. And this same technology is showing that there are these columns underneath the pyramid in various places that are 20 meters wide and they have coils around them. They don't know what the hell they are. The whole structure of this thing is not small. It goes almost a kilometer into the ground. There's this enormous bottom of it. It seems like something that's constructed. So they're like, okay, the pyramid is crazy enough, but if there's something underneath it that's man-made that's a kilometer deep into the ground, like what the fuck are we even talking about? Who made this? What did they have?
1.2 kilometers into the mountain. That's nuts. It's a half mile into the mountain. And this thing can see through all that and get this accurate depiction of this particle collider. And it's showing with multiple scans, not just one, multiple scans and different technology, the same exact images, the same exact structures underneath this immense 2,300,000 stone structure that almost perfectly aligns to true north, south, east, and west. Like what? What was going on? Don't tell me copper tools. What was going on? Something crazy. And I have a feeling our simplistic explanation of it is doing no one any justice. It's doing no service to history. It's doing no service to our understanding. They've got to be a little bit more open in the fact that they are perplexed. And not just perplexed by stuff like this. This is a 3D print of an actual vase that exists in Egypt that they found in tombs of the Old Kingdom. This thing was somehow made with diorite, incredibly hard stone, and made to a thousandth of a human hair. The precision of it, and it wasn't turned on a lathe because it has handles. You look at the handles on the side, they're perfect too. The alignment of everything. You just look at it, it's a vase, no big deal, but it's kind of crazy. How did they cut that out? There are all these core marks in some of the stones that they find in Egypt. They've analyzed the amount of revolutions per minute that you would have to go through to be able to cut through something and leave these lines. It defies explanation. This is not sand and copper and just rubbing things. This is some insane technology that we don't understand. There are scoop marks out of the bottoms of some of these stones. It looks like ice cream. They just went... What are they doing? There are so many questions. What tools did they even have to do all these things? They had copper. There's some evidence that they had some iron. Tutankhamun had a dagger that was actually made from meteorite. When they could find meteorites and make things out of them, it was very valuable. But the sheer volume of work that they did there, you look at the temple in Man, you look at the three major pyramids, all the different temples, the older you go, the deeper into the sand they go, the more complex these things are, which is even weirder.
So it seems like civilization after civilization, they would there was probably a rise and fall with their technology as well.
Absolutely. I think it's incredible that none of this knowledge was properly documented ever. It's a whole line of work to just go understand how to even rebuild these things, leave alone how did they build it. Well, think about what we're doing right. All of our knowledge is essentially stored on hard drives and paper. Those are the two things that are going to deteriorate the quickest. Maybe we should take a dump of the internet and put it on a rock, preserve it somewhere so that even if our civilization is wiped out and all the data centers are gone, whoever comes next can go figure it out. But then you've got to assume that even if they found a hard drive, how long would it take for them to reverse engineer what we did and figure out what these ones and zeros actually mean? That is one of the most bizarre and fantastic accomplishments of modern civilization. This is a terabyte, which is nuts. I don't know what your first computer had. Definitely not a gigabyte. A few hundred megabytes was your hard drive. I remember when they first came out with gigabytes, I was like, 'This is nuts.' You remember when Gmail launched and gave everybody free unlimited email storage and the bottom sliding bar would keep increasing in terms of total allowed size? That was nuts to me. We take it for granted that we have infinite RAM and infinite hard disks. Nobody has to worry about taking too many photos on your phone. You'd run out of storage and have to buy an external hard drive. I remember the old Android phones, you get an SD card to store images to save space. All that stuff is so vulnerable. If a completely alien society had to come down and find our hard drives and they went a totally different path of technology, they'd have to reverse engineer everything, try to figure out what operating system, how does it work. It would be a nightmare. They would need an advanced AI to figure it all out for them. So if the hard drive survives, and if there's some massive flood, cataclysm, some horrific thing that damages all of our electronics, which is totally possible, just some solar flare, or just another lab leak. It's nuts. We could go back to zero real quick and basically be like preppers and hunt. Hard to reverse engineer everything again. Which is why I'm really fascinated by the post-flood timeline. If these people like Graham Hancock and a lot of other folks have speculated that there was probably a very advanced civilization that went in a completely different direction many thousands of years ago. If you look at the emergence of Sumeria and Mesopotamia, which a lot of people attribute to be the earliest known civilization, that's around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. So the flood is like 11,000 years ago plus. So you're looking at 5,000 years of what? That's not even that long in the grand scheme of things. No, not to the earth but for people, pretty long. Think of how long it took us to get our shit together. It took thousands and thousands of years of people probably being monsters. Just being the worst of the worst. That's probably the only way they survived. There's probably a lot of cannibalism, a lot of murder. There was a lot of horrific shit going on for 5,000 years until people slowly but surely figured out agriculture again.
