Joe Rogan | People May Choose to Live in Virtual Reality

There's a real thought, and this is something that Terrence McKenna described way back in the late 90s, early 2000s. He believed that you're going to be able to recreate a lot of psychedelic states through virtual reality so that people that don't want to actually do a drug will be able to experience what it's like to be on that drug. It's very theoretical and hypothetical, and who knows whether or not that's possible. That could be one other way that human beings interface with technology. So humans, in my view, are far more hackable than we think. There are so many that we just imagine our biology as being fixed, but our biology is really variable. I have a friend who's an anesthesiologist at Stanford, and she's done this experimentation of just running very mild electric currents through people's brains. People have these very real experiences, and whether it's arousal or something, you're entering people's minds through different ways. You talk about virtual reality, and we are entering a world where the pixelation of virtual reality will be equal to life. You're going to be in this VR space, and it will look. It may smell. It could even have haptic suits. It may feel just like life. And our brains, I don't know if you've done these things with these VR glasses where you go and you can see people. You're just in a hall, and you put on the glasses, and now you're in an elevator going to the top on the outside, like a window cleaner's elevator to the top of this high rise. And there's a little rickety board, and then there's this cat at the end of the board. And they're saying, yeah, you have to go. Go save the cat. And you've already seen that you're just in a hall. You know it in your brain. There's this cat. Everybody's looking at you, and you've seen all these other people panic. And you're like, wow, when I'm there, I'm going to be so, I'm just going to go grab that cat. And you're terrified. You're trying to override your lizard brain, and your lizard brain's like, no, don't step this cliff. They have that for our HTC Vive. Yeah. We need to set that up, Jamie. We need a two by four that we put on the ground for that. It's incredible. And so I think that this whole concept of reality is that our technology is going to be changing our sense of reality. And then what's real? Like if you feel arousal in your brain because of an electric current, or you feel it because you're with your girlfriend, or wife, or reading a magazine, or whatever, is that different? Is one real and one not real? I mean, I think that there's real big issues here. Yeah. I mean, that is the matrix, right? Yeah. I mean, the idea that, and if it feels better and it's more enjoyable than real life, what is going to stop people from doing the Ray Kurzweil deal and downloading yourself into this dimension? Well, I mean- Not much. Whether it's possible to do a full download or not, I mean, I think that's an open question. But whether people are going to be more comfortable living in these alternative worlds, and whether we're going to be able to say, oh no, that is the fake world. Like if you're in this virtual world, but you're doing, you have friends in that world, you're interacting in that world, you have experiences that feel every bit as real in that world as in our world. And people say, oh no, that's not real. Those aren't your friends. Like even now, like, you know, we all, people with global lives, you kind of have these friends like, I have a good friend in Mongolia. We talk all the time. Do you ever see them in person? Once in a while, like once every year or two. It's great to see them. Oh, well that's a real person though. No, it's a real- But that's someone you actually know. No, no, this is like a pen- No, but I don't mean that. I mean, you actually do know them. Absolutely. But if it was someone that you only talk to online and they lived in Mongolia, that's where things get weird. That's true, but let's just say following that hypothetical, you have that person. They're part of your whole life and they're with you. They're with you through your life experiences. You call them up when you're sad. Like, is it so essential that you've met that person physically? Like, is that the core of what it means to be someone's friend that you have? It's not essential, but it means a lot. It does. Because we are not, like we are these physical beings and we are these virtual beings, but figuring out what's the balance is going to be really tricky. Yeah, what is the balance? I'm worried about augmented reality too. When you see people that use Snapchat filters and give themselves doggy ears and stuff like that, how long before that is just something that people choose to turn on or turn off about life itself. Yeah. Like, you'll be able to see the world through different lenses. Absolutely. The sky could be a different color. Yeah. The plants could be a different color. Yeah. I write about this in one of my novels, Eternal Sonata, where I think we're just going to have these contact lenses and it'll be different kinds of information based on what people want. I mean, like I'll meet with you and it'll say, all right, this is Joe, here's a little bit of background, whatever, and we'll have useful information or you're walking around a city and you'll get little alerts of things you might do or history. Right. So I think that... That's what they were thinking about with Google Glasses, right? Yeah. Well, I know, but it just was so annoying that people wanted to kill people. It's just too weird. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was just too... Everybody felt like they were getting filmed too. They were. Yeah. I mean, when you were walking around with Google Glasses on, you assumed that people were recording everything. It was very strange. They were. But I think that's another thing that we're just... all of our lives are going to be recorded. Of course. Yeah. Now, do you think that that's going to come in the form of a contact lens or do you think it's going to come in the form of ski goggles that you're going to put on and see the world through? Nobody wants to look like an idiot. And so in the beginning... That's not true. No, but in the beginning, all these... you talked about Michael Douglas with his... or my favorite one is Kurt Russell in Escape from New York. What do you have there? It's like this really cool tech. He finally gets out of this Manhattan Hill and he's got this phone and it's this big. And it's like... So that's pre-cell phone? It's like very, very early days. And so now we have these kind of glasses and there's like a little bit of... a little bit of cachet. But a mom has a cell phone that's that big. Have you seen that? No. How's it at the Verizon store? Yeah. I think it's like an attachment or an accessory to a phone. Yeah. It's like you can bring it with you and not bring your other phone. That's the idea behind it. So you could decide, well, I'm going out. Let me just bring my tiny phone for essentials. All this tiny... I mean, the phones are going to get... The quote unquote phones are just going to get so small. That's why I say they're going to come inside of it. You'll have like a little contact lens, maybe a little thing in your ear, maybe like a little permanent implant behind your tooth. Or one of your teeth. They'll replace a tooth with a computer. Yeah. Well, you don't pipe it right into your nerves. Any kind of crazy stuff you can think about is probably going to happen. Some of it will take... Some of it won't. Right. Yeah. It seems like that's what we're going to have to see, like how it plays out. And that's one of the things when you were talking about scientists that are working on these things, they're working on what's right in front of them. They're not looking at the greater landscape itself in terms of what the future holds. It's not their job. And that's why we need other people. I certainly see myself... Who are those people? You and who else? Who would you elect? If Trump came to you and said, Jamie, we've got problems. We need to figure out the future. What should we do? So, certainly, we need to have a mix of different kinds of people. And so I, certainly people like me who are kind of big picture futurists, we need that. We need scientists. I work with some really incredible scientists. I did an event at Harvard last week with George Church, who's kind of like the living Charles Darwin. David Sinclair, who you know has been on this program, is a friend of me working on life extension. And we need people just from all backgrounds. And so, like I would say, we need people. We need poor people. We need people from developing world. We need all kinds of people. But in terms of the people who are kind of articulating the big picture of the world and what are the challenges that we're facing. I certainly put myself in that category. People like you all know a Harare who are just kind of big, also kind of big thinkers, people like Sid Mukherjee. And I just think we have to articulate the big picture and we have to do it in a way so that people can see themselves in this story and then enter into the conversation. Thank you.