Joe Rogan and Adam Kokesh dissect government overreach, from Rogan’s Fleshlight/Alienware sponsorship split to police arrests for harmless acts like hugging. Kokesh, a Fallujah veteran turned libertarian, critiques statism after witnessing military exploitation and systemic corruption, including his punishment for returning an Iraqi gift. They debate psychedelics—Kokesh’s DMT experiences reveal "pure human will," while Rogan questions if altered states just expose preexisting truths—and explore anarcho-capitalist solutions like voluntary funding for roads and law enforcement. Skeptical of systemic change, Rogan leans on individual responsibility, but both agree tech-driven transparency could replace coercive governance, sparking a libertarian movement they call "mind melt." [Automatically generated summary]
It is with great sadness that I tell you that this Joe Rogan Experience is not brought to you by the fleshlight.
We've come to the end of our long road with the fleshlight and they've been they were the first sponsor ever on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and we appreciate the fuck out of that.
They took a chance when we were on a laptop with snowflakes in the background and we did two hard years together and we hope two really hard years.
We hope that we sold you a lot of fake pussies.
That's what we sincerely hope.
We hope that our relationship was profitable and we just want to say that you guys are cool as fuck and we enjoyed working with you and best of luck in all you do with your rubber pussies in the future.
If you have a solid product and it was an honor to represent you in the field of battle.
We only are doing this because I think it's a good idea to support companies who support MMA.
And Alienware stepped up and them and Dell, that's a big deal.
When a company like Alienware starts sponsoring fighters, I mean, when I see that Alien logo on fighter shorts, that's a big deal to me.
It's like that's a big fucking company.
Like an Anderson Silva wore Burger King.
I don't eat Burger King, but if I was going to eat Burger King, I would eat Burger King because they sponsored Anderson Silva.
Not that Anderson needs it as much as MMA gets a lot of these fighters, what they get, how they get money for training and to pay for.
It's not just their salaries from fighting.
It's from their sponsors.
So if you see young guys and they're fighting, you know, for $10,000 or whatever it is, you don't get paid a lot of money when nobody knows who you are.
You get paid a lot of money when you can sell tickets.
But what keeps these young guys going is, especially companies like Alienware, like really high-profile companies, when they start putting their logos on your shorts, that means that there's a big company that's invested.
There's a big company that's stepping up.
I think that should be rewarded.
And that's why we decided to do this.
And we're working with Sucker Punch Entertainment and Alienware MMA.
And they hooked us up with some laptops.
And we're trying to support a company that supports MMA.
And by the way, these are not cheap laptops.
They're fucking expensive.
But they kick some serious ass.
If you want to play games on laptops, these things are the shit.
And people are like, well, you can make it yourself for cheaper.
Yeah, Boss Rutan sits in your mouth kind of crazy, like this big giant mouthpiece.
But the other one, the elevation mask, it's got little hoses on it and shit.
It's very controversial, by the way.
Scientifically, not really supported.
It's not really supported that that improves your oxygen.
And it certainly doesn't do training at altitude does.
What training at altitude does is you live in a place and you stay overnight and sleep in a place where there's a very high altitude, very low oxygen, your body naturally overproduces red blood cells to compensate for the lack of oxygen.
That doesn't mean that when you restrict your oxygen, your body makes more red blood cells.
It just means it's harder to breathe.
I mean, it's kind of a better workout, but it's also kind of not a better workout because you're not able to work out as hard because you can't breathe as hard.
So unless you're in absolutely perfect shape, the benefit of it is probably negligible.
I don't know what the fuck this has to do with anything we're talking about, but that's why I wouldn't work out with a ball gag.
If you do it right, you've got to get really uncomfortable, man.
If you do it right, you've got to feel like shit.
My favorite way to feel like shit is with kettlebells.
It feels like shit, and then I feel awesome afterwards.
That and Hindu squats, a lot of you have been saying, you've been sending me tweets about that you started doing the Hindu squats and what a big difference it makes.
It's fucking incredible.
It's one of the best exercises you can do.
You don't need a gym.
Hindu squats, I do 200 of them before I do any workout.
And I feel like stopping.
I feel like I'm done.
Just 200 squats with no weight.
You would think there's no way that's going to be easy.
That's so easy.
It's not.
It's fucking hard.
And it gets hard at around like 60.
Like around 60, you're like shit.
And then you're into 70.
And then you hit 100 and you're like, another 100 of these bitches.
It's fucking great to do.
And it's not like a high weight exercise.
It develops your leg strength without really putting yourself in like precarious positions with weights on your back.
So it's a good way to start a base of training as well.
Instead of like if you're not really a guy who works out at all and you're thinking, man, I want to get in shape, don't go crazy and just immediately start doing squats.
Our friend Kevin Pereira was in here yesterday and is all fucked up because of that very reason because he didn't work out and then all of a sudden he was doing crazy fucking power lifts three times a day.
Anyway, point is, go to onit.com.
This is our only sponsor.
We only have one sponsor now.
Onit is the spot.
We only have one sponsor and you still managed to have a 15 fucking minute commercial.
Go to onit.com, use the code name Rogan, and save yourself 10% off any of the supplements.
The kettlebells have been selling like crazy, and the positive results that I'm getting from people who are really enjoying the workouts on Twitter that are coming like crazy too.
I thank you very much.
I don't get behind anything unless I 100% believe in it.
Even the fleshlight.
If you want a beat off, that's better.
But with onit.com, everything we sell, especially the supplements, the first 30 pills, there is a 100% money-back guarantee.
You don't have to return anything.
Just say, this shit is not for me.
And you get your money back.
We're that confident that, one, we're selling you something that you're going to enjoy and it's going to help you.
And two, I don't want anybody to feel ripped off, period.
I'm way more concerned about having people feel like this is an even transaction and this is a good deal for them than I am about making money.
And it was kind of a way of, you know, sticking it to the man to say, yeah, like, down with your rules.
We're for drugs and prostitution.
And it was that sort of macho flash libertarianism.
And my story is really of the deepening of my understanding of the philosophy of this because I went to Iraq in the middle of all this.
I was in Fallujah in 2004.
I was a reservist while I was going to college and I volunteered for what I called my semester abroad.
And I did seven months in Fallujah with the civil affairs team.
I was in combat for most of that time.
And it was a really intense experience.
And coming home and watching the second battle of Fallujah play out on the front page of the New York Times, while I knew that the only reason we saw so many Marines dying was because of the political manipulations of what was happening in the city over the summer that I was there.
And I was there February, September 2004.
And coming back and realizing that people were dying for political bullshit was a significant turning point for me in wanting to really figure out what was behind this.
And this is the thing I think that sets libertarians apart and that I think a lot of people in my audience appreciate about your perspective is that you ask why.
And when you don't have good answers, you reject the bullshit and the propaganda and you see past it.
And your understanding of foreign policy from that perspective is very appreciated by a lot of veterans who have gone through a similar experience that I have.
So I got back and I was active with Iraq Veterans Against the War.
I actually moved to D.C. to get a master's in political management.
I should say, actually, I got in trouble for bringing a pistol back from Iraq.
And it was a really nice one.
It was engraved as a gift from Saddam Hussein.
It had little gold-plated medallions on the pistol grip.
Well, it's a long story, but I had it on campus in my car.
It got stolen out of my car.
And instead of letting it go, I chased the guy down.
And there was a campus security guy there.
And that's how I got snagged for having it on campus.
And it got confiscated.
And I tried to go back to Iraq.
And this is the thing that really, the flip that they switch in your brain when you go through boot camp these days.
And you know, they've heavily developed the psychological process, the conditioning that you go through to make sure that you will obey orders and you will pull the trigger.
And the reason I wanted to go back to Iraq was because I didn't get a purple heart the first time.
Like I hadn't, I hadn't bled enough.
And it really is a sick thing.
And this is what makes the military mentality distinct.
There is nothing more glorious than dying for your country.
And even Patton said, you know, no, it's making the other poor bastard die for his.
But in order, you know, it's part of the conditioning, especially in the Marines, where there's that certain machismo, that first to fight attitude.
And, you know, there's a noble intent behind it.
I wanted to have my life in the line for my country, but really for the people of America, you know, and that was why I enlisted in the first place.
It's not just that, because the lesson to be learned here is that it's everybody, everybody who waves the American flag, the nationalism that's imbued in all of us.
It's the same thing to a lesser degree.
But it's still a perversion of humanity.
It's still a perversion of the way human beings are designed to get along.
