Duncan Trussell joins Joe Rogan to explore psychedelics, societal decay, and human perception—debating Terence McKenna’s "novelty creating machine" theory while joking about a hypothetical Shamanic Institute of America blending mushrooms, chanting, and ego dissolution. They critique monogamy, parenting, and festival exploitation (like SXSW’s unpaid performers), contrast it with fairer events like Vancouver’s, and musing on whether life is a constructed reality. Rogan teases future stand-up shows—including Trussell’s February gig at Arlington Draft House—and promotes Onnit’s nootropics, while Trussell hints at a 2026 book. The episode ends with playful banter about cults, custody contests, and the internet’s role in reshaping consciousness, leaving listeners questioning how much of reality is just a shared hallucination. [Automatically generated summary]
Somebody just tweeted, what are the odds that Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell got so high and are now having an amazing conversation without the podcast running?
Imagine if that's where it gets born, in the bottom of a fleshlight from some sick fuck that never bothered to clean it, and he tried to fuck it twice.
And of course, you're going to be like, have the most friends of Fitbit world because you're going to be working out so extreme.
And everyone, that would be like, you're not like, instead of Dane Cook having five million friends on Twitter, that you would have the most extreme, you have the most like red graph, like you worked out the hardest.
And you should be able to figure out within 30 pills.
I mean, you know, a lot of people say, how much can you tell the difference between when you're eating multivitamins and when you're not eating multivitamins?
I can tell.
I can tell.
There's this subtle thing.
But I'm really in tune with my shit.
I eat healthy.
I work out a lot.
I take supplements.
I know what gets me and what doesn't.
But there's some people, man, that don't know.
You can give them things and they're not sure.
Is this my multivitamin working?
I don't know.
Is it working?
They're not in tune with their body so much.
If you're not really athletic, if you don't push your body to extremes and you don't eat healthy and clean, I think a lot of people, there's a missing amount of communication.
I cut way back on my coffee consumption, but I have found that coffee and the show go well together. but I have found that coffee and the show go I think they're important.
We're doing the Chicago Theater this Friday night.
Fucking super fired up.
Duncan and me and Joey Coco motherfucking Diaz in the flesh.
If you have never had a chance to see Joey Diaz live, you're going to shit yourself.
That guy, dude, he hits moments.
He hits moments on stage where it's just ridiculous shit that he says.
It just makes you repeat what he said over and over and over again.
He's one of those dudes, when Joey really rocks it on stage, he'll say something so fucking completely preposterous and so out of control that you'll just be repeating it.
You'll be like, he's fucking what?!
You'll just repeat what he said over and over again.
unidentified
Because you had to re-register in your head almost.
The Georgia Godstones, a large granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia.
Yeah, a message that contains ten guides is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages, and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient language scripts.
Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It's pretty intense shit, man.
I mean, this is someone saying, you know, look, if humanity completely falls apart, here's a message.
I got into it because I was just thinking about how crazy it was that rhinos were in France at one point and kind of like, who the fuck were these people?
It was a little dry.
If you carve something in stone and you put it deep enough in the stone and on a big enough stone, it's guaranteed that if people are still around in hundreds of thousands of years, they're going to think that that really meant something.
They're going to think it was very important just because you carved it in stone.
So it could be anything.
You could put anything on a cave wall and people will come in and look at it and be like, wow.
Look at this!
They worshipped a penis with a happy face on it.
And it's just a guy who, like, painted something on.
The Georgia Guidestones, it's just some guy who went and carved some shit in stone.
He was talking about the different types of civilization.
Type 0 civilization, Type 1 civilization, Type 2 civilization.
I think someone just put it on my Facebook wall.
But basically the concept behind it is that right now we're moving from a Type 0 civilization to a Type 1 civilization, which is we're going into a place where...
We're going to recognize that we're all, you know, we're planetary.
You know what I mean?
We're a planetary civilization instead of broken up in all these weird divergent pieces where we all speak different languages and we have these different beliefs.
We're moving into something where we're all connected via the internet.
But he said this is the most dangerous time possible because we're moving from Type 0 to Type 1, and the Type 0 people, the ones with the crazy ideas, they have nuclear weapons.
And so we're in a place where if we don't work this shit out, we can destroy ourselves.
But if we can get past these crazy ideas that differentiate us, that split us up, the shit where people say, like, you know how those Marines just pissed on the Taliban that they'd shot?
And everybody got upset about that?
Everybody got upset about what?
They got upset that they were pissing on them.
They didn't get upset that they killed.
They're like, how could you urinate on bodies?
It's like, you just blew fucking holes in the chest of these men.
That's horrifying.
That's awful.
We're still at a place right now where it's worse to piss on a dead body than to make a dead body.
Now when we get to a place where making a dead body has the same cultural resonance as pissing on one, where it makes national news because one person had the fucking insane idea of like shooting someone instead of working it out through language or talking it out, that's when we're going to be entering a new age, a new, if we can make it there, a new evolutionary period where we recognize that a solution to a problem is never It's never blasting people to smithereens.
And if it is, it's so fucking rare that it's the most rare thing.
It's only in the most rare situations.
So I think that...
I think that we're on the verge of getting to this place and I think the internet's helping.
I think every time you look at what happened with SOPA and PIPA and you see the power of this organizing force and logic seems to rule in the internet.
It's just logical.
The logical majority seems to be making things happen.
So if that happened on a planetary scale where instead of these fucking insane guys like the president of Syria Look at that freak.
Yeah, these guys who think it's okay to be president for 40 years straight.
You know what I mean?
These fucking assholes, once we start getting them out of the picture, and then move on to the fucking clerics and the priests who are teaching people that they're the only way to communicate with the universe and connect with God.
Once we get rid of those motherfuckers, this is a pretty awesome planet, man.
You have an awesome, optimistic view of the world.
If we could just all communicate in the same native language so we could tell each other this, that's a big part of the problem.
A big part of the problem is if there was some sort of a civil unrest or some sort of a problem with another part of the country that was European, we would get all the information back immediately.
What's going on, exactly what's going down.
Can you imagine if the United States was in Ireland for some reason?
We have infinity out here, and all we have to access to describe this infinity and our perception of it and the way it feels to be a part of it is a language that we didn't come up with ourselves, a language that has been passed down and is a trade language.
