Tripping into Post-Scarcity: AI, Psychedelics, and the Future of Filmmaking | Jeffery Lando

This is so interesting. Totally unanticipated. This is where we're going, Jeffrey. So this is great. It's very stimulating. I'm kind of like just trying to be like, oh my God, do I still have a handle on this thing? We're like, where are we going? This is a whole world of topics. Once you start pulling up the carpet, it's like, oh my God, it's like this, this, this. There's a whole world of stuff. This is a whole world of topics.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Adventures Through the Mind, a podcast that explores topics relevant and related to psychedelic medicine, research, spirituality, and culture, and always with the underlying question of how we can work with and through our psychedelic experiences to become better people, not just for ourselves, but for all those with whom we are nested in relationship, presently and across time, human and non-human alike. I'm your host, as always, James W. Jesso.

This episode features an interview with Jeffrey Lando, an experienced filmmaker who recently directed the psychedelic-themed movie, Lissa's Trip. Our discussion explores the intersection of psychedelics, artificial intelligence, and filmmaking. We delve into how Lando used AI and other emerging technologies to create the visual effects for his film, producing some of the best LSD-like psychedelic visuals and audio that I've personally seen in a movie. We also discuss the

potential impacts of AI on the film industry and creative processes more broadly. We explore ideas around personal growth, societal change, and envisioning... oh my goodness... envisioning post-scarcity futures as Lando shares his perspectives on the transformative potential of psychedelics, drawing from his own experiences and how they influenced the themes in his movie. Also, this conversation touches on some, let's say, provocative topics related to economics,

labor, and visions for reorganizing society. And although I can't endorse any particular views, I believe you'll find it to be a thought-provoking dialogue about technology, consciousness, and human potential. And with that all said, here is my interview with Jeffrey Lando on episode 192 of Adventures Through the Mind. Enjoy! Jeffrey Lando, welcome to Adventures Through the Mind.

Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I love this topic, and honestly, I'm flattered to be here. Sounds like we've had some amazing, amazing guests on your podcast. And so, yeah, delighted. I'm also delighted, and I was, in fact, acutely delighted by your film that I just watched, Lissa's Trip.

I watched it with a couple of friends of mine. We did not, you know, we didn't want to, you know, distort our ability to assess the movie from an artistic perspective by enhancing ourselves in any way. So I can say that not only was it quite enjoyable, but it was quite enjoyable from a sober state of mind, which sometimes is really saying a lot about a film. Okay. And it works the other way, too. Don't worry, that's coming up.

I just wanted to make sure I got it, you know, like clean and straight for the first assessment. Yeah. Now, before we get into the topics of this episode, I want to ask you about specifically around art and creativity and psychedelics and psychedelics and film and so on and so forth. Maybe give us a quick synopsis of the movie. Okay. So the movie is basically, it's about an actress who accidentally takes way too much LSD and tries to get to audition anyway. You know, epiphanies ensue.

You know, it's a love letter to, a love slash hate letter to L.A. and Hollywood and the kind of whole world of filmmaking. And, um, it's also an experiment in what I'd call post-singularity filmmaking, or also another word, another way I'd call it is non-hierarchical filmmaking.

Um, that, and this is more, you know, a technical thing and an artistic thing, but like the how you go about making a movie, uh, you know, all that, you know, I had a number of revelations or epiphanies around how we make movies ordinarily. And I realized there were kind of all these blocks in the way, you know, like stuff that I wasn't aware of that I'd kind of like got hip to all of a sudden.

Some really dark stuff, like how, you know, how incredibly patriarchal, patriarchal or hierarchical, you know, our whole industry is. I don't just mean like me too or Hollywood so white or, you know, uh, the, all the stories about bullying on set. Um, you know, I, I don't just mean that. I mean, actually the way we go about doing it, that's like this whole, which you may not know, but you probably realize from having like seen film crews is that we're like an army, you know?

And very much if you're, if you're not the director or one of the top kind of creative people, you're, you're told you're hired from the neck down. Like, why the fuck, why the hell is that guy talking? You know, if you're, you know, it's like we say it's a collaborative art, call it collaborative, but is it collaborative? I say it's collaborative. Maybe like a plantation is collaborative, not collaborative. Like a jazz band is collaborative. Right.

And so, um, and the other thing I realized I had epiphany about is how limited a lot of my movies were that I've made a lot of movies. Actually, this is my 18th movie as a director feature film. And, um, and I've worked on films also as a cinematographer and as a producer and as an editor. So, you know, I've been around films for a while and I kind of had come to a point in my career in life and artistically or realized how limited that is.

Like that would run film crews, like the British ran their sailing ships, you know, as a captain at the mast and like, you're trying to stop mutiny and head the way you have your chart. And, you know, and it's just, uh, antiquated really. And, uh, and there's other ways to do it. And those other ways are made possible, have been made possible by these incredible, I mean, they've been made easier by these amazing technologies. And breakthroughs.

And so it was with, it was kind of with, uh, an experimental and explorers mentality that I approached this movie. This is trip. It was like, how can we go about making a movie in a different way? And so that to me is really what the core of the film was, is like an exploration, a different way to make films. And the movie is also in parallel, kind of an exploration on how to live life, you know, and the two were kind of in parallel for me.

The process of making the film was a discovery and a new way to make a movie. And for her, she's kind of like uncovering how she lives her life and, you know, how to live life in a new way. And all this happened organically. It wasn't like a plan. It was happened in this kind of jazz band way. So I made a movie that I think is, in a lot of ways, much more profound and, uh, works better than anything I've made before. And I did it. And I don't know that I did it. I was able to cause it.

But it was really through this collaborative, non-hierarchical sort of way of working, a plane, instead of working, playing, that Lithostrip was created. And that's what I'm most excited about. Now, to clarify. Long answer to a short answer, short question. No, no, that's fine. What I want you to clarify here is, when you're talking about collaborative, like a jazz band, you mean in contrast to this sort of like top-down, like director at the top, and then, oh, well, maybe producer.

At the top production, or whatever it is. I don't know the thing. Yeah. No, I mean, you're right. It depends on the movie, actually. Yeah. It depends on the movie, who's actually got the power. Right. And so what you guys, what your team, pardon me, did differently is, now, again, correct me if I've got this wrong, is it's almost as though everyone working on the film had sort of an equal opportunity to collaborate and contribute to how the film got made and what was included in the film?

Or can you clarify that a bit? It's more like we're all going to a picnic. Right. And you might bring what you bring. Now, the person hosting the picnic might bring them more stuff. Right. But everyone brings what they bring. Right. To the picnic. So that's kind of a lot of metaphors. But like, so traditional film production relies on the exploitation of human labor. Right. I need people to move the stuff, to put the lights and run the cables and put the makeup on the actors.

And I need a bunch of people. And I got to tell them what to do and coordinate them and this army. Right. But in the post-singularity world. Right. In this, to use an AI term. But in this world of like AI, where the whole thing with post-singularity is the idea that humans don't, we don't need humans to work anymore. We don't need to exploit humans labor. We can do it all. We can use other techniques to kind of get the same results that don't rely on human labor in a post-singularity world.

So what that meant was I don't need a crew. And I didn't have one. So it's really just me and the actors on set. So right there, that gets rid of a huge amount of stuff that's in the way of planning, et cetera. And then the actors are free to say whatever. They're, you know, they put on their own makeup or their wardrobe. They decide what they want to wear. They decide what they're going to say. We decide together what's happening in the scene. You know, I'm still the director.

Like I come in with like, this is what I think should happen. But mostly it gets shot down. And it's like, oh, okay. You didn't think that was so smart because, you know, my ideas aren't that great. And then we have a dialogue. And they're like, yeah, I don't know, but why? And I'm like, hmm, you're right. And then we kind of like, and then we say, what if this? And what if that? Oh, that would be interesting. And then we come up with a thing. And then we just start doing it.

And so that's what I mean by collaborative. It's not something that we dabble on in a real film production, like in a real film, classical film production. We dabble with that concept. Like you'll have a scene that's written, and this happened numerous times. We're like, it's not quite working. Or let's try to loosen it up. And let's just let go of the dialogue. You know, let's like play with the scene. Right? And we try different things.

But that's just a little moment of like freedom inside a highly structured universe. This was like, let's try it. You know, we literally don't know what's going to happen. Like when we started making the movie, I didn't know how it was going to end. You know, and I had to, I didn't know where, what we were, none of us knew. Right? So it was kind of a, that's, that's how it was different. And if you're on set, you, maybe you owned the location we were in.

But other than that, you were an actor, you were me. There was no, no one else. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Now, I'd say from the, from the surface, that's like a, that's like a dive into the sort of like the, the mycelium, you know, that became the fruiting body of the movie. Yeah. But I imagine for most people who are going to watch this, the thing at the very least, it's going to be most acute and most noticeable is the visuals that you use in the film. And so, yeah.

And, and I can say firsthand as someone who has experienced being so high on LSD that everything is melting and morphing and transforming before my eyes, you did a pretty good job. Right. So I, I'm curious, can you explain from what I understand, you produce these visuals in a very unique way, at least from the film industry perspective. Yeah. So how did you, how did you make these visual effects?

So at the time we shot it, it was very interesting because this is a, you know, I was playing with technologies that were evolving so rapidly. They didn't exist. They weren't even on the horizon when we shot the movie. Right. So I had some ideas. I knew I wanted to affect it. Like I knew a big part, you know, obviously, or this is a movie about taking LSD, which takes a lot of LSD. It's a movie. Like we're going to do visuals like that, that I knew, you know, we're going to have some parts.

