Joe Rogan Experience #1698 — Neill Blomkamp Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. It's awesome to have you. And we were talking just before we started about this t-shirt which is a design it's bob lazar's sketch of what he Not far too much if I have any rationality, some, some rational element of my brain is saying it is not possible. an accurate understanding So you think it could be human-made? Yeah. And they said, let's think outside the box

3:28 Anti-gravity. it started out with a silhouette they had a fake name for him and then i believe his story is that It's hard. maybe I read it somewhere else, but the height of the occupants of it, right? They're all sort is not that crazy. It would be cool to push that further where they also build some kind of, Frail things with huge heads like if you go from chimps to us chimps are massively muscular

7:03 He said, you're not going to need to use words to communicate. Have you ever heard of the Hogan twins in British Columbia? They're I came across it recently. would allow you to go somewhere else. It's more like dial-up rather than high, you know, broadband. hundreds of brains together in some kind of hive mind and everyone can think together, Yeah, so— If Neuralink really can accomplish something like that that could like

10:43 You disappears. Yeah. It, sort of like ego death you know, super organism that would just never return to individual humans. think we should be here at all. Well, yeah. Like at a certain point in time, what do we lose that And I think that tug of war yields everything, you know, that we understand. It yields creativity. So to take that away, I mean, you know, it's an understandable thing.

13:30 and we can reproduce through some sort of genetic engineering about any discussion, like, like the negativity around people building rockets, like Elon and, Because instead of it all being like NASA and the argument was like, why is NASA spending all this money on this when we have people starving here on Earth? No, I mean it's definitely subsidized.

15:18 In case some religious nut Right. But what was that thing that we, Jamie, what is it? So this thing was, we were reading it going, what the fuck does this mean? Go back to that, please, where you just were. The physicist appears to have bona fide credentials, including a Ph.D. from Case Western, There's that thing right there, actually, that little object right there that supposedly Bob Lazar worked on.

18:19 I'm not exactly sure how it worked. Yeah. pause and we look kind of like this. It's why I have lower back plane from playing squash consciousness? Is that important? You know, it, cause I think it is. And, and so what in, So those kind of discussions are really interesting, They make beehives. Yeah, it changes the trajectory of the culture. a sense that we're a stepping stone biologically to something else it's like we're the first

22:45 Yeah. Like, because it's the big bang is science fiction. Right. That's the ultimate science fiction. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds like, let me just knock down any discussions about God, but that sticks. Well, that was Hawking's thing, right? all, with, with thinking that, that, you know, extravagant is, is that I, I think I'm a complete given set of what I'm allowed to choose from. But the paradox is also that I think that

26:03 How so felt true? I've pondered this before and I've heard this brought up before. Why would he believe that? Because you're not learning each time you go back. inside of that linear timeline, you should live your life in a way that you would want it to go Is that comforting? Do you think, like, because the creative process of writing I mean, you could say, right?

30:39 One of the things that I've always thought of when it comes to ufos this is like a side pondering is that the preposterous NASA has a rover right now on Mars 60,000 plus feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second and then take off. and there's however many hundred million of them, like we know octopus or octopi are super intelligent, right?

33:39 it figured out a way through evolution to join minds in some strange way but it doesn't travel It's like a frog hacked DARPANET or something and launched a nuke. yeah it does it does also feel like some form of adolescent life form that's between is some sort of a technological advance yeah that we don't really understand yet yeah like that's this is biological programming, right? Like I think, I think that people hang on to resources

37:27 was doing a commercial for Nike and I was in San Diego and the line producer that I was working And these federales saw us doing it. I don't remember how long we were walking for. was trying to get into, was incredibly striking. Like it was just crazy. along the fence, along the perimeter. Like, I guess they'd driven us kind of like, you know, And I mean, it's a phenomenon that's seen across the whole world. But in South Africa,

41:30 happened and not as simple as what it appears to be. And growing up in South Africa and creating the feeling was I wanted people to, I don't, I'm not sure if someone from Beverly Hills knows what with District 9 was, I mean, one part of it was growing up in South Africa in that period of time. But the other part was a huge influx of, you know, people from Mozambique

43:48 where you could switch out the honest answer I have, who's the most obsessed with UFOs is South African who moved to, to Canada when he was yeah okay what's that yeah how do you Everything is at least... Yeah. But that's a real problem because if that guy goes to his grave and he doesn't tell everybody and show everybody that It's the same concept, right? It's a synthetic gravitational field. So it would bend light and it would. But when you're looking that it's yes it's it's a synthetic