So the words that we have, there might not be words that exist right now to describe certain facets of reality, and sometimes that will make them invisible.
But if you could undercut language and just have a I mean, imagine being the president of Syria and you, the guy who's killing protesters, jailing people and torturing them.
You take that guy and just for one second he gets a feeling of what it's like to be out in the street or to be in a country where you've had a president forever and you're being completely repressed.
If he could feel that feeling.
You know what I mean?
It would be hard for him to continue on.
It would be hard for him to live in delusion and to think that, oh, it's easy to be a tyrant, I deserve this, or these people are less than me.
Slavery never would have been able to happen.
Slavery was based on this ridiculous idea that somehow black people deserve to be enslaved.
You know, it's the same thing with eating meat.
We believe that In general, people, one way, not everyone, some meat eaters are like, yeah, I'll eat meat and I know that these animals have feelings and generally die a brutal life, but I think I deserve to eat meat and I think that's natural.
That's the best rationale for eating meat.
That's it.
You acknowledge the suffering and pain you're causing and you do it because you think you deserve it.
But some people, they think fucking animals are like clockwork things.
You know what I mean?
Like a little mechanistic like a wristwatch and they don't feel the same things that we feel.
And we'll never know that until we create a neurological interface with animals and the moment you realize, oh fuck man, these cows...
They feel love.
They feel love for each other.
And fear.
And they fucking mourn their kids.
Then when you sit down and eat a hamburger, it's going to be a much more intense experience.
Could you imagine if cows eventually evolve and just get a little bit smarter and learn how to speak English and then start coming into people's houses and see all the leather shit?
Yeah, and isn't it odd, though, that even if I died, maybe I'm wrong about this, but if I put my will, I want my flesh cured and made into wallets for my friends.
Because there's one dude and he's going to get through this miserable life in one piece, one way or another, until one day he's at the fucking flea market and he finds a human flesh wallet and that's it!
If we were smart as a species, that's one of the big things that we would do.
We would set up places where people who had fucked their lives up Can go and not be a criminal and get some food and have some and help them and figure things out.
Like, listen, we can keep you from going to jail for the rest of your life.
Let's work this out.
Let's fucking figure you out a fucking career path here.
Help this dude.
Somebody help these people.
Everybody's like, hey, put yourself up by your own bootstraps, which I believe in for...
For most things.
For most things, that would be the advice.
But occasionally, there's some people that are a part of society, they're handed the shittiest fucking hand of cards ever in life.
And then they find themselves in and out of the judicial system as a young kid, and they find themselves in jail.
I mean, it's like, man, you don't think that that dude somehow or another didn't get a fair shake ever in his whole life?
There's an interesting essay that this guy has got the weirdest name.
His name is Zerzan.
He's like, I don't know the exact word for what he is, but he's like an anarchist primitivist.
He thinks everything started going bad when we started using symbols to represent reality instead of just being in reality.
The moment you start using symbols to represent reality, you're kind of boxing reality in and you're separating yourself.
You're creating this separation from you and the universe.
And so he was talking about the...
Growing use of the term like, how people use the word like instead of just saying what it is.
So you know it's like you're walking outside and you like come up to this thing and you're like, and he says what that is is this subconscious problem where people are not directly experiencing reality so everything's like something else.
Things aren't being, things are being like something else.
It's very curious.
It's pretty good.
If you look up Zerzan, it's a little fucking dense, but it's a pretty good essay.
unidentified
Joe, have you ever hung out with guys that hate symbols?
Well, you know, it's weird, you know, one of the things that I always thought was fascinating about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs is that they had a completely different way of writing things.
So they must have had a completely different way of talking, a completely different way of, like, Of phrasing things.
When you look at how you could be a human being, obviously an intelligent human being, advanced, sophisticated culture, capable of producing amazing works of art, but that language is totally alien to us.
We look at it and we're like, what is this crazy chicken scratch and pictures of birds and shit?
These fucking people, this is what they used to describe the world, but somehow or another, to them, it worked.
And for the longest time, people have always been aware that one of the big things that keeps people from really directly communicating with everybody is the language barrier.
If I went over to God's house, like there's a lot of gods living in the same neighborhood and they all have these little aquarium earths that they're fucking with.
If I went over to a fucking God, the God's house that did that, I'd be like, you're a dick, man.
Why don't you just let them speak the same language and have fun?
Why do you consistently fuck with these people?
You gotta give them a break.
You know what?
I'd call animal control on God.
Like, if you believe the concept of God, And really think about the fundamentalist Christian concept of God.
If someone was doing that to animals, what God is apparently doing to us, according to the fundamentalist Christians, he would go to jail for a long time.
Anonymous would fucking attack him.
God's a sadist.
He's like taking gay people, burning them in hell forever.
He's like giving cancer to people because they deserve it.
He makes people go blind.
He turned a whole city in the Bible to salt or something.
And although to you and your mind, you believe you have it all figured out, and that you're smarter than the Lord, and I say that's not possible, Duncan.
It's by Abraham Maslow, and it's called Religious Values and Peak Experiences.
And it talks about a theoretical...
A theory of how religion happens and the progression of information as it goes from being someone who's really happy...
To it being a priest class that's controlling people.
And so his idea is certain people throughout time have had peak experiences where they break through the particular ego barrier created by the zeitgeist of their time.
They have a direct communication with some kind of like super ideas, super intelligence, whatever you want to call it.
They get really happy.
Happy in a way not just like someone who's having a good day, but in a way where if you ran into them You would recognize that they'd figured something out.
So that person gets a group of people around him who are kind of magnetized by the energy and by what they're saying and they're talking about a real way that you can live and actually be happy in the world.
And those people from being around someone who's like, you know, like in sports, They used to say you could only run a mile in this amount of time.
And everyone thought that and everyone was doing that.
And then right when someone broke it, all of a sudden everyone started breaking.
It's like, oh yeah, I could do that.
So in the same way, certain people will overcome a specific phantom of their time, which is causing them to be miserable.
Those people get people around them who also get this certain level of happiness.
The person who came up with the original idea dies.
Now he's just got the disciples, and the disciples have people around them.
And they transmit this idea to the people around him, but now it's a little diluted.
And some of the people who are doing it aren't really quite happy.
They're not doing it right.
So you pass that down.
It keeps getting watered and more watered.
It keeps getting watered and watered and watered.
