Duncan Trussell and Joe Rogan explore Nietzsche’s "God is dead" as a cultural earthquake, linking it to Terrence McKenna’s mushroom theories—suggesting psilocybin may have fueled human brain growth—and John Lilly’s fringe experiments, like distracted dolphins. They critique political media for ignoring veteran suicides (17–22 daily) while sensationalizing scandals, and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks revelations, joking about a Guy Fawkes flash mob escape. Burning Man’s radical inclusivity—from MDMA therapy for PTSD to absurd pranks like salmon costumes—challenges societal norms, yet its controlled chaos raises questions about scalability. Ultimately, the conversation reveals how fringe ideas and systemic failures collide in human perception of reality, connection, and even survival. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh man, he's a he's good cuz he gets into your fucking head man because he like Carl Jung will get in your head, but it's more subtle whereas like Nietzsche like you're reading you ever read any Philip K Dick?
Yes So you know how like you're getting on top of 1882. Wow.
With Philip K. Dick, he was kind of crazy, but he was a genius.
So when you read his fiction, it's like you stop reading it and you feel a little crazy for a second because something about the way he's writing just isn't normal.
There's something off, man.
Nietzsche, it's the same way.
It's like when you stop reading him, you're gonna like spend the next few days like, fuck.
He had some crazy fucking theories that he pitched that I've seen scientists, especially the doubling of the human brain size one, that was a really fascinating theory that he had.
He connected it.
See, I'm not sure if he was right in terms of the climatological data, but his contention, for those of you who are aware of it, was that monkeys had come down from the trees and they experimented with new food sources, and they started flipping over cow patties to get to bugs, because that's what they do.
And along the line, they discovered psilocybin mushrooms.
And he thinks that the grasslands, the rainforest becoming grasslands, The changing climate led to these chimps, these monkeys, whatever our ancestors were, led to them becoming more experimental.
And that could be coincided with a bunch of different things that they know about mushrooms, or it could be sort of confirmed with a bunch of different things.
Yeah, I don't even know if the test pertained to periphery only.
It might have been peripherally as well because I do remember that one specific task, that one specific thing where they were trying to figure out How quickly you could recognize when an angle's changed and you could do it quicker when you were high.
The creativity aspect of it, there's that, you know, like the tapping into alternative ways of thinking and that would lead to a lot of innovation and And it's also possible that...
It's really possible that psilocybin, in some ways, is a nutrient.
I mean, it's also...
It's an intoxicant, for sure.
It's a hallucinogenic, whatever that means.
But it might be a nutrient, too.
It's entirely possible that this increase in visual acuity and this...
that it gives you in this connection to nature and this intense creativity, like you're tapping into a river of ideas and like scooping out buckets of them.
Like all that might also, it almost, it might be something that when you're consuming, it's actually beneficial to the body or beneficial to your brain.
But if it's having all those crazy positive effects on the brain, it might have like a beneficial long-term effect in the brain.
And they've been doing these studies on neurons, on repairing neurons and psilocybin.
And psilocybin's role in repairing brain disease or brain issues, brain trauma.
Might not have been neurons.
See if you can find that.
The most recent studies with psilocybin and brain damage.
And they think it might, in some ways, be able to repair brain damage.
Well, if that's the case, what if these monkeys were just eating them all the time?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it is pretty safe, a safe bet that monkeys, or what, I mean, monkey isn't the right word, proto-hominids, right, who are wandering the plains are gonna like, if we're omnivores, we're definitely gonna be eating whatever we can find that gives us nutrition, that has nutritional value, especially if you're out in the hunt, you're hungry, the thing you're hunting, shitting, food is growing out of its shit.
I think it was way later when they started doing that.
Here's a study that Jamie pulled up.
It says psilocybin mushrooms stimulate the growth of brain cells.
Psychedelic mushrooms have already had a reputation for helping people open their minds and broaden their perspectives in the world Some have shown the ability to combat mental disorders like depression anxiety and now research is showing that magic mushrooms can actually Help physically rebuild a damaged brain.
Well if that's the case If it's a case that it can physically help rebuild a damaged brain maybe over long-term consumption It can actually make a brain grow I think, I'm almost positive that McKenna's idea was not that they were hunting these things, but they were flipping over cow patties looking for beetles and grubs and worms and stuff.