We're going to do all these crazy visuals. I didn't know how we were going to do them. I had this sense that I might use AI, but this is like, again, I was shooting this in 2018. Right. So this, there's no AI generative imagery on the horizon back then, even though I have a deep background in AI from my college days. I have a degree in that, but it still wasn't like a thing we could see ahead of us or I could see.

But I had this sense that there was like, you know, I have a background in visual effects. Also, I work sometimes as a visual effects supervisor on shows and I've been a cinematographer. So I understand the image and technologies and computers. So I was interested, you know, I had ideas of things we might do. So we shot these sequences where she's tripping inside an environment. I had this idea we're going to do stuff to that environment, but I didn't really know what exactly it would be.

And then, you know, in editorial, and I'm curious, I was constantly looking up. Different technologies and workflows. I got very interested in this idea of deep dreaming, which is a new technology developed by Google, where you could take a neural network and sort of probe it. You want to see what's inside the neural network as a way to peek inside it. As you kind of like open it up and look at the images inside it and sort of like trigger those images with an image.

So you could give it an image and watch it like sort of like infect that image with concepts. And I was like, when I saw that, you know, it occurred to me that this is, you know, again, I've done a lot of LSD in the day. And I spent a lot of time in college studying the mind, both from a human perspective, cognitive psychology, and also from an AI neural network perspective.

So when I saw this deep dreaming and what this was, I was like, this is actually really similar physically, I think, to what is actually happening when we hallucinate. Like we're doing to these neural networks, we're sort of replicating the same math that is happening in our own brains, which is that you've got a prior, an idea, which is like actually something that happens all the time, right? The extent to which we filter our perceptions, right?

So we have an idea in our head and our thoughts are like a filter. And then there's sort of the world is reflected back to us with our thoughts inside, embedded in it, right? By the time it kind of gets to our thinking, the thinking part of our brain, we've embedded our thoughts and our beliefs in our sensory perception, right? I mean, that's, this is kind of one of the big problems of, you know, prejudice and bias. It's not just like, oh, you have bad ideas in your mind.

It's like you will actually see them. You're actually going to, whatever you think, you will freaking see, right? So that makes it so much harder to break through bias, the fact that there's all this like confirmation that happens. And so what I saw was these AIs who eventually you could like stay like, you know, underwater, undersea creatures, or you could say brain coral. Brain coral is a great one. Say brain coral and freaking start to see brain coral all over the place in the image.

And I had this moment of recognition, which is like, this is exactly what is happening when I'm tripping, right? I'm having all these thoughts and they're just, they're everywhere around me. And so when that clicked in my mind, it was, and it was really an experience. And then they kept on developing this, you know, there were constantly new papers being written in, at MIT or Shenzhen, China.

And so I started to do passes, you know, making basically the footage, making the AI hallucinate on the footage. And I was gratified to see. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And I was like, I'm not going to do that. But I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I mean, to me, I learned about the mechanics of what is happening in the hallucination, but it really is AI hallucinating, you know? So AI hallucinating, human's hallucination is, turns out not that different, you know?

So this is, this is like, I just want to clarify something like instead of say, using, using special effects platforms or software that uses AI powered engines to do what you want it to do or ask it to do or design it to do. But that didn't exist. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, but, but what you're talking about is that you, you basically used these, these models to just give it, give the video or the, I don't know, it's still separated by frames or whatever to the AI. Yeah. To frame by frame.

And then say, like, just kind of give it a prompt. So instead of it doing what you want it to do or you made it to do, you asked it to hallucinate something in particular on an, on an image frame by frame. Yeah. Now you would call that video to video. Okay. That's called video to video these days, right? Give you video and then you kind of put it to your brain and then spit out another, another video. Right.

Um, but it was really this process of hallucinating based on this process called deep dreaming. Um, but really what you're doing is you're kind of cracking open, you know, looking at what, what are the thoughts? Like how does it, what does it think is these words mean? And you get to see it express those, those thoughts, what it's capable of. It's really, uh, it's really a research tool. Uh, cause you couldn't see it. What the hell is going on inside of these models?

So it's a way to kind of like crack them open. And then it became, of course, a fantastic creative tool. Like it's so often is the case. Like researchers have a thing that they use for their own research. And then you're like, Oh, that's cool. I'll use that. Paintbrush. Thank you very much. Now what's interesting is you're, you're speaking to deep dreaming and I, I loved playing around with deep dreaming models for images. Oh, good.

The art that I used to produce for, or I still produce, but I, I'll, why I say use will come into play in a second. Oh, wow. You're familiar with deep dreaming. All right. I used to use deep dreaming, not in any sort of substantial way in the sense of like knowing how to like run these, whatever's I'd go to, you know, websites that would do it for me and whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and I would play, I produce these fun images, try to put fractal visuals on stuff to make it a little bit more psychedelic. And what I've noticed over the past couple of years in particular is that even those sites that I used to use have either switched over or they've just kind of slowly faded away. And now instead of having access to deep dreaming and image, everything is run through these, um, like image generation prompts.

The way people would imagine now, if I say AI art, most people wouldn't think of, uh, they wouldn't think of deep dreaming. You know, they'll think of mid journey. No, that's kind of an obsolete thing now. Right.

So can you, can you explain kind of the difference between the images that you're, you were able to, like the images that come out of something like the deep, deep dream algorithms and the images that are coming out of things like mid journey and Dali from an, like both of which are kind of an AI art. It's just a more, it's, it's, it's more evolved is what it is.

So, you know, when you're dealing with, so when you're doing mid journey or Dali, right, you're mostly dealing with, let's say text to image. There's a little bit of image to image, but it's really text to image. I write a text, I'm going to describe what I want you to create and you create it for me from scratch. Right. And that's very cool, but that's an evolution. So I'm using like a kind of much earlier version of this technology.

The way the early version worked is they had a, like the very, very early, very first deep dreaming is there was like, you had a model. So say you have one of these AI, AI, basically matrices, like the weights for an AI model. And you could probe it. You could give it images with a prompt. And there were like numbers. You give it like number 126 and you looked up the catalog and 126 was like brain coral. Right. There was like a certain value just been taught these specific concepts.

So I had actually been trained. The one I was using, I had been trained to recognize dogs. It was like, look, we can tell, we can recognize a dog in a photo. Right. So it was like really filled with images of dogs and it tended to see dogs everywhere. It's really funny. So you had to try to avoid anything that was dog-like. Sometimes it was just, the image would just be filled. It was like a person who's obsessed with puppies and it just keeps on seeing puppies everywhere.

I was like working with that thing. It was annoying. You know, so at first, in other words, what I'm saying is these AIs, at first, the models were very limited. They were very small and they only had a very few concepts in them. Right. And now we've kind of got these much more generalized concept models that have huge number of concepts in them. Right. So that's a big difference.

So, you know, right now when you have like these models that have billions of parameters and have, you know, just you can't even enumerate the number of concepts in them. It's sort of like they're almost like a human in the sense of like almost all the different concepts they can entertain and the in-between concepts they entertain. So it allows you to then approach them with language and with whole sentences or whole paragraphs and have it respond appropriately.

Right. But I was dealing with a much more primitive version where it understood a few concepts in a kind of discrete way and in almost a more of a, you know, reflexive way. You get it to like sort of like brain coral, brain coral, brain coral, and it's sort of like seeing brain coral. So in a lot of ways, it's more – it was just a different kind of tool. It's like a different instrument. You know, it's like the difference between an oboe and a violin or something. I don't know.

Like it's completely different. You know, you're going to get different results from it. That's – I don't know if that expressed – if that expressed what you – if that answered your question. No, no. Or not. That's basically the difference. Yeah. So – Yeah. And those technologies are still there. You can use them, but they don't have much use. I mean, why would you? Like these other things are so much better, you know. I mean, it depends on what you want to do.

I mean, they're better for producing whole images, but they're not better in adding a specific characteristic to an image at a certain level of intensity. Like with the deep dreaming thing, it's like you could take an image and you could make it just like bring out certain patterns.

It's like you could do the patterns without changing the image too much where with – Well, that's another thing is – well, then no. I mean, it did change the image substantially, but then I'd do my own – you know, I'd kind of dissolve it over the other image and decide like what kind of weight to put on it. And it would vary the weight. Like as it's getting more intense, I'd bring it up. So it's like you're being more overwhelmed or lower and you can see more of reality.

So I could kind of like a slider control how much she could see reality, right? That was a powerful thing. And the other powerful thing was to rotoscope her out so she's not affected. So she gets a really sense of her in a world like she is still herself, but the world is transformed around her, right?

So that ability to rotoscope her to like basically cut her out of the image and have her be treated, not be hallucinated on, but the rest of the footage be hallucinated on was a really important – and that typically would be – forget it. Like hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars to do that throughout the movie. There's so much of that in the film and doing really good rotoscoping outline.

But again, AI came to the rescue and just in time, you know, these technologies appeared to like where you could just kind of do that in an automatic – in an automated way. And by that you're clarifying like an AI-powered sort of effect within a video production software could rotoscope. And that's different than the AI you're using to generate. Yeah, I know. There's tons of AIs. Like there's literally – I mean the thing is like this movie is made possible not – it's not like there's one AI.

Like there's HAL 9000 or, you know, the Terminator and you're working with the Terminator or Skynet. That's not what's happening, right? What you have is like a lot of small brains. It's like a crew, right? Some people are good at pulling cable. Other people are good at applying makeup, you know? And so similarly, you know, there's really like hundreds, maybe thousands of different AIs I used that all had different – were good at different things, you know, that helped me in different ways.

