Civil Disobedience With Adam Kokesh & Chase Geiser | OAP #77
You know the official story about the world that we’re supposed to believe? You know ... that governments are always good and necessary, that politicians only do what they do because they love us so very much, that the police only exist to serve and protect you, and that every war the government has ever fought has been perfectly just and righteous?
ADAM VS THE MAN brings you the reality THEY don't want you to know, hosted by libertarian activist Adam Kokesh. From Wikipedia: Adam Charles Kokesh (born February 1, 1982) is an American libertarian political activist, radio host, author and a U.S. 2020 Libertarian presidential candidate running on the single-issue platform of an "orderly dissolution of the federal government."
Kokesh is a former U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant, and a combat veteran, having deployed to Fallujah, Iraq in 2004. Upon his return from Iraq, he became an anti-war activist and an advocate for Iraq Veterans Against the War. He has been a radio, TV, YouTube, and podcast host/producer under his brand "ADAM VS THE MAN" since 2010.
I'm coming like into this interview, just super adrenaline pumped because I've been working on my property all day here in Gardenia, the Garden of Freedom, trimming up juniper trees with my chainsaw.
And I got to say, man, I'm in heaven.
I'm in heaven.
You know, World War III is starting.
The economy is tanking.
Gas prices are soaring.
And as much as my heart breaks for everybody who's suffering as a result of all of those things, I am blissfully in a different world up here in the mountains of Arizona.
And, you know, I know that since you've been a fan of mine, you've seen my message evolve, I think, over the years.
And this is the most important thing is to go from fighting to loving.
You don't fight for humanity.
You don't fight for freedom.
You love for humanity.
You love for freedom.
You choose to engage in the world and in life in a way that is that is loving and enriching.
And I don't want to tell people you're wrong for doing this.
You're wrong for being dependent on the evil system.
You're wrong for working a W-2 job where the average working American is working for government over half the year when you had a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No, man, just I want to, I want to be an example.
You know, and I feel like for so much of my career as an activist so far as a public figure, I've been a bad example.
I've been angry.
I've always been a pot smoker since I got out of the Marines, at least.
But I mean, it's taken me, you know, see, I got out of the Marine Corps November 30, 2006, and moved to DC to get a master's in political management at George Washington University.
You know, I've achieved not just in my lifestyle, you know, a certain peace and happiness and a paradise for myself here, you know, in my homestead.
And I'm, I'm ecstatic in what I do every day and building the homestead, building the life, building the relationships, building, you know, businesses, et cetera, et cetera.
And I just want to share that with people, you know?
And it's the same thing about, I don't know if you noticed, but I've been vegan for about four years.
The non-aggression principle is the foundational ethical principle behind libertarianism based on self-ownership.
That as a divine independent human consciousness, it is an observation of reality that you own yourself, and that should be respected relationships that should therefore be free of aggression, force, fraud, or coercion, anything that violates that self-ownership.
And when we live in a world where all human relations are voluntary, that is, they are free of force, fraud, and coercion, in a voluntary society, we are free.
Our will, our individual, independent will as human beings is able to be expressed without impediment of other people.
Well, so then you're defining libertarianism by libertarians today.
And I would really disagree with that because libertarianism is fundamentally different from most other political ideologies and certainly from liberalism and conservatism, which are vague, culturally defined notions.
Libertarianism is a very specific idea of ethics applied to politics, at least as I define it in self-ownership.
And I think most libertarians who give it thought and really, hey, I'm all for two definitions of libertarianism.
Or I'm not a crook, but two definitions.
One that is, you know, anybody who calls himself a libertarian, you know, and that's great.
You know, you believe in freedom.
You like the word you're libertarian-leaning.
Hey, it's a big tent.
Come on in, right?
But if you go, a libertarian is someone who believes in freedom.
Well, how would you say that that person dare call themselves a libertarian if they haven't defined freedom?
And if freedom is the ability to exercise your will, your rights, a state in which your rights are respected, that would mean a state of ethics, right?
Where you know, ethics are practiced, right?
But here, so here's my point to Chase to bring it back to veganism: is that if you believe in some sort of, oh, by the way, let me say what I mean by I'm a Lockean too, if this is what you mean, is that you can mix your, well, I don't know.
You probably mean a lot more when you say I'm a Lockean than I do.
I say I'm a locking in terms of property rights and homesteading and the idea of mixing your labor with the soil as a foundation of ownership.
But then when I've asked other libertarians, like what qualifies you for why does why do I have to apply ethics to you and not a rock?
Well, that, well, have you ever looked into a Russian's eyes or a Ukrainian's eyes?
No, I mean, obviously, there's a distinction that most of us make blindly and unthinkingly in our ethics.
And most, I mean, like, as a vegan, I believe in a continuity or a continuum of consciousness and conscientiousness and conscious consumerism.
And veganism is just one arbitrary line that I've drawn in a certain way for myself for a variety of reasons.
But the main one is that I've never been satisfied with any of the distinctions between humans and other animals when it comes to ethics.
You know, I certainly believe that as higher life forms, we have greater responsibilities.
We can take custodial control of animals, even, just as you could with a human being or a who's incapacitated or a child, right?
We claim guardianship.
And I think in many ways it's appropriate for humans relating to non-human animals.