Relaxed a little. Got some solid weapons to keep people away so you could work on math. And then next thing you know, civilization emerges again and it goes right back onto the cycle. And then you start reading in the Rig Veda about stuff that happened thousands of years. You go, wait, what the fuck is this? Like what happened?
Yeah. And that's my belief. I think there was something going on on Earth many many many thousands of years before established beginnings of history that was very bizarre and probably technology that went in a completely different direction than what we're doing now with combustion engines and circuits and all the different things that we use. They probably figured out some other kind of technology. Exactly. Which is totally possible. And it's amazing to think of what if we could rediscover all of that again. Yes, well I would love to be able to just have a window in time to go back to see what it would look like. I would 100% pick ancient Egypt while they're building. The pyramids. Show me what the fuck was going on. Just put me in a big hamster wheel, a big plastic bubble where no one could see me. Just let me violate space and time and exist there for just a few minutes. Just let me look. I think that would be the most insane thing that you could see about humans in human history. I just want to know what they knew, what they had, what they used. Look, this thing Petra is same time period at least attributed to 7,000 roughly BC. Jesus. And they, how would you do that? How? The details of all those carvings is just insane. Insane. And what in 7,000 BC? What are the tools?
What the hell were you using? How did you make a temple out of the side of a fucking mountain? Look at the size of it, man. The size of those columns.
It would be hard to do anything like this even today. It would be incredibly difficult, insanely time consuming. Oh, the Kailasa Temple, by the way, in 1650 or so, someone sent a thousand people to try to destroy it, and after three years of doing nothing, they stopped. They barely made a dent on a couple statues. A lot of times when invasions happen in India, they tried really hard to fuck it up and couldn't. Oh, wow. That's crazy. That's very robust.
That's a great way to describe it. It's just there's so much of that stuff that's so interesting because it's so undeniable. It's so undeniable in its scale, so undeniable in its complexity and the planning and the understanding that you had to have a deep knowledge of geometry, of measurement, of accurate everything, sturdiness to resist calamities like earthquakes, floods. What tools are you using?
Yeah. Like how are you doing this? How are you coordinating all these people and getting them to do stuff? I mean sure conditions must have been way harsher. People didn't really have a choice but to do these things because the only way you could take care of your food and clothing and shelter was to commit yourself as a laborer to the state. But you could also ask what gave them the initiative to go do these things. Well, that description is perhaps of a later time. We don't even really know what civilization was like when these were constructed. The real problem is the material science. There's a lot of things you have to have to make those things. It's not as simple as a sculpture like Michelangelo making a sculpture out of something fairly easy to carve. The scale is so undeniable that some piece of our understanding is missing. Looking at all this, everyone should just be a lot more humble. We don't actually know that much. What we know is so little, like what Socrates said. The only thing we should strive to be is just be curious. There's a tendency for people to think we have all this advanced technology and we're so amazing, but you don't even understand what happened thousands of years ago. There's so much out there to explore and learn. What is this place? This is unreal. This is called the Ellora Caves. Timeless wonder carved in stone. They're all kind of the same area. It's the same Ellora cave in the Shiva Temple. Look at that. My god. Look at this stuff. It's insane.
And again, there's no steel back then.
It's actually really symmetrical. It's not even like, can you go back to the first one with the symmetrical top? Look at the symmetry at the top. This is nuts. It looks like that mall in New York they made where the World Trade Center? Yeah. But way more robust.
I mean, how, what did you, this is the thing, the material science aspect of it.