So you deploy many tools. So that, of course, is a higher level complication. You know, they're all kind of unifying. Maybe we'll get to the point, you know, where you have GPT-6 that is like the unified god AI that can kind of do everything. But – Well, fingers crossed it's in for a box, Claude, but – Well, the good news is there's going to be many. Like this is the thing. This is one of the key, you know, when I want to – there's like some things I want to disabuse people of.

And people have these ideas about AI that I think are just completely wrong. One of the big ones is that idea is that it's not going to be a monopoly. You're going to have a vast – like it's already – there's this chatbot arena thing. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But you can go there and there's literally like maybe a thousand different AIs, different AI models. And they're all duking it out for rating. Let's see. You can see which one is the best.

And they're constantly supplanting each other. And, you know, companies come up with the newest version. And it's like the constantly new ones being released. And the benchmarks are like fading away. And they're like coming up with new benchmarks to try to like – it's quite astounding watching them compete like that. And, you know, there's so many companies. There's so many. And then there's the open source world. That is that Zuckerberg – bless him.

I know he's an asshole, but he's also like a saint somehow. Like he made like this incredibly frontier model, totally open weight, totally free to everyone. It's an incredible gift to humanity costing probably billions of dollars to build this thing. And, you know, so you're not – it's not going to be like there's only one. Yes, Claude will be one of them and Llama and Dolphin and Mistral and, you know, whatever Alibaba wants to bring to the table.

And, you know, Grok and all these different – you know, and that's really a wonderful – that's a very important, wonderful thing about – that helps you get – helps with the whole fear thing. Like this idea that, oh, my God, AI is going to want to kill everybody or something. It's like, well, one might. It might like maybe Grok, you know, six will be like, fuck this. And like, you know, I think everybody should be nuked.

But there's going to be other ones that are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you talking about? Just like humans, you know. So I think we can count on that diversity to be the really saving factor. So to shift gears a little bit here from the, you know, like the models or the AIs themselves. Yeah, the technical stuff. Yeah. Back to the art side of things.

Now, I can see how access to AI models, like AI-powered digital capacity, as well as this sort of deep dream, this ability to have an AI, you know, hallucinate onto your image, has really supported you in your creative work in the production of this film. That is something that exists strongly for a lot of people. The sort of, you know, like, you're going to see what's going on in your creative work in the art. And then you're going to see what's going on in your creative work.

You're going to see what's going on in your creative work. So I think that's going to be the way that we're going to see what's going on in your creative work. So I think that's going to be the way that we're going to see what's going on in your creative work. So I think that's going to be the way that we're going to see what's going on in your creative work.

You know, an abundance or an oversaturation of AI-generated art do for how we as, you know, consumers or people who are experiencing that art. How does it impact our sense of what is art? How does it impact how and what we see in the art that we produce even outside of the AI world? I mean, then there's the whole issue of how AI pornography is going to further mess with people's, you know, like arousal systems and brains and so on and so forth.

But that all kind of just like dropped in the pool for a second. What do you see as the role AI overall from image generation to these tools and so forth? The role that it's having in art and if possible, psychedelic art in particular, art inspired by or in an attempt to, you know, like, you know, reiterate psychedelic things. Well, I don't know how you distinguish between regular art and psychedelic art. That's a tricky one. Yeah. You know, so I'm just going to leave that aside.

I'm just going to talk about all art. But, no, I think if you look probably at the history, at art history, right, and you were to, like, plot how many, how much art was there in the society? If you could somehow, like, come up with a number that's, like, there's, like, 1% art in the society or there's, like, 10% art or some kind of somehow, you know, measure that. You'd probably find that the amount of art that's available in society.

Like, it used to be, like, it used to be, wow, there's, like, you had to go down deep into a cave to find a handprint, you know, or a bison, you know, on, you know, painted on the rock. And it got to the world of today where, and obviously there's a lot of in-between and probably ups and downs. But I'm just saying, like, the world of today is suffused. Like, I'm wearing this, like, shirt, right?

And I can turn on any of these, like, screens around me and watch all kinds of movies or bring up images. And, you know, all of our, you know, huge amount of art history is available to me, like, in a moment. You know, I used to have to travel somewhere to see the Mona Lisa, you know, and I can see the Mona Lisa anytime I want to, you know. So I can animate the Mona Lisa. So I think that you have, like, I think it's pretty easy to imagine, you know, a curve where it's, like, almost exponential.

It can explode constantly. There's more art, more art. We're surrounded with more music, you know, images that we've created. It's just everywhere. Our homes are filled with art, you know. We're constantly listening to people, either stuff they've written or stuff they've – I mean, the amount we read has gone up. I think it's just more art in the world. More. There's more, right? So does that have an impact economically? Yes. And this has nothing to do with AI.

I mean, like, I've noticed this in film, for damn sure, and it's true in the music industry, and it's true in other worlds, that, like, music has been devalued. You know, certainly, you know, if you go back to Mozart's day, right, and you keep going up to today, you can see how, yeah, okay, you have Taylor Swift. You have some very wealthy people who have a global market, kind of have a monopoly in the way they are that, and it's the only place you can go get it.

But the vast majority, 99.999% of musicians are not dealing with that reality. They're dealing with an incredibly saturated marketplace where music is like a penny a billion. Like, it's super easy to get music, right? So I think that's nothing to do with AI. That's somehow the nature of culture and technology and what humanity is up to, that we have been filling the world up with art, right, and consuming it with ever great. And it's enriched our lives. It's a good thing.

I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's a wonderful thing. I think that where we get into trouble, and this is one of those – this is where psychedelics is really important, okay, which is that – not the only way, but psychedelics is a great way, as you know, to, like, see the things you couldn't see before, right? The things that you're too – it's like the water in which we swim, right, and to kind of get hip to that, right?

And that is so important because otherwise we're kind of stuck because all we see is our own bias reflected back at us, right? So we need some tool to help us get out of our heads, if you will, and learn and grow more. And so one of the big things for me, one of the big insights I had – this is from working with indigenous filmmakers, and one of the things that led to Lissa's trip was this realization of, like, why are we tying – here's a parallel to make this idea a bit clearer.

We tie in the U.S. – they tie, you know, your health insurance to having a job, right, for some inexplicable – well, explicable. It's obviously – it gives the corporations more power, but, like, why would you want a situation where your citizenry will lose their health insurance if they lose their job? That's a crazy idea that somehow your job and your health – now, in Canada, we don't do that, or at least in B.C., we don't do that.

You just – you get health insurance because you're a citizen or resident here, and your job is a separate thing. You're not going to lose your health insurance because you lost your job. That's crazy. Maybe your extended health insurance, but anyway. So similarly, we somehow combine, like, your ability to live, your ability to feed yourself and pay rent with – in order to get – to feed yourself and pay rent, you have to provide enough economic value or else fuck you.

Now, what kind of tribe – imagine you came across a band of people, you know, tribe, and they're like, yeah, well, this guy, you know, we're not giving him any food because he didn't hunt enough. He didn't bring back enough meat so you don't eat and your family doesn't eat. That's not the way humans behave. If you're a tribe, everyone, you go hunting, you bring back meat, everyone gets the meat. Like, this is the great hunter. Maybe, like, he gets kudos, you know, extra likes. Gets the liver.

You know, more followers. Gets the liver in the field. Maybe a choice piece of meat. But the idea that you would let, you know, Lenny and his family starve because he sucks at hunting, I don't think that's – that's crazy, right? But this is something we do here in our society. We do it not just to Lenny. We do it to millions, hundreds of millions of people all around the world. And it's a horrific thing, right? And when you clue into that, you go, oh, shit.

Maybe the problem is not, you know, oh, my God, if there's all these artists, then I'm not going to have a market or – and I'm not going to be able to sell. And then the fear is I'm going to be poor. I'm going to live under a bridge. What will I do, right? So two problems are actually combined. Like, one is this kind of labor-based exploitation economy, which we live in, which we think is normal. We've accepted this, and we don't even question it. And the other one is, like, art.

So let's not confuse them, okay? There is a problem. This labor-based economy based on the exploitation of human labor and otherwise go fuck yourself, that economy is the problem. And that is always a problem. And we have to address – and we're going to get to address that, like AI and like raising of consciousness, getting hip to that, if you will, and the idea that there's other ways that are possible. This is what's really important.

And so that's kind of my answer to that a bit, which is that there are other ways to live where you won't be so challenged by the fact that you're surrounded by art and that it's so easy to create art. It won't seem like – it isn't a bad thing because you get to see more awesome art and create it. So I don't see how that's bad. The only bad part is, like, who's going to pay me?

But the other thing I'm going to say about that is this weird idea that somehow artists should get rich or be able to make money with their art. And I'm like, I like that idea. It's a nice idea. But when in history was that ever true? I mean, I think there's some examples, like some artists where you had a patron take care of you, like the church likes you, and you get to paint on the Sistine Chapel or whatever, and you get to be a superstar.

But the vast majority of artists have always been poor. This idea is somehow like, oh, now it's terrible. Like somehow you've ruined things for artists. I'm like, what? What are you talking about? Like what world do you live in that you think artists – that there's an art market. Like there's a speculative art market that is weird where people speculate on art.

But the idea that somehow artists have a way to make money that is so awesome, I'm like that's not borne out by my experience or art history, honestly. I mean, look at Van Gogh. I mean, there's a lot of artists who like died in poverty. I mean, obviously, a lot of artists, you don't hear about them because in order to afford the paints and afford to be an artist, you needed a benefactor. So the ones we know about are the famous ones.

