Michael Stevens joins Joe Rogan to debunk fringe theories like the Anunnaki’s genetic manipulation of humans and the absurd "gay bomb" conspiracy, while acknowledging real historical plots such as Operation Northwoods (1962)—a U.S. plan to stage false flag attacks against Cuba. They contrast ancient Sumerian cuneiform with modern science, like quantum superposition, and explore how language shapes thought via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Rogan’s skepticism of security theater clashes with Stevens’ humor about cargo cults, while both critique human progress stalling due to ego-driven resistance to new knowledge. The episode ends with Rogan promoting Vsauce’s viral science content and teasing a future Abby Martin interview. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Blue Apron.
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Yeah, the physics of the spinning Earth, it's very bizarre when you stop to think that the idea, all planets are constantly spinning in this weird way around a giant sun and these outer planets and They're all spinning.
That's something that you don't think about on a day-to-day basis.
You just walk around and go to the mall and drive in your car.
You don't think about it.
You're on a thousand miles an hour in a circle at all times.
Yeah, that could explain some of the, you know, things we still don't know yet.
There could be parallel universes where every other version of things happen, and that would explain things like why we happen to see the universe that we see now.
It's almost kind of stoner talk because it's one of those things like, man, try to wrap your head around that, man.
But it is a fascinating concept that we are in this essentially infinite universe.
I mean, they've tried to put dimensions on the universe itself.
Like, there's an actual beginning and end to the universe itself.
But the infinity comes from the concept that inside every black hole...
Is potentially another universe.
That every galaxy has a supermassive black hole that's one half of one percent of the mass of the entire galaxy and that inside that black hole it's very possible That there's a whole other universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with black holes inside of them, each with new universes inside of them, and that this fractal thing goes on and on and on and on and there's literally no end.
Yeah, and I don't know about black holes, but the universe itself, we give it a dimension, we give it like a circumference or a diameter, but that's just the observable universe.
We don't really know what's beyond what we can see.
And it could go on infinitely.
It could also wrap back on itself and be sort of infinite in one sense, but actually, you know, if you go far enough out, you curve around like an ant on a globe.
That ant can just keep walking forward forever.
He'll eventually return to where he came from, but he's never going to, like, reach a wall, an edge.
We think that's how our universe works.
Is it wrapping back around itself?
Well...
Probably not.
We've been able to look really far away and we don't see any evidence of things converging as if it's...
For instance, in a cloud chamber, we can see individual particles because they interact with gas in the chamber and cause trails, and we can follow the trail and photograph it and study it and say, wow, look how it moved.
Because of its spin or because of its, you know, the mass that we were able to detect, it was probably an electron or whatever, right?
But we can't look at it and say, oh, dude, that was the same electron that I saw yesterday, you know?
When they're measuring things like particles in superposition, which means a particle that is moving and still at the same time, like how are they doing that?
That does create a problem, doesn't it, with educators?
Because if someone's been basing their entire life and their career writing books, teaching a certain principle that turns out to be completely and totally incorrect at one point in time...
When new understanding come about, that runs into human areas, ego and weirdness when it comes to what people are willing to accept and not willing to accept.
Procedure, the scientific method, you know, thinking scientifically and always basing these, you know, theories on things that we can experimentally test, right?
That's what matters.
And if you can devise better and better tests, you can learn more and more and be more and more sure of theories.
But you should always be more excited about conquering ignorance than just like holding on to the fact that you...
But it's got to be a real pain in the ass if you've spent your entire career teaching something, writing books on something, and it turns out to be incorrect.
Yeah, it's really bizarre when you think about the fact that people had, not only did they have just a rudimentary understanding of the Earth and its position in the stars and the universe, but with that rudimentary information, they were able to circumnavigate the globe.
They were able to use those sextants and look at the stars and measure distances and figure out where they were based on constellations and go on the ocean in a fucking wooden floaty thing and just use the wind to take them around a different...
They have an amazing piece on the Galapagos Island recently.
And it's where Darwin sort of landed and partially...
Where he formed his theories about evolution and because it's such a just incredibly rich with diversity and different kinds of life.
But what they were talking about that's really amazing in this is how little we understand about life and life's changes and they're seeing life changes right now.
They're seeing like the evolution of this new finch.
There's some new bird is forming because there's a larger finch that's dying off.
And the medium finch and the smaller finch are breeding and they're creating this new finch.
Right.
And it's just unbelievably fascinating to think that all this is – our point of reference is, you know, a thousand, a couple thousand years of people writing shit down.
And it's – in the greater spectrum of life on earth, it's nothing.
There's a National Geographic special called Decoding the Maya.
It's all about Mayan language and how difficult that is.