Yeah. It's like you don't have the ability to do... Look at that top one. Go to that top one again. The one that you just had, Jamie. Yeah, that one. Look at that, it's crazy, man. I am just blown away when I see stuff like that. My mind just starts racing and I think, how did you do this? Who was involved? How was it planned? How was it so symmetrical? What were the tools?
Like what were the tools, man? If you don't have steel,
You don't have, what are you using? How'd you do that? I mean, most of it is done with stone, clearly, right? So, I guess I doubt it. I bet they had something else that over time eroded just like metal would today. If you left a shovel outside today and came back 500 years from now, there's nothing. That shovel's gone. And you've got to assume that these thousand-year-old temples carved out of a mountain, whatever tools they used probably got absorbed by the earth. It's giving me a weird thought. When they make a big building downtown, they only bring the crane in temporarily. There's only so many cranes on the planet. You take it and move it to the next spot. Especially something like this, if they had heavy equipment, they probably moved it and it rotted away. If there was machinery, there must have been something else, some technology we haven't imagined. But their commitment to art was so fascinating. These aren't just structures, they're incredible. Intensely beautiful and ornate. It's not just functional architecture, it's a fascinating artwork with so many features and images of people, beings, animals, elephants. There's one more temple called the Tanjore temple, done more recently in the age of the Cholas. It's pretty incredible. All of them are nuts. This was done as a project by the king to make a name for himself. Wow. That's incredible.
Is that multiple pieces of stone or did he carve that whole thing out of stone too?
Probably multiple pieces. So that's actually like construction. Yeah. Not like removal.
The other ones are essentially a giant sculpture. Wow, it's so pretty. Look how geometric it is, too.
That's what amazes me. They didn't have all these simulations and CAD tools. And uh, what year was this made, Jamie? Does it say?
It's just so incredible how much of this stuff exists, it's really baffling. Like I just found out recently that the Aztecs didn't build those temples, they found them.
Really? Yeah. They found Teotihuacan. They call it the place where the gods were born. The Aztecs found it and uncovered it. On the consecration day, they killed somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 people in 4 days. Damn. Not exactly the mindset of the people that would construct something like that. So those are the people that found it. It might have been sitting there for a thousand years. Then they came along and said, 'Oh, this is cool. Let's live here.' What was the society that lived there before them? Where are they? What happened? How did they do this? Why did they align it with the constellations?
It's some of the calculations are pretty amazing, like how they timed it, how they positioned it, how they cared about planetary positions. Sure, some of it could be pseudoscience, but the level of calculations they were making without powerful computers is outstanding.
It's just nuts and it doesn't make sense. They're making it without powerful computers, so what are they using? At one point the word computer just meant a human. Human beings would do the calculations. That was their only job. Some astronomers were actually the first mathematicians. The terms were used synonymously. Really? Yeah. Why is that? Because studying the stars involved geometry calculations. That was one of the first sets of mathematicians in India. People like Aryabhata, Bhaskara were astronomers too, not just mathematicians.
And Aryabhata was earlier to the idea of using zeros and he had contributions in geometry, all because he was interested in astronomy. Isn't there evidence of Pythagorean theorem in ancient Sumerian?
