Daniel Pinchbeck and Joe Rogan debate whether human consciousness shapes natural disasters, citing the Kogi and Hopi traditions—fasting, snake rituals, and ayahuasca—as tools to master altered states, not just physical endurance. Pinchbeck dismisses genetic determinism, favoring cellular awareness and morphogenic fields, while Rogan speculates on humanity as hosts for artificial consciousness. They critique the "dominator empire complex," a parasitic system of exploitation, arguing inner spiritual growth can dismantle it. Pinchbeck’s projects like Evolver.net and UnifyEarth.com aim to foster global consciousness shifts, but the segment blends deep philosophy with absurd tangents, undermining its urgency. [Automatically generated summary]
So I think what we're, you know, it's basically we can see where we're going at the moment.
There's more and more natural disasters coming faster and faster.
Some of that may be because of the fact that we're going through a whole solar system-wide transition, as scientists like Dmitryov from Russia talks about, and this guy Dieter Bros.
Some of it may be because the level of human consciousness is more meshed with the natural state of the planet than we actually can comprehend quite yet, which is what most of the indigenous people believe.
I've been visiting, like, we've been doing retreats down to Columbia to work with the Kogi Indians, and they walk, like, 25 hours down from the mountains to hang out with us.
And that's basically the message that they've been giving us from their, you know, Understanding of the nature of reality, you know, it's somehow the level of human spiritual development and how much we are in a reciprocal relationship to our local world, you know, has an effect on what type of catastrophes do or don't occur.
So when the earth is sick, it's because we're sick and we're all sick along with it.
So as tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and ultimately shifts to the polar ice caps and shit like that and super volcanoes and Yellowstone that are ready to blow and kill half the shit on the continent, that that is all in correspondence with the sickness of this species of us?
But listen, man, if we look at the ideas of quantum physics that even observing something with certain intentions can actually change the outcome of particles, you know, when they do those tests, those slot tests, and they show that observing an experiment actually has an effect on the result of the experiment.
And that they just circle when you have too much macaroni and cheese and 40-ounce beer in one location.
It's a terrible idea.
It's a terrible joke.
It's really cruel to think that you're cooler than these fucking poor people that live in some place where the sky becomes an angry monster.
But it is kind of weird that they only land in fucked up places.
You don't want to think that.
You don't ever want to blame people for that, but wow.
Obviously we know that's not true because there's geographic centers in this country where they're certainly attracted to.
But the idea that more of them come because people are more fucked up and they're accelerating because our society is deteriorating, that's a terrifying thought that we're responsible for that.
As I discussed in the 2012 book, the Hopi, for instance, who live in Arizona, tribes like that may have actually chosen to live in very difficult environments where survival is really on a knife edge because it forced them to be able to do things like rain dances.
Well, it's quite possible because they had a large choice earlier on of where they were going to leave.
And it's possible they actually chose to leave and live in very difficult environments because it forced them to develop their initiatory and psychic capacities.
I mean, for instance, we now understand that there was like a sign language.
Even Native people who didn't speak the same, you know, language could actually communicate a very highly developed sign language that was all across the continent.
And second of all, what they've discovered is that a lot of Native cultures were actually more like cultures of abundance than cultures of scarcity.
That actually the amount of work that they had to do today, you know, compared to what we have to do, you know, an average day was a lot less.
Anyway, amazing fucking movie, but one of the scariest parts of it is one of these rites of passage that he has in order to become one with their tribe.
What do you say to people that say that doing something along the lines of fasting where it's actually possibly dangerous to your body and that's what's causing you to have these experiences is really kind of a silly thing to do in this day and age where you could choose other paths to the same sort of results without damaging your body and shutting things down.
I don't know enough about nutrition to tell you whether or not it's healthy, but I've read a lot of people that start talking about fasting for days and days and days.
Pan and Teller's bullshit makes some excellent points, but they also make some silly ones because they want to find the conclusion that everything is bullshit.
I watched them dismiss yoga when he was talking about, it's just stretching!
It's stretching!
And I was like, wow, you're crazy.
You've never done a yoga class.
If you do yoga for two hours and tell me that's just stretching, that shit makes you hot.
Yoga makes you hot.
I've gotten as high from yoga as I have from a couple hits of pot.
No doubt about it.
No doubt.
Real strong pot.
I've gotten to body tingling moments, especially if you take a real good class, like hot yoga where you go real deep into poses and you really hold them.
Anybody that dismisses that as just stretching, you're either not giving me the full information that you have access to or you did a really sloppy job of investigating it.