Another dead language, essentially.
But a dead language that's in hieroglyphic form, so images that mean sounds, you know?
So, like, McKenna described it best, like, you would have, like, an eyeball, a saw, like, that cuts wood, you'd have an ant, like the bug, and a flower, like the rose, and that's how you would say, I saw ant rose.
I don't know what's going to happen to English someday, but I, you know, me and my friends were sitting around the other day and we were talking about the idea of everything being on hard drives.
And how bizarre that is that if anything happened and for whatever reason, you know, a good percentage of the population died and everybody that was left was computer illiterate, how long would it take before we lost everything that anybody ever figured out?
I mean, there wouldn't be much left.
Unless, somehow or another, genetically, that information is stored, or the revelations are somehow or another, if there's a large enough segment of the population, but if not, that shit's gone.
Well, that's a thought that people like Graham Hancock have when they stumble across these, you know, gigantic monoliths that nobody can explain, like Baalbek and Lebanon and...
Of course, the pyramids in Egypt and all these just bizarre, massive stone constructions that we're not exactly sure how they put together.
I mean, still to this day, they look at the Great Pyramid and they just go, well, maybe we think that they kind of, maybe they, I don't know.
I did a video on putting history in perspective, and I mentioned that the ancient Egyptian pyramids were as old to the ancient Romans as the ancient Romans are to us.
There were woolly mammoths still alive when the pyramids were built in Egypt.
You know what's even more trippy is these new discoveries like this Gobekli Tepe thing that they're finding 12,000 plus years ago that they thought people back then were just hunter and gatherers and they're finding these gigantic carved stone columns with 3D images of animals that are carved into it.
Meaning like you have a large stone and you cut the stone down but leave enough of a piece of stone that you could carve in a lizard.
and that a lot of these lizards and animals aren't even native to the continent in which Turkey is, you know, they don't really think that these animals existed in the spot where this was going on, at least the current knowledges, that we don't think they existed there.
It's very, very strange because they thought people were just hunter-gatherers back then, and they built these massive, like, concentric circles with 19-foot hides, stone columns like they don't even know how the fuck they did it or who did it or what the culture was and it's all new stuff over the last couple decades i found these and they're older to to the ancient egyptians than the ancient egyptians are to us Wow.
Yeah, by almost seven years, 7,000 years, because they're 12,000.
So the ancient Egyptians, that's 2,500 BC, they think they built the pyramids.
But if you could see a thousand years in a time lapse, if you could see it run through a time lapse and then see like seven of those in a row and then see like Gobekli Tepe, which is seven twice, you know, and just like just run through how much change must have taken place on this planet.
And just with this one bizarre life form that alters its environment.
You know, we sort of imitate whatever the hell's going on around us.
If we have this idea that babies aren't alive yet.
Well, look at the horrible things that people are able to justify doing to others just because those others are, you know, thought to be an enemy or a subhuman because they're the enemy.
When you really stop and think about what these bizarre behavior patterns people have and what they create.
They create these cultures that vary wildly.
All human beings, all on this planet, but...
You know, look at the difference between Palestine and Chicago.
Look at the difference between, you know, fill in the blank, Liberia and San Francisco.
Look at the difference between London and, you know, Mongolia.
It's very strange how much things are different and how much they change.
But yet, everyone's just a person.
Everyone can interbreed.
Everyone can exchange ideas.
And once you take someone from that culture...
And bring them into yours.
They adopt those ideas.
If you took a baby from Nigeria, brought him into, you know, whatever, Atlanta, and raised him there, talk to him 20 years later, he's going to have an Atlanta accent.
He's probably going to be into, you know, all the things that young kids are into and video games that young kids are into.
I mean, he will look essentially entirely like an American kid.
Well, you know, that's the argument that the ancient alien guys used to point to the fact that human beings are genetically engineered because dogs were essentially genetically engineered.
So their idea is that this is the proof that humans have been engineered and that there's many versions of us and that, you know, there's been a bunch of different models that were created.
And that's why we vary so wildly as opposed to every other animal that can breed because...
Hybrids in other species are usually sterile.
But hybrids with human beings, like if you took Shaquille O'Neal and a white dwarf, you would assume that's a hybrid.
But they're not.
They're not.
It's the same race.
They're totally compatible as far as the way you can breed with them.
it wouldn't take long what if we had evolved to just not ever have to a baby after just a month would be bigger than the biggest human ever don't you think I need to do the math well it depends on what you need to consume like if your body was so efficient that you no longer needed to urinate like we kind of assumed that your body would need to urinate but why If your body needs water to stay alive, like, why are we assuming that it has to process this water?
You put food in, and then it's got bacteria and different pumps and reservoirs inside, and it creates something that resembles completely and smells just like a human dump.