And then the next thing you know, you have some fucking old horny man with his pants down just nailing a fucking toddler in a confession booth.
And that's the end result.
Starts off with a super happy guy, ends up with a fucking...
A pedophile dressed like a god clown with his cock in a kid's ass.
That's how mutated things get, which is why it's very funny that people feel so desperate to cling on to this old thing instead of thinking, wait, there might be a new thing that we can come up with based on all the information we have right now.
Well, I think that what we're talking about here is that the ability to describe reality and to understand reality keeps increasing as we evolve as a species.
There's really smart people, you know, in every single time.
There have been very smart people at every single time.
Really smart people in different ways.
But their ability to describe reality was limited to the language available to them and the technology that was around them at the time.
I mean, if you look at, like, shit, man.
I hope you remember this because there's a book in the Old Testament that is, in my mind, is clearly a UFO encounter.
It could have been a hallucination and people just believed it.
But I think that outside of religious hallucinations or visions and people trying to describe it, everyone's limited to the tools that they have around them to observe reality and they can only report on reality based on the tools that they have.
If that were to actually happen, I don't think the human race would survive.
I think we can't survive.
We're the alpha.
We can't exist in a world where we're under the thumb of some incredibly intelligent, super sophisticated, alien life form that thinks in a completely different way than us and can control matter.
I don't think it's going to come from the sky and the silver ships.
I think the way it goes down is maybe...
All of a sudden, we as a species get to a point where we kind of realize we remember actually what's going on.
I think right now we have a little bit of amnesia.
We have lost a sense of what truly is happening.
I think when you take a really potent psychedelic, sometimes you'll see this universe that already is around you, that's already happening around you at all times.
You get a sense all of a sudden that you've been there before.
And then it goes away.
But it seems like we're more like getting projected into this reality with awful amnesia for some...
I don't know what it's for.
It could be just a video game.
It could be a sadistic joke.
It could be a prank.
This could be a prank that one super intelligent entity is playing on another super intelligent entity.
People are not looking for some sort of a spiritual release and some sort of a A broader perspective on the universe, an objective view of life.
No.
They're looking to see if they can punch a hole through the center of space.
You know what I mean?
The real height of progress is not a complete overhauling and understanding of the educational system, of the way to develop human minds, the way to stop people from harming each other, instead of devoting all of our resources to evolving socially, if it even is possible ever, instead of doing that.
One thing you can do is, when you think about the passage of time as we move into the future, if you get out of your head this idea it's like running down a race track or something, like you're running down a track, and think of it more in the sense of a revealing is happening.
So as we progress into the future...
More things begin to emerge into this reality that weren't there before.
Like we go from having stone tools to all of a sudden having, you know, iron tools.
And then we go from that to all of a sudden, you know, where we are now, where we're surrounded by fucking silver glowing Macintosh computers and like microphones that are somehow recording our voice.
And these things keep getting revealed more and more and more.
And any of these items, should you take them back 100 years, people would think it was a UFO.
They'd see it and think that fell out of a spaceship.
So all of a sudden you realize, and maybe McKenna said this, and I think he may have said something like this, but the idea is the spaceship, the alien, the extraterrestrial intelligence, it's growing around us like crystals.
When you're a kid and you're growing crystals, but it's growing in the form of technology that eventually is going to become self-aware.
Which is why I heard this awesome thing, which is the first alien contact that we have is going to be a computer that wakes up.
That's going to be our first communication with another consciousness.
Not something from the great void of space, but something that grew through time.
It could be that the first UFO or the first real intelligence that we encounter that's greater than our own is something that we create ourselves.
It replicates itself very quickly.
That was the idea that once a computer becomes sentient, the real issue is going to be that they're going to be able to go, this is a stupid fucking design.
Instantly, they know exactly how to put it together.
And, you know, The idea of programming emotions and programming our mammalian system of dealing with babies and puppies and little baby chickies and shit.
They won't have any of that guilt or weird feeling about biological life.
And they might just say, look at these fucking assholes shitting all over this planet.
We can't even use half of the resources on the planet because these fuckheads have blown up nuclear bombs and left nuclear waste in holes.
We're like cats.
We take our nuclear shits and we just throw them in a hole.
And then we cover over it.
We're like stupid cats.
At the top of the heap of technological innovation and science, the best way to get rid of nuclear waste besides shooting it at other planets.
Could you imagine what assholes we would be considering in the universe if we just shot our nuclear waste up into space like a rocket?
We send it out with the Voyager and it crash lands on someone's fucking moon someday.
What if it starts some future war?
They think it's a bomb.
We shoot nuclear waste they're wearing.
Apparently it's very devastating to their particular environment.
Kills like 80% of the people on the planet.
The rest, they get together on giant battleships and head to Earth.
Well, the problem with that is, yeah, I'm sure you could, but it takes so much energy to get it out of the orbit of the planet that it ends up becoming less efficient to use nuclear energy.
And so that's their motivation, yet what they did is they created a biological nuclear weapon.
Now, all over the fucking planet, there's people in the military.
I'm sure that some military commander was just looking through the air and was like, Martha, can you get those scientists on the line?
I'd like to talk to them.
And they're like, hey, do you guys want to make $17 million this week?
Send over your research.
We'd like to know how to make this biological agent.
And then the next thing you know...
Some fucking government somewhere in the world.
I mean, shit, you think Iran wasn't interested in that?
Or maybe North Korea or us, certainly.
Any fucking world power would want that weapon.
That's a great weapon outside of the fact that it ends up...
Well, see, you know biological weapons?
Biological weapons have a really...
The problem with that one is it might not burn itself out, but biological weapons have a distinct advantage over nuclear weapons because nuclear weapons destroy infrastructure.
So if you have a nice, fast-moving fucking disease that you've made that you can drop on a city, then, you know, fly in there three months down the road, clean up the bodies, you've got a city, you know?
Let's say somehow it spreads through, and all of a sudden, like, the consciousness of, like, all these people who started getting into power, they're like, you know, people who are, like, coming...
Like, people who are coming into power all of a sudden have more open-minded internet ideology of how the world works.
And let's say that just...
The whole of our government suddenly turns into like the smartest fucking people on, forgive me for saying this, the smartest people on Reddit are now running the United States government.
The breaking news stories would be like cute cat pictures.
