Duncan Trussell and Christopher Ryan join Joe Rogan to debunk cultural myths—from Star Wars’s simplicity to North Korea-style drug war propaganda, where LSD users face jail while veterans with PTSD are ignored. They contrast hunter-gatherer fulfillment (fire-cooked meat, communal bonds) with modern emptiness (antidepressants, artificial hygiene), like the "Sweaty T-Shirt Study" exposing birth control’s role in disrupting natural attraction. Ryan’s antibiotic crisis warnings and absurd remedies (seawater, urine) highlight medicine’s overreliance on tech, while Rogan’s alien bunker jokes expose fringe conspiracy theories like Discordianism framing rebellion as a war against "Dark Archons." The episode reveals how societal control—legal, ideological, or even biological—erodes truth and joy. [Automatically generated summary]
Which is, I've noticed that seems to be a quality in people who have a real spiritual practice.
They're funny.
They're always funny.
They always have this real specific non...
Bullshit style of humor.
It's really hard to offend them.
Quite often that's how I can tell if somebody's got a real practice is they're usually impossible to offend.
Like there isn't anything that you can say that's gonna make them upset.
But you know, the alarm bells start going off in my mind when you get around people Who you say something and you see, oh shit, I triggered the alarm system.
I have offended this person, which is really curious to me.
How are you in tune with the universe and yet still something that a monkey descendant says out of the end of his feeding tube causes you to feel revolted?
The way they've described it, or I've heard it described, which is super cool, whenever Ram Dass talks about his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, Is that there was nothing there.
Like, there's no obstruction.
Like, anything that...
Everything was just sort of going through this person, you know?
As opposed to, like, me, I get on the phone with Bank of America, they've frozen my card because I went to Australia, and, like, I'm...
unidentified
Seething with rage, you know, like, what the fuck?
I heard Wim Hof talking about this, and maybe it was on your podcast.
He was talking about being under the ice and his retinas froze, and he couldn't find the hole to get out.
And whoever he was talking with asked him, like, so, you know, what was the panic like?
And he said, well, you know, when I'm in those situations, or like when I got lost in a whiteout on Mount Everest in my shorts, there's no stress.
Because then it's all just like it takes you back to yourself, to who you really are.
And I know in my core I am like, you know, competent and, you know, confident.
And so he was saying like it's been demonstrated that you can generate more stress hormones lying in your bed and just thinking about something stressful.
On his phone, with his phone literally on the steering wheel, as he's texting and driving, it just went right into my lane.
It's constant.
People are constantly doing it.
They're just not paying attention.
And if something happens, when the guy rear-ended me, the lane was closed for some reason, like construction, so everybody had gotten to that on-ramp on Hollywood or the 101 in Highland.
You know that exit?
And it was shut down for whatever reason.
So we were all stopped in a big line.
And this dude just barely paid attention.
And then all of a sudden, shit!
And I could see his face gritting his teeth and pulling his face.
Remember Bill Burr telling us what it, he was, I guess at the Ice House, he's like, riding a motorcycle is like, imagine sitting on the hood of your car, driving that way.
It's like, you look down at the road buzzing by you at 70 miles an hour, and it's like, I could reach out my toe and just grind it off, you know?
Yeah, but it's like a metaphor for so many other things in life, right?
Do you really want to have the illusion of separation?
Or are you actually safer being intimate with the danger of what's going on, so you're hypervigilant?
Because in a car, you're looking at your phone, you're fucking with the radio, because you've got this sense that I'm in a room and everything's cool until you hit the tree, you know?
Yeah, it's the space between automation and like semi-automation and full automation that is going to be really dangerous.
But man, the dream is you leave your house, your car looks like a little living room, a little pod with a couch in it, coffee maker, a TV, and you just sit on the couch.
Tell the car or take me to Vegas.
And it just takes you there.
And you just relax and you sleep.
You can look out the window.
The interstates are just going to look like houses.
I'm sure there's a nostalgia attached to antiquated technologies, but it's like, sure, great, but I'm going to be sitting in my pleasure pod with VR goggles on as I get taken to Florida.
Someone had to be the first person to be like, you know what, let's put a big sheet over you and cut a hole right over your pussy so I don't see you anymore.
It says that, that they're not responsible for any accidents, so you should always, you know, watch the road and be prepared to step in if something goes wrong.
Back in my computer-making days, I used to have friends that would get the latest builds of software, of operating systems, rather, and so they would run, like, beta versions of, like, new Windows operating systems, and the shit was always crashing.
But it was kind of half of the fun.
Half of the fun for those guys was like saying, hey man, I'm using Windows NT, you know, blah, blah, blah, and this is the new shit, and it's really only for servers, so I have to have a workaround with certain drivers for video cards.
Don't catch the cholera as they're on your fucking slippery ride over the top of the mountain where you might wind up eating all your friends because you get stuck up there.
Did you hear about that guy that was, oh, he went to sea, he got shipwrecked at sea for like over a year with another guy, and he made it by like drinking rainwater and eating turtles and all kinds of crazy shit, but it's the nuttiest story.
He's like on a raft for a fucking year.
But his companion's family is now suing him because they say that he ate them.
So then I read this guy, Marvin Harris, this anthropologist who wrote a book called Cannibals and Kings.
He went back and looked at societies that were cannibalistic and those that weren't, especially in the South Pacific, because some islands were, some islands weren't, whatever.
And in Latin America.
And what he determined was that the societies that were cannibalistic had a lack of protein.
There were no animals that could be domesticated.
And so when they killed people in battle, they ate them because they were protein hungry or starved.
But Europeans had plenty of domesticated animals, so they didn't need the protein because they had the goats and the pigs and whatever.
But if you think about Mexico, there's nothing that they could domesticate except turkeys or dogs or animals that eat the same food as humans.
So you need to domesticate an animal that doesn't eat what humans eat.
Apparently Amanita Muscaria is very hard to get right.
I've never gotten high off of it.
We tried it once.
It didn't work.
But then we tried psilocybin mushrooms with it, and we had a fucking insane journey.
So they might have worked together in a sort of synergistic way, but apparently by itself it's really hard, and they think that it might be a geographical variant, and then also seasonally, and then genetically.
You have to get the right stuff, and the right stuff might not even exist in most places anymore.
And all you have to just consider, I mean, this is the most rational way to look at it.
If you lived at that time, and you had no science, you had some myths and fables, and you had some rules to live by, and you found those things, you would think that you had found God.
Right.
If you just ate, you don't have a scale, you're just eating these mushrooms that you find, and you eat 10 grams of them, good lord, you're gonna meet God.
You, like, literally will be transported to God.
And everybody, you know, people will listen to this kind of shit, and they'll go, oh man, that's so stupid, you know, you're just tripping, you're just hallucinating.
You gotta take this into consideration, I know I've said it before, but it is important to repeat.
When you have an experience, it doesn't matter if that experience is like you could put it on a scale or hit it with a stick.
It's a real experience.
No one's saying that you're meeting God when you do mushrooms.
But what I am saying is it's the same thing as meeting God.
The experience is so profound that it would be like doing that.
When you do DMT, perfect example, it is like meeting the highest power It's like meeting a god.
I mean, I trash religion as much as the next guy, but I'm sympathetic for the experience of someone who says, look, I go there, I have these rituals, I smell that stuff, I was raised in this tradition, and I am transported to another world that makes my life better.
You know what I think is problematic is the label.
Like, even how I said it.
Like, you'll meet God.
Like, that word is so loaded.
That's a big part of the problem.
A big part of the problem with just the idea of religious ideas.
Like, forget about...
The words that you're using, whether you're using the word prayer or scripture or whatever the name you have for your deity, those are just noises you're making and they correspond to whatever the cultural context is of the Hindu god or the Christian god.
But if you just think of the feeling, The feeling of wanting to be a good Christian, right?