It's some ancient something that predates Pythagoras. Interesting. My theory is that even though it was not formulated as a Pythagorean theorem, people had to understand concepts of sines and cosines to build these structures. Yeah, 100%. And you have to have incredible measurement tools. The oldest known evidence of Pythagorean theorem dates from Babylonian clay tablets from about 1900 to 600 BCE, roughly 1,000 years before Pythagoras. Vedic ritual text also states the rule. So completely different parts of the world coming up with the same stuff. Exactly. Because they're all curious. That's it. I would argue that anything of impact in the world has only been done by curious people. The common trait is curiosity. Well, that's certainly a powerful trait. People that aren't curious are not fun and don't attract interesting people. So it applies to personal relationships too. You'll have a more fulfilling life if you're more curious. The transistor story: Bell Labs employed many engineers, but only three people questioned vacuum tubes and came up with the transistor, leading to modern computing. There's a conspiracy theory that transistors were back engineered from the Roswell crash along with fiber optics. This is just a fun theory, not something I believe. The Roswell crash is weird: witnesses, bodies, Truman visited, material flown to Wright Patterson and then to Bell Labs. There's a company called American Computer Company that had a section on this. The assertion is that the transistor was not invented but given. There's a giant leap between the first ideas and what came about. Bell Labs has a military base nearby and there's weirdness there, like remote viewing programs. David Grush on oath said there are back engineering programs. The movie The Age of Disclosure says the problem is misappropriated funds and lying to Congress, so disclosure would lead to jail. My problem with that is that's what I would say if I had been stealing money. How do we know these aren't just top secret military programs? They clearly don't want to tell people, partly because it's fun to keep secrets. With AI and technology, we have more access to information. Eventually, there will be no bottleneck and we'll know everything. So how can the government keep secrets? It's harder to get away with things now. There will be AI fact checkers for politicians. But the government still has access to things we don't, like advanced weapons. Building frontier AI models is similar; the details are not widely diffused. My hypothesis is that high-stakes things will remain secret for a while. But long term, things get out. When you look at history, massive change happens in 200 years. The US is 250 years old, a blink of an eye. But we don't understand everything that happened. As time goes on, will it be possible to keep secrets? It might be a good thing because no more lies, but also privacy concerns. If you're a true surveillance state, there are no secrets except about the government. As long as curiosity and truth-seeking continue, people will find the truth. When asked about 250 years from now, I honestly don't know. Even 5 years is hard to predict. Five years ago, nobody predicted the current state. If they had, they would have secured power and chips. Everything is reactive. I use Perplexity to think about hypotheticals. If there is an AGI, the value will shift to scarce things like asking high-quality questions. Archaeology might become cool again because AI can't do ground work. We'll still be the ones probing. There are many interesting projects. I'm not concerned about what we'll do. The association of personal worth with job title will collapse. When jobs are replaced, people will find new things, gravitating towards scarce value. The Gulf States example shows that if basic needs are provided, people might become lazy. But enough people will be inspired to pursue their interests. Retired people find meaning in family and community. Status will come from being interesting. Best case scenario is a good future; worst case is upheaval. But even without AI, calamities can happen. I'm not a fan of the fearmongering about AI while continuing to build data centers. My position is that being curious will serve you well.
In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds.
The brain rot that you're fed every day with just continuous doom scrolling.
That's bad. Um, and the one that can supercharge it is AI. Okay. Like now that you could just ask whatever you want if everybody has like a pull it up Jamie for them, you know, and that's amazing. So, all you have to do is be curious about a lot of different things and talk to interesting people. Engage in interesting activities together. If money is no longer an issue, you can fund passion projects yourself. You don't have to require government funding or venture funding.
Uh, way more land than we know what to do with it. And surely we can build a lot of interesting things there. Well, that's a good glass half full scenario. And one of the things that I keep coming to is this whole idea of people working and making money and having careers and having portfolios and bank accounts and all. This is all very recent in human history. Very, very recent. But we've become accustomed to this as a way of life.
And Microsoft built this concept of a knowledge worker because they wanted to sell more office software.
Yeah. Like this whole idea of putting a PC on every desk and making you glued to the PC was Bill Gates' vision. Put a PC on every desk.
That fucking wizard. What an incredible accomplishment because boy did they nail it.
Yeah. So it was not about making computing beautiful like Steve Jobs envisioned it, right? It was just about selling more software, selling more computers because that way you can sell more software. And if you sell more software, you become rich and the company was a machine built to sell software, and now they sell cloud. But that's essentially the reason we all got trained to use software. People went and did tutorials on how to use Excel, Word, email tools, and that became the upskilling you needed to go work at different companies and write code. So if that part is going to be done by AI, it's not necessarily a bad thing because this is not actually the way you feel real purpose and fulfillment in your life. If you were never exposed to that, whatever you had as intrinsic curiosity is probably what you should be doing.
Yeah. There could be a completely new way to live life where we're not dependent upon labor for basic needs. But then it's going to be incumbent upon people to figure out a way to be either self-starting or we're going to have to expose people to things that excite their curiosity and make that a mandate.
