Shane Mauss, a comedian and VR enthusiast, shares his harrowing cliff-jump injury—breaking both heels in May 2015—that left him with chronic pain, nerve damage, and a three-month struggle in his parents’ basement due to insurance hurdles. He credits Kratom for relief but questions the DEA’s Schedule I proposal, comparing it to Nixon-era psychedelic suppression. Mauss also details bizarre psychedelic trips, including DMT visions of fractal-like structures and evolutionary simulations, debating whether they reveal alternate dimensions or internal brain constructs. His upcoming A Good Trip tour blends comedy with psychedelia, while Rogan teases deeper discussions on consciousness, from VR to ancient Egyptian mysticism. [Automatically generated summary]
No, I would imagine it is a good workout, because I did his boxing one, and that's a good workout.
You're, like, boxing against this guy, this video guy, and I showed it to some fighters, and I was, like, I really think that this could be an amazing training tool.
If they We could figure out how to make the headset so that maybe if the cord was in the back, if it didn't interfere, as long as you didn't do anything when you had to spin around, it would probably be effective.
But they can map your body movements.
Like they had that, Jamie, you would know this, that wasn't there an Xbox One where it just sort of takes a picture of your body as you're standing there?
Yeah, I played one of the ones, was a paintball one, with other people that were online.
And, I mean, I guess we've had kind of, people have been playing other people online, but when you're doing it in virtual reality, it's just a totally different thing.
Because I'll tell you what, playing that archery game, my arms were so tired.
Just from holding, it's like a static thing with your left arm in particular.
You're holding your arm in one position, and then your right arm that you're drawing the bowstring back, you're holding that in one position constantly.
But the paint one is just this virtual paint where you paint like...
You use a spray can here.
You put sparks in this area.
And then you can walk through it.
You can make a circle around yourself and then walk through it and shrink it and enlarge it.
And you can see all these people that have painted entire ships, like spaceships, that you can then go inside and walk around and see all the different areas that they've made.
And you can add your own graffiti to it and stuff like that.
I think that's going to be...
To have someone like Alex Gray or something like that get in there.
It's like those old letters that, like when I was a kid, the chain letters had come and if you didn't send it to like seven people, you'd have bad luck or, you know, whatever it is.
And now people are falling for that with like Trump memes.
And maybe your intelligence level may be several steps above the stuff you're posting, and you're kind of half-trolling and being shitty at the same time.
But there's another version of this that has, okay, maybe this is different.
I think I've been hoodwinked.
I think this is probably the real one, because it says save the day and the channel saved the day.
And the other one is someone made it and took their speeches with some of their imagery, but then put a bunch of stuff in the background showing, like, how fucked up the Benghazi situation is, how fucked up Donald Trump's past is, how many people are suing Trump University.
And then, like, so it makes this thing about saving the day...
I guess most of what save the day is, is, like, anti-Trump.
But when you see the video that whoever has created this put together online, it shows a lot of fucked up Hillary stuff, too.
It really lets you know, like, hey, you ain't saving shit, stupid.
This culture and memes and everything else, it's completely changing what the role of politicians is, what the president actually does, whereas it used to be like you'd need a representative to ride on horseback or whatever.
And now we don't really need any of that anymore.
And so now these are just people that are going around giving pep talks because by necessity they have to raise a certain amount of money so they have to go to each town and say...
I like America the most, the other guy doesn't like America the best, and I support the troops the most, the other person doesn't, and they're just giving the same talk.
I don't know how they could have any time to actually be doing the job.
They're just going around marketing, and it's kind of by necessity.
Yeah, because now, even if these people genuinely say it's just this person who genuinely wants to make a difference, is super smart, they know just how to do the job, they won't be able to.
Yeah, Obama's a very bright dude, seems like a hard-working guy, but he's still, you know, he's just out there giving pep talks and having to, you know, raise funds.
And I think it's ridiculous to try to pretend that one person is even capable of running the United States government, something so monstrously huge.
Encompassing the IRS, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI. Fucking go on down the line with every union and all the different special interest groups that he has to, you know, they all contribute to his campaign.
He has to help them out.
There's so many different people he has to meet from other countries.
There's so many different foreign interests he has to address.
There's so many different deals that are on the table.
And why not, rather than going to each small town and giving the same speech, I mean, we have the internet, we have TV, why not just get together and have like a podcast or like once a week where you just talk about what you're doing and what your plans are and you're getting together with certain whatever experts you're working with.
And giving a summary on what's actually happening and how things work so people are involved and understand and can give feedback on it.
I mean, that's, because right now there's just, like, no substance.
And even, I used to think the debates were like, oh, okay, finally, they're going to be saying something, you know, of substance, but it's just, you have one person on one side, one on the other, and they're just digging their trenches, and they're not open to the other person's idea.
They're not having a conversation.
Like, I wish someone would just make these two children just sit down and And have a fucking conversation over tea or something like that.
It's so strange and it goes along the same lines to me as there's some certain things that have been around for a long time that I'm like, how did they ever let this get in?
Like if you are operating for the greater good of the people, not for the most amount of money that you're going to receive for making these decisions, but if you're operating for the greater good of the people, why would you let pharmaceutical drug companies make advertisements?
Why would you let politicians make advertisements?
Why would you let the cigarette industry?
How the fuck is that still around?
How are you still allowing that?
And then you're saying that marijuana should be illegal.
There's so many of these ancient things that are so ridiculous that have been around forever.
Well, and then things like the DEA, which just, what was that, three weeks ago when they decided they weren't going to reschedule it, even though everything's going that direction, clearly?
Yeah, it's just, it's kind of like, I remember the gay marriage debates.
Like, ten years ago, it was just like, I don't care if you're the most homophobic, you have your religious beliefs, or whatever it is, but the inability to see that this is happening, that this is where it's going, and you're just wasting a lot of time on a losing battle, is kind of troubling, that people aren't able to...
Look at society and be able to make better predictions.
Well, they got caught up in a lot of it is religious.
A giant percentage of it is the beliefs that people have about gay people that are based on whatever religion they grew up with.
It's the only reason why you would care.
People who are agnostic, I guarantee if you like did some sort of a survey and checked atheist versus pick whatever religious designation, you know, and saw which ones were against gay marriage.
I thought this was like some news story that like a bleppo or whatever it was that Gary Johnson, the capital of the series, fucked up and didn't know what it was.
Nobody nobody disliked that movie because a woman was the lead see that's where all this Ghostbuster shit falls apart You know people are crying sexism and all this is no, it wasn't good.
Yeah, it just wasn't good You know, there's a lot of I haven't seen it.
What was that movie that everyone loves the wedding movie the wedding planner?
No bridesmaids bridesmaids everybody loves that fucking movie Like, universally.
I've never heard anybody who saw that movie who didn't think it was funny.
I've only watched like an hour of it, but I was laughing my ass off.
Well, people who are into creating movies especially, I think, that's a very specific mindset of looking at all these different things and going, oh yeah, I've got to piece these together, and I have to have an arc, and I have to have a hero, and I have to have this, and I have to have a, okay, how do I mix this up?
Yeah, I mean, I thought that when I kind of got into doing more science stuff with my work, rather than just straight stand-up, I realized that, well, if you want to be interesting, like, read interesting things.
And then I can at least be there so he'd make sure he doesn't roll off this fucking cliff in front of me.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's one of those things you feel like a fool in hindsight.
And I was like, you know, I've jumped off stuff higher than this.
It's just that I'm wearing bad shoes and I can't roll.
I'm going to have to take it with my feet.
And I even told him, I was like...
I'm gonna be risking breaking a heel because I broke a heel once before when I was like a teenager.
I love jumping off shit.
And so...
But it wasn't like the end of the world.
I was like, you know, if I break a heel, it won't.
I'll still be able to get around.
It's just like a couple-month thing.
And in my mind, this is the worst of what's going to happen.
And so I went for it, and I jumped, and I landed.
And as soon as I landed, I heard both of my heels break.
It just...
The sound shot through my body and I heard it like, it sounded like a branch like snapping underwater.