The first one I saw was done as a piece of art, as artwork.
Like an artist created this machine that could poop just like a human.
Now they do it, they call it a robo-gut.
It's actually a medical thing because when people have GI problems, a poop transplant is commonly used to reintroduce the healthy bacteria.
And taking poop from someone else and giving it to the sick person and shoving it up there is kind of like, you know, there's a lot of possibilities for rejection, infection, stuff like that, I guess.
But the robo-gut can make just perfectly clean poop, just with the kind that you want.
While I was peeing, I did think of something that kind of wraps up the whole first part of this pre-pee conversation.
And it again goes back to Jared Diamond who said – he tells a story about Europeans first meeting a tribe in Papua New Guinea.
And of course, if you're this tribe and these guys show up using technology and materials you've never seen before and they look very different and they dress very different, you might think that they're gods, that they're a different type of animal.
And I think they thought they were gods until two things happened.
One, the tribe realized that the Europeans pooped and it smelled just like theirs.
And secondly, they could have sex.
Those two things solidified the fact that they were all humans together.
Yeah, can you imagine being someone who lives in some sort of a tribal environment in the middle of the Amazon and all of a sudden a plane lands, you know, on the water and people come out and you're like, what the fuck is this?
No one's ever seen another person, especially a white person.
Yeah, von Daniken used that as an argument in Chariots of the Gods to explain that this is one of the reasons why these depictions of what could be interpreted as flying saucers and all these different things in modern art, that's what it is.
It's like the long lost information passed down generation to generation of at one point in time we were visited.
By something from somewhere else.
And it sounds...
That's one of those subjects where as soon as you open up the possibility of that, you say, like, well, maybe we were visited, but you're like, oh, fucking Christ, he's one of those guys.
Like, it's an immediate reaction.
I have it.
It's like when someone starts talking to me about...
The possibility of humans being visited, extraterrestrials coming here, manipulating our DNA. Okay, dude.
That, you know, these beings came from another planet, genetically altered human beings.
And he points to these various images that were in the Sumerian text and Sumerian cuneiforms and all these different stone carvings that show what looks like the double helix of DNA. Sure, sure.
The caduceus, you know, the two snakes that are wrapped around the pole that we associate with medicine.
And they interpret that as being like this idea that they took subhuman primates and manipulated their DNA, adding alien DNA, creating just incredibly intense and bizarre stuff.
But what gets me is...
Yeah, absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah, probably not right.
Most people...
And there's also a website called Sitchin is Wrong, where other scholars who have studied the cuneiform and studied the Sumerian text completely disagree with his interpretations.
But if we could travel to another planet...
And we could do it successfully and we've done it, you know, for thousands and thousands of years and this other planet is, you know, way the fuck on the other side of the galaxy and we find some primates.
I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that we would manipulate their DNA. There are actually protocols already in place, not officially adopted by any government, but protocols about what do we do if we discover life?
Because we most likely would contaminate it by trying to observe it.
I think that there are even people arguing right now that Mars has been contaminated.
It used to be, to go across the United States, it took so many years that people died, people were born, it was a whole different group of people by the time you finally got to your destination.
This is the Louis C.K. joke, and now it's just like you get in a plane, and yeah, you're done.
It used to be, if someone showed up on your border, no matter where you were, it was usually a fucking problem.
If a boat pulled up, very rarely were people just super cool and you're not worried about it.
But today, there's a thing called tourism.
And it's a huge part of life.
I mean, a huge part of life in various cultures is people showing up and bringing with them money, and you welcome them.
They're part of the economy of the area.
It's very strange how just that ability to traverse distances has changed the way human beings interact with each other.
And it's also made the idea of countries, nationalities, and your loyalty to those countries and nationalities a little bit more ridiculous every year.
A little bit more ridiculous.
The closer we get to this ability to instantaneously travel from one place to another, like these borders, these self-imposed borders, like the border between Mexico and the United States is probably one of the most egregious.
When you stop and think about the difference in prosperity between like, you know, Juarez and Los Angeles, Tijuana and San Diego.
It's like, fuck, man.
Like, that's crazy that a third world country is right there.
These poor people are starving to death and we won't let them come across this little imaginary line where everything is wonderful and everybody's fat.
My friend Ari that you see behind you right there, or above you, that photo, Ari just got back from doing a tour of China, and took some photos of himself on the Great Wall, and I read that you could see the Great Wall from space.
Apparently you can't.
But when he was there, we were talking about the Great Wall and he was saying how fucking crazy it was.
So then I started looking up the Great Wall and it's 5,000 miles long!