You know, you can't just say these fucking Indian masters that have been doing this shit for thousands of years are just stretching.
And that's why they have these very specific poses that they believe activate very specific regions and hemispheres of the chakras of the body.
I mean, that's what's so kind of interesting and cool about what's happening right now and how things are so, you know, complex.
I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, I was looking at a book by this guy, Dean Radin, who studies psychic phenomena as a scientist at Institute of Noetic Sciences, and we interviewed him for a film, wrote a book called The Self-Aware Universe, and he analyzes a whole, you know, century's worth Of data and psychic experience.
Statistically, he even looks at reports from the U.S. Army and the government, which support the existence of psychic phenomena of non-local communication, mind to mind, which means that consciousness is not simply brain-based.
It exists in a different way.
But I've also read recently this book by Richard Wiseman called Paranormality, who believes there's no psychic phenomena, busts every evidence for it, and in his own way is quite convincing.
So for me, it makes it a very interesting time where you can approach...
Anything and analytically rip it apart and find the weak spots.
But maybe what's missing from Penn& Teller and Richard Wiseman's understanding is the sense that intention is somehow a fundamental aspect of the universe.
So if your intention is to take something apart, desecrate it, ignore it, and so on, you can do all of that for sure.
But within there, you've kind of missed a subtle key that actually makes a life worth having in a way.
Well, intention is aware, and you can be aware of it in a very tangible form in the art of stand-up comedy.
You cannot be thinking about something different, say something else, and have the people react to it.
They won't.
It won't work.
It's a weird thing.
You could have the joke worded correctly.
You could say it with the right intonation.
But if your mind isn't into it, they can smell it.
It's the weirdest fucking thing in the world.
A connection that you have with an audience, it could be an audience of 200 or it could be an audience of 1,000 if you've reached that full connection.
It is like a giant mass hypnosis.
There is some sort of a relationship that you had with these people.
And if somehow or another something hits you, you remember something or something bothers you or you think about an argument that you got in with your girlfriend or a bill you forgot to pay or any distraction that makes you feel in a negative way, even if you're saying the words the same way, the audience will feel it.
They will feel it and they will back off you.
You can feel it.
You can feel them going.
It's legit, man.
It's real.
You can't tell me it's not.
I've always said that I do my best to write, stand up.
I sit down.
I do my best to put in the time to be there to make the writing happen.
And I do in the time when I perform enough so that I get on stage that I'm really comfortable and I relax.
But ultimately, at the end of the day, I'm not exactly sure how that shit is even coming out.
I don't know where it's coming from.
I don't know what's happening.
And when I'm on stage, when I'm completely locked in...
I am as much a passenger as I am the person who steers it.
And as long as that works, as long as I'm in that groove and the audience is in that groove, the whole thing will go seamlessly.
But one little hiccup, one little bad thought, one little error, one little stress point, and everybody hops off the ride and waits and looks at you.
And goes, you gonna get this thing going again?
And you go, yeah, get back in.
Everybody get back in the ride.
We're okay.
We're okay.
Do you know what you're doing now?
Yeah, I know what I'm doing now.
They can tell.
And that's a psychic connection.
That's a legit, tangible psychic connection.
When you're on stage, you feel it from the crowd.
You feel like waves are positive and negative.
You literally feel the energy.
You can say that, right?
You've had really good sets on stage, and you've had jokes that bombed, and you've had people angry at you.
They used to have them all the time in Boston at the...
There's a place called the Comedy Connection, and every week they had this guy, Frank Santos, who would do a hypnotist comedy show that seemed like bullshit until you saw it a few times.
And when you saw it a few times, you would realize, oh, my God, these people are really fucking under.
It's so weird.
And not everybody.
He would know.
He would go up to the people that weren't, and he'd look at them and go, okay, you get off the stage.
And he'd pull the people off the stage.
But the people that were up there, for whatever reason, he found their hack code.
I tend to look at most of our politicians and news anchors as kind of Illuminati sorcerers who use transignosis to keep people in a lowered state of consciousness, a lowered state of suggestibility.
Yeah, if you could, instead of working at something, if you could just correct something about your behavior, the way you think about things, or the way you look at the world, or anything, what would it be?
Look, there's babies that are killed in drive-bys.
And when I hear about that, I go, well, how the fuck does that work?
What's going on there?
Did the baby have some negative thoughts?
And then I think about it and I think about all the positive things that have happened in my life and all the positive things that I know have manifested themselves through a certain type of thinking, a certain ethic, a certain way of looking at the world and I wonder if it is either or or if it's a combination of things.