The feeling of wanting to please God, not by blowing up abortion clinics or any of those, none of the wacky aspects of it that we sort of connect to it when we think about like radical, fundamental religion on any side of the fence, right?
But the feeling that you're getting, like you're feeling, if you're all together in church and you really are praising his name, You really are praising the idea of this loving God that wants fellowship and wants camaraderie and brotherhood.
Whatever that feeling is and whatever that thought is, take out all the words, Jesus Christ and praise Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad and Allah.
Take out all those words and what is the feeling?
That feeling is the search for this positive feeling.
This positive source, like this thing that ultimately we can all eventually reach if we put aside all of our ridiculous monkey behavior and greed and jealousy and anger and lust and just get to us at our very best.
You know, and it's almost like it's like a guide to get you there.
But we get tripped up on the words that are attached to the guide, like the word God or the word Muhammad or the word Allah or, you know, Krishna.
Duncan started off talking about how you can recognize someone, not just as a spiritually enlightened person, but as just a person you want to hang out with, if they are really hard to offend, if they have a good sense of humor.
If they don't have a sense of humor, there's something wrong.
But you think about the Old Testament God.
He's the most easily offended motherfucker imaginable.
You know, like the book of Job.
Have you ever read the book of Job?
It's fucking amazing.
Like, Job is this, you know, great guy, does everything he's supposed to do, everything's cool, and the devil and God are hanging out one day, and the devil's like, The devil says, like, people don't really like you so much, man.
You know, you think everybody loves you.
And God's like, of course people love me.
Look at Job.
He's perfect.
He does everything I tell him.
And the devil's like, yeah, but he only does what you tell him because you've been good to him.
Fuck with him a little bit and you'll see what happens.
So God, being the fucked up asshole that he is apparently, killed Job's wife and kids.
So if you look at the universe, like right now, at this moment, mothers are dying of cancer, kids are getting exploded by bombs, dogs are attacking fucking old people in the park.
You know what I mean?
The story of Job has always struck me more as a kind of like...
The story of how, look, man, you can't understand the infinite.
Like, when I step on an ant, you know what I mean?
To me, it's like, well, I stepped on an ant today, but for whatever that ant's tiny little subjective universe happens to be, I've completely obliterated it.
I wiped it out.
That ant could never possibly understand the interaction that just happened there, but it was a real interaction.
So it seems like the story of Job is more like, What the fuck are you, universe?
This incredible thing that I'm surrounded by that seems to, very capriciously, at random times, just destroy people and lives.
And like, shit man, I just heard about this family driving under an underpass, and like a concrete block fell out of a truck, landed on the goddamn Range Rover, Bam!
Entire family zapped out of this universe.
And to me, Job was...
That's what the story is, is like, how can someone be a servant of love, like what you were talking about?
How can someone connect to this desire to, like...
Give love and happiness and joy into the universe when at any second guaranteed for any human being there could be and there will be a tragedy more devastating than anything you could ever imagine because that's just the way the world works.
You're gonna die, your wife, Your family, your friends, this is the reality we're in, and how in that kind of swirling vortex of chaos and violence do you find a place where regardless of all of that, you will still be committed as much as you can to do that thing you did on the road when the fucking car hit you.
Instead of getting out and fucking pummeling the guy because your adrenaline's flowing, you ask, hey, are you alright?
That's wild.
I mean, to you it might seem like not that big a deal, but if everyone on planet Earth started doing that, whoa, holy shit, it'd be a whole new...
I think, I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but I think there's an underlying assertion of the cruelty of the universe that I think is distorted.
Okay?
I think that, you know, I was watching this nature program a couple weeks ago, and there was a seal.
I may have even talked with you about this last time I was on, but there was like a seal playing in the waves.
And then you hear the like, do, do, do, do, do, do.
And you see the shadow coming up and it's a great white and it hits the seal.
And then the guy, the narrator actually says, we slowed this down to one fortieth of normal speed.
And you see the teeth of it, and the, ah!
unidentified
And the seal's flopping around, and there's blood everywhere.
Well, they think there's an evolutionary advantage to both species, both the predator and the prey, in them having this endorphin release when they get got.
Because when lions attack antelopes or when big cats catch deer, the deer kind of give in, man.
They get jacked, but they kind of fight a little and then they kind of give in.
But bears, those kind of animals, they don't really give in like that.
So if a cat and a mountain lion or a mountain lion rather than a bear go at it, the bear isn't just going to give in to the mountain lion.
If the mountain lion bites the bear in its neck, the bear is going to try to turn and bite him back and they're going to tooth and claw it out.
It's like, I mean, it does sound like dire, but on one level it sounds dire.
But then the idea is like you have to accept the situation that you're in.
And it is true.
We are like being like, we're in the mouth of the most incredible, most powerful, most omnipresent thing ever.
Earlier when you were talking about, you know, you smoke DMT, you have this experience of God.
You see God, whatever it is.
You see this incredible matrix of consciousness.
Theoretically on ayahuasca, I haven't done it on mushrooms.
But the funny thing about it is, right now, minus the psychedelic, you are surrounded by an entire universe of which pieces of the universe are alive and aware of you and are talking to you.
It's novel again, but it's just another level of the same experience that's happening, Partially living universe that has a tendency from time to time to produce life.
This universe that we're in produces life, and you're part of it, and you're surrounded by an infinite ocean of that tendency.
So that's very overwhelming, I think, for people, which is why they begin to accept, oh, this is just completely normal, this thing.
And then that's when you take the psychedelic and you're like, holy shit!
Well, see, when Joe was talking earlier about foragers finding these substances, I was thinking exactly what you're talking about because we take those substances and it's like a revelation, right?
And the veil is pulled back.
What is the veil?
The veil is culture.
We live in a culture that is constantly trying to put out the fire of mystery in us.
It's constantly saying, no, life is about having this car.
This kind of house, get a new air conditioner, go to work.
Don't be looking for mystery.
Just go to work and punch the fucking clock, alright?
Go work in your mine or your cubicle or whatever.
It's constantly trying to get us to accept this bum fucking deal, right?
Whereas foragers, they're surrounded by mystery every day.
Every day, everything's alive.
Everything is full of spirit.
There's the spirit of the river, the spirit of the clouds, the spirit of the air.
They're surrounded by spirits.
So I wonder what their experience with psychedelics is like, because I don't think it has...
I mean, I'm sure it heightens everything and is amazing and obviously has sacred value.
But I don't think it has that same revelatory aspect that it does for us.
It might be a different, even deeper revelatory thing because they're not confined to the bullshit of buildings and streets and traffic lights and taxes and all these things that we hold in the forefront of our mind.
Our consciousness that are really just retarded.
We've created these things.
Most of the things that people come up with to occupy their mind during the day are things that we've come up with that we've discovered or created and decided that they're significant.
It certainly could be or it could be a mechanism for us to continue to create technology and innovate.
Because the best way to do that is to not have a good perspective, not realize that if our perspective is really good and we realize that we're these temporary beings who just love each other and spend as much time together in camaraderie and in friendship as possible, we're not going to get shit done.
We're all gonna look at all the phones we have now and then go, "We're good.
We just keep using these phones and everyone's fine." We look at our TVs and that is a very big TV. We're good.
My computer is super fast.
We're good.
My internet seems fine.
Let's just leave all this stuff alone and hang out.
Anyway, so she made this dinner for me one night, and I went to her place, and everything was beautiful, and it was all set up with candles and nice silver.
And it was escargot.
I don't fucking eat escargot, man.
I'm American.
I don't eat snails.
But I was going to go through it just because she went into all this trouble.
28, 29, something like that.
And so she has this big pot of escargot, all these shells in the sauce, tomato sauce, and she puts it on.
So I pick up the first one and suck up the sauce, and there's no snail.
And I'm like, whew, lucked out.
And then I pick up the next one, same thing.