And just a few weeks before that happened, I was reading some article I found on dig that was all about, you know, airport security keeps us from bringing things on the planes.
But the real nest next threat is what people can do to planes from the ground.
And I was like, no way.
But then if you go to the In-N-Out burger that's near LAX, there's a great view of...
I was thinking this the other day while I was traveling.
We're going through the airport, and they're going through all your shit, and they're scanning you, and you're putting your hands over your head, and the radio thing checks your body for weapons, and you go through, and you get the clear, and you go.
But it's only the airport.
There's places where people congregate by the thousands, and there's virtually no security whatsoever, like malls.
When was the last time nobody checked shit at the mall?
You go to the parking lot, it's filled with cars.
Yeah, Times Square.
You walk through, there's thousands of people in these malls.
I'm not a criminal, and I'm not a threat, and I'm not a terrorist, and I don't have any plans on ever being one.
So when I'm doing this, I'm like, this is just so crazy that this tiny, minute, one one-hundredth of one percent of the population, if it's even that, that you ever have to worry about.
It's probably not even that, statistically.
Look, one percent of the population means out of a hundred million, you have a million people, right?
It's very, very, very, very, very small what the actual threat is.
But because of these fuckheads, these actual threats, everyone has to be massively inconvenienced.
So I find it to be incredibly inefficient, ridiculous, and almost...
It almost sort of enforces this idea of instability, because although 99.9999999% of people are nothing to worry about, because there is this minute, tiny threat.
Everyone has to be inconvenienced.
Everyone has to be a suspect.
And you have to be treated by these people that are getting paid very little money in high-stress situations.
They're not experts at sociology or psychology, rather.
They're not experts in how their behavior impacts people who are being treated like threats.
There's a distinction between that job and working at a complaint department where the complaint department, maybe you're helping people with the problem they're experiencing.
But if all you do is stop people from bringing in the bottle of wine that they want to have, You don't work with them to make it work.
Something about the moon doesn't mean that they're going to believe me.
And that's one of the things people don't think about when they imagine being the king if they could travel back in time is that, sure, you could explain to people that where you're from, everyone has a cell phone.
But could you invent one for them?
No.
Could you put a satellite up into orbit?
No, but you could explain that in the future people will put things into orbit.
But would you know more about how to get something into orbit than just some rando guy from the year 1200?
Obama came under a lot of criticism for this whole, you know, you didn't build it thing.
Like, if you built a small business, you didn't build that infrastructure.
You didn't build those.
But that is kind of...
I don't think he was eloquently put and it left open a lot of room for counter.
But the reality of it is, every single thing that any human being has invented only took place because someone...
Someone invented the ability to communicate.
Someone invented education.
Someone invented a society that's civil enough that you could think and pontificate on these things and not have to worry about the barbarians coming over the hills with fucking spears.
All this only takes place because the only reason why you can build a rocket is because someone built alloys, because someone figured out propellants, because someone figured out contained explosion, because someone figured out velocity and speed and How much energy you actually have to have to escape the energy of gravity pulling you down.
The pull of the earth and then the resistance of air and all these different variables.
About the various times throughout history where locusts had filled the sky like clouds of locusts.
And it was about the Old West and the army being brought in to deliver food to these poor people that had lived in the 1800s or 1700s or whatever the fuck it was.
But they had these black and white photos of the army and they're bringing in these...
These wagons filled with food and these poor people.
Their crops have just been completely devastated by these things that just showed up and filled the sky.
These grasshoppers.
If you could go back and talk to those people and explain pesticides and shit.
What we need to do is find the root cause of the problem and find these bugs and keep them from breeding.
They'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Like, pesticides?
What is that?
Well, it's a chemical that you spray on and it keeps the plants from...
Like, if I went back to before there was pizza, I could probably still make a pizza because as long as bread had still been, like, invented and there was cheese and meat, I could combine them in the right way to make a pizza.
I don't know how to exactly make pizza dough from the ingredients they'd have back in the past.
But now it's become bizarre, and it's not really one.
It's one that's a figurehead which is controlled by other giant groups of Individuals which we call corporations and military industrial complex and all these different various points of influence that are trying to change the course of how things are done in order to benefit themselves or their group And I mean it's essentially like alpha male shit, but on this really bizarre and distorted scale Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean, it's really just the same as monkeys, right?
And how much would that change someone's life or a group of people's lives or a community's life if Bill Gates decided, okay, I'm going to create Utopia.
I'm going to go to Tijuana and I'm going to buy it.
I'm going to buy everything.
How much would it cost to buy everything in Tijuana?
I've always wanted to do an episode about that and actually work with a bank and go to their vault and say, could I show people a million dollars in hundreds?