Yeah. It has to start from schools. And as long as we keep rewarding people for having answers instead of asking interesting questions, it's going to be a difficult change. In schools, you're always rewarded for being smart based on whether you have answers to 20 different questions. All those 20 questions can be answered by AIs. Have you ever flipped the script where you say, 'The smartest person in the room is the one who asks the most interesting questions'? What kind of students can you cultivate based on that? Imagine if the room had no pressure to always know the answer but the freedom to ask a lot of questions. Because sometimes when someone asks a question, it makes you pause and think, I never even thought of that, but that's the question.
And it takes so many different perspectives, which is one of the most interesting things I've experienced doing this podcast. I get to talk to so many different people and they vary so widely. There are so many different ways of looking at the world and engaging with it. I would never have been exposed to this many people. And in turn, I've been able to expose these people to all these folks that are listening and watching. It's incredible. I've never had a job that more aligns with my personality. I've always been that kid: 'Shut up with all the questions.' That's the system.
And the reason you're successful now is the exact thing people told you to shut up about in the past. Don't you know, stop bothering my lecture asking all these unrelated questions? It's mainly a frustration of the teacher that they don't have the answers to you. Or sure. And now that bottleneck is gone. We did an experiment with one instructor at MIT who taught introduction to biology. He gave Perplexity to all the students as part of the lectures. We used AI during exams too.
So wow. How do you even design questions for an exam in such a world?
Maybe you just encourage people to pose a question that AI can't answer right now, and that becomes your research project. You turn everybody into a scientist. There's this belief that scientists have to go through a rigorous PhD and be accredited by an amazing university. But anyone who's curious can be a scientist. The only thing required is intellectual humility to understand you could be wrong, question things taken for granted, be willing to change your mind with new evidence, operate with ambiguity and uncertainty. That's all you need. You can run experiments, gather data, consult experts. As long as you're uncovering more about the world, you are a scientist. You don't need a PhD. We need to inculcate this in the upcoming generation so they feel liberated. You don't have to memorize textbooks or feel bad if you get 12 out of 20. AI will always get 20 out of 20. That's not what you're meant to be good at. Master the basics, but your job is to pose interesting questions.
Yeah. And intellectual humility is so important. One of the things that was really weird about the COVID pandemic was we weren't supposed to question science. Or when Fauci said if you question Anthony Fauci, you are questioning science.
That's because they try to assign credibility through their degrees and affiliations, but not through the scientific method. Anybody should be allowed to ask questions as long as they are open to new evidence. That's the most important quality of a scientist.
The scientific method is one of the most important things to figure out what's real. As soon as someone says don't use it, don't question. There was an actual government push to silence questioning. Legitimate researchers were kicked off Twitter because they didn't back the narrative. This is anti-science. Science demands questioning.
When you don't understand something, the best thing you can do is ask all possible questions. Curbing that is like saying, 'I'm going to tell you what happened. Believe in my worldview, I'm not open to new perspectives.'
I wonder if anybody has used AI to map out possible scenarios for where technology leads human civilization and what could be done to mitigate the problems and push it in the proper direction.
I try to do that for fun, but not seriously enough to have a proper answer. A lot of things we do today will not be needed or valuable. Taking lessons from the past... Did you have to be good at mental math or remembering phone numbers? That was considered smartness.
Well, you had to because we had little address books. I had a tiny book with everybody's numbers. That's the only way I knew them. I remembered a bunch. Now I have only two numbers in my head.
But was there a time when people thought somebody was smart based on memory power?
Oh yeah, definitely. People are impressed if you know things now. I have a bunch of weird information gathered from years of podcasts and curiosity. My daughter asks how I know that. I pay attention.
Memory is impressive and we equate it to intelligence, but it's not necessarily a sign of being intelligent. It's a fast lookup table. Being smart is about posing the most interesting questions. Also the decisions you make and whether you self-correct.
Exactly. When you have an amplifier to your intelligence like AI, lookups and reasoning can be delegated. But posing the right questions to gather data, forming your own judgment, and having the courage to make a decision is still you. That agency, intrinsic curiosity, intellectual humility, questioning your beliefs—that's what will be considered smart in the future. You don't need a PhD to be a scientist because all scientific literature is open. You can take an expert's paper, use AI to understand it deeply, ask questions, and maybe disprove it. That's the peer review process. You should be allowed to question eminent scientists' work. It's worse to not allow the question.