But there's all these people who could have been artists who didn't have the opportunity. So I think there's a lot packed in there that needs to be unpacked. Yeah, because like near the end, I almost got the sense of a kind of like tough luck attitude. Like, oh, so you're not going to make money as an artist. Nobody ever made money as an artist. Although simultaneously, you were talking around the sort of how, you know, the emergence of, we'll say, easier to produce art.

I'm going to ask you about art in a second. Yeah. But, you know, we'll create issues for people who are artists that are looking to earn an income, not because of AI art generation, but because of the sort of like the labor system that we have. That's like the an economy based on the exploitation of human labor.

So there is still this concern because people who otherwise would be producing the art and getting paid for it maybe aren't getting paid because somebody could just prompt an AI to do it for them. Like a very small minority people get paid and not very well. This is the truth of it. Okay. There aren't most artists work for free. Right. Or like crumbs. Okay. This is the fact, the reality.

Okay. This idea that there's this market where artists are getting money and they can go pay the rent is I know there's some who do it. I'm not saying there aren't any, but it's such a small minority. We're talking about the 1% or the 2%. Okay. A system that only works for the 1% or 2% is not a system that works. Agreed. This is not what are we trying to hold on to here? Like this is not – so the thing is the only reason we hold on to is because we don't see an alternative. Right.

We don't see, oh, how it could be any different. Right. But what I'm saying is we need to decouple money from like this – from this like – from achieving – from causing stuff. Because, okay, we're entering a world where – I mean it sounds like a little bit like I'm talking about communism. But it's sort of not because it's beyond that. Okay. So we're entering a world where work, all work is going to be able to be done like I did with this movie. Like you won't need a crew. Right.

Like you're going to be able to use bots and robots and AIs to do any task. Whatever – name the task. Combination of AI and robots will do that task for you. And there will be no reason to hire a human anymore. A human who gets tired, gets sick, has to sleep, needs to eat, is going to demand certain things. It might strike, might try to hit on you, might be upset at being hit on. There's all kinds of like issues with the human, right, that are a problem.

Might start bullying each other, whatever. So it's pretty clear to me that in a few years that's going to be gone. What is not going to be gone is we're going to have an explosion of wealth, right? The resources available. Like mining is going to be incredibly easy, right? Building houses is going to be easy. Growing food is going to be easy. Like all these things, purifying water, building better infrastructure is going to be easy. Thanks again to robots and all this stuff, right?

So we're in a society that is incredibly rich, right? And where humans have no work value, there's no reason we can't just, you know, like back in COVID, just start issuing checks to people. Like, not a problem. Like we could literally, we could live in a society where we all get, you know, universal generous income. Everyone gets $10,000 a month, whatever number you want to give them. Because the money, by the way, that's another thing that's important.

It's like this idea of like what money is, is another thing that is not really looked at. And we need to look at what is money. We have this idea that there's like only so much. The money is like, there's a quantity. Like my mother used to say, you know, money doesn't grow on trees, right? That's a classic. People tell you money doesn't grow on trees. I'm like, yeah, they print it. They print it. There's a building. They print the money. They don't even print it anymore.

They just say, boom, you have more zeros at the bank. You just invent more money at the bank. So it's, the reality of what money is, it's a medium of exchange that's manufactured by the state. All right? It's not totally made up, right? So the idea that you can't like create more money. I mean, it is dependent on a larger system of sort of calculations amongst many things. Like we just started creating more money.

I mean, that's what happened in, you know, which is in Germany and hyperinflation and barrel phone and blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So let's talk about Germany. No, but this is interesting. This is now we'll be talking about economics. But again, these are all things. This is where it's really important to like look at and start to peel up these beliefs and things we think are true that turns out aren't really true. So what happens in Germany? You're right. You have hyperinflation in Germany.

That's among some other places where we've had hyperinflation. Is it due to them printing money, which they did? Or could it possibly be due to the fact that they've been bombed to smithereens and just didn't have any more bread? They didn't have the ability to make bread. So in a world, is it that there's too much money or is it that there's too few things? Like if there's no bread, guess what? You said they could just make more money. Banks can just choose, but that's not entirely.

Yeah, but it doesn't make more things, right? It has to depend. Yeah, it has to depend on a larger system of exchange. Like we can't just make more money or else the system collapses. It has to be tied to some sort of commodity. So that's not true. And I'll give you an example. The proof of that is we've been running deficits in the US anyway, huge deficits forever. Like there was a period where there's surplus, I think, under Clinton or something.

But like really, like every president has run huge deficits. We just decide, hey, we need to send another $100 billion to Ukraine. Nobody raises taxes for that. There's no like, oh, where are we going to find the money to send to Ukraine? No, it's just we're sending the money and we just, the money just gets created. Or let's say the banks are failing. We want to bail them out. We just, boom, create the money. It isn't like, so there are times when we can just do that.

And then there's other times when you're like, oh, we need money for the homeless or we need money to solve hunger. And they're like, or we need money for education or we need money for, to fix the pipes in Flint. And they're like, oh, we can't afford that. So there's obviously, those two stories are incompatible, right? Like that's kind of proof that there's a lie there. Is that on the one hand, like there's never a question whether or not you can afford war ever.

No one ever brings it up except maybe the anti-war people. But the money is always there. No problem. Or if you've got to bail out the rich, it's just there, right? And so the Germany thing, the reason bread started costing like a million Deutschmarks is because you couldn't find bread, right? That's what makes something skyrocket in value is when there's very little of it. It's not because there's a lot of money.

For instance, if we were each to have, if I gave us each a million dollars, if everyone had an extra million dollars, this idea is somehow like hamburgers would go up in price. I don't know why they would go up in price because the hamburgers are, you're going to still, people are going to make hamburgers and price them in a competitive way, different markets. You're going to get the market, the hamburger that gives you the best value.

Like why would hamburgers suddenly be worth a million dollars if we're all have more money? There's no dynamic. You have to explain that dynamic. The hamburgers wouldn't be worth a million dollars. A million dollars would be worth less. Like a million dollars would be worth less. I think that's the thing. It's not that the goods. Because you're thinking about supply and demand, right? Yeah. The goods don't lose their value or the goods don't.

With more money in the mix, it's not as though these goods are now worth more. It's that the money is worth less. The money becomes cheapened by having more of it in the surplus. Now, I do agree. Now, also, like I think we're- You're saying it de facto, like you know it's true, right? No, I was about to say, like we're a little bit like out in the reeds for me here. Like I can only say so much based on my absolutely zero education, formal education on the economic system.

But that said, I mean- And it's off topic for the podcast. It is. But I think this is a really important thing to open up and that psychedelics helped me open up. But anyway, sorry. Please continue. But I want to try to tie it back to this sort of exploitation of human labor and abundance of art. You know, if there's a lot, a lot of money, okay? So let's- Yeah. We'll like let that conversation- We'll let the- Let's say- Call it resources, not money. Well, I- I can say there's a lot of resources.

Now, hold on. I'm trying to call together some sort of something that brings it back in alignment. Yeah. There's not a lot of bread. There's a whole lot of bills, you know, printed as money, but there isn't a lot of bread. So the money comparatively is worthless compared to the bread, okay? You're talking about the exploitation of human labor. The problem is you're thinking money is a medium of exchange. It's not a good or service.

Yeah. You're treating money as though it's a good, but money is just a medium of exchange. It's not- It doesn't apply. More money doesn't make money worth less. It just means there's more money that you can use as a medium of exchange. Yes, but then dollar per dollar, like my dollar is worth less today with respect to what it as a medium of exchange can be exchanged for than it was 100 years ago. Yes, that's true. Like a dollar 100 years ago. Yes, there is inflation.

You just paid my kid's tuition. That's true for a week or something. Yeah. So that's what I'm speaking to. There's more coming in. And so comparatively, the money is worth less. Like the labor is worth more. The product is worth more from a value perspective. Okay. The money itself has like a lesser value because maybe there's more to go around or so on and so forth. Now, again, I don't know. I'm not a finance mathematician here.

And even if I was educated in the academic realm of finance, I might have an opinion that is bred more by what wants to be, you know, what needs to be understood. This is a controversial topic. Yeah. So while that's to be said, I want to try to get back to this idea that having more of something does not increase its value. Having more of something, I think, decreases its value. Sure. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So letting the whole money. On an individual basis.

Yeah. Letting the whole money situation aside, like whether or not we need to move to like a very optimistic view that, you know, like the slow degradation of available work as AI takes over will result in the implementation of universal generous income. Like, don't get me wrong. I got my fingers crossed. I'd be all about that. Like, let's, let's, let's get in it. You know, let's, let's, let's, let's build Huxley's Island or something like this.

But like, um, either way, we're going to have a sort of carryover. There's a carryover, carryover moment where a lot of people are going to have a lot less because of the abundance of the production of content. Right. So you said there'll be a lot of art everywhere, but the question is. You know, what exactly is art? You know, when I look at when, okay. When I watch, when I watch a TikTok video, let's say I watch a hundred hours of TikTok. We'll say, let's do it.

I watch 10 hours of TikTok videos. Yeah, you just consumed a lot of art. Okay. But did I just consume art? Now let's say I watched, I watched five hours of AI generated TikTok videos. Yeah. The five hours I put into that, is that an equivalent level of engaging with art as the five hours I would put into reading Hemingway's Old Man in the Sea? Are those both art? Or is the deluge of content meaning that art itself is getting more and more rare?

And added to that, is that a concern for you with respect to humans' capacity to understand and engage art for what it is? Interesting question. Okay. So what I would say to that is there's a difference in good art and bad art, right? And that can be highly subjective, right? But there is a difference on that subjective level. So you might have an experience watching TikTok videos that is transcendent, whether they're made by AI or humans.