Again, no snail.
And I'm looking at her across the table, and she's getting this weird look on her face.
We were talking before the podcast started about the social justice warrior placemats that Harvard had given to children to take home with them.
And I say children because if your parents are paying for your education, you're a fucking child.
You're still a child.
I don't care if you're 18. I don't care if you can vote.
I don't care if you can go to war.
They sent these placemats home with these kids explaining how to talk to your parents if controversial issues come up, like if your parents exhibit xenophobia or sexism or transphobia.
Not only that, you're dealing with someone who is encountering bad people all day.
Most of the people that cops encounter all day are breaking the law.
Most of the people, they're either pulling them over or going too fast, or they're doing something stupid, or they're trying to steal something, or they're trying to rob somebody, or they're showing up at a scene after someone's done something fucked up.
So just think about the stress that a normal person's under, and multiply that times a hundred.
You get paid like 40 grand a year.
People want to shoot at you.
You're wearing a goddamn bulletproof vest, and you're going to someone And let's not forget that a lot of these dudes are coming back from wars.
To live in that kind of world where you realize that you just have to accept getting pulled over and you have to accept the fact that there's some chance if you make the wrong move or if the cop snaps for whatever reason, You're dead!
And what about these cases where they, like, swat right into someone's house in the middle of the night and shoot them in bed, and then it's like, oh, wrong house.
And also, think about how much of this is related to drugs.
So when you realize the asset forfeiture is actually happening for something that shouldn't be illegal anyway.
Do you watch...
Have you watched, it's called, like, Drunk Tank.
Have you seen this show?
Where, like, it's like, I don't know, it shows, it's a show where after someone gets pulled over for a DUI, they get thrown in the drunk tank.
Man, there is to me nothing more vile than seeing a cop smugly like searching a person and pulling marijuana out of his pocket and being like, well, well, well, what do we have here?
Marijuana.
Look at this.
That's going to be something that history is going to judge in the most intense way.
Every single cop that's been on a reality show smugly Taking someone's weed for them, putting handcuffs on them because they had weed for eternity.
They're going to be looked back on in a really fucking awful way.
They're going to want to scrub the internet of that footage because they're enforcing a law that, I mean, we all know, I'm going to preach in the fucking choir here, but there's something so foul about it, that smugness, you know?
I don't know if the culture sets out to deny it or if all these things are kind of in place and they all benefit each other and the overall result is that the culture denies its reality.
I don't necessarily think there's any design involved.
The guy who founded advertising, essentially, and also worked for the CIA. Also came up with the, we're defending freedom abroad justification for American military adventures.
I mean, he was central, and he very clearly said, like, we need to create reality for people.
Because if they are allowed to create their own reality, they won't buy stuff.
They won't do what we need them to do.
They won't vote for who we need them to vote for.
So there's an elite that has to create reality for the masses.
If we got assigned to, and we were assholes, and we got assigned to some massive group of people that we needed to control, and we needed them to think that we were in charge.
That was the first thing.
You would have certain rules that they had to abide by.
And the first rule would be, don't let them take psychedelics, man.
Because if they start fucking tripping, they're going to realize we're just three dudes.
Just like them, and they're not going to listen to us anymore, which is why I think there is a five-year mandatory minimum when it comes to LSD, because when you take LSD, the entire thing seems absolutely absurd, from money to the government to jobs.
It all seems like a ridiculous thing that everyone else seems to have accepted as like, yeah, this is just how you do shit.
The people that are enforcing the laws are not the people that created those laws, and the people that are enforcing the laws most Certainly have not experienced these things.
I think that there's a certain momentum that these laws and that this propaganda has sort of set in motion that's going to be really hard to slow down and stop, and we're starting to do that with pot.
The availability and the relaxation of the way people view pot in 2015 is way different than We're doing it with hallucinogens, too.
The people that started those laws, the fucking Joe Fridays, the Dragnet guys, those guys are dead.
So, like, the people that, like, started this whole, the sweeping Psychedelic Legislation Act of 1970, I believe it was, when they made everything Schedule I. Nixon.
Yeah, they were just trying to batten down the hatches.
We gotta stop these fucking hippies.
Like, everything was crazy.
The response to the Vietnam War, everybody wanted to get out.
There was, like, this culture explosion that was going on.
Do you do marijuana like wire wire mushrooms illegal if you've done mushrooms if you've done mushrooms and you think they're illegal Something went wrong someone wrong either you you tried to fight it and the trip took you sideways or You know you didn't get enough of it or you did it with assholes if you heard of the There's a thing.
When somebody gets invested into a religion or a cult, you get into a cult and after you've invested yourself for a certain amount of time, when you get really sucked into the cult, just the fact that you've been in it for 4, 5, 10, 15 years is enough to keep you in it even though you know it's complete bullshit.
So you stay in it only because you've invested too much energy.
They just stick to it because their ego is completely committed to it.
Imagine if like your entire life you had been enforcing legislation that was completely absurd, that wasn't based on anything in reality, that in fact For your entire life, you're enforcing legislation that was in some way dampening or pushing your society back, pushing back the evolution of your culture, and you have to come to terms with the fact that you did that.
You are an agent of the state, and you enforce laws that shouldn't have been there at all.
Man, that's a fucking tough pill to swallow.
The fact that you may have killed some people.
There's people out there who have put bullets in people just for growing marijuana, something out of the ground.
But you have to come to terms with it because it's cowardly to continue to fucking enforce a goddamn thing even though you know that it's no longer relevant.
There's no need to do it.
There never was a need to do it.
You just have to take the bitter pill and go through a few fucking days of feeling guilty, you know, and understand that what you did was wrong.
It's a real easy thing to say, but the problem is until the laws get changed, it's not going to seem real to people that are still caught up in the haze of culture.
Like, you get sucked into it, and you're in it, and that's why people do different things in different places, and it seems normal to them.
And then we see it.
They're, what?
They eat with sticks?
What are they, fucking crazy?
Don't they know about spoons?
It's like culture becomes the norm.
It becomes what you accept.
And right now, our culture accepts the fact that you get locked up for drugs.
And you don't want your kids to be a druggie.
You don't want your kid to be a loser.
They become potheads.
They become lazy.
We have these thoughts that were really all the seeds were started in the 1930s with all those crazy Reefer Madness movies.
I mean, it's the same stuff.
It just has gotten less and less ridiculous.
Even to this day, if you talk about getting high, you talk about smoking pot, the vast majority of people look at it the same way as if you say, I got fucked up.
We went and drank, and I got hammered.
I was so blasted.
But there's a very big difference in what it's doing to your body.
Like, one of them is closing off awareness.
One of them is opening up awareness.
We're putting them in the same category.
And this is not a knock on alcohol.
I'm a fan of alcohol.
I enjoy it.
But it's a completely different experience.
But when you explain it to people, they'll look at you the same way.
Ah, you guys got stoned, huh?
You fucking crazy kids.
Meanwhile, you got stoned and might have realized exactly what was wrong in your relationship and tried to fix your life and wrote something down.
It's going to be like the new chart, the new path of your destiny.
More you got drunk and shit in your neighbor's lawn because you thought it would be cute.
That thing you're talking about, man, that thing where you're like, well, well, well, guess you're high right now, that's deep North Korean level conditioning.
It's no different than people in North Korea praying to dear leader.
You have been, depending on how old you are, you have been in a war.
The war on drugs.
It's a real war.
It's a war where people have been killed and imprisoned.
Conditioned by some very intense brainwashing that was created by the CIA to try to control your mind.
And so you have been infected with propaganda if you think that drugs should be illegal.
You are a victim of the drug war.
And you know another fucking casualty of the drug war?
Truth man, I was thinking like how much I lied to my mom I was in high school taking LSD having these powerful life-changing experiences beautiful experiences where I was realizing so much about Society and myself and a lot of shit I didn't understand and I would have loved to have talked to my mom about it, but I couldn't talk to my mom about it I Because if my mom found out I was doing fucking LSD, she would freak out.
