Aubrey Marcus and Joe Rogan explore ayahuasca’s visions—like a bear trapped in gold chains—as universal metaphors for wealth’s suffocating grip, debating intention vs. action in hunting’s morality while linking animal purpose to human fulfillment. They critique antivenom’s archaic production and modern detachment from nature, arguing resistance fuels growth, whether through combat, failure, or even destructive missions like hunting lizards. Contrasting war’s camaraderie with today’s disconnected leadership, they question mainstream history, citing Graham Hancock’s theories of 12,000-year-old asteroid impacts and 30,000-year-old pyramids, suggesting lost civilizations and divine punishment myths may hold scientific truths. Decentralized spirituality, like shamanism, emerges as a counter to institutionalized fear, hinting at archery’s ancient role in bridging primal instinct and purposeful discipline. [Automatically generated summary]
Man, the first time it came was the first time I did ayahuasca, and I saw this bear, and it was wrapped up in all these chains, and it was struggling against these, like, gold chains.
It was like a Mr. T bear.
It had, like, fucking crown and these, like, heavy gold chains, and he was, like, stuck, and it couldn't move.
And the bear, like, stops.
He was, like, kind of frantic trying to get out of these chains.
He stops and looks at me, and he goes, I remember when I was just a bear, and I didn't have to worry about all this shit.
And it was a lesson about the wealth that we have can become, like, a prison.
That holds us back and prevents us from being our true nature.
The bear's true nature is just being a bear.
Chasing after shit, eating shit, climbing trees.
But the wealth that it accumulated prevented it from doing that.
With that archetypal alien, the iconic gray with the large black eyes.
Like, that thing's real now.
It's a real thing.
I mean, whether or not you ever meet one or whether or not one exists in a physical state where you could drag it in front of the National Enquirer photographers and get some good shots of it.
It's a real thing.
And what I mean by it's a real thing is, if you do mushrooms, you'll fucking see them.
You will see them.
And are you seeing them because you did mushrooms and you're hallucinating?
Or are you seeing them because we've created this archetype that plugs into the imagination easily?
And connects you to this thing, this imaginary world, or this world that...
See, I don't even like the word imaginary.
Because every time I've done a psychedelic, I don't like that word imaginary.
Because to me it seems like it's some sort of a frequency that you're tuning into where a real world exists that you can't bring back anything physical from.
You know what I mean?
And I feel like...
It's entirely possible that what we think of as these gray aliens, they're almost like a frequency of the universe that you can tune into, whether you're on psychedelics or whether you're dreaming, which is, of course, your brain producing its own psychedelics.
Your brain produces dimethyltryptamine while you're sleeping.
So these things that we think of as being all these imaginary things, like Aliens or bears that talk to you or...
No one's going to say, oh, we figured out exactly what's happening when you're tripping on mushrooms, and here is what it is.
And this is why you see these things, and this is what those things actually are, and this is the part of your brain that creates them, and they're absolutely not real.
Yeah, well, there's the materialist reductionist point of view, like something that Sam Harris could explain very well.
All right, when you take psilocybin, the default mode network of your brain gets starves of blood, which starves it of oxygen, which downregulates it, allowing the other parts of your brain to come forward.
And the experiencing itself, this is, I mean, if you've heard me say this before, but this is kind of important.
The experience is exactly the same, whether or not it's in a physical form, or whether or not it's something that happens to you while you're tripping.
The experience is the same.
Like, if you have a trip, and during that trip, you meet a golden serpent that explains the universe to you, and it explains that Every single person is in fact a representation of what we think of as love.
Love or a god or creativity or some divine force that is pushing forward improvement and innovation and that that is the reason why life today is so much different than it was 30 years ago or 30 years before that or 300 years before that it will constantly keep improving and it is the way of the universe.
If you have that in a psychedelic trip, it's exactly the same as if it happens to you.
If you go to a field and a dragon rises out of a marsh and confronts you with all of the problems of your personality and all the mysteries of the past and gives you an understanding and a blueprint for how to move forward with your life and then goes back in the swamp, it's exactly the same as if you're tripping.
The experience is the same.
Well, we found the dragon.
We've located him on GPS. On Google Earth, you can see the dragon moving through the marsh.
It's a real dragon.
It doesn't matter physically if it's a real dragon.
the experience is the same and the impact that it has yeah that's and that's the thing that you know we're seeing now in these scientific inquiries is that it's not just you have this experience like going to a movie and you come back out and you're relatively the same afterwards these are having the lasting impacts and the significant changes throughout a lifetime that you would expect from a huge event like you just described happening in the real world because you It does feel real to you.
And the information you're getting and the experiences you have, it changes you.
It's not like you put it in this dream world like, oh, that was weird.
I saw this person naked in my dream.
It's different.
That feels kind of like random, like you're just shaking up some dice and throwing it.
This stuff comes to you in a way that just leaves a significant impact.
Yeah, and the scientific reductionist point of view is really important because we really do need to understand what's the chemical process that's going on in the brain when you consume, you know, whatever, peyote, whatever it is.
We need to understand.
I mean, it's fascinating and it's important for research and it's important that science keeps moving forward, the greater and greater understanding of the mind, but...
You can't discount what is happening as a human, as a person, as an entity with consciousness, what's happening during that experience.
You'll go to these ayahuasca retreats, you'll have 20 people, and seven of them will talk to God.
That's the same dude they're describing.
It doesn't matter what religion background they come from.
You hadn't pre-discussed what this notion is.
It's like the wisdom that comes through from that element, source, or whatever you want to call it, God, or If you talk to Mother Earth, the wisdom is all consistent, and it's weird that way.
You never hear something like, man, that's strange.
The idea that I'm looking at you through my eyes, we're making noises with our faces, and somehow or another we're translating this back and forth to each other through this thing, which is a microphone which works in a way that neither you nor I can describe to anybody.
Jamie probably can.
It goes through these wires, and it's going wirelessly out into people's phones.
I mean, these people that are streaming it right now, live, with their phone, in their car, driving around, 4G, LTE. The fucking world is slippery as shit.
Yeah, there was an article about that recently, about how primate brains are sort of predisposed to being able to adapt incredibly quickly.
And that sort of makes sense if you look at the wide variety of cultures throughout the world and what they think is normal, what they accept, like those women in Africa that have those giant plates in their lips.
The primate brain is pre-adapted to face potentially any situation.
It's a really interesting article, and I'm not going to do a good job of it without someone reading it, but that's the title of it.
It's on phys.org, phys.org, and the title is The Primate Brain is Pre-Adapted to Face Potentially Any Situation, and it just talks about how your brain Sort of calculates potential outcomes and all these different variables that could possibly take place.
So when it moves into that direction, it starts to set the landscape.
Well, you look at how we developed and you look at something like the genetic bottleneck theory where these big cataclysms would happen, dramatically reduce the human population.
You're dealing with these macro changes on a global level.
Well, the most flexible and adaptive are going to survive.
The stubborn asses are like, nope, I'm not leaving my forest.
Like, I told you, and I know you rented a place there recently, too.
I've rented a place in Malibu for a while on the beach.
And I'm like, what the fuck kind of place is this?
Like, you're just banking that something that's constantly changing and moving and growing is going to stick around long enough for your investment to pan out.
I fucked up, because the first day, literally the first day we stayed there, I got barbecued.
Like barbecued on edibles.
And we were downstairs.
There's three floors to this house we were renting, and the first floor was literally the water.
You could open the window and jump into the water, and it's a four-foot drop.
And I'm not exaggerating.
It's fucking ridiculous.
And in the daytime, it looks so amazing.
It's so beautiful and blue and lovely and you see the birds and the waves are so gentle and inviting but at nighttime in the dark it becomes a monster a giant dark black uncaring beast that will swallow you whole and not give a fuck It's absorbed a billion people before you.
It'll absorb you just as easy.
And you realize the true nature of it when it's dark.
When it's dark, you go, oh, this is like another world.
It's like as if...
If you could get a high-rise, and that high-rise could hit the edge of an alternative galaxy.
It's like if you could climb on top of your roof and throw rocks into the event horizon of a black hole and it would disappear into another galaxy.
Well, there was another article recently where these scientists were saying that essentially, octopuses are aliens.
There is nothing like them.
They have more chromosomes than any other observed animal.
They're different than any observed animal.
Besides cuttlefish, their ability to rapidly adapt and camouflage themselves to their environment is unprecedented.
They change their texture.
They change what they look like.
I had Remy Warren on, who's a great guy, and he has a television show called Apex Predator.
And one of his Apex Predator episodes, in his show, he's a hunter, and he used to be on this show called Solo Hunter, where he would go by himself with a bunch of cameras and just go deep, deep into the woods and hunt, and capture this experience in this really remote forest in a really cool way,
because it was literally just him, Survivorman-style, With a few cameras set up and hunting and then cooking the food and eating it and heading back and running into some like weird difficulties and dangers and strange animals while he's out there too.
But he did an episode on octopus and he came in and was talking to us about it and it fucking blew my mind.
I had no idea.
You know, I was 47, 48 years old.
I had no idea that a fucking octopus could do that.
I think I've told this story on here before, but I got to see one in Fiji and watch this Fijian man.
craziest experiences ever they were he was flowing over the coral and just at like you said half of his body would be one color half the other color it was that fast it wasn't like it waited because we have a no leaves and chameleons in Texas right you know they they plant somewhere and there's some weird color that they're not supposed to be and then eventually they turn into brown for tree bark or green for the leaves or whatever they're at but not an That shit is instantaneous.
And when he was fighting it, so he eventually goes down there, jams his hand in there, and the octopus bites him.
There's blood in the water.
It was this crazy struggle.
But eventually he jams his hand back in there, pulls the octopus out, and when he was fighting with the octopus on the surface, the octopus knew to go for his airway.
It kept wrapping its tentacles around his mouth and his nose as he was trying to get this thing off his head.
It knew exactly what it was doing.
It was pulling off...
So he eventually wrestles his snorkel-free and starts beating it to get it to calm down.
And he brought it to the shore and barbecued it.
Now, everybody else was just fucking horrified at this show because it was completely savage.
I mean, it was the octopus trying to choke the airway of this primate and this primate being stronger and more determined and using his snorkel as a bludgeon to kill it so he could eat it.
But that's, you know, that's, again, that bias of all of the things.
Like, if people say, oh, no, this animal's too intelligent to eat, but they're a pescatarian, well, they're probably eating the fuck out of some octopus.
Because I know a lot of vegans that are absolutely nutritionally deficient.
They're not getting enough vitamin D. They're not getting enough D3. They're not getting enough B12. They're definitely not getting enough essential fatty acids unless they're scooping coconut oil and almond butter into their mouth every day.
Our mollusks and plants, they're possibly fairly equivalent.
Yeah.