Well, I feel like, you know, running something like a strip club is pretty good because the clients are unlikely to really ever want to tell a lot about how much they spent and what they spent it on.
So you could easily say, yeah, I made a million dollars last year at my strip club.
Like, I dare you to find the clients and account for all of this.
Just keeping stacks of it in your house means that maybe you could totally go for nice dinners all the time, but you can't buy a house very easily if everyone just goes, well, how are you paying for this?
I have a room full of cash that I don't want a bank to know that I have.
Well, you know, they were running into this issue in Colorado with medical marijuana, then becoming, or recreational marijuana, rather, becoming legal, and then banks were not accepting the money from these people.
So essentially you have these workers, you know, I don't know how much they're paying them per hour, but they're driving around with insane amounts of money.
Not only that, here's where it gets really tricky, and this is important for anybody who's listening to this, that lives in Washington State or lives in Colorado, where as a state, marijuana is legal.
Federally, still not legal.
So, if you go into a national park, and you're in a national park, and you're smoking in Colorado, people are getting arrested.
We had a guy on recently who was a poker pro and he was talking about poker players who come back from other countries and they win these poker tournaments.
They have thousands of dollars and a lot of times it gets taken from them at the border.
Because they don't believe that they won this plan.
You have to prove that you've got $50,000 on you.
Oh yeah, you're a fucking drug dealer.
No, I'm a professional poker player.
I won a tournament.
Here's my paperwork.
Nope, you've got to go to court.
And they would force them to go to court to try to get their money back.
They'd essentially steal their money and then make them...
But when you would think about it, if people can understand the stock market, which they sort of can, and there's so much money involved in the stock market, they would be able to figure out the variables involved in any sort of athletic gambling, too.
If there's money involved, someone's going to try to do really well at it.
Insurance is that way, you know?
There's a bunch of people that are way smarter than you who are cranking away at machines going, what should we charge to make sure that we come out of this well?
I'm sure there's different ways that it works, but I know that when I was in the radio quiet zone in West Virginia, there's no cell phone service, but satellite and GPS worked.
I think it can pull up where you are and how fast you're moving, but it You need the data plan to get the images of the ground and the roads and where's the nearest thing.
That's all from data.
I mean, it depends what your plan is and what device you're using, but...
Or at the very least, when you arose, when your consciousness...
I mean, you know for sure, reasonably sure, that you were unconscious and then you became conscious this morning.
And when you became conscious this morning, you're like, where am I? I'm in my bed.
What time is it?
Let me check my phone.
What's today?
I think it's Wednesday.
Okay, what do I do today?
Oh, I have Michael from Vsauce is coming over.
He's going to do a podcast.
That's going to be cool.
Okay, cool.
And I'm assuming based on my memory that this is the life that I've chosen and that this is the path that I'm on and this is the events that are going to take place based on my iPhone calendar or whatever.
But the reality is it's mostly just memory of a life that I've assumed that I've lived.
When I was a kid, I would freak myself out by just thinking about how I was trapped in my own mind.
No one else was ever going to see out of my eyes.
No one else was me.
And it really made me feel lonely and trapped.
But isn't that, of all the people I could have been seeing out of all the minds I could have been on this one, That's a weird thing to freak out about.
There's gonna come a point in time where there's a much more sophisticated way of doing that and I think it's going to be based on like some sort of a virtual reality Oculus Rift type situation where we're going to have whether it'll be a Google Lens, a contact lens or whether it'll be some sort of a neural implant That's able to accurately record what you see and what you experience.
And then they're going to take it to the next level.
And the really advanced versions of it, we're going to be able to record emotions and touch and feeling and the battles that you have in your mind of perception.
The battles of is this person being mean or are they just doing their job or how do I go with this?
Is this traffic annoying or is it fascinating?
There's all these cars.
What's my take on this?
And how do I choose to perceive the world?
Because that's a lot of what the world is.
The choices that you make in perception.
It's not just the perception itself, but how do you interpret that perception and what do you decide that it means?
Like, you automatically, you've developed a pattern where you automatically assume the world's out to get you.
Like, I know a dude, and he's, I wouldn't say he's smart, because he's socially very dumb, but he collects a lot of information, and he believes that he's smart.
It's one of the ones that conspiracy theorists love to point to because it's pretty fascinating.
In 1962, this was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Operation Northwoods was a plan to get the support of the American public for a war against Cuba.
And what they were going to do is they were going to blow up a drone airliner.
This is one of the big ones, because it was right around the time where we were considering going to war with Cuba, because Cuba was allied with the Soviet Union, the whole deal.
And they were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay and kill American soldiers.
I mean, there was a whole series of events that they were planning.
This was all vetoed by Kennedy.
And it was a real false flag plan.