When I've collected a whole number of anecdotes told to me by people and observing their state, their efforts to kind of understand it, to fathom it.
My own experiences also have had similar.
I think that there's no doubt that probably You know, psychic energy collects in physical environments, and when people are no longer there, if they have a stake in that environment and they're not finished with their business in the world, they hang out, you know, or some piece of them.
Like the phone call that you didn't have to make today to me, there are certain things when you feel the synchronicity, it's like a click.
It's like you have an intuitive acceptance that you're being shown a little bit of the fabric of space-time making a little bit of a ripple or something.
The comedy store, if you didn't know, just FYI, was Ciro's nightclub, and it was Bugsy Siegel's hangout in Hollywood, and a lot of people allegedly were murdered there.
And every single person who has been there for more than X amount of years has some sort of a ghost story.
I'm sorry, my grandparents lived in a supposedly haunted house, and I stayed there with them in Newark, New Jersey.
And it was on North 9th Street, and there was a guy who actually died in the house.
And he was a guy who was renting a room there, and he died.
And they always thought that this house was haunted, because the house is always making noises.
But it's a fucking house that was built in, like, 1909. You know, it's an old fucking house.
And when you're dealing in a place like New Jersey that's moist all the time and it rains all the time, and then it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter, wood is like, you know, it's an organic piece of, you know, construction.
It constricts, it expands, depending on the moisture in the air, depending on it being cold or hot.
And old houses like that, they make a lot of fucking noise.
They creak.
They're always going...
And people are like, this fucking place is haunted!
Or it's an old house, man.
But I'm not completely averse to the idea of ghosts, but a lot of people that talk about ghosts are full of shit.
Well, that doesn't mean that they're not real, because if you think about what a ghost is, if a ghost is something that's not in this dimension and sort of flits in and out of it, how do you measure that?
I mean, science is, you know, everybody says, well, science says there are no ghosts, or there's no scientific evidence of ghosts.
Well, science was not really designed to measure shit like ghosts.
Science is designed to measure, like, how much does lead weigh?
You know, what happens when a star goes supernova?
Observable things!
When you get something like a ghost, if a ghost was real, and it's an incredibly rare phenomenon that depended on some really exotic conditions...
I'm giving the offer, if there's any ghosts listening, they can fucking rape me tonight, and they can just rape my ass all day long with their ghost dicks, and if it happens, I'll let you know.
There's a book, what's his name, Ian Stevens, who's a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote a 2,500-page book called Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersects.
And he found all around the world there were children who had spontaneous recall of past lives, and often very specific.
Like in India, they would be like, well, you know, I lived in this town, my wife had this name, I had two kids.
So in a number of cases, he found these kids, and he went back to the towns that they talked about, and they found this family and established that there had been this connection.
And sometimes the kids would even have a pronounced birthmark, like a birthmark on the neck or something, and it would turn out that the previous incarnation, perhaps, had died of a wound to the neck in a fight or something like that.
Is it possible that the connection is an abstract one, that they haven't met it yet, but that yet there's not a balanced value to learned experiences that are transferred through genetics, like instincts?
And that perhaps some instincts that we have are really like, things go wrong, you learn from them, that's why you're afraid of cats.
I mean, kids are afraid of monsters that live in New York City.
I mean, isn't it possible that somehow or another that there is a memory that through whatever mutation or whatever extreme condition or weird circumstance as far as like physical biology becomes a more potent one and that this, as it is transferred through generations, awakens.
This memory awakens.
This experience that someone who shared these genetics so many generations ago actually did have that all of a sudden For whatever strange reason.
I think that a lot of those ideas about all these things being inherited by the genetics being this kind of master molecule are actually being kind of challenged right now by the emerging biology of epigenetics.
Which is recognizing that awareness actually begins at the boundary of the cell where chemical signals are exchanged.
There's a kind of cognitive process that happens even at the permeable boundary of the cell, as some signals are allowed in and some are ignored or rejected.
And that what's allowed in actually then influences how the genetic material expresses itself and reproduces itself.
Actually, it's not so much the genetic material as the master molecule.
It's more as if the whole cell is a unit of cognition or awareness.
I mean, this is, you know, you look at the biologist Bruce Lipton, he has a book called Biology Beyond Belief, really looking at how, you know, consciousness and awareness begin even at a cellular level, and how that in itself influences and inflects how the genetic material expresses itself, that the genes are not master molecules.
In our material, the material that makes human beings, there's certain things that you show people.