So your whole cause of why you're not eating them gets a little blurry when you start to think, all right, well, plants are smart as shit, and mollusks are mollusks, and they're probably equivalent.
Just one has the ability to move slightly more than the other one.
Yeah, the movement thing is something that we cling to.
What we essentially cling to is things that are closest to us.
Like, we really don't give a fuck about fish.
Like, we're worried about people killing all the fish in the ocean, we're worried about the depletion of the ocean, but when a little kid catches a fish, you go and look at the Instagram page, there's no hate.
A little kid shoots a bear.
Back the fuck up.
You don't even want to read those comments.
If someone eats a bear, like, whoa, that's too close to a dog.
I absolutely have some sort of a weird anthropomorphization thing with wolves where, um, you know, I think they're like probably my favorite animals ever.
They're the fucking coolest things of all time.
They have these packs.
They mate for life.
They get together and fucking...
They have like this social group.
They have this really complex method of hunting where they communicate with each other.
They howl out to each other and they have like a roll call.
I mean, they're a complex, really intense society.
It's because their life is hard as fuck, and it doesn't last long.
You can't be a pimp.
But apparently there's a documentary about a wolf, and ironically enough, it's called The Black Wolf, and there was a black wolf that apparently wasn't following any of the rules.
And this wolf would go across the highway, away from the rest of the pack, and lure the women over to him.
And he was banging these women, and female wolves, obviously, not women, human.
It's interesting because, you know, in all of these ayahuasca trips and all of these things, I've talked to animals of all kinds of variety.
And again, this could be just pure imagination.
But in that, you know, they always have lessons or things that we discuss.
Common themes is the amount of free will that the animal has.
So when I talk to the insects, and you don't talk to one insect, you talk to the insect overmind.
Again, this could all just be my imagination, but it helps me understand things a bit.
You talk to the insect overmind, and the insects say, basically, we are like the trash keepers of the world.
We have no flexibility for free will.
If we all decided to go on strike, the world's fucked.
Nothing gets decomposed.
There's no spare parts.
We run out of spare parts for the world.
Nothing else gets built.
The whole thing goes to shit.
The food source at the very bottom.
So we have no free will.
We're perfect creatures acting in perfect accordance with the laws of nature to allow it to happen.
Where you get these things like the automatons, like the digger wasps that No matter how much you fuck with things, they'll try to do the same thing over and over again.
Well, really, that's perfect because it's doing absolutely what it must.
And then you go on up the chain towards the mammals, and there gets to be greater and greater access to free will.
So you talk to, like I've talked to dolphins, and dolphin spirit was like super happy, playful, and they said, you know, dolphins are one of the best existences of all because we have...
Greater access to free will.
We can choose to play.
We can choose to fuck.
We can choose these different elements.
Getting food is easy.
And it's also how easy it is to get food.
Like, getting food is easy for us.
You know, there's not a lot of natural predators.
So we have kind of the ultimate existence.
And we don't have the human brain, which is the ultimate saboteur.
You know, it's our own minds that lock us in these depressions and anxieties and hells.
And dolphins don't have that level of self-awareness that they've created all the problems.
So it's almost like they're in this perfect sweet spot, which is one of the things that you feel when you encounter them both in real life and envision is that they're just happy as fuck because they have the most flexibility with the least amount of troubles that come from it.
Yeah, we were talking about this on the ride when we were in Edmonton, or in Alberta rather, and it was really interesting because we were talking about, was it Ben O'Brien that was telling us about a queen that got stuck in someone's car?
But when they use those things, it's really, it's that, that's only one aspect of one of the things that's problematic about large-scale collecting of food.
But look at this fucking thing.
This enormous machine.
And this is not even a big one.
That's a fairly small one.
They have ones that are like a football field wide.
Yeah, this is like something like if you had a small farm you would do, but anything that's in there is getting chewed up.
And one of the things about fawns, it's really unfortunate, but fawns, when they're young, they will lie down in these fields and they don't move because they can't outrun any predators.
So their strategy is to just not move and hope something doesn't find them.
And that's also why...
They have those, the coloration on their body is very different.
They have the white spots, which is kind of nature's version of some sort of form of camouflage to blend in.
But those poor fawns get chewed up in those things all the time.
I have a friend who has a large-scale corn farm in Illinois.
I think the problem that a lot of people make is they attribute morality to the actions You're taking rather than the intention behind it.
You know what I mean?
And I think people make that mistake a lot, really.
So is hunting good or bad?
Well, that's a ridiculous question to ask.
It depends on the intention of the hunter while he's doing it.
And I think that's why a lot of people reserve this kind of Native American idea, because...
hunter was in a way that was different than the guy just looking to put a trophy on his right one of those automatic guns that are on a camera that you know shooting animals that way it's it's not the act that's either good nor bad nor is it vegan good nor bad it's about the intentions behind it and I think people tend to lose that perspective you So that's when I was in bear camp, that's what I needed to get straight, is what my intentions were.
If I was going after to hunt a bear so I would be cool and Cam would think I was cool and everybody in the hunting party would be like, yeah, well that was the wrong intention for me.
So that's what a lot of the work was.
That's what the part of what the Taking the Mushrooms was for, was to make sure that my intention in doing it was the right intention.
And what was that intention?
Well, to me it was some part meat acquisition.
I wanted to Have that experience of taking my own meat from the field, which was incredibly powerful for me the first time I hunted.
And then I wanted to be able to use the code and use the claws for jewelry and really connect with that.
So if that intention was leading, then it was a correct action for me.
If that intention was not leading and I was doing it to be cool or doing it because I was nervous or any other way, then it was an immoral act for me.
And that's to me how I just kind of sorted it out.
So I was able to get to that comfortable place where I knew that if the bear came, the right boar came, I was going to do it for the right intention.
Because I'd worked through all of the other forces and pressures, that desire to be cool or the desire for this or all these other reasons that would have made that act not cool.
I worked through those as best I could.
And so I knew if the bear came, I was comfortable killing it.
I had no idea in my head that this was the wrong thing because my intentions were right.
I mean, you had many opportunities to kill a bear, as did I. Oh, totally.
But what we go for is very big, mature bears for a couple reasons.
One, because very big, mature bears kill cubs.
It's one of the favorite things to eat when they come out of hibernation, which is really fucked up.
They actively hunt cubs.
They go for them.
They even go into dens and pull them out of dens and kill them.
There's a lot of debate as to why they do that.
The initial thought was that it brings the female back into estrus and that the bear can breed with the female and that way that bear is passing on his genetics.
But there's some scientists, some biologists, some wildlife biologists that believe they're just doing it for meat.
There's a lot of competition out there, and it's hard to get meat, and this is meat, and they've become accustomed to it.
Whether they're doing it because they're hungry, or whether they're doing it because they want the female to survive or come back into heat and breed again, either way, they're killing cubs.
And they're limiting the DNA. They're limiting the genetics.
And it's not good for the overall population of the bears.
So the idea is when you kill the large male boars, that what you're doing is you're actually enhancing the genetics of the area and you're saving the cubs.
So even though it seems counterintuitive, when you kill boars, you're actually increasing the population of bears.
It's really weird.
When you look at it outside of the world of hunting, when you don't have all the information at your fingerprints, you have this idea that hunters are like those bad guys in that Wolverine movie that were poisoning the bear.
Did you ever see that?
It's always in the movie.
They're always the assholes that are killing bears.
Meanwhile, Wolverine will sit down and eat a steak, and he's a good guy.
We're so fucking tortured and twisted when it comes to our morality.
But also, the big one is the population of the traditional game animals, like the moose and the deer and the elk.
You know, one of the stories that Cam told, I think, gave me one of the biggest lessons and takeaways of the trip for me was when he told about there was a mother with her cubs and the cubs were kind of cruising around and then a boar, a big male bear, came in and then killed one of the cubs.
And I think the mother, like, scared her off, scared off the boar.
And so there was just a dead cub that she had there.
And so for a moment, the mother kind of like wanders around and looked like she was like mourning the death of this cub, but just for a moment.
And then within minutes, you know, seconds, it was eating the cub.
The mother was eating her own cub.
And that was like a really, you know, we humans have this idea of this trauma that we carry.
Like if our kid got killed, you know, we would carry that trauma for the rest of our life.
But for the bear, yeah, there was a moment of recognition, but bears are constantly living in the present moment.
They're like the embodiment of the present moment.
And in the present moment, that death happened in the past.
That death was over.
What's there now is there's meat on the ground that'll feed her and provide, you know, an opportunity for her to live longer and provide for the rest of her cubs.
So it's a simple decision at that point if we don't carry the traumas of our past with us.
There's meat on the ground.
You eat the meat.
That simple thing.
And that way, it's why nature is really perfect, because nature is always in the present moment.
I was blasted on the mushrooms, and I went to that bear carcass near where Cam had killed his bear.
They had this just decomposing bear carcass.
Taking mushrooms and seeing a decomposing bear carcass with...
Yeah, it was like there was another one that they'd already taken all the skin and all the meat off of.
So it was just the bones and the organs that were there.
And Cam, his bear was still nice.
It wasn't even smelling or anything.
It looked great, fresh.
But this other bear, which was right in the same area...
It was really interesting because I was very aware of the forest around it and I just looked at the forest around it and the forest was not mourning the death of the bear.
The forest was in the present moment.
It was just going about the business of returning that bear to spare parts.
It had no traumatic memory of that incident.
And it's really how nature acts perfectly because it's always in the present moment.
The body doesn't weep for the death of a cell.
Cells die all the time, but the body's in the present, so it just carries on.
It doesn't carry that trauma with it.
Ultimately, the forest doesn't weep for the death of the bear, and ultimately, the cosmos won't weep for the death of the earth when the sun explodes.
It's just constantly moving forward It's one of the things that I find so attractive about wolves and I think many people do they're so romantic in that their their existence is so Vibrant and powerful and so brief, you know, if a wolf is super lucky they get to 10 You know, they get you man.
Imagine, you know, I mean my middle daughter's eight years old and Wrap your head around that.
A wolf is almost dead.
I have a dog that's 10. He's almost done.
He's got gray all over his face and he limps when he walks now and he likes to lay down mostly.
That's a wolf, man.
10 years, that's all they got.
But during that 10 years, fuck they live!
They're just running and howling together and grabbing the back.
I mean, that's one of the crazy things about wolves, too, that I admire, in some sort of a real fucked-up way, that they kill for fun.
Like, they sport kill.
People that love animals, when you bring that up, they defend it to the death.
Oh, my God, they go off about it, and, well, the animals are probably sick, and they're taking them out.
Nope.
They're having a fucking blast.
They're running around and tearing these elk apart.
We were talking about it a couple weeks ago.
They found 19 dead elk that these wolves didn't even eat.