47:14 what i want to say or actually be in it like get invited down to s4 go in it sit in it, fly around in it. You know the Jackie Gleason story? was it upstate New York? according to william shachter gleason said nixon showed him the roswell aliens um who knows if I created the small experimental studio called Oats Studios with my brother, which was, um,

49:19 And so I started writing different versions New York. make this thing i mean i mean what does it mean knows? I'm not into the woods around it though. It looks a little too claustrophobic. The woods? Well, no, that around the house like that. I can't stand rain. Yeah. Like, I mean, I'm into like thundershowers and cool rain. Yeah. have the same sort of association with suicide and depression the way like Portland and Seattle do?

51:53 I mean I haven't heard it about Vancouver. COVID because, um, we, we had a place that was since 2017 and I just kind of loved the area, There are bears. with which bear. And it's like, Or it's young. Or it's young. Was that Alaska? Play it because it's pretty wild. You guys got a camera out? Hey, bear. My brother sent me this video. I't know where where it's from but he sent me a video that was like it was a home security camera inside of a house

55:27 Yeah. Boom! And this massive arm that just comes down and slams into the back of a fucking moose. And it's like, what are you talking about? Yeah. where they're all in this very specific area. I don't know whether they, I mean, I assume they killed it, but we actually had like a dead, it looked like a really large deer that they killed on our property.

58:12 Where's he at? The noise man See there's the bobcat. was shot out there i mean the main the main, you know, it was during COVID. We used all of the stuff that we had access to. But yeah, that film was... No, not sound. it's an unusual process to be used in that way in a film. you have you know the performances from the actors, you can put them in synthetic computer generated environments and then begin to light them and select your cameras.

1:02:20 And then another idea was this idea of the Vatican kind of buying up corporations What are your thoughts on that? the bulletproof glass and see how he was doing right it would be interesting and if someone is The Event Horizon. It's a cool mixture, yeah. It's a fun film. That's why I was really excited when i heard that you were at least continuation of what happened after aliens and for newt to be alive and for you know for ripley

1:06:26 It's wild when you find out that the movie, the original, was from the 70s. Yeah. It's really amazing how well it was filmed. I think. Matt Painting's pre-computer graphics were done on panes of glass. Obviously, you can't move. of vietnam war high technology low technology sort of parable at play yes um so it was two forces Yeah. edited anything out of it is there an uncut version i think I think just the way it is in 1979 would be extreme.

1:09:58 Wait, are you talking about a computer game? Oh. it's horrific. It's really scary because you really do feel like you're trapped inside these The body horror, where you can't get out of the ship. I mean, I love the movie. Yeah, I totally love it I totally love it the Geiger alien itself like the way he designed it So it has her and it has aliens. At the time of the article I found, the game was free.

1:12:50 Oh, totally. Because you know what they did as well? They even did, they got so silly. Yeah. Yeah. So those films, just the scenes, you're passive. The whole point is that someone has learned something in life or gone through So there's this misconception where it's like some cases of narrative could work, but for the most part, it feels like doubling down on photoreal immersion, which is basically some kind of like wish fulfillment, right?

1:16:38 Yeah, I'm terrified of that We can just go right in there, and then you have your own little plug, definitely coming. That's definitely coming. like million fold increases in speed. Yeah. I mean, coming also from visual effects and And with the level of photorealistic immersion that we're talking about in VR, it would be really fascinating for that to swing the other way now where you could be in a photorealistic immersion of the Shinin.

1:19:08 possibility that you could see a big game adaptation. Yeah, it's gonna flip and what And then to see this Unreal 5 engine. Yeah. It's its ability to handle hundreds of billions of polygons. Look at this. Okay, that guy looks a little fake. to the way they move their mouths? That is really, really amazing. but we could, like Alien Isolation, we could port those out to VR. So you could sit and watch those

1:23:01 But, but, but I mean, it goes back to the narrative versus, you know, the passive versus active experience discussion. Yeah. it's like the goggles and the you know opening that at christmas and like wheeling it down the Yeah. And it was celebrated. So he never went to sleep? Yeah. How many days can you do that? I think so. And what was the result of it?

1:27:00 I'm trying to see. Negative experience. That's your next movie. Okay, this sounds like... knew so little about human beings in 1964 comparatively especially like makes sense to me. Like I'm so averse to surgery and cutting and stuff. Yeah. Refused potentially life-saving cancer surgery Like, I just don't, I'm not into surgery. No, not proper surgery.

