Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, joins Joe Rogan to explore Burning Man’s transformative gatherings—hosting tech leaders and artists—and debunks the 2012 apocalypse myth while framing ecological collapse as a sign of civilization’s breakdown. He links synchronicities to global consciousness shifts, proposing the Unify Earth project, a collective peace meditation event. Pinchbeck argues mainstream media stifles critical thought, contrasting it with the internet’s potential for societal evolution, and aligns with Rogan on capitalism’s instability, advocating for Terra currency to curb hoarding. The conversation reveals how systemic crises and media manipulation shape humanity’s collective psyche, urging a reimagined future beyond outdated paradigms. [Automatically generated summary]
We're gonna get crazy Taking a long ride Down some of my favorite schools of thought with this guy here Daniel Pinchback is author if you've never heard of him Taking a long ride down some of my favorite schools of thought with this guy here.
Daniel Pinchbeck is an author.
If you've never heard of him, he's got a great book called Breaking Open the Head.
And another one called 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl.
I'm sorry you got stuck in traffic, but it's almost appropriate because you're sort of a little bit of a doom and gloom, end of civilization sort of a dude, and there's a giant power outage in L.A. that fucked traffic upside down.
I mean, it's all sorts of genius people there, actually.
Yes, definitely.
Like, not just hippies, but the heads of all the technology companies.
I had a debate with some Google exec who's a yoga practitioner.
I had lots of great conversations around there.
It's all the psychedelic community.
I spent a lot of time with this woman who runs the Women's Visionary Congress, and my friend John Perry Barlow, who wrote lyrics for The Grateful Dead and started Electronic Freedom Foundation.
It's actually an amazing, you know, brain trust of human oddities and eccentric fossils.
You look at these speeches, these debates that they're having.
It's like one nutty fucking person after a nutty person.
I mean, this fucking...
The guy from California, the guy from Massachusetts, rather, Mitt Romney, he's a Mormon.
I mean, at a certain point in time, you gotta go, come on, man, really?
You believe that Joseph Smith, this 14-year-old kid, found these golden tablets with the lost works of Jesus, and only you could read them because you had a magic rock.
Really?
Right?
At a certain point in time?
I mean, how is a guy like that allowed to even run for president?
If there's certain things that you believe, do you think that there should be a line that someone can pull you aside and go, come on, man.
December 21st, 2012 is the big day and that's, you know, etched in stone and a lot of people's ideas about a lot of the shit that you write about and a lot of the shit that people think of about the coming of the next age.
On the other hand, it seems to me that it's super clear that we're in the middle of a transformation, that we can see now the global economy is buckling, the planetary ecology is also buckling, we've hit peak oil, A lot of the resources are in serious depletion.
So yeah, we're faced with an endgame for the current global civilization that we're in.
Of course, but it's why we are in wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and why we're trying to hold down our access to the remaining resources.
But yeah, so I never anticipated anything exactly what happened on December 21, 2012, although it certainly might.
But I think that what we need to do and what I tried to do in my work up to this point is really try to take a big step back and look at our situation and factor in all sorts of stuff that the modern worldview is not really factoring in, which for me includes Shamanism, the DMT experience, psychic experience in general, the kind of psychic capacities that actually many people are aware of that happen all the time, whether it's synchronicity or telepathy.
I mean, yeah, you were supposed to be on the podcast today and we had emailed each other about it, but we hadn't talked on the phone in a long-ass time.
Well, I mean, you could say that it's weird and creepy, but then you kind of get past that point and you just kind of integrate it.
And it's like, okay, somehow there's actually one consciousness that's kind of working through all of us.
And as time moves on in this period, it seems like those synchronicities are speeding up and our psychic capacities are somehow intensifying.
But I will say that one idea I'm working on for December 21st, 2012, is to utilize the date, because now there's so much popular focus on it, to create a kind of global event, which would be a kind of spectacle.
I'm working with composers and a team from Cirque du Soleil, and they're kind of putting together a concept for a show that would kind of celebrate humanity's evolution to this present point.