They call them surplus kills.
They just go on rampages.
I have a friend of mine who lives up in BC and he said they'll get into sheep.
They'll find a pen of sheep and they'll kill 19, 20 of them.
They just rip them apart.
They don't give a fuck.
They don't give a fuck.
They're just having fun.
It's part of what they are that we have this intense romantic connection to wolves.
It's like they have a little bit of us in them.
They have a little bit of party in them.
They're howling and shit and having a good old time and they have battles with each other to see who becomes the king.
Did you see that video recently of these folks who were in Canada and they were driving down the highway and as they were driving they saw these mountain goats running or sheep running away from a wolf and the wolf's chasing them and the wolf tackles the fucking sheep and kills it instantly right in front of them.
It's always He's fucking Canada.
Like, that Martin that killed the bear.
See if you can find it, though, because it's pretty cool.
And it's pretty cool to see.
Wolf takes out, uh, sheep.
Mountain, uh, yeah, Rocky Mountain sheep.
But when the wolf took out the sheep, he carries this thing up the side of the hill like you would carry, like, a five-year-old.
People love animals so much is because they're not carrying around all the bullshit that we are.
They're just living full and presently and they're not straddled with these concepts of morality and these different things.
They're just living to the most of their directive.
It's like in the present you have the idea of eternity with you.
It's like you're not worried about this other stuff.
You just go.
And you just fucking live to the very fullest.
And we can count those moments that we have as our best moments in life.
And we can recall maybe dozens of times.
If we're lucky, there'll be hundreds of times in a normal person's life where they're just totally present, embodied, free, doing exactly what they fucking want to do.
Yeah, and in a lot of ways, the world that we've constructed, the modern world, with social media and with constantly being inundated with new news stories that have almost nothing to do with you.
They're on the other side of the world.
You know, someone got shot.
On the other side of the planet, someone fell off of a mountain.
You know, this guy died in a fiery car accident a thousand miles from you.
I mean, all this stuff is like constantly going on.
It's constantly coming at you.
It makes it really difficult to focus on the actual life that you're living.
Like, it might not be your world, but it becomes your world.
When you're one of those yoga booty girls that just sticks her ass up in the air for all her Instagram pictures, and now...
God bless them.
God bless them.
Thank God.
Thank God they're out there.
But when there's a gal like that that has 5 million Instagram followers, and her notifications are constantly coming in, she's checking her likes, and, damn girl, you hot.
Damn girl, you fine.
Oh, shit.
Can I get what you...
And they're looking at all their comments and they're getting all that love and all that attention.
Then that becomes them.
And then, I mean, I would hope that they're well-rounded and they also read books and they also do a lot of other things and they meditate and take yoga and really get in.
But it's highly likely they don't.
It's highly likely that they just stare at the pictures of their own ass and go back to the gym, you know, for the second time in a day and do deadlifts and just fucking pump that ass up.
And they're thinking about getting fat injected into it and like...
Yeah, what people fail to realize is that that in itself is a pressure and that pressure needs a response of equal magnitude in order to balance it.
It's like all of these people with fame, especially fame that you really didn't work that hard for.
And kind of just celebrities, pop culture celebrities or Instagram celebrities, have a little bit of a different feel because that athlete knows all the fucking quiet moments.
Like, Steph Curry knows all of those hundreds of thousands of shots he took when nobody was watching.
Dribbling around and practicing and practicing.
So when he gets out there, what he's doing and what he's known for, it makes sense and it's solid.
It's like grounded in something.
But all of a sudden, you have a great ass and the ability to take a decent photo and you've got the reach of five million people.
I think that amount of pressure really fucks with you and you have to take extreme measures to counteract that and to get yourself back grounded again.
More time in nature, meditation, float tank, eating weed, whatever you want to do.
Find that other thing to counteract that.
Recognize it for what it is and don't just look at the positive aspect of it.
Look at the negative that it's having.
Because I think if you don't, we see the effects of that all the time.
We see the Robin Williams.
We see the people who are dying of these overdoses that They ostensibly should be happy as fuck, but they're not.
They haven't dealt with the pressure of fame in a way that's as aggressive as the pressure that it's caused on them.
Yeah, Robin Williams might not be the best example because we had Bobcat in the other day, and Bobcat was a really good friend of Robin's, and Robin was diagnosed with several illnesses.
One of them was Parkinson's, but there was another one.
There was a brain illness that he was diagnosed with.
So the pressure, but they're responding to the pressure in a way that's deleterious for their life rather than responding to the pressure being like, man, this is fucked up.
I got all of these people looking at me.
I got to do some other work.
And society's not pushing them in that way either.
They're just saying, more, more, more, get another role, get more followers.
It's like the demon voice that you have from your act.
Exactly.
They have that fucking thing in their head rather than the other guy.
Like, hey man, go fucking on a vision quest.
Like, find some mountains by yourself where nobody's watching and you don't have to act at all.
I wrote a note earlier because we were talking about depression and I've always wondered if the depression that people see in mass today, there's so much depression that people, I mean, it's a common trait.
It's a common condition.
Oh, he suffers from depression.
Oh, she suffers from depression.
Like, oh, he's got herpes, you know?
You know what I mean?
It's a common thing.
I've always wondered, or I've been wondering more and more recently, it really hit me when...
Have you ever seen Heinemann's Arctic Adventure?
It was one of the first vice pieces that I ever saw.
I think the first vice piece I ever saw, in fact.
No.
The first one was David Cho looking for a dinosaur in the Amazon.
Or was he in the Congo?
I think he was in the Congo.
David Cho is so fucking crazy.
I love that guy.
He went to Africa!
The guy's worth like a hundred million dollars.
He went to Africa looking for a fucking dinosaur that definitely doesn't exist.
But Vice has done some awesome stuff, but one of the things they did that was really interesting was this guy.
His name is Heimo.
I think that's how you say it.
H-E-I-M. Here it is.
Heimo's...
Heimo.
I had an N in there, I think.
Heimo's Arctic Refuge.
And this guy lives in this incredibly remote area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Alaskan interior and he he lives in this really small log cabin and He hunts and gathers and that's all he does and he's very smart like he's not a dummy at all and he's been up there He lives with his wife and his he raised children up there and it's really really There's some dark moments in there because they lived like this from the time like when they had children up there and They lost their two-year-old baby in a fucking canoe Like they tipped over,
you know in a canoe and lost their kid and it's like it's really intense when they revisit the site and leave flowers and it was like 30 years ago and they had several children since then but this moment is still like this intense moment of loss for them when they lost their baby, but this fucking guy Is very happy and very smart and very connected and very articulate.
And he firmly believes that human beings, when we evolved and developed and were hunter-gatherers, that there's a set of rewards.
There's reward systems that are set up inside the human body, inside the very being that we embody.
That don't get met in today's society and it's one of the things that's causing depression One of the things that's causing this funk that people are in is that we're living our lives many of us at least in these very unfulfilling ways where you're going to this office with artificial light and you're doing something you don't want to do all day long and then you get home and you're tired and on top of that you're eating shit and You're eating potato chips, and you're drinking soda, and your body is just like, what in the fuck is this?
We're supposed to be out in the fields.
We're supposed to be walking up hills.
We're supposed to be looking for animals or gathering vegetables.
We're supposed to be doing all these things that our body's designed to do.
We're supposed to be in nature.
And nature is like A medicine.
Like, it literally is a medicine to you.
Like, people that go, you don't have to go hunting, you don't have to go fishing, just go fucking hike, man.
Just go hike up to the top of a mountain and look out.
You know, there's a reward that you get from that that is intensely, like, soul-filling.
There's, like, something about, like, when I was in Colorado, And there was this area of Boulder where you drive up one of these roads and there was this area where you could park.
And it was this incredible view, man.
These people would just park and just go out there and just look.
But you get there and you park and you go...
Because you would see, you're literally seeing the continental divide.
And I think nature, I think the ease of suffering is always in presentness.
You know, when you're in presentness, truly locked in presentness, there is no suffering.
There can be pain.
But no suffering.
Suffering is something created by our own minds.
And I think nature is one of the great ways to do this.
Because humans, we learn, we take cues from our environment.
And nature, as I was saying earlier, is always in the present.
You know, there's this natural presentness of all the animals, everything around you.
Whereas if you get around a bunch of people watching Housewives and stressed about this and popping pills, you're going to take on that energy too.
And you're going to lose your presentness because...
where we get back to, ah, present moment again.
And that's such a fucking key element to human happiness.
And I think the other key element is having something we're fighting for, having a mission.
I think we're all forces, and that force needs to have an effect, needs to have a reason that it's moving in a certain direction.
And I think with all of our needs met, where we don't have to hunt for food, We don't have to acquire everything.
Everything's relatively easy and it's all about advancement and all this.
We've lost a lot of the basic mission, which was the mission to survive and procreate.
And we haven't replaced it with any other universal mission, which is, I think, one of the big allures of These things like wars and these things like creating an enemy.
Well, at least then you have a mission.
And when you have a mission, human beings are happy.
You know, like Bertrand Russell talked about, he did the book Conquest of Happiness, and he had his own fucked up attributes.
Every time I bring him up, people talk about his fucked upness.
He was into phrenology and he might have been a racist.
Whatever, but he was a good philosopher.
Smoked constantly.
Yeah.
But anyways, he talked about the happiest person he knew.
The happiest person he could find was a groundskeeper on a manor who every day woke up and was at war with the rabbits of the grounds.
He just declared that the rabbits were the fucking enemy and he would go out with his gun and he would hunt as many as possible and he would go morning till night and he would kill as many rabbits as he could because the rabbits were the ones eating the hedges and the flowers and whatever.
So he basically made the rabbits his enemy and struck out every single day to kill as many rabbits as possible.
And that dude, according to Bertrand Russell, was happy as fuck.
Like, when you encounter one diseased individual, it's so, like, this guy who shot up that nightclub in Orlando, you're looking at one diseased individual.
And if you say, man, people fucking suck, look at what they did.
Well, look at how many people that are responding with rainbows on their Twitter pages and love and all the best wishes to those folks that got killed and all that.
I mean, I was looking at this guy's There's a lot.
There's more beautiful people.
This is, without a doubt, not just the safest, the easiest.
This is the happiest time in terms of being able to reach out and Send love to people and have people send love to you.
Even if you look at the U.S. penal system, it's very much about punishment.
Whereas if you watch that documentary that Michael Moore did, Who to Invade Nest, where they go to Norway, they have a whole different idea of what the penal system is for.
It's about punishment.
Restoring human dignity and cultivating a change, really making change in the person.
It's not about punishment.
It's about actually changing that individual so he doesn't do it again.
And then you look at the recidivism rates between our prisons and Norway's prisons, and they're just dramatically different.
That impulse to punish immediately is not the healthiest impulse.