But to deny that every conscious thing has an individual will that would be described as a soul by those who believe that is a religious concept, or would be described at least as an independent will and a capacity for suffering by any neurologist or biologist who would look at an animal and say, well, yeah, it's clearly, I can see suffering in that creature as much as I can see in another human being.
You know, I can see consciousness.
I can see a soul.
I can see all of the hallmarks of consciousness that I think make me qualify for ethics.
So I'm a vegan for ethical reasons and that I believe we should, as best we practically can, extend the non-aggression principle to every living thing that can experience suffering and has an individual will.
And I've been a fitness enthusiast my entire life.
You know, I played rugby in college and for the Marine Corps team one year.
Before that, I was a three-season athlete because my parents really encouraged it: baseball, soccer, track and field, usually, basketball, baseball, soccer, track and field, sometimes a little football.
But no, there's, don't get me started, though, that on rugby versus football, because as much as like rugby is a glorious expression of freedom and individual autonomy and cooperation on a field, football is the American perversion of that into a statist command and control version.
But in playing rugby, before that, when I was in the Marine Corps, I did two cycles.
I did a cycle of steroids in the Marines and out of the Marines.
And so I, and, you know, I got up, I'm 5'10, 5'11 on a good day.
And right now I'm about 205 pounds and 8% body fat.
And steroids, I was 228, but I was higher body fat percentage and I had a lot more water weight I was carrying with that.
And I've basically been bulking for 22 years and sort of decided to cut recently as a vegan.
And I thought like I would be very fortunate if I dialed my diet and my routine in to lose fat and just maintain my muscle mass.
I actually gained muscle mass during this time.
And at some points, not even lifting, just doing manual labor out here around the homestead, you know, playing with my chains on rocks and things like that.
So not only is it sort of a superior choice for longevity by every scientific analysis that I've seen, that if you want to live longer, you know, eat less and eat less animal products.
And certainly you can make the case for the health of animal products in different ways.
And I'm not going to try to debate the biology of it because I do believe that eating meat was essential to human evolution.
A lot of vegans try to deny that.
It's not natural.
Like, yeah, it's really fucking natural to eat meat.
That's like, but you know what?
Murder and rape are natural too.
That doesn't mean they're good.
I don't mean we should do them or encourage them.
And in that sense, as a nutritional crutch that we don't need anymore, we have a better way of feeding ourselves with a vegan diet that has a variety of nutrients that ends up being more bioavailable.
And this is what for me, like I'm finally comfortable really coming out, coming out of the closet as a vegan and talking about it openly because I've actually been strict about it nutritionally for the last four months where I can honestly, like, I'm not, I'm not anal about it.
Like, oh my God, is there.
Is there a trace of eggs in this, you know, or in salad dressing or something like that?
Honestly, saying the last four months, less than half a percent of my calories have come from animal products.
And I am in the best looking shape of my life and I'm the healthiest I've ever felt.
And it's like you mentioned this to people.
And, you know, sometimes I wonder if statists have a more visceral emotional reaction to libertarianism than meat eaters do to veganism.
But man, are people triggered by this?
And I'm just like, look at me.
I want people to have this, you know, and people respond out of fear to change to something that challenges who they are.
Well, see, this is, I think there's the main reason people like me get censored, you know, and there are a lot, I'm not the only one, but there's plenty of controlled opposition in the way that the conversation is managed on the internet.
And I think what sets people like me apart who get censored is that we say live it.
If you say vote it or think it, it's a threat.
It's like one of Richard Nixon's advisors told him while they were watching anti-war protests go by the White House, they can protest all they want as long as they keep paying their taxes.
In that sense, you know, I've made a name for myself in civil disobedience, smoking pot in front of the White House, the shotgun incident, dancing in front of the Jefferson Memorial.
Most recently, though, it was for carrying mushrooms in Colorado and getting pulled over for driving without plates.
No, I mean, I basically legalize mushrooms for myself anywhere in the United States because anytime the government comes after you with a threat of we're going to arrest you, what they're saying is you are going to plea to this and you are going to accept responsibility and accept this punishment.
And you are going to go before a judge and you are going to be contrite and apologize and you are going to grovel before the authority of the state and you will kiss the ring.
And if you don't, we will assemble a jury of your peers and get their permission to fuck you even harder.
Anytime government charges you in the United States with a criminal charge, that's what they're saying.
And the thing about mushrooms is that they're so beautiful and powerful and unfairly demonized in the war on drugs, just like cannabis, that they have reached at least one in 12 of my peers in America.
When the government comes at you with that threat, you can say, no, no, you can't fucking bring it.
And when I got arrested in Colorado, my civil disobedience wasn't carrying mushrooms because that was just me living.
But I want to think that that's the more important civil disobedience.
You know, the more important disobedience is in life.
I'm an anti-fan because I love what Rand did for the progress of human thought in creating objectivism, but she got a lot of wrong.
So I'm an open objectivist rather than a closed objectivist.
It was just someone who supposedly thinks that Ayn Rand got everything right in her specifics, in her application, her methodology of objectivism, which is excellent.
Well, I should explain to people that there was an act of civil disobedience once I got arrested of absolute non-compliance.
I demanded all my rights.
I demanded vegan food when I was in jail, but I didn't cooperate with anything.
They said, you know, do you want a fingerprint?