And if you look at that, you realize, well, that's how they think.
Like, the people that were running the government at that point in time, at least, in 1962, there was a certain faction of them that thinks this way.
Changes, evolves, becomes more complicated, becomes more, you know, they get better, they innovate.
Everything.
It's just the way things go.
Nothing stays still.
Everything must elevate.
Including It's conspiracies.
I mean, if that's the case, if Operation Northwoods was really signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Freedom of Information Act, the documents that have been released show that it was, if that's the case, and no one went to jail for that, because no one did, those are fucking criminals.
I mean, those guys were planning on killing the children of Americans who went over and We're working as soldiers, believing that they were defending freedom and all this jazz, but they were going to be killed by other American soldiers or other American military people who are working in cahoots with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
So if that is true, you look at things like that and you've got to go, okay, well, of course people believe in conspiracies.
If you don't believe in conspiracies, I believe you're infantile.
I believe it's a silly thing to think that the government doesn't conspire.
When you hear that Dick Cheney and George Bush were considering a false flag attack that they were going to say that Iran had attacked America, this was something they had considered before they left office.
So, the problem is that there are conspiracies.
But then there's another problem is that people see them in everything.
They see them in things that aren't conspiracies.
Like, they see chemtrails.
They believe that contrails that are created when jet engines pass through certain levels of condensation in the atmosphere is actually the government spraying artificial clouds over us.
And in the interview, he was talking about chemtrails, and he was talking about growing up, and that, you know, when he was a kid, he would see these trails in the sky, and then all of a sudden, everyone would be fighting.
First of all, obviously, he has formulated this incredibly complex theory that these people are being quiet, that thousands of pilots, hundreds of pilots, whatever, engineers, people that have armed the planes, all these people have formulated these Methods of distributing some sort of unheard of chemical that can cause people to be aggressive and fight and only target the hood.
And there's a thing called the human genome, this very complex program that has been devised to understand the ingredients, the very components of human life.
But yet, you haven't looked at all into this whole plain spring fake clouds thing.
You know, when I was a kid, I used to see these trails in the sky all the time.
And so that's cool.
A jet just went over.
And then you started to see a whole bunch of them.
And the next thing you know, everybody in your neighborhood was fighting and arguing and you didn't know why.
And you really didn't know why.
I mean, everybody was fighting.
So he started riffing about the chemtrails.
And he started to say things that hit home so hard and I would recommend that everybody try to get what he said online or wherever and try to get a copy of it and just listen to it because I was so moved that I had to write this song.
Yeah, the government actively tried to figure out a way to make a bomb where they could ignite it in the air, blow it up in the air, detonate it, rather, and it would cause everyone on the ground to fall in love with each other and be gay, and they would lose the will to fight.
I don't know if it's true, but what I had heard was that this was when Richard Gere had left Scientology, and that one of the ways they got back at him was this horrible rumor.
It might not even be true, but my friend Eddie grew up in L.A., and I grew up in Boston, and we met when we were both in our, like, 30s, and we had both heard the same rumor growing up.
So, somehow or another, that rumor got across the continent.
Which is really strange when you stop and think about the length of time between religious stories being told over campfires and through oral traditions and them actually being written down somewhere.
Because if that story about the woman at the chicken restaurant, which I didn't even tell very well, but it's not even very funny, but it's just that story was accepted as fact.
I went on this fishing trip, and the guy who was the...
The captain of the boat, a really cool guy, was telling me about...
He actually grew up in California and then made his way out to Hawaii and decided to stay there.
And we were talking about the local traditions and the folklore involving how the islands were formed, how the stars were formed, and all their stuff was in songs.
Yeah, yeah.
Their whole history was just oral tradition.
I mean, it's a people, you know, the Polynesian people settled in Hawaii first, a people whose entire history was these very, very important stories that they told to each other, but they never really wrote them down.
The whole thing's circular, it's spinning, it's spinning around another ball, and that ball's a part of a giant cluster that's spinning around a circle.
And so, yeah, there's a famous puzzle about this, and I think it goes something like, a hunter walks, you know, 10 feet south and then 10 feet east and 10 feet north, and he's back where he began, what color was the bear he shot.
And the answer is white, because he's clearly at the North Pole.
That's the only way you could do that walking.
Like, go south, go east, go north, and you're back where you started.
So if you hold your hand up, I guess, and that is the L, like it forms it, that's the one that is the L. So if you hold your hand up and you see an L in front of you, that's the left.
There's a difference between dumb and a lack of data.
When you have a person and they're 50 years old and they still think that the world is flat and they still think the Earth is 6,000 years old and they still think, well, that's a dumb person.
They've been exposed to 50 years of Western civilization And their perceptions of life are insane.