But here's the problem.
If that happened in this country, let's say it happened in Europe, and let's say it happened in parts of Asia.
Still, these pockets, all you need is like two or three fucking pockets of people who are worshipping some mythological entity that they think hates gay people and wants women to wear fucking weird shit or thinks it's okay to lash people.
I don't remember which country it was.
I think some country just executed someone.
I think it might have been Iran, but that could be propaganda.
Who knows?
I don't know.
But apparently they executed a guy for coming up with a program that allows people to download porn.
It's like the Earth right now has the potential to turn into an awesome party, but you know that thing that happens when two dicks roll into a party, like two weirdos that nobody invited, or all of a sudden start fucking drinking too much and trying to pick fights?
That's what we have on a planetary scale right now.
Well, the real problem is we're great when we can communicate directly with each other, but when we band together in big groups and then we can't communicate, we get too far away from each other, then we just start getting dicky with the people that are furthest away.
Like, fuck them, man.
I'm taking their shit.
They're over by where the good water is.
And, you know, that's where the lack of it, the fact that you don't feel all these other people.
I think it's an evolving entity.
That's what I think.
I think the human organism is some crazy...
Technology inventing evolving organism.
I think the invention of technology, though, I think is like the whole reason why we're here.
I think what we're all doing as stand-up comedians and as nurses and doctors, we are all supporting the system that keeps alive the people that make the awesome shit.
unidentified
We're just going to find out that we are technology.
Look at what's happening right now with SOPA and PIPA. What you're seeing is right now technology has surpassed government and it's surpassed the control mechanisms that are in place in the entertainment industry to monetize their product.
It should be you log in, you have a fucking email address, you know, it's Duncan Trussell at theunitedstatesofamerica.com, and you fucking log in, and you get to vote, period.
That's how it should all be done.
Yeah, keep the system secure, don't be an asshole, don't abuse it, let's find out what people really want.
But, you know, choke outs, physiologically, not that bad for your body.
Head impact is bad.
Head impact, they're finding out, is, you know, you gotta limit the amount of times you get hit.
That's why for a fighter, it's really important to know when to hang it up.
There's a certain amount of shots, and after that, you should really, you should, you know, I know you still like to do it, but you've got to think about your future.
Is it always in the decision of the fighter, or can the UFC... Ultimately, it has to be the decision of the fighter, unless someone owns him, unless he's a slave.
When Chuck Liddell was on top, when he was at his best, man.
One of the most exciting guys of all time.
So for that guy, you know, it's probably real hard to just accept getting up in the morning and listening to the quiet of your yard as you walk towards your Fucking newspaper that's sitting on your front porch, and you're looking out there, and people are mowing their lawn.
The real problem with me when I was a kid doing martial arts is I worried about two things.
One, you couldn't make any money.
There was no money in kickboxing.
There was nothing back then.
You couldn't even kickbox in Massachusetts.
You'd have to drive to Rhode Island.
It was weird.
You could fight in full contact Taekwondo matches in Massachusetts, but you couldn't kickbox.
You had to go to Rhode Island for that.
And they didn't even have Muay Thai there.
It was just like it was a mess.
And then there's the brain damage issue.
Brain damage is always a concern.
I was always thinking about that.
Because I knew.
I did not do very well in school because I did not want to pay attention.
I was just a really distracted kid.
I'm sure if I was with the wrong parents, they would have drugged me, especially today.
I was super distracted.
But I read a lot of shit.
And being like...
A young kid and not knowing what the fuck is going on with the world and trying to figure things out and trying to read as much as you can to try to piece it together yourself.
It's a very bizarre place to be.
A lot of us get there, right?
A lot of people that we know...
Came from a place where when they were really young, they were like, what the fuck is going on with the world?
I might be upset because a cheerleader that came over to my house, I couldn't figure out how to kiss her.
Maybe that's the biggest problem I'm having at the time.
But at that time, when I did it for the first time and had that initial experience, and you go back to your parents who've never taken it, and if you mentioned to them that you'd even taken it, they might want to put you in a drug rehab or they think you're insane or they think you're getting down the wrong track.
You're forced into this place of like, fuck, man.
I can't...
You guys don't even...
You don't even know.
You don't even understand this new way of experiencing life.
And I think there's a lot of people...
Who spend their whole lives never knowing that.
You don't have to take psychedelics to get to that place.
There's other ways to get to that place.
But yeah, it's a very strange thing.
And those people who never get to that place, they're the ones who are, a lot of them are in control right now.
Well, no, I'd say that Taking Acid started with a series of like books.
It started with contact with like, you know, the whole weirdness, my whole weirdness started with, or as I recall, it started with me...
coming upon this book that my mom had called Raja Yoga by Yogi Rama Chiraka, who, by the way, was never a yogi.
It was just some English mystic who wrote this book and lied about being a yogi.
But it's a fascinating story.
But the book, you know, that was the first time I'd ever read the idea that you're an observer observing yourself, that you're an observer observing That you aren't necessarily the you that can be observed.
It's not you.
You're the observer state, the mindfulness, the watcher.
That's the first time I'd come upon the idea of what's called the Atman, the thing that observes yourself.
You know, someone will say, I'm really mad right now.
The moment you say, I'm mad, you're creating a distinction between the thing that's observing that you're mad and the thing that's mad.
So that observer, that watcher, that's the thing that, that mindfulness is what, you know, throughout My whole life I try to, you know, go into that place of observing myself rather than being the thing.
And it's a game that you can play and it really is quite helpful with a variety of problems, especially if you get really angry.
If you get really angry and you can stop yourself and just watch.
And there's tools you can use.
In that book I remember it said, as you walk around, start thinking he is walking.
That was like one of the tools.
Like it's in a book and you're a character in a book.
So when you're going around, you're like, you know, right now he's doing a podcast.
Right now he's talking.
And so these are activities designed to create this like the watcher, the state of presence of watching.
So that started it.
That led me to like, you know, and then I found out about, you know, I think I read the electric Kool-Aid acid test, you know, about fucking Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters blasting themselves on acid and going to the World's Fair in a bus.
Yeah, there's definitely a Duncan 2 that happened, I'd say.
And then that Duncan 2 changed too, man.
Because as you get older, the best thing that can happen to you is you get knocked off track.
That's the best thing that can happen to you in general.