To me what's really particularly interesting is that as our society and our species is moving into some new era, as we're moving into some God knows what the fuck it is, These guys are too.
It's like they're moving for them that state of the art.
You're looking at goddamn Elon Musk right there.
That's the Elon Musk of orangutans right there.
Like, what the fuck?
Look at him!
He's like fucking using that thing to get fish.
He's a genius.
That's a genius.
Like in the same way that like we have people sending things to Mars.
But it's funny that the two are coinciding.
Like it's funny that it appears.
Now I don't know how long this has been going on, but it's like, it seems like this sort of trickle in of stories of monkeys suddenly doing things like this.
It could be related to just more people researching and getting more data that's always been there.
That line of ants, they can't comprehend what you are.
Like, you walk by the line of ants, they have some instinct, maybe, to run away from you.
A lot of times they don't even run away from you.
You turn the sink on, kill like 30 of them in a second, but they don't, they can't, whatever way they used to think, they can't process it, right?
So death to that ant.
It's going to be processing its extinction in some way that we can't even understand, right?
So there's this idea, my friend was telling me that in the same way when a human dies, what we process is like, oh yeah, he got in a car accident, man.
What really happened was some kind of like hyperdimensional event that we can only see one tiny piece of that looks like a car accident.
The way our minds process the thing being wiped out Off the face of this dimension is by like, oh, car wreck, car wreck.
But really, there's like all these other levels involved.
So it's like maybe some hyper-dimensional entity just squashed your friend.
And the way it manifested is like, oh, a car wreck.
It was a car wreck.
But really, no.
That's just the way our brains process that event from where we're at currently in our ability to comprehend reality.
But the same way these chimps are doing these things that to us seem pretty cute, really.
Like, cute.
In the same way, like...
You know, there's this idea that we're going to sort of...
God, I wish I could remember who explained this.
It's like, okay, human existence up until the point of flight was completely based on, like, you would climb a mountain and then you could see the ground like you're from an airplane.
That's pretty much it.
Climb up a tree, I guess.
You get some altitude.
You can see this whole new perspective on what things look like from a high place.
But you certainly couldn't get the perspective of flying through the air and looking down at all this stuff that formerly in front of you is like looming over you.
It's like when I... You know, I have two little dogs.
Adorable, adorable little babies.
But you pick them up, and like, for you it's no big deal, but for that dog, it's seeing what's on top of the fucking counters, man.
It's like, doesn't see that usually.
It's looking up at everything.
So it transforms its reality a little bit.
So flight transformed human reality in this intense way.
And now the satellites floating around our planet have transformed it even more.
Because we see, oh shit, yeah, we're on a planet.
It's a ball that we're floating around, or a flat Earth, or whatever.
So in the same way, the next sort of liftoff is to somehow rise above the time-space continuum, so that time itself becomes an object instead of a thing that we're stuck inside of.
That's like the next big liftoff, and that there are already things that are See time as an object instead of as a river that we're currently being rolled around in and For them we look totally different.
So that's like the next that's what like maybe McKenna was talking about the idea of the time machine or the singularity or whatever is that like once we figure that I know that There's never gonna be a fucking time.
I know it's insane, but theoretically it's possible.
You know, people do say it.
It could be possible.
Like, there's no, necessarily, there is no reason for us to be stuck in the current way that we are.
At least that's from the fucking documentary I saw when I was super stoned four years ago.
Like, they were saying you could use, like, the power of a star or something to...
If it's possible, and we exist in an infinite universe, then why wouldn't things have potentially figured out a way to get beyond the time-space continuum?
So we're looking for aliens inside of time and space.
But maybe there's the thing that we're looking for.
We don't even have the technology to scan outside of past, present, and future, because that's what we're in right now.
These things are way outside of our understanding of what Of what this even is.
We can't even fucking see them.
Like, the ants can't see us.
Like, we can't even see them.
We couldn't talk to them.
An ant can't talk to you.
You know, I saved a bee from my swimming pool, and I swear to God, it seemed like it was thanking me.
And then it did this cool little, I swear, it was like a little dance in front of me.