And I was, I think I was in shock or something because I just kind of turned and looked at him and I was like, I just broke both my heels.
And I said it just like that.
And so he thought I was like joking.
So he is just about to, I'm like, no, no, no.
I really broke both my heels.
You're going to have to go around and try to help me down.
And I started making my way down.
It took him like a half hour, 45 minutes to get to me.
And I had to kind of, Do you remember when you were in school, in gym class, did you have to do that crab walk thing where your belly's facing the air?
So I had my left foot just was already like five times its size within like 30 seconds.
And so I couldn't use that at all.
And then my right foot, I couldn't even tell if it was totally broken or if I just bruised it real bad.
But I was able to use my toes, thankfully.
And so I had to kind of like...
Uh, one foot crab walk, uh, down.
And then he got around to me and was, and like a couple people were trying to help me for a little bit, but it was too steep for anyone to help me.
So I just kind of had to make it down on my own.
Once we were at level ground, which took like three hours, um, of just like, it was an exceptionally annoying, uh, I mean, it was painful.
I'd scoot down for a little bit, and then I'd have to take a break for a few minutes and just roll around in the fetal position in pain.
And he was like...
He was like, so this was his dumb idea?
And on the way down, he's just standing there next to me, waiting for me, trying to lighten the mood by telling me jokes and stuff.
I'm like, dude, this is not the time for jokes.
I am fucking pissed right now.
And I was like, it's fine.
It's gonna be fine.
I just fucking need to focus and get through this.
And got down, went to the hospital.
I still, I mean, it hurt.
Real bad.
And we had to go to a second hospital because the one was too full.
And then, I mean, I thought it was bad, but I thought, I was like, this is more than just a little break.
This is like, this is a pretty big break.
And then the doctor came in and he's like, this is really serious.
And maybe somewhere way back in my Facebook you could see some of the scars and stuff like that.
It's real gross.
I'm not sure if you'd be able to find it or not.
So they put these metal plates in and kind of screwed in the bigger pieces of the bone that were still there.
Like where they wanted them to be eventually because it's you can't just put the bone It's like if you if you snap like a candy bar and try to put it together There's all these crumbs and stuff like that missing and so they just kind of put it in place where it was supposed to be and and and they're like well,
hopefully it just kind of grows back and comes together right and and it did really the real issue was so they The way they did the surgery, they told me ahead of time.
When I... At the time I lived in Malibu and my place had like 50 steps and there's no way I could like get up with groceries and everything with two broken feet.
I could get around on crutches a little bit but I ended up having to spend like three months in my parents basement because I couldn't care for myself or anything so like on top of having to cancel three months of work We don't have a safety net.
And having no income.
It was actually like, I'm very grateful for my parents.
But it's just embarrassing when you're like, I had to move into my parents' basement.
So after three months, I got back on the road, and there was still this little kind of wound that had opened up.
It wasn't healing, and then I started...
It was just taking...
They told me it was going to take at least six months to...
Start walking.
And it ended up taking much longer than that because so about four or five months in I got on the road and then a doctor thought that maybe I was getting just a topical infection and gave me some Stuff that wasn't good enough for the infection.
And then I started...
So about four or five months later, I started having fevers.
And then I went into the hospital.
And then they're like, you have a bone infection.
And I was like, oh, God.
Because they're like, this is really serious because that's when you can lose your foot and stuff.
If they can't stop the infection, they just have to cut it off.
Came back, canceled all my work again, came back to L.A. They did a surgery, and I was really thankful that I'd happened to sign up for the health care.
This was right when the universal health care just came out.
Otherwise, I'd be bankrupt from it, but it was still, certainly, it was not perfect.
When they showed me what I had to do, it was, so once I'd get the IVs hooked up, and I'd have to figure out how to get bubbles out of the lines and stuff like that.
I was Googling, how do you get bubbles out of the lines?
That's literally what I said.
Then I had to, the first time they showed me what I had to do, I couldn't believe it.
They're like, now watch this, because you're going to have to do this yourself.
And then, so this huge hole in my foot was packed full of gauze, and they started pulling out this gauze.
I didn't know how big the hole was at first, but then it was like one of those magic scarves that kept on coming.
And then they're like, so you're going to need to take this out, and then look in here, look in your hole, you're going to need to clean it out, and clean off your bone and stuff.
See, they would always be like, Okay, we can get you another home visit or something like that.
It would be like a week after I actually needed it.
Because then I got this vacuum suction cup thing that they put on my feet.
And it just kind of sucks all the infection stuff out.
And...
It closes up and creates blood flow into that area.
Things actually work amazingly well.
So then I had this device and a vacuum and I started performing again.
I'd have to take this vacuum off myself and close up my fucking foothold and then go on stage and perform and then get off and put this vacuum back on.
I remember...
Because I had, before I, before I, I went through a big breakup before I broke my feet.
And when I, and I had been in like 12 years of relationships.
And so I was like, I'm not dating for a year.
I'm not going to have sex.
I'm not going to think about women for a year.
I'm just going to get my head straight.
And I did that.
It was great.
Got tons of work done.
And then, then when I started getting back into things.
No, I had already, I broke my feet during this time, which helped when, like, you don't have a sex drive when both of your feet are broken.
And then, but when I started getting back into it, like, I remember I brought a girl back to I went back to my hotel when I still had this fucking vacuum on my foot and I was just like, it was fucking awkward.
And I hadn't had sex in like a year or two, so I'm like trying to figure out how to have sex again.
Yeah, I mean, it was more just the depression of it all and the stress was harder than...
I was getting plenty of sleep and stuff, but it was a depressing time.
But ultimately, it was kind of good, in a way.
Character building?
A little bit.
I mean, I got a good album out of it.
I... So, I mean, when I started in Boston, when I started doing comedy, I was, like, fearless.
I would do, like, the ballsiest stuff, always trying new material, and I just did not give a shit, and I got a lot of attention for it, and I caught some breaks early on.
And once I started making money and doing The Road, it was like...
Then you're worried about, like, getting negative comment cards and all this shit, and that's like my livelihood.
And it was just watering down what I was doing, and I wasn't fearless on stage anymore.
So after breaking my feet and having three months at my parents' house, it kind of was just like, I don't give a fuck anymore.
I'm just doing exactly what I want to do.
And it really created a change in my career.
I thought that album and the new act that I'm doing now are the best that I've ever been.
What I was thinking, there's a thing called a Hindu squat.
And what a Hindu squat is, it's a bodyweight squat, and I'm a big proponent of it.
I love them.
I do them all the time.
And I do them in sets of like 150, 160. Sometimes when I'm in really good shape, I do 200 at a time.
And then I do, this is my main leg workouts.
I do those, and then I do kettlebell squats afterwards.
But the thing about the Hindu squats is it's all body weight.
You don't use any weight.
Sometimes I put a weight vest on, but most of the time I don't do any weight.
But if you look at that diagram up there, you see when you go down...
Your heels come off the ground.
Your hands go behind your heels.
And then as you go up, your hands stay parallel to the floor in front of you.
So as you go up, you push off with the balls of your feet, not with your heel.
So as opposed to a regular squat, if you had weight behind your back with a bar, that weight would be on your heel.
You would actually concentrate on keeping it on your heel.
Keeping your you know when I do squats like with weight I look up I always look straight up so I make sure that my spine's in alignment But there's a lot of weight on your heel there.
Yeah, yeah Well, actually that doesn't the weight on the heel that like the heels totally fine It's it's more of a mobility issue and and like all the tendons and stuff like that that they went through during the surgery and all the nerve damage from it So like actually going up on my toes is is one of the harder parts Maybe it'd be a good thing to break everything up in there.
Yeah.
When I do like a really intense hike, my foot feels better.
Okay, she's doing it wrong, because you're actually supposed to go on the balls of your feet, and you're supposed to drop your ass all the way down to the back of your calves.
People doing YouTube things don't even know how to do it right.
There's a guy named Matt Fury.
He's kind of an odd duck, but he's a big proponent of them.