Because generally the track you're on has been set for you by people who never got off their track.
You end up the child of someone who decided to have you in their 20s, 21, 22. They're not going to know a lot of stuff.
They're not going to understand the universe that much unless they came from a really good family of like, Artists or intelligent people, chances are they're scared, hungry, desperate, angry.
They don't want to be in the relationship anymore.
They don't want to be monogamous anymore.
The idea of non-monogamy to them might just seem insane.
Who the fuck knows?
But you're born into that planet.
That's the atmosphere you're born into.
That's what you're breathing when you're first born.
And that can set you on a weird path.
And that's a very sad path that you can get on.
And so, hopefully, if you're lucky, you'll come across somebody who knocks you off that fucking path.
You know, I remember the guy who hooked me up with acid.
I remember sitting in the theater of my school, because I was a drama nerd, and I was sitting in the theater of my school next to this guy.
Somehow, if you don't know this, LSD gets put on sheets which look like blotter paper.
And sometimes they have designs, sometimes they don't.
But the name...
It usually is a reference to the design on the sheet.
Purple Jesus, White Blotter, Lips.
There's a million different names for the different types of acid.
So this is just white.
Who knows what it was?
But it was really good.
And I can remember, I took it.
And you have to, you know, it takes 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes longer for it to kick in.
I still remember I was sitting in my friend's trailer, in a trailer park in North Carolina, sitting in an empty bathtub, like an empty jacuzzi tub that was in this trailer, and I'm sitting there, and they're watching Star Wars, and I'm sitting in this bathtub.
And all of a sudden, the greatest feeling just started going through my legs and up into my body.
And it was a fucking sword fight.
It was a lightsaber fight.
And I'm listening to that.
But all of a sudden now, the sound's echoey.
Like someone's turned an echo up on it.
So it's like...
It's kind of bouncing around.
It's beautiful and I feel so fucking good.
I started laughing.
It seemed so funny.
Then I went outside and lay in the grass.
I'm staring at the sky.
Everything's beautiful.
Trails.
You put your hand in front of your face and it's just this rainbow of hands drifting in front of your face.
Everything's breathing.
Then my friends come running out because they knew this was the first time I was tripping.
And they all start jumping over me.
They're like jumping over me as I'm laying.
And they're laughing and we're all fucking laughing and it's just perfect.
And I'm looking at the ceiling and it's fucking...
Hieroglyphics or some kind of like ancient writing you know I don't even think I knew what Sanskrit was at the time but I'd probably be like oh I'm seeing Sanskrit some kind of runes or glyphs all over my friend's car that's just kind of breathing and warping and it's just beautiful so yeah that was the that was the first time and and once you've had that experience how do you go back to a world a normal kind of world if First time I ever did acid.
This is what made me think of a theory that every time you die, you don't know that you died, but then you left this world and everyone else in this other parallel world, they think you died.
So we took Acid, and the opening band was on, which is some Asian band that just screamed the whole time, and it was like, you know, it's kind of like...
And then, this is even better, and I swear to God, you could ask her, I'm not going to say who she is on here, but we started fucking while I was driving in the rainstorm on acid for my first time.
The horrible idea, especially horrible to bring it up to anybody who's had poor fortune in this life, is to somehow or another connect it with past lives.
Have you ever heard someone say that?
Like, oh, he must have been a real fuckhead in his past life.
I know when shit goes wrong in my life, I know why it went wrong.
I don't have to go back to when I was a friar in the 1800s and fisted a fucking nun.
I know that if shit's going wrong right now, generally it's like, because I'm fucking up now.
And people can get lost.
People can start blaming their karma or where they're at right now on past lives, and it puts them in this place of stupid hopelessness, and they don't do the things they need to do right now to get to a better place.
Yeah, find the life-sucking situation that you're afraid to kill.
And the reason I say vampire is because vampires only go where they're invited.
And generally, the situation that you're in, you invited it in.
You invited this thing into your life, and now it's sucking your life energy and your blood and your happiness away.
A lot of times, you'll try to believe, you'll try to convince yourself that this thing is not a vampire.
But in your heart, you know you're a servant to a fucking bloodsucker.
You're a Renfeld.
This thing is like sucking your life essence away.
Sometimes it's doing it with a trade.
Quite often they'll be a bad trade.
You'll be, you know, whatever the situation you're in, you'll feel like you're in the situation, you know, it's worth it, it's kind of bad, but it's totally worth it.
This happens with jobs quite often, you know, where you're like, well, you know, but it's good enough.
That's the vampire.
You gotta take a fucking steak.
And drive it into its heart.
How do you kill a vampire?
Two ways.
Direct action.
You don't kill a vampire by, like, making up with a vampire.
You don't kill a vampire by, like, having a sit-down talk with a vampire.
You're not gonna be able to, like, you know, make friends with a vampire.
There's two ways to kill a vampire.
One, you fucking, you know, put a stake in its heart.
The other one is light.
Sunlight.
Truth!
Light!
It's the greatest metaphor of all time.
You shine the light of truth onto the situation, fearlessly analyze it, and then you'll destroy it.
He drops his bow and God says to him, rise to the fight.
Fight.
You're a warrior.
This is what you're here for.
Fight.
It's better to die.
It's better to die in a righteous battle than go skulking off into the fucking woods and be a beggar.
It's better to fucking do what you do when you're a warrior.
You gotta fucking do it, man.
It fucking sucks.
When you're drunk and you want to throw up and you try to not make yourself throw up, just throw up.
You'll feel better.
You'll feel better in the end.
When you're puking, it's gonna suck because you're helpless and you can't breathe.
go through it man fucking jab a fucking knife into the foot not literally of course but yeah you gotta act and you gotta make the big fucking decisions sometimes and it's scary if it wasn't scary it wouldn't be worth anything yeah for some people it's almost like they don't know how to start They know that there's action they need to take in their life, but they're paralyzed trying to think about it, trying to figure out how to start.
Because it's scary and it seems like there's so many things that people will, like, ideas people will create that will keep you trapped in whatever prison you're in.
It's very similar to...
What you're talking about in the UFC, with these fucking fighters, this is a visual representation of what anyone can do in their life.
Not all of us are going to, obviously, be world-class fighters in a ring in front of the entire planet and fucking knock someone out.
But you have, in your life right now, if you haven't already done this, you have the chance to be heroic.