This weird little, cool little bobbing dance thing and then flew away.
I'm like, did that fucking bee just like...
Thank me or like was that like some form of attempting to communicate with me?
I mean bees certainly communicate with each other.
There is communication among insects and I don't know if they're aware that we exist, but if they talk to each other, isn't it possible they might try to talk to us?
I mean all the levels of communication happening around us at any given moment are it's astounding we can't deal with it like it's just too much to handle So we sort of get focused on our own little lives as human beings or whatever but fuck man There's a lot more going on.
I mean just that yeah, you know that if that's happening with bees There's then it's probably happening with everything And so then we're in this, like, and we talk about this a lot, but that means we really are in a matrix of intelligence and we've just decided to focus on this one the way that we're doing it right now, you know, which is a pretty, uh, it's sad in a weird way because we do, you do cut out, you cut yourself out of a whole other, uh, community.
That's one of the things I like about, like, the Native American mythology is that they, uh, You know, it seems like they had less of a distinction between humans and animals.
So they have this exclusive relationship with the world where they allow into their periphery or in their circle of friends.
I'm letting you into my circle of friends.
So I have this, like, tight circle of friends.
And then other people, based on whatever their particular metric is for determining who they want around them, you know, shit snobs are the ones who happen.
You know those people who happen to...
Only be friends with successful people it's like they're only friends with like like celebrities and they're only for like weird that a weird coincidence how did that happen holy shit I don't understand how that happened you know so there's that which is like for them they want to interact in this particular like part of the societal ecosystem Which means they're excluding, excluding, excluding, excluding all these other fucking people, right?
And so the moment you stop, you start experimenting with not excluding people as much as you can, this doesn't mean you let annoying people around or people who don't have the good intentions with you around or whatever.
It's a really cool idea, though, which is like the Galapagos Islands.
Here we have these beings that have evolved in a certain way because they're completely separated from everything else.
It's fascinating to see.
So in the same way, there's a kind of economic Galapagos that happens with wealthy people, which is that they only get around each other, and so they start mating within their own circles, and And they start exchanging only information that wealthy people have.
And so this creates a kind of hybrid, a weird new form of human being, which is the elite wealthy class.
Not a new idea.
The kings and queens would only like fuck within bloodlines and stuff.
It's an intentional form of like wealth eugenics or something.
But anyway, what ends up happening when you're doing that is you end up cutting off all these other Forms of information that come in.
And then also you start living according to a pretty ridiculous fucking idea, which is that all these other people, whatever they're doing, whoever they are, whatever it is, you know, that's just not really worth it.
Like, what does that person really have to tell me that I need to hear?
Or is it that they feel like they can get along with those other people because the other people are going to understand them?
Because people do find like-minded groups of people and hang out together.
And if you're like some super wealthy Rothschild guy and you become friends with some weirdo painter dude, I mean, how much do you guys have in common?
So that exclusivity, even from a human perspective, cuts you off to a lot of data.
Admittedly, some of that data is probably going to suck.
But a lot of the data is gonna be really fucking good information that can make your life better.
Stuff's gonna come to you that you would never expect when you reduce your exclusivity.
So, in that same way, humans as a species are exclusive.
We place ourselves as the top of the food chain, human beings, and underneath us is all this incredible biomass filled with all these other forms of life that we have managed, many people have managed to reduce to being some kind of meat machines.
But going back to what you were saying earlier about ants, And the system that ants live under and bees, how these bees can communicate with each other through pheromones and some other way.
I mean, I don't know exactly how they're sorting out who's who and which clan belongs in what part of the woods or, you know, who the fuck knows.
But...
The thing that we know about human beings is that there are signals that are around us constantly that we can't detect.
Wi-Fi and radio and television and satellite.
All that stuff is broadcasting around us, through the air around us constantly, and we can't detect it.
And we also know that all throughout nature are these animals that are blind, there's animals that can't see, there's worms, there's all sorts of things that have no idea you're there, no idea that you're watching television, and there's no idea that you're about to get in your car.
They don't even know what the fuck a car is because they don't have the senses to detect it.
Why would we assume that we hit the fucking bonanza with the senses and we've got it all down?