Given the data that's available, that's a dumb person.
But a baby is just this bundle of potential that doesn't have any data yet.
And so they're just acting on what seems to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint or from a genetic standpoint.
They're animal instincts.
Very bizarre, the idea.
Also, the idea that this is all changing and growing, and then your children will have the benefit of the information that you've accumulated over your life, like through epigenetics, and it's going to somehow or another pass to your children.
Yeah, I haven't seen a lot of evidence for that kind of stuff, but there was a famous experiment where a guy taught worms to move through a maze and then he like ground them up and fed them to some other worms.
And those worms knew how to solve the maze without having to be taught.
But it's never been replicated.
But wouldn't that be cool if we found out that there was a chemical basis for memory?
So that's different than just natural selection, where you say, well, the mice that just naturally didn't like that smell were the ones that lived longer, procreated more, and so that's why...
And we have this tendency to want to wrap things up in a nice, neat little bow.
So the concept of natural selection, well, there's natural selection.
This is very simple to explain.
It's natural selection.
No, natural selection is a factor.
That's also a factor.
It's not like it's non-existent.
No, that happens as well.
But then there's also this weirdness.
There's this weirdness where information is transferred.
Right.
I've done jujitsu since 1996 is when I started.
And I've also been a commentator for more than a thousand professional fights.
I've probably seen more mixed martial arts fights than most of the population ever will.
In real life, too.
And my kids, when I watch them roll around, when I watch them play, especially my youngest, she has instinctive moves that I don't think are natural moves.
Like, when they're rolling around, there's a thing called the over-under, and it's what you do when you take someone's back.
Taking someone's back is you gain an advantageous position by being behind them and controlling their body in a way that they can't attack you, but you can attack them.
You're forced into a very defensive position, and they're in a very dominant spot.
And the over-under is one arm over a shoulder, one arm under the armpit, and you clasp your hands together, and it's a very dominant mode of control.
But I don't think it's instinctual, but my daughter goes to it immediately.
When my daughter, who was three at the time, when she was rolling around playing on the bed with my five-year-old, she would go over-under all the time, and then she would throw her legs around and get her hooks in.
These kind of conversations are always really cool though.
Whenever you're involved in a conversation where you're sitting with someone who you've never talked to before and you start going over weird shit like genetics and what causes a person to be this and that and what are the steps that you take to become a human being and It's also a rudimentary knowledge of how...
When he was talking about...
We were talking about learned things and how much of it is natural selection.
And then you find out things like the mouse test, where they know that mice associate that sense of smell, that smelling that thing, with an electrical shock, even though these mice have never experienced that electrical shock.
It was their parents doing it.
That's pretty clear evidence that there's something being transmitted through genetics.
Whatever it is, they don't know.
But we'll know someday.
Someday we'll be like, oh, well that's, yeah, they definitely, like we've found, we've isolated the genes that cause people to transmit certain bits of information to their children that are useful.
Like right now, we're not much different than the people that we mock from a long time ago that thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, you know?
Like, the amount of information that we have, I was just saying that As you're back from your potty break.
The amount of information that we have today is kind of akin to, like, we mock people that lived in Galileo's time for not knowing that he was correct, that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
You know, we're like, God, I have to torture the poor guy.
Or Bruno for saying that the universe is infinite.
But yeah, it's not linear entirely, but it's kind of like an up and down, and it's progressive.
So at this point in time, we're talking about information being transferred from parents to children, and we're like, I wonder, I wonder, maybe natural selection?
But we don't know.
One day, whether it's a thousand years from now or whatever it is, they're going to go, oh, those dummies, they didn't even know.
Lava lamps are used to generate random numbers, and they can generate them very, very well.
They're very difficult to find patterns in.
I don't know how they do it, but they'll look at the shapes and movement of a lava lamp, and that'll generate numbers, and they don't have patterns in them.
And random.org uses atmospheric noise, just noise in the atmosphere like radio static to generate numbers.
Pretty good.
Lava lamps, there used to be a website that had a lava lamp and you would type in, give me a random number, and it would, based on the state of the lava lamp, give you a random number.
So if you watched a lava lamp, so if we had that lava lamp on and we maintained the same amount of heat coming off of the light bulb and the same water temperature and the wax.
The initial conditions are so difficult to know precisely enough to predict which way it's going to float.
We only know the temperature to a few degrees or a tenth of a degree, but that millionth of a degree difference is what's going to make it move now rather than in the next second.
Would it be possible to make an ultimate lava lamp that was incredibly precise?
So the amount of heat that comes off of the bulb was really precise.
The temperature of the water was incredibly stable.