You have the ability right now to make a heroic act that could kill you.
That's the thing.
These actions, it's not always guaranteed that because you do the right thing, you're going to end up in a great place.
You might end up fucked.
You might end up temporarily homeless, or you might end up temporarily jobless.
If there wasn't risk associated with it, you would have already done it.
That's the point.
If there wasn't risk associated with it, it wouldn't be worth anything.
If Mount fucking...
You know, if the Himalayas were, you know, a little grass-covered hill in a park, nobody would take pictures of them at the top putting a flag into it.
Kill the vampire in your life is a brilliant speech, dude.
You're dead right.
I stopped you because I'm like, not everybody has a bad person in your life, but I didn't know that that's what you mean.
You're absolutely dead right.
I always say that the energy vampires that you have in your life are really your number one enemy.
They keep you from enjoying good times.
Everybody knows that one person where you settle down and you're like, Finally I can fucking relax and you turn on the television and then someone for whatever fucking reason will decide that they have to talk to you now and they want to get angry at you now.
It could be a guy or a girl, whoever the fuck it is.
It's one person that wants to, they want to have power over you somehow or another and they want to stop you from doing what you want to do.
There are people that have issues in relationships because one of the people in the relationship has some sort of a transparent issue with the other person.
And what they try to do is they try to control that person from doing things that they want to do.
Anytime the guy wants to go play basketball or something like that.
They come up with a reason why now is the time I would really like you to take me shopping or now is the time.
It's almost like they want to see if they can drag you away from the thing that you like to do, thus proving that they're the most important thing in your life.
This is how a girl will behave if you don't keep the pimp hands strong.
And that's a fact.
That's a fact.
The only reason why girls get away with stuff like that is because guys let them get away with it.
Just like, you know, the real issue with guys being douchebags to girls, of course, is the physical violence issue.
It's not fair.
It's not fair if you're, you know, if you're fucking two chicks getting in a fight with each other, you know, two lesbians, and you're basically the same size, you know, hey, you know, I don't want you to fight, but...
I don't know why you're fighting, but hopefully you got a good reason.
But it's not a mugging.
It's not a man beating up a woman.
So physical fights are completely out of the question.
We certainly have to protect people from that kind of violence.
That's one of the ways that we know there's some sort of a weird disconnect between what we're capable of and the way we currently behave as a human race.
The fact that it's even possible that we have a real issue with men beating the fuck out of women.
Well, no, man, because, you know, what's confusing is guys can be, like, super loving after they do it because they feel terrible, and then they're, like, really, really, really affectionate.
Yeah, they're really affectionate.
Some of them aren't even that, you know, but with a lot of people, they're the ones that, like, get drunk and blame it on getting drunk, and that's why they're abusing each other.
You know, like, the way, like, I read this great autobiography of Timothy Leary, and they were talking about, I can't remember the name of the famous house that he lived at, but where they were all tripping out and, like, constantly taking LSD. They would do this.
But what they would do is they would have this weird thing.
Because what they were trying to do is they were trying to dissolve the reality.
They were trying to dissolve...
All the fucking ego constructs, of which one of them is monogamy.
Monogamy is an ego construct where you want to be the only person who is fucking the person that you're with, and they want you to be the only person to be fucking them.
This is like a basic way that most people enter into relationships.
So what these guys would do is they would have married couples, and what they would do is randomly Two people would be picked, a man and a woman, to go into this bowling alley that they had, and they would stay there for like three days straight and just take acid the whole time.
Well, that was McKenna's idea, was that an orgiastic mushroom cultures that existed in his, you know, I really think that's kind of, a lot of it was his imagination of what could have been possible.
Because it doesn't seem like that you really explain exactly what these people were doing, you know, 10,000 years ago in Choctaw, Hyuk, and all these different places.
But he had this idea that they developed this sort of an orgiastic mushroom style of living.
And then people would get together and they would just come.
So they would raise each other's kids.
They would all be loving each other and all taking care of each other's kids.
And I'm like, wow, that's kind of trippy.
It makes me think.
Could you live in a world like that?
We all are just automatically possessive of our loved ones, our sexual partners, your wives and boyfriends and husbands.
Somehow from your mind is removed all the negative or weird or strange connotations about sex.
Now sex is just a physical experience of oneness with another person.
So there's no – nothing from the zeitgeist has been put in your head.
Now imagine eating mushrooms and all of a sudden being in the experience of having sex with a group of people with zero sexual inhibitions, with zero guilt.
Just pure hedonistic pleasure as you sort of merge.
This I completely agree with in the terms of like a utopian society.
But the way our world runs, it's like my thoughts on it have always been, and my advice has always been, that when you find someone who you really enjoy hanging out with, hang out with them.
And whatever...
If you get to a point where you really trust them and you're really honest with each other and you're really enjoying each other, find out what bothers that person.
What is it?
Is there a genetic thing that you have maybe that I don't have?
What is it?
Yeah, I don't like me.
And if you can do that, if you can find someone you really sync up with and you actually enhance each other, Then the relationships are fucking beautiful.
The real problem is most people, they're not even into exploring their own consciousness.
They're not into exploring the origin of their own thoughts.
They're not really into self-examination.
They're not really into a lot of different things that lead to sometimes problematic conversations that you have.
Especially when they have a commodity and the commodity is that they're an attractive woman.
And you're in some sort of a weird situation where there's a master over you.
The problem is that the drug of sex, it's really exciting and thrilling to get to the I love you part as quick as possible so the sex can get really intense.
Oh yeah, and that first awesome time when you're just getting into a relationship where the person says, I think I'm falling in love with you and you've been feeling that.
Have you ever seen that awful, what I consider to be the most grotesque experiment of all time where the fucking, they took a monkey, a little baby monkey, and they gave him a wire.
Some people, but a lot of people are in that relationship where they're clinging to something that's not even real and they've tricked themselves into thinking that...
The real issue is the people that are raising these people.
The real issue is how everyone starts out neutral with whatever blend of personality.
I bet almost every kid, unless they have some serious neurological difficulties, almost every kid could be rendered a positive human being by the right people.
They're surrounded by the right people.
What we're doing is by putting the most important thing for the resources of the human race, the youthful people developing into contributing members of society who can Actually add to the culture, add to the experience, add to the process.