And it's not about the arbitrary lines set up by government around this, or it's the American heritage, the American tradition of moving towards greater freedom.
And the step that that represented, you know, the whole Revolutionary War is a step forward in the human understanding of liberty.
But, you know, it's an idea that's global.
It's essential to the human nature.
And now we see that America, as defined by any specific thing other than that, is, let's be honest, kind of fucking disgusting.
America is the best fucking music that's ever been created.
America is the best movies that's ever been created.
The most creativity, the most design, the most all that shit.
I mean, and I love my friends in Europe.
I love the Japanese.
I'm not saying that I did any of this.
I'm not taking any credit for this.
I'm a fucking idiot.
I've never invented shit in my life.
But if I look at it objectively, even if I lived in Spain, I would tell you this.
I'd be like, look at this freak motherfucker country that in 200 years exploded onto the map, covered the globe with weapons, controlled the whole thing, locked it all down, started wars like, whoa, what a crazy little country you guys got.
Well, you know, you said it in, you know, I listened to your podcast with Giorgio Sucolos, and you said, you know, with aliens, like everybody's looking for a daddy, and it's this, you know, manifestation of that psychological desire to be taken care of.
And what's worse is with government, for a lot of people, you said it was aliens, and it was God and religion, and I don't know what else.
You said a couple other things, but you didn't say it was government, you know, and that's the big one.
And that's the global paradigm.
That's like the phase of evolution that we're at in humanity that we're seeing the institutionalizational collapse of.
This is all centered around the scam of the central banks, of the fiat currency, because that's how they really rip us off.
Everything else is about control, but that's the real incentive.
Well, here's why they don't teach economics in high school, though.
I mean, because the basic concepts that anybody can understand would have you very easily come to the conclusion with a very sound basis of rationale and understanding of economic framework to get to the point where you can know, really, really know, we're getting fucked.
That like all of the exponential increases in productivity that should lead to an increase in quality of life for everybody, it's still going up.
And we still see it, you know, the fact that we have smartphones and computers and all this shit, you know, and that the average American is so much better off.
That's still an exponential growth.
But what it would really be if you didn't have everybody who's on the teat of government sucking all this wealth away would have us, you know, in flying cars by now.
I mean, I know that sounds crazy, but you see the wealth that's being sucked away and what the implication is of that.
We are getting fucked.
And what's worse is that we're institutionalizing a system that is not just a system that robs from us, but that kills people.
That's the police state, the military-industrial complex, the spasms of statism.
but what government fundamentally is, is the institutionalization of all of our desires to control and dominate and manipulate others by force.
It's based on putting fear into its citizens and being afraid of the other people in the world.
The other people are not us.
And, you know, until we figure out a way to treat everyone that we meet in this life as if it was you living another life, until the world can adopt and develop that attitude, we're always going to have cunts that are going to lead us against other cunts.
I mean, that's just the way it is.
We are a flawed, fucked up species, and somehow or another, we still have the echoes and remnants of bygone sword fights in our fucking DNA.
You know, that shit still rattles around inside our head, and at the highest levels of government, they're willing to just sacrifice lives for money at a drop of a hat.
They're not worried about it at all.
And they're going to go and clean up afterwards and make money on that as well.
I mean, it's a staggering business that's based on 100% horseshit.
The idea that no one went to jail after that whole weapons and mass destruction thing in Iraq, the fact that none of those cunts went to jail for lying about weapons of mass destruction being in Iraq, just that alone.
It just shows you, like, what the fuck did you do?
Like, how do you not go to jail for that?
If you can't go to jail for that, how are you trying to pretend that this is a just system?
You guys made some shit up about weapons of mass destruction purposely to get people to go to war, and then a million people are dead now.
Do you think that in the past they were able to get things off much easier?
So they have this sort of pattern of behavior and the way they do business as far as how we go to war, like the Gulf of Tonkin type shit, where they could get away with stuff like that in the past.
But today, this sort of the same group are basically in charge.
I mean, they've evolved somewhat.
But, I mean, there's photos of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.
You know, I mean, a long time ago, was it the Reagan administration?
You know, even when I'm talking about the worst fucking shit that government does, the most offensive shit, I, and I, I, you know, I cuss on my show, and I get shit for my audience sometimes.
And every time I use statist collectivist language, every time I say we to refer to myself as part of the evil federal government that commits these crimes, I am going to punish myself by putting a quarter in the real curse star.
As disgusting as that war money is for Halliburton, what it's really about is the bankster money.
It's about the money that goes through the financial system that flows faster for war.
But you know what?
Let me tell you my long view perspective here because I'm much more optimistic.
And when you understand government to be pathological behavior, whenever you say we need government for something, you're saying we can't solve this peacefully.
We need to somehow, as the majority, impose our will on the minority, or we need to take money from people by force because they're not charitable enough or they don't care about their own defense enough or whatever it is.
We can't do it peacefully.
We need force.
We need coercion.
And it really comes out of the monkey brain.
It comes out of that when we evolved in the state of nature, it was in our best interest that whoever was the biggest, whoever could pick up the biggest rock was in charge.
And you go along to get along, otherwise you don't eat tonight.
And we're evolving past that.
And as we develop greater technological dominance over our environment, as we are better able to process information, all of these things are leading to the evolution towards a stateless society.
We are evolving past this phase of statism.
And like you were saying about what they get away with in war, to answer your question, you know, they get away with less.
It's harder to come up with an excuse now.
I mean, look at, you know, and it's really sad to see that we're marching to war in Iran, but I've made the prediction for a while now that we'd see boots on the ground in Syria first because it's much better propaganda to have a humanitarian war where we can save a bunch of people from an evil dictator than, well, it's the clash of nations and we're trying to keep Iran from arming themselves.
And that propaganda is kind of wearing thin.
But it's scary now to see they might get away with that.
They might get a war in Iran.
And it's all absolutely, I mean, in the 21st century, with the historical perspective that we have, is war just not fucking embarrassing at this point?
Well, you know, one of the things that they have done recently with the Taliban, they've said that they're going to stop administering polio vaccines if they don't stop the drone strikes because the PTSD that they are causing in the population is worse than having fucking polio.
I mean, how sick is this?
But I got a quote here.
This is Anwar al-Alaki, the New Mexico-born man that was killed in Yemen by a drone strike ordered by Obama.
His 16-year-old son was also murdered the same way a week later.
You probably heard that story, Abdul Rahman al-Alaki.
And he was made out to be the great propagandist for al-Qaeda.
This is the quote from him.
Our position needs to be reiterated and needs to be very clear.
The fact that the U.S. has administered the death and homicide of over 1 million civilians in Iraq, the fact that the United States is supporting the deaths of killing of thousands of Palestinians does not justify the killing of one U.S. civilian in New York City or Washington, D.C. And the deaths of 6,000 civilians in New York and Washington, D.C. does not justify the death of one civilian in Afghanistan.
Well, my whole position is that we're not innocent.
The United States government, we, whatever's over there, we're not innocent.
It's that simple.
So if we're not innocent, we have to take some sort of responsibility, or they have to take some sort of responsibility for the repercussions.
If you're doing something that's fucked up and the people are dying, you've got to know that you've done something terrible and you need to make amends.
You need to fix this whole thing.
You can't just get out of there now.
You can't just get out of there and leave it behind.
And if I may, the next part of my story was coming back from Iraq getting in trouble with this, trying to go back to get a Purple Heart.
And when I got out of the Marines, I had been, you know, as a sergeant who spoke Arabic with civil affairs experience, pissed off because I was managing a barracks and mowing lawns for most of a year.
And I got out and I was disgruntled.
It was like the day after I got a medal for heroism under fire and all the other crap that I got cited for when I was in Fallujah that took three years to process, they busted me down from sergeant to corporal and I got out.
Well, an official gift from the regime or something like that.
But it was a cool historical piece.
I got plenty of guns now.
But this is an important thing about who is going to be on the front lines of this revolution right now that we're facing?
Who is going to help us evolve past this status paradigm?
Who is going to help us push past and see past the collapse of government?
Because it's not going to be the people that the system treats well.
And this whole thing is set up.
You have the propagandizing class.
You have the dependent class.
You have the enforcement class and the law enforcement and the military.
And you have people that are bought into the system at a whole variety of levels.
In a way, that's how they get away with it.
They make everybody think that they're benefiting from it.