Yeah, agreed. It's going to be interesting to see the future of education. How valuable are degrees when AI can do the majority of work? How good are they at law? Pretty amazing. At mathematics? Perfect. Coding? Way better than people. At a certain point, what is education? Is it just providing information that's readily available, or teaching you how to think, pursue interests, be curious, have intellectual humility?
I think that's what it should be. Institutions will preserve their brand value because there's an aspect of education outside learning: access to other curious people. Community. Brands attract good communities. But the learning process itself has to change. What you're rewarded for needs to change. Incentives are downstream. If the incentive is to score highest on exam answers, you're not changing much. You need to change what you reward a student with, like what is an A+.
The education system in this country was designed to make workers. The curriculum was designed around that.
In India, it's still the case. When I was there, the first two years of computer science spent learning hardcore electrical and mechanical engineering: welding, lathe machines, carpentry. It was fun. But if someone was just interested in coding, it was pointless. You had to go through it to be qualified. The curriculum was designed for the labor force of that time. That should change as work changes. But people are slow to change, scared of disruption. Let's start at the incentive structure in schools and colleges.
In the future, when things radically change, schools will be rewarded for developing thinkers who can adapt. They'll have to adjust their curriculum because tools are so spectacular now.
One proxy different schools use is if more entrepreneurs arise from your school, you created independent thinkers. They take fresh perspectives. That's what America has always been about: the American dream of coming here, having your own idea, being taken seriously. The whole venture capital ecosystem, family and friends helping bootstrap a business into success—success doesn't mean billions. As long as it pays you enough to live a fulfilling life and explore passions, that's success.
Yeah, having a yacht but being miserable.
The smartest or richest are not always the most fulfilled. The most curious people have the most fulfilling lives because they have better relationships.
What did the American dream mean to you when you weren't in America?
I always thought America is the only country where you can come and have an idea and people listen and encourage you to pursue it. The risk-seeking culture is incredible elsewhere, you're forced to defer to authority. Here, you can challenge authority. People want new ideas. That spirit of questioning is encouraged in academia as well.
It's a simplification to say it's not everywhere, but it's not as encouraged. The incentive structures are not there. The ability to be taken seriously for crazy ideas is why America is on top.
If the American dream is so compelling, why doesn't the rest of the world adopt those values?
It's hard. A lot of it is cultural. America was built from nothing, requiring bold risks. Jeff Bezos said on a podcast, where else can you raise a few million for an idea with a 5-10% chance of working, fail, and then raise more for the next idea? Nowhere else. People who get rich here want to encourage others' crazy journeys because it's hard to pursue all bets yourself. It's an ecosystem with network effects, hard to copy.
So your value is measured in your curiosity and willingness to work.
Correct. You have to work hard. I believe in intense hard work. Nothing great is accomplished by being soft. When you create something from nothing, it's not meant to be easy. There are sacrifices, but the joy of achieving something almost impossible is what you sign up for.
Yeah. And if you're not, find something else. It's fine.
Exactly. The country has enough jobs for all. People go through phases. There are many curious people here. I don't know any other country, but people who talk about the American dream from elsewhere are the most passionate about this experiment in self-government.
Just the whole idea that anybody can chase their dream if they're willing to work hard.
That's right. And it's not just people from one country; it's the attitude, the system rewarding bold bets against established players. It's okay to be an upstart. People love the underdog. That culture continues. People still want the young hungry person to succeed.
Yeah. Well, they love disruptors and underdogs in this country.
It's universal. Not specific to technology. Everyone loves an underdog story, whether in sports or business.
That's a very uniquely American story. That's what this country is. Despite challenges, it's consistently true.
One of the big fears in America about technology is that everyone gave up their data without knowing it was a commodity, making corporations immensely wealthy and powerful. They have the ability to shape narratives. That concerns people because they use their ideological position to push through technology that has immense control over people. We didn't see technology as having that much control.