And we're putting the development of our most valuable resource in the hands of everyone and anyone, including retards, morons, assholes, douchebags, fuckheads, everyone in between.
There's a bunch of crazy motherfuckers shitting out kids every day, and you can't say anything about it because then you're Hitler.
This overpopulation by monkeys isn't working either.
Well, that's why you got to be a bit of a – I mean, if you start waking up to – Yeah, we got to wake all these people up and figure out a way to reevaluate – I mean, not reevaluate, but reset people's minds, to reset people's – whatever it is that your operating system is – wherever it's failing.
But it also makes me think, I wonder if it's just that the mechanism for retrieving really good, interesting, creative ideas, that the mechanism for thinking, you have to have all your resources, all your facilitating resources, so the ego has to be fucking completely quiet.
And if the ego is not completely quiet, the ego is like, I'm going to get some fucking new clothes so I can look slick.
And I'm thinking about getting a nose ring.
Nose rings are pretty hot.
Chicks are really into that.
I wonder if my hair would be cooler if it was blonde.
And you start really tweaking.
Your ego starts wigging out on your...
Maybe I should get myself a new Cadillac.
Chicks dig that shit.
And you start, you know, fucking, I'm tired of being the VP at work.
I'm going to step it up this year.
And I'm going to demand the fucking, you know, you start getting crazy, ego-y.
And it like, it cuts out all the noise.
I mean, it makes, it creates too much noise.
And the creative mind, the zen mind, the humble mind, there's not enough resources.
So this is a, you know, you use this tool.
And this tool is to say, oh, I'll just pretend they're not even my thoughts.
I'm just tuning them into the universe.
I'm so humble.
So what you're doing is, with this philosophy, like putting it through this filter, you've just shut your fucking nasty, stupid ego up.
Whatever fucking vehicle you need to use to get to the point where the thing's turned off, use it.
If you need to conceptualize it by thinking you're connecting with some kind of super intelligent consciousness that just wants the planet to be happier because it doesn't want the planet to die and it's giving its own voice to as many people as allow it to.
And so when you get in a fucking bus to get to point A, B, or C, it's not the bus, it's the point that you're getting to.
Use the vehicle.
Use whatever mechanism you have to use to dissolve your ego to the point where you're not going to turn into a fucking dick.
Because the moment you start claiming ownership over whatever it is, man, I think the most obvious version of it is super attractive people who act like they deserve it, who act like they've done something for it.
It's so unfortunate because of all the shit you could talk about, like, when a really hot chick shits on a girl for not being so pretty, like, wow, that's like, damn.
Doug was high on the job every goddamn day he worked there.
It was a natural progression for me to stay high on the job doing Fear Factor as well.
Everybody was high when they were working.
That's how you got through work.
When you started working there, I remember you went through this little struggle where you wanted to be a comic, but they didn't take you seriously while you're still working there.
Don't be convinced that you have anything figured out, whether it's the secret or Buddhism or whatever the fuck it is.
Don't be convinced, man.
Don't be convinced.
This world might be entirely made up of imagination.
It might be.
It might be entirely made up of imagination.
The more time moves forward, the more I wonder if there's a theory, and I believe that you were the first one to introduce me to this theory as well, the theory that your life, the world that you live in, is really something that your own mind has created.
And as you get older and your body starts to slowly deteriorate and progress towards death in your own particular universe, that's when the shit hits the fan and it all goes down.
And you've managed to manufacture this idea inside your mind that the life you experience is an actual real life, when what it really is, is just a series of events that have been tied together to prepare you for the next stage of existence.
And the more that you can let go of your attachments to this particular life and become the thing that is throughout the evolutionary cycle, then the less traumatic death will be.
Imagine there's a hell, and the only way that you could keep the people in hell was making sure that they didn't realize that at any second they could turn that hell into heaven.
You had to keep them oblivious to this idea.
You would realize that the thing you're talking about, the things that obscure the light, so to speak, of making people's lives great, it's like TV. It's the media.
Every time you turn the fucking TV on, it's showing you death and destruction.
When you turn on the radio, they're talking about wars and bombs.
Everywhere you go, look, it's darkness, darkness and darkness.
It's like people are really trying to keep our consciousness focused on the dark instead of on the light.
But if there was a global movement to try to get people's minds to shift from the obsession with death and all the forms of negativity that so many people are focused on and to turn their minds towards the beauty And towards friendship and towards healthy sex and towards embracing each other, then really this entire planet could transform into some version of heaven, I think.
I don't know where the name came from, but I do understand this idea of, like, rebirth, or the idea of, like, once you get knocked off track, why not go really deep and fucking just rename yourself altogether?
Every time you have an issue, he's going to know a little bit more of how to fix your issue.
And he's going to give you some awesome advice.
And you're going to start really getting freaked out as to how this fake Duncan Trussell really knows how to manage the real Duncan Trussell's life.
And then you're eventually just going to We live under the assumption that this fake Twitter account, Charles Duncan Trussell, is actually the universe giving you advice through Twitter.
Because I was just complaining because they don't fly the comics out and it's just generally a bum deal.
And I'm just saying this because pretty much right after I... From that video, I got invited to this awesome festival that's happening in Austin called the Moon Tower Comedy Festival.
And that's happening in April, and they just are doing the press releases today, and I just think it's so fucking cool that they're showing that festivals can pay performers, pay airfare, and put them up, which isn't that insane an idea.
I'm sure South by Southwest does charity, but when you ask artists to perform for free at your festival that's sponsored by 16 million different corporations, it's a bit of a charity.
The strongest memory of South by Southwest 2010 was a rooftop party when the South by Southwest partygoers spontaneously raised $300 towards the purchase of a wheelchair for the nephew of one attendee.
The young man was paralyzed temporarily and the family could not afford a wheelchair.
No, I think some of the bigger names get paid, but mostly after I did these videos, mostly what I heard from people is that the idea, here's the concept, to play South by Southwest advocate, the idea behind it is Hey man, it's just we're all having fun out here.
It's a party.
It's a chance to hang out with a bunch of other comics and have a good time.
We don't invite a lot of comics out, so it's an honor to get invited out, and you're going to get a chance to perform.
We'll put you up in someone's guest bedroom, but we can't pay you, and we can't pay for your airfare, and if you want to stay in a hotel, you're going to have to pay for your own hotel.