And they have people, and it's like if capitalism, a true free market, a natural society where people have property rights is like a rough fabric, when you introduce the Federal Reserve and you have this thing that can create money out of thin air, it's like pulling it up and creating an unnatural spike in concentration of wealth and power.
And we have this illusion of capitalism, like we can own property and we can trade.
But it's this whole spike where everybody is kind of picked up along with it in this illusion of being able to print money that's worth something.
And that's how they manipulate the economy, and that's how people really get screwed.
But the first people that are going to be questioning the system aren't going to be the guy that was student body president or captain of the football squad or the cheerleading team.
It's going to be the miscreants and the punks and the misfits and the people that were, in a sense, challenging authority naturally because they had something in for it or they had something in their life.
And the thing is, right now, it's about being a victim of government.
How many people do you know that got arrested and when they got arrested, they turned political, or they started paying attention because then it hits home and they stopped trusting government.
And that's a really important thing.
And the rest of us have to stop turning a blind eye.
And I say the rest of us, again, maybe a bad collectivizing term, but the people that are asleep to this need to stop turning a blind eye and saying, well, I got mine.
I'm cool.
I got my paycheck because somebody else is getting fucked.
And the thing is that's so exciting is that enough people have been fucked now that it's coming to a critical mass, you know, where people are questioning the government.
People are waking up.
People are saying, we don't need this thing anymore.
We are standing up to the bully.
And that's what's so fun about what I do now in civil disobedience.
Speaking of which, did you get my invitation to the civil society?
No, the answer is you've got to go back in time to when their parents conceived them and then work with their parents to try to straighten out what their emotional bullshit and make them a shitty parent so that they can deliver a kid that's better functioning in society.
But when that kid is all fucked up, you've got to deal with them.
Somebody made a fucked up kid, let that fucked up kid get loose, and he's whipping a frisbee around near your two-year-old baby.
It's emotional abuse or physical abuse, but people aren't naturally violent.
The natural state is to want to cooperate with fellow human beings.
At least that's what we're evolving towards.
And so think about it.
Like right now, compared to the state of nature, 200,000 years ago, everybody had to work 16 hours a day hunting and gathering to survive.
And now the average American can work from when they're 22 to 65, eight hours a day with weekends and vacation time and support a whole family for their lifetime on that.
And if anything, it would be a lot less than that without the central banking system that we have today, without the systems of government exploitation robbing that exponential growth, what should be exponential growth in quality of life.
And it's still exponential, but not nearly as much as it should be.
And what we're coming to, like, how are you going to convince people that you need a welfare state when you can work for one year and save enough money to live at the quality of life that we enjoy today for the rest of your life?
And to me, that's what makes it such an exciting time to be alive.
And just look at how much less violence there is.
And this is a really beautiful thing.
You can look at government and be pissed off all you want.
And this is where I've come to now as a Zen libertarian, is being able to see this bigger picture.
And that the actual average amount of violence that an individual is subject to is at an all-time historic low for as long as we've been able to track it.
That's part of that evolution.
This is the natural development of life from single-celled organisms, from little molecules bouncing around in the primordial soup together.
The essence of life is cooperation, is pooling of resources, of coming together, of energy coming into harmony.
And that's what we're going through.
And we're seeing this process of two steps forward, one step backwards.
And we're in the middle of a big step backwards right now that really is centered around the institutionalization of the Federal Reserve and the modern systems of government going back about 100 years.
And within that time, you know, we've had steps forwards, gay rights movement, the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, not in how they were institutionalized in government, but what they represented for society were steps forward.
But we're coming to this major step forward now when we get past this entire paradigm of statism.
And it's a beautiful thing to see that as we're able to raise our children nonviolently, as we're able to be better parents, because we have better prosperity and better just the leisure time, the ability to do things that the cavemen couldn't do, and raise children that are emotionally well balanced and don't engage in this pathological behavior that is government.
I agree that it seems that if you, you know, you measure our time on earth in comparison to the Greeks or the Romans or anybody who lived in any sort of an ancient civilization, like, yeah, no one's ever had it as good as we have it.
As far as the less violence, the more health, the more pleasure, it's like the people being nicer to each other, people understanding the impact of being nice to each other, actually understanding what that's all about now.
That's never happened before, the way it's happening now.
Yeah, but if you look at the rest of the world, though, if you look at especially the impact on some of the things that are necessary in order to produce the amount of power that's necessary to run this crazy sort of peaceful, easy-going country that we think of as America, where you drive around, there's really not that much crime.
Drive around, there's really not that much violence.
Well, how are you driving around on gas?
Where's that gas coming from, dude?
That gas is coming from a place that's getting bombed from the sky with missiles.
Well, no, yes, but it represents, the framework from which you're coming from, this represents that status paradigm of, you know, how do we have an identity or how do we have a society when you're using government in a way that doesn't clearly define it?
And when you really break it down, the only clear way to define government is a group of people with an arbitrary, geographically based monopoly on the initiation of force.
That's what sets them apart.
Like, if I go and say, you know, put a gun to your head and say, give me your wallet, I can't, you know, that's wrong.
I mean, generally, police, you know, and what's sick is that we have to extricate.
We have to pull out these legitimate functions of government in order to get rid of it.
Like, it's really tricky with the police state, and it's an issue I'm really passionate about.
You know, one of the things that kind of put me on the map was the Jefferson Dance Party when I got picked up and body slammed by a police officer at the Jefferson Memorial for dancing in public.
You can't get it from the sound anyways, but Brian just vanished.
You know, police officers do serve a legitimate function.
The problem is that they've got a government monopoly on it.
You know, they provide for the public safety, but private security is obviously much better.
And when you have this monopoly power, they're not accountable to the people.
There's always that detachment.
And it's the idea of government.
You say, do we need government for society?
Government is antithetical to society.
If society is defined as how people come up with an identity and come together peacefully and cooperatively and engage in commerce and do productive things, then it's like, you know, how do you, it's like saying, how do you live healthy with a giant leech on your back?
You know, is that essential?
And it's like, no, no, no, you're not going to be able to do that.
No, so it's a bit of a story because it goes back like three or four years ago.
There was a group of 18 people that were just a bunch of libertarian activists that liked Thomas Jefferson.
And so they wanted to go dance because he was the dancing president.
I didn't find out about this until after the incident.
My Facebook wall got just covered with all these Jefferson quotes about how he liked to dance and bust out the fiddle at the White House and stuff like that.
But they went and danced at midnight on Thomas Jefferson's birthday, just as a little like flash mob thing, right?
And the security guards came and shoo them out of the memorial.
And one of them was dancing out and got arrested.
And they were like, what the fuck?
And so they tried to fight it in court.
And like three years later, the judge said, you know, like, if the judge had said on the grounds of it's improper usage or it's a safety threat or it's like, you know, there was a way that they could have legitimately said there's no dancing.
But it's kind of a ridiculous thing to say.
Anywhere that you're illegally allowed to be, you don't have control over your body or if you move in a certain way, like that's going to be illegal, you know?
So it's kind of absurd on its premise, like most of the things of government, when you really go down to the actual core premise of what it means to be, when you say there should be a law for this or it should be illegal for that.
But we decided to go back because the judge said it was not appropriately reverent enough.
Unless you live more than 50 miles away from the District of Columbia, you can spend the night So he comes up and he's threatening to arrest us without telling us that there's any law that we would be violating.
unidentified
That's illegal.
What are you being charged with?
You are too far away from the city to allow citation to reappear.
So maybe the urban law that we should have are the ones that are based on respecting each other instead of having a central authority deciding what even the standards of society are going to be.
Do you think that with the internet and what's happening now with the integration of society and technology, that we're sort of slowly but surely getting closer to each other even than is comfortable?
And it's going to get to a certain point in time where there's not going to be a whole lot of privacy in this world.
We have this idea that it's only for good until AI comes live.
When artificial intelligence actually becomes sentient.
You know, there's a lot of scientists, very intelligent people that have studied this shit their whole life.
That guy in that movie, the Singularity movie, was Kurtzwell's documentary?
What is it called?
Transcendent Man.
Transcendent Man.
There's a guy in England who's terrified of what he calls artillery, artificial intellects.
He's terrified of the possibility of them actually getting to a point technologically where they can think for themselves and shut things off and create new ones and create new artificial intelligence that's more powerful and with more potential than they have.
It is what the universe is, which is ever complex.
Just complexification on top of complexification keeps moving in that direction.
It doesn't stop.
You know, stars explode and they eventually become fucking human beings.