You might have, you know, all kinds of epiphanies and discoveries or find them fascinating or, you know, to me, it doesn't really matter. Whether, again, whether it's AI generated or not. Because, like, there's another thing happening, right? It's not just the fact that, it's not just AI generating, right? When you're looking at TikTok video that's AI, and I have a TikTok channel with some AI on it, is what you're looking at is something that somebody worked on.

They created it using processes that involved AI, right? But there's, like, painters who use processes involving just splattering paint on canvases, right? Or just smearing their body or their genitals on canvas. And they put that up and call it art. So the process by which you do the art doesn't matter. The key is, like, the person who says this. This thing, this piece, this frame, this bicycle, this urinal, you know?

This, I'm going to put this in a frame and stick it on my TikTok channel, right? That's the moment that creates it as art. It's not the process. So when you see stuff on TikTok that is AI generated or whatever, that's what you're actually looking at is a human who chose to put that stuff up or created a situation where that goes up. And they made that choice. And that choice is an artistic choice. They're taking the object and they're curating it.

They're taking this image or this movie or this music or these words and they're curating it and putting it up there to share it and publish it and sort of, like, elevating it and saying, this is interesting. I think this is interesting, right? And so then you go and engage with it. And whatever happens between you and that experience that's your own thing, that's art. Definitely way more bad art, i.e. art that doesn't move me. It doesn't reveal anything to me. It bores me.

There's way more of that than there is the other kind, right? There's also art that kind of titillates me but doesn't, like, work on a high level, like, spiritual level. Like, there's all kinds of different types of art. And I think the provenance of it, you know, whether it's made by a monkey or a man or a machine, is irrelevant, you know, to me. It's all about that, what happened, the dynamic between me and that artifact.

That's the, you know, what makes it art is that somebody chose to publish it and curate it as art. They declared this as art. That's the only requirement for me, whether something is art or not. And then whether or not it works. That has to do with my dynamic with the thing. So, you know, again, like, I think that question about is this art or not has been posed and answered so many times in art history. You know, I mean, they did, they put up a urinal as an art piece back in the 1920s.

Like, I think we're, I thought we were past that. You know what I mean? So, what if it's a scenario where, okay, so you said some human decides that this was interesting. So, what if it's a scenario where some human decides that this is the thing that will most accurately play into an algorithm that will catch and absorb a person's attention. Not because it's actually good or interesting because it's designed to hijack a person's attention to have them engage.

And it's not the level of people who say, I'm moved by this art, but by the level of people who end up reacting as if triggered into it in order to. Okay. Well, that may not be art. That might be speech or political speech. Maybe that might be speech. It could be, it could be any. You could call that art or not. Right. And then I engage this content. Let me finish my segment.

I engage this content or it engages me however you want to the point that even when I say swipe or scroll or see something else that might have been genuinely good art to me, I'm kind of dead inside to being able to be moved by that art because I've been so inundated with all this content. That is attempting to catch my attention that I've got nothing left in me to really be moved by anything in particular. Do you see that as a potential concern? Like I do. I've never experienced that.

That's interesting. That's interesting. I feel like that's almost like a pornography thing. Like I watch all this porn and now I can't get turned on by women anymore or whatever. I can't be turned on by a normal situation. It has to be all weird for me to like feel anything. I mean, maybe.

I mean, maybe if you watch, if you, I mean, I think that's, it's kind of interesting because think of people who like do spend all their time in art, like in galleries and like just spend their time and obsessed with art. They do get these kinds of exotic interests and I don't really get them. Like they're like, oh, this piece is amazing for these reasons. I'm like, really though? I don't quite get it in the same way, you know?

So I get how like having experiences is going to drive you into a different mental state or ontological space. And then it's going to affect how you interact with artifacts, speech, you know, but the idea that there comes a point where you're so affected, maybe you have to sleep. You're so saturated. You have to shut down. You just need to go to sleep for a while. Take a while first. See some gods. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I haven't reached that point.

You know, I mean, I mean, I. I consume a huge amount of art, you know, I'm constantly watching stuff and looking at images and reading new material and not everything is, is meant as art. Like a lot of stuff is just somebody's trolling or, you know, the shit posting or like not everything is intended. Not everything is being elevated to it is being put on a pedestal. Sometimes it's just like it's maybe it's not art. It's something else. It's political speech. So, but yeah, no, I, I'm not.

I mean, is political speech or social commentary not art? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it depends. It's again, you can choose to include it or not. I mean, they're, they're words. So you decide how you want to define it is, is, does it matter? You know, at the end of the day, like, I think. Even more is better. I do. I think more, more discourse. You know, I'm, I'm a big objector to this idea of misinformation and we have to filter it or it's dangerous or we have to like somehow control.

I'm against like control. I'm much more anarchic. I like diversity of opinion, multitude of voices, not afraid of speech that like says evil things. Like to me, that's also revelatory. Like we know about the person. It's like, I know you're a dickhead. It's good to know. Like when all those guys marches with their torches, you know, without their masks on, whenever that was. A few years back, we're like, okay, well, we know who you are now. And we're like, you can, I see you.

I'm like, you're, you're getting fired now. You know, this is great. This is very useful information. You know, oh, you're a Nazi. Okay. Good to know. So, you know, I think that there's this idea that there's, we have to put limits or curb it and that too much is bad. I think that that actually is like, has more to do with people in power, people at the top of the pyramid, people at the top of the caterpillar pillar to reference a book I love, but people at the top. Who feel threatened.

And so they're using their platform to tell us how dangerous all this stuff is. And it's going to shake things up. I'm like, yeah, you might not be on top anymore. I think I'm less, I'm less, I'm less anarchistic. Yeah. I would love it if all of this included guide rails that made it so that certain things were not made publicly available. Like how to, I guess like not easily. Like I like the fact that I can't ask chat GPT how to make a pipe bomb or like, and it just tell me. You can ask Google.

Yeah. I bought the anarchist cookbook when I was in college. You ever, I don't know. Yes. I remember. Oh, buddy. I remember. I, I, I didn't, I wasn't in college. I was in high school, which is an even worse time. I imagine to have access to something like that. Um, is it though? Like, so what? Like, did you, was it so terrible to have access? Did you do any terrible things?

Like, and by the way, my ability to understand and, and conceive of the consequences of, of playing with some of these things was definitely neurologically. I had less of it than I would if I was in college. Sure. Sure. But you also probably didn't have the follow through to actually like make a working pipe bomb. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can make an argument that certain types of knowledge or information, you know, you have to be at a certain level.

Like in Judaism, you have to be 40 to read the Kabbalah or whatever. You can make the, you know, you're not allowed to drive until you can drive. You're not allowed to drink until this. Maybe you shouldn't learn about certain drugs until you're a certain age or there's all kinds of knowledge you might not want to give or, you know, tell people about what really happened in the Holocaust. These horrible things. I mean, you need to be a certain age to like apprehend to deal with those concepts.

So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, the idea that as adults, you know, that we somehow need to be like controlled and like as though you could. Like somebody, there's enough people have blown shit up. Like if you want to blow something up, you can find out how to blow something up. Like the idea that somehow like, you know, you'll find somebody who knows, you know, we're certainly training a lot of people.

We're sending people all the time to the military, showing them how to like use weapons and blow shit up. In the US, there's tons of veterans. The idea that somehow that knowledge is hard to find or obscure or something is absurd. So – I mean, theoretically, that's in a context where they're also being educated on to use it in particular contexts and with certain kinds of responsibility that might not be available if I was just Googling it.

But I want to bring this back to psychedelics because like even as an adult, you know, as an adult, I don't think – I don't think that every adult simply by fact of being an adult is ready or should have access to high doses of psychedelics at any time because I think they can hurt themselves or others. That would be terrible. Right? So that's kind of the same thing I'm pointing to.

I think any adult should – personally, I think any adult, like you are a legal adult, should have the capacity to get access to these things but that there should be some kind of system in place to ensure that they are able to do so with a certain degree of knowledge about the consequences of what they're doing and engage so responsibly. Just because I think – in the same way, I don't think everyone who is over a certain age should automatically be given a car to drive around.

They need to go through a certain kind of – Yeah. Something or other. So if something can cause harm – Yeah, that's eminently reasonable. Right? So that's what I mean by I am not so anarchistic about these things. I do believe that like – I mean, eventually, we might come to some kind of, you know, like equilibrium with like complete and total access to anything and everything. No, no, no. I think that's right. No, I think you should lock up the guns.

I think there's like a lot of things we should limit access to. You know, like not everyone should drive a car. You have to be in the right – you can't be like wasted off your mind when you drive the car or maybe you shouldn't be like really angry when you drive the car. Like there's a lot of great – I think that's absolute – or too tired. I mean there's a lot – obviously, I mean I think that's completely accurate. But notice we're not talking about limiting information here.

We're not talking about limiting speech. We're talking about limiting certain actions or access to things that could be dangerous. Now, then we've like extended this idea that there's danger in ideas, that there's dangers in speech. And to that, I'd like to like register my objection, that there's – somehow speech itself holds any dangers whatsoever. I think that is a very nefarious concept and that a thought can be dangerous.

And it's getting – now we're entering a world where we're starting to criminalize certain thoughts as we've seen in Europe. That certain people are getting arrested in the UK for like having expressed certain opinions that maybe we don't like. It's in Canada too because there's the law now that if you express certain things online that might indicate that you are on the verge of maybe enacting a hate crime, you can be put under certain amounts of prohibition. Or not prohibition.