That's just going to create more issues down the road.
You're not rehabilitating anybody.
You're just...
Taking even more broken people and putting them out in the world and hoping they're not going to do the broken things.
Well, it's not going to fucking work.
You know, the right impulse is always that compassion and looking to see as if that was you, how all of these fucked up elements of the world and choices.
I'm not overriding the fact that they had choices in all this.
They're not free of guilt.
But look at that.
This is the person that just made some bad choices and had some tough shit to deal with and couldn't overcome it.
The resistance in the video game was higher than his skill set and he wasn't able to choose to work and choose the positive elements that would allow him to overcome it.
They don't have that conqueror's mentality that we have We're so wrapped up in success and also in punishment.
I mean, that is a big aspect of our culture.
Like, punishment and...
I mean, like, when anyone does anything wrong online, the amount of people that feel like it's their job to shame that person and embarrass that person and insult that person, it's pretty crazy to watch when something goes down.
It's all so counterproductive, you know, and I see that in the people shaming people for appropriation, right?
So let's say, for example, someone wears a headdress at a fucking festival, right?
They're probably mildly, they're not doing it to mock the Native Americans, most likely.
It's probably like a mild appreciation and interest.
I think this looks cool.
I'm in a place and, you know...
And then all of a sudden they get all this intense hate and shame and putting all of this stuff, all of these intentions on them that weren't true.
Again, going back to my point about morality, it's not about the act.
It's about the intentions of the act.
But right now we make it all about the act.
Oh, you wore this headdress.
That means you're insulting thousands of years of Native Americans.
You're oppressing.
You're appropriating.
Like, no, I fucking wasn't.
I was wearing a fucking headdress.
But then all of a sudden that imprint will create trauma.
And that trauma will have a poisonous impact that will make them feel weird and make them want to do that to other people.
So it's like you're injecting someone with a hate virus that they're going to then pass on to other people rather than doing the opposite.
Spreading the love herpes where it's this contagious positivity that goes the other way.
And we have those choices with how to deal with people, but more often than not we come With this thing to punish and create more trauma, which triggers their own self-judge and their own self-hate, lowers their own self-love, and then they're gonna pass that off to kids, family members, people around them.
You know, there's just two sets of dominoes that we can choose to take either path.
And the concept of culture appropriation is so stupid because culture itself is bullshit.
Culture itself is just a bunch of shit that people have done over and over again as a habit.
So your idea that no one should appropriate someone's other bullshit habits is so fucking ridiculous.
Like, you shouldn't wear your hair like that because other dummies have been wearing their hair like that for a hundred years.
They've decided that this is theirs.
They own the dreadlock.
Or they own the braids.
Fucking nonsense.
It's nonsense.
And it's just one of those things that Michael Shermer likes to call virtue signaling, where you see someone who's doing something and in chastising them, you're not just trying to stop them from doing it.
You're also letting the world know how ethical and how moral you are.
So you get a lot of really goofy fucking white people who get mad at other white people for doing things that they deem to be cultural appropriation.
It's one thing if you're deeply embedded and rooted in that culture.
What is that thing that Hindu people put on their forehead when they're in love?
The biblical scholars who have studied the connection between psychedelics and ancient religions, I'd say, believe where it all went wrong is that they tried to hold back these psychedelic rituals and hide them from conquering armies and That's what John Marco Allegro believed that Christianity was really initially all about.
It was about writing down these things in the Bible in parables and hiding them in these stories, and that these stories were to mask it from the conquerors, from being conquered by the Roman army.
Then you go take the counterpoint of that to a culture, ancient Chavin in Peru, which archaeologically has been shown that for 700 years there was no records of war in this region around Chavin.
And Chavin were the curators of Huachuma, the plant medicine which enhances serotonin, a very heart-opening medicine that I've talked about here on this podcast.
But they would give it to everybody.
You just showed up, maybe you brought a seashell as a gift, maybe you didn't.
It didn't matter.
they would hold these open ceremonies for everybody who came kings peasants doesn't they didn't differ differentiate they were offering this to everybody and everybody was just more open and the records of war and the destructions and that's it's just not there in the archaeological record and it has a lot to do obviously you can't prove causation but the correlation between them open sourcing these psychedelic rituals to everybody and they're not being war for hundreds and hundreds of years is absolutely there and
And it is where people went wrong because they tried to hoard information for power because that knowledge, of course, yields power.
If you have the knowledge and only you have it, you'll have power over people who don't.
Whereas real heart-based power leading with your heart forward, just open source all that.
Yeah, it only makes sense that if you want the world that you live in to be a better place, you've got to tell people the things that have made your life better.
Yeah, but how could they possibly have known that thousands of years ago?
You know, I mean, it's...
I would love to have gone back in time.
I would love to go back in time, like, several thousand years.
Just be invisible.
Be in, like, some sort of an invisible cone of protection and just sit down in a village, you know, in ancient days and somewhere in a really populated area of the world, whether it's Greece or Rome or wherever, and just try to take in what these fucking people were doing, how they were living, and look at...
They're not just our ancestors.
I think we can look at ancient cultures and ancient societies and see, if we look back and see all their weird, crazy stories and traditions and the way they sort of established their government and we look at what we're doing now, And if you sort of extrapolate deep into the future, like, these are all, this is just, it's not that long ago.
It's a small little blip in time.
And there's obviously some sort of a process going on.
Some sort of a process of improvement and of innovation in some sort of a weird way.
Innovation of culture and society and communication.
And I think that's one of the things that we're dealing with now, with this age of information and all the The data that we have to sift through and all the communication that we have to sift through.
We're becoming some new thing.
And it's happening in our lifetime.
And it's happening in a really fucking confusing way.
And it's one of the things that makes people yearn for the past.
It makes people yearn for the good old days.
It makes a slogan like Donald Trump's Make America Great Again.
What the fuck does that mean?
It's never been better.
It's never been better than right now.
It would make America great again.
How could it be greater?
When has it ever been better than right now for anybody?
Yeah, and still we're in this weird transitional period that I think we all can notice because truth hasn't percolated down to the rest of society.
And it's a frustrating point.
We know that people should not be getting thrown in jail for marijuana.
That's not a debatable fact.
The act of throwing them in jail is bad for the person.
The act of taking the marijuana is not bad for society.
The truth is there, but still we're in this lag.
And the lag is really frustrating for people.
But that's just the nature of it.
It's like when you go from switching from McDonald's to starting to eat healthy and drinking kale shakes, the body doesn't respond instantly.
You know, you have to be patient with the body.
Like, it's not just because you change your mind.
The mind is instant.
You can change your mind and instantly it's changed.
But the body is different and so is society.
Like, it's gonna take a while for truth to percolate all the way through.
And in the process, like if you switch from McDonald's to going on a juice fast, you're gonna feel like shit.
All the toxins are going to come up.
Everything is going to bubble up through the body and you're going to have this massive detoxification period where you actually feel worse than if you had just continued to eat McDonald's all the time because the body is going to go through the process of re-acclimating to a new way.
I think we're in a little bit of that stage now where truth has come out in a lot of different ways.
Aspects of things, but it hasn't percolated all the way through.
So we're going through this kind of societal detox where we haven't applied the knowledge that is there readily available.
I have feelings on that too where I think that a lot of this resistance to new knowledge, new information, and even the resistance to freedom.
Like the marijuana laws and a lot of things that we deeply deeply disagree with that this is all in some sort of a way Fueling change that the resistance actually fires people up and makes them more motivated to move forward It actually it actually strengthens the resolve of the resistance to know that there's so much ignorance out there in the world like when some slob like Chris Christie starts going on about nonsense Saying how dangerous marijuana is.
Meanwhile, he's clearly abusing the fuck out of his meat vehicle.
I mean, that guy, if anybody should not talk about health and consequences of negative actions, it's someone who's morbidly obese, who's already gone through fucking stomach surgery and still morbidly obese.
But that guy, whether he knows it or not, through his ignorant statements, has fueled a massive amount of resistance.
There's people that have, like, fucking...
Double down on their resolve because of the stupid shit that he said.
And it actually fuels things in a positive way.
And in a horrible way, even a mass killing of gay people, like what happened to Orlando.
Horrible, terrible tragedy.
But ultimately, that's not going to stop people from being gay.
What it's going to do is it's going to fuel all the people like you and me, who have nothing but love and acceptance for everybody, regardless of your sexual persuasion.
To double down on that and to get that out more.
And that's where all the people on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all the social media posts about love and respect and not giving a fuck.
I've seen I don't know how many fucking memes from that bit that I did about those two reasons to hate gay marriage.
You know, you're either dumb or you're secretly worried that dicks are delicious.
That is fucking all over the place after one of these things happen.
That and then a million other ones like it and a million other rainbows and hearts in the shape of a rainbow.
And it's people doubled down on their acceptance, doubled down the resolve.
And there might be some people that were on the fence that might have had some negative ideas about gay people and see all this and go, man, you can't fucking kill people in a nightclub just because they're gay.
That's crazy.
And then they might open their mind a little bit more and then they might read a little bit more.
And then they might see an interview with some gay people that are holding hands and go, well, Why do I give a fuck?
What is this?
Religion?
What's some ancient stupid tradition?
Is it cultural appropriation?
What is it?
What is it about this idea that people should or shouldn't love people of one sex or another sex?
And if they do love them, they definitely shouldn't fuck them.
You know, I love you.
Like, we're really good friends.
We've never fucked.
I hope we never do.
But you know what I'm saying?
Like, why would anybody care if you love somebody and then you wind up touching your body with them and pleasuring each other?
Like, to some people, that becomes this taboo worthy of violence.
That's a nonsense point of view that is highlighted by horrific acts, and these horrific acts, as horrible and despicable as they are, in fact fuel people to be more open and more understanding.
It's like the more you push back, the more the resistance grows.
Yeah, and that's a point that you always fall back on that's absolutely 100%.
Right.
I mean, the obstacle is the way.
These things that, you know, in any video game, you need resistance in order to test your skills and improve.
In a weight room, you need gravity and the additional weights to stress your body so that you respond.
And that's the same case with all of these elements.
We underestimate the value of resistance, and that's a great constant reminder.
Like, yeah, there's a lot of fucked up things that happen, but that resistance will allow us to cultivate our own consciousness and our own love In a much greater way than if it wasn't there.
And so in a lot of ways, to really grow, you have to seek out resistance in your own life.
It'll come naturally in society, but put yourself up against your own fears to grow and put yourself up against it.
And when these things do happen, they are great natural things that you can rally behind and then bring forth your best attributes and best aspects because that's what allows us to grow.
And really, it comes down to, you know, people also...
One of the things that I've been ranting about a lot lately is choice.
You know, and people this...