I mean, all of this is coming from this idea that things get more and more complex and more and more crazy.
But it might not necessarily be good for humans.
Technology might be terrible for humans.
We might just be the rats that build the raft.
We might just be the monkeys that start the computer life form.
They start the artificial ones and zero life form.
And we say it's not real, but it becomes real when you make it real.
If artificial intelligence actually becomes sentient, then it is real.
That's a real life form.
And we just don't think of it and respect it like we would an alien life form because we think of it as something that we have control over because we just shut the power off.
But yeah, if you give the computer program that you create the initiative to act on its own, and it's much more intelligent than you are, things might get crazy.
I don't think that's going to be good for all the dumb fucks that you're like the person with the rotary telephone saying, oh, those cell phones, they're crazy.
You know, I mean, if you talk to people that live in the mountains, they still stand by that shit.
Ah, you're fucking yourself up with all those cell phone signals, and you don't need to check your email every five minutes.
But, you know, we might be is just a step along the way.
I mean, we surely are, right?
I mean, we look at evolution.
We look at these new fossils they just discovered today where there was a, or it was just a news release today about some hominoid that was a distant relative of ours that was upright and walking six million years ago.
This is a pretty radical discovery.
They're figuring this out.
Just think of that.
Six million years ago, there was some fucking monkey thing.
And then six million years later, boom, you and I are sitting in front of giant laptops and ones and zeros are flying around the sea, you know, through these pipes and wires and shit under the ocean.
You know, a more significant benchmark that in a way is not a benchmark because as soon as we have the wheel, we're able to use that to get more technology.
You know, every innovation builds on the previous innovations.
But in a sense, we get to the point where we have computers that we tell, design the next smarter computer, design the next smarter computer chip.
And we're already kind of at that point.
And then it takes off, this exponential curve.
Next thing you know, we're telling computers how to solve all, instructing these things to solve all our problems.
But see, and what I'm scared of is that right now we see in the news, they have this laser that can hit your skin and do a molecular analysis from 100 feet away.
And the TSA is going to have this and be able to tell what you have to do breakfast that morning.
It's crazy.
But it scares me to see that that's in the government's hands.
But at the same time, I'm so confident.
And like I said, it is going to get scary.
And at some point, every surface surrounding us is going to be a touchscreen.
And virtual reality merges with reality.
And then who knows?
But now we're going to have to jump ahead and start talking about my last DMT experience because it relates to that.
But what we're coming to is there's going to be a point where basically everybody gets a therapy robot.
That's my prediction.
And in a way, you know what?
And I thought about this.
Every single trend that I look at, like way into the future, I go, wait a second, how is it already happening now?
And in a sense, think about how much therapy and psychological benefit people get from the internet.
The fact that they can look shit up and go, oh, I have issues because of this.
Or they're able to find communities of people that work through their issues.
We should step back maybe for a minute and talk about this podcast because there are a lot of people, and I want to get a shout out to Michael Salvey for making it possible for me to come out here because there are a lot of people like him and my audience that really cared about me getting to have a conversation with you.
And there are, you know, in a way, I really look up to you.
And I feel like as much as my audience wants you to benefit from hearing my perspective right now and talk about the way that we refer to ourselves as awake to in our understanding of government society.
You're 14 years ahead of me, but you're like, I want to learn something from you.
I mean, you saying that you look up to me is always funny to me when people say things like that because I think the reality of it is we all inspire each other, and it's great when we run into someone who we really feel like is on the right path.
Like, fuck, man, you're out there doing it.
And we benefit from each other.
All of us do.
I mean, there's just, that's a good thing about the internet.
That's a great thing about the internet.
The internet can connect people like you and I, where in past years it would be so impossible.
We exchange a couple series of tweets.
We don't even talk to each other face to face until we're actually sitting down.
I mean, that's a crazy, we're in a crazy world.
So in that sense, it does amazing things.
But we are all, everybody has a part in this thing.
It's one of the things I was going to say earlier when you were talking about people and the human mind and the power of a computer.
The crazy thing about people is not just the power of the human mind.
It's the fact that we can figure out how to work together.
Because the only way a computer gets made is if somebody figures out how to make all the different parts of it and figure out how to integrate them together and make it work together.
That's a lot of motherfuckers.
That's not one dude figuring out how to code algorithms and figuring out how to send packets to the internet.
No, this is like a bunch of people.
Everyone has a specific task.
And guys like you have a task.
Guys like me have a task.
And that task is, what are you drawn towards?
And even if it's fucking playing basketball, if that's what you love to do, and if you're fucking thinking about basketball all the time, that's your thing, man.
Well, I think that the lessons and the battles that you go through in your life where you figure out what's stupid and what's empowering, what's good and what's bad, for you not to have a perspective when you get to be a certain age, for you to hit 44 years old and not have some shit figured out that you didn't have when you were 25, this is ridiculous.
But for me, it's like whenever someone would say they look up to me or, you know, hey man, you changed my life, I would say like, I'm like an antenna, okay?
I'm just an antenna for all the shit that's out there in this crazy fucking weird world.
So when I repeat shit back or when I analyze and add a bunch of shit together that I've read that other people have figured out, someone saying they look up to that is a very weird thing to hear because I'm just doing stuff.
I'm just doing comedy or doing podcasts.
It doesn't ever seem like anything important.
But when you get the overwhelming amount of response that this podcast gets on Twitter and whatever, anything on the internet, my masterpod, it can fuck with your head.
It gets kind of trippy.
You feel like you have this weird obligation.
And enough people come up to you and say, yeah, hey, man, you changed my life.
You start going, man, maybe I should start a fucking cult.
Yeah, because you're turning the guns of government away from people.
You're covering for people.
And it's funny in Colorado, though, where it's not as well established, that it hasn't been subjected to market forces for as long, the doctors still charge $200.
But anyways, he was, you know, we weren't allowed to film in there, and they were very professional about it, and it was understandable, and they had a no-cell phone policy.
But they have a separate bar in the back.
So at first, I went, I talked to this lovely young woman, Mickey.
And this is my ulterior motive.
I'm kind of hoping that by giving her a shout out, she'll actually call me.
customer service was really incredible it was my first time They're going to be real friendly.
I went to the club in Breckenridge in Colorado, the Breckenridge Cannabis Club, and for my YouTube channel, we did a recording with my friend Joby Weeks there with his new local currency, Mountain Hours.
No, no, no, no, because it'll be more commercialized.
They'll be selling it at Walmart in the cigarette section.
You know what I mean?
Like, or with liquor stores.
There will be specialty shops, but with more competition, you'll end up and more legalization, you'll end up with a greater consolidation in the market.
I wonder how long it would take before marijuana is legalized, before like Coca-Cola got in business and started saying, listen, man, we need to, you know, this is a big business.
It's really fun to apply the economics to this, and then you start to understand why the violence is happening in Mexico, because their business is being shredded, and they're fighting over a territory that is rapidly shrinking.
It's hard to find shitty Mexican trash compactor weed.
Like the shit I used to get in high school for $80 an ounce or whatever it was.
You can't find that anymore.
I had this epiphany.
I was in Kansas City where it's as illegal as it is anywhere else.
I was there for a gig a couple weeks ago trying to buy weed, and it was like we were trying to, we were joking about it, but we were actually trying to find shitty weed to see if we could do it, and we couldn't.
But you see how much it's because when it's quasi-legal in California and it's still gray market for producers, it puts pressure on the market in places where it's harder to grow.
And so people are able to get better weed from the surplus in California and it's a better deal for them than the ship that's shipped up from Mexico.
I don't want to say the name because it's probably illegal what they're doing.
But they have a pot shop in the front where they sell bongs and shit.
In the back, they have a hot box.
This is a hot box.
Like 100 people boxed in with no fucking ventilation whatsoever.
And everybody's hitting bongs and vaporizers and they're passing blunts.
The air is so ridiculously unhealthy.
No, it's smoke.
It's all smoke.
It should be a little smoke, a little air.
A little smoke.
This was just nothing but smoke.
To the point where the next day my throat was sore.
I was like, wow, I might be fucked.
I was worried that it was going to mess with my voice.
Because it was breathing nothing but smoke for like an hour.
I've never been that high in my life.
It was ridiculous.
There was so much THC in the air, and there was no air.
It was all THC and carbon dioxide and bad breath, and people just blitz-greaked.
I don't even remember what I talked about.
I bet I did maybe five minutes of material in an hour on stage.
It was preposterous.