Do you want to get your photo taken?
Do you want to book in?
Do you want to put on oranges?
No, thanks.
No.
But I'm going to demand my rights.
You're going to kidnap me.
You're going to pull me in here unjustly.
Well, I'm going to hold you accountable.
And because at least I have the, you know, luxury of an internet presence, I'm going to shine a spotlight on your bullshit until you realize that you're in the wrong and you let me go.
And it took them 12 days, but they dropped the charges and they actually paid for my towing an inbound for my truck and I got it back for free.
So I'm in the process of getting my mushrooms back and suing everybody involved.
So anyway, I digress.
It's not technically civil disobedience if you're not breaking a law, but it might be more meaningful non-compliance and a statement and doing something as activism productively to fight the evil of the system to simply not contribute to it.
So rather than confrontational civil disobedience, you know, is it civil disobedience to collect your own rainwater?
Well, in some places in America, it fucking is.
Government in certain municipalities, it's only a handful, have said, yeah, we own the rainwater and collecting rainwater is illegal here.
And, you know, I live off grid.
So like I live in an unincorporated part of Yavapai County in the mountains of Arizona.
So like I've already sidestepped most of that.
But then I had to assert it because when I came out here, they threatened me literally with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for building without a permit, basically.
Every little, every little thing we were doing here, including camping on your own land for more than 10 days at a time or 30 consecutive days was a violation of county zoning.
And I was like, I'm not going to play that game.
And I got them to back off.
And because other people saw my example, there was another round of confrontation with the Yavapai County Zoning.
And it got to the point where the county supervisor had to hold a town hall in Pauldon, where head of county zoning said, well, we're just going to a complaint-only enforcement policy from now on.
And it's like, I know my neighbors.
Did he complain?
Did she complain?
Did they complain?
No.
Then you're going to fuck off.
And so they've left me alone since then.
And I think that that, you know, peaceful assertion of rights might in its cumulative effects of people saying, you know what, I'm just not going to work for the man anymore.
You know, it's funny you mention that because what we're doing here is in a way more of a direct challenge to government with the creation of a micro state, not a micro nation, which some people use those terms interchangeably.
And I have in the past, but recently realized that micro-nation is more referenced in those that aren't really serious about asserting their sovereignty.
But as a micro state here on 10 acres, we are going to be declaring our independence and formally asserting our sovereignty by the same grounds that the American government says, well, we're independent of Great Britain and King George III, and therefore we're a sovereign country.
This is an act of assertion of rights of sovereignty to say, well, you know, if they want to fight a war, that's cool.
In fact, I was actually thinking the day after we declare sovereignty, we'll probably declare war on the United States so that the next day we can surrender and get a billion dollars in Fourneau.
It's just 11 acres, me and my girlfriend and our dogs right now.
And we're in a wonderful area in Northern Arizona that I encourage everybody to check out.
People say, oh, you're starting a community.
It's like, no, I joined a community.
Like it's a community of homesteaders out here where there was a cattle ranch of 120,000 acres called Juniperwood Ranch created, I don't know how many years ago, but over the last few decades has been parceled out in 10 and 40 acre and other random and bigger, smaller size, mostly 10, 40 acre plots for homesteaders and individual investment.
And I bought 11 acres for $13,000 six years ago here.
Just the raw land at this point is worth about twice that.
That's how much it's a pre-I mean, how much the dollars lost value over the last six years.
But also, you know, it's one of the best parts of the country for I don't want to miss a tribute, but one of the most well-known survivalists has said that for places to have a homestead to get away in the case of or in the situation of any kind of social collapse, that this is one of the best areas of the country and for a lot of reasons.
I mean, I toured the country for my book, Freedom, a few times before choosing where to settle down.
And I do not regret it at all.
I love this part of the country.
We are, people, people here, Arizona, and they think Phoenix, which is a miserable fucking pollution bowl of a desert where humans should never live and is only there because of government.
But Arizona has some amazing mountains and they're at a thousand feet in Phoenix.
We are at 5,000 feet.
Flagstaff, the highest area in Arizona, is at 7,000 feet.
And they have skiing.
We got snow yesterday here, actually.
Yesterday before.
It was a dusting, didn't stick at all.
We had a few storms that give us a few inches that stick every year.
We are consistently 20 degrees cooler than Phoenix.
And it's a little on the dry side, but when people call it a desert, I take it personally because desert is 10 inches of rain per less or less per year.
We get 12 and a half inches here in Ash Fork, which is the nearest town.
And we have trees.
We have the most beautiful juniper is Rocky Mountain and Utah Junipers.
And we post pictures of this.
If people aren't on Telegram, get on Telegram.
Fuck all that mainstream centralized corporate media, corporate social media bullshit.
Telegram's where it's at.
It's a messaging app where you can have channels that serve like social media screens.
t.me slash Adam versus the man just find Adam versus the man on Telegram, please.
But if you want the Garden of Freedom, we also have a channel for the homestead.
We're me and my girlfriend Joey, G.I. Mary Dean, we mostly post pictures of our dogs and cats.
There's stuff we're doing around the homestead and stuff we're building with earth ships and prefab sheds for cabins, which is what I'm sitting in right now.
I'm in front of my wood-burning stove, keeping me warm right now in our half-finished 16 by 40 cabin here.