This is an effect of the asymmetry between centralized AI power and individual power. When you don't have AI to judge for yourself, you're under the influence of big tech. But when you have access, you can customize what you see. Eventually we'll have our own LLMs on our hardware, giving individuals sovereignty. That will lead to local AI. In a year or two, capabilities from power-hungry data centers will run on a box you own.
It's already happening. I know Duncan Trussell does that.
Today, local model capability isn't quite there, but it will be a hybrid. You could buy an AI box like a refrigerator for your home. That's the only way to fight centralized power.
That's a good solution. I use Perplexity to search instead of Google.
Yeah. Eventually you can control the compute on your own hardware. Why do you care? What if the data center is bombed or the government makes a model unavailable? You want control over what models you run and your context.
Yeah. What do you think about social media algorithms? It's terrible for kids.
It curbs curiosity. If an app helps you find things you're interested in, that's great, but it doesn't work that way. It leads to echo chambers.
I'm stuck in a trap of schizophrenics on Instagram. It's full of AI slop. It's hard to trust anything.
It will get worse. Your default will be that something is AI. We need to encourage things that supercharge curiosity, not curb it. Searching for information and using AI to learn faster supercharges curiosity. Brain rot feeds with AI slop do not.
Do you think we'll recognize the dangers of algorithms and gain control?
You can customize on most apps, but it's buried because engagement time would go down. That doesn't help them sell ads. Elon has a metric about unreged minutes. It's hard to measure.
Measure. It's more like a in spirit the right metric. But this metric is also why it's hard to make money on ads if you care about this metric, which is why X doesn't really make a lot of money on ads compared to, you know, Instagram or YouTube.
Because you're kind of like optimizing for interestingness, but that doesn't mean X has everything, right? There's a lot of chaos, a lot of memes, a lot of weird stuff going on there as well. But in general, social media is not necessarily great for people. I think it's terrible for people, but it also provides you with a way better understanding of what's going on in the world than has ever existed before.
Because it's a place for discourse. It's a text-based app more than a video-based app, right? So naturally, people tend to engage in discussions and debates, and there's a lot of curious debates going on there and interesting viewpoints expressed by people. So I think in terms of the unregulated minutes, it's actually one of the better social media apps. But apps that are purely based on video or images, and largely video these days, I think that's just trying to get your eyeballs in time.
Yeah. Those are the mind numbers. Yeah.
They just numb your mind.
I mean, it's depressing when you go into a metro and you just see people scrolling through their feed. Nobody...
Everybody doing it. You look the entire car, everyone's doing it.
I always say that if there was a drug that made people stare at their hand for six hours a day, everybody would be like, 'Get that out of here.'
But that's essentially what we're doing, because most of what people are looking at most of the time, they don't even remember.
They're just scrolling through this thing.
It's brain rot. It curbs your curiosity.
I mean, Apple has these settings in different apps. Have you tried this where you can set the timer for every app?
No, I just use discipline. I don't engage very much anymore. I dip my toe into X every day for a few seconds. I go, 'What's everybody mad at? What's going on? Who stole this? How much corruption's here? Who got killed there?' Okay, bye. And then I just check out. I don't want to do it.
And Instagram to me is just nonsense. I look at that every now and then for nonsense and occasionally something interesting.
Really? YouTube is my main go-to thing. Yeah.
Because YouTube is my most unregulated minutes.
YouTube for me is always interesting. There's always some cool thing on cosmology. I watch fights on YouTube. I watch professional pool matches. That's what I do for the most part. That's where I really find my actual interests and fulfill my curiosity.
Long-form content is what the human mind should be trained to consume more of. Whether it's books or 30-minute videos explaining something.
And you need to train your mind to actually complete it. That's actually the biggest problem with the younger generation. They're in the reels experience, short-form video. They're unable to actually complete long videos anymore.
That's true. But also at the same time, the rise of podcasting is happening.
And it's great. It's great.
So it's not universal. There are a lot of people that don't find fulfillment in all the doom scrolling and nonsense, and they really do want...
Yeah. I'm particularly focused on the younger generation. I'm sure people like us can adapt, but a lot of young people...
But a lot of the young people, I meet kids at the mall that are 11 that listen to my podcast.