And parents, they go through their kids' drawers.
They become agents of the state.
They're digging through their kids' drawers to try to find a substance that has been on the planet for a very long time, marijuana, or a substance like LSD that is profoundly beneficial to a person who takes it in the right way.
And they've become agents of the state and they're forcing in their house, in the home, which should be a place of absolute truth and trust and acceptance and growth.
It's been transformed into this kind of weird gulag.
It's been turned into this bizarre prison place where the parents somehow have got to enforce these absolutely arbitrary laws and that I don't think that anyone is ever going to be able to calculate how much damage that has done to society, that we have placed our teens into a position where they have to fucking lie to their parents about having the most profound experience accessible via chemicals.
I did it all through high school and I absolutely am so grateful to that.
I'm so grateful for the information stream because I didn't have the internet, man.
My encounter with what LSD was was through pure government propaganda.
It was like finding books where it talks about Timothy Leary.
An insane lunatic who lost his mind.
It paints a picture of people who are advocates of the psychedelic experience as being some kind of evil, drug-addled lunatics as opposed to being what they really are, which is rebels and heroes in a completely insane war that has destroyed countless lives.
So I wasn't able to go on the internet and look this shit up and find out that Indeed this experience that I'm having which appears to be beneficial is truly beneficial to a great many people all I had was Bullshit like you're gonna you know if you take five hits of acid you're legally insane Yeah,
unidentified
or the old classic I made sure to take five so I'm covered if I do something good I'm insane I'm gonna talk like from the 1940s from now on Why, I'm insane, Duncan.
And what's really sad about it is, like, other wars, the casualties, you know, we build walls with names on them in other wars.
But in this particular war, so many people who are just farmers and alchemists are laying in their graves.
And nobody realizes that these were heroes.
These were people who were in the face of insanity making the decision that regardless of what the state was telling them to do, they were going to follow their hearts.
I think there's, I just read about this documentary about the shift in pornography, the way that pornography, that industry is kind of disintegrating because of the internet.
And that guy, I heard that he is part of a, uh, him and some other people have, uh, Said that they're going to give a billion dollars to create a new artificial intelligence research center or something?
You're getting these, like, weird little hits, and it's kind of cool, and it keeps you, like, stuck in a cycle.
But that pull you're talking about, man.
I had this, like, awesome goth friend who was into, like, I can't remember if it's...
There's a differentiation between death metal and black metal, and I was getting in trouble for mixing them up, but, like, he was, like...
Explaining to me about Vlad Vignes, Burzum.
I always get in trouble.
I get the whole story mixed up, but basically he was explaining how these guys are actually burning down churches and they were really hardcore, man!
So he plays this Burzum, this death metal for me.
He's like, listen, I was super stoned.
He's like, listen, listen.
I'm listening to it.
He's like, do you feel the pull?
It's like, shit, man, I do a little bit.
I know what you're talking about.
It's got a weird, dark little gravity to it that if I allowed it to, I could see how I would start getting more and more and more into it.
It's the same with these fucking phones, man.
They have a true...
Weird magnetic subjective magnetism where you always feel it's almost a physical feeling man like you'd almost feel it Pulling your attention towards it.
Well, it's interactive That's the big factor the big factor is it's interactive you click on things you can make things happen You can open things look at pictures.
It's one of the things that people like about Instagram You're you're clicking on it and you go.
Oh look at that picture.
Look at this picture.
Oh, I'm gonna comment And you're interacting.
And that interacting is like some bizarre introduction to a new type of society.
These are the first steps.
These social media steps, these are the first steps.
This new type of integrated communication that we're experiencing.
But like we're talking about with the city, the city separates us from the realization that we are just temporary beings collecting things needlessly because we're only going to be here for a short amount of time, but yet we spend all of our focus trying to accumulate the largest pile of shit before we die.
That's sort of the same thing is going on with phones.
It's the same thing that's going on with everything.
It's like it's slowly pulling us into its trance, and the more we feed into it, the more we work hard, the more they'll make more of these, the more they'll make better ones of these, the more these things will deeper and deeper integrate themselves into your life until the point where they're symbiotic, until the point where that new Google contact lens, have you seen that shit?
This woman named Katie Bowman was on the show, and one of the ways she described it as a cast, she said if you're always looking at something that's the same...
It was Katie Bowman, right?
They brought this up?
Pretty sure.
She was saying if you're always looking at a certain distance, a certain space, then that becomes like a cast.
So if you put your arm in a cast and the muscle atrophies, but when you're outside, like a normal person is, you're looking at things that are close, you're looking at things that are far away, and it doesn't distort your When you're staring at a screen all the time, which I am, all the time, either doing a podcast or going online or whatever, that fucks with your eyes.
That's why, you know, people who would read all the time would get glasses, and people would correlate it, like, oh, he fucked up his eyes from reading.
In fact, I just interviewed a sleep scientist two days ago in San Francisco, a really interesting guy, does research at Stanford, Dan Pardee, and we were talking about that.
It's the blue end of the wavelength, which is what you get from sunlight, affects the centers of your brain that sort of tell you what time it is in your circadian rhythm and all that.
So as you get toward evening, you want the light to glow more and more gold, yellow, and eliminate the blue.
So this app just automatically filters your screen based upon where you are and what time it is.
And it's good.
It helps with the sleep.
Because if you're looking at blue light right before you go to bed, your brain thinks you're in the midday, you know?
They're going to make it out of carbon fiber and they're going to adjust the light in the plane to match the light in the area you're going so that your circadian rhythms don't get interrupted.
We talk about this all the time, but if you really...
Let yourself accept the fact that right now at this moment, flying over neighborhoods are high-tech helicopters scanning the radiation from the houses to find out if inside there are growing plants that aren't accepted by the state.
I'm sure they'll figure out a way to interpolate whatever data they're gathering and turn it into something that isn't shadows.
It's just a matter of time.
And it's a matter of time.
Any technology that is being controlled by the state Because it's too expensive for normal people to obtain.
Eventually, more than likely, will become less and less expensive, and everyone will have it.
So, if right now, there's some insane technology that people are using to look through walls and see shadows fuck, then it's a, what, 10, 15 years before it's gonna be something that you could just order, or something that you can download on your super sophisticated phone.
So let me, if we follow up what you were saying about how something controlled by the state, you know, gets miniaturized and cheaper and eventually becomes available to everyone.
If we apply that same thing to weaponry, I've been thinking about this for a long time.
Are we going to come to the point where any terrorist group, so-called terrorist group, and I use that word in air quotes, can have access to these things?
What's that going to mean to world politics?
Kind of like everyone in Switzerland has guns, you know, this philosophy, if everyone had guns, everyone would chill out and be nice to each other.
Are we going to come to that point internationally, where if people are aggrieved enough, they can really fuck up the game?
Then the tension will shift to not having people so aggrieved.
Because right now, we don't give a fuck, right?
We'll go blow them up.
If they're that pissed off, they're going to come for us, then we'll send drones and kill them all.
But if they could come for us with a speedboat and nukes...
Is that a game changer or do you think the whole thing just shifts to another level and stays the same?
I did an interview at Singularity University, and he brought up this exact thing, which is that, you know, he was explaining it in terms of, Bioweapons that people are creating these like apparently are like fucking around with jeans in their garages.
And then he was saying like things like the ability to launch satellites and just about anything you can imagine.
What he said...
And I think he may have, I mean, I don't know, he didn't say he was exaggerating, but he said we're looking at, if technology continues to accelerate as it is, we're looking at a point in human history where anybody, if they wanted to, could destroy the entire planet or cause massive damage.
And so, You think to yourself, alright, well let's imagine that that was the case, and somehow, by some miracle, every government of the world suddenly figured out a way to address everybody's personal issues.