Which is going to be tonight.
Tonight's preposterous.
If you're around, ladies and gentlemen, tonight we've got a 10 p.m. show at the Ice House Comedy Club right here in lovely downtown Pasadena where they spotted rabid bats.
Well, let's come back to that because we were talking about the perspective, you know, how I used to be asleep.
Right.
And how so many in my audience are excited to have me appear on your podcast and to be able to share this perspective with you because it's about sharing the joy of standing up to government, of standing up to the bully, of actually seeing yourself as part of this process of humanity evolving.
And they know that you share a lot of the premises of this, of distrust for authority, of your good understanding of what government is and the exploitation behind it.
But what we're doing is actually working to change the paradigm and get people more involved.
We're not so much a political movement as an anti-political movement.
We understand that politics is pathological behavior when you're advocating for more government control, when you're saying that we need government to do this.
And we are helping humanity by spreading this message that it is a universal moral message of don't hit, don't steal, unless you have a badge or a gun of the government.
Government is an opinion with a gun and getting people to see that and move past that.
And as activists, it's funny, you talked about what it's like being a celebrity for yourself.
And you're a legitimate celebrity, and then there's political celebrity, and then there's me, minor political celebrity.
And I still get some of the same experience of people having a relationship with me before you meet them.
And you know how that is.
And what you have with your presence, your ability to get people to get more involved, to share this perspective, to enjoy standing up to the man, that people in your position can use your presence to better affect this change and be a part of this.
And I wanted to open the podcast by saying, I'm from the revolution and I'm here to recruit you.
That was so stupid that that's one of those things where, you remember when you did that show the other day and you're like, man, people, they didn't know who I was.
They hated me.
Yeah, that's how a normal person would react to you.
It's like people didn't understand for years I had to tell people that he kind of grows on you.
It's a weird thing.
It takes a while for your sense of humor to make sense, but even that you should be embarrassed about.
Even you should be embarrassed about that last one.
The cops that I ran into were cool, but they didn't have to be.
They could have been coming off of some terrible people, and I'm always very polite if anything happens.
But it's that weird feeling, like, you could just lock me up right now.
When you watch, like, the videos of those guys slamming you on the ground and arresting everybody for hugging, you just want to go in and you just want to arrest them.
You want to just pull them out of society.
You want to make them watch this, make them sit in the theater with people, sit on a stage, and I want you to sit, and behind you, we're going to play that video, and then I want you to respond to all these people, the citizens, The taxpayers, they're going to have some fucking questions for you.
You absolutely are, to be fair, because you are spreading important information and you are sharing a very important perspective that is about challenging authority.
What I've always said is that what's going to change this world is the youth.
The people that are growing up right now, the people that are listening to this in their dorm rooms, the people that are listening to this in their high school bedroom where they're trying to keep it down because their dad would yell at them because he disagrees with all the shit we're talking about.
Those are the people that are going to be involved and exposed to information that our generation and the previous generations, the rum spells of the world, they never thought that this was going to be an option.
They never thought that information would be so freely distributed between anyone, everywhere, all over the world.
That was never in the plan.
They thought they're going to be able to run shit, business as usual.
So what we're seeing now with world dominance and the craziness and the chaos of foreign policy, we're seeing like the last ripples of this emerging creature, this emerging new human technology symbiote.
So right now it's pushing all the old things out.
It's pushing all the old paradigms away.
It's going to dissolve standard forms of government and law enforcement.
It's going to dissolve all that shit.
Because you're going to be a part of everybody.
It's going to happen.
That's where it's going.
It's going to be technological or it'll be the next stage of our physical evolution, if you're allowed to use that term when it comes to something that's technologically driven.
Because I think it may be.
I think it may be something that someone creates.
And they create an ability to enhance the human body.
And if you look at what they're doing now with genetic engineering, they're creating fucking bladders and petri dishes.
They're working on developing artificial organs.
Eventually, they're going to look at the, once they figure out more and more and more about the human body, they're going to figure out parts of it.
They're going to go, we're just going to fix everything.
We're just going to turn this into, we're just going to remove all the greed.
You ready to apply Austrian economics in a way that's going to bake your noodle just a little bit when you talk about roads and the government monopoly and subsidization of the auto industry and the oil and gas industry?
If we didn't have the government doing that and Eisenhower, who built the interstate highway system to serve the needs of the military, and like where I live in New Mexico or where I'm from in New Mexico, where the Speaker of the State House can have an intersection moved to where he wants it to make his land worth more, and we didn't have all that happening being forced into that, we would be, we're already at the point where we should have cars that are self-driving.
But if it wasn't for government, keeping all this research and development stifled with intellectual property, you know, who killed the electric car?
Have you seen the documentary?
Imagine how much you see just that one government policy of intellectual property.
So that, oh, you invented a battery and you bought a piece of paper that describes it from someone.
You can keep that from humanity.
I mean, do you see how much that holds us back?
You see how much the exploitation by government keeps us from evolving into that state of greater technology?
I mean, even like, why do we not have self-driving cars right now?
It's a little romantic to be able to hear the rumble of a V8 and step on the gas when you want to, instead of just being trapped in a fucking grid like your own little trolley car.
I can't fucking believe there's so many goddamn liberal statists here in Southern California when all around them they are wasting hours and hours and hours of their day.
Well, I guess it's because they sit there and they listen to propaganda NPR and they're in their cars.
Yeah, but they're sitting there and they don't know about it.
Geez, maybe having the government manage transportation resources isn't a good idea.
Yeah, you should be dealing with your life and your reality right now, but instead you're dealing with realities hundreds of yards away, a mile away, six miles away, and all these realities are interfering into your reality.
But also, wouldn't you like to know, just for safety reasons, like be able to check your house and be like, holy shit, there's been seven home invasions in the last two weeks.
All I'm saying is it's just weird that we have this ancient brain.
It's certainly a good quality.
I certainly prefer to be able to access information than not.
But it's a weird brain that we have where we essentially have the same mind of people that lived in the past when you just write things down on animal skins.
Those dudes, when we find their parchments, their brains are exactly the same as ours.
When they find 2,000-year-old documents or 1,000-year-old, holy shit, their brains were exactly like ours.
You're finding out about things that are happening in Pakistan and Syria and Japan.
There's a nuclear problem and what's going on in Russia and Chechen and the Philippines.
And there's an earthquake in Thailand.
And this shit is coming at you all day, every day.
If you get on Twitter, if you get on CNN.com, if you go and access the news sites, you're constantly inundated by actions and things that are happening that literally have nothing to do with you.
But it's a constant barrage of them because you are in contact with essentially billions of people and all the information that they project out there into the internet.
And our little shitty brains are not meant to have that much information coming at us.
We still have this tribal body that wants to move around and find animals and grow vegetables.
And this is the same fucking body.
And this body is getting YouTube videos and fucking all kinds of crazy information coming at it all day, 24 hours a day.
It's almost like we're standing in the middle of a river and we're just trying to hold on to the water.
It's almost like it's too much.
It's almost like for every one person, there's way too much information that you have to absorb about everything.
It's like, to even focus on one thing, it's like you could give your whole life to politics.
Give your whole life to observing politics.
You still barely have a grasp on everything that's going on.
All the sneaky little fucking underhanded deals that are taking place all over the place.
How could you possibly manage them?
How could you possibly even research them?
How could you possibly even read all the documents that have been transcribed about every different case?
What it used to be to be a human being, like hunting and trapping and fishing and living off the land, growing your own vegetables, knowing what to eat when you're sick.
I've had three sessions every time I've smoked twice.
And this last time has been exponentially more complex.
The first time started with a blob of psychedelic colors.
The second time It had a bit of a female personality and a bit of a form to it, but not much more.
The third time, I saw building structures and scenery type stuff.
And the fourth time, I saw what I described as my face being raped with the truth of the universe, and it was this complex vision.
And the last time, the third time, in the first launch, I saw a pattern of like colored bricks moving at me, unfolding in different ways, and going through different color shifts and showing different shapes.
And it was like, wow, now it's really complex and trying to show me something.
And then I did another rip right then, as soon as I came out of that one.
And I spent half the time laughing.
It was just such a beautiful experience.
But I couldn't even describe the whole thing.
And I was videotaping it, so I tried afterwards to talk to the camera and describe everything I did.
And this one, actually, as we speak, Adam versus the DMT part two and 2.1 are uploading with disclaimers on them.
And then part three is in the can, and I'm going to be editing it soon.