But, like, again, because we live, this is, I mean, so much of what we live in is, like, very advanced, but so much of it is, like, ridiculously barbaric and primitive.
And the thing that I've been thinking lately, or just playing around this idea, is like, what if...
I have all these different versions of it, and I don't quite know the right way to get it out.
So imagine like...
And directly behind you is a window that opens up into a universe where everything's made of love, right?
And you're standing in front of the window blocking that light, right?
You're standing in front of the window.
And so like the human condition, again, this is just a thought experiment and admittedly a very high thought experiment that I had, but I can't get it out of my head.
And I've heard Ram Dass give different versions of this too.
So the idea is like, here's this window opening up into this alternate I don't even want to call it an alternate universe.
The actual universe.
I guess it's kind of like Plato's allegory of the cave too, but you're standing in front of this fucking window, blocking the love.
Your ego is, right?
Your ego is.
And so, the more...
The more opaque your ego becomes, the more you allow yourself to become less and less of a thing stuck to anything at all, the more the light from that universe shines into this one, right?
So when you're with someone who's like, I love you!
I really love you!
They've gotten over their ego enough To let the light from that window, they've kind of managed to let that light shine through them for a second into this dimension, which is why it's so shocking.
And maybe why babies are so entrancing, because there's no ego there.
They're just a pure...
Blast of love or dogs in the same way or cats or like anything that loves you is so incredible because what they actually are are like Windows or portals into their reality of what our universe is which is love and so if you're blocking the window then that means that like You're mostly living in a world of shadows like a person who's like very egotistical Is like living in a shadowy world dude,
I was just thinking when you were talking about dimensions, is that an egotistical point of view that we have, that there's a portal to another dimension?
And is it really just that these dimensions are constantly around us, we just don't have the ability to access them?
So, from the first tool to now, a couple hundred thousand years, I think, from now to a time machine, if we stay alive, if we don't blow ourselves up, we don't get hit by an asteroid, if we keep improving, they're gonna figure it out.
And the day they figure it out, what becomes crazy is, then...
All time travel from any point in the future to that moment is possible, and to any place else on the scale.
See, the idea is that you can only travel where there's a road.
So once the time machine is invented, Yeah.
Time ceases to be linear and everything happens all at once.
Like literally anyone can come back to any point in time and go back and forth.
You could smack someone and then you go back in time before you smack them and kiss them and then go back in time and smack them and they'll go back in time and kiss them.
And you'd be communicating with the same person once it happens.
So once it does happen and people have access to it, which that access, like everything else, whether it's cell phones or automobiles or anything, the access starts in a limited way where very few people can afford it, and then it becomes worldwide.
We need the road to travel, so we need to build the road.
So let's say I do invent the technology for a time machine, which basically means I have point A. Now I need a point B, right?
So the point B, I've got to get the further out the point B is, I guess the more powerful the time machine would be, right?
So this is the idea of direct to panspermia as a means of time travel is, assuming you are the super advanced species, then what you do is you create these genetic You create like DNA. You create a kind of packaged thing that when it lands in the right environment that you could live in has the tendency to evolve into a technological civilization that will build a time machine that is actually point B for your time
machine.
So you release from your planet.
Just infinite blasts of this DNA. And you know that when it lands on the road and the seed finds the right soil, it's going to grow into a technological tree that at the end of its growth is going to flower with...
Your point B, the end of your time machine.
So if you were this kind of interstellar traveler, then for you, you would send these seeds out into time, and then the moment a time that they got to the point where they built a time machine, for you it would seem like it happened instantly.
There's your point B. You don't know what it's going to lead to, but you know it's going to be at least a habitable planet because you've developed these genetic machines to only take root in a planet that you could live on.
So what we are are these genetic robots that are compelled to build technology because we're opening up the point B in some kind of interstellar time machine, and that's what the singularity is.
It's when our creator masters come through the time portal that we've opened up on this planet and say, Oh, hi, you did it.
It seems so science fiction-y, though, that if we really got to a point...
Like, imagine if our civilization had gotten to a point where we could transcend space and time and travel through the universe and go to any place at any point in time and even drop the seeds of life on a planet and sort of...
What is that term that they were going to use on Mars where they...