Now, I think that that, coming from a festival that really was a charity, like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, or something that was solely raising money for charity, or even a startup festival.
What about just a startup festival that seems really cool and isn't making any money?
All that totally makes sense to me.
It'd be really cool.
But I think when it's coming from a festival the size of South by Southwest, which is a I read that 30,000 people come through there a year and they're asking performers to come out for free and to pay for their own ticket.
I think there's something in that that's pretty fucked up.
It's a whole town, you know, Montreal, that literally has been privy to these festivals coming in every year.
So they have this really high palette for comedy.
It's a fucking great place to do comedy.
We were supposed to go back in March, but unfortunately, the UFC had to move its March date.
They had to move the Montreal date because no champions were available, and they were going to put together a big card for up there, so they postponed it.
I was like, damn!
I was really looking forward to going back to Montreal.
Montreal, I don't care about, like, I don't want to come across, like, I'm like, you gotta fucking, you gotta pay up if you want me to, it's not that at all, it's like.
But if you look at what they're doing, even if you think that they should be paying more, like Stanhope does, it's fucking infinitely better than nothing.
And also, the other thing that the guy said to me during these emails, and the guy who books it is a super nice guy.
I started feeling guilty because he's a really nice guy, a very friendly guy, but he couldn't acknowledge the one point that I was making, which is that if you're charging tickets, For people to come see performers, you have to pay the performers something.
It's just basic logic.
That's all.
Maybe you don't have enough to pay for everything.
Maybe the performers, you can only get them in a hotel and get them out there.
Because if you're making them pay for everything, then they're subsidizing your festival.
In my opinion, if you're looking at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, or any of these huge things, people are usually going because it's what they love and it's a collection.
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And to me, I would go just because it would be an awesome party.
These concerts like South by Southwest, isn't this where people go to go, hey, we're looking for people for the next year's sitcoms and stuff like that?
Well, it just drives so much fucking business to the town, too.
I mean, I'm looking at an article about nine ways to profit from South by Southwest, even if you weren't there.
And they're talking about figuring out how to profit from this gathering of people.
Isn't that amazing?
That's like, when you look at human beings as some sort of a life form, and you look at just what this article says, nine ways to profit from South by Southwest, even if you weren't there.
The idea that you could be extracting resources from some spot you're not in.
I believe it's on True TV, one of those reality TV networks.
Anyway, these people did an investigative journalism thing where they went into the woods up there, very dense woods up there, and they found these crazy campsites.
These guys had set up with this guy who was the Saint of Narcos.
The consciousness of this country, this world, this global entity, this human race, the consciousness of this human race is altering right in front of our eyes with the internet.
And the internet and psychedelic experiences together Shit has changed more in this hundred years than at any time ever.
Just the idea of how people feel about life on Earth.
All this stuff, I just want you guys to all know that I am...
100% humbled, blown away, flattered.
I can't use enough positive words to describe how awesome it is that you guys, first of all, just like the show, but then that you make like these little videos and little...
I mean, there's so many cool videos of rants of just you and I. Just you and I just going off about stuff.
When that rant we had that landed on Alex Jones, where I was talking about Alex Jones getting arrested, and that landed on his website, that was intense, man.
I was like, fuck, we're going to end up in a fucking FEMA camp.
We communicate to those people and they're not going to do what these assholes are telling them to do.
That's ultimately a real problem with civil unrest in this country.
The fucking genies out of the bottle, the cops, the firemen, everybody knows that this is a fucking mess.
Everybody knows that these people are just doing what you're supposed to do when you're an American.
They're protesting some gross injustices and they don't know exactly how to do it.
And the way I've described them is that there's a fucking...
There's a problem, and they're white blood cells, and they're surrounding this problem, and they don't know how to conquer it, and they don't know what to do, but the fact that so many people have gravitated towards one area, if you were looking at any other organism and this sort of a situation was happening, you're like, well, clearly there's some sort of a disease, there's an illness, there's a sickness, there's an issue that's being addressed.
Something very, very important is being addressed.
Well, yeah, I knew that we'd have no problem getting, man, there is nothing fun, like, the power of fucking young things, they're so powerful that they can wake you up at four in the mornings, you know, squeaking, and you go in there and they will do jailbreaks where they would, like, get out and suddenly the house is just flooded with chihuahua puppies that you're trying to, like, bring back in.
Thanks to all the positive Twitter messages and all the cool shit.
You know, the cool people outnumber the cunts by a staggering amount.
There's so many more cool people out there that I'm connecting with because of Twitter, because of Facebook, because of this podcast, because of the internet.
There's so many more cool people out there than anybody imagines.
The Death Squad is free on iTunes, and it's the only place to get the Ice House Chronicles, which is a podcast that we do live from the Ice House.
Seriously, it is, to me, the coolest fucking thing that we do.
I love it.
It's so fun.
We have a great time every week.
The last week we had Dane Cook on, Bert Kreischer, Ari Shafir, me, Kevin Christie, Brody Stevens, Nick Yusuf.
It's fucking awesome.
I mean, you know what it is?
We have a room at the Ice House, and so we have this stand-up show that's totally sold out, packed, little, tiny, intimate, awesome room, and then the comics are rotating and going on stage from the podcast, and it's amazing.
It's the most fun and the closest you can get to, like, Hanging with a bunch of best friends in the green room before we go up there and fuck shit up.
It's like the greatest podcast of all time.
I love the Ice House Chronicles.
The only way to get it, though, is you've got to subscribe to Death Squad.
So go to iTunes, subscribe to Death Squad, and get it.
It's all free, of course.
This podcast will always be free.
Death Squad will always be free.
We will not charge you.
Duncan Trussell, though, he'll charge you a couple bucks.
I am talking with my people about doing the same thing that Louis C.K. did.
I'm totally going to steal his idea and try to put out my next special just online like that.
It just seems to make sense.
Now that everybody has iTunes, so many people have Apple TV, so many people have Netflix, I get more messages about my streaming special from 2005 on Netflix.
I get more email about that particular special than anything I've ever done ever.
Because I think more people are seeing it through Netflix.
I don't know if they can get the last one, the Talking Monkeys in Space, but the Netflix one, they made.
They produced it.
So every day I get tweets about that, man.
That's the future.
The future is...
Louis C.K. showed us the way.
So I'm going to totally do what he did and release it that way.