There was still gonna be one or two, more likely a thousand people, who were like, no, that's cool, man, but...
I think I'm gonna detonate this nuclear bomb that I've created in my 3D printer getting from fucking who knows how I mean it's a big question mark or something even worse than that so this thing what you're talking about I think is the that awful race Terence McKenna talked about that we're in which is that here we have this race between absolute destruction and some kind of via tech technology that doesn't even exist yet and some kind of utopian Awakening.
I know this kind of stuff probably makes you want to punch me, but...
But these are these two races that are happening right now.
One of them is, without question, technology is going to get to the point where every single human has access to some kind of device more powerful than any other human in the past ever had access to.
And the question is, Is that going to happen before some other form of technology emerges that makes us all unify into one organism or some beautiful thing happens?
Like, we need some sort of a problem to overcome it.
We need competition.
We need a yin and a yang.
We need a dark and a light.
We need...
You know, we need a tide.
We need, like, a cycle.
It's almost like we need this resistance of, like, us building towards this technological singularity, almost, that's gonna be in your fuckin' iPhone, and everyone's gonna have the ability, and we're like, well, we have to fix humanity in order to have this happen!
The only way that we're gonna survive is we fix humanity!
And so, you know what I've been thinking?
And this is something, I've never talked to an economist about this, but, in my own stupid head, I think we're gonna run into a bottleneck with technology, and I think one of the big bottlenecks is technology is all about access to information, right?
Technology, like as far as what's going on, it's like your ability to do things, whether it's to project images on screens or to download things faster or to number crunch or the various different things that technology can do.
But what we're using, the way we're using it today, A big factor is the ability to exchange information and the access to information and the access to each other.
And it seems like it's getting closer and closer and closer, right?
Access is getting quicker.
There's more information.
It's easier to get to.
The boundaries between people are getting smaller and smaller.
What's the bottleneck?
Bottleneck's going to be money, and money is ones and zeros.
That's what money is.
Ultimately, all information becomes available to all people at all times.
That's ultimate enlightenment, right?
Instantaneous information constantly available to everyone.
Well, isn't money information now?
Because money's not sacks of gold.
You're not talking about, you know, I've got 15 bushels of gold.
How many you got?
I win.
No, we're talking about some weird ones and zeros and plastic that makes these ones and zeros transfer.
Your magnetic strip, you slide on the machine, you punch in your numbers.
It's not real anymore.
It's information.
And transferring our money to information.
The bottleneck is going to be money.
We're going to come to this ultimate point where we realize, look, we can't protect money anymore.
You can't say, this is Duncan's money, this is Chris's money, because it's going to be just money.
It's going to be just money.
And, I mean, maybe there'll be some sort of a merit-based use system Where you can have access to money or use money.
We'll have to figure out some sort of a way around it, but it'll have to be some sort of like ethical thing that we all agree on.
If I'm looking at it correctly and I'm looking at all these trends that lead to quicker and quicker access to information, more and more availability of that information, access to information becoming universal, what's the money?
Money is information.
It's ones and zeros.
That's all it is.
Well, how are you going to stop it if that's the trend?
If the trend ultimately becomes instantaneous, constant access to all information for everybody, no secrets, none exist anymore.
They don't exist.
I can read your email.
You can read mine.
We're all communicating with each other.
That's it.
There's no more secrets.
How does money fit in there?
Unless we go back to fucking collecting clamshells and putting them on strings and this is, look how many knots I have on my string.
Grant Morrison, he writes a bunch of incredible comic books.
One of them I'm super into right now are graphic novels called The Invisibles.
But he's really smart.
There's a Grant Morrison lecture.
He was at a Disinfo gathering, and he gives this really cool lecture or talk.
And one of the things he said is that the super elite...
They have gone back to a barter economy because money doesn't mean anything to you if you have billions and billions and billions of dollars.
So the normal way to get someone to do something is to say, okay, I'll give you X dollars for you to do this thing.
But if you've got infinite money, And someone asks you to do something to give you more money to add to your infinite pool of money, it's not an incentive anymore.
You're not incentivized by money, so it's more like, what can you do for me?
It goes back to some kind of weird, maybe you're gonna barter power, maybe you're gonna barter some Access or something like that, but money is irrelevant to the super elite.
Money only means something to people who are in the lower and middle class.
Once you have an infinite amount of the shit, it's completely and absolutely irrelevant, which is what you're saying.
Everything then, theoretically, would have to go back to some weird barter economy.
Right, but we're never going to reach a point of ultimate resources where everyone has the same access to things that the super elite does because there's just not enough stuff.
Like, technology is doing the thing to us that the fucking face suckers on aliens do.
It started off far away.
It was our phones.
It was our computers.
Then it, like, it was on our desks.
It was a nice, safe distance.
Then it got into our pockets.
It tried to climb onto our face with the Google Glasses, but nobody liked that.
But now it's getting into our eyes, and it's not going to stop at our eyes.
Technology is going to merge with our consciousness, and when it merges with our consciousness, the theory would be that it could somehow create experiences that were indistinguishable from reality, which means that, really, what's the difference?
I equate it to, and you might know this, that every locust starts off as a grasshopper.
And what happens is there's this particular, the best example is in North Africa.
It's this species of grasshopper that when the density, the population density gets tight, sufficiently tight, there's a trigger point.
And different genes are triggered and activated in the body.
They're pre-existing genes, so it's the same DNA, but it changes the shape of the head, changes the legs, changes the coloration, and changes the behavior, and that's when they become locusts and swarm.
And so I think that humans are like the grasshopper locusts, and I think that with agriculture, we became locusts and started swarming, and we're well into swarm behavior at this point.
And so for the sake of argument, I would say...
Human, the way I would define it, is hunter-gatherer, which is 95 plus percent of our time on the planet.
That's human behavior.
And what we are now is shifted into this other, you could say artificial, you could just say emergent behavior pattern that conflicts with our grasshopper-ness, right?
And that we're suffering from.
That's what this latest book is about.
And so...
You know, I would say we're no longer human.
It's like we're a bunch of poodles talking about when we stop being wolves, you know?
Mitch Hedberg's got that great joke, like, thank God the fish can't scream because the ocean would be the scariest place because you'd just be hearing screaming.
I haven't done one for about six months, but the last one I did was an animal that I shot, and I smoked it in my...
You know, I brined it for six days, and then I smoked it.
It was like this big project that I did.
And yeah, it was a way different sort of a feeling when you're eating it.
It's like I have a leg.
I have a pig leg of a full ham on the bone.
It's about that big.
It's sitting in my freezer that I'm eventually going to brine sometime soon.
And I'll stick that sucker in this, it's like water with garlic and salt and brown sugar, and it sits in there for about six days.
And then I smoke it at like 250 degrees for hours and hours until it's just this juicy, delicious, 140 degrees in the center, so you know all the parasites, potential parasites are dead.
It's just like, it's a really cool grill, man, and it's a fire grill, so you've gotta, you know, so there's no, it's not a gas grill, so you have to adjust the, there's like all these wonderful dials you have to adjust to get the heat right, but yeah, man, like when you're sitting over an open fire cooking, It feels good.
I mean, I know what you mean.
It's like this thing like, oh shit, I miss this feeling.
This feels as good as when I jump into a swimming pool or something.
Well, there's also this, like, there's moments that people throughout history have had success hunting and then eaten that meal over a campfire, and when you do that, that is the most rewarding of all fires.
Like, I've eaten meat that we shot, like, hours before from a deer on a campfire in the middle of Montana, and it was one of the greatest nights of my life.
It was amazing.
Me and Brian Callahan and Steve Rinella and my friend Ryan Callahan and a bunch of other friends were on this show.
And when we were sitting around this fire, we were eating, I was like, I can't remember a more enjoyable meal.