We're the first of all these things to achieve this state.
And that when these things achieve this state, they either blow themselves up or they keep going and they become more and more advanced.
But I don't think it happens very often.
And I might be wrong.
I might be totally wrong.
But it hasn't happened anywhere near us, so let's pretend that the galaxy that we look at right now that we can see, let's pretend that's the universe.
What if we find out that out of this galaxy of hundreds of millions of stars, we're the only intelligent life?
Yeah.
Drastically narrows the possibility for intelligent life everywhere else in the universe, except for the fact that the universe is infinite, which means that not only is there intelligent life somewhere in the universe, there's a Duncan Trussell somewhere in the universe.
Not only is there a Duncan Trussell, but there's a Duncan Trussell that said everything that you said in the exact same order.
With every pause, every time you dribble piss on your toilet seat, and you go, I'll take care of that later, and you shut the lid, it did that to the exact T an infinite number of times throughout space.
Right.
So, like, not only is there one of you, but there's an infinite number of yous and then an infinite number of possibilities left and right that you could have gone.
But that doesn't mean that anything's ever gotten smarter than this.
This is the only thing that we know that's gotten this smart.
And it might be, this is the only thing that's got this smart.
Because something had to be the first thing that got this smart.
Unless it happened simultaneously, like we're saying, then it happened with a bunch of things.
But let's call that thing the same thing in different places.
It's not like there's a grey alien with big black eyes and a giant head and a little skinny neck that reads your mind and flies through magnetic fields.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about you and I, this thing.
This thing might exist an infinite number of times.
All throughout space and time.
But let's call it this one thing.
This one thing.
This might be the first time anything has gotten as advanced as this one thing.
I mean, it's impossible to really, at this point, we can't prove that this isn't the default base reality that the entire universe is experiencing.
But my guess would be that no way, man.
I think it's more realistic that we're in a fucking...
Like a novelty farm?
Like some kind of technological novelty farm?
I mean, to use human terms, we're like...
I mean, if you could simulate a universe and then create intelligent anything, sentient intelligent beings, or particularly sentient intelligent beings that matched you, your species, duplicate yourself even, and then run that duplication an infinite number of times in this server mechanism or whatever you have in your supercomputer, and then you just set time to loop as fast a rate as your computer would let you, so at night you just like...
You let it run in the morning, you wake up, and it's like, oh, fuck, look, Hemingway, huh?
That's interesting.
The entire works of Hemingway just got generated in my universe simulator by one of the simulated creatures that I had in there.
I mean, it's a very prosperous job.
You'd be like a novelty farmer or something, in the same way they've got those fucking Bitcoin things that are like...
Constantly grinding to make bitcoins.
You're fucking making universes and inside the universes, the universes are making planets and the planets are making technology and the technology is being, every single whatever your morning happens to be, whenever you wake up, you're like, oh cool, we've got, whoa, that's interesting.
That's a new form of teleportation.
I haven't seen that before.
It's a way to harvest information from a kind of living AI or something like that.
You know, it seems like it'd be a very, really smart way to kind of like gather data or to create novelty events.
I mean, just for the pure entertainment of it.
Like if you had a way to like access, like for you, it's like, you know, right now we download a movie.
It takes like two minutes, five minutes, depending on your connection.
In the same way, like you wait five minutes and a universe is born and dies and throughout that it can pick out an interesting moments.
Like, look at this!
Oh, look, here's that moment where in that planet, World War III started because fucking Russia wanted to secure Syria and we didn't want it to happen.
Well, we already have examples of this in a rudimentary form and all these new universes that are being created in these online games that people are playing.
The summation of the anger is just because something is gigantic doesn't mean it's entertaining, right?
And so you end up getting in this kind of feedback loop because if you're going to procedurally generate an infinite or a semi-infinite universe with all these different planets and stuff, then that means you need an AI that you can procedurally generate that's also going to procedurally generate what we consider to be a game.
The other part that people got mad about is the...
Apparently...
Not even apparently.
You can see, like, people got so mad.
God, may you never piss off the gaming community.
That's like...
It was just like, don't fuck with it, man.
Because they swore, man.
And it's vicious and brutal.
Like, I was playing the game and really enjoying it for, like...