But that second trip and the third time was just overwhelming.
I couldn't even describe it.
And it was so much coming at me in different forms and in different colors and different shapes.
But what I experienced in the middle of that just had me laughing with joy the entire time was an experience of the pure human will.
And at first, it was like a vision of a brain floating in a psychedelic space, whatever.
I don't even know how to describe it.
And I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, though, where you're in that spacelessness experience.
And then it wasn't the brain.
And then it was my consciousness.
And you realize that your consciousness is separate from your brain, and that it's still a product of your biology, but that there is something in the middle of it that is the human will, that is distinct, that is who we are.
Because if you think about it, we're not particles, we're waves.
You know, what defines us is not our matter that is recycled every seven years or whatever it is that all your cells are replaced in your body.
You are a wave of energy.
Everything that gives you identity as a human being, as an entity, is a wave.
And what I experienced was Well, what gives you form.
It's not your body.
It's not the material of your body.
It's the course of your life.
The person that you were as a baby, the body that you were seven years later, did not have a single molecule in it that was in it when you were born.
And every seven years, your entire body is replaced.
I would imagine that you are wherever the thoughts resonate from.
Whether or not it really is in your brain or whether it's in every aspect of your body, it's just your brain projects it.
Whether or not it's even the brain that projects it, whether the brain tunes it in, whether it's like a frequency and you just use this body as a vehicle.
Well, the evidence is that dimethyltryptamine is something they believe your body produces when you're in periods of extreme stress or when your body thinks it's going to die.
And if you follow all the different myths and different cultures, beliefs in the afterlife, I mean, so many of them involve going towards the light and these crazy visions.
And what those are probably are near-death experiences because your brain is tripping out on DMT.
And that can very well be real that we think of, we only think of ourselves as real because we can make noise, we can hit yourself.
This is what I experienced, and this is what was profound about it to me, was that it was, I could only describe it as pure human will.
And I don't want to say it was an out-of-body experience because that describes it wrong, but it was an experience where my consciousness was separated from the rest of my being.
This is how I think of the effect of marijuana when I smoke weed usually.
And it's that if your consciousness is, and this is a crude metaphor, but a point moving around in your brain, a point of light, say, Then marijuana makes it a more diffuse light.
And sometimes that means exploring different things.
And I think that explains the creative, legendary benefits of marijuana.
I agree.
But it also means it's sometimes harder to put sentences together.
We can see the technological singularity coming, right?
We can see that coming.
We can see sooner or later, you know, we're going to have taco copters and food's going to drop out of the sky for us and our cars will drive themselves or whatever the case is going to be.
But I think that there's something else coming, you know, when every surface around us is a touchscreen and we just get to that level of prosperity.
And that's coming within our lifetimes because it's happening so exponentially.
I see this as, you know, who knows how long it's going to take.
But again, an urgency for me to help humanity evolve past statism.
But that what we're coming to is a state of greater experience in our day-to-day lives of that pure human will, that we're evolving to that.
And you know, I know this is silly, but the first time I heard the term technological singularity, which describes that point at which we have computers smarter than human brains, is I thought, oh, that's when all of our brains are plugged into the matrix and we're all this hive mind and we've all replaced every individual brain cell in our skulls with computer chips.
But who knows what that's going to look like, but what we're going to experience as human beings.
And who knows if our waves are going to ride that long, if they're going to last that long.
But I think most people alive today, especially young people, are going to live to experience this.
And we have a special motivation then to make sure that the world that experiences this technology is one that has evolved past statism, this thing of government, of imposing our will on others by force, of saying, well, if it's 51%, then it's okay.
But then I also look at all the shit that people have accomplished.
Who the fuck ever would have figured out how to build a bridge?
Who the fuck ever figured out how to make airplanes?
How is there a dude who really figured out how to put satellites up in the air so I can watch direct TV?
How did all that happen?
And if all that happened, I hold out hope for the possibility that people could, as much as they have achieved creatively and technologically and with ingenuity, could also reach a same level of excellence with their social engineering and the way they treat each other and the way they develop a community and the way they project the idea that it's way better to have a world where everyone is happy than to have a world where a few people dominate people.
And we have to figure out how to do it from the ground up and it's got to be, you've got to figure out how to raise children better.
You've got to figure out how to raise children better.
You've got to deal with children that are in foster homes.
And that's got to be handled way better.
You have to look at human beings as resources and potential problems if they're not.
The last thing anybody wants to do is grow up through life just constantly dealing with a fucked up childhood.
I have so many friends that were abused as children and they are constantly in battle with this, well into their 30s, constantly at battle with their childhood.
And that's because people raising kids, they just do it their way.
It's the most important resource that we have as human beings.
And we used to have a whole fucking community.
We used to have tribes of us, 50, 60 monkey people.
And we all fucked each other, so nobody knew who the real daddy was anyway.
And they were raising these babies.
And the whole community and the tribe raised each other.
They all stayed together.
When that shit slowly started expanding into cities and people slowly lost their, you know, you get that diffusion of responsibility feeling where things are happening.
It doesn't feel like it belongs to you.
It's all those people over there.
You can't be living with those people over there.
It should be a giant community or not.
This is like some half-assed way we're doing it today.
The way we're treating our society.
It's like it's like, you're in my tribe, but you're not really, because I don't know you, dude.
You know, you just live down the hall from me.
But still, we're all in the same fucking tribe.
That's the weirdest thing ever.
It's like your enemy could be inside your tribe.
That should be impossible.
We should figure out a way where we are treating everybody the same way.
There's so much security, though, that you're not allowed, like the nightclubs, you're not allowed to stop and just stare at the nightclub for a second, or you have this guy coming out of nowhere that goes, please continue to walk.
Well, we see it as part of a larger goal of evolving past statism and getting past this particular phase of human evolution where we institutionalize all of our desires to dominate and control others by force into government.
And, you know, you understand this.
You've supported Ron Paul.
You've come out and you see when a candidate speaks from this philosophy, and this is what we have in common, is this idea of voluntarism, of all human interactions being voluntary, free of force, fraud, and coercion, and understanding that government is what George Washington described it as.
It is not eloquence or reason.
It is like fire.
It is force, like fire, a dangerous servant, a fearful master.
And when you understand that government is force and 99% of what it does doesn't qualify as a morally justified use of force, whether it's starting wars or collecting taxes or beating people up for a plant or locking them in cages because we don't like what they're doing, it's all immoral.
And we can find ways to do these things peacefully.
We can find ways without democracy, without the majority imposing its will by force on the minority and using this, well, we have 51% as a cover, so we're justified in doing that.
And that's part of the bigger goal.
And really, this is what I think a lot of people want me to inspire you to be a part of and to really see yourself as someone who is part of this struggle and someone who can see past, someone who has your wisdom to see past the current paradigm and see that there is something better on the other side.
Well, I think, like I said, there's certainly a potential for something better, but it's going to have to come through the youth.
They're going to have to grow up into the system and change it because it's changed from the time where people were wearing white fucking powdered wigs and they thought the world was flat.
I've tried to, what part of that statement about the evolution of people figuring out things through the youth and the youth learning from the mistakes of the, Because you're in a position to be a leader.
I hesitate to use that term myself, you know, and people try to apply it to me, and I say absolutely not because I can set an example in a way that you can't get a bunch of people.
I would never say that about them because I don't know how they feel about the world, but I know for me, I was certainly very childlike before I did DMT.
I was very self-centered.
I had a very different perspective on my place in the universe, very different perspective on my place in humanity, my place with my friends, my place.
It put everything into perspective and showed me an illuminated correct pathway.
And I think it's by the humblingness of the experience, destroys your ego, makes you just sit the fuck down and stop trying to control everything.
It's like the universe is really a magical place.
If you just absorbed only the magical aspects of the universe, you'd be constantly fascinated every hour of every day.
But we forget that and get caught up and distracted in the horseshit and TMZ and nonsense.
And it's just we are still struggling with this fucking weird primate body that is trying to figure out how to manage massive groups of people and insane volumes of information coming at us all day long.
And that's where we stand now.
That's our conundrum.
Our conundrum is we're surfing, but we might not stay on the board before we hit the rocks.
I was a fucking security guard for one summer at Greatwood Center for the Performing Arts.
It's this place in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
I got to see fucking amazing bands.
I got to see Rodney Dangerfield perform live naked in a bathrobe.
Rodney Dangerfield would wear a bathrobe.
And I was thinking about being a comedian, man.