He's got a bunch of videos of him doing it online.
Here you go.
That's how you do it.
See how's this guy?
As he goes down, his heels come off the ground, and then he touches the ground in a circular motion, and then he brings his arms parallel in front of him.
They're super easy for, like, the first 10, and then 20 gets a little harder, and then 30 gets a little harder, and then 40 gets a little harder.
And then you start hitting, like, 90, and you go, okay, I got 60 more of these motherfuckers to go, and then, you know...
Your legs get super fatigued.
But that's like what I like to do for legs.
I start off with kettlebell swings just to sort of get everything loosened up.
I do it light for a couple sets.
Then I do heavy ones.
And then from there, everything's all warmed up and loosened up.
Then I get into those Hindu squats.
Because I feel like that's something that's always hard to do.
I went hiking in Nevada with...
Couple friends of mine that were very fit my friend Dan Doty Who was we were doing a TV show up there and he's that he was the cameraman and he was much better Than me at doing these hill things and I was realizing while I was doing like god damn it This is a very specific thing like if you do it all the time If you, like, cameramen especially, they get in some really incredible shape and they do these outdoor shows because they're constantly carrying this camera and walking around.
So if you were doing a show on hiking and you had a guy following you, this guy has to follow you, all the stuff you're doing.
I've never been an exercise guy, but I was probably working out, like...
That's crazy!
swimming or crossfit or doing some boxing stuff.
Yeah, it was like, I was just like on a kick because I also had, I had quit drinking, which I drink again now, but I quit drinking and smoking cigarettes.
One of the most interesting things that I learned from the injury was how your physical...
Health or well-being alters your perception of the world.
Have you ever heard of this study?
They do the hot and cold cup study where they have someone come in to fill out a survey.
That's what they tell them.
And then a person gets in an elevator and there's someone in there, like a confederate, an actor, is in there that's like, here, my hands are full.
Could you hold this cup for me?
And it's either like a hot A cup of coffee or whatever, or a cold drink?
And the person's like, sure, takes the drink.
Goes up the elevator, gets off, gives it back to them, you know, says bye, goes in, takes the survey, and then afterwards, and this is what it's actually about, afterwards they go, did you meet anyone on the way in?
And they're like, actually, I met someone in the elevator, and then they'll be like, so...
Can you describe that person?
And if they had the hot drink, they would more often describe them as being warm or friendly.
And if they had the cold drink, they would describe them as cold or distant.
And the idea is that the way our brains...
Evolved kind of these higher ideas of what like being distant as a personality trait or whatever means has to be built over this pre-existing kind of five senses kind of software.
And so there's all these metaphors.
So you call someone like bright or you say we're having a deep conversation or someone's shallow.
So a lot of these ways in which we describe life is...
is kind of used through these physical metaphors and I remember when I when I broke my feet I remember thinking The whole fucking world is broken.
Like, I remember thinking...
Like, I was going down this mountain for like three hours, and I wasn't just worried about my feet.
I was also like, in the fucking political system, isn't it?
Like, everything just seemed broken.
Like, the whole world.
And then I also remember, after I got the second surgery, after the bone infection and stuff, and having to change all this, I remember feeling like...
Like, something...
Like...
This nagging feeling that I couldn't get over.
I was like, something's missing from my life.
There's just this deep hole somewhere in my soul.
And then one day I realized, I'm like, oh, there's a fucking hole in my foot.
There's an actual hole in my foot.
That's what's missing.
And just how much that your physical senses can alter what your perception of the world is.
It changes the kind of conversations you have because maybe you'll have more enthusiasm or energy or friendliness or whatever it is when you engage with people.
I have, like, I probably, yeah, probably once or twice a week I have, like, a hit of weed.
Okay.
But edibles help a bit, and the CBDs, I don't know if, I can't tell if the CBDs are helping or not.
It seems like they do a little bit, but I'm still experimenting with some of that stuff.
The Kratom, I just, I was just in, I was in Wilmington, North Carolina, doing this Dead Crow Club, and I had When I'm doing lots of stand-up and on my feet in one place is when it seems to have a lot of trouble.
And I was just bitching about it because it was one of those three days where I was just having a rough few days with it.
And they were like, you should go to the Kratom bar.
Is there a real issue that people could die from it?
What's the LD50? Which is, if people don't know, lethal dose at 50%, meaning that if you give 100 rats a certain amount, 50% of them are going to die at a certain level.
And I imagine it's not that well studied, which I understand why the FDA or whatever can't just have companies making who knows what they're putting in a bottle.
I get that.
But, I mean, if you look at what people are saying about Kratom, people that are...
Trying to manage their pain and nothing else works or everything else is really addictive or makes them woozy or whatever.
This stuff is like, I feel very energetic and enthusiastic and just sharper than normal when I do it.
I mean, if you look at how the DEA just didn't reschedule marijuana, which is, think about it, if you're them, if you reschedule marijuana, it's basically like you're saying, hey, should we just get rid of our own jobs?
You know, should we just make a law that gets rid of our jobs?
Well, when Nixon scheduled it in the first place, he hired a team of scientists and all of these different politicians and different experts in different fields to advise him.
And then they advised him to not schedule it, to have it be legal and focus on treatment for things.
And he was like, nope, we've got to get rid of these hippies.
And this was something that came out over the last year.
I don't know if it was the Freedom of Information Act or whatever it was, but they released some papers that showed that what the drug war was truly all about was the civil rights movement and the hippies.
The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement.
And that they were trying to attack the leaders of the civil rights movement and the leaders of the anti-war movement.
And one thing they all had in common was marijuana.
And LSD. Yeah.
And mushrooms, I'm sure, too.
So that's when the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 was passed.
It was all passed under the guise of attacking the political forces that were trying to take Nixon out of office.
Nixon was such a piece of shit.
He was such a horrible, horrible piece of shit.
Clearly.
When you go back and see what that guy did and who he was and what he stood for, it's wow.
When you're getting impeached or have to resign, wouldn't you go back and look at the things that he did and be like, you know what, maybe we do a redo on that whole presidency and whatever he did, we re-examine that?
I have my take on why all of that happened was because of psychedelics.
Psychedelics have this testable effect on it.
A person's openness.
So if there's a big five personality indicator, it's not perfect by any means.
But it's used quite a bit in psychology.
So you have conscientiousness.
Like I'm low in conscientiousness.
I'm a very disorganized person.
I'm kind of messy.
Agreeableness.
I'm a little low in agreeableness.
I like to argue with people and stuff.
And then there's stability or sometimes called neuroticism.
I'm in the middle there.
And then there's extroversion also in the middle.
And then there's openness.
So if you're very high in openness, that means not only are you not averse to novelty, you can't get enough of it, you love new restaurants, traveling, meeting new people, going on adventures.
And the side effect is you're the kind of person that maybe ends up not having respect for authority and ends up getting in trouble with the law or you're a little overly spontaneous or a little too adventurous and you break your feet or whatever it might be.
Are you a tarot card reader?
Yeah, I know.
It sounds a lot like tarot cards.
And really, some of these things shouldn't be taken much more seriously than tarot cards, but it does do a nice job.
So you ask people questions like, do you consider yourself a clean person?
Like, strongly agree, strongly disagree, wherever in between.
And so you're filling out questions like that, and that's how it's kind of determining.
And it's self-evaluation, which there's problems there.
Or there's a website called Apply Applesauce.
You go to it and plug it in, and it goes through everything you've liked on Facebook and kind of determines your personality traits based on that.
So if you're really low on openness, you're like the kind of person that's always been in their hometown, kind of, why go anywhere else?
This is great.
Traveling is scary to you.
Your country's the best.
You haven't been to other countries, but you know that your country is the best.
Whatever church you're brought up in is absolutely the right one.
The other ones kind of sound ridiculous.
And outsiders are very scary.
And one thing that psychedelics have been pretty well studied to do now is that a single dose of psychedelics will, for a good amount of time, often a year, sometimes for the rest of your life, you'll be more open.
You'll rate higher in openness for the rest of your life.