At least a week and a half, two weeks, and I would go on, like, Reddit, No Man's Sky, and read the comments, and I'd be like, God, you guys are fucking dicks!
But really, it was like reading the critique of gourmet chefs far more familiar with where gaming is at.
You know, these are people who play games all the time and know it and like have very high expectations.
But anyway, the point is, yes, it procedurally generates this incredible universe, but it ends up getting kind of boring or something like that.
But yeah, procedurally generate, like we are in a procedurally generated universe that is producing novelty events, which may be in the universe that We are being procedurally generated out of as a form of currency or a form of entertainment or a form of something we don't even understand yet.
All I know is if there was a game called Universe Creator, run your computer and your universe will We're good to go.
Pure capitalism.
What's better than having a never-ending stream of inventions coming from your universe simulator that you could then market in this dimension?
I think there's something weird that we do, too, where we look at things that we can generate with a computer versus things that sort of exist in the real world, and we look at them as coming from different sources.
Something that man makes versus something that just happens.
And because we look at it from different sources, I don't think we recognize that it's kind of the same thing.
Like, there's a long process from a star exploding to a human being being born, but they're all connected.
That star exploding is necessary for the development of the...
Any great painter, any architect who's built the most incredible buildings, you were made.
This whole thing is made, and you're making things too, but those things aren't any more significant than trees.
The whole thing is nuts.
The whole thing is somehow or another getting more and more complex, more and more involved, more and more aware, faster information sharing between the things that make the things, and making more and crazier and better things, but all of these things made by a star explosion.
I think it's like there's lots of different ways of saying it, and every single way of saying it falls short of what it is.
Now, there's a...
I keep telling you about this guy, man.
One day, I hope you pick him up.
There's a Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa who says...
So I'll get in an argument with Cho Gyum Trungpa.
If he heard me spew that bullshit, what he would say is, wait.
So when I ask you, is it an individual?
Is it a thing?
Is it a person?
And you say, I don't know, man.
There's no words for it.
Then at that moment, what you've done is you've taken your confusion And you've put it on an altar, and you've started worshiping it as though it were your God.
Your ability to not articulate the thing is not an indication of the existence of a thing, but is more the indication of your laziness because you want to deify your confused, passionate emptiness.
It's something like that.
There's a great fort in one of his books that is...
But so that being said, I think you should do experiments in reaching out to the transcendent as though it were possibly an embodied thing that was a lot smarter than you.
And if the result of the experiment is nothing, if you just feel embarrassed or dumb or you're like, why the fuck am I praying?
But if the result of the experiment is even as a placebo effect, you begin to experience a shift in your subjective reality, then I think it's worth continuing those experiments and seeing how it unfolds.
I've always had the problem, whenever people talk about intelligent design, or a thing, or a deity, and this is my own problem, I automatically think of, instead of the universe, like, say there's the universe, and then there's this thing over here, like, right next to the universe.
It's like, oh, I'm just gonna sit here and make the universe.
It's the stupid way that I look at it.
It's completely my own, like, You can grow up or you can just sort of form these ideas in your head about what a deity is and then those ideas can be little prisons.
And when they start looking at subatomic particles, you realize how deep they can go and how small they can measure things.
And then you look at the size of the universe itself.
You look at the size of galaxies and black holes and just the vastness of space and the ability to measure.
I think they measure 13 point something billion light years since the Big Bang.
All that madness.
All that craziness that they're trying to...
I think by looking at all that stuff, by looking at the vastness of all this...
We define it in this way where there's a Duncan over here, and there's an ant over there, and there's another animal over here.
But inside of all of us are a bunch of different animals that are all little tiny ecosystems, right?
Like inside every person, there's not a single individual life form That's a person.
Every person requires all this life inside of it.
E.coli living in your body and all sorts of gut flora.
All sorts of things that are not you.
But there are you.
Because you are a system.
You're a system just like your neighborhood's a system.
Just like the rainforest is a system.
I'm sure all the people in the rainforest that are hunting with bows and arrows and looking out for jaguars, I'm sure they don't think of themselves as a system, but they're a life system.
That's how life balances itself out, both in your gut and in the jungle and in the mountains of Montana and in the savannas of Africa.