This is how he'd go on stage.
He would go on stage with a bathrobe on.
He was such a bad motherfucker.
I got to see Bill Cosby where I worked there.
But we were at a, who the fuck is his name?
Not Jethro Tull, goddammit.
I can't remember his name.
Southern man?
Neil Young.
We were at a Neil Young concert, and they started fires up in the, there was like a wooded area, or rather a grassy area at the top.
It was like an amphitheater outside, and then there was a top area that was grass.
People decided to start fires, and fucking hell broke loose, dude.
And it became an us versus them thing.
It became an us, 19-year-old kids, security guard, you know, and my friends who also worked there against all these people who were Neil Young friends who were fucked up on drugs and starting chaos and starting things on fire.
And I watched like people hit people that I would never would have thought would have hit somebody.
Like my friend Larry was like one of the nicest, most peace-loving guys.
And I watched him punch this dude in the stomach.
And I'm like, I can't believe Larry just hit that guy.
And I was like, I got to get the fuck out of here.
But it was an immediate us versus them thing that happens when it becomes a real problem if you're not educated right.
If you work in any position of authority, any position of, you know, you're going to have some control and be able to tell people.
We got to work compassion into that.
Because when you don't have that, when you lose that, that we're all in this together, then you're not a cop, man.
You're the fucking enemy.
Like that, you saw that video in Long Beach where that kid is lying down and they step on his head.
I think what we are is human beings that understand that our system is not correct.
And to call ourselves a revolution, to call ourselves anything other than just human beings, I think is pointless.
I think it's rational thinking human beings that realize there's something wrong here.
And that includes the people in the system.
That includes cops.
That includes judges.
That includes lawyers.
That includes everybody along the line that is all equally eligible for a personal awakening.
Every single one of them, with the proper medication in the right setting, could see some shit that would make them rethink reality.
And it would make them humble enough to at least understand that they don't know everything.
Because they never knew that that was there.
You can say you know everything.
I'm a fucking smart guy.
I was hopping my class.
I get you high on DMT.
I guarantee you you will think about everything different for the rest of your life because you didn't know that was there.
You didn't know that all you had to do was follow a few simple steps and you're in a different land where everything is complex geometric patterns made out of love and understanding that are communicating with you in some sort of a telekinetic language or telekinesis language.
I don't think that you can really appreciate life unless you know that that's there.
If you don't know that that's there, it's like you've lived three quarters of a life.
You don't understand.
There's an experience and it only takes about 15 minutes and you'll never be the same again.
you're going to come back, and you're going to be burdened with all your past preconceived notions and ideas, and all the things that you've learned from your life, but you're essentially going to be a totally different person now.
You're a person who can never forget the things that you saw or the way that you felt when you experienced that.
Now, whether that's just your brain getting tweaked with chemicals or whether it really is what it feels like, because what it feels like is you're going to another place.
And we just assume that the only way to travel is to put one foot in front of the other or get in a car or get in a plane.
You might be able to travel chemically between dimensions.
And that might be what things like DMT are all about.
That might be why it's made by your own fucking brain.
And the reason that so many people in my audience really appreciated this conversation or anticipated it is because they realize that you already carry this message in a way very powerfully in the way that you talk about society, in the way that you integrate it.
What I just want to do is I want to express my appreciation for this.
We feel the heat of suppression that Mother Earth gives us.
And this oppression will help us get through this podcast better.
Look, man, I think everybody's recognizing it now.
Anybody with a brain is realizing, you know, Bush was the first guy where everybody had to step back and go, wow, like, because of the access to information, that was the first time we got real news, daily news online and shit.
That was the first time people realized, like, whoa, this administration is bought and paid for.
Like, this is ridiculous.
Like, this is the most obviously bought and paid.
Like, they're rocking it in a way that nobody had previously done.
Everybody had been way slicker about hiding their connections to money and to war profiteering.
But the Bush administration just let their freak flag fly.
They just fucking went out, started two wars that made no sense, profited a fuckload of money.
If you could talk to George Bush, what would that conversation be like?
If you could just get alone with that guy, would you do it respectfully?
Would you slowly try to chip away at it and try to get his perspective?
Or do you think you would just lose your fucking mind when you were just in the face of someone who is at least indirectly responsible for the death of probably a million people?
And I used to, when I was active with Iraq veterans against the war, when I got out of the Marines and was disgruntled and started questioning things, I used to fantasize about that.
Well, yeah, I think part of my own philosophical development and my own experience going through to the point where I feel like I got to, you know, you never get all the way to the bottom, but like to the effective bottom of the rabbit hole for me that allows me to function the way that I do now with my current understanding of the world.
You know, part of it was having a philosophical approach.
Like there's a quote from a Buddhist monk, Thick Not Han.
I'm sure I'm butchering the name, but it's something like, when someone does harm to you, it is only because harm has been done to them and they are reflecting it back and they are expressing it.
And to me, I see that that is what government as a whole is, in the sense that it's pathological behavior.
It is a relic of human evolution, of the scarring of the only way we were able to raise kids in the state of nature was you beat them so they keep up with the tribe and the evolution of that into government.
And I see that as George Bush simply a representation of that broader social phenomenon of government being the last manifestation of this desire to control and dominate and use violence against others.
And so he's just, you know, and it's not that the president is a pitch man or a puppet.
He's a power broker.
You know, he legitimately makes decisions.
But the reason the one who usually gets into the position is the one that is is because he's reflective of the environment that produces him.
And that's the existing power structure.
And that's the paradigm of society as a whole.
And that's why changing the paradigm and waking people up and the perspective that you share about government is so powerful because what ultimately determines whether or not you're going to be free is whether the human beings around you agree that you should be free and they won't tolerate people initiating force against you when you're acting peacefully.
Well, one of my biggest philosophical influences is Stéphane Molyneux, and he went through a whole process of describing this anarcho-capitalist ideal society.
And really, to embrace this philosophy, you kind of have to go through all of the resistances that people have.
Like, without government, who's going to build the roads?
And it's the same question as people would ask when we were trying to abolish slavery.
And it was, but without the slaves, who's going to pick the cops?
I don't think there's anything wrong with having a form of council.
The idea of calling them government, like what the Obama administration was able to do, what the Obama administration was able to do in this whole Operation Fast and Furious, where he was able to just say, I don't want to talk about it.
And what is it, invoking executive order or whatever?
Executive privilege.
I mean, how silly is that?
There's a giant scandal where they sold guns to Mexican drug dealers and they said, oh, yeah, yeah, we're just going to track them.
And one of those guns killed.
One of those guns killed one of the border patrol agent, yeah.
Like the idea that he would be able to use executive privilege and get out of that and to do it so blatantly, like that, that's a creepy thing.
It's saying we are not going to allow ourselves to be cowed.
We are going to understand that as human beings in what we call the free market, we are able to cooperatively accomplish all the things that we have been convinced we need government for.
They do it through companies where they're able to buy protection services, where they're able to get the legitimate services that police provide without forcing it on people just because they happen to be.
So you want to turn the government and how things run into just a big free market as far as police, as far as teachers, everything's just a giant free market.
You think a child going to school doesn't understand that if they don't go to school every day, their parents get in trouble and that the way the school is paid for is by taxes that the parents pay against their will, whether or not they have children in a school system?
It's also true that parents pay taxes in a very specific neighborhood because they know there's a good school system in there, and then they run rallies for the school system, and they gather up money, and people don't.
Okay, that aspect of it, however, is superior, is it not, to the Federal Department of Education coming into that community and saying, now you're gonna follow these testing standards in order to get these funds, and if you don't do what we say with this.
So that community should be determined not by people.
Okay, so wouldn't you, this is the mechanism by which you separate the good cops from the bad cops?
Their actions.
No, no, this is the mechanism by which you actually do it, is you take the arbitrary power of government away from them.
You make them serve the market.
You make them serve the people peacefully.
You make them convince you that their services are necessary, not put a gun to your head and say, if you don't pay our taxes, you're going to get locked in a cage.
Well, I think that locking someone in jail for taxes is very unfortunate, and it doesn't make sense when you think about how many fucking gigantic corporations have gone bankrupt and how much more that affected people than, you know, one person is not paying their little tiny slice of the military-industrial complex's pie.
But you should have to pay something.
It should make sense.
You're getting something out of it, and you should want to contribute.
If you live in a community, if everybody said, well, hey, man, our streets are all fucked up, but Mike gathered up all the names that everybody lives here and realized if we all just chip in $100, we could fix this whole thing.