And then ending with a synchronized peace meditation, kind of global focus on unity, with the idea that you could take the energy that's pointed towards that day, and there's so much fear around it, and anxiety, and trepidation, and actually make it into the most awesome thing possible, where it's like, well, look where we've arrived at, and look at our opportunities now to make a shift and a jump into a new form of planetary civilization.
Well, this is the clearest time in human history where the common person, any person really, has a direct influence over an incredible amount of people with viral information, with videos, and with anything that you write that really resonates with people.
You can hit an amazing amount of people now.
So a guy like you could get in touch with a bunch of other people who could do exactly the same thing, and a ripple effect can go on, and it can hit millions and millions easy.
There's never been an opportunity to do anything like that.
At the moment, we're actually in negotiation with the Mexican government to use Chichen Itza, which is considered by the Mayans to be the heart of the Mayan world.
Different people are kind of moving towards this idea that maybe humanity is on the verge of transitioning into being kind of like a superorganism, you know, that we're kind of like coming to awareness of ourselves as a singular being, in a sense, you know, and then we can, you know, begin to act more symbiotically rather than like parasitically or aggressively.
There was a really fascinating article recently written on creativity and how people are always praising creativity and looking forward to getting new and creative ideas.
But that other people's creativity actually makes people uncomfortable.
It makes people uncomfortable and uneasy.
And the idea that someone had come up with these ideas that they didn't.
And you wonder if...
Like, the really powerful push towards fundamentalism, the really powerful push towards the 6,000-year-old earth kind of shit, you know, and follow the Bible kind of shit, is really the same thing as someone trying to confine creativity.
I guess my feeling is basically we live in a culture where people are being indoctrinated not to think.
They're being indoctrinated by the media, the mainstream culture, by the education system to be ignorant, to not question, to not develop their independent capacity of thought.
No, all these things are, from my perspective, they're basically kind of holding the mass consciousness, the planetary consciousness, at a certain low level or low frequency.
I can see your point that maybe perhaps it isn't used to its utmost abilities or the capabilities that we would have for it.
But I don't think that it's not...
I think this idea that we're helpless to media constantly bombarding us with these images and ideals and that we have to accept them.
I think that's silly.
And I think that, honestly, with the internet, you look at the society that's growing out of the internet, look at movements like Anonymous, look at things that have never happened before, these giant groups moving forward and taking down websites and taking down companies that they feel have acted unjustly.
No one's ever been able to do something like that before.
A number of things are happening simultaneously, and that's another thing that's very interesting about our time, is that things are getting pretty complicated.
Now, one problem with television in general is that it's designed to reduce everything into tiny little sound bites.
You know, when Lincoln and Jefferson debated in the 1860s, the debates lasted eight hours, you know?
When we have a debate on TV, each person gets, like...
36 seconds for this response, 22 seconds.
We're basically used to everything being spoon-fed and dumbed down to an absolute level of stupidity.
And basically, the problem is that because our scenario on the planet is very complex at this point, we actually need to be able to articulate and analyze at a much deeper level.
So yes, we have two things going on.
We have the one-directional mass media, which I really am convinced is basically a kind of lobotomy machine that anesthetizes people into an ultimate state of idiocy and consumerist passivity.
And then we have the development of this new interactive media, which is having profound effects and will continue to have profound effects.
And if you go look at the history of media, Every time there's a new form of media that's very powerful, it transforms the society, the political system, the government, changes everything.
You could never have had an empire until you had a written code of laws that could be distributed to the borders and beyond.
You could never have had a modern representational democracy, nation-state, unless you had the printing press, which distributed enough materials that everybody could participate in civic dialogues.
Now with this interactive technology, potentially points towards a much deeper transition in our political and social paradigm.
Potentially towards a way from centralized control hierarchy to more of a kind of distributed or direct democracy.
That reminds me of a joke that Terence McKenna used to say, that some guy practiced a city of levitation for 40 years and figured out finally how to float.
And he came up to the Buddha and he said, Master, I can walk across the water.