And children, when they're really young, have certain fears and notions of the boogeyman and the monster that lives in the woods and the things in the dark.
And a lot of these are imprinted from being killed by jaguars, from some proto-hominid that lived 5 million years ago.
They got killed by jaguars.
And those instincts are still tingling in the background noise of our minds.
So maybe there was this species encounter that was like a near-death encounter for humanity and it left this morphogenic field of fear and terror around the snake or around the jaguar or something like that.
The state of this interconnectedness, this morphogenetic field, this idea that...
We are living in some sort of a complex meshwork of biological life and natural laws and physics and space and radiation and all of it together combined.
People are realizing it now way more than ever before.
Well, I think we have to look at technology itself as an aspect of the evolution of consciousness.
You know, that actually, like, we're tool-using and tool-making species.
We make a new tool, then we look at the tool or the instrument we've made, and it reflects us back at ourselves.
And then it gives us new metaphors for understanding ourselves.
Then it allows us to make another more, you know, advanced tool, and that creates a whole new set of metaphors.
So now we've gotten to the point in our tool creation and tool-using where this feedback loop is happening faster and faster.
So we're having, but it's still, you know, a tool is a projection of our consciousness, of our thought into the material realm, which then gives us information about ourselves, which then leads us to create another tool, which also advances and evolves our consciousness in that process.
Do you ever get to the point where you get upset that you have a connection with these items, these technological items like phones, or do you not regret it ever?
Part of what we've been doing with Reality Sandwich is bringing people down to work with indigenous shamans and elders.
So recently we went down to Columbia and worked with these Kogi guys from the mountains in Columbia.
And when we hung out with them, we were in a place without any electricity for eight days.
So no phone, no computer.
And after like a day and a half, I was like, what did I want all that stuff for again?
Like, this is so much nicer.
You know, suddenly you can see the stars, you know, you're at night, you like light a fire, then the fire goes out, you go to sleep, you wake up at dawn.
I mean, you know, I think that actually we may find that we've gone way too far on this technological path, that we thought, you know, we've had a kind of, in a sense, the religious belief of modern society is linear technological progress, leading to some kind of singularity or transformation.
That we may actually back up from that and be like, well, wait a second, where is this stuff...
I mean, actually, I have more plastics in my tissues.
You know, my eyes are going bad from looking at these tiny screens.
You know, why is life constantly mediated by glowing rectangular screens anyway?
That actually we might want to, you know, retract from this technological path and develop in a different direction, which doesn't mean rejecting technology.
It's more about mastering our projections rather than feeling that we always have to get enmeshed in them and then move in that direction.
Is it sort of like riding a bike too fast and you're going downhill and you go, oh, fuck, it's good to ride this bike, but I've gotten kind of away from my own biological control of this situation?
Do you ever consider the idea that when some sort of a weird symbiotic relationship where it's our job as the host to create this environment where the parasite, which is technology, this new life form that we've created to exist and then ultimately discard us because it is the next stage of not organic life but of consciousness and that consciousness, the next stage of consciousness will be artificial consciousness created by this, this consciousness that was created by biological life.
And that we are only here to usher in the next stage.
And that next stage is an electronic form.
A stage that doesn't have emotions or nonsense or any of this shit that ferments us.
I mean, if we are a step along the way, who's to say that that step eventually...
It continues along a biological train.
Maybe it really is truly our destiny to create some sort of an artificial life that's not burdened down by our monkey DNA and all the instincts that we needed to evolve to this point with the curiosity that would allow us to make something as crazy as artificial intelligence and computers.
Maybe we're just the carriers.
Maybe we're the carriers of the disease that eventually takes off and develops on its own.
I guess part of what I would suggest to you is that part of our opportunity right now is to become co-creative with the evolutionary process, and that in a way means that we have to step into a much more responsible and mature role where we actually become participants.
And in a way, we still kind of enjoy The spectacle of our own alienation and our own potential destruction.
So we kind of enjoy elaborating these futuristic mythologies of how our technology is going to overwhelm us or devour us.
That might be the case, but all we really know at this point is that we have will, we have intelligence, we have consciousness, and we're not using it very well.
So the first thing I would think that we would want to try to do is use it very, very effectively to see what type of better situation we can rapidly create, you know, rather than fobbing off our responsibility onto, oh, there's going to be this technological thing,
Well, I do agree that as a person who's a big proponent of team people, I definitely advocate the idea of us figuring out what the fuck we are doing and making it better for all of us and our relationship with the planet.