Because there's fire and there's an animal that was just killed and we're cooking it and preparing it together.
There's all this camaraderie.
There's this successful hunt aspect of it.
And then there's this primal satisfaction that you get from watching meat cook over fire.
We're sleeping in a van, even, you know, just the sound.
So I think this is the key to human happiness that we're ignoring, that our society takes all these things, that we're free and daily reality for our ancestors...
Takes them away and sells back cheap copies, along with antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.
Do you think that it's possible that we, like you said, are no longer human and we're becoming this other thing, that this is a drawn-out process and we're just caught up in the wake of it?
But it's that, when people get caught up in the symbol versus what the symbol is representing, and completely ignore the fact, like think of how many different forms of fuck there are, like the term fuck, or how many different forms of the word shit there are.
And all of them are intention-based, you know?
Like, you could say, if I say, there's so many ways I could say fuck you to you.
The point is, every single one of these has behind it an energy that has been encapsulated into the sound, and that energy is all that matters to me.
And the fact that everyone has been caught up in the sound itself and forgotten the fact that the energy behind it is all that matters, that's where things are getting fucked up.
Yeah, because you realize that there is a kind of war that's raging around this planet, but it's like a war against people who are For whatever reason, intent on expressing anger into the world, intent on expressing power over other people into the world, and people who are thinking, I think there might be another way.
Maybe there was a way that we could re-adapt or maybe evolve to fit into this society, or maybe there's a whole new way where we don't have to try to constantly punch back at a person who has punched us.
That's the war.
It's just a war between when you get fucking hit on the interstate, when your nice car gets hit because some asshole isn't paying attention, do you get out and scream at him or do you ask him if he's okay?
And there's a whole group of people who think, no, you fuck that motherfucker up.
You teach him a lesson.
Let him understand that if he's not paying fucking attention, he's going to get fucked up.
You become dead.
The hand of God in the world, bringing vengeance as much as you can.
Or the other version of it is you try to overcome that desire and you become a servant of some concept, which is the most important thing, even if we've lost everything, man.
Even if we become locusts and it's all gone, and you know, the more you talk about it, man, the more I do know what you mean.
Earlier, I was like, ah, I'm a locust, but I do hear what you're saying.
I think it's very sweet and actually kind of tragic and sad.
But if this is the case, then we still have to figure out a way to, like, Even now, as much as possible, put out into the world, love, and it doesn't matter what language we're using, if love is behind it, I think that's the highest thing, by the way.
I think that's all that matters, is like, that meal was good because you were with people you loved.
If you were sitting after that hunt with a bunch of people that you disliked or assholes, I bet it wouldn't have been as delicious of a meal.
This is where you got, like, couples, and you got the wives up on a platform and the two husbands down, and there's a maze where the wall's seven feet high, and the women can see where the money is, and they're yelling to their husbands like rats, like, no, go left!
What I say in the book is, there's no way we're going back.
That's over, right?
Because they're 7 billion, they're going to be 10 billion in 100 years.
There's no way.
There's not enough land or animals or whatever.
So we're going to live in an artificial environment.
But, you know, you're going to live in a zoo.
Do you want to live in the Calcutta Zoo or the San Diego Zoo?
Right?
I mean, come on.
The San Diego Zoo, it's built with an understanding of the natural environment of the animals that are enclosed there.
So I want to live in a natural environment that's got my interests in mind, and in order to do that, you have to understand what kind of animal Homo sapiens is, which means you have to cut through a lot of the bullshit propaganda that you've been hearing your whole life.
This Hobbesian bullshit about how prehistoric people all died in their 30s, and it was a struggle for survival, and predators lurked in every shadow, and it was this terrible You know, dangerous world.
You actually look at the anthropological data, hunter-gatherers are chilled out, happy, relaxed people who are not dealing with the sorts of chronic stress we are.
And you hear all these bullshit arguments that wouldn't last a second if they weren't Propping up the civilizational edifice, like that everyone died in their 30s in Hunter Gathers.
That's absolutely untrue.
But I just heard the Dean of the Medical School of Columbia University say it in an NPR interview.
Well, there's certainly some benefits to modern medicine, 100%.
Yeah, for sure.
But there's also some negative consequences of our overly complicated society.
There's no doubt about it.
I mean, the levels of depression that people experience and the levels of discontent with their existence, you know, we were talking yesterday about people wanting to take a chance to go do something.
They want to do something outside of what they're doing for a job.
Maybe they like making pottery or whatever it is.
They just don't have the time.
Maybe they want to be a tattooist.
They just don't have the time to dedicate, to jump into it.
And then along the way, you get saddled up with debt and maybe a family that you have an obligation to feed, and then you're stuck and you're trapped.
That trap, that feeling of discontent with one's own daily existence, your day-by-day life, is more commonplace than not.
It's essential, as we were saying, to keep you running on the wheel.
You've got to believe the Rolex is going to make you happy.
The car is going to...
Then the next thing is going to do it.
And that's a pernicious lie that we've heard so many times we come to believe it's an aspect of reality itself.
And it isn't!
And that's, you know, if you look at the hunter-gatherer data, what you see is these people who, I mean, you were talking about it earlier, how we need something to, like, a challenge to take us to the next level.
For them, the challenge is like, oh, we're going to go hunting.
Just to play devil's advocate here, isn't this a different version of what you're talking about?
The modern human thinks, if I have this thing, a car, or whatever the thing is, a nicer job, a better whatever, I'll be happy.
What you're saying is, if I have an immediacy, if I'm more connected to nature, if I move to Alaska, if I become a hunter, I'll be happy.
But both of these things have within them the idea that I need some other thing to be happy.
Whereas the...
What I keep hearing and what I subscribe to is that to be happy, you have to be in the present moment, wherever you are, whatever situation you're in, whatever's going on, whether you're in an office, in a job you don't like, in a marriage you don't like, with a bunch of kids that you don't like.
Instead of fleeing from that by planning some fantasy of becoming a tattooist or a potter, the real way out Is to allow yourself to be fully in the experience of what's happening right now.
And that, that thing itself, just doing that, and maybe that is what happens when you're in nature is you're more in the present moment.
Yeah, but that makes way more sense when you're in nature.
Because if you're working in an insurance company and you're just going over clients' claims day in and day out, it's super hard to be in a joyful moment.
It's super hard to be there when you really want to get out of there and make music.
You have songs and ideas in your head, you want to put them to wax, but your fucking kids need...
The thing is, the idea is, sure, for sure, but this is where you're at right now.
That's it.
That's where you are.
You're not in a situation where you're gonna start a band, and you're not in a situation where you're gonna become a potter right now.
Could be in the future, but the trick is that even though you're not in the fucking Anirondacks hunting, and you're not fishing, even though you're wherever you're at right now, Get into that place.
And it's not about happiness.
It's certainly not about joy or bliss or anything like that.
You're not feeling joy and bliss.
You're feeling a kind of claustrophobic horror at the concept that the situation you're in right now is going to continue forever.
And so your mind is fabricated an escape route, which is this thing or that thing, whatever it may be.
But the true situation is that until you train yourself to be in the present moment, It doesn't matter where you are.
You're dead.
You're not alive.
It doesn't matter.
You have to train yourself to get in the moment.
Then once you're in the moment, then start making the moves.
From time to time when I'm lucky, that I've been carried away by my thoughts.
Like that fucking thing you were saying about laying in bed, you can generate more stress chemicals.
I'll recognize like, holy shit, I've been in a vortex of thinking for the last two days.
I've been caught in this like endless recurring series of worries or scenarios or whatever it may be or things I need to do or things I just did.
And suddenly I realized I haven't been here at all.
At all.
I've just been caught up in what's called in your head.
You're caught up in the thought pattern.
So the practice is...
And this is something like, you know, Jack Kornfield talks about how the guy who taught in meditation, Ajahn Chah, was saying to him that...