And the Buddha said, but the ferry's only a nickel.
I mean, take the fucking mushroom.
Take a chance, dude.
Take a shortcut.
Not only that, the idea that you are independent from nature and that you don't need some help in any way.
I mean, you're constantly getting help from nutrients and vitamins and protein and all these different things that you absorb through nature.
But then when it comes to this that you think may or may not do something to your mind, I can get there naturally.
I like what you said, pull ourselves into, because it's going to have to be that, because you're going to have to pull away from the system that we have now, especially the financial system.
We've learned from when Ron Paul wanted the audits of the bailouts and people found out how many trillions of dollars had been sent into this whole idea of bailouts and where these tax dollars went.
I think a lot of people became really disillusioned and disenfranchised and had no connection to it.
You know what I mean?
When it happened, did it make any sense to you?
When you were hearing about the bailouts, did any of that make any sense to you?
And we interviewed this guy, Bernard Lyotard, who was an economist.
He was one of the architects of the euro.
He wrote a great book called The Future of Money.
And in that book, he, you know, and in our film, we discussed how the financial system is broken.
It really doesn't matter at this point who you put in control because it's still just like a car with no brakes, but that actually we're going to have to reinvent instruments for exchanging value that actually have fundamentally different value systems connected to them.
So, for instance, he proposes a currency, which he calls the Terra, that has a negative interest charge.
So it's a new trading currency, a global trading currency, that's indexed not to just a virtual abstraction like our money currently is, but actually it's indexed to a basket of real-world goods and resources that decline in value over time, because most things do.
So the longer you held on to a Terra, the less it would be worth.
A bundle of resources that would include fuel and wheat and processed foods and unprocessed goods and so on.
And as a summation of all of that, it would actually decline in value.
It would have what's called a demirage charge.
So when people got a bunch of these taros through some business deal, rather than seeking to hoard them or hold on to them, that wouldn't work.
So they would be best used by putting them back into circulation, by sharing them or whatever.
So that's Leotard's concept, one of many concepts.
We're actually publishing a book through my company Evolver called Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein.
It's actually already out on the internet and you can get copies.
But he actually puts together a whole paradigm looking at the inevitability of the financial system breaking down and really seeing that rather than just having one monopoly of a value exchanging instrument like money that's controlled by private banking interests, You could really create a whole ecology of different ways of exchanging value that would be used for different purposes.
And in fact, if you look at the bankruptcy of the government and the effects of peak oil and all this other stuff going on, the capacity of the federal government to intervene and to meddle may actually become radically reduced in the next years.
Because there's just not going to be the money available for that kind of endless effort.
Because the best tool, in my opinion, to sort of calm down those instincts, those competitive, super hyper-aggressive instincts, is psychedelics, and it's...
But the fact is that one of the values of psychedelics is they kind of decondition you from your present state of consciousness and your social ideology and belief system.
There's a kind of peeling away.
I remember the first time I took mushrooms, one of the first experiences I had was going to a deli and buying something with money and just finding it totally ludicrous that our culture invested so much belief in these wrinkly, brown, ugly pieces of paper.
You know, and that everybody was kind of so disconnected from their present experience and focused on the sports or the stock ticker or all this crap, for my opinion.
You know, so I think that peeling away back to a kind of, you know, phenomenological, as they say, level of just presence of being, that's a very powerful thing.
And we tend...
As humans, it's very easy for us to get lost in abstractions and concepts, and then we believe in our concepts.
We think that they're real.
So the psychedelics can break that investment we've made in all these things that we think are real that are just abstractions and concepts.
Can you enjoy a good movie and still be a person who believes that we're evolving as a consciousness and that we are in an adolescent state of evolution and somehow or another we're in a transitionary period and we're all coming...
When I get excited now about popular narratives, it's more because I see in them the seeds of part of this transformation that's underway.
Now, for instance, if you look at like a lot of the most archetypally huge stories that our culture keeps telling us, which includes the mutant, you know, the X-Men, Harry Potter, you know, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings to a certain extent, but Star Wars, let's say, Avatar.