The consistency of the wax was uniform throughout and that you set this like perfectly measured lava lamp with the glass being the exact same diameter or the exact same thickness rather over the entire circumference of the bottle that holds the water and the wax in.
Would it be possible to make an ultimate precise lava lamp?
I still don't think that it would be precise like symmetric all the time unless you put in special controls that like didn't release the wax until it was ready or whatever.
Yeah, it's just like every little movement of those blobs is affecting all the other molecules inside that system, and those are affecting how something moves later.
It's like a butterfly flapping its wings causing a tornado in Brazil, you know.
Neil deGrasse Tyson did a great calculation in his book...
Death by Black Hole, I think, where he says, yeah, just what it took to send up that satellite that never comes back down means that Earth is going to be a few degrees in some different direction in a million years.
And we don't know which direction that's going to be unless we have an incredible amount of information about that satellite and how it affected Earth when it left.
Like every day they were just like checking like, yeah, yeah, same time of day.
Somehow I knew that it was the same time of day and I marked it.
Or maybe, what do they do?
They just watch and see where the sun was when it was at its highest point, make a little mark somehow, and then they realize, hey, it's going in this like loop thing.
That's one of the ways that a lot of these revisionists of ancient Egyptian history point to the possibility, besides the erosion of the Sphinx, point to the possibility that the Sphinx is far older than we think it is, is that at 10,500 BC, it was pointing towards the constellation Leo.
This lion was representative of this constellation that has sort of been universally described as being associated with a lion because of its shape.
This is the reason why they believe that 10,000, besides the fact that there's all this water erosion around the Sphinx, that can only be attributed to thousands of years of rainfall.
And the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 B.C., Which they think, you know, they think that they want to attribute the Sphinx to the same people that they believe built the pyramids, which is about 2500 BC. But they think that actually there might have been many, many, many older kingdoms.
There's hieroglyphs, apparently, that date back to 34,000 BC. I don't know any of this.
Yeah, they date back as far as their descriptions, not as far as the actual carbon dating.
This constellation, Leo, at 10,500 BC, aligning itself with the Sphinx.
Also, coincidentally, the 10,500 BC lines up pretty close to what they believe 12,000 years ago was a massive asteroidal impact all over the Earth, like this nuclear glass.
I think it's called tritonite.
You know that stuff that they find, they do core samples and they find it at 12,000 years all over the place.
Meteor impacts, meteor showers that could have led to the extinction of saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, all these different animals that died off at a very similar time period.
60%, I think, of all land mammals died off during that one time.
The theory is that just this huge interruption of life, this massive meteor shower that they found all throughout Europe and Asia, this nuclear glass that's very similar to the The type of glass that they find after nuclear detonation tests.
That this nuclear glass, which exists all over the place, is indicative of massive impacts.
That something happened.
And it's not in one spot.
It's in multiple spots all over the place at the same time.
Much more likely to be a meteor shower than anything else.
And that probably was also the cause of the end of the Ice Age.
12,000 years ago, more than half of North America was covered in a mile-high sheet of ice.
And so they think that what caused that stuff to rapidly change was most likely the same thing that caused this nuclear glass to be all over the place.
with when the Sphinx was around.
That, you know, it could be that there was a fairly advanced civilization at that point in time slammed with meteor showers, massive amounts of people die, and then they sort of have to rebuild.
And they kind of learn, like, it took them a few thousand years to get back on their feet.
Well, the idea that it's been a linear progression, complete linear progression, straight line from caveman to us, seems a little silly when you see all the impacts that we know for sure happened.
When you look at the Clovis Comet, when you look at all the different...
The Holocene crater, all these different impacts that they know happened.
And when things do happen, all these stories, like the Noah's Ark story, Epic of Gilgamesh, all the different cataclysmic events that have been documented through folklore, most likely some shit went down.
And that's the idea that, that's what freaks me out about hard drives.
That's what freaks me out about the idea of everything being stored on computers.
Yeah, if you really stop and think, we're in the process of something.
We're right in the middle, or not even.
We're in the middle in that it's going on, but it's constantly going on.
It was going on when there were single-celled organisms.
It was going on when...
The star supernova to create carbon, which created carbon-based life, which created us, which created everything that came before us, which is going to create everything that comes from us.
That would be, if I could see something, I don't think, if I had a choice between going a million years in the future or a million years in the past, just for a visual glimpse.
A million years in the past is pretty fascinating, but a million years in the future, to see what a human being looks like a million years from now, that's what I would want.
And we've made changes unnecessary in a way because we have climate-controlled buildings and we have vehicles and we have medical care that can keep things the way they are.
And the symbiotic relationship that we have with this technology, which now you leave your phone behind, you feel naked, eventually it's going to be something much more integrated.