1:30:21 surgery, meaning they're going to resurface the head and the socket? Like so. Yeah, I don't want to do that yeah oof yeah i know a lot of people that have had Like, this is crazy. with having your arm almost severed from your body can't right now at all uh i could probably do that it just hurts yeah there's certain emotions when I was five. I fell down a flight of stairs and cracked my nose. My brother's having that done.

1:33:33 is so bad at moving blood around as well it's very un it's not vasculated exactly so the inside of my Now it works incredible. film commercials for, for Halo. And I was in the back on one side and my friend slash director of but just enough to shear my ear off feeling for like 10 years. You, you would have been in martial arts, but that feeling of like

1:35:55 where I just looked like death essentially after that. So it constantly feels weird? Yeah, there's probably not a lot of circulation in there. You can't do any walking or put any pressure on it. meniscus is another tricky one yeah like they try to stitch them up together and hope it heals but Like I don't know what it was, but it would be like here

1:38:44 Yeah, let to see the to be able to move these the the last two fingers of his hand right the first That's enough. He is. shows you how much it's just like a meat astronaut suit that you're wearing it really is the brain Well, I'm choking my legs out. Yeah. To anybody that doesn't think that that is potentially what killed him. just that level of slow lack of consciousness

1:42:41 It's a terrible place to be. As soon as there's some kind of arterial blockage or. it is amazing how how the body does i, it's just a bunch of mechanical understandable components that can be laid out on a, you know, all the rest of it is just mechanical. with my friend John Joseph. like completely normal. And it didn't squeeze too hard or anything?

1:45:04 What are we doing here, bro? The gait and the motion is realistic. And I think as they get to the nerves that do remain There's something, I think, there's a neural plasticity element to do with limbs and articulating limbs that can be explored in future, far future games with brain-computer interfaces where you could give people more than two arms, for example, right? If you suddenly had two extra arms right now that were being simulated but driven by the same motor control that you have that you use your real arms with, they would be like a toddler.

1:47:21 into something that's a simulation with eight arms and five legs, theoretically, you could begin to use that other version of yourself. they have actual density in areas the ability to play piano. I mean, if you can do it like if someone can play piano at a very high level so there's obviously Oh, it was incredible. Yeah, it was my favorite viewing thing, event, that I've ever been in in my life. Oh, it was incredible.

1:49:23 It became literal. gonna take us over or we join mm-hmm or or become kind of like an anti Yeah, in a new film. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Well, that's one of the ways you would get if you run acid. And he started like thinking on black males in America with, I think, syphilis, right? Yeah, it's just like, how is this even happening? And it's also they have this ultimate ability to just make everybody disappear.

1:54:07 So this was another CIA? But it's an amazing book called Chaos by a guy named Tom McNeil. And they had provided him with acid. like he was giving people acid and experimenting on him and one of the They're in the process of potentially converting the book into a series. and they had something on the prosecutor That's the part that's the most interesting part to me. And the, and the, the most sort of

1:56:55 It's wild. had rejected his advances like a girl like he would be like really vicious and mean and write Or at least there's some potential insight. people overcome predators and enemies and their environment and all these different things happen, that we've developed. It's like our biology is hopelessly stalled. We're not changing fast enough. nukes, overpopulation, limited resources, runaway. I mean, when you start introducing things like

1:59:58 I am become death. but then the question is what's better Is it better if we just kill each Right. Right. advance right they don't there's no like long-term thinking to the human race right right so so the result of of doing what the what is being told on a biological programming level immediately which Yeah. that form so and and all of that within the context of the movie makes a lot of sense it's and and I know that she's also or the AI is cut off is cut off

2:03:15 decided that the human race is a mess, maybe what AI would do is create bots online and have people And it goes about doing it in a way that you would never have ever thought of. And the results of Exactly. And those are the sort of human characteristics we apply to the way we think right? So now it's like, it's able to access everything. And its task is, please make this

2:06:26 or something you're like melting us down into like base like glue from bones to fuse pages together yeah there's no i mean if you have no sense of self no feeling of self-preservation alien AI hybrid, or it could just be pure alien silicon-based computer technology that is sentient. like oh we got a snake in the garden or putting yeah putting like guardrails up at a at a tenpen

2:08:30 there's the kenneth arnold story where that this is the um original flying saucer imagery came from What's crazy about that one is the mayor, was it the governor? And then he says he saw something there. it's so confusing it's very confusing because you've got eyewitness encounters, which are absolutely the worst kind of evidence you could ever get.