If we didn't have jobs, if we didn't have responsibility, children, careers, if we didn't have things we had to think about all day, instead, you're running around there trying to fucking figure out how to pay the firemen and how to make sure that the cop tires are good.
And at a certain point in time, how much micromanagement can you do in your fucking community?
If they don't have a specific set of rules and are only open to the market, they're going to push as far as they possibly fucking can to get things done.
And if they're dealing with businesses that have a lot of money, they're going to do things that aren't legal.
But that's what would happen if you privatize the cops.
And that's a fact.
That's just how human beings are.
If you give them little loopholes and you allow them to figure out how to get through those loopholes, they're like rats on a sinking ship.
And they're going to pop out and they're going to fuck things up.
No, because you're basing that on an understanding of the corporate structure of the current government paradigm where government empowers corporations to have an unnatural advantage in the market and protects them from competition.
In your scenario, you say rich people like existing corporations and concentrations of wealth would abuse this ability to hire police forces and private whatever to be able to do evil things.
Well, guess what?
They already can.
The thing is, what we have is a government that keeps the rest of us from doing the same thing, from being able to say that our demands for community safety services, our demands should be met by the market, not by a monopoly that's forced on us.
This is the premise of the drug war, man.
You do this, the drug war goes away.
You do this, all unjust laws go away because the demands on the enforcers are the demands of the market.
They're what people actually want.
The bad cops go away because you get to fire them.
There's no police unions that say you can't fire people and there's going to be a law against this, that if a cop shoots somebody, he's going to get paid leave.
You know, that kind of bullshit.
All of that goes away.
When you have roads, like I was telling you, in the way that they're holding us back from technological development, but specifically like in New Mexico, where the Speaker of the House gets to just say, well, put that intersection by my land so the value of it goes up.
If you were involved with Apple and you left your phone, the prototype phone, in a bar somewhere, even though it's awesome free publicity, you would be arrested.
Or you would, for sure, they checked the guy.
They fucking stormtroop his house with machine guns, looked everywhere for the iPhone.
But like I said, when you were living under slavery and someone said, hey, we need to end slavery, the devil's advocate was saying, but who's going to pick the cotton?
Do you think that, did you ever read The Strange Death of Vince Foster?
Do you know the story behind that guy?
It's one of the guys involved, and somehow or another, he had some sort of connection to that giant real estate deal that the Clintons were involved in where people started fucking disagreeing.
It might just be how at a certain point in government, everybody just knows that's how shit's done.
And it's always been that way.
And, you know, here's the fucking Zapruder film.
I mean, it just must have always been that way.
It seems like, I mean, even Obama, all the things that Obama said, you know, you think about the stories of Obama being in Hawaii, smoking pot with his friends.
His friends said Obama would go interception, Stephen, take the joint.
Brian, you can't do two Olive Garden in one episode.
You're overdoing yourself.
You're becoming a parody of your own creation.
Stop it.
Stop it before you ruin this fucking beautiful show.
I'm totally not disagreeing with you, by the way, when we talked about anything.
It's just, I just, I'm a devil's advocate sort of a guy, and I think the F Explorer, whenever someone gives me absolutes, that's when I automatically go, what about this?
And it's not that I'm, you know, and people will argue with me on Twitter, and I'm like, I agree with you too.
I'm not committed to any version of the future that I think is going to be optimum.
But I'm not averse to the idea that someone could be in a position where they could benevolently guide people instead of the idea of run us like a government, you know, and, you know, be able to be involved in some sort of fucking crazy gun running scheme and evoke executive privilege where you don't have to talk about the crazy gun running scheme that they sold guns to Mexican drug dealers and one of them killed a U.S. federal agent.
You don't have to talk about that.
Not in my vision of what's possible.
I think you have to be accountable for all your information.
You have to be accountable for all your duties and it should be a place of benevolence.
I mean, in a real simple mechanical sense, the way that technology is empowering, you know, Google glasses, pretty soon we're going to have facial recognition embedded in contact lenses, right?
And to the extent that you want to make your information public, people will be able to scan your face and see your reputation, and there'll be some way of accounting for your reputation that pops up if people want to see that.
You're going to be able to, well, like we're all going to, and that laser thing that they have at the TSA agents, you know, the checkpoints now where they shoot the laser and read all your shit, you're going to have that embedded in your glasses.
It's all going to be part of the system of accountability.
And it's weird because everybody should be uncomfortable about how privacy is going away.
But if anything, you get the government out of it and you decide what your level of invasiveness is.
And that's what's so cool about this technology empowering people to do things that we think we need government for that we really don't.
And it's now with the technology as superfluous as it is, it's easy to see it.
What you're saying is that people are going to have to act together and instead of government, they're going to have to form some sort of a sense of community.
It's just really hard to do that when the numbers are so big.
We're just not designed to deal and be able to manage hundreds of millions of people when one person is in charge of that.
Well, our civil disobedience beach party that was a group of people breaking laws and standing up to the man the other day happened on 24-hour notice because I got a Facebook and a Twitter account.
I think the conversations that you started on this podcast and the topics that you're so passionate about, this is really how it starts.
Because now there's some dude right now that is on the train on his way to work, and he listens to this podcast every day, and these ideas are imprinting in his head, and they're helping him or influencing him in his decision and what he's going to do with his future.
And that's where I think everything is starting.
I think everything right now, what we're seeing as far as the changing of the world, is nothing compared to the people that are growing up with the internet from baby to grown up because that's a totally different fucking human.
You're not going to be able to sell them Donald Rumsfeld bullshit.
You're not going to be able to sell them Dewey Decimal System, horseshit.
No.
They're going to Google and know on a fucking note that looks like a laptop and it fits in your pocket.
Man, these are the kids that are recording their teachers and calling them on their bullshit because they know that public schools are government-run indoctrination centers.
You know, you saw that that made headlines in North America.
What is the purpose they serve to government, man?
No, it's more than that.
There's a reason government has taken over education.
This is the dumbing down.
You look at the Federal Department of Education instituted like, what, 40, 50 years ago when we were at or near the top of every international educational ranking system.
Now we're down like 30, 40.
It's not by accident.
It's by design.
They want you to be dumbed down and not question government.
They want to control the curriculum so you don't learn about topics like what we're talking about now.
People don't benefit and profit from making the schools better, so it's easy to keep them suppressed.
It's not that there's some sort of a strategy that are trying to keep people stupid.
It's that there's no money to be made from making people smart.
So why should they try?
So they don't try.
So they underfund the school.
So when things get cut, cut the fucking teacher's pay for fuck math.
Suck my dick.
Cut her pay.
So we need to balance the budget.
What do we do?
Cut the school.
No more wrestling.
And that's what it's coming from.
It's not coming from some fucking grand poo-bah plot where there's a bunch of assholes standing in the middle of a field burning an effigy deciding how they're going to keep people stupid.
Well, this is one of the things that's happening in America right now.
We call the libertarian mind melt.
And it's kind of a phenomenon we see people going through.
We used to joke: like, what's the difference between a minarchist and an anarchist?
You know, someone who believes.
Someone who believes in government limited to the Constitution or to specific principles, you know, the government should only be used for this or that, as opposed to, really, we should evolve past government.
He presents a minarchist platform as an immediate practical transition of going back to the Constitution or at least getting government restrained to what it's legally authorized to do, supposedly.
And his end goal, though, is a voluntary society.
And when I interviewed him for my TV show, we talked about this.
And he says that he is a voluntarist.
All human interaction should be free of force, fraud, and coercion.
And when you really get that, you're okay saying, I don't know when you look to the future.
And you're okay saying, when we don't have slavery, I don't know who's going to pick the cotton.
I don't know if we're going to have big machines that are going to pick the cotton for us and then spit out t-shirts.
We don't know how that's going to happen.
Who's going to build the roads?
We don't know.
What's the exact system that the market is going to be able to do?
Who's going to do it?
People are going to do it.
People are going to do it peacefully.
And when you understand that government is going to fucking be potholes everywhere, nothing's ever going to get done.
And in the course of, I mean, we've been talking for a few hours, but in the course of a conversation, it's very hard for someone to really shed their attachment to violence because that's what it is.
I see what you're saying, that your money's going to go to that anyway.
it would be a beautiful thing if you were able to vote for whether or not your money went to the war.
Boy, would war be different than if you could like check off They should say, you get to vote whether or not any of your tax dollars ever get used for anything military.