We live in a society that loves to take choice from us and say, all right, everything is a disease, everything is privilege, everything is this thing.
You know, you really didn't have a choice because there were these preconceived conditions.
And really, it's robbing us of choice because if we accept our inherent superpower, which is choice, then we have responsibility for who we are.
And if we have responsibility for who we are, all of us have such a harsh self-judge that every failing we have, if we say, well, it was up to us, the judge just beats us to death about it.
So we'd rather shrug our responsibility and go with our hands up to the judge.
Judge, it wasn't my fault.
It wasn't my fault.
Because we have such a harsh self-judge in our own head, That we intend to do that.
So we give up our inherent superpower, which is choice, because we don't want to take the responsibility.
But at any point, we can take that back.
And you have to deal with the judge.
And you deal with the judge by making a pact to always forgive yourself.
Forgive yourself for any of the fucked up things that have happened and just accept that we're all imperfect.
This idea of perfection is nonsense.
We're all going to fuck up.
We're all going to make mistakes.
And so the judge is nonsense.
It's like we're all going to have come to the place we are through any variety of channels, and it's going to be an imperfect path no matter what.
So continue to pound that own message of self-love and forgiveness, and then re-harness that element of choice so that we can then decide what we want to be, who we want to be, what we want to go, and put our intent forth.
And yeah, maybe not everything is possible, but what better thing to do than to Fail in the cause of your greatest wish and your greatest intention, your greatest desire.
I mean, that's the ultimate warrior's death.
That's what they would talk about with Valhalla.
To find an enemy worthy enough to kill me in battle.
That was the ultimate idea.
And we can all choose those battles and choose that thing that we're fighting for.
And fuck, if we fail, so what?
But at least if we're going out on that way, you know, we'll go out with a smile 100% of the time.
Their ego is so fragile that they can't accept the fact that they may have not done a good job.
So they will manufacture ideas in their heads so that they did a good job no matter what because their ego can't take the truth of the blow like, man, you fucking bombed out there.
So it comes from insecurity and fragility, and then they create this ridiculous story in their head about what it is because they can't withstand that truth.
Because ultimately, I think it all comes from the same thing, this lack of self-love, that lack of ability to be like, man, I fucking shit the bed, and I'm okay.
Of course Well, that's the beauty of being a comic as opposed to being a fighter because a comic can have that moment and just the next night go on stage and I'm sure he killed Yeah, where he was killing like he's a super self-critical guy.
So whatever the bad moment at the very end was probably just Fairly You know Like, less funny than normal.
You know what I mean?
I'm sure it was funny.
But, like, for a fighter, like, here's a perfect example.
Someone like Luke Rockhold, who just got knocked out in one round by Michael Bisping.
He's gotta fucking rot with that.
That's gotta chew away at him, that mistake that he made, for months and months and months until he gets back in there again.
And even if he wins his next fight, he didn't win that fight.
That fight is still there.
That fight's still going to be chewing away at him.
And if he's smart, he'll keep that.
That's a little engine that when he's thinking about, like, when he's at the top of the hill, and he's like, this has got to be the last sprint.
That engine will be like, wrong, bitch!
Michael Bisping knocked you out and he mocked you.
And then we'll get right back to the bottom of that hill and hopefully he won't blow his joints out and break his body with that kind of motivation because that also can happen to people where their motivation sort of outpushes the physical capacity of their meat vehicle.
That's a possibility too.
You've got to be real careful with that.
But that, even though it seems like a terrible thing that happened to him, it's not just a good thing for him, it's a good thing for all martial artists.
It's a good thing to understand.
You are a human being.
Your jaw is made out of bone.
Your skin is made out of flesh.
The nerves are just like anybody else's nerves.
If you get cracked by a left hook the way Michael Bisping cracked Luke Rockhold, you're going night-night.
Everybody goes night-night.
Unless you're Mark Hunt.
Mark Hunt seems to be able to absorb some pretty fucking tremendous shots.
It goes back to that idea that the act is neither good nor bad.
It's how you respond to it.
Another kook, Carlos Castaneda, he had a great quote that, for the ordinary person, everything is a blessing or a curse, but for the warrior, there are only challenges.
And that really applies to fighting.
At this point, that was neither a blessing nor a curse that he got knocked out by Michael Bisping.
It's his response to it.
Is he going to respond like GSP did when he got knocked out by Matt Serra and revolutionize his fighting style and become the legend that we know him today?
Yeah, maybe the old GSP was more exciting, but it carried way more risk.
So he adapted and he became better and he became this indomitable force.
See, I don't even think the regular GSP was more exciting.
You know, exciting to me is a weird term.
Like, when I look at the GSP that destroyed BJ Penn or John Fitch, that motherfucker was pretty goddamn exciting.
And that's post-Matt Serra.
I think, but the Matt Serra analogy is a perfect one.
Because it's the same sort of a thing.
He was fighting a dangerous guy that he underestimated.
And, by the way, both of them won the Ultimate Fighter.
So it's a perfect analogy.
And both of them were huge underdogs, and both of them went on to win with spectacular first-round knockouts.
You've got to respect everybody.
And human beings that are professional fighters, even if you think you're better than them, they have weapons, man.
They take people out.
They all have, and you're a person.
But you think that because you beat Chris Weidman, you destroyed Lyoto Machida, you beat the fuck out of all these people, and you strangled Bisping the first time you met him, you're like, there's no way this guy's going to beat me.
No way.
It's impossible.
And so you go in there super relaxed.
And I remember when I was competing in the Taekwondo days, if I was relaxed and I didn't feel nervous, I fought like shit.
It was a terrible feeling.
I only fought well when I was scared.
And I think that's a really important point for almost anybody.
You really have to have some element of danger involved in the contest.
If that's not there, if you're just like pshh, You can't do shit to me.
Well, that's a key characteristic of being in flow state, that the stakes have to be high.
Everybody uses surfing as an analogy.
Well, you can surf some baby-ass waves, some two-foot waves on a sand bottom, and you're not going to get in flow state.
You're just going to be kind of paddling and cruising around.
But you surf that gnarly fucking double overhead on a coral reef bottom, fuck yeah, you're in flow state, let alone what Laird Hamilton is doing, surfing those monsters.
Yeah.
When the stakes are high and you're really feeling that, that's what drives you to your highest performance level.
But yeah, these people that are doing really exciting, really dangerous things, they carry with them the consequences of those really exciting, really dangerous things.
Like, occasionally you're going to fail.
And when you fail, it is important to know that you can fail.
It's important to know that no matter how much you have mastered whatever you're trying to do, there are consequences to every zig and zag.
You know, it's just really about mastering the ego.
You know, the ego is the main thing that thwarts you on either side.
It gives you this false sense of confidence and importance.
Remember, I was recently reading Ryan Holiday's new book, Ego is the Enemy.
And he has this story of the Persian king Xerxes, you know, who is immortalized in 300 and whatnot.
And this guy was such an egomaniac, it makes sense that he got his ass kicked, you know, repeatedly.
So they were building bridges over this canal, as the story the historians wrote.
And the water came up, the storm came in, storm surge, and it wiped out the bridges.
Well, then he ordered his men to take his chains and lash the water 30 times as punishment, you know, for knocking down the bridge.
And he cut off the people's heads who made the bridges, right?
So this fucking egomaniac.
And then another story where he's trying to build this tunnel under a mountain, and he sends a letter to the mountain, has his emissaries go out to announce this letter to the mountain, saying to the mountain, Mountain, if you give us any trouble, I will move you piece by piece into the sea.
King Xerxes.
What the fuck are you talking about?
No acknowledgement.
He's been fed his own bullshit so much that he thinks he's the god and he plays that role and then he runs into 300 bad motherfuckers at the hot gates at Thermopylae and they just wipe out half of his forces because he can't fucking see beyond it.
And there's so many ways that ego does that.
It either inflates you or it makes you too fragile.
And that's really, if you're going to be good at anything, you're going to have to come and confront that.
You know, I was at Disneyland a few weeks back with my family.
And I was talking to this guy that works there.
And he was talking about this five-year-old boy who was a prince from some Middle Eastern country.
And he came here with this huge group of guardians and watchers or whatever it was.
But they were all at his beck and call.
And so this five-year-old was telling all these adults what he wanted, when he wanted it, what he wanted done, and they all just scrambled and ran over.
And he was saying like it was so bizarre watching all these people terrified at the wrath.
Terrifying of the wrath of a five-year-old boy and that this five-year-old boy wielded just fucking supernatural power.
And he never earned any of it.
He was just born a five-year-old boy.
He was born this little child and now he's lived for five years.
I remember one time, they bought us all paintball guns, and I remember one of my older stepbrothers just laid in wait behind a wall like this.
We were on the property, and he just could hear me coming and just shot me point blank in the fucking face.
This paintball gun just lit me up, you know?
And that's the thing, like, obviously at the time I was not happy about it, but this, you learn things about the world and you get like a different toughness that comes from that form of resistance that if I didn't have that, I wouldn't be nearly the balanced person I was, you know, I am now.
And I'm not, fuck, I'm not perfect or balanced or anything, but that certainly fucking helped.
Failure, losing, especially individual one-on-one type competition where you realize the consequences of not working hard and you run into someone who has worked hard.
I remember in my competing days, I had a chance to see some...
When I was 19, I went to the Olympic Training Center, and there was the World Cup in Colorado Springs, and I got to see the best of the world compete.
And I remember seeing this insanely high level, and it was one of the most important things as far as my development as a competitor, seeing the top of the food chain, seeing the best guys, and realizing...
Fuck, look how hard they work.
Like, Jesus Christ.
I was watching them train.
I was watching guys compete.
And I was realizing, like, I'm not nearly as dedicated as these people are.
I have to ramp it up, like, in a big, big, big fucking way.
And seeing that and comparing yourself against other people's efforts and realizing that you fall short is so critical for people.
It's so critical to realize, like, oh, that guy would fuck me up.
Because if you're that five-year-old prince, that five-year-old prince probably has no idea that someone could beat his ass.
He probably just thinks he just gets to yell at you and you have to get on your knees and start bowing and lowering your head.
And if you don't experience other people's efforts, if you don't experience like...
A real competition where you see people pushing themselves as far as they can to try to win, like a race, where you see the last few meters of the race, where guys, you could see it in their face, the fucking struggle.
If you never do that, if you never do that, if you never push to that very edge of physical capacity, then you don't really understand what's out there.
It's like one of the reasons why people who have never had any martial arts experience at all or don't know how to fight at all get so weird around confrontation with men.
I mean, how many times have you been around men who don't know how to fight, but all of a sudden they get a few drinks in them and they start yelling at people and talking crazy shit.
It's like they don't know what to do.
They're like confused.
And so they're almost inviting their own doom.
They're almost like sending out a bat signal for someone to punch them in the face.