One of his students was saying, I'm too busy to meditate.
I'm too busy to meditate.
I don't have time to do that.
And his response was, are you too busy to breathe?
Are you too busy to breathe?
You can breathe, right?
That's all you need to do.
All you need is your breath.
And no matter where you are, what you're doing, where you're at, you can put your attention away from the...
Incredible array of worries that you have.
Incredible array of fantasies that you have.
Incredible array of, if this had happened, I'd be happier.
Or if I could do this, I'll be a better person.
And just bring it to your breath.
In and out.
In through the nose, out through the nose.
And then, it's not going to stop these fucking thoughts.
But instead of you being controlled by them and caught up in them.
I mean, talk about looking at your fucking cell phone.
Get rid of cell phones.
People are still looking at cell phones.
It's just their various worries and things that they're constantly ruminating over.
It's another form of the cell phone.
You're fixating on these endless recurring worries.
So you bring it to the breath, the worries emerge, the happiness, whatever it is, is there, but It's not you.
You're not identifying with it anymore.
You're not identifying with the specific emotional state, the specific intellectual state, the specific thing anymore.
You're just observing and watching.
And that thing, that consciousness, the more you become that, the more you will find yourself experiencing what you were talking about.
These rare moments of peace.
These moments of like, whoa, holy shit.
Regardless of what's happening around me, I'm still I'm centered, untouched, unfreaked out, unanxious.
I'm just watching.
So that's the concept.
And it's a very hopeful concept because some people do not have access to the kind of zoo you're talking about.
Prisoners, for example.
People who are incarcerated right now, they don't get to get out of that system.
So they have to find a way in the midst of all of that negative phenomena to allow themselves to experience the same kind of peace or tranquility that you are experiencing with your friends in front of that campfire.
And that is why the concept of cultivation is so important in Buddhism, which is the idea that these experiences, which in various, many different world religions say at their root, what is so wonderful about them is love.
That feeling of love, which is also compared to the feeling of coming home, being at home, finding your home, coming back home.
It's all the same because the feeling of what is the feeling of being at home?
It's a feeling of being at what did you call it?
A situation of acceptance and love.
It's that feeling of being truly safe.
Not safe because of the government, but safe because you're surrounded by people who love you and you're loving them and you know that you could be taken care of.
The concept is that feeling can be cultivated.
And that cultivation starts with some form of the practice of mindfulness or whatever you want to call it.
I think what you're saying actually isn't in conflict at all with the other point.
Because the mindfulness being here in the moment, I think if you've got a shitty job in a cubicle and you're trying to distract yourself from it, you're listening to podcasts all day while you shuffle paperwork or whatever, right?
And you're not really being in the moment.
It is advantageous to be in the moment if it allows you to see that the moment is fucking killing you.
I mean, if you're in prison, that's a different deal.
You're going to be there for 10 years.
You're not going to, like, don't try to escape, is my advice.
But if it's just a dead-end job...
I mean, I got this great email a couple days ago from someone who...
I had these guys on who live in camper vans, several.
One guy...
One guy, funny guy, he worked in a tiger sanctuary in Thailand, teaching baby tigers not to eat people, essentially.
He was like the guinea pig who would go in and play with the baby tigers to teach them, like, don't eat people, people are cool.
Anyway, he flew to Chile, bought a VW camper van, and drove from Chile to Alaska in this camper van, and just picked up people along the way and, you know, had all these adventures.
Well, if you live in a shitty situation like that long enough with a job you hate and bills that don't make any sense and for stuff that you don't even want or enjoy anymore, then that idea of getting in that camper and just driving across the country seems amazing.
My friend Steve Maxwell, he doesn't even have a camper.
He just lives in hotels.
He has a bag for all of his belongings.
He's a personal trainer.
He's like world-renowned.
He puts on these camps and seminars and stuff like that.
Him and his girlfriend, they travel all over the world, constant travel.
That's all they do.
They stay from hotel to hotel.
And he trains people.
Everywhere.
And he used to have a big gym, and he used to have a house, and then he went from the big gym in the house, he got divorced, he got a camper van, like you sleep in it.
Got sick of that.
Sold that fucking thing.
Said, you know what?
I'm just gonna get everything down to a 10 gallon bag.
He's got a 10 gallon bag with all his worldly possessions, and that's it.
What if you switch everything to digital currency?
You're finding more and more people are accepting Bitcoin and other forms of digital currency, so they start using that to pay for their rent, pay for their food, pay for their drinks, pay for their travel.
The idea of you being constrained to a patch of dirt and you have to have a piece of paper to show the other people and the other patch of dirt so I can cross over.
Can I enter into your kingdom?
Depends.
Did you at one point in time drive your carriage under the influence of wine?
But I was told, like, when I did four days, you know, and then I went before the magistrate and he said, if you don't get arrested again in a year, this will go off your record and all that.
So ever since when I've been asked if I've ever been convicted of a crime, I always said no, because I figured it's not on my record.
I don't want to confuse everybody and, you know, whatever.
But the first time we went into Canada at BC, you know, he asked all these questions and we went and sat down and he called me up, you know, like, no, just you, not my wife.
And he's like, is there anything you want to tell me about 1982?
You'll need to prove, the paragraph before that said you need to prove that you're not currently licensed to drive, don't know how to drive, or have a medical restriction that prevents you from driving.
Dude, the real scary thing about what you're talking about as far as getting into other countries because of shit on your record, this is something that when I interviewed Aaron Frank at Singularity University, they try to think about what are the implications of these technologies.
So, you know the recent terrorist attack where they shot up the people, that couple shot up the people, and apparently, even though I think this got disproven...
San Bernardino, they were talking about how one of them was a professed jihadist on their Facebook page.
And they were saying, well, we don't check social, whatever they've posted on Facebook.
We don't do that.
And a lot of news stations are saying, a lot of people are saying, what the fuck?
That's crazy.
You should check that.
You should definitely check that.
At Singularity University, they were saying, what happens if the society changes so much that shit that you've posted online and admitted to doing becomes illegal?
What happens then when all of that stuff is infinitely accessible by all future governments?
What happens when, if like, who knows, you know, this is the scary thing to me.
But the one scary thing about when you look at like for-profit war, for-profit conflict, and you look at the fact that there is a benefit to some awful thing happening in the United States on a big scale,
there's a monetary benefit to a great many people, Living in the United States, weapons manufacturers, legislators, people who just get off on controlling other people, and you realize that it not only benefits them, but there also is a huge incentive for people in other parts of the world to create that event, knowing that all it takes is one catastrophic event.
One catastrophic event.
We're like, what, one dirty bomb away?
It's the new September 11th away from experiencing one of the greatest Diminitions of personal liberty that has ever happened in this country, and there's a lot of people who would like that to happen, and they're not just terrorists.
There's people who would like that to happen who run prisons.
There are people who would like that to happen who want World War III to happen because they sell weapons.
And that, to me, is fucking scary to think.
And if something like that did happen, and we enter into some new Orwellian Your awfulness and all your shit that you've posted, every single one of your podcasts show, you're going first, man.
I mean, Eisenhower's, you know, his parting speech, the military-industrial complex, is...
You know, he was warning, we're in a situation after World War II where the army doesn't stand down.
All these industries that sprang up.
Los Angeles is a result of World War II, right?
Raytheon and Boeing, they're all on the West Coast because they were pumping out those airplanes and ships to go beat the Japs, and then they're looking for something to do.
Well, they've got to keep us on a war footing forever.
What's going on with dental hygiene versus, I mean, is it Florida in the water that makes a difference or being conscious of dental hygiene that's made the difference in tooth decay in people?
His campaign for Dixie Cups scared people into thinking the glasses they were drinking out of were unsanitary and could be replaced by disposable cups.
It's amazing how wrecked your brain gets when you come back.
Just wrecked.