2:10:21 and they talk about a thing that they saw This is how one person hears another person talk about it and then people just start talking could everybody also agree on the same thing how could thousands of people agree this is a this is They're literally floating in the sky. Like what happens if something like this, if we put something like this over a city?

2:12:05 Who said that? Did you guys say that? Like, is this the Pentagon? the the image of what was the go Fast or the Fleer? I forget it's hard to parse it's hard to parse true so badly. It's hard to parse. Yeah. Yeah. And there's the, there it is. Is that it? Door opens up out of nowhere and it sort of dissolves and you see the yeah, there it is But again, this is the classic shape that people had decided was the shape of alien vehicles.

2:16:08 Well, that was one of the cool things about that one film where they were like these octopi and they spoke with ink. There's actually one that you'd find really interesting called – piecing together what's happened to him. And then he finds where this drug is still in sort of FDA And he calculates because of this that this other person, if it's an exponential rise in intelligence, is this much further ahead than he is.

2:18:25 that particular story. So as you scale it, or stories And I went and read his book called Blindsight, which is hard sci-fi. So there's a few different avenues now, I think. There's far fewer lions than there are gazelles, right? So it could actually just drink a little bit of blood which is, it's so intelligent. And then it hunts the population down again, right?

2:22:49 that like we've never seen. there were no right angles in nature. Nature was nature. But humans started building, And so they died off. bring this out of humans again. But it's similar to AI where once it crosses a certain threshold, for a few hundred thousand years. This is what I spoke to Peter about. Dude, that sounds amazing. Yeah. for night vision with a 900 IQ. It's totally sociopathic and it's out thought everything

2:26:17 So in his book, In Blindsight, it's a first alien encounter book about, um, about aliens on the far, And the captain of the ship is a vampire Vampires in Space. What is the name of the book again? always existed throughout It's Eastern European mostly, I think. I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean they're, well they're there they're well I mean by yeah I'm sort of explaining that the

2:30:03 based on this werewolf yeah on yeah when rick baker saw it he said it's too big oh really yeah Rick Baker didn't make it, though Pat McGee made it. It's a copy of Rick Baker's Werewolf. It was fun, but... It seems like we're due for a real good werewolf film. But I mean, yeah, you could do something very cool with werewolves. Like that transformation.

2:32:09 everything what does that term mean practical effects um does that mean non-cgi yeah exactly werewolves are i don't know if i've seen any underworld films they're kind of silly she's who's running through the subway station trying to get away from the werewolf. very effectively oh yeah i mean it seems like it could be done again. It seems like there's enough.

2:34:19 I don't know. want that movie to be out tomorrow how long does it take you from a premise to a script writing to film? I have, I have a sci-fi film that i'm working on So when you have a concept executive would allow that to happen. So that definitely is the result of me. Or, I mean, So I described this Afrikaans character to him as a test to show Peter what I was thinking.

2:37:21 fuck have I created? Well, we, we also didn't test it with anyone, which is uncommon for movies, right? So it was watched for the first time at Comic-Con a movie career. Yeah, for sure. I mean, in acting. Yeah, no, totally. So yeah, no, you have control You could, you could potentially take more risks, although now it would be almost impossible You know what I mean?

2:39:21 He's promising a world. didn't if you didn't have the right star in there mmm you know it's not always like denzel washington is one of my favorite actors if not my favorite actor and it's like i I mean, there was a few people that were fairly well-known actors that were in there, but I didn't know any of them by name. Whereas like, I mean, So there wasn't a giant star that was compelling you to watch it because it was another Brad Pitt movie or whatever.

2:42:53 And that, you know, with people like Denzel or Leonardo DiCaprio, it's like often it is them because they're just so good. because it wasn't supposed to be released the way it was. And what is it like to try to get a budget larger event stuff that feels more comic booky and huge in movie theaters as events against of YouTube videos, you know, which is, which it may stay that way. I mean, maybe we can't figure

2:45:57 um i would wait for that because i knew i wasn't i wasn't going to be in a theater with people on great films to keep being made and i want there to be these budgets so they can make an avatar those could, those could presumably get bigger and bigger and bigger. That is the thing about level of competition yeah it's almost like when you want to watch a film if you want to stream

2:48:38 the theatrical experience stays because I I agree with you in terms of annoying audiences but I also It makes it better. I really appreciate it thank you very much