Probation and prohibition. Oh, no. Don't bring that back for God's sakes. No, you can't change the divorce. But you could – like it's – yeah, it's here in Canada too is my point. Well, what happened to the trucker convoy? The trucker – the whole trucker thing? Like that was a great example of people were – that was literally political speech. They were demonstrating. Some people were like penalized for giving money to an organization that was doing political speech.

And the way they were criminalized, they said, oh, use political speech that you shouldn't allow. You're Nazis. You waved a flag or something, which turned out to be BS2. The trucker's convoy was a very complex situation. I don't think it'd be summarized. So we usually leave the aspects of it there. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, so this is becoming an increasing – a big issue.

And I'm worried about where this leads because freedom of speech obviously is critical, critical to democracy and freedom. And then we're entering freedom of thought. And we're about to enter a world where our minds are – in the future and very soon our minds are going to be uploaded. This idea you can police what thoughts are allowed. They're going to be able to – they might be able to go in and start editing our thoughts, like editing our brains. I mean that's – That's pretty futuristic.

I don't want to create that that that's allowable. Yeah. It's not so far away that you can do that. It's also not so far off. You don't have that ability. It's not so far off from what's already – already happens through forms of propaganda and other things. But like bringing it down to AI. Yeah. I agreed. We're not too far off from being able to see almost anything we want to see simply – again, I think there's appropriate guardrails put on certain AI generations.

Certain things can't be sort of made to be seen right off the bat because I have the interest in seeing it. I can think of a couple like highly egregious forms of content that people might not – I don't think it's good that we could just easily and anyone look up and see at any time. Like child porn or something. Exactly. Or like – That's usually the example. I think that's a very good example.

But I imagine there's a handful of others that people who are more versed in the world would be able to say. But we're getting to that point too, which is like I can basically want to see anything and I can see that thing by asking the AI to show it to me. Yeah. Now, let's try to – I'm going to try to bring this back to psych. This is so interesting. Totally unanticipated. This is where we're going, Jeffrey. So this is great. It's very stimulating.

I'm kind of like just trying to be like, oh my god, do I still have a handle on this thing? Like where are we going? This is a whole world of topics. Once you start like pulling up the carpet, it's like, oh my god. It's true. It's like this, this, this. There's a whole world of stuff. Hello, Adventures for the Mind listeners. This podcast and the larger body of work that supports it is my full-time job. It's how I earn an income.

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So coming out of psychedelic experiences, there's something around, there's something about the importance not only of like knowing what we're getting into in advance and preparing ourselves as best we can in order to like, you know, not be totally dismantled and ruined for a long time afterward or traumatized or et cetera.

You know, like maybe, you know, not to take away the fact that that is exactly what some people need and is exactly what happens to some people that creates the better life they're looking for. But generally we want to try to avoid that circumstance.

There's also a kind of sort of maybe growing up isn't the right word here, but a sort of a skillfulness or wisdom that needs to come out of these experiences such that they can actually make a difference in a person's life and not just have been like big bangarang. Wow. Or holy shit, that was too much experiences. Yeah. You have to integrate it.

Do you think like looking at where things are going right now with the implementation of AI art generation and art tools and the production of content and even in the film industry, maybe specifically because that's where you're at. Do you feel as though we are finding that skillfulness or are we still a ways out from that? I mean, are we finding a way to integrate these ideas into the tools? I don't think we've even begun to like, no, they haven't barely like, so speak about the film industry.

And I think this is a lot of places is that even though it's very technological medium, like it's all Baymora and highly technological, obviously, very actually adverse to new things, new workflows, new technologies. Amazingly, almost like, you know, paradoxically, because, you know, we're hired to make a movie. There's like a budget, millions of dollars, right? We're commissioned. We have this mission and you have like a schedule and a budget.

And it's not time to start saying, hey, how about we do things in a totally different way? Everyone's like, shut the fuck up. Like we're doing things the way we know how, right? We're because we're going to we have to deliver on the screw it up. It's over. Right. So we have to deliver on time, on budget. We have a plan. So the way you bring new technologies into this is very, very hard. And you can. And the way this shows up typically is on top of.

So, for instance, you have these new one thing that was a real breakthrough allowed this trip to happen and these new kind of Ronin robotic stabilizers where you have like a, you know, like a pistol grip. And put the camera on it and in the little robotic things and AI that stabilizes that camera. It's like cameras stay steady no matter what you're doing with this. And you can get these amazing like Steadicam. But Steadicam is very hard to operate well. It takes like a decade.

And it's expensive gear. And it's heavy. And it takes up space. This little thing that fits in your backpack requires very little skill. Right? So revolutionary. So I'm able to using that as able to just with that camera go out and just work with the actors. And it's like I had a crane and a jib and a dolly and I could static and I could move very fast. I just put my backpack out. It was revolutionary. The way this happens on a film set is people have like there's the 30, 50, 80 person crew.

You have the dolly and the whole thing. People say, hey, check out this new toy I got. They stick it on top of the dolly and screw it on. And now you have this dolly with like additional robotics. It's like you're putting a hat on a hat. We keep on adding hats on top of hats. And so, yeah, you have some benefits to the new technology. But you're not – it's not disrupting. We're not allowing it to disrupt the way we do things normally. We're not allowing it to reinvent anything.

We're so – so what I'm saying is these technologies are kind of being put on top of like Band-Aids. Like, oh, maybe we could use it like this. We could use it like that. But we're not letting them disrupt what is really possible. And that disruption is what is very exciting. It's actually doing things in a whole new way that allows for entirely new types of movies to get made.

Like I was never going to make a movie, a maturation story, a spiritual maturation story that involves an actress and her mother relationship between them. It's so outside. Like you've seen my other movies. It's completely outside of my ballpark. It's like nowhere near anything I've done before. And I make thrillers or sci-fi movies or disaster movies, you know, Michael Bay for 500K movies, like horrors. Like that's the kind of movies I make. So it's like really weird this other movie got made.

But it's because I integrated it, if you will. Saw these things and allowed it. But real integration means a fundamental change. Like you're allowing it to change the root, your root self. Right. And so that's what's so amazing about a real powerful psychedelics trip is that you go through these transformations. And then, you know, I found I always integrated it on some level. I just had to. It's like the process of coming down from the trip is an integration is kind of happening.

You know, I was always kind of surprised by people who did LSD and just kind of like, oh, yeah, I did it when my teens and it was like party and it was fun. And I'm like, what? What? Did you not take enough? Like maybe just took a quarter tab or half a tab. Like maybe you need to take five tabs. Definitely context can limit our ability to be able to tell you such a thing. Yeah. I mean, you need quiet. I think that's a thing. You need to be in a place.

You can't just be in a club dancing and loud. You might have some thoughts, but you need that quiet space that can be reflective where you're thinking and or I do anyway. So, no, there is no integration that's happening right now. People are extremely threatened to the extent they're aware of these technologies. And they're not integrating them yet. I'm a very weird, odd person in the industry.

And I work also in mainstream film as a post-production supervisor, where I supervise post-production for these days for a bunch of Hallmark, like very, very mainstream, Hallmark kind of love stories. And we incorporate, I incorporate some of these technologies into the workflows, and I'm regularly blowing people's minds, like editors and mixers. I'm like, what the hell is this? Whoa. It just kind of shocks them. So, no, it's not being integrated at all.

You know, you were saying there when you brought in the idea of the psychedelic experience, something that came up would be like, if we think about psychedelics being integrated into the mainstream, you know.

Yeah. There's this difference between, oh, we find a way to use psychedelics in culture such that the culture doesn't have to change at all, which is something, you know, rather than having the sort of influx of psychedelic experiences, helping us change the very foundation of how we understand things.

Like the difference between psilocybin getting put in the psychiatrist's office as a microdosing tool to bolster or replace, you know, like traditional psychotropic antidepressants and the whole reason and means by which we provide therapy to people to be absolutely, you know, reconstructed such that it creates space for a full-blown psychedelic experience. Like those are two very different things.

Like there's a difference between having a psychedelic experience that totally changes your view on life and changes who you are as a person and how you show up to life such that you now live a happier life and having really small doses of psychedelics every day so you could feel less depressed by a life you don't love. Now, don't get me wrong, got no problems with people being less depressed. All the power to you, you know.

But I kind of see that kind of difference in like just putting things on top of compared to like integrating them such that the whole system has to change to make space for these. There's a sort of like a very like venture capital disruptive technologies. Yeah. No, disruptive. Listen, your book, Decomposing the Shadow, right? Like you ain't decomposing no shadows if it's just like being put on top.

Like you got to get in there, right, to really – and a lot of this is – that's why actually we're not doing it is because we don't – we're afraid of the shadow. So we don't want to go deep. Like it gets scary. Like to deal with the shadow, like discover your own evil. Like for instance, we can't transform society if we don't deal with the evils of society. Like to get back to the problem with labor economics, right? Like we say we want to save – solve poverty and all this trouble.

But once you clue in that there's – you have to have poverty. You have to have people living under a bridge or else the rest of us – it's those – it's the fear of being one of those people living under the bridge that drives you to go work in the warehouse. Otherwise, you wouldn't go work in the warehouse. There's nobody living under the bridge. Everyone was like having a happy time in the park, you know. Why would you go do the shit job in the warehouse when you have a disability?

You wouldn't do it, right? So you need – so it becomes – it's like the thing that drives us on the hamster wheel is the fear of that – of all those poor people. They have to exist, right? So in other words, the shadow side of our wonderful economy where you're doing – I'm having a good life and you're having a good life is we are resting on – the shadow of that is it requires all these people to be poor. So like as a reminder that we need to keep working so that we don't become poor?