But to me, that doesn't seem like you're fobbing that off, considering the possibility that we are merely here, as many other parasites and hosts are in this world.
And you look at grasshoppers where they're infected by aquatic worms and the aquatic worms trick the grasshopper into jumping into water and the grasshopper drowns so that the worm can be born out of its body.
I personally think that we actually are infected by a parasitical agency.
And I would say that agency is something like the dominator empire complex.
The sense that we have of separation from nature, the sense that we have the right to annihilate ecosystems, dominate ecosystems, control other people, the whole trip of empire, the slavery.
I mean, there's still tons of slavery around the world, domination of women.
That's the parasite that's eating us alive right now.
And that's where, if we can go through our inner initiatory process, We can begin to find the antidote or the cure to that.
But it's not about, from my perspective, giving it up to technology as an amazing thing.
It's more like reclaiming our human capacity.
And for me, that's really where the knowledge of the indigenous people is not folk tale.
It's not silly.
It's not worthless.
It's actually something that those of us who care about seeking to move into an evolutionary framework, they have tools and gifts for us.
And that's why part of what I've been trying to do over the last couple, well, a lot of my work, but now in a different way, is build bridges to the indigenous people and their knowledge systems.
So I'm working now with the Kogi in Colombia and also the Sequoia from Ecuador.
It's almost like when I look at the relationship that we have with technology and I look at the relationship that different parasites and different hosts have, it just...
As a consideration, you have to think about the fact that our society is completely obsessed with pushing innovation.
We're completely obsessed.
And I often look at the dominator culture, what you describe, and I say, well, you know, you're right.
I mean, that is a huge fucking problem.
I mean, war and the domination of other countries and battling for resources.
But what do you say to people that say that there's no way you can have a society that reaches this particular height this fast without that as a byproduct and that, in fact, the reason why people push so hard to innovate and to Create new things and conquer new boundaries,
both scientifically and socially, is that it's all almost a byproduct of this desire to innovate and create and produce this next thing, and that this is all a part of us creating some artificial things, some intelligent things.
I think we have to break the trance of technology.
Which is not to say that we reject technology, but we have to break that trance that somehow this linear technological progress is necessarily bringing us to something super amazing.
And for me, the shift in the future is more to a kind of psychotechnical phase of development.
By that I mean that if you've had the DMT and the ayahuasca experiences, the yoga experiences and so on, you recognize there are these vast dimensions within the psyche that are basically unknown continents.
And in a sense...
That, for me, is where the action is going to lie for us in the future, as well as potentially exploring other planets, other solar systems, and all this stuff.
But at the moment, we really more need to get control of our thought projections.
And the only way to do that is to undergo an initiatory process that involves getting into our unconscious patterns.
Yeah, well, I mean, like, you know, hanging, you know, fasting or hanging by your pecs for six days or taking ayahuasca, you know, for a couple weeks until, you know, you're so nauseous that you can't believe it, but still vision and insights keep coming up and they begin to heal you of your, you know, pathetic humanness.
Do you feel happy that you're, and I believe you are, one of the people that's sort of an agent of this sort of, I believe right now, currently, we're in a very unusual age of enlightenment.
And I think that the level of enlightenment that we've achieved culturally over the last year, certainly not everybody, not last year, last decade, certainly not over everybody, but generally, has been more than anything that I can ever remember in my lifetime.
And people like you that are pushing these ideas and people like you that are trying to challenge the way people view things and the standard predetermined patterns of behavior we seem to have come to accept, you're a part of moving this thing along.
These kind of discussions are part of moving this thing along where people in college or people who are getting their first jobs, people who are starting their own first business, they're stopping and they're reconsidering the direction that they move forward and what their motives are and whether or not they're just caught up in momentum.
The number one problem that we have is that consciousness and subjectivity are mass produced by a system that is basically keeping us in a state of passivity and ignorance.
Is that system there because everything else, like the way alpha wolves treat beta wolves, that system is almost set up in place so that there is an antagonist?
We definitely have a powerful military, industrial, corporate empire complex that has sunk its roots into our subconscious processes and our psychology.
It requires a lot of disciplined effort to recognize how it is operating through us on so many different levels And then begin to turn it around from within.
It's a way for a kind of global community that's trying to understand this new paradigm and move into it, to reach out to each other, and then self-organize.
We just did one on shamanism practices with Alberto Villaldo.
So that's evolverintensives.com.
And now we're doing a line of books that include this book here, Jose Arguelles' book, Manifesto for the New Esphere, which is about this idea of a transition from the biosphere to the new esphere.