But this planet, everything on this planet, right?
The life system that's contained on this planet is all...
Bathed in oxygen, right?
It's all these gases.
And the elimination of those gases does not mean that you're not connected to all the other things that don't have those gases.
You take those gases away, you go into space itself.
You're still fucking connected to that.
You're still a soup.
You're a part of an infinite soup of space.
And you, just like a subatomic particle that blinks in and out of existence, that they can measure, it's moving and it's not moving, it's there and it's gone.
This is how small the life form of a planet is in comparison to the mass of the universe itself, which might very well be just like every other fractal.
The bigger you get, the more it represents the same patterns over and over again in larger scales.
And I'm going to try to say that it's got a great name that I always say it wrong and I always get corrected, and so I'll say it wrong again.
The Emerald Tablet...
There it is.
Hermes Trimestid somethingeth.
But if you open it up, open up the Emerald Tablet...
And then hopefully we can see what it says on it, because it's like, there it is.
Okay, what does the first one say?
Okay, tis certain with error, certain and most true.
So you just said number two.
That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below.
To do the miracles of only one thing.
And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one, so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation." So anyway, it's like...
It only makes sense that if we see these fractals all throughout nature, and we can observe them here, that our idea is that we can only observe subatomic particles, that that's the whole universe.
I don't know if he's asexual, but if he was, I think a lot of these guys, they were fucking around with mercury a lot, and it was like messing with their heads.
Well, I mean, checking on it is one way to put it.
Another way to put it is, it may be that some of these people figured out ways to directly communicate with this intelligence that I certainly believe in.
Meanwhile, what are we doing that makes any fucking sense?
Exactly.
Oh yeah, they're crazy.
I got it all figured out.
Look what I'm doing.
I'm sitting in a fucking podcast studio talking about the infinite universe.
It's like, we're all...
The idea that there is a kind of pattern that's like, oh yeah, that's the sane pattern right there.
Well, I think these people, they do make contact.
And I think, you know, we talk about like...
One of my favorite, I think you told me this, Joe, one of my favorite UFO conspiracy theories is that Roswell was a real alien crash and that we can chart the evolution of technology from the Roswell alien crash, that technology is actually some kind of alien virus that came in through Roswell and is now spreading through history now.
Dude, one of the many things I love about you, man, is you are like the Library of Congress for this stuff.
Whereas in my mind, it's just like a murky swamp when I try to remember.
You can, in detail, expound on these things.
You photographically memorize them.
I think it's really cool.
So therefore, I know that you were the one who told me this.
And I think about it a lot.
It's a really cool idea, but I think it's funny.
Because for us, we're like, okay, the way we would get technology is by a metal craft shooting into the earth, and then we're going to take that and make technology.
Whereas, I think the real alien encounters that happen throughout history, the UFO encounters, a UFO, for lack of a better word, a UFO, Flies through the consciousness of Isaac Newton.
And Isaac Newton, Tesla, all of the great inventors have this spontaneous idea where they're like, wait, what, wait?
Oh, wait.
And so the alien technology is actually not something that necessarily has to be matter, but starts as a thought form that then gets sort of produced through the spinneret of the particular inventor that, like, allows it to come through them, you know?
Because we were talking about ideas possibly being a life form.
Ideas being a form of creativity and ideas being a form of life that...
Forces the change on an environment.
Forces the change in a civilization.
They come from ideas.
The ideas, creativity is responsible for everything, including this microphone, the internet connection, the building we're in, everything we're wearing.
Everything the car you drove to get here all that comes from the imagination from ideas and from creativity and The initial burst of imagination comes from where we don't know it might be a life form It might be as much of a life form as a physical thing like like a person or it might be the okay,
so like a plane or you know like a I don't know, you see in the, it's never actually happened to me, but like a plane flies too low, and like the fucking trees, or like when a helicopter's landing, the trees blow, people have to hold their hands to their ears, right?
So maybe when these like transcendent objects enter into our time-space continuum, shit tons of people start having the very same idea, or different like brilliant ideas that are actually just the sort of Impact that this craft as it passes through our planet or passes near us or whatever that means from the dimension that they're in Maybe that's the impact that it has on our consciousness is the sudden origination of these incredible ideas that end up creating massive
shifts in our society that that that's because if you look at like Tesla where he got his ideas and I don't know about Newton but a lot of Great inventors there.