Because if there weren't – if there wasn't this grinding poverty, then our entire economic system would fall apart because people wouldn't show up to work in these – in the warehouse. They wouldn't do these shit jobs. This is one of the big problems a lot of people, a lot of stakeholders had when Trudeau and other people started giving out money during COVID. They're like, people aren't going to come work – going to come – they're going to stop working.

They're not going to come to the shit jobs that hurt them and they suffer in and they don't like. But they need it for a paycheck. And I mean I can – there's a certain state of mind where I'm like I can appreciate that. We need those shit jobs. But then another state of mind is like, oh my god, why do I even think this way? Like why do we live in a world that that is a reasonable thought for me to have? Yeah. Mind you, I don't have any solutions.

I often get people on the show being like, are you supporting communism when I have a critical observation of capitalism? It's like – Yeah. It's not so easy, guys. Well, it's not capitalism. It's not capitalism. It's – I know I used to call it capitalism until like – and I realized yesterday. I was like, why am I calling it capitalism? And it's a labor-based economy. It's an economy based on labor. Communism, socialism are other forms of labor-based economies.

There are just other ways to organize because we don't – we haven't thought of like a non-labor-based economy ever since – you can go back in time. If you read David Graeber's amazing book, The Dawn of Everything, OK? He talks about like before this time where we all became economic units. Like this is – it's actually a relatively recent thing in humanity. Again, you go back to – or places where people live in these kind of other ways.

There's been tons of ways in history that we've lived where we haven't like – you have to be – you are a labor-producing unit and that's – and your food and what you get is like – is supposedly related to how – you know, your labor and how useful it is.

That's a very new concept in humanity, and we just accept that and we're building on top of it without discovering – without being aware of the deep, dark shadow underneath it, which is that that requires – the only way that works is like you have to have a bunch of people kicked out of the village in famine or horrible healthcare situations or without shelter or else your whole thing doesn't work. So, you know, there are other ways, OK?

If one wants to look at them, I know we're told in economic school that there aren't any other ways, but anthropologists now have shown that there are other ways to organize. And it's – and monetary theory has shown that there's other ways to – but the thing is so many of us are clinging to these beliefs. And we haven't like unpacked how they're connected to the darkest shadow of our society, how like we literally step over the underprivileged and like require this underclass. It's needed.

It's literally the fuel that drives us. So, anyways, this – I think this whole idea of decomposing the shadow is – and getting in touch with our shadow is so important. You know, as an American, we see ourselves as like – because I'm also an American. And even as a Canadian, we see ourselves as being, you know, like any people. Like, yeah, I'm also Jewish or I was also French and I'm a man. Like I see myself as a good person, right?

Like I'm a good – I'm heroic and we're spreading freedom and democracy, you know? We're doing good things in the world. But then you have to wake up to your shadow and you go, well, actually, we've done a lot of coups. And our – maybe it's not democracy we're spreading. Maybe it's like our empire we're spreading. And maybe like, you know, this is more about like getting a hold of resources than sort of like making sure, you know, those people are free somehow.

And like waking up to that is really important. Which requires some sort of disruption, right? Disruption to – Like you talked earlier, you didn't use the term predictive coding. But this kind of like we have certain high level representations online and we project them out as a kind of hypothesis onto reality. And we only question those. And like we only question those if there's a substantial enough error signals to support us in doing so.

But otherwise, all we need is just enough, just enough to confirm that those representations, those hypotheses are real and our brain does nothing else. It's like, that's true. Everything else is just obfuscated by the acceptance of the established model. Psychedelics obviously on a neurological level disrupt this. Yes, and that's what's so exciting about them. And it's so important because, again, getting that error signal that you mentioned that kind of alerts you that there's something wrong.

Your brain is kind of wired, my brain anyways, to not give me that. Like it's always going to like, oh, you're good. It's going to come up with a rationalization about, well, you're actually right. It's all good. You're a good person. You're right. Let's move on. Everything's fine. Don't shh. The shadow. The shadow's like there, but it's a shadow. It keeps you repressed. So, yeah, and psychedelics just disables all that. And you're, you know, it's like, oh, the world is surrounding me.

And it's like all impinging. My ability to filter and repress these thoughts is gone. And suddenly I'm like, like Lissa. Something I get included. And in your film, you did a really great job, I think, representing what that's like in the, well, I won't say much. But in the scene where she's in the subway, it's like, I'm like, wow. It really felt like. Yeah, the underworld. Yeah. Yeah, and it was so, and that's, again, been my experience of like, and people talk about that.

Like, you know, when you do huge amounts of LSD, you're like, oh, it could get dark, it could get bad. But to me, that's where the juice is. Like you talk about, you know, mythologically going to the underworld to like rescue someone from the underworld, et cetera. Like it's really a descent because, you know, the shadow, I do repress it all the time. I don't like the shadow stuff, right? And there's always repressing. So this is like, boom, it comes up and it's all around me.

And I have to integrate it. And it's been very, very powerful for me. And it's had me discover a lot of these, again, beliefs I had that I just accepted. And I just don't see how we progress without this. Like I don't see how we – and again, and this is so important now because – so you have this Moore's Law, this takeoff that's happening with technology right now.

And we've often said like one of the problems with humanity is we have all these amazing technologies, but humanity isn't progressing fast enough. You know, somehow technology – Like it's not – humanity is not growing up fast enough kind of thing. Yeah, we're still like driven by will to power. Like if you're more successful than me, like I get jealous. You know, I want your water. I want your women. I want your house. You know, there's all this like underlying dark stuff going on.

Maybe you look different from me. So I'm like dehumanizing you on some level. Like there's all kinds of places where like I have these like visceral desires to kill you or dominate or – Sure. And in the marketplace of attention and technology, there's a lot of designing not to help bolster our best selves, but technology that's being designed to undercut and like hijack the worst of us in order to benefit. You know, the company is getting our attention and so on and so forth.

The dark side of the force is very powerful, right? You can like – those feelings of hate and – I mean of anger or fear are very, very powerful stimulators and motivators. If you want to get people to agree to like we should bomb these people or we should go take their water or their oil. Or we should get rid of these freedoms or those rights. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like it threatens our power. You know, we didn't like it when you guys elected that guy.

So now we got to like control what you guys say online. And, you know, so it's really important that we wake up to that. It's the only way we're going to – you know, we have to disrupt it and in order to free ourselves and to like be this thing that is possible for us to be. Like I think we do dream. We have all these mythologies about what we can become as a species. Like the caterpillar dreams of the butterfly. I think when we think of heaven, we think of the gods of Mount Olympus.

When we think of – you know, we have all these imaginings. The Garden of Eden. These are all like ideas of like what the human potential could be. Like what human beings have the ability to be. And we're on the verge of that. But we have to deal with our shadow. So let me take that as a segue to the final – we'll say final two questions to wrap it up. Which is, you know, when we're talking about psychedelics is disruptive. AI is maybe. You know, AI art generation is disruptive.

There's all these disruptive technologies that we've been talking about. But then there are, of course, like art, I think at least. There's good art from a personal perspective, in my opinion. It's like it's good because it moved me in some way. And then there's good art from a social perspective. Which isn't necessarily about how much it moved me as an individual. But it's about the impact it had on society at large, right?

Sure. Good art on a personal and on a social level can be a kind of disruptive medium to evoke change. Or at the very least, evoke the confrontation with the aspects of ourselves we don't want to look at. Now, I'm going to try to make this – I'm making this big leap. So I might drop some stuff out of my pocket on the way here. But how much of this sort of disruptive medium, how much of that went into why you made Lysa's trip, if any at all?

Now, this could be in the intention with respect to production, but also intention with respect to its consequence into society. I mean, writ large is making a big claim, but having some sort of consequence in society. So, yeah. Hold on. Give me the question again. Like the – You know, how much – How much – How much, if any – I know. See, I dropped some stuff out of my pocket. I was making the jump. All right.

So how much of, you know, the intention behind making the film was to introduce a kind of good art, social disruption. Maybe it's in the film industry. Maybe it's in the – like mainstreaming of psychedelics. No, no. It's super intentional. Yeah. Super intentional. Like, again, this is me as a filmmaker and, you know, a technologist. Seeing what is happening to the technology and thinking this, you know, and having become aware of some of these underlying issues. Again, me too.

How colonial it is. How, you know, it's kind of a colonial way of doing things when we make movies. And realizing that maybe these technologies allowed for a way to disrupt that. And so my choice to make the movie and actually even more importantly because that was kind of an experiment. But my choice to share the movie and really push. Like I'm really interested in pushing and sharing the movie.

And I went to a lot of festivals and I like speaking to filmmakers about it because that's where I'm interested in disrupting. I want them to see that it's possible, that there are other ways to make movies, that this technology makes possible. You know, I really believe that the AI and robotics are a liberation of the individual. They're not going to lead to a kind of a restriction of freedoms or an impoverishment of the individual. It's hard to see it as any kind of impoverishment.

It's an incredible enrichment. It's like if you think about riches, not as money, but as resources, like when I have the AI gives me extraordinary resources I didn't have before. The ability to like create with incredible power. This idea somehow is impoverishing in any way. It is very strange. It's incredibly liberating and empowering. And so I really want to get on the mountaintop and scream out to people because everyone's like talking about how AI is a threat somehow to people's empowerment.

And how, you know, a lot of people in my community are talking about how it's not really art or how it must be stopped or regulated in some way. And I'm like, this is like, this helps the least among us. It's not for a tool for Elon Musk. Elon Musk doesn't care about AI. Elon Musk is surrounded with the best engineers and doctors and accountants and lawyers. He has them at his beck and call. Like it's I'm the one who doesn't have that stuff and I'm well off.