For days, I would work out and I'd just be like where I'd normally be able to do like 10 reps of something I'd get to like six and be like fuck I got three more seven fuck two more I just couldn't do it I almost couldn't do the same physical things that I used to do I mean I could get to it but if I was gonna do 10 reps I'd probably get to like nine or eight but getting to it would be way harder I was amazed.
Well, this guy, Dan, who does all the sleep research, this is his area.
He's looking into why that fucks you up so bad.
Can you change melatonin using different medications and different techniques?
He works with seals and stuff.
He's a hardcore guy.
And apparently there are all these techniques that you can do, changing your sleep cycle before you go, and time so you wake up at a different time and all that.
We're just so weird because we want to think of ourselves as being like very simple, very simple, very autonomous little beings that I just need my food, my vitamins, and I'm normal.
No, you're like tied into the cycles of the earth itself, the light and dark, the literal rising and setting of the sun has a direct effect on the rhythm of your body.
Your biological operating system falters when you throw that and it has to readjust and set things back.
Yeah, don't think you're going to get away with that.
So anyway, so he wanted to understand why is this, and his hypothesis was that women are picking up information about men's immune system from their pheromones, from the way they smell.
Because you'll hear women often will say, like, he's a cool guy, he's got a good job, he's funny, whatever.
Because this is important knowledge for people to have.
So he got a bunch of guys who were deficient in one part of their immune response.
And then a bunch of women who were also deficient in one part.
The immune response, it's called immune histocompatibility index.
And let's say it has five elements.
So they would find a bunch of guys who were low in one or two or number three or number four, whatever, and women who had the same different deficiencies.
My hypothesis was that a woman who's low in factor three won't be attracted to men who are low in factor three.
They'll be attracted to men who are high in factor three because then the babies will be healthy, right?
So he gets these guys to wear t-shirts for three days and nights with no deodorant, no showers, no soap, nothing, then puts the t-shirts in plastic bags.
Then he has the women smell the bags and mark on a piece of paper how attractive they thought the men were, based only on the smell of the t-shirts, right?
And he found that with 80% of the women, they chose as he predicted, that they chose the men high in the thing that they were low in, and they avoided the men who were low in the thing that they were low in.
But in about 20%, they seem to be choosing randomly.
So he went back and looked at the women again and found that those 20% were on birth control pills.
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So the birth control pill short circuits that response.
So think of how many couples have gotten together when she's on the pill and they both like Louis CK. Joe's looking into the distance.
Was she on the pill when I met her?
I talked about this at an interview in San Francisco on the PBS station down there, and as I'm talking, the guy's going, making the gesture like, that happened to me, but be quiet, don't say it.
And after the interview, he's like, dude, that's exactly, my wife went off the pill and she was done with me.
Aspects of like deep aspects to know of a person's like some specific Deficiency in their immune system just from your nose That's crazy and that kind of stuff lends credence to the idea of telepathy or clairvoyance or people who can read other people really well like maybe they're just somehow Better at like detecting whatever chemical field is around the person and can decode it in a certain way What are we doing with people?
Yeah, think about how many kids are born with health deficiencies because of this, because people low in, you know, number three and get together and these kids have...
Well, it's one of the things you realize from grappling and jujitsu when you start getting really into it, that you have to keep a healthy biome.
You have to keep healthy skin flora.
It's critical.
One of the first things they tell you when you start training is you should start taking supplements like acidophilus, something probiotic, because you want to keep your skin flora healthy.
And you want to not use antibiotic soap.
A lot of times when people get infections, one of the problems is they've created a barren wasteland on the surface So infections take hold and then you treat those infections with more antibiotics and you kill off all the natural healthy, like acidophilus in particular is supposed to be aggressive towards certain types of infections.
So that like if you keep a healthy skin flora, you're less likely to get things like ringworm or things along those lines.
Well, it is if, you know, otherwise you would go, you would dehydrate.
I mean, if you never dehydrate, if your body would never express water in that way, like you take water in, you keep a healthy level, and it's like oil in your car.
Like, you know, your level's there.
You're good.
But no, we're like constantly getting rid of it.
But I guess it actually cycles through your body and it takes impurities out.
There's a lot of other things going on when you drink a lot of water.
That's why one of the things that happens to people when they're dehydrated, they get kidney stones, you get crystallized things in your body, and you have to piss those out of your dick hole.
Yeah, but if you fully hold your piss in for like a long time, and you finally get to a bathroom, and you're like, uh, I've definitely pissed longer than 20 seconds.
Casilda, my wife, who's a doctor, thought I had a gas-like bubble in my intestine, so she had me upside down on the sofa with a funnel stuck in my ass, and she was pouring off.
Well, what they wanted to do is they send sound waves in from the back and the front and they calibrate it so that the waves meet right where the stone is.
So they do an x-ray and find exactly where it is, right?
And then they have, like, sonogram machines, right, that are sending vibrations in, and they meet at the point where the stone is, and they'll break it into sand, and then you can piss it out.
But, unfortunately, mine had already passed through the tube into my bladder by the time they got around to it, so they're like, well, if it's in the bladder, we can't do it.
We're going to have to go in through your dick, through your pee hole, with, like, needle-nose pliers.
It just popped out and somehow it had gotten into the tube and the orgasm, the ejaculation pushed it right up to the end of my dick and then when I pissed it just popped out.
Well, I guess they can, by looking at the chemical composition, they can tell what causes it, if it's a chronic thing or if it's dehydration or whatever.
When Duncan and I were doing that silly show, the Joe Rogan Questions Everything show, we ran into these people that do think that they have implants in their body that aliens have.
And they'll find, like, some bizarre imperfection in their skin and they'll swear that wasn't there before and that there's something in there.
And one of them was insanely hot.
And we got Duncan to talk to her and Duncan's like, yeah, I mean, probably.
But they had this, like, underneath this mountain, there's, you know, he'd set up example homes that you could live in in this paradise, and he kept saying how, like, there's going to be a wine bar.
They were using it as some kind of storage facility, and so he bought it from them and then converted it to this theoretically dystopian future place that you go to to save yourself when the bombs go off.
Like they just didn't tell them that they had stored alien artifacts in that same location and while they're there it comes alive and like we have movement in the corridor.
What?
There's nothing in the corridor but us.
We've double checked and triple checked.
unidentified
Well, we just found this manuscript and we're not sure what to make of it.
It's the idea that what we are in right now is actually an interdimensional prison.
And we've been trapped by these super advanced beings that have kept us here called the Dark Archons.
And that they like power and authority.
And so anybody...
So basically this idea...
I think it's called Discordianism.
But the idea is that Because we are in an interdimensional prison where we've had this consensus reality given to us by people like Bernays, Chef Bernays, who whipped up this reality tunnel that we're all existing in.
Because we are in this situation, anyone enforcing the reality tunnel is a servant of the dark archon.
So anybody who's like trying to uphold this bullshit reality that we've all gotten trapped in, they're actually a form of Satanists.
And so as a religion, anytime that you do anything to break a ridiculous rule, anytime you do anything to break a mundane law, anytime you do anything to subvert the authority of someone getting off on their power, you are actually taking part in a kind of holy war you are actually taking part in a kind of holy war and subverting this very ancient and terrible prison that all humanity is trapped in where people parade around as though they have some kind of right to
Kings, being the classic case, they somehow convinced people that they were gods on earth.
Clearly just human beings, the ultimate liars.
You're not a god, you're a human who's convinced us that you have some kind of power.
And so anytime you do anything to subvert those people, whether it's some fucking asshole who's wearing a crown and has convinced you that he's the A divine being sent here.
Whether it's some son of a bitch in one of those reality shows who's like going through your pockets for weed.
Anytime you do anything to even disrupt that system a little bit, you're doing a holy act in the great war against the interdimensional prison keepers who are keeping us trapped here.