It's not like their ideas came As they were sitting at the whiteboard calculating and then they got a eureka moment.
But the ketamine injections, that was towards the end.
I think in the beginning...
It was LSD. It was LSD, and I think he got to the point where he recognized that maybe his physical body was actually getting in the way of what he actually was, so he just sort of wanted to melt into nothingness, and it was sort of troubled by this thing.
I like this story you're telling me because it's the story of the fucking luckiest dolphins.
You know what I mean?
I'm saying if you get caught as a dolphin, it's not great, but if you are going to get caught by the monkeys and you end up in a place where they're giving you acid and jerking you off...
Some raven flies over to one cat, fucks with him a little bit, the cat tries to get away from him, the cat, like, turns around real quick, and the raven jumps away, and then the raven flies over to another cat who's on another rooftop.
The idea is, like, yeah, you're never gonna be fucking happy again.
Like...
Ever.
Like, happiness is a dream.
Give it up.
The reality is that life is...
You know, it's the usual kind of fucking drivel that comes out of people.
No, I don't mean to say drivel, but sometimes the old happy juice isn't coming out of the synaptic vesicles the way it should, and you translate that.
It's like, instead of recognizing that your engine is running low on coolant, You think that all cars in the world must just run in some shitty way.
To me, it's one of the most beautiful things to realize while simultaneously being one of the most depressing things to realize, which is that so much of what human happiness is is coming from these Synaptic vesicles, these little bubbles of serotonin that are getting dripped into our brains according to what activities we are partaking in.
And so, some people, the drip isn't happening.
And I would say that it's probably safe to say that for Edgar Allan Poe, His brain, if you could say the synaptic vesicles are the vagina of the human brain, then his were dry, arid, just fucking chafed synaptic vesicles.
He was depressed.
Nothing's coming out, man.
And I know what that's like, because anyone who's taken MDMA, if you've taken MDMA and have felt the MDMA-related depression, extrapolate from that thing.
Three straight years of that unrelenting numbness that comes when you don't have enough of the happy juice up there.
And then you're gonna start writing shit like, quote the raven, never more.
Also, it doesn't help that his fucking wife...
I think at one point she had, what was the name of that terrible disease?
Tuberculosis.
I think it was tuberculosis.
She had some horrible lung disease.
And I think she was playing piano.
At this party that he threw and she just like exploded blood all over the piano.
But I do think that I just I mean can only talk about this nonsense so long but her her insistence on working towards marijuana and Making sure that marijuana stays a schedule one drug.
But I think it's not just not doing your job to serve and protect us and to lead us.
Not only is it not doing your job, it's doing the opposite of your job.
You're doing something for profit and you've made a connection and through influence you've decided to do something that you know for sure doesn't help anybody.
It keeps people in jail.
That's all you need to know.
The keep people in jail part, that's all you need to know.
More people were arrested From marijuana than for all violent crimes combined.
There's a giant business in arresting people and putting people in jail, keeping people in jail, enforcing laws.
There's a business in that.
It's a huge business.
We don't want to think of it as a huge business, but any time a huge business drops off, and it's gonna drop off, whoever you're, if you're in that business, get out now, because you're like, blockbuster video, you motherfuckers.
But if she's saying, if the next president, she's definitely going to be the next president, is saying that she's going to continue this prohibition to the bankers that were paying her to give a presentation, And this is the person Obama's endorsing and Bernie Sanders is endorsing.
It's just like, I don't know.
The more I look into all this shit, the more confused I become.
I tried to go a little deeper into it, like looking up the Clinton Foundation and then checking out the charity websites that talk about the Clinton Foundation or give it a rating or whatever.
And it's like, well, there's a lot of misinformation coming from both sides.
But the most the one I trust only because they're like a left-leaning super liberal website the Huffington Post called there's an article and they're saying the Hillary the Clinton Foundation's gross is the name of the article and basically it says the foundation itself If you look at the tax returns, since it's an operating foundation, all the bullshit about how they're only giving