And some people would say, like, you know, we're partway into it already.
You know, and it might have, it might turn out that, you know, this is the worst of it.
You know, a teaser of a world war and a global pandemic.
And then people kind of wake up and want to move past the systems that led us to these calamities.
And by the way, about COVID, COVID's real, but it's nowhere near as bad as they say it was or is.
And it no way in any way whatsoever justifies government coercive intervention or violation of basic ethical principles in terms of right to freedom of travel and association and private property.
So that being said, obviously it was government policy that made it a lot worse.
And that's what I'm talking about with COVID.
Oh, am I going to get you banned on YouTube now for saying that?
You know, there's so much bullshit happening that any thoughtful person who was skeptical of authority had like the coats of the matrix and we could just see through everything.
And they're like, Delta, Omicron, the vaccines.
And we're just like, redhead, blonde, brunette, you know, like the guy in the matrix is like, no, it's, it's, it's population control.
It's big pharma.
It's censorship.
It's, yeah, it's corporatism.
It's, it's consolidation of wealth and power, et cetera, et cetera.
You could just see it happening.
The one big thing I was wrong about with COVID was how long it was going to last as bad as it was.
I thought it was going to be more six months to a year.
What we've seen now over the last couple of months be like the end of the main phase or the initial phase of COVID, looking like it's been about two years, at least in the American experience of it, if not the global one.
And so I've come to learn to trust my instincts a lot more.
And, you know, I've seen people, I know people who hide from vaccine complications.
And is it something you'd say 100%?
You know, no, but like, yeah, you look at it, unless there was like a very, you know, targeted autopsy, you never know for certain.
But, you know, enough that you can say 90 plus percent, like, yeah, that's a weird coincidence cluster of symptoms with that kind of timing.
And it could be that like what saved us, you know, from the calamity of pandemic policy was just being skeptical about vaccines and being confident in our independent thought enough to deny the social pressure, defy it, and say, I'm not going to be vaccinated.
And that was it.
And it might be that everybody else, you know, if you got vaccinated, I don't know.
Maybe it's not a big deal.
You know, maybe it's just, maybe it's just worse.
I mean, again, I got to keep saying I told you so, because now Pfizer's coming out with this, like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of side effects that they were trying to hide about the vaccines.
But even if it's not that bad, even if it's a 1% thing, then maybe what saved me from the social upheaval, what was the way you asked the question was, do I believe that social collapse is happening?
And maybe what, you know, why did I come out of it better than most because I live on 10 acres in the mountains and I never had to deal with that bullshit?
And I live in a relatively rural community where even where I go shop, I was never forced to wear a mask.
You know, I don't have a job where I work for the man, where I've faced that pressure, where I've already escaped dependency on the system in such a way that the, oh, you got to get a vaccine if you want to keep your job.
You can, in some ways, like escape by lifestyle, but then you're just surrounded by it.
So why would you want that?
You know, and then we see, like, is there?
So if you say that that period in 2020, right, of the forced shutdowns in most of the United States was a period of social collapse.
I mean, I think more upheaval.
But yeah, is it a mild form of collapse, like society temporarily collapsed and then came back?
But it is much more vulnerable and fragile now to such upheaval because of the consolidation of wealth and power, because of the template of new medical tyranny that the government could roll out anytime for any new virus or threat, real or imagined, that they could come up with or release from a lab.
And I don't care if COVID came from a lab or not.
I mean, I care, but like, do I care to decide?
Does it, does it matter?
You know, I'd like to think of myself as a big picture guy, you know, kind of a Renaissance man.
I don't want to waste time.
Like, I looked at that, you know, and I said, I will probably never know for certain.
Do I need to care?
No, because I already knew governments run bio labs and it's a possibility that could come up at any time.
And you look at all the horrors committed by government in the past, it's definitely within the realm of possibility today.
And could it happen in the future?
Absolutely.
So we have to acknowledge that possibility.
But I'm just, you know, all the more affirmed in my lifestyle decision.
And it's kind of like veganism.
You know, it's for health and ethics.
And those are both in and of themselves sufficiently compelling reasons to live that way.
For me, living off-grid, being self-sufficient, not relying on a paycheck from the man, not having to work at nine to five, working for myself as an entrepreneur, being free and happy out here.
I mean, there are sort of two reasons.
One is in the event of greater social upheaval, I'm more likely to survive and thrive, not be threatened or challenged or made unhappy in any way by it.
But also as a matter of principle, because I believe in this as a matter of civil disobedience lifestyle.
That when they want you, is it technically civil disobedience?
Whatever, it's a matter of definition because it's not illegal, although in some ways, you know, like when they come after me with all the threats of fees and fines and everything else, yeah, it is.
But it's more important to, you know, live a principled life, know what your principles are, and to maintain intellectual, psychological, emotional sovereignty of the mind and have that freedom first and foremost.
And some people say that, you know, like Thomas Jefferson Declaration, you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, that that's a kind of a sequence, but it was originally life, liberty, pursuit of property, right?
And that actually makes more sense as a progression because happiness is actually somewhere in between life and liberty in that sequence.
Happiness is a choice, it's a product of sovereignty of the mind that you can choose to embrace at any time.
That gap between Stimulus and response is where choice lies and the sovereignty.
And you always have the choice, as long as at least you are healthy and your brain is otherwise satisfied with its supply of oxygen and nutrients and whatnot.
Your attitude, your outlook, your frame of mind, that's all your choice.
And I think about the John Lennon quote as it relates to this issue of civil disobedience lifestyle.
Is that, and I'm going to butcher the exact words, but I have this on my desktop.
I should have it memorized by now.
I made my own laptop desktop background with an image that I found of John Lennon, and I stylized and I made it purple and orange.
I put the quote next to it.
I published it as a meme, but he's like, I've made this for my computer desktop background.
And it's the establishment will do everything they can to irritate you.
They will pull your beard and flick your face, anything to make you violent.
Because once they've got you violent, then they know how to control you.
The only thing they don't know how to respond to is nonviolence and humor.
And if you can maintain that frame of mind, if you can maintain that attitude towards your fellow human beings, even those that may be in conventional terms your enemy, to love your enemies, as Jesus taught, is such a powerful concept, but to forgive them, to recognize the divinity in them and that they are doing what they are doing for the same reasons that any human does anything to survive and thrive and pursue true happiness.
I mean, maybe this is where I need to get a little personal because for me, a big motivator in my activism in my early days was penance.
Because not only did I enthusiastically join the Marine Corps at age 17, but I volunteered to go to Iraq, volunteer to go with the Civil Affairs Unit.
And during the siege of Fallujah in 2004, I was ordered to guard detainees in a way that was torture, sleep deprivation, and stress positions to soften them up for interrogation.
And that was really the first impetus for my activism coming home and going, holy shit, people are still suffering.
People are still dying in a way that if the American people knew what I know wouldn't be happening.
And that's pretty intense.
That's pretty motivating.
But at the same time, being motivated by that possibility of being a hero, you know, or improving the human condition, I was also motivated by a sense of guilt, having to make up for what I had done.
And not just that, that one night, but all the evil of militarism and the global war on terror that I contributed to.
And at some level, I guess I've just kind of moved past that.
And I think that's how we should relate to each other.
I think there's a quote from, I think it's the Iranian poet Rumi, you know, said something like: somewhere beyond hate and fear and judgment, beyond all the restrictions of our physical existence, there is a field, and I will meet you there.
And I'm sorry I'm crying while butchering this quote, but that there is something about the divinity of the human soul, to get back to that idea.
To me, I don't talk about the human soul.
I mean, to me, it's just the divinity of human consciousness, the gift that we enjoy as the phenomena, as individual human beings of consciousness that we are the universe becoming aware of itself.
How do you, you know, see the good in others who are doing evil and actively hurting people and defending my political sensibilities and my ethical sensibilities.
It's just transcending it to not need it, to not see humanity in terms of good and evil, but to just appreciate those fundamental truths of the human experience.
like a piece of wood you know it's funny It reminds me of some of what you're saying reminds me of the story from the, I'm a shame that I don't remember the gentleman's name, but the story, the movie, The Born on the Fourth of July, is based off of.
A lot of these guys that were in these almost impossible situations and committed violence.
It's so fascinating to me how when they, so many of them later in their lives reach like a total enlightenment, like a spiritual enlightenment as to, you know, because in movies and in our stories and our culture, we think of like evil as like inherent and always evil and good as inherent and always good.
And we have superheroes that are just always good and we have villains that are just always villains.
But the real part of the human condition, the real truth to the human condition is that if you're a person of conscience and you commit evil, there is such great likelihood and hope that you will at some point become aware of it and repent of it.
And it's almost like had you never had the experience, had you never seen the abyss, you could never have become as good as you do in response to that experience.
You might have been a middling average person that's kind of good, kind of fucking up, had you never had the abyss.
But because of the abyss, then there's like this greatness that compensates.
There's an important distinction for me in rejecting militarism and recognizing the difference between soldiers and warriors.
Because a warrior is someone who's willing to put their life on the line to defend people who can't defend themselves, to stand up for justice and to do the right thing no matter what the cost, right?
Very noble.
A soldier, by complete contrast, is only killed for politicians or helps kill for politicians for money or personal glory or bullshit benefits or misguided ideals.
And there are a lot of us who go into that military experience because we have been fooled into thinking that soldiers are warriors.
And we are motivated by that.
There are people who join the military for superficial research lack of options, whatever.
But I want to shout out also, since he mentioned Vietnam and Vietnam veterans against the war, Scott Camille, who really is my hero from that generation.
If anybody wants to see a great mini documentary, Seasoned Veteran, the Scott Camille story, you can find it on YouTube.
It's 40 minutes.
I've watched it like a dozen times.
There's something about those of us who like really fought into it because we were intrinsically motivated to put our lives on the line for something greater.
And it's not just being sort of forged by the experience.
And I'm inclined instinctively to reject that notion because it suggests something almost mystical about it.
And I want to demystify that for people, like I do with civil disobedience.
I'm not brave.
I just have a better understanding of the system and more confidence in my calculations.
And I happen to be, you know, a healthy, fit white male that makes it, you know, white looking at least.
I'm half Jewish and half German, so I'm, you know, genetically programmed to hate myself.
But, you know, I'm, you know, going to jail is relatively easy for me.
I don't have a job.
I don't have kids.
You know, I don't have people who are dependent on me, but not like in that kind of immediate sense.
But it's not so much forged by the experience as those of us who join the military for those deeply righteous, intrinsic reasons go through the experience not of the abyss, but of seeing the evil of militarism for what it is, seeing the evil of war.
And we stay warriors.
We become the warriors that we meant to be and hope to become when we joined the military.
And it was simply the disillusionment of going, oh, fuck.
I'm just a soldier.
I'm just another sucker for militarism.
I'm just another bit of cannon fodder, another pawn.
I'm not any, I don't have the autonomy.
I mean, to be a warrior, you have to have autonomy and to be able to make moral choices for yourself.
The military does everything they can to take that away from me.
And yeah, I was supposed to disobey unlawful orders, but I was in such a frame of mind in a combat zone that didn't even occur to me.
It's interesting that talking about autonomy in the context of society, for lack of a better term, because I'm a big fan of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the concept of self-actualization.
And I'm sure that someone else has written this before, but I'm not very well read, as well read as I'd like to be.
But the point I'm trying to make is it occurs to me that it's impossible to reach a state of self-actualization, which is something that I consider to be my purpose, if you don't have absolute autonomy.
You can't manifest your potential without freedom.
I would go a step further even because I imagine if you don't have that, if you're giving that up, then you have to give it up essentially.
And we have been convinced, fooled into giving it up largely as Americans, as humans in modern society.
In the past, we were more forced circumstantially and by literal direct violence, but now it's mostly by persuasion that we are convinced to give up at least a piece of our material sovereignty, if not the most important chunk of our intellectual, psychological, and emotional sovereignty.
So, of course, you can't be self-actualized if someone else is in your head, if someone else is running part of your life, if some of your will has been ceded to someone else.
But here's where I would go a step further.
You can't be fully self-actualized if you're doing that to someone else either.
I'm not a pacifist, but I'm not like, you know, a lot of simplistic libertarians applying the right to self-defense.
I'm a de-escalationist.
You know, if the purpose of ethics is to improve human life, to alleviate suffering and property rights are a framework for ethics along with self-ownership, you know, then part of the point is creating or preserving value.
You know, if someone's stealing a meal from you, fucking let them, you know, like, do you really if, or talk to them, try to give them more, you know, I believe in the power of generosity and letting go of property when possible, but to see the greater value in harmony and human relations.
And if you want to put that in terms of future value or reputation capital, you know, yeah, you can quantify it too.
That's kind of one of the beauties of the Austrian economic analysis is that it allows you to quantify so many things that are written out of modern conventional economics that sees everything measured in dollars and widgets.
But that greater sense of value of valuing humanity, you know, and de-escalating instead of escalating, I think is extremely important.
it's a little nihilistic no it's the opposite Because the search for meaning is driven by an indulgence in a very negative inherent emotion of humanity of dissatisfaction.
One thing is animals to say, well, I'm hungry.
I must eat.
I'm dissatisfied.
I need to do that to sustain my life.
But to search for meaning is to suggest that you lack meaning now in the moment.
I refuse to believe that.
The meaning can't be found in the future and doesn't exist now.
This idea of searching for meaning is like a failure to accept whatever the status of meaning is right now.
I might take a more positive approach and say life has whatever meaning you want it to have, whatever meaning you give it.
But I would rather suggest something deeper that transcends the need or the want or the search for meaning because when I do mushrooms,
there is an inherent overwhelming sensation that can be gotten through meditation, which I do.
I'm a daily meditator.
I generally meditate twice a day, usually five to 15 minutes.
I put on my phone just so that I have a sense of how long I sat there when I'm done.
I let my thoughts wander.
I have two objectives in my meditative practice every time: is one, find stillness and allow my brain to sort itself out and find peace and address whatever floats to the surface, so to speak, and to tune in to God, just the love vibration of the universe, the fabric of existence itself.
And there was a study done with mushrooms where they took a Buddhist monk who'd been meditating for decades, who'd never done mushrooms, and they gave him mushrooms and they hooked him up to a bunch of equipment and measured his brain waves.
And he described the experience as what he had been seeking for decades in meditation available through this substance, psilocybin.
I think it's true about LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, a number of other things, altered brain states.
But in a way, those all represent a higher state of mind.
Not just literally high, you know, in the sense that you are tuned in to God.
You're tuned in.
And I'm, by the way, I went from being agnostic to atheist to pantheist as I describe myself now.
That everything, so I believe in all the atheist arguments about the personified God and contradictions.
When I say God, I mean that inherent love vibration, the pervasive oneness of the universe.
I'm going to say that, Adam, you don't believe in God by my definition.
Okay, fine.
I don't really give a fuck.
But there's something that I get that I think everybody should have.
And psychedelics are just one gateway to meditation probably more meaningful.
In a sense, psychedelics is a chemically induced meditative state.
The experience of that can be.
But as I describe it, it's the overwhelming sensation that everything is right in the universe.
Everything's okay.
And you don't need or want anything as long as you can keep that in mind.
You are not driven by needs or wants or desires or a feel by a lack, a feel of a lack of meaning.
You have to go on some warrior's quest and complete this grandiose life cycle in order to be happy.
In fact, it is only in our conscious indulgence of wants and needs and seeing the lack in life that actually leads us to a state of consciousness that is detuned from that higher state of consciousness that we're all capable of that really is closer to our true nature.
I've done psilocybin, I think, on two occasions in my life, just a couple of grams.
And I had good experiences, but I never had like the hero dose, kind of deep, total loss of ego that I hear people describe.
I never got there.
but i've had some interesting experiences a lot of jesters making faces at me and all this from asking about the meaning of life Never been asked that question.
Honestly, I must profess my relative ignorance and inexperience.
I think about heroes like Dennis Leary and Ram Das, you know, heroes of the humanity's great dance forward and awareness that what they did with psilocybin and LSD makes everything I've done look like I'm just barely dipping my toes into the water.
You know, and I've done LSD maybe 50 times.
I've done psilocybin, you know, 150 times, done 150 to 200 launches with DMT.
I've done MDMA, I don't know, a couple dozen times.
There are, I mean, except in the external sense of like, if someone walks up to you and shoots you while you're tripping, okay, that's a bad trip.
But no, what is mistakenly thought of as a bad trip is an experience of kind of emotional stress, right?
In an otherwise, you know, safe, healthy environment, or even in a stressful environment where the environment challenges you and leads to a state of distress.
It's just the negativity could be described really as growing pains, you know, and I'm being, I'm not being very precise here, but in the sense that it's like,
okay, your brain, given the opportunity with this substance in it, decided to make you feel this and go through this because you're going to grow and you're going to learn some shit right now, you know, and I think if people have that attitude and maintain that attitude in those challenging experiences, again, with or without psychedelics, you're much more likely to get more value out of them and experience less distress.
You know, and it's again, that detachment and the sort of, you know, the ego death that you experience with psychedelics and meditation.
And I'm also a big fan of yoga and working out and other sort of grounding meditative experiences.
When you go through those kinds of challenging experiences, it's just your brain given the opportunity to say, like, okay, I'm going to make you feel this.
And through that challenge, usually of identifying something within you, you get to with psychedelics or meditation or whatever it is, separate the ego from the experience.
You know, lesson, like not just it, ego, superego, but the true self detached from your thoughts.
You know, a lot of people as advocates of meditation practices and specific traditions will say, you know, just find stillness and see your thoughts, be able to be the observer of your thoughts and not be attached to them, not be them, not even be your emotions, but be that higher consciousness.
Oftentimes, a bad trip forces you in a challenging exercise to look at something challenging in your past or in your ego or in yourself that needs to be examined and step back.
And then when you come out of that experience, you get to maintain a better frame of happiness and enlightened detachment from that negativity.
Oh, yeah, mushrooms when I was, but it was mushrooms in high school.
Yeah.
Actually, and I remember a couple really distinct vivid visual hallucinations during that experience.
But one of the things that is so destroyed by the drug war is reliable access that allows people the safety to explore different modes of consciousness.
You got to take this eighth, you know, or well, I got to save it.
Like your usage is very much polluted, distorted, at least, by those circumstances, often dictated by the legal circumstances and thus the availability of these things.
And we're coming out of that.
I mean, I grow mushrooms here now.
After my Colorado experience, I'm happy saying publicly that I grow and give away mushrooms to people here on my private property as part of my religious expression, my First Amendment rights.
Fucking come at me, bro.
I'll stand on my head for 12 days in solitary confinement again and make you look like an asshole until you realize that you're wrong.
You know, so we're on the verge of all of this being available to a lot of people.
And in terms of, you know, what do I have attachment to?
You know, what is, you know, if you're going to be attached to something, I say be attached to the biggest things that you can, you know, the greatest expressions of love and consciousness and light.
And I think of the human experience as an accelerating exponential function that is just being held back by the institutions of today in so many poisonous ways.
But you look across just the course of what we know of human history, go back 200,000 years, wherever you want to draw the line arbitrarily, whatever, for dawn of the species, invention of the wheel and fire, you know, until then, very linear.
And even after that, very, very almost linear.
But, you know, in hindsight, you go, no, it was exponential, but negligible progress, right?
And then, you know, the computing age, information age.
And I describe this as the asymptote of the human experience, knowing that we never really hit the asymptote, but it is a certain period that we're going through right now of acceleration where on the other side of it, the human experience is going to be so fast as if it might as well be vertical from the perspective of our puny consciousness's ability to comprehend.
And I'm talking about not 3D printing organs and weed dropping out of the sky from quadcopters because you have an app on your phone or Musk's self-driving electric everything.
No, I'm talking about like uploading our brains and the consciousness in the machines and populating the cosmos beyond our solar system.
That's what I'm talking about.
Our destiny is as intelligent life is so far beyond this.
And so I'm just rooting for everybody to make it, you know, and I'm rooting for us to get through this and experience this as richly.
And I want to hold on, man.
I'm 40.
I'm having a quarter life crisis.
Doctors say first man to live to be 120 has already been born.
I'm going to live to be 160.
I have no doubt.
At least, at least, at least with just the benefit of modern nutrition and supplements and modern medicine and all that and our understanding of the human body, we're capable of so much more than we even realize right now and give ourselves credit for.
It's like we're about to take off and go to the moon and people are fooled into thinking that it's the Titanic sinking and we got to push people out of the lifeboats.
You know, every human life is precious and everybody has the opportunity to experience this and to see this right now and to be a part of it and plug in to the hive mind of the internet.
And yeah, it's driven by technology, but it's fundamental to the nature of life itself to create intelligence and intelligence to create technology and for that technology to take off and accelerate in exponential ways beyond the biological organisms' ability to comprehend it.
So that's that's what I like to that's the star I want to hitch hitch a ride on.
I believe there have been periods in human history where we certain civilizations have experienced periods of enlightenment that have been suppressed because we didn't have the printing press and we didn't have the global communications technology, the ability to back up like right now you figure something out, a discovery is made, it's around the world in seconds, right?
Prior prior to the printing press, it was a whole different world of slow knowledge.
And there may have been periods, you know, like a lot of people give credit to ancient Egypt as being such a period, right?
I used to be bad hallucinations with that versus the man.
Yeah, I'm not saying aliens, but aliens.
No, it was, but there, so there may have been periods where humans were, you know, living significantly longer, but you know, giants and hundreds of years.
Well, it's weird if you think about like archaeologists say that Homo sapiens go back as far as like 300,000 years.
And if you think about that in terms of all the different changes that have happened on the planet over the course of 300,000 years, in terms of many ice ages, one or two big ice ages, it's not unreasonable to think that society has been much more advanced than present historians give it credit.
But no, in this case, that's no, it's two steps forward, one step backwards.
And that, like, right now, society is in the middle of some major steps backwards.
And I would say the biggest defining one of the human experience is fiat currency and modern bureaucratic governments that are spawned by it.
And as a phenomenon of just simple technology, right?
Paper money and everything that sustained it in modern communications and propaganda and economic control, industrialization, blah, blah, blah.
But I think if there's a single defining feature of the step backward that we are currently in for humanity, it would be the advent of fiat currency.
And that you could say goes back in the United States to the current central bank, the Federal Reserve System to 1913.
But remember, there were two right central banks in the United States before that, and that the growth of modern fiat currencies is a global phenomenon over the last several hundred years and not just of the 100 years of the American experience.
So they don't have coin clipping as part of the Roman story and the collapse of empire.
I suggest you learn that.
But the militarism, the wars of the 20th century, what we're experiencing now, the concentration of wealth and power, the suppression.
I mean, the fact that the suppression of the middle class, so to speak, ability to enjoy exponential productivity is being suppressed because what's being skimmed off the top is growing exponentially and the average human life is increasing more linearly.
And we're happy with that, but we shouldn't be because all of our lives are threatened when that evil is allowed to be institutionalized the way that it is with modern bureaucratic governments built around fiat currencies.
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But if you see that, you go, holy shit, oh, oh, hold on, hold on, hold on.
We're on the verge of a major leap forward because we're about to overthrow this whole thing.
Fiat currencies are going to survive crypto, not like Bitcoin is like they're just the internet itself, the hive mind, the availability, the quality of life, the productivity available to so many human beings across the earth.
And I'm extremely optimistic that what's happening right now in Ukraine is really a currency war.
And I think it's related to currency because I think that the globalist institutions that exist realize that fiat is going to collapse because it's a Ponzi scheme and they want to are both different flavors of collectivism as far as I'm concerned.
But sure, as competition between the super class defined as the several hundred thousand richest, most powerful people on earth.
I don't care how you define it.
That's a thing.
Competing amongst each other for a piece of their shrinking pie of exploitation because humanity is on the average of an enlightenment and you cannot oppress, control, exploit people.
And that their time as rulers is coming to an end.
I think they're getting their last licks and they're death in a dying system.
Everything we've seen around COVID, the consolidation of wealth, the censorship, the policy of shutdowns, control, like all of that, it's not, oh, we're doing, we're such great, benign rulers who have the faith and confidence of the people.
That's not it, man.
And I think really what Putin's doing specifically right now is triggering a dollar collapse.
And whether he is or not, the specifics of that are sort of less important to me than the general dynamics in the bigger picture of this human acceleration that I see.
I just, I don't see fiat currencies lasting as the dominant force that they are for more than another decade.
Yeah, they're going to last.
They're going to be around for decades, but fundamentally, it's like sort of the way that humans do money.
No, it's going to, it's going to move to crypto, you know, something like 10 years.
I hesitate to make timeline predictions.
That's, I'm a little weak on that, but I'm very strong.
I think on seeing the dynamics in this, very confident.
Which was a document between the colonies by consent, whereas the Constitution was forced nine out of 15 and there was coercion involved behind that, which actually was motivated by a desire to create a standing army and a central bank.
Most of the founders were against.
Obviously, a government that didn't respect consent and legitimized slavery, taxation, intellectual property, among other ethically problematic things.
And World War II and the Holocaust was not what they tell you it was.
If you look up the Garden of Freedom on Telegram, you'll find it.
And we have one for our nonprofit here for veterans.
You know, veteran suicide is still an issue.
I didn't think it would be at this point, sadly.
Basically, we're going to get vets stoned in the woods.
So all the alternative therapies not available through the VA, we're making available here.
Psilocybin, cannabis, MDMA, ketamine, these are the big four that we want to help veterans explore.
My videos now, we post, as I said, on Odyssey.
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Don't endorse Twitter, but there's a certain and I am on Facebook, like, and we broadcast there as a backup channel, but I have not engaged with Facebook for many years.
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