It's almost like a subconscious thing where they want someone to kick their ass because they kind of know that they're so unbalanced in their approach.
They're going to light their own place on fire and beat themselves up just to get that attribute out.
But you see that.
And the other thing is where people just don't take the idea that there may be consequences to their action to heart.
I had a perfect example of this.
I was after partying with an ex-gamer.
I won't mention anything further than that.
But an ex-game guy.
Super successful.
Like 20-year-old kid.
And he's been so successful for so long.
One of those child prodigies, right?
And we go, and he's over at my apartment downtown in Austin.
We were having fun.
And he continues to...
He goes and immediately puts on his music, and then he cranks it all the way up, full volume.
I'm like, yo, man, we got neighbors.
You can't do that shit.
You know, you can't crank it up.
He's like, okay.
And then he goes and he does it again.
And he goes and he does it again.
And I keep warning him, like, man.
So finally, like, time number five, I go up to him.
I go, you turn the fucking volume up.
Shit's gonna get real.
And I looked at him with a total different tone.
And then he looked at me like...
Oh my God, I didn't think that that consequence of my actions was even a fucking feasible possibility.
Like that moment of like, oh shit, this other dude may punch me if I fucking do this again and be that disrespectful.
It was like, you know, for him, he had surrounded himself with other people in this environment where just having respect for somebody and the consequences for repeated disrespect might actually be there was like a world-changing moment for him where he looked up like, Oh, shit.
And it may come from the fact that, particularly skateboarders, they're constantly getting persecuted by lame-ass authority figures telling them not to skate on their fucking handrails.
Some banker comes up, don't skate on my handrails, kid, you fucking punk.
So they're constantly being chased around by people who are dummies.
And so maybe it develops this kind of like...
Counter this reaction.
So that reaction of being persecuted for doing what they're enjoying to do creates this like, yeah, fuck the man.
Like I've seen some crazy stunts on YouTube where these dudes jump on top of these reelings and slide them to the bottom and fuck up and plow into people.
The world is not an X game.
You can't just do that with a bunch of other people around.
I mean, I've gotten to know him real well because he trains at the Onan Academy, so I see him coming through there all the time.
And just the sweetest dude.
It's great!
And he shows up, like, no chip on his shoulder, no, like, he comes in wearing silly little shorts and a fanny pack and just a big old smile on his face and a silly fucking mustache.
And just, he's got nothing to prove.
But then he has that switch, you know, obviously where...
He can do whatever, access whatever that place is, that fucking wolf heart.
And the thing that you can really appreciate is the truth of it.
It cuts all the way through to the core.
The people that you shake them a little bit and some other person emerges and you shake them again like a fucking magic eight ball and they got another thing that's going to come out.
Those are the people that are the worst.
You shake Tim, it's Tim.
You shake Tim, it's Tim.
If you shake him again, it's a little slightly angrier Tim.
It's the same fucking guy and that's always a beautiful thing when you see it.
People who've dealt with those deeper things, they've reconciled all these forces that, you know, you're not going to put them in a situation where this other person emerges and you're like, what the fuck is this selfish piece of shit guy, you know?
Yeah, and this is also something that we were talking about earlier when you were talking about people like the camaraderie and the craziness of going to war that they actually enjoy it and become happy there in some sort of a weird way because life becomes real.
Because life becomes real in this chaotic moment.
I think it was a TED Radio Hour.
It might have been a Radiolab podcast.
I think it was a TED Radio Hour.
But they were talking to soldiers, and they were talking to people about happiness.
It was a TED show.
It was a TED talk.
They were talking about happiness.
And one of the things they got into was these people that went over to Iraq and Afghanistan and served, and they would come back and talk about it.
And they said, it was horrific, it was chaotic, it was scary, but it was the happiest days of my life.
And one of the reasons why it was the happiest days of their life was this intense bond and camaraderie that they had developed with these other people that they were serving with.
There's nothing like it.
There's no sort of closeness and bond of brotherhood that even comes close to the bond of brotherhood when you need to rely on these people and they rely on you for your very life and you're taking other people's lives.
Yeah, I think that's a huge missing piece in our society.
And I think a few people get to access it on sports teams and on different, you know, and obviously in war.
But I think, you know, that tribal element of going through these shared rites of passages and going through these things that bonded a group together so that you really had true altruistic love for I think that's a deep calling that we've kind of ignored.
Those soldiers would truly fight and die for each other, which is the epitome of altruism.
It's wanting the other person's good even at the cost of your own.
And that's a feeling that I think feels inherently the best.
It's our natural state to be this, like the sun of love, you know, like just pouring it out and not deciding who gets it, but truly feeling that way about a group of people.
And I think there's, you know, as we develop, I think that's, you know, one of the concepts that I'm always talking about is recreating some kind of tribal element where you do go through these rites of passage and doesn't have to involve war, which is inherently...
An unsustainable and unnecessary practice.
But how do you create that same closeness, but do it through ritual, do it through, you know, going and climbing this mountain and taking this psychedelic, however you want to do it, you know, in a way that can bond you together with the group.
So you have those feelings where there's nothing you're holding back.
Your truth is completely exposed.
You're naked with all your intentions and thoughts and ideas.
And you just truly want the best for another individual.
And that feeling of tribe, that's what tribe is.
And I think we're missing that.
We have ourselves in this small nuclear unit.
And then we have this whole wide world, which is too big to really care to that degree about.
And we're missing the intermediary, which is this band, this group, this family that we're willing to do anything for.
And they were pushing so much energy back to him, chanting and just...
It was this really amazing moment.
I mean, you imagine those...
You read about those moments in history where the great leaders...
You know, come and have that moment with their troops.
And you don't see that now in today's warfare.
There's no that Independence Day moment where they give that rousing speech and everybody's just pounding their chest.
And, you know, that was...
That's something that's really deeply moving and powerful.
And to have that, you need to have that force of resistance that you're all allied against.
So you're all banded together against that other thing.
And it's just choosing a thing that is truly worthy of your fight.
So choosing to fight against something that's not just another people or another race or all the stupid things that we choose to fight against, but choosing to fight against something truly worthy of that fight.
You know, like history, especially like history of Rome, which I'm most familiar with, there was always these moments in time, you know, where a leader would naturally emerge like that, for whatever reason.
And then it always made the emperors really squirrely, because at any point in time, that person could all of a sudden be like, Yep, my army now, bitch.
We need someone who understands the realities and the consequences of what these people in these hallowed halls of justice are trying to pull off all throughout the world.
Instead of having these old chicken hawks, they're sitting in these...
It was one of the best quotes from the documentary on Hunter S. Thompson, where he was talking to, it wasn't Ed Muskie, it was McGovern.
And McGovern was saying, I'm sick of old men in air-conditioned buildings sending young men to go off and die in war.
And that's really one of the most despicable aspects of the decision-making process by quote-unquote leaders, is that their consequences are so minimal.
I mean, if every single politician and leader had to be at the head of the army, had to go to the fray, had to be on the front lines, how many actual wars would we get into?
Yeah, and people would say, well, if they did do that, war would be impossible the way we need it and the way we do it now.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, don't do it that way, you fuck.
That's what we're trying to say.
It's one of the main problems with war and with leadership is that the people that are in charge at the very top in a lot of ways are behaving like that five-year-old boy at Disneyland who's a prince.
They have too much power with no consequences.
They have too much power that essentially they haven't really earned.
You know, when you got a guy like Jocko Willink who was A real military hero who was over there commanding.
When that guy talks about the military or talks about war or talks about actions, the respect is not...
You don't need to respect him.
You're going to respect him.
You're going to understand that this is a guy who's been there and you're going to listen because it's real.
When a guy like...
Dick Cheney starts talking about military actions.
You're dealing with some fucking weird detachment from the reality and consequences of war from a guy who, during the Iraq invasion, a lot of the times was in a bunker.
Remember that?
Remember they would talk about him being in some underground bunker?
And I was always like, why is Dick Cheney in the bunker and George W. Bush is on TV? Like, who the fuck is running this country for real?
But these guys that got multiple deferments like Dick Cheney did to avoid actually serving in the war.
I mean, I think he got several deferments to avoid having to actually see real combat.
Those are not the people that should ever be able to make those kind of decisions to put people in harm's way.
And the nature of war is, I don't think we're, obviously, with post-traumatic stress being such an epidemic that it is now, we're not adequately dealing with that element of things.
I mean, it's an incredibly traumatic aspect of, we're not prepared for death can come at any moment unseen.
Our bodies, yeah, it makes sense.
All right, there's the barbarian horde.
They're going to run with their pointy thing, and I'm going to have time to run at them with my pointy thing, and that's when death might come.
But death's not going to come from this random explosion that happens.
Every car could be a bomb, all of this.
It's this crazy time that we're in, and we have to really pay attention to what that's doing to the humans and use the best technology available to fix that.
And I think, obviously, Rick Doblin, who's been on here a few times, is on the forefront of that Yeah.
But we're just looking at the whole thing completely wrong.
You know, we have old ideas, bad ideas, bad leaders.
And it's again that thing where truth is there.
We understand that there's this epidemic.
We understand here's some possible ways to fix it, but it hasn't percolated all the way through.
So we're in this transition period that's, you know, it's ugly right now in a lot of ways.
But you can see the horizon.
You see that sun poking through the clouds and you know that truth just has a different resonance.
It has a different frequency.
And it's adopted eventually.
You know, it's only, you know, there'll be people who still think there's flat earth and whatever.
There'll be some resistance to truth.
But for most of us, it has that frequency and that resonance where it's going to eventually win.
He posted a whole video the other day about some dude who was arguing against the flat earth or for the flat earth in the weirdest way possible.
But what I was talking about before that I don't know if I articulated it so well is that when you look at our culture and look at society and then you think back to the time of Xerxes and all the crazy shit that was going on, Thousand years ago or two thousand years ago.
That's not that long ago, man.
No, it's not it seems like it is it seems like it is but like When I was listening to Dan Carlin's hardcore history and he was talking about world war world war one And he does this amazing, I think it's a five-part series on World War I. And it sinks in like, Jesus Christ, that was a hundred years ago.
Like, that's nothing.
That is fucking nothing.
Like, that is so recent.
And the world is so different now than a hundred years ago.
And a hundred years before that, so different.
And then, you know, he had this piece on the Mongols a thousand years ago.
Well, not much different.
You know, it's like...
I mean, not much different in terms of the relationship between then and now.
It's so recent.
So recent.
A thousand years is nothing in the scope of the world.
And then you take it back it out to, you know, some of Graham Hancock's theories that he puts out in Magicians, which seem to make a lot of sense, that we'd reached heightened states before and gotten kind of wiped out and restarted.
With Randall Carlson's evidence, with the two of them together, they really sort of both provided the missing pieces that each other need.
And if you've never heard those podcasts, they're some of my all-time favorite podcasts.
The Randall Carlson ones, and the Graham Hancock ones, and the one time that I had the two of them on together, which was just a fucking epic meeting of the minds.
The world has most likely experienced some cataclysmic disasters, most likely due to asteroid impacts.
And it was most likely the cause of the end of the Ice Age and also the collapse of whatever civilization was available then and the rebirth of what we're seeing now as ancient history.
So when we look back at things six, seven thousand years ago, we think, wow, this is the dawn of civilization.
Not so fast.
This is the dawn of this current era of civilization before we get hit again.
God, it would give so much to see the construction of the pyramids.
If there was like one time in history, if you could take that sort of a time capsule and go back and watch, for me, it would be ancient Egypt.
For me, for sure.
I would want to see how those crazy fuckers were walking around with their wacky goth makeup on and weird golden robes and making those hieroglyphs.
God, what a fascinating weird blip.
Or weird era in the development of the human mind and of culture.
If you think of what they were capable of doing and what they did accomplish over who knows how many, you know, we're sort of going back trying to piece it all together, but one of the things that Graham Hancock and even more importantly John Anthony West, John Anthony West has a new series apparently,
Magical Egypt 2. I haven't seen it yet, but Magical Egypt 1 is just Fucking mind-blowing when he goes into great detail about the different construction methods from the old kingdom to the new kingdom and that he points out that this is most likely evidence of a different era of construction and not just a different era but different by 10,000 years maybe and that the hieroglyphs on the inside of some of the pyramids Which dictate,
or rather, which go over and depict the various pharaohs throughout the different stages of Egypt, they go back 30,000 years.
But what modern Egyptologists choose to do is to say, well, that was all fiction.
Anything more than 6,000 years ago is just fiction.
Like, okay, says who, bitch?
Says who?
How do you know?
It's crazy enough that they did this 4,500 years ago.
That's just crazy enough, okay?
But it's no more crazy to think that they were doing it 30,000 years before that.
Like, this whole thing is this majestic sort of monument to human innovation in a weird way that's not like what we do now with cement and steel and glass and asphalt roadways and fiber optic cables.
And that's kind of an interesting speculative part of Graham's theory, but what seems concrete is that there was these cultures advanced and decided to do it.
Now, why gets into the speculation, but Gobekli Tepe and Gunung Panang and Indonesia and then Egypt and all of these places.
Really, really super interesting.
And interesting to imagine, you know, if the Flood did kill off most of that civilization, then they kind of just settled in different places in the accounts.
Just one of the best books, I think, ever written was Magicians.
And just going into the mindset of, you know, he talks about, they called these people watchers.
And then some of the watchers, you know, would get a bad reputation because they like sleeping with the local girls.
So they would be like the bad watchers.
And then the good watchers.
Well, maybe they were just the pimps of their time, you know.
Well, when they burned the Library of Alexandria, man, did they do the human race a massive disservice.
We could have learned so much.
Could have learned so much about why the ancient Greeks would go to Egypt to learn shit and to engage in psychedelic rituals.
It's funny that the greatest minds of their time would go specifically to Egypt to engage in these psychedelic rituals and to learn from the Egyptians.
The greatest minds of our time today will mock psychedelics.
So few, in terms of mainstream, recognized scholars, will even entertain the possibility that there could be some beneficial aspects to engaging in ritualistic hallucinogenics Well, all of academia is about defending to the death your own structure of information and psychedelics are inherently disruptive and I think people have that knowledge.
They know like, shit, I may totally rethink all my whole theories and you'll have to confront those demons that you're hiding.
That which is hidden will come to the surface and that's generally the beauty of this process.
But if you're defending something, you know, and you're attached to it and it's part of your identity and because it's part of your identity, it feels real.
Like that's the trick that the ego plays.
The ego says, my identity is me and I will defend it as if it was my flesh and blood.
You know, like all of these things, my theories, my position in academia, it becomes real to the ego.
And so it fights as if it's defending your own, you know, blood and bone body.
It's just, it's bullshit.
It's your identity.
It doesn't matter.
It can shift.
It's fluid.
It's a manufacturing of that ego, that attachment.
And so psychedelics are a threat to that.
If you've been defending something that you don't want to get challenged, it could threaten your position of authority and power, and people are afraid to do it.
There's no real other reason To have that fear widespread, yeah, there's a time and a place, and it's not for everybody, etc.
But, you know, really, it's such a powerful tool to access truth.
Yeah, there's a really interesting documentary that's...
Funny enough, narrated by Charlton Heston about the mystery of the Sphinx.
I think it was on NBC at the time.
But one of the weirder moments in it was when Robert Schock, the geologist from Boston University, and John Anthony West presented this evidence that the Sphinx most likely was far older than 2500 BC because of the erosion in the Sphinx compound that could only be attributed to water.
I've heard arguments against it.
Um, against it being water and it being wind and sand, but they just, they don't fly.
It seems like they're working to try to make that a wind and sand erosion, whereas it's pretty obvious the fissures, the way it's cut into the, I mean, it makes total sense that it was water.
But the only thing that could make it water would be that it had to be before 9,000 B.C. Because 9,000 B, or 7,000 B.C., 9,000 years ago, one of those.
Somewhere a lot longer than 2500 BC. And the argument when it was presented to this archaeologist, he was laughing.
What culture was around 10,000 years ago that could have done this?
What culture?
Meanwhile, now we have those cultures.
Now we have real evidence Of Gobekli Tepe, which is 12,000 years old.
We have real evidence of all sorts of weird shit that they didn't know.
I mean, now they're finding evidence of human beings in North America 14,000 years ago.
They're finding woolly mammoth bones with clear indications that they were slaughtered by human beings, like cuts on the bones.
And they're like, oh, Jesus.
Like, people, we don't know.
We just don't know.
We don't know what the fuck happened between 10,000 years ago when the Ice Age ended and today.
There's just so much weirdness.
And we definitely don't know what the fuck happened before that.
Before that, there is a lot of unfilled pieces in that puzzle.
It's like the greatest mystery novel that I've ever read was Graham Hancock's book.
It's just you're uncovering something that was real and trying to piece together the puzzle.
And in 20 years, from fingerprints to magicians, all the new evidence that have come has really supported his initial evidence, which was pretty good in fingerprints.
But then by magicians, it's like fucking overwhelming.
He was just so openly mocked by a lot of people that didn't want him to be right or didn't want anyone to achieve any sort of notoriety by having some sort of an innovative idea.
I mean, they pushed back on him so hard.
But the stuff that Randall Carlson presents...
Like these various craters that they've uncovered all throughout the world that indicate asteroid impacts as recently as 5,000 years ago and deep into 12,000, 10,000.
The nuclear glass they found all throughout Asia and Europe that indicates massive meteor impacts somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000, 12,000 years ago.
The circumstantial evidence is just mounting and mounting.
And it's interesting, you know, we hear about these things that are like myths.
And one of the ones that I saw that I'm not sure if it's true or not, but it's an interesting take on what actually happened to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Because in the Bible, you know, God rained fire upon and burned all these homosexuals and sodomists and people that sounded like they're having a great party.
And, you know, what they were suggesting is that it was a meteor that burned up in the atmosphere and it raised it created this flashpoint effect, which they know can happen.
It created this flashpoint effect where instantly the ground temperature reached several hundred or thousand degrees or whatever.
So it was like this instant everybody's just fucking crispied.
And how do you explain that other than an angry god?
It doesn't make sense.
You have no idea.
So these stories and myths get passed down.
And they're like, well, why did that happen?
Well, I don't know, man.
I went to Sodom and there was some crazy shit going on.
But today, I mean, this guy in Orlando, obviously he's fucking crazy, right?
But he's killing gay people.
Because he thinks the gay people are doing something against God's will.
They're doing something bad and evil.
So in his mind, his wrath is like the wrath of God on these people.
In 2016, with the information that we have, With all the evidence that we have, there are still people that are inclined to go towards some sort of a biblical or, in his case, the Quran version of the reality in which we live in.
This is today.
When you're talking about 7,000, 8,000 years ago, God only knows what it would have been like.
It was probably straight out of Game of Thrones.
Like, the reaction that people had to any sort of a natural disaster, it had to be the will of the gods.
It had to definitely be something that our own actions had caused.
And so when someone would stand up, like the old dirty dude on Game of Thrones who wants everybody to repent.
I don't know exactly when, but there's several of them there.
And all the different torture devices that they have.
So many of which, by the way, involve the genitals.
Like, I would say at least 40% involve different things, different ways to torture someone.
Balls and dick and pussy and tits and all this.
I mean, it's just these ways that they could channel their own perversions into this unarguable point about, you know, this is God, this is what God wants.
But they're really just pure sadists accessing that sadistic demonic energy.
And doing it under God's name.
And that's what happens when you create these systems that only a select few can access the knowledge.
Nobody else can talk to God.
These few people that did it and we're talking and we're the descendants of those people.
We guard the knowledge.
You can't reach it.
So it creates, instead of decentralizing it and opening up truth to everybody, it's a select few that have it.
Only a few people know God's will.
Not everybody can find it.
And that creates these massive power imbalances.
Whereas any good religion is going to completely decentralize and say, you know, not listen to me.
I'll tell you what God says.
Here's how you go talk to God yourself.
Here's how you reliably go find your own deepest truth.
You don't need me.
It's the same with any good teacher or any good healer.
The very base level is a teacher or healer who fixes you.
You come to him and he fixes you.
And then the next level is someone who teaches you how to fix yourself.
And then, you know, the final level is just to really, the great mystics, and even if you go back to Jesus and you go back to the really great mystics, their message truly is that, you know, you don't need us to fix you.
You're already whole.
Like, just recognize that you're already whole.
You're already perfect.
You know, you are the Son of Man.
You are God.
I mean, that was really the core message that got twisted in a million different ways and manipulated for power.
There's one of the other more interesting podcasts from Dan Carlin was on Martin Luther and Lutherism.
Lutheran?
Lutheran?
The Lutheran discipline?
And that he was the first one to translate the Bible from Latin into German.
And translate it in a phonetic way, that the people could actually understand what the Word of God was and not have to be a priest, because they were relying upon these priests.
And not only that, he was also the first one to say that your interpretation of what God meant is essentially up to you.
Which was just blasphemy to these people that had massive amounts of control.
I think if you're looking for that one, I think it's called The Prophets of Doom or The Prophet of Doom.
I think that's the name of the podcast from Carlin on that insane time.
But it's amazing, amazing to think that, you know, in that sense, you're talking about, like, what was it, the 1400s or something like that?
They were getting mad pussies, so someone came along and said, all right, you fuckers, no sex.
They just made that up along the way.
I mean, it wasn't even like it came from God.
It's like it came along.
They already established one way of behaving, like even the Pope.
Popes used to have wives, they had armies.
Like, Popes weren't like this weird feebled guy who sits on a golden throne and has little gay people do Cirque du Soleil dances in front of them like that last asshole.
Yeah, again, it's the control of power, the control of information rather than the shamanic way, which is always show you, not tell you.
That's another great way if you're trying to find out who you should go with.
If someone's busy blabbing their mouth and trying to tell you all of the things that you'll see from an ayahuasca journey or something like that, Tell you all the lessons and give them to you that way.
Fucking go the other way.
You know, like the true path is, you know, here you go.
I'm going to create the environment and you're going to go find truth for yourself.
You're going to find whatever the truth that is.
And they have faith that you'll arrive at the truth that's going to be most beneficial for you.
And most often than not, it comes back congruous with those ideas.
And that's the true path.
That's the path that any religion should take.
And I think one of the reasons why Buddhism is so popular, because it's similar in that way.
It teaches a practice or Zen or It teaches a practice that allows every single person to access that higher state of consciousness.
Everybody can reach nirvana.
It's not just the chosen, pre-selected, this thing.
Here's how you do it and go for it.
And I think any good spirituality system is going to have that in common.
Isn't it interesting, though, that that's sort of the exception to the rule to find a system or find an individual like a Martin Luther or like someone who steps up and says, no, the whole world should benefit.
All the people should learn this.
It shouldn't be about centralized power.
It shouldn't be about controlling the people.
That's a rare thing, and that's fought against vehemently.
They passionately resist this.
And in many ways, it's like what we were talking about before.
Almost negativity and evil to bring out the best in people in a response and it almost it sort of takes this horrible control this dictatorship of religion and ideology to Resist in such a powerful way that you change Everything around you because of these people were just like sort of well, you know There's the word of God and go with it.
Don't go with it.
I don't give a fuck everything's cool, you know and Oh, you don't have to give me any of your money.
I'm not trying to fuck anybody.
I'm just hanging out over here.
There'd probably be no resistance to that religion and there would be no sort of rebound effect where people are trying to find their own truth to this and understanding that the negative...
Attachments that they have to all these religious cults or sex or whatever you want to call them the negative Attachments that we have them are completely unnecessary like they don't have to be there that through what everyone's trying to find Through religion.
You're trying to find the Word of God.
You're trying to find ultimate love and wisdom and power and this one individual who's created literally the entire universe or this force has created literally.
So why is it this guy's trying to fuck my wife?
And why is it I have to give everybody my gold?
And how come I can't read the Bible myself?
How do I have to trust this guy who's trying to fuck my wife and steal my goats?
I have to trust that asshole?
Fuck that, man!
And so then this Martin Luther guy comes along who actually can read it and understand it and translates it.
And there is a massive blowback.
And obviously just based entirely on Dan Carlin's podcast, but apparently his influential position in the community was the only thing that kept him alive.
Anybody else doing the exact same thing he was doing would have been killed by the church.
The church would have killed people for distributing the word of God in a way that other people could understand.
And it had been done before.
People had questioned the church before.
They just fucking strung them up and cut their dick off and shoved it in their mouth and lit them on fire and launched them in a catapult.
How does a system like that take hold and take effect?
You've talked about the toxoplasma that alters behavior.
This disease that will alter human behavior or alter mice behavior.
And we have that disease too, and it's called fear.
And it is the primary disease that once fear takes a hold of us, once we fear that if we do something wrong, we'll be punished in the most obscene ways.
You know, look at like a Bosch painting from Italy during the time of all of these inventions of how you were going to be tortured if you went against the will of God.
And you'll be punished not only for a little while, but eternally.
Eternal torture and suffering like that's some kind of just punishment for you know having lustful thoughts or whatever but that's what they believe so they inject people with this fear virus and then the fear virus robs them of their own free will robs them of their ability to think so it's like this form of virus that takes hold of somebody and then you allow these atrocities to take hold because fear is within you and in other cases maybe it's the greed virus or some other thing that takes hold but it's It's really like this thing that really limits your ability
to use rational thought and to harness your own power of choice.
But fear is that original virus that the religions played so, so well.
It's weird because it's such a distortion of a really important aspect of being alive.
You have to have fear of consequences.
You have to have fear of animals.
You have to have fear of the ocean.
You have to have a healthy respect for the consequences of stepping off of a cliff or the consequences of walking into a bear den with a mom and her cubs.
All those things are real.
So you have to have fear.
But there's some fear that people have that exists for no reason.
Well, isn't it interesting in that respect then that it seems that the more knowledge we gather, the more information we acquire, the less we have to be fearful of.
The more we can say, oh, that's not an angry god, that's a meteor.
And then one day, oh, we'll figure out how to deflect those meteors.
We don't have to worry about the Ice Age ending or rather a dinosaur killing chunk of iron and stone from the sky slamming into the ocean and killing all of us.
Because we see those fuckers coming now and we just shoot a net at it and push it off into Jupiter or some shit.
I mean, this is all information that will slowly but surely eliminate the need for fear.
And I guess that's probably going to extend to the consequences of injury and death as well.
I mean, at one point in time, things keep going the way they're going.
I guarantee if they get to you within a certain amount of time, they're probably going to be able to reanimate you.
Bringing it back to our camp as we bring this bitch home.
When we were up there, it was like...
I felt like since you've been practicing archery for a couple years now and you've been really getting into it, that would have been the perfect first archery hunt because it's a controlled environment.
It's a really high likelihood of success even though we both struck out.
It's a high likelihood of success.
And there's a crazy intimate connection that you have with an animal when you're up close with them within 20 plus yards and you shoot it with a bow and arrow.
That is like some really old DNA that you tap into.
That's some like, there's a boop.
There's like a switch that goes off where your tissue is like, "Oh, we've seen this We did this 500 years ago.
There's genetics, I think, that are attached to archery in some sort of strange way.
Apparently, I'm not a traditional archer.
I haven't done that.
But they say it's even stronger in that shooting, even just shooting regular bows, like a recurve bow, has an even more visceral connection to the human body.
And the human mind, you know, what Ted Nugent calls the mystical flight of the arrow, that there's some sort of a weird ancient calling when you do that.
Well, I always imagine that it's like a lot like playing pool in that You develop a feel for where it's gonna go and you have to do it.
So what they say that it's one of the most important things about Traditional archery instinctive shooting is you have to shoot hours every day to be really Really accurate, but like if you watch like Olympic recurve shooters, they have a lot of weird shit going on, man.
They have like a clicker, so they'll pull the arrow back a certain distance and a click will go off because you could have the bow all the way to heat.
I'm making a motion.
Like you could pull it back to your chin or you could pull it past your chin.
Like it's not like a compound bow where it hits a wall.
A compound bow is extremely accurate.
And guys like John Dudley, who was a guy who set up my bow, and he wrote the curriculum for the World Archery Federation, or whatever the fuck it is, and travels all over the world to teach people proper technique and teach people and coach international teams in archery.
He was saying...
That if you get like a rifle shooter and they shoot like freehand and not resting in something to 100 yards, that archers are actually regularly more accurate at 100 yards with a bow and arrow than someone holding a rifle is.
Any kind of recurve bow can shoot 20 pounds if you just pull it back a little bit to fucking 65, whatever, depending on how much you can actually bend the limbs of that thing and go.
So the up and down variability, I mean, side to side you should get pretty accurate.
You know, just by anchoring and kind of lining that up.
But the up and down really depends on how far you pull and your breath.
And your release gets super squirrely, too, because it's in your fingers.
You don't have a little release thing.
So you hold on a little tight or you don't let the string flow through your fingers the right way.
Yeah, and if you look at a compound bow, if you look at someone who's shooting a compound bow, like people, I put a picture of me up from our camp that Ben took when we were there, and one of the things that people have commented on, like, look at that fucking weird thing, like all these pulleys and cables and all these things hanging off of it, and the sight and the stabilizer, there's like so much going on.
I've added things and taken things down, but oh, there it is.
There's the photo.
Yeah, there's a lot going on on that fucking thing.
But all those cables and the pulleys and the stabilizer and the adjustable sight that goes up and down depending on distance, but it's so fucking accurate.
Yeah.
It's so fun too, man.
There's very few things I enjoy as far as clearing my mind as much as just shooting at a target.
get it hard they don't need viagra i don't know all of these things that we have in our that our monkeys are just broken because we've ceased to recognize the monkey in all of us yeah you know so getting back to that and looking at nature is just a great way to do it whether you're hunting or camping or whatever just fucking soak that in yeah you'll learn shit there's also a feeling that you get when you're in the woods where there's there's no cell phone reception there's no people you don't hear anything you're just surrounded by trees and wildlife in some weird way
it's for some people they find it lonely they They find it like, God, this place doesn't give a fuck about me.
Because it doesn't.
Because you realize that you really are a part of this enormous, almost infinite system.
Infinite in the terms of if you go down to the macro level or the micro level, you're down to atoms.
And you're down to subatomic particles and then you expand from there to cells and cell walls and the structure of tissue in the body and then the instincts that come with keeping the body alive and then with a human being language and then the culture and Media that you have absorbed that has given you this distorted idea of what life is what being a human is what being a man is and That music should play when you see your girlfriend.
You know what I mean?
There should be a score to your life and that you are enormously important because your ego wants you to survive long enough to shoot your loads into someone and make little baby arteries.
And all these things, they don't matter when you're in those woods.
All those things, it's like the woods confront you with this ultimate reality that you are a part of this infinite system.
And this infinite system, when you really expand upon it, the very planets itself, the very planet, this planet, and all planets themselves, become tiny little subatomic particles in the nature of the universe.
Yeah, the perspective is so key, and it can be kind of mind-boggling to think about it.
It's almost like we're lords of our own universe, and our universe is our body.
Our thoughts can manifest different things.
Our choices create the environment that we live in.
You know, it's like we have our own universe, and then we're plugged into this, you know, greater universe that we know all around us, the planet and everything else, and that's plugged into the larger.
And you start just expanding your perspective, and it just kind of really goes on infinitely.
You know, like the cell is part of an organ.
That's its universe, a liver cell.
The universe of the liver cell is the liver, and they're one cell in that thing.
It goes up and down infinitely, and you just get a perspective that everything's gonna be okay no matter what.
Everybody just fucking relax, enjoy yourself, get back in touch with the monkey, get back in touch with love, and whatever happens, it's gonna be alright.
There'll be another Earth, there'll be another time, there'll be another opportunity for this thing to go.
We get so caught up in the minutia of the details of this thing or that thing, It'll be okay.
If the earth blinks out, you know, some other point in some other time in the vastness of eternity, another fucking awesome earth will come with new awesome animals and it'll be okay.