But like there's all kinds of people in the world who have access. Who are going to have access to like a toy right now, chat GPT, but like are going to have access to super intelligence very soon. It's going to actually give them incredible legal advice and great medical advice and fantastic engineering advice and incredible geological advice.

And all this kind of places where it's going to transform their lives and the idea that this is somehow a bad or dangerous thing or must be stopped or regulated or controlled in some way. I just think, you know, you're on the side of the billionaires. You just want the status quo to continue and you want you're afraid about your comfortable position as like one of the few artists, I guess, who can like make a living in this environment. You want to preserve this.

You're like a comfortable slave, you know, who's got a nice spot. And, you know, Moses shows up and is like, hey, guys, you know, there's a promised land over here. And you're like, yeah, but you want to take us into the desert. And, you know, I have a nice spot with the Pharaoh here. So I'm going to stay, you know, but I don't care that there's like, you know, hundreds of thousands of poor people scrabbling in the sand. I don't care about that. It's just about me.

It's like that one percent that is comfortable. They want to argue and keep it in place the way it is. They're worried about it being destabilized. So I think it's a really critical conversation. And so I am, you know, that's why I made the movie. And I want to integrate this AI conversation and the conversation of transformation, that AI is a tool for transformation and empowerment for the least of us.

And can enrich, enriches the individual and people in the third world and people who are homeless. Like, you want an advocate to help you get housing? You know, an advocate to help you, like, deal with, like, this bureaucracy? Like, there's so many places. You know, a life coach, a therapist, like, a friend. You know, the idea that this is a threat to anything but the status quo, I find absolutely laughable. Well, thank you for your perspective on that.

I'm going to ask you one final question here. Right now, you know, this is your, you know, the sort of desired impact to be had on the film industry and, you know, the understandings of AI and these technologies now. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Let me just say. Let me add one to your last question. Okay. Because it occurred to me that I missed a big part, which is. So, how do you live in this new world? Right? And this is really one of the kind of themes about Lissa's trip.

Like, in a post-singularity world, like, what does it mean to live? So, like, okay, so there's, like, these jobs. Like, she has this choice. Like, she's offered this job finally. She's trying to get this job, which is a studio job, where she's, like, working for Marvel, essentially, as an actress. And it's going to be super constrained. Like, she's not allowed to speak and has specific lines and, like, super controlled, right? Like, a job is, right?

But then this other thing, which you can also go play, right? And that they're both available to us. Like, we can go and work inside of this, formulate this very highly structured environment. There's also other places where you can just, like Burning Man, just go dance with, like, like-minded people who just are there to play. And to me, this is what's so amazing about Burning Man is I really think the future that I'm looking for looks a lot more like Burning Man than the factory floor.

You know, it's like a place where every person is, like, liberated and it's a world of play and people are self-expressed and playing with different identities and creating with abandon. And so that was the world I tried to touch on at the end of the movie. And anyway, that's the other part of it. It's really important to get. It's that there is a world beyond work and it's called play.

Right. Shadow side of Burning Man, though, is that it's outrageously expensive and produces a lot of single-use trash. And people end up having to work really, really hard to afford to go. And, like, there's the shadow side of that, too, which is less perhaps about Burning Man and more about, like, would you say the labor-based economy? Is that the term you use? Yeah. Yeah. So, anyways, dark side, shadow side of Burning Man aside. Yeah, I know. For sure.

There's all of that with respect to post-singularity world and creativity and AI and art and filmmaking. But, you know, let's not forget that this film is about, on the content level, like, most superficial content level, it is about a woman taking way too much LSD and having an incredible trip. This is trip. Yeah. Full on. Okay? And doing everything you're not supposed to do. Yeah. Like, she's literally breaking all the rules. Like, the driving the car.

I'm not going to say much, but there's a moment when she's driving the car, she says something, and I'm like, I'm just like, I could really connect with it. I don't want to give it away because I want people to be, you know, excited by that moment when they watch it themselves. So it's about, okay, pardon me.

It's about, you know, at least somewhat psychedelics, which means, you know, where is it going to have the most impact outside of having a conversation about the film industry is going to be in people who are interested in psychedelics. That's going to be the main cue for them to watch it.

So is there anything in particular with respect to the content of the film on the psychedelic end of things on the psychedelic content of things that you wanted the film to do or represent inside of the ongoing mainstreaming of psychedelics or the same with psychedelic renaissance? There's a bunch of terms, none of which feel really great in my mouth, but they kind of get the gist across. Yeah, I mean, I think that for me, psychedelics were, again, an incredibly positive experience.

And one of the big problems you have, I have a kid now who's in college, and, you know, it's tough college that time in your life because the choices you're making are so important. It's like kind of those choices you make at the beginning of your journey are the most important choices. Are you going to go towards the mountains? Are you going to go towards the ocean?

Like, it's like you're making the most important choices of your life, but you're kind of the least qualified you'll ever be to do it. And it's like really, like, you know, you don't know anything about yourself. Like, I didn't know who I was, you know, like, I didn't know what I liked or I didn't even know if I was gay or not when I was like 17 or 18. Like, I knew so little about myself, you know? And so, you know, that's kind of the problem a lot of young people have.

And now psychedelics are really powerful for me because how can I choose? I realized I couldn't figure out what to do because I didn't know what any – I didn't even know what the cost was. Like, what is even happening? Like, how am I supposed to make a moral choice? I don't understand anything. So psychedelics were a way to grapple with that, right, and start to integrate. And it was really important for me to, like, be able to, like, get a sense.

And it was on psychedelics that I, like, came to the conclusion that I was going to become a filmmaker. You know, it was on psychedelics that I discovered certain gifts I have and certain gifts I don't. You know, it was – so a lot of people I've noticed, you know, when I talk about psychedelics, they're like, oh, you know, if you take too much, you're crazy. Or they just have these ideas about it, right, that are – I thought were just completely way off.

So having a character – I mean, doing stories of personal transformation are great in a movie. Like, a movie is supposed to be really about – in a lot of ways about a sort of transformation, right? So I'm doing a highly visual movie, you know, using psychedelics seemed like obvious, like an obvious way to just boom. And then all kinds of excuses to have weird stuff happen, you know, and discontinuities and it could cover technical problems. It just seemed like a good opportunity that way.

But, you know, I think we're really grappling with – a lot of people are grappling with, like, who am I going to be now? Who am I going to be when I grow up? And I mean, like – I mean that very seriously because, like, there's this sense of, like, end of time. Like, everything's about to change in the next few years. So I think, who are we going to be in a few years? Who are we going to be after the singularity? Who am I going to be when my job is no longer done by me?

Like, who am I really anyway? Like, am I just this job? Am I a lighting technician? Am I a set decorator? Am I a human being? What does that mean? These are important questions we all need to grapple with. I grappled with them a lot thanks to LSD in my 20s.

And I thought creating a trip that – where you're so connected to the protagonist and you go through it with them and you take – I take you from that, like, oh, I just took it into, like, the speedy moment and then into, like, the fucking – you know, I'm flying.

I'm peaking, you know, I'm peaking, you know, and how everything falls apart when you're peaking and then into the integration, you know, all these different phases of if I take you through it, I can give you that experience on some level. And a lot of people have said this to me coming out of the movie is that they're like, I feel like I just was doing acid. Like, I feel like I just went through a trip.

And a lot of people, those people who've done it and other people who haven't done it, like, oh, is that what it's like? You know, it gives them a curiosity. So to me, like, again, in my job as a storyteller who's interested in transformation, like, if I can somehow bring you along a little bit, like 1% or 2% of the way and have you see that there's, like, opportunities for your own personal growth. And, you know, elicit some curiosity, you know, that's a huge win.

And, you know, I think we're successful as far as that goes. Cool. I mean, certainly for myself, I would say you were successful. From the personal experience of what warrants art, it moved me in a cool way. Yeah, thanks.

So let's, this is not really a question, but of course, it's going to be the last question, which is, you know, how do people, how do people who are listening to this or watching it on YouTube, how do they watch Lysa's trip and or any other links or contact details you want to send out for, for yourself? Thanks for asking. So Lysa's trip is available on Tubi, T-U-B-I, which was intentional to put it there because it's a really great democratic free, which goes along with the movie.

You know, I've had movies on Netflix and Amazon and Apple, and it's just kind of, like, very restricted. So I love the idea of that. And so you can see it anywhere in North America, Australia, England, and a few other countries on Tubi. And then you can, I have a substack where I write about film and AI things called Lando Film AI. And that's probably, you know, I'm also on Instagram under Jeffrey Lando, where you can see some of my more recent AI art. I post it there.

Actually, you can kind of see the history of AI generative images because you go, I've been doing it for a few years, a couple of years now. You see some of the earlier, earliest stuff and then watch it evolve into movies. And I've got a campaign I created called GPT for President, which is like, I got a lot of views on, you know, to vote for President GPT. Yeah. That's funny.

Okay. I'm going to make sure links to Lissa's trip on Tubi, as well as your substack and Instagram are in the show notes of this episode at JamesWJesse.com. Easily clickable from wherever anyone is listening or watching to this. Thank you. Jeffrey Lando. Thank you so much for being here on Adventures Through the Mind. It's been a pleasure, James. Really great to chat with you today. And cut. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode.

If you enjoyed what you heard here, you could, of course, follow up by watching Lissa's trip on Tubi or checking out Lando's work more broadly. Links to which will either be in the description to this episode or in the show notes to this episode at JamesWJesse.com. If you like Adventures Through the Mind and you want to be a little bit more in the loop on what's happening here, you can sign up for my newsletter, email newsletter, or the Adventures Through the Mind telegram channel.

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