The story that's repeated over and over again is there's like this hero's journey.
And as part of that hero's journey, there has to be a learning to use our psychic faculties.
Yeah, so if you look at mutants, they're going to this academy, they have to learn how to master these paranormal gifts.
You know, Harry Potter, you have to learn to cast your spells.
Star Wars, you have to use the Force.
You know, I actually, the more that I've thought about it, and the more my own experiences have kind of echoed, you know, some of these things, I think that these stories are so powerful because they represent a kind of yearning that people have for a kind of initiatory training and extrasensory perception.
And that is something that our society...
You know, has rigorously denied us, you know?
And I think if you look at, like, what happens to you when you're, like, an adolescent, like, let's say you're 15, 20 years old, you know, you have this beginning, and when you're a young teenager, you have this tremendous sense of expectation.
You're, like, waiting for some transformative thing to happen to you.
And then it doesn't happen.
And so instead, you accept a lot of basically crappy, degraded substitutes, like dulling entertainment, like, you know, watching athletes do this and that or whatever, Rather than having gone through something that you always just know is missing, but then the culture kind of hides it from you.
And I think that that thing that's missing from our culture is this direct initiatory process.
Actually, it was through ayahuasca that I stopped.
Actually, it was through ayahuasca that I started also, to be honest, because there's a whole relationship between ayahuasca shamanism and the Amazon and tobacco.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Some of the thinkers that I wrote about in my books talked about how cultures need to have some type of initiatory ritual.
And if they don't have it consciously constructed, it'll end up being unconsciously destructive.
It'll happen through war or through destruction of the environment or something.
So one theory that I have about the quote-unquote 2012 or this transition that we're in is that it's almost on an unconscious level.
Humanity has not been able to change its behavior, right?
So it's like it's on an unconscious level.
We're kind of willing ourselves into a state of catastrophe to bring about an initiation and thereby a transformation of consciousness.
Yeah, but if you talk to my grandfather about TVs, he was like, wow, this is crazy.
TV was invented.
You could see TV. It's just us living our life, and then around a certain age, we grow up to a certain point where we're like, yeah, it's fucking spinning out of control.
That is possible, but it also could be that human beings, even though we love to think of ourselves as being separate from all the other things in this world, we are a natural thing.
And even though we have plastic fucking cars and glass lenses for our fucking cell phones...
We are still a natural thing, and we are subject to the natural cycles of this earth, of this superorganism, of the universe itself.
And even when we see crazy weather patterns and wild crazy shit, there could easily also be crazy cultural patterns.
And that culture, even though we can create it and we do have control of it, it may be very well a natural movement.
As natural as your evolution from baby to adulthood.
Both of these computers, I tried to go to your website today and just search my name obviously first, but then Joe Rogan's name, and both of them kept on crashing my browser.
Anyway, we've published a few pieces by a German scientist, the guy Dieter Braus, who wrote a book called Revolution 2012, and he's one of a bunch of people who are arguing that a lot of what's happening has to do with changes that are taking place throughout the whole solar system that have to do with the sun changing, that actually the electromagnetic environment of the Earth is shifting.
He said it's a constant thing, that same alignment happens all the time.
He's like, you know, the fact that everyone's making it out that December 21st, 2012 was the first time that this happens in 25,000 years, he's like, that's nonsense.
So, I mean, I can just give you my little interpretation.
I mean, my understanding is that it's simply an optical alignment, which means there's no particular reason that we would know of that would be such a tremendous transformative thing, where the winter solstice sun rises within the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way.
So, in a sense, it's an eclipse of the center of the Milky Way by the sun.
On the winter solstice, on that particular date.
So that date had a lot of significance for them.
It was like the key moment in the year.
And they considered the Sun to be the first father, and they saw the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way as the cosmic mother, or they also called it apparently a black hole.
Which is interesting, because only in the last 15 years that our astronomers discover there is a huge black hole at the center of the Milky Way.