So people were doing more psychedelics at this time.
And so if you're low in openness, you're often a pillar of the community because you love laws.
Like laws are your favorite.
You have this nice little playbook that you can live life by.
And you wish they were stricter so more people would follow them.
So if you're a lawmaker, these are your favorite people.
And then if these people were young and in college and like, oh, what the heck, everyone else is doing that.
And then all of a sudden becoming more open and starting to question authority.
I think it did play a little bit of a factor in a little bit of the civil rights movement.
So you think this was a conscious decision by the powers that be to try to limit psychedelics because they were worried specifically about people becoming more open?
There's quite a lot of tests that went on, especially with LSD, with the military, and then of course there was the Harvard, the very famous Harvard LSD studies, which, there's a good argument, created Ted Kaczynski.
I'm sure you're aware of that, right?
What was the German documentary?
I believe it was called The Net.
It all highlighted how Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was a part of these LSD studies at Harvard.
They fucking fried that dude's brain.
He went to Berkeley.
He was probably crazy already, but he went to Berkeley, became a professor, hoarded off all his money, just saved enough money to implement his plan, and then bought that little cabin in the woods and started killing people who were involved in technology.
Because he was convinced, because of his LSD trips, And really, he's right.
His brother recognized his crazy, rambling scribe.
From the manifesto.
His brother recognized the manifesto and probably is thinking it might be his brother anyway because when his brother came back from the LSD trips apparently he was absolutely convinced that technology was going to be the end of mankind that we had to stop in its tracks.
That it was this like Trojan horse and that people were creating all this technology but he was extrapolating.
He was seeing the future and seeing everything.
He's right.
He's right.
I mean, this is one of the things we're talking about today as AI becomes more and more of a reality.
You know, even Elon Musk, that famous speech that he said that we're summoning the demon.
Like, this is essentially what Ted Kaczynski saw.
He's just in his crazy fucking head.
He said the way to fix this is to kill people that are made from technology.
Well, so to clarify, just so I'm not coming off like I think it's a conspiracy, I don't think the government knew any of this stuff.
I don't think anyone knew a lot of these effects.
I think a lot of these cultural memes or laws that happen is just kind of something that just kind of happened, an idea that was stumbled upon, that just kind of ended up working in the interest of the lawmakers.
So I think people happened to start taking more psychedelics because, you know, they're popularized for therapy use and whatnot.
So it just happened to be that people started doing psychedelics and it happened to be during the civil rights movement time.
And when people did take psychedelics, they happened and people didn't know this at the time, happened to be opening themselves up and questioning authority more because that's what they happened to make you do.
And then all of a sudden, there's a lot more troublemakers out there for the government.
I mean, I feel like I've tried a bunch of different strains and I can't find anything that...
I like to, at the end of the night, have a hit of weed if I'm by myself and watch a movie or something like that.
Or if I'm just hanging out with a friend watching a movie.
In a social situation, the reason why I wouldn't want to smoke weed before doing this podcast is because I would worry that I would get in my head too much and be overanalyzing things.
See, when I, now I, so, here's the other problem, I guess, with my, the way that I smoke.
When I first started, when I first got my medical marijuana card, went into this amazing, the first time you walk into a dispensary, it's like, yes, oh my god, the future!
And I, you know, went crazy.
I spent like 700 bucks.
Give me like, money's no object.
I want the finest of every kind of everything that you have.
And then I realized that...
What happens when you smoke the best of the best is, for me, I have one hit and then I'm in a coma.
So now what I do is I just get, usually if I'm going to get weed rather than edibles, I just get stuff out of the shake jar that's like five bucks a gram or whatever.
Is how it's measured and there seems to be like a little difference in between Brands and stuff, but I know 5 milligrams nothing 10 milligrams just kind of feel a little good 15 milligrams.
I'm really high and I don't do more than that I took 10 sprays And then did a podcast, and I was shitting my pants.
I think I might have done 12. I might have done 12. 12 sprays, and I did a podcast where the whole time I was doing the podcast, I was skiing downhill, just hoping I didn't have to change.
Like, hoping I didn't have to turn or avoid another skier.
Yeah, I've been high on stage probably 20 times in my...
I've been in comedy for like 12 years or something like that.
And I probably had 10 of those times where I felt like I was giggly and having fun and it helped the show.
And then I had 10 of those times where I... It was just like, I couldn't think straight, I couldn't remember anything, and it's just not worth the risk for me.
Somebody told me he doesn't really know what he's talking about, that he just comes up with these really obscure references because they work well in a joke form.
Yeah, the whole thing is just One person telling another person what they can and cannot put in their body, where you can't demonstrate that it's hurting anybody else but that person.
To me, that's like, okay, if that's the case, well, why is it okay to rock climb?
Because rock climbing is obviously dangerous.
Why is it okay to bungee jump?
Why is it okay to jump out of airplanes?
That stuff's all legal, but you can't take this Kratom stuff.
The pain's so intense that they trip like they do with this during ceremonies.
You can run a marathon and get into a transcendental state because your body's going through such torture that it goes into this different part of your brain that pushes you through it.
And, um, I mean, you can hallucinate from lack of sleep.
Uh, For like six months of my life, I was trying to do the thing where every two hours you sleep for like 20 minutes or whatever.
The thing was, if you didn't follow the schedule really strictly is when you'd get fucked.
So if I did end up having some drinks or something like that and hanging out with friends and not doing that nap, or if I was at work and I wouldn't get my break when I was supposed to, it would really fuck me up.
And I started hallucinating when I was driving.
I fell asleep behind the wheel once and almost crashed my car, went into a ditch and was able to drive out of it.
And so I put an end to that experiment.
But yeah, I couldn't believe I did it for as long as I did.
Looking back on it, it's like, it didn't seem that crazy to me at the time.
But by doing it in these long stretches where two hours, then 20 minutes, two hours, then 20 minutes, you never really get into, like, heavy REM sleep or...
You know, Wim Hof has some pretty, there's some psychedelic aspects to his breathing technique, I think, too.
It definitely puts you in a state of mind.
But the holotropic breathing thing, somehow or another, it forces your body into a psychedelic state.
I've had actually a couple people that have done it.
It takes a while, but through this specific style of breathing.
See if you can find it, Jamie, so we can tell people what the fuck we're talking about.
I haven't done it, obviously.
But I know of several people who do kundalini yoga who have also done DMT. And they say that through kundalini practice, when you get deep into it on a regular basis, when you do it daily, you can achieve DMT-like states on the natch.
It was like a little more controlled, and I could pop out of it anytime that I wanted to, but that was like four...
I mean, it would take me, like, five minutes to get into it.
And then, within five minutes, I mean, I had music playing inside of my head and, like, these crazy, like, DMT stories happening in different worlds that I was seeing and, like, palaces and, like, other areas with, like, scary weird clowns and stuff like that.
I was, I mean, it was the best trip of my life.
And it was, like...
Full-on hallucinations.
Because I did float tanks a couple times just sober, and I never really saw anything.
I didn't like hallucinate or anything.
It was just kind of like meditation on steroids, I felt like.
It is definitely like meditation on steroids, but float tanks are something where the more comfortable you get with the experience, the easier you slip into it.
So the quicker you slip into it, like when I go into it, I've done it so many times now because it's in my house, that I lay down and my body goes up.
I've had the strongest hallucinations, honestly, is from too much edibles.
I've had too much edibles where I went into the tank where I just got to like, oh my god, I'm gonna die!
And you get in there and I just have had full-blown...
I had this one insane, intense experience where I... Felt like I was in a jungle, like I was in a jungle, and I was walking through the jungle with these people, and they were all speaking a language, and I understood the language.
And in my mind, I was thinking in their language, and then I realized it.
I went, oh my god.
God, I'm thinking in this other lane.
And then I'm out of it.
And then it went away.
But for the brief few moments where it happened, I mean, I could remember feeling the dew on the ground and feeling the leaves under my feet and walking through the jungle with these people.
There's a lot of folks that believe that the reason why we have instincts, the reason why, you know, like an animal comes out of its mother's body immediately goes to the breast and instinctively starts sucking, that there's certain data that's just encoded in our body.
And what it comes from is the experiences of all the different beings that existed before us that bred and eventually became us.
That this is just mass database of Experiences of all your ancestors and they're all sort of collected together.
So the idea is that occasionally you can tap into some distant memory that's locked in like, oh, look what I found!
It's our high school yearbook!
This is crazy!
And you open up what's essentially your DNA's high school yearbook from some, you know, fucking sub-Saharan experience when you were half a monkey person.
Yeah, like memory stored in DNA or something like that.
So that's, I mean, my scientific mind would just say that, you know, genes that are set up to have this inclination to suck on your mother's tits end up being passed on easier and whatnot.
But I've had full-on...
I remember specifically I had a mushroom trip like 10 years ago where I must have taken a ton.
What happened was I was blackout drunk.
I took mushrooms.
I don't remember any of it.
And then I must have passed out.
And I just woke up.
It took me like a couple minutes to realize what was going on.
I was like, am I dreaming?
Did I go crazy?
What happened?
I was like, oh, I had mushrooms in the fridge.
I bet I gobbled those things.
And then I closed my eyes, and I saw...
I saw like inside my brain was kind of like the opening scene of Fight Club with like electricity shooting around different neurons, blah, blah, blah.
And then it zoomed in.
And then I saw like an individual neuron.
And then it zoomed in.
And then I saw like a strip of DNA.
And then it zoomed in.
And then I saw like this little section of DNA.
And then it just exploded.
And I saw all of life like going all the way back to...
So I saw, like, all these different battles and stuff, and, like, my ancestors, and then it went all the way back to, like, being monkeys and all that, and it went back to, like, this first little plant seed, like, springing, sprouting, and then it was over.
And that's not...
I mean, it wasn't an accurate representation of the history of evolution, but it's still insane that my brain was able to do that.
They tortured these little meeses, zapped their feet with that citrus spray in the air, and then there's a clear indication that that memory of that smell being attached to danger was transmitted to their children.
So it's one of those things where Maybe other things are stored in other parts of the body.
We just assume that the very body itself doesn't have some sort of memory.
But when you talk to people that have limbs that have been removed, they have phantom itches and things along those lines, that's one explanation for that phenomenon, is that you have a memory.
Well, it does make me think of how information from our environment can affect the fetal environment.
Like females...
Females in lower income places or in lower parts of the social kind of hierarchy in humans will tend to have and there's all these different species that have where the species can kind of pick depending on the environment whether it's going to be a male or female.
So lower status females tend to have Daughters more and like the kings that are higher status tend to have more sons because sons if they're doing very well have the opportunity to mate a bunch and spread their genes on quite a bit more but a female even if it's like a lower status female or low income or whatever female can always have like at least a couple children whereas a lot of men get kind of our evolutionary dead ends you know if a dude's brought up poor he's gonna have
to have a harder time finding a mate basically so so it does seem like there's some environmental influence that is somehow recognized in the brain that is then kind of selecting a little bit um better than chance whether you're going to have like a male or female so there might be other mechanisms in there like that that can affect i just yeah i can't conceptualize how how it would
I've read other studies like that, and I don't know enough about them, haven't read enough about them.
Why can't you conceptualize why there would be a strong connection between that smell, which was always followed by an electrocution, that it somehow would be stored in the DNA of the animal, which would be a smart thing to pass on to the children.
Rupert Sheldrake had an example about this, where he was talking about children In inner cities, they're not afraid of car accidents or murder or bank robbers or real threats.
They're worried about monsters, even though they don't ever see monsters.
They're worried about monsters in the closet.
And he correlated it to an ancient fear of cats.
Like jaguars, and leopards, and lions, and things that kill people forever.
And that, at night, these things with big teeth that hide in the dark and wait to get you, the monsters.
Which, you know, there's a video of this guy where a lion, or a tiger, rather, charges him.
Full clip charges him.
And it is as terrifying as any horror movie you'll ever see in your life.
The thing veers off like about 30 or 40 yards away from him and decides not to run at him.
But it's running at him full clip with this insane speed that I kind of knew the Tigers could run that fast.
But until you see it, You go, oh my god, like, they're so fast.
It's just this furious snarl and just unbelievable pace as it moves towards them, and it's a monster, you know?
And if you saw that, if that killed one of your friends, and you had children, that would be passed on to their kids.
Well, sometimes when people take ayahuasca, they report seeing these snakes or worms as well.
Jaguars, too.
But I think that there's a physiological reaction where your body's thinking that it's been poisoned, which it kind of has been in a little bit of a way.
And I think that maybe in the non-conscious, there's this projection of...
In your ancestral past, if you're poisoned, it's probably because of a snake or some parasite or bacteria or something like that.
So maybe that, because that is, like you say, maybe stored in the DNA or in the memory somehow, even if you've never ran into a snake, perhaps you would hallucinate one if your body thinks that you've been poisoned, being like, what happened here?
And kind of running through a simulation of what must have happened.
I mean, the idea that we can dream and I can have a dream where I'm making up all of these people or people that I know and doing perfect impressions of them in maybe different languages that you don't normally know.
And you do it all without even realizing you're doing it.
You think it's happening to you.
You don't even realize you're making up the storyline and writing the script and putting together the actors.
And you're doing it in your sleep.
You wake up well rested.
If you sit and read a book, you'll get tired.
You'll get fatigued using your brain like that.
But your brain can do all of that in your sleep.
And you wake up well rested.
It took no energy at all for the brain to do that.
I mean, it's got to have something to do with DMT. They don't know for sure, but they do believe that when you're in heavy REM sleep, your brain's producing all this DMT. Now that they know, now that the Cottonwood Research Foundation has done those studies on rats, where they've proven that live rats are producing dimethyltryptamine in their pineal gland, they know that this is actually the source of it, right?
This is like the first time.
Before, it was all just anecdotal evidence.
Now that they know that, It's totally possible that once testing measures get better and they can figure out how to detect things at a more accurate rate, they are eventually going to do studies on people that are asleep.
And they're going to be able to measure your DMT levels and where it's coming from and when it spikes.
And if they can somehow or another...
You know how they're starting to be able to do things now where they can show you images and you can receive those images in your visual cortex?
Yeah, I have to think that eventually they're going to be able to interpret whatever kind of dream data is going on in your head, at least in some sort of crude form.
Yeah, and this is, like, 2 million people have downloaded this, and you can find out what other people are dreaming about, kind of, like, based on a map.
And I think the person that was in here that was talking about it said that they're finding out people are dreaming about the same things at the same times all over the world, or...
It's interesting that they have the people that can't talk or whatever, ALS, like Stephen Hawking, basically.
You can show...
You can now show them, you can give them MRIs, show them pictures of certain words that are useful, like bathroom or whatever it might be, and then it can determine what part of the brain is lighting up when they are thinking of a bathroom.
And then you can hook them up and they can just concentrate on the word bathroom and then it will know that they're saying bathroom.
Stephen Hawking just hates using new technology and shit.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, he hates it.
That's why his voice is still fucking shittier than my GPS. He likes old computers.
Yeah, he just doesn't like learning new technology stuff, even though that's what gets him around and talks for him and everything.
I don't think you're ever going to be able to slow it down, because I think we look at it in terms of what we would see in normal reality.
Like, if you had a scene that you could, like, say when...
You know, you were 15, you hit a home run in a Little League game, and you remember it so clearly because you were the hero.
You came back, everybody carried you around on your shoulders.
If you could go back and replay that over and over again, if you had a recording of it in your mind, and you could go back and see it in real time and replay it, it would all make sense.
You'd see the grass moving in the breeze.
You would see the clouds floating gently overhead.
You'd see the players in the field.
You'd see people talking and laughing in the stands.
It would all make sense because it's all references and things that exist in this dimension, in this plane.
The problem with DMT is if you took even one hundredth of the images that you're seeing, just a little corner of it, and just looked at it and tried to examine what the fuck it is, it's a Constantly changing geometric pattern that's somehow intelligent.
I actually, you know, they say to set an intention and everything.
I set an intention.
I was like, I want to understand why I have some self-esteem issues and why I don't have more confidence.
And...
And, you know, I was like, I'm going to play along.
I'm going to be as open-minded as possible.
And I will say, during that ayahuasca trip, I was the most confident I've ever felt in my entire life.
Like, it was just a feeling.
Like, I could do anything.
Unfortunately, it was all geared toward, like, wow, this is a bunch of bullshit.
Like, I was pretty confident that it was...
I was like, can I just go outside and, like, trip by myself?
Because I feel great.
I'm just in a room of people, like, puking and farting everywhere.
And, like, I just can't...
It's not for me.
And bowing.
Yeah, and bowing.
With magic wands.
And I also...
I have a couple things.
I think some people are misrepresenting what's happening.
I think that when you're...
As someone who's almost died probably 20 times in my life, I've had a near-death experience and breaking my feet kind of...
I think that...
One, when your life flashes before your eyes, it's not like some, hey, let's just have a quick, fond, nostalgic run through what our life was and visit some old memories.
This is your brain going like, do we have anything for this situation?
Have we seen a TV show that will get us out of this?
Do we remember first aid class?
And it's going back and back and back.
And I'm wondering if it's going back far enough to what the fetal environment is.
I wonder if we do have memories somewhere stored in it.
And because the fetal environment could have easily been all of these weird structures and cities and fractal-like...
It doesn't seem that odd to me that that's what the environment before you came out of the womb could look like.
I think fractals are, I mean, fractals you're able to put a finite, you're able to fit infinity into a finite space somehow.
It's the weird counterintuitive thing about fractals.
But if you were, if you made packets of information that were fractal-like, that would be a great way to transport information or like transport ideas into I think.
And so I think that could be the very origins of consciousness.
And then when we came out, we were seeing this, but it was all like a blob.
You didn't see like walls or pictures or like you didn't understand sound.
It was just a blob of information coming at you that you...
Later had to be taught or decipher.
But I think the origins of it could have been like these...
Like I've seen a lot of holographic cities that kind of look like computer chips a little bit and that sort of thing.
And it wouldn't surprise me if that's what the first little...
Like say you get this machine where you can record dreams.
If we can record then what's happening when you're a fetus, it wouldn't surprise me if it was something like this.
And I think that...
Ayahuasca and DMT have a way of triggering near-death experience, whether you're consciously aware of it or not.
And it's like, what the fuck is happening right now?
I haven't necessarily felt it that much myself either, other than I felt like I, you know, I've forgotten that I'm a human that smoked DMT. I'm just like a different thing entirely.
To unpack this a little bit, though, for people that are like, these fucking hippies, what are they yapping about?
The brain does produce endogenous psychedelic chemicals.
It produces 5-methoxy-DMT, it produces NN-dimethyltryptamine, two super potent psychedelic drugs the brain produces and we don't understand why.
It's entirely possible that if the adult human brain produces it, that a baby's brain produces it as well.
So if it's in that womb state, which is in a lot of ways sort of like a sensory deprivation tank, but with of course the feeling and the cortisol effect of the mother and the oxytocin and all the all the different hormones and Responding directly to the stress of the mother.
There's a lot going on with the the body inside the body, right?
But we should assume that those brains are experiencing what we know to be possible in the human mind which is psychedelic chemicals and And I've seen actual dreams on DMT trips, like a regular dream, like you're used to having, which is unusual because that's nothing what the normal DMT world looks like.
I've smoked DMT, and then I'd see a guy walking down a hall holding a box, and then I'd look at him, and he'd look at me and be like, uh-oh, and then start twitching like there was a glitch in the metrics, and he's like, Uh-oh!
And then he'd just reach back and grab the wall and pull it and it would be like this veil that then it became the whole world and started like the DMT space that you're more familiar with.
They're going to be able to figure out a way to create a virtual.
It's one of the things that actually McKenna believed, that they were going to be able to figure out how to create a virtual DMT world, which would give people the DMT experience without actually taking DMT. Mm-hmm.
Is that your brain would somehow or another synchronize with this virtual world and you would have a full-blown DMT trip.
And this is...
He thought this up.
I'm sure he was tripping.
But he thought this up in, I believe, the 90s.
Or maybe the 80s.
It might have even been the 80s that he was talking about this.
It's when virtual reality was still...
Like, people had predicted its...
You know, that virtual reality was going to blow up and going to be huge, but it took a long time until recently where the technology caught up to the concept.
And what they're doing right now is they're using it, and the guy stands on it like a skateboard, and he sort of slides around on things, and it's only a couple inches off the ground, but it's clearly floating.
Yeah, it's super cooled magnets with some sort of liquid nitrogen.
Look at that.
See how it's so, all that air that's coming out of the bottom, that's the liquid nitrogen.
So, I think Lexus is assuming that this technology, sort of like Back to the Futures shit, that this technology is eventually how we're going to get around with cars.
And one of the interesting things about that, if they really do figure out how to do this, if we get around in cars that are not connected to the ground with wheels, even though there will be momentum as we collide with each other if we fuck up, it won't have nearly the same kind of impact, because you won't have the friction of the road that makes the vehicle absorb the energy of the other It'll absorb it a little bit and then bounce you back.
Someone's gonna go to Britney Spears' house and whack off on her roof, and they're gonna get arrested, and it'll be, like, the new thing.
Like, planking was a thing for a while.
Jerking off on famous people's houses would be a new thing.
Yeah, we're going to not be able to control the skies.
It's sort of like the ocean.
I think the ocean is fascinating for friends who, I have friends that have boats, you know, like guys who like to go fishing.
And I've never had a boat.
But one of the things that I've always thought was incredible is like, if you live like Marina Del Rey or something like that, and you have a boat, and you hop out in your boat, you just go out into another world.
Yeah.
You're a fucking space traveler on a boat and you're roaming around this enormous swath of ocean.
It's a giant squid that they found in Mexico, and it was a camera that was attached to one of those oil rigs.
So they were essentially just checking the oil rig, and there was this thing that was floating right next to the oil rig, this really freaky-looking alien squid that has, like, crab legs.
Like, really bizarre, like, obvious bends to the legs.
Like, check this out.
Look at this.
Look at that fucking thing, man.
Like, look how long its tentacles are.
It's enormous.
This is 2007. What's the name of this video, Jamie, so people can...
Like, I was talking about how your brain perceives things as metaphors.
Everything that's, like, getting high is good or you're feeling, like, up rather than down is bad, you know, and hell's under the earth and heaven's up in the clouds and stuff.
There's something...
I don't know if it's just this natural, like...
Our inherent fight against gravity.
That makes us think, like, that's what you want to obtain.
You can hop in a helicopter, you can fly over the Big Island of Hawaii, and you can actually watch the island grow, because the island grows something like a foot a day or something like that.
You can literally see the lava come out of the chutes and go into the ocean and create new land.
And you're flying over this helicopter, the helicopter, rather, you're flying over this volcano, and you look down into lava.
You see the very center of the earth oozing out of its zit, out of this weird surface, which has created the entire Hawaiian island chain, by the way.
The entire Hawaiian island chain is just volcanoes.
That's all it is.
Volcanoes in the middle of the ocean that erupted millions of years ago and poked their way through the top, and they're constantly growing and changing.
The idea that there's hundreds of billions of galaxies out there and that each one of them has, you know, infinite possibilities about what kind of planets are on there, how far they are from their stars, how many stars are in the solar system, what else is out there in terms of life, what are the possibilities of things surviving out there.
They think it's possible that some living things could maybe even survive in space detached from a planet.
I mean, even the reality of evolution, like, right, I mean, when you get far enough into it and you look at all these different examples, it's, the reality of evolution is actually crazier than, like, there was a God and he had a son named Jesus.
Like, it is, it's also more accurate.
But I remember I used to be like, how could anyone believe, you know, I was very angry.
I was raised strictly Catholic, so I had some bitterness about all of that.
But then once I started learning more about evolution, it's just like, oh, I didn't know half of this stuff.
No wonder these people...
No one's been given the opportunity to learn it when you're brought up in a small town and that's just your upbringing.
I mean, man, just stop and think about the Big Bang.
If you want to mindfuck yourself, think about the idea that these scientists are proposing that the universe itself, everything that you say, was smaller than the head of a pin, and had infinite mass, and somehow or another exploded and created everything we see in the stars today.
Yeah, and I mean, I think that our brains are endlessly fascinating, too, just that, I mean, humans like to give themselves a lot of credit, but I think that we have, kind of like the movie Inside Out, I think we have vast universes inside of our head that seem all expansive, because I think that Dreams and hallucinating are coming from inside the mind.
I don't believe that you're connecting with different dimensions and stuff like that, but it certainly looks like it, which means you have, if I'm right, which who knows, then it means that you have this whole multiverse set up just for running all these different tasks, just for walking around and making decisions.
Which is totally possible, but I don't have a position.
I don't have a position on whether or not it's in my mind or whether or not it's real.
And I think it's entirely possible that we need to consider the possibility that everything that's in your mind, everything that's imaginary, is actually real.
Meaning that the imagination is responsible for every single thing any human has ever done.
Every car that's ever been built, every podcast that's ever been made, every television that's ever been designed, all of that has come out of the imagination.
The imagination is this strange force inside of human, quote-unquote, consciousness that living physical, or not living, but solid physical things come from.
Literally, it's the seed of these solid physical things.
So when we say that we're imagining or hallucinating that we're experiencing some divine entity that comes to us from another dimension and explains the universe, the nature of reality...
It's entirely possible that that is a hallucination, meaning that physical thing, you can't kidnap it, you can't throw a net on it and bring it back from the wormhole and plop it down in front of the police department and say, look, I found it!
But if you went to visit with God, say if someone proved that there is a heaven and that God is real and you can have a brief visit with God and you go to God and you talk to Him and in 15 minutes explains the nature of the universe and love and the concept of positive energy and all these different things, please take this back with you.
Please take this back with you and do what you can to make the world a better place.
Well, if you have a trip or if you actually go to meet God, Or if you have a trip where you imagine you meet God, the experience is exactly the same.
Like one of the reasons why we get paranoid when we smoke pot is because we start becoming aware of variables that we might have suppressed or chosen to ignore and then we're confronted with them and all of our insecurities and like a cascade, tidal wave sort of a situation where you can't handle all the data that you've been putting aside.
But it doesn't mean that the trips that you have, these intense, transcendent, psychedelic experiences are hallucinations.
It doesn't mean that they're not real.
It means we might be entirely hung up on containing our consciousness and our thinking and our awareness to what we can touch and bang on and pick up and measure and look, I put it on a scale, I know it's real.
And these physical laws that we've applied to like this reality, what we call reality.
I don't necessarily know.
I think it's entirely possible to me that that might be a limiting factor on how we perceive the universe around us and that it's left over from having to worry about predators and hunting and gathering and we're moving, I believe, slowly away from that.
Not even slowly.
And I think our ability to alter reality through virtual reality and even through our understanding and application of psychedelic drugs.
There's psychedelic technology as well as virtual technology.
And all of these things are giving us this ability to change the concept of real.
I try to be very, very skeptical of my trips because I've seen God in different universes and the whole bit and it seems like as real as anything I've ever experienced did.
My problem with my memory and perception of it is that it's just such a short amount of time and it's so different and so exciting that I think the brain just automatically...
I think that's very salient.
And the brain really attaches to this, these new and novel new information that's very exciting.
And it's a little scary, too.
Your brain remembers scary things a lot, you know, triggers a bit of a stress response.
And I think that I like to say that amazingly.
Imagine instead there was someone who was born on...
their brains on lsd all the time and then one day you know things are rainbow colored whatever and that's fine and then one day when they're they get around just fine and then one day when they're 30 someone gives them a pill that brings them to our reality it would seem just as mind-blowing and just Get it now!
There's like these things called jobs and like these entry-level positions and like these hierarchies and you can if you show up on time each day you can establish yourself in this hierarchy you know and then and you'd if you went in on different days it would seem like a different world like I thought I had it all figured out but then I was like this person that was in a cube typing away and then you think you have that figured out and then you hit a casual Friday and We're like, it was weird.
I thought they all had uniforms and then they all looked different.
This, to me, this perception is just as much the trip as any psychedelic will ever get you on.
It's just that that's such a short amount of time.
It might entirely be possible that when you make good decisions, when you decide to take care of your body, when you decide to eat healthy, when you decide to meditate or do yoga or practice mindfulness or set out an intention for your day and say, you know, today I'm not going to complain about anything.
You know, I'm going to show up on time.
I'm not going to complain.
I'm going to be a nice person.
When a negative thought comes into my brain, it's going to be a mandate.
I'm going to do my best to push that out and replace it with a positive thought.
When someone...
It chooses to exercise that sort of a protocol, chooses to go forth with a list of things that they're going to, this is how I'm going to treat life, this is how I'm going to think about life, and I'm going to be fluid while I'm doing it, but I'm not going to allow all these things that I know to be detrimental aspects of life.
And I think it's entirely possible that what you're talking about when you're saying that when you're enthusiastic and you're embracing the psychedelic experience, that it's possible that your brain creates all this new stuff.
But that might...
That might be the point.
That might be the point of all of it.
When you have these psychedelic trips and your brain on these psychedelic trips interacts with those songs and the music, the Icaros.
I know you didn't have the best experience of it because the DMT wasn't that strong in the ayahuasca.
But I've had experiences with the songs where you see the experience moving to the song.
Well, if a song can alter the way...
And I know there's something special about sounds and music.
There's a special connection between creative sounds that people have put together and concocted and put together in some sort of a beautiful song.
There's a response that the body has to those.
If you're on a treadmill and a great song comes on, you feel like you could run faster.
My thought is that your mind and your attitude might not just have an effect on experiences when you're running into people, it might have an effect on the psychedelic dreams, It might have an effect on your future.
And it might not just be hippie bullshit.
The thinking positive and choosing to act and go forth in a positive way is just a...
Just like a good karma, sort of hippie, nonsensical way of trying to control the uncontrollable, which is this random world we live in.
It might not be true.
We just might think that because it's comforting.
We might want to think that there's less control than there actually is.
And I actually think that music altering the psychedelic State or world or perception or whatever you want to say is like I listen to this band Spongle that makes music specifically for DMT I think that that's one of my rants really as a Spongle song has this long rant where me and Jim Brewer were so barbecued on pot lollipops and this is like the
early 2000s Some guy called in and he asked us a question about something about DMT and I went on this crazy rant about DMT. And they put it in a song.
See, to me, the fact that a different song, and I'll see a different story, and it's pretty predictable.
I'll play this song again, and I know I'm going to see this purple woman dancing around or whatever.
And the fact that that influences that perception, that world that you're in, is more of an indicator to me that it's coming from within your head and not...
Transporting you to a different dimension or making you perceive a different dimension because why would it influence that dimension?
A better example, I smoked DMT once and I had my dog jumped on my lap while I was on a DMT trip and then it came into my DMT trip like all colorful and in codes and stuff and then I saw like kind of a bit of a dream state of Of where I would...
I saw myself setting my dog down, but I was like sitting in a different spot.
I was at the kitchen table, and it's where my dog would normally jump on my lap and where I'd normally be like, no, and sit down.
And so it was like accessing that part of that brain that has the memory like, this is when we put the dog down.
And then I lifted it off of me.
And I think there's all these...
I see lots of things like that, like these exemplars, like these kind of...
Prototype objects that your brain is using to retrieve, like if you're gonna throw a frisbee, I think that you're accessing this ideal frisbee throw in your mind.
You can probably close your eyes and picture it right now.
And I think that that's in there, like these prototypes that our brain draws off of, because I've seen that on a DMT trip, like a silhouette of a perfect frisbee throw, and then the guy's like, You might be
It's entirely possible that everything is connected and that when you are imagining things in the DMT realm, you're imagining things in another dimension and they're happening in that dimension because your imagination can create things in that bizarre, detached from your body world that you experience under intense psychedelic states.
It might not be mutually exclusive.
It might not be, oh, this is all my imagination.
That might be true.
You might be creating this, but that also might be real in that dimension, in that state, as far as real goes.
You know, this 15-minute lifetime, that's what you have.
You have a 15-minute DMT lifetime.
You're there for 15 minutes, and it feels like a lifetime.
Because it's a lot smoother and you can just draw bigger hits and it's fast.
It's like an oil vaporizer.
it has like a little cup in it and you put the DMT in this little cup and okay so you're not talking about like like a blue cigarette pen no talking about like a fat one like like you would use for your vaping your yeah yeah okay so it's not really a pen right like a more of a vape pipe yeah it's that thing it's uh it's It's pretty...
The way I describe it, it was very slippery for like two weeks.
Everything seemed fake.
Driving cars, I was constantly worried about cars flying over from other lanes and smashing into my windshield.
All these weird paranoid thoughts.
What I logically and objectively Feel like it's possible that it was the ego trying to regain control by like activating distress and like physical worry sort of intentions.
Like worry about strangers, worry about random crime or accidents or things along those lines.
You know, that it was like, my brain was like, hey, the world's a hard fucking place.
You know, it's like the conservative right-wing aspect of the mind sort of kicks in tenfold.
Right, but again, isn't it just what we're used to?
We're used to this imperfect world, so we think the imperfect world is normal, you know?
Maybe this is the oddity.
Maybe the oddity of the coffee spills is what's really strange, and that what DMT represents is the energy that creates the world itself unharnessed, sort of unbridled, unattached to culture, language, physical bodies, anything that we come to accept as being a normal thing.
Right, but why make that distinction is the question.
And not that there's anything wrong with what you're doing versus what I'm doing, but why make a choice that it's in your mind versus What a lot of people like to say, who the fuck knows?
Do you feel like, and this is one of the reasons why I'm getting to this line of questions, there's actually a point to it, do you feel like, because I know that you do a lot of stuff with science, and part of your presentation, your comedy show, involves science.
When you're under the scrutiny, and this is a very good thing, of other scientists and other people that are going to judge what you're saying and making sure that you're correct about your facts, do you find that you tend to be more skeptical or tend to lean towards Occam's razor, more acceptable answers, more scientifically plausible, or at least more scientifically acceptable in academic circles.
I think that, one, my brain just likes working that way anyway.
I was always a big fan of math and very good at it, and I kind of liked numbers because you could make sense of the world.
And I would say that I was actually scared to the psychedelic show that I do now.
I was planning on doing it like five years from now or so.
I've been sitting on it for like a couple of years, really.
And I was like, well, once I'm like a bigger name or something, then maybe I'll have the power to go out and do this because I have my podcast.
I interview scientists each week and I need to reach out to these people.
I'm like, oh, I don't want them thinking I'm like some burnout or some lunatic or something like that.
So absolutely, that absolutely factors in my perception of things.
Also, none of my memories of any of this stuff are reliable.
You know what would be interesting with the idea you were talking about before, if you scanned someone's brain and then you watched the replay of them hitting a home run or something?
Well, that memory wouldn't necessarily be accurate.
In fact, there's a good chance that it wouldn't be.
And so you could see different people's, how people's memory looks as opposed to what was actually captured on CCTV or whatever it might be, you know?
Do you know the study where they took the faces and they morphed them like 10 degrees five times in each way to make them more or less attractive?
So you take your face and then you make it 10 percent more symmetrical, 20 percent more symmetrical, so on to like 50 percent.
And then you make it less symmetrical.
And so you have a real wonky face by the end on the ugly one.
And then you mix up all of those faces and you have and you flash all of the pictures all mixed up to a person and give them like a second to pick it or whatever.
And people predictably will pick the one that's 10-20% more attractive.
So you think of yourself as like 10-20% Like, around 15% smarter, more attractive, more skilled at driving, whatever it might be, because that gives you the confidence, which is often beneficial in life.
But you're not thinking 30% more, because now you're delusional.
And also, one person's perception of you, like objective perception, might be very different.
Like, you and I might observe someone, and you might come away with a take, like, oh, this guy's this and that, and I'd be like, hmm, I thought he was this or that.
And then we would discuss it, and then I'd figure out, well, he reminded you of this asshole you used to know, and he reminded me of my best friend from high school, and just weird things, and again, things we bring into how we approach anything.
And that's one of the reasons why we chastise people for racism, because we know how easily the inclination to judge people specifically on what they look like is, and how unfair it is.
You know, and how reminding ourselves over and over again that that's not cool, it like gives the whole culture more of a relaxed feeling.
Humans are so strange, man.
It's so cool to be a person.
It's so bizarre when you think about all the variables and the possibilities of human behavior and how different cultures accept certain things and we look different and we live in different climates.
We're such an odd fucking creature that's just completely overwhelming this globe.
When I started comedy, I used to drink like a lunatic.
Now I drink more like a normal person.
When I was my most hungover, which I'd only get four hangovers a year, but when I was as sick as I've ever been, that's when I'd get my best writing done.
It's like some self-defense mechanism or something like that.
My brain doesn't operate like that anymore, but...
Well, I think when you're in periods of extreme emotion or energy or just a transitionary moment in your life, whether it's a breakup or the end of a job or moving to a new place, it sort of kicks in this effect.
The newness, the novelty of that experience sort of kicks in this effect where you want to express yourself.
You want to sort of reestablish your point of view on things, your perspective on things.
You know, like, you know, it just seemed like, you know, it's like you had water in your ear, and you got the water out of your ear, and also you could hear, and you could, hey man, why don't you stuff your ear up with cotton?
I like the idea of having little snapshots from your life.
Even if, say, your tattoo has nothing to do with anything, just a cool design, you'll still remember that period of your life a little bit more, I think, looking at that tattoo.
You'll remember when you got it and where you were at that state.
I just had this very sheltered, wholesome upbringing that fucked with my head because I just knew it wasn't reality and I just tried to do everything that I could to rebel against it.
I think, who knows, if I was like swerving or whatever else, or you just saw a kid that was, you know, I was like 16, 17 at the time, saw a kid that was out at like 1 in the morning or whatever, and might have done something.
I don't know.
The second time when I got caught...
This is so fucking stupid.
I was driving and I was like flying.
I don't know what my reasoning was exactly.
Like I said, I was an adrenaline junkie, but I was like flying through stop signs and stuff.
I was going like 70 miles an hour in a 20 mile an hour zone and like...
Three or four in the morning.
I was trying to get back to my friend's house before they went to bed so I would have a place to crash.
That was like my weird logic behind it.
And also it was fun for me to be drunk and driving this fast.
And I blew through a few stop signs and then I saw...
And then I saw this car with its lights on, and I'm like, fuck, that's a cop.
But I just kept on driving anyway that fast, and I kept on swerving around corners.
And he was catching up to me pretty easily.
And then when he put his lights on, I pulled over, And then he came up and I was like, oh, thank God!
I thought you were this person that was chasing me.
They had this Dodge Neon that was like similar, kind of made up headlights that would look similar.
You had a whole creative story?
Yeah, and there's like a couple people, a couple cops showed up and I was, because they called me in when they were like, this is a chase.
But as soon as the guy put his lights on, I pulled right over.
And, um...
And he...
I don't know if I was fucking fooling these two good dudes or what, but it was like, I think they're gonna let me go.
And then this woman cop showed up that knew me, because I had like 11 underage drinking tickets and shit.
She's like, is that Shane Moss?
He's like, he's up to something.
Give him a breath of lies.
And she comes over, and I was wearing a winter coat, and she's like, what's in your pockets?
And I looked down, and I had two beer cans in each pocket that couldn't have been more obvious.
Like, ah, fuck.
And I took them out, and that was my second Dewey.