Duncan Trussell joins Joe Rogan to debate whether Osama bin Laden’s 2011 killing was a staged event, given CIA ties and conspiracy claims like Alex Jones’ "dead for nine years" theory. They compare modern economic dependency to slavery, critique the prison-industrial complex, and explore psychedelics—from MAPS’ MDMA PTSD trials to Johns Hopkins’ psilocybin research reducing death anxiety in terminal patients. Trussell’s Comedy Central pilot on mushroom studies excites Rogan, who also teases upcoming shows with Tripoli and Tom Segura while mocking Joey Diaz’s legal troubles. The episode blends skepticism of government narratives with psychedelic science, questioning reality’s boundaries while dismissing fringe theories as absurd. [Automatically generated summary]
Ladies and gentlemen, in this amazing moment in human history where not only was a prince wed, but a couple days in this amazing moment in human history where not only was a prince wed, but a We are in the middle of an awesome movie.
That's what's going on.
We have a black president.
Princes are getting married in front of billions of people.
Everyone is happy for them.
And we killed the bad guy who was living in squalor in Pakistan.
I'll tell you what, I thought a million bucks would buy you a little bit more in Pakistan.
I thought for a million bucks you could own Pakistan.
I didn't know you would get that shithole house.
You're like, this is Osama bin Laden's million dollar compound in Afghanistan.
Like, what the fuck?
Is it just like the most fertile heroin ground in the world?
The bottom line is that the United States, the CIA, the whatever the fuck you want to call them, whatever we're under...
What they did was they got all these people in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union.
And they helped them.
They helped the Mujahideen.
They helped train them.
They helped arm them.
And Osama bin Laden was a part of that.
And when the Soviet Union got out of Afghanistan, And, you know, whatever happened overseas that shifted, you know, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda's interest in, you know, taking out the United States instead of taking out Russia, instead of defending themselves.
When shit got weird with Afghanistan, that's when Homeboy came into the picture.
And then he basically took over over there.
Supposedly.
Who the fuck knows?
You know, when you start talking about what the CIA did and, you know, what they're doing, the Contras and the Sandinistas, are you sure?
Because, you know, they've been lying about everything for so long.
Who the fuck knows if Osama bin Laden really...
Alex Jones thinks he's been dead for nine years.
They froze him nine years ago, froze him, and they're pulling him out right strategically in line for when the new elections are setting up.
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See, what they did was they threw out this bogus birth certificate.
What people need to know, I asked a thread about this last night, and the general consensus among people who understand Photoshop I put up a thread on the message board asking, Photoshop wizards, please check this thing out and tell me what's up.
And there's a bunch of videos.
What people don't know is a lot of people are claiming Osama bin, or not Osama bin.
Isn't it weird that the president's name is right next to this evil, evil terrorist?
For dumb white people, that must be so terrorizing.
You know, just fuck, fuck, fuck.
Anyway, for people who don't know, supposedly he faked his birth certificate.
And what they did was people took the image that the White House released online and they took the image and they ran it through Photoshop or Adobe Photo Elements and they saw that there were many layers to the photograph and that the photograph wasn't just one flat photograph, that things had been added supposedly or...
That it looked like things had been cut and paste.
But the general consensus among people who understand Photoshop seems to be that when you scan something and you put it in Adobe Photoshop, it shows layers automatically.
Like, it wasn't just like they were just, you know, happened to have slaves.
Because that's what some people say that, you know, back then it was a, that was normal and they were just doing what was normal and they didn't like it.
I mean, there's a big difference between working at McDonald's and having a manacle on and the door opens and some fucking horny guy in a wig comes in and fucks you.
But I think what they realized about slavery, the reason why people were willing to let slavery go, since it was such a fucking horrendous idea, and people were willing to impose themselves so much on other people that they literally owned that person.
You don't have to pay a single payment for three months.
By then you'll be up on your feet.
Yeah, by then.
Yeah, by then.
Next thing you know, this fucking moron lives in an apartment he can't afford, with a car he can't afford, and he's a slave.
He doesn't know he's a slave, but he's a slave.
If you go anywhere and fuck off, they will literally take away your ability to buy things and or throw you in jail, which is way worse than being a slave.
They're going to throw you in a cell with a bunch of guys who want to beat you and rape you.
But here's the difference, because I've thought about this before, which is the idea that if you're working 40 hours a week, that's its own form of slavery.
I mean, it is free will, and it is a society that's open, and you can work there and save up your money and move on to a better gig, and it's just a gig.
You can take it until they figure out how to make robots that can do your job.
That's really what it's there for.
But, you know, people will argue that it's slavery when you see a bunch of people that are super, super rich, and then they have super poor people that work for them.
The reason that hallucinogens became illegal is because one of the biggest proponents of hallucinogens, Timothy Leary, He was taking LSD and was saying, tune in, turn on, drop out.
His advice to these people that you're talking about was completely drop out of society.
This game that you're playing where you think you've got to go to work and have a family, it's just a game.
It doesn't exist.
It's not a real thing.
It's time for everyone to stop playing that game and let that game die.
That was the whole point.
Dropping out of society, rejecting completely everything.
Every aspect of the society you're in and just dropping out, going into a commune or going into San Francisco and starting the summer of love and wearing beads and dancing in the car.
I don't know if that— Why is it that people are afraid of the idea of communes?
You know, I said that— I knew a bunch of kids that had grown up in communes and the fucked up shit had happened to them.
It doesn't mean that all of them do.
If you grew up in a commune and it was awesome for you, I'm not negating your experience or saying I know any better, but what is it about communes that are so scary to people?
When you hear about people branching off and going out and doing their own thing, like the Waco Davidian thing, when you hear about that cult, when you hear about a commune or a cult or anything that's really alternative to the standard model, things get really weird.
This is how they had been operating for the longest time.
But the age of VCRs is fairly recent, as is the age of the Internet is today.
We don't realize that there's a mentality of a bunch of people that were in charge many decades before VCRs and the ability to show video to almost anybody at any time.
When VCRs came along, all of a sudden you can watch something again.
And you could go, what's going on here?
What's happening there?
Yeah, whereas before they basically picked and choose what they broadcast casted on television.
Once you had the ability to record things, and then tapes started passing around, and then in the case of Waco, I think that was the early 90s, right?
But yeah, to go back to the question, it is a very strange thing that when these alternate societies spring up in our society, they usually go bad or they end up getting attacked.
There's a standoff.
It's a very strange thing.
Our society does not tolerate alternative ways of living sprouting up inside of it.
We want everyone to be living the same way.
And anytime that stuff starts happening, the officials get involved.
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who turned into Ram Dass, who I always talk about, and Andrew Weill, the vitamin guy, you know that guy?
The guy with the giant beard and he sells vitamin products?
Well, like, the fucking story there is that...
Timothy Leary goes to Mexico.
Someone gives him mushrooms.
He's never eaten mushrooms.
He takes them, has this insane experience.
He's a Harvard professor, so he thinks, oh, we need to study this.
This could have huge implications as far as psychotherapy goes.
We could use this.
So he goes back to Harvard and starts the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which is where they're giving psilocybin to students and Well, they weren't supposed to be, but they're experimenting with psilocybin to induce mystical states of being.
They're going into prisons with mushrooms and giving the...
Well, actually, synthetic psilocybin.
They're giving that to the prisoners.
The prisoners are eating it with them.
Like, they would trip out on mushrooms with the prisoners to try to do therapy and...
So, Andrew Weill fucking goes into one of their meetings where the staff is meeting about this and, like, writes a kind of negative news story in Harvard about how these professors have started a semi-cult and are giving psychedelics to their students.
And this ended up in Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert getting kicked out of Harvard because, like, the Harvard newspaper, and I don't remember the name of it, is read by, like, the president and stuff.
And so they got kicked out of Harvard and they went down to Mexico and were taking mushrooms.
And this woman whose husband used to be in the CIA was hanging out with him and she told Timothy Leary, everybody's totally cool with you guys doing this as long as you keep it quiet.
Like, don't be loud about this.
And then according to Timothy Leary, she called him...
A few days before Kennedy died and told him he's going to start talking about everything and I'm really worried about the president.
Well, President Kennedy came from Harvard, and yes, according to this book, this woman who dated Timothy Leary supposedly went to this Mexican, to this retreat or the hotel in Mexico, and as I recall, You know, said that she wanted to get some LSD for someone who's too famous to talk about.
Well, if you want to look online, look up the CIA doses French town because there was a town in France where it's been, by the Freedom of Information Act, these papers have been released and they found out that they did LSD studies on whole towns in France.
They would dose the whole fucking village and watch people commit suicide, watch all kinds of crazy shit happen.
Excuse me.
So, you know, they've been doing shit on soldiers in the United States and Britain.
There's videos of British troops all dosed up on LSD wandering around.
Burgess Meredith, when he's the last man on Earth, and he's like in a bookstore, so he gets all these books, and he's so excited, because that's all he wanted to do.
That is washing the window and basically it's a stunt that went wrong and a car went through the wrong window.
So there's these two stunt guys and they're washing this window because they have the outtakes and you see them all of a sudden brace themselves and one guy jumps Trying to get out of the way, and a car just goes through a window, smacks one of them, knocks him backwards into the building.
If you ever need proof of evolution for knuckleheads, just look at Flash Gordon.
Look at that from 1936 and look at us today in 2011. If you can't see that things are changing and moving in a certain direction, the complexity of the dialogue, the simplicity of it in the Flash Gordon movie as compared to what we're having in this conversation right here, we're two totally different human beings.
I don't know if they were incredibly naive or if it was that the Cinema was so new and naive that it could be stupid and fake because everyone sort of accepted it.
You know what I mean?
When they saw those old King Kong movies, I love all the King Kong movies, but the first one was pretty badass.
But it's so fake looking.
It's so bad.
If you go and watch it now, you're like, whoa, what?
But back then, they knew...
They knew it was good for them.
I was like, wow, I can't believe that that's the monster.
They didn't have anything to compare it to.
They knew it didn't look real, but they were still impressed.
It's like, you know, it's like 3D. Look how much 3D's evolved.
But when you first went to, when I went to see Jaws 3D when it came out and wore those red and blue glasses, I was like, oh my god, holy shit, this is incredible.
Like, there was one scene where a needle came out of the screen and it was just like, whoa, that's crazy.
But, so I was just happy.
I didn't care about, I didn't know that there could be better 3D than that.
While you're playing the game, it erases your memory of your previous life.
So the moment that thing goes on, you have no more past.
You're just the memories of the character in the game rushing through the game, playing the game, completely unaware of the fact that you used to exist as a person.
Dude.
And then you know what happens?
You're doing a podcast.
You're like, oh, fuck, man, my heart feels weird.
Dude.
And you suddenly wake up in your futuristic apartment and you're like, oh man, that game was awesome.
I wrote something once about maybe the life that we're living, maybe the reason why it seems so fake is because it is fake and what we are in is some sort of a reality simulation of the roaring 20s of the technological age.
Like maybe we live in some time where everything is all scented candles and perfectly lit white rooms and no one has a muscle car and no one's getting their dick sucked.
And maybe there's like a simulator that you can run where you run where it's just chaos.
But chaos that's entertaining as fuck.
It's like every time you turn around there's some new thing.
Christina Aguilera fucking up the national anthem.
Two billion people tuning into the wedding.
There's constant shit going on to keep you entertained.
And you are in this biological ride canister.
And you're going through this thing.
Yeah.
Your portal to this ride is your skin and your flesh.
And you know, it sounds like you're advocating fantasy.
It sounds like you're advocating, well, you know, so you want to look at your life as if it's some sort of a simulation and just live it as a simulation?
So there's this mental pollution that comes pouring out of every information device that we have and that like corrupts your mind and you begin to think you're in a horror story when your real reality is one that's usually quite pleasant or This theme has been going back and forth with me over the last couple of weeks.
I was talking about it even on stage in Canada that I don't think, and I think it goes along with the same thing that we were talking about as far as us not being able to process films and movies.
that what I was saying with that was that movies, for those people who've never heard it before, I think that human beings are set up to imitate their atmosphere, and we're set up to find the alpha and follow him 'cause he's the old leader, and he's the guy with the broadsword that has the most nicks in it, and he's experienced things that you can learn from him, and so we and he's the guy with the broadsword that has the most nicks That we don't, we're set up to imitate our atmosphere, but we don't know when our atmosphere is bullshit.
Those same signals All of a sudden we're getting them from a hundred foot screen and we're sitting there in IMAX surround sound and the hero, every time he comes on screen, he says the exact right thing because he's got a fucking team of writers and they've been working on it for weeks and there's music plays every time he's in the room and you get just drawn into this thing where it's incredibly influential.
Like almost more so than real life.
And I don't think we're set up to process that.
I think we're set up to process the natural world.
And this is along the same lines as that, right?
I think when you look at the news and there's terrible things going on all over the world, I don't think we're set up to process the world.
We're set up to process our fucking neighborhood.
The universe, the world, is a chaotic fucking place.
And the key is, when somewhere sucks, you gotta get the fuck out of there.
That's how people got to America in the first place.
That's why people crossed the Bering Strait when they came over from Asia.
We are nomadic for a reason.
It's because the world is spinning around a fucking nuclear explosion, and sometimes it gets a little too far away, and when it does, everything freezes to death.
Okay?
So you've got to move around.
You've got to keep moving.
And I think we are supposed to be in a good spot and surround ourselves with a bunch of good people, but we can't be looking at the whole goddamn thing all at once.
The whole six to seven billion people all over the world.
Yeah, everywhere you go, you're going to see billions Bombs going off, and people getting shot, and planes dropping fucking missiles out of the sky onto the wrong building.
You're going to see that everywhere because there's so fucking many of us.
You're not supposed to be monitoring the whole thing.
Well, the idea would be, I think, that laws, like good laws, would be laws that were a natural expression of a kind of metaphysical function of the universe.
Another way to look at it might be with your child.
You've got certain rules that you have with kids where you have to tell them not to go into the medicine cabinet and eat these things because they can't regulate themselves and they'll die from it.
Those laws are obviously necessary and they're good, but what I'm saying is there's so many laws that aren't necessary.
You're basically sucking people's life energies out of them, converting it into money, and then using that money to buy nice things for your beautiful wife.
I can't tell you how much I'm disappointed in Obama as a spokesman, as a representative of us.
I don't know what's going on in the world.
I don't know exactly what happened with Osama bin Laden or any of this, why we're bombing Pakistan, why we're involved in...
I don't know.
Who knows?
Mike, for our own benefit, how come this motherfucker, a guy who came from a single mom, how come he can't step up and figure out some way to get people to put funding into horrible neighborhoods to try to make the system better, to try to get more cops into those neighborhoods,
to try to get more teachers into the schools that are more qualified, to pay them more, to set up community outreach programs for kids who don't have fathers, and set up like You know, mentoring things, you know, like local clubs where they can play sports and, you know, they can have friends and where they have something to fucking look forward to and you will create an infinitely better country.
Because our number one problem is people who suck.
And a lot of people who suck just needed love.
They needed something.
They needed guidance.
And I'm not saying we're supposed to be nanny state in the world, but I am saying there's a certain amount of people that are born in this country for sure are going to be fucked.
Why can't we help them?
If you really wanted to make this world better, wouldn't that be one of the first things you do?
And in comparison to how much fucking money we spend just blowing shit up in a bunch of places where we're never going to go, compared to that, the fucking money would be nothing.
There's an article in Salon.com which addresses the point you're saying.
It's there today, I believe, that says that instead of the money it cost us to kill bin Laden, it would have paid for college and free health care for everyone in the country.
It's just because the military-industrial complex has a huge influence on what happens in this country.
It's what Eisenhower warned about when he left office in that famous speech.
And that's just the way it goes, man.
It is the reality.
And that reality, despite WikiLeaks, despite anything that gets released about any fucked up thing that happens in the world, it still seems to keep moving in the same direction.
The summer of love, when people were fucking blasted on psychedelics, things were changing.
There was a shift, man.
There was a real shift happening.
Then everybody got on speed and the shit became illegal.
And now we're all self-absorbed lunatics.
We're all individually only taking care of ourselves.
Our minds are focused 100% on getting to work on time.
And that's one of the fun...
One of the most interesting things to do during rush hour is look around at all the people in the cars and you'll just see people in a dream sleepwalking.
They're all asleep and the dream they're living in is that they're the only person on the planet.
That's all there is.
Just them.
Nothing else.
And we've all trained ourselves to not even look at each other.
To not even say hello.
You want to freak somebody out these days, all you have to do is go say good morning.
I think right now, more so than any time in my life, I hear psychedelic discussion more than at any time in my life.
This is a big, big, big, big, big, big, big difference between now and, say, when I started comedy, like 1994, people would occasionally joke about doing mushrooms.
What you're reading is a version of the Bible that was translated first into Latin, then into Greek, The ancient Hebrew version of the Bible, they don't even know all the words.
They only know a certain percentage of the words in ancient Hebrew.
Like, they literally don't know what the words mean.
And part of it's because letters were also numbers in ancient Hebrew.
Like, the letter A is also the number one.
So, like, there's a certain numerical value to words that we don't understand.
Right.
The interpretation is the worst version of the grapevine ever.
And on top of that, the oldest version of the Bible, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls, is so fucking crazy that they don't even use it.
It's just so filled with these vague stories of trips and UFOs and visitations and all sorts of nutty shit.
According to John Marco Allegro, what the Dead Sea Scrolls was all about was them hiding their history of psychedelic mushroom use.
And they were trying to hide it from the Romans in stories.
And the older you go back in these stories, the more you get to the original version of the story.
And that's what it was all about.
These guys were tripping their balls off, and it totally makes sense.
If you were a bunch of idiots that was living 7,000 years ago, or whatever the fuck they were, and you're living with your stupid leather shoes that got all sewn on you, and you got some goofy-ass hemp clothing on, You know, you're a dope.
You don't know what's going on.
You look at the stars every night.
You wonder when the gods are going to rain fire from the sky.
And then you've stumbled across some mushrooms.
And you ate them.
And ate way too many.
And had some insane, super psychedelic, wind tunnel, vortex, tornado experience.
Where the whole universe is like a giant ball of yarn.
And each strand of the ball is like...
Hyper-segmented with billions of planets and lives and trees and water.
And you can see that for five or six hours and then come back.
You're not going to want the Romans to know about that shit, man.
And that's, I think, where things have gone wrong.
Because one cool thing about the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, whoever the fuck they were, is that they were courageous enough to try to express that experience as though it were a reality.
And now, when people take a psychedelic, they mark it off as...
Some kind of dream or an imaginary thing that happened to them that's not real.
So they pretend that this alternate dimension that seems to exist and exactly on top of ours and is filled with hyperdimensional, super intelligent Beings that throughout time have been called aliens or angels or elves or dwarfs or whatever the fact that these people tried to articulate that.
They tried to bring something back from that place here.
And just the effect of bringing a close linguistic description of that place onto this planet Look at the fucking change it caused.
It created a religion.
We date time based on that.
The way we look at time is after Jesus' birth.
All that stuff.
It's like the power that comes from being able to swim out into the hypersonic waters of the psychedelic experience.
Keep your fucking head about you.
Look at what you're seeing.
Try to understand it in a logical way instead of being like, I'm partying!
Try to understand it.
What is this?
Is this a projection of what's inside of you?
Or are you seeing something that's really there?
And if you're seeing something that's really there, what are those symbols you're looking at?
What are those?
Is that Mayan?
Is that Sanskrit?
What is that?
And the more you try to understand that and really get the message, because there is a message over there.
We've all heard it.
You've heard it.
I've heard it.
The message is...
The universe loves you.
And you're fine.
And everything's gonna be fine.
Don't be scared.
Try to spread love.
Be positive.
Embrace the world.
Embrace your fucking neighbors.
And let go of the fear that's ruining your life.
That's the message.
That message gets interpreted in a bunch of different ways.
Buddhism, Christianity, whatever.
But it's not like people are supposed to stop bringing that message back.
Well, people don't want to accept that that's where that message comes from.
There's a lot of people, when you connect something to the idea of it coming from a mushroom or any type of drug, ayahuasca, whatever, it inherently devalues the experience.
I didn't listen to it, but apparently, Robin Quivers from The Howard Stern Show went to Peru.
And I heard a lot of talk about it, but when I'm in my car, I never know what episode I'm listening to.
I didn't catch that one.
But apparently, she went to Peru to engage in an ayahuasca ceremony.
And they were giving her a hard time because she's like a vegan.
They're like, what, you won't even drink milk and you'll take this fucking shit?
Which is very funny.
But, you know, a lot of people, they were poo-pooing her experience.
And that experience, the ayahuasca experience, the mushroom experience, you know, everybody that is religious wants to believe in God.
What I'm telling you is I can show you something that...
Sure, you can meet what God is.
And I'm not saying it's God you're meeting, but you can meet what God is.
What God is, is perfect and all knowing and all embracing and loving and wise and constantly around you all the time.
Well, when you take mushrooms, that's what you feel.
That's what you feel.
You really feel God.
And I'm not saying that is God that you're communicating with or what God is.
Even the concept of God.
When you say God, all of a sudden it's this male hierarchy point of reference where you think of one alpha that controls all.
How do you not know that those thoughts, those demons, just represent thoughts in your mind?
And perhaps what that experience is entirely is you contacting your own thoughts and ideas and dreams and hopes and expression without the context of reality attached to them.
Sure.
So without the idea of, you know, what you did that you're embarrassed about that made you weird about your underwear when you were 13, you know, instead of that, maybe it manifests itself in almost a living thing.
Yeah, sure.
Projections.
So when you're saying there are beings out there that are fucking with you, maybe those are things that you've let grow in your mind.
Yeah, that what you're seeing, literally, is, like, that thoughts are live.
They're real things.
Look, have you ever heard the possibility, I mean the discussion rather, of the idea that aliens will come through the mind and that they're not going to manifest themselves in a real form and that when you think of the imagination or when you think of dreams and what we have is some weird slippery sort of experience that we can't completely control.
But what if that...
That dimension of dreams, that sleep dimension that you tap into when all your neurochemistry starts flowing between the blood-brain barrier while you're in heavy REM sleep.
What if that is in fact another dimension?
What if that is in fact a world and that is where aliens will contact you through?
They will contact you through this spiritual dimension instead of a physical dimension.
Well, if that's the case, and if you think about taking mushrooms and these elves show up, it is possible that negative things that you've created in your own life Shitty choices or bad energy that you've set forth and then nurtured and repressed and put it down and tried to deny it and all these different things that people do to sort of rationalize creepy things that they do in their lives.
What if those things manifest themselves as living organisms in the free pool of your mind?
I think it's on the DL. But anyway, you go there and they have this big thing, the history of cannabis, 4,000 years old evidence of cannabis use in China and it goes like throughout human history, how long people have been using marijuana and they're selling bongs, they're selling like pipes and shit.
And then you go into the back room and they have a comedy club.
But the funny thing is, on the internet you can look it up, there's a National Geographic thing about these mummies, and there's a scientist being like, I don't like saying this, but...
Why are people so reluctant to admit the positive effects that all these, or the effects, the need that people have for all these different intoxicants?
Why is it so mainstream to dismiss it?
Is that some Nancy Reagan shit that's still left over?
I mean, God, isn't it like the people who came over here in the beginning were super religious, and they had all these ideas about sex and intoxication that were really super strict, and were their distant ancestors,
and somehow that line of guilt still remains, where if people are like, I only drink after 5 p.m., I only smoke marijuana after 4.20, They said all these things because you're not supposed to be in an intoxicated state more than a little bit.
And if you are, then you've got a drug problem.
I must have a drug problem.
Isn't it possible that not all drugs are exactly the same?
Isn't it possible that you don't put everything under the umbrella of drugs?
Those are the experiments that they've been doing where they give psilocybin to people who have late-stage cancer and it helps them overcome death-related anxiety because you take it You take synthetic psilocybin, which I would love to try, which is so much better than apparently regular.
Actually, I think that you're supposed to say psilocybin, because it's easier to dose out.
When you're eating mushrooms, it's not like each mushroom has an exact certain amount of psilocybin.
But you know, the way they're doing these tests, you know, is so fucking cool.
And I would so love to have this.
They have people laid out on a bed and they have sitting on either side of them psychotherapists.
So while you're going into the ecstasy experience or while you're going into the mushroom experience, you have these people who are there to talk to you.
So that when you say, man, there's fucking super intelligent toddlers swimming through my body and mocking my thoughts, they could say, oh, let's talk about that.
What do you think those things are?
When you see them, describe them to me.
Or if you don't want to talk, if you just want to be by yourself, they leave you alone.
You know, I think if they have had the experience, I don't think that they're going to announce that, because it's such a strict fucking thing.
And just the fact that they're letting them reopen tests since, I believe, October 6th, 1966, was when LSD was made completely federally illegal, and all testing on psychedelics was brought to a halt, bringing us into a kind of...
Pharmacological dark age where nobody could fucking even experiment with the substances.
Meanwhile, you have people getting CAT scans and their fucking brain looks like the surface of the moon because they've been slurping back shitty club ecstasy and God knows what the fuck that is.
They haven't been taking pure pharmaceutical grade chemicals, which is what you should only take that when you're taking a hallucinogen.
Do you think that this idea of a trip, like when you take mushrooms, that you're entering into, accumulation of trips throughout human history, does that make sense to you?
And if that does make sense, then is the psilocybin that's chemically produced or that's artificially produced, does that bring it to the same place?
One tunes you in two different ways, maybe slightly different, but it's like you're still tuning into the same fucking station.
And I... And also, you know, the different tests that they did, for example, the Good Friday experiment at Harvard where they gave psilocybin to people in the basement of a church and piped down the church music to see if it induced mystical states.
And the modern stuff Johns Hopkins is doing with the same exact purpose to see if you can create mystical experience.
The effects they're having, they had from that is like people...
From the Johns Hopkins experience, reporting a year later that their lives are better, they're more connected with their family, that they feel like life is more worth living, their anxiety is decreased.
A lot of it's probably like, you know, when you're in your DNA, like, yeah, I have my grandfather's nose and stuff like that, like the history of your own DNA. So, like, maybe mushrooms lets you kind of tap the history of your DNA some way, like the memories of your ancestors.
Well, and also, that's why dogs are so excited when you come home.
Because, like, back when people first started domesticating dogs, if you went out on a hunting trip, there's, like, a good chance you were just going to get killed.
Like, coming home used to be a much bigger deal, you That's why your dog's like, you survived!
Can I please be the obnoxious hippie and be the hippie's advocate there and say Hippies advocate.
I think that, you know, the idea that people maybe have that you retain your personality when your body stops existing and you go into some kind of like new age paradise where you're flying around sipping honey out of the craters of heaven and after you're there for a certain amount of time you're like, you know what?
I think I want to go back to Earth and reincarnate as a kid with Down Syndrome.
I don't think that happens.
You know what I mean?
I don't think that that really happens because I don't believe that so many people on the Earth who maybe are born with disabilities or in incredibly difficult situations, it's hard for me to imagine someone at a super-dimensional spa being like, yeah, you know, I want to...
I think it's time for me to reincarnate as a blind person who can't walk and who, you know what I'm saying?
So that's silly.
And sorry for the too long explanation for that.
But I think that there is another thing that we are, no matter what, which is our consciousness.
And I think once the body ceases to exist, that consciousness continues to radiate inside of everything and through everything.
You can't comprehend it because there's no way to comprehend it because it's nothing.
And then they stop and they expect you to be like, oh my God, that's terrible.
But if you look at what Socrates said, which you guys should read because it's fucking hilarious and awesome, when he made what's called his apology because they wanted to execute him and make him drink hemlock.
In his response to their attempt to execute him, he said, okay, I tell you what, here's the deal.
If you kill me, And I die.
And there's nothing.
Like when I'm in my deepest sleep, and the deepest, deepest sleep, and there's just nothing at all, then you've given me paradise.
That's paradise.
Because this isn't exactly a fucking fun park here in early Athens.
And guess what?
being in complete non-existence for infinity might be better than having to like sneak around and fuck 14 year olds because I'm getting too old to catch them I can't catch these 14 year old Olympian athletes
And then the other thing he said to them is, if there is something after this, if I die, if you give me this stuff and there's some other thing and I continue to exist, then I'm going to keep doing what I was doing here.
Which was going around and embarrassing everybody with his mode of inquisition that essentially makes you realize that you don't know anything.
Well, have you ever heard the theory that every timeline, every life is repeated until you get it right?
And that what we're dealing with, this one timeline of this earth that you are listening to this podcast right now, you are a part of an infinite number of timelines that are all interwoven.
And that you go through this one, and then you come back until you get it right.
And you keep doing it until you have no shitty thoughts, until you have...
Nothing wrong, no personality defects, until you literally, ultimately achieve enlightenment.
Well, I mean, you say it is, but the evidence states that the universe itself is fractal, okay?
And the latest findings about Big Bang, or about black holes, rather, is that inside every black hole exists the possibility of another universe.
That's the ultimate fractal, because we know that inside every galaxy is a black hole.
And if inside every galaxy there's a supermassive black hole, it's exactly one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy.
And what the theory is, is that inside that black hole exists a whole other universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a black hole in the center of them, Each has hundreds of billions of galaxies inside of it, and it never ends.
And it literally is the ultimate fractal.
If that's the case, I don't think it's that preposterous that your silly little fucking life can be repeated over and over again.
You know, oh, I'm going to be Bob the Postman until I die.
If you can live this life over again, you're telling me that somehow or another, what kind of super order can have every car stop in the exact same spot, every red light be there when you get there, Rewind your DVD. Yeah.
Okay, so life is just a movie, and everything that's ever been done in your life is predetermined completely.
Well, it all goes back to the idea that you are...
You are the only person that you can prove has self-awareness.
You don't know that I have self-awareness.
You don't know that Brian has self-awareness.
So that's the idea.
You can't prove there's anyone else except you.
You like to think that we all have self-awareness.
You like to think that we're not projections of you, but it's possible That you're the universe in the very first phase of it's waking up and it's having this nervous breakdown where it projects this bizarre reality where you're like hosting a podcast and you host the UFC and you used to host Fear Factor.
I mean, doesn't it all seem kind of absurd, like a ridiculous weird dream?
Do you really think it's happening?
Well, that's the idea.
If everyone can individually do that same thing to them and look at your life and really think of all the coincidences And synchronicities that have happened in your life and all the bizarre events that maybe even just happened to you today.
You really think that that's all an accident?
You really think that this whole thing hasn't been planned out just for you?
Do you ever toy with the idea that, you know, I mean, you said that everything, you know, there's this possibility that everything exists by plan and that the same life will repeat itself over and over and over again.
Do you ever toy with the idea of the human being as the caterpillar that will become the butterfly?
Yeah, man, that's the, to me, yes, that's the idea that I adhere to the most.
It's like, I don't know what it is.
And of course, we can't know what it is.
But just from looking at the weather, you know it's going to rain.
And you can look at what's happening now.
And every time I sit down in front of my fucking iMac and basking in the glow of World of Warcraft as I eat edible marijuana, I consider to myself, It's only going to be about 20 more years that you're outside the machine.
They are neurologically going to figure out how to put you into this place where you can experience weightlessness, where the weight of the body is lifted, and you can live in a virtual paradise for the last part of your life.
That's something we all have to look forward to, is making the decision.
I mean, depending on how old you are right now or how healthy you are, you will eventually have to make the decision.
Between spending most of your time in this world, or spending most of your time in a virtual universe, a virtual paradise that is indistinguishable, or probably only the distinguishment is that it's a million times better than here.
It's weird to know that there's these weird little electronic parasites that click, click, click, they get the number, and then they make a new card, and they're just sucking numbers out of the system.
Yeah, and they went into the HTML. I still have to fix it.
If you go to my website now, there's nothing there.
I'd take it down.
But...
They injected into the HTML of my index page, any place there was HTML, some kind of fucking iframe that took people to a website in Russia or something.
So when you went to my website, a Google alert would pop up and say, this site is known for hosting malware.
And the CIA joined forces and they figured out how to neurologically replicate that sort of endorphin rush in a kind of ever-accelerating pace.
So the game, the higher level you get, the more the game begins to complexify and the terrain that you are used to that you already thought was cool all of a sudden becomes a million times cooler and then a million times cooler and then a million times cooler so that you get hooked.
That is a hilarious narrative that Alex Jones is talking about, because the implication is that there's somewhere in the CIA where there's like a frozen Bin Laden ice cube, and they're just waiting to melt him.
Wasn't there a guy who did that, who killed people and froze them and then dropped the bodies off?
And, oh, I think it was the Iceman.
That's who it was.
It wasn't a premise of a movie.
It was that guy, that crazy hitman for the mob called the Iceman, the Iceman Chronicles on HBO, which if you haven't seen it, they are fucking terrifying to know that this guy existed.
He was a crazy fuck.
You know, that guy used to play pool.
And he used to gamble, not with people that I know, but with people that I know who know the people.
And he, as long as you didn't make a fool out of him, he would lose some money.
He liked to gamble.
So he would go in and play some pool as long as you didn't rob him and make a fool out of him.
You know, as long as it was a competitive game.
But I guess he got in some sort of an argument with one guy.
One of the first guys he ever killed was over a pool game.
Yeah.
He used to, and apparently he had one situation with one guy.
It felt like the guy was robbing him.
The guy fucking disappeared.
Nobody ever saw him again.
He killed so many people, man.
He killed people over just, a guy would step on his toe, he would kill him, he would shoot arsenic in his drink, and the guy would never know what hit him.
Look, they said SEAL Team 6 killed him, and if that is the case, those guys aren't going to keep their mouths shut.
They're not going to pretend that they killed somebody and not.
I mean, I don't think they would take...
I mean, when you're dealing with SEALs, there's a code that those guys live by, and I don't necessarily think they would pretend that they killed somebody like that.
All throughout the years as a head of one of those SEAL Team 6 units where they all would have long hair and tattoos and they would look weird.
It was like a fucking goddamn Sylvester Stallone movie.
It's like The Expendables, but it was real.
Fuck.
Yeah, there's a lot of guys like that, man.
That's what they do.
That's what they do.
I mean, if you watch those, you ever watch any of those Discovery Channel specials on how they recruit people and what you have to go through Hell Week and you have to go through where you're trying not to be a Navy SEAL? Dude, the people that get through that are some extraordinary fuckers.
Those are people who would do some crazy shit.
There's a lot of people out there that love and live for the idea of getting a fucking flat out straight license to be a bad motherfucker killing machine.
And if you want to, if you're good enough at killing people and you're willing to pledge your loyalty to the United States government...
They'll take you in.
They'll train you.
They'll fucking give you a great attitude and a lot of psychological counseling that they've been working on for decades.
They've got it down to a science.
They know exactly how to tune your mind so they can send you places to go fuck people up.
You don't believe our great president, Obama, was sitting in a situation room and being shown the plans to descend on this base and attack Osama Bin Laden.
You don't believe that that was happening?
Looks good, SEAL Team 6. I'm going to declare code red on Osama Bin Laden.
I say they cast Nicholas Cage as the hardened veteran who doesn't give a fuck, and he goes over there because if you're going to do a job right, you've got to do it yourself.
Yeah, well, you know, it's that wannabe famous thing, man.
You know, and when it goes away, there's nothing weirder than someone who used to be famous and isn't anymore and really desperately wants to be again.
Yeah, but apparently it's based on a comic book, which now I want to read from watching it.
But it's like, what's so cool about it, man, is in other zombie movies, they never explore the emotional impact that being in a zombie apocalypse would take on you.
And the directing of the acting, he's really good at directing people how to act when they're in shock, which is what you'd pretty much be in if you were dealing with that kind of event happening.
Well, I mean, yeah, I think, I guess I'm going a little, like, too, I just smoked Joe Rogan's weed deep, but I think that, yeah, I mean, fuck, that is a scary idea, is, like, seeing, like, yeah, what's worse than being chomped on by humans?
That moment when they rip you apart and put their intestines around their neck?
By the way, I did Massey Hall in Toronto on Friday night.
2,600 podcast fans.
It was like all podcast fans.
Except this one dude who brought his teenage son who apparently didn't read the signs.
I guess he didn't know what he was getting into.
His son probably likes MMA. I'm like, go see the Fear Factor guy.
There's signs that say, warning the Joe Rogan show will contain the strongest language and material content imaginable.
That's what I came up with.
So that you can't say that I didn't warn you.
It says the strongest imaginable.
And I might be right.
And apparently during the...
There's this one port in my joke where I talk about a fake baby getting his dick sucked.
And he didn't like it.
He got up.
I heard about some people that were in their section I couldn't have possibly known because the joke was killing and there was thousands and thousands of people.
That Massey Hall is fucking huge.
It's huge.
It's so crazy doing a show like that where there's that many people.
That's the most I've ever performed for.
And I'm glad I'm doing that thing lately where I do like an hour and ten, something like that.
Just the best way to do it, man.
I did an hour and ten.
Just stomped it.
And I was so amped up for that show.
It was the first show in a long time that I was actually kind of nervous for.
Like as I was walking...
Not nervous, like, oh, I'm scared.
But like all day, I was like, whoa, I got a big fucking show tonight.
And when you go out on stage and there's 2,600 people and they're screaming...
And it's super intimate, too, the way it's set up.
Because there's three tiers.
And they're pretty much in your face.
They're all in your face.
2,600 of them.
Fucking awesome.
And Doug Benson was there.
And Doug Benson was hanging out with his buddy, who's his opening act.
I go, what are you doing tonight?
He goes, nothing.
I go, come down to the show.
So he came down.
I go, you want to go on stage?
He goes, yeah.
So I just introduced him at the beginning.
We also got Doug Benson here, and they went fucking crazy.
That is the problem with talking about, like, really heady, trippy shit, is you get a certain percentage of people, like my friend who thought he was Carl Jung, who have to come up to you now to talk to you about things, and take what you do very, very seriously.
It's like, you know, the vast majority of the hardcore Bill Hicks fans are amongst that stuff.
Instead of, you know, having some sort of a discussion or a debate, I am more than willing to look at someone, you know, they say, you know, send me something that says, Hey, you know, I think you guys are like a little insensitive.
I love the podcast, but here's where I think you're wrong.
Or like on Twitter, someone said that about Top Gear.
I was making fun of all these people for criticizing Top Gear about their comments about Mexico until I heard the separate group of comments that everyone was upset about.
I had read some shit that wasn't very offensive at all and to me was a joke.
But then I read and watched the video of the real stuff, and I was like, oh, okay.
You know, I'm more than willing to be set hit.
But the guy who did it was very polite and very cool about it.
He didn't, you know, oh, I guess you're just a jackass and a fucking loser.
You are the target of the day to distract themselves from a fucked up horrifying shithole of a life they're living.
It's not you.
It's not what you did that's so terrible.
If someone agrees with you or disagrees with you, it's just a thought and an idea, an opposing thought and an idea to be considered and either accepted or rejected.
It's that simple.
But when you get all angry about it, unless what you've said is really fucked up.
Callan all the time, like, fucks up and then has to come back.
Look, in that figuring it out and looking up those facts in message boards and discussions, we all grow.
We all find out.
Like I said, when I put up the thing about the Photoshop thing about Obama's birth certificate, I'm like, I don't know what's going on.
Somebody tell me what's going on.
And a lot of people are like, why would the government do this?
That's speculation.
Shut up.
Let's get to the heart of this.
What is going on here, Photoshop-wise?
It's so important to have this sort of a back-and-forth exchange with people online.
It's not just throwing something out at them.
The reason why this podcast really works, honestly, is that it's like people are tuning in to a cool conversation amongst friends, and sometimes they contribute.
Sometimes tweets contribute.
There's many discussions.
Many of the discussions that we've had on this podcast are based on things that someone will send me.
Someone will send me something on Twitter, and I'll go, dude, you've got to look at this.
Check this out.
I'm going to read you the story.
And it's this interwoven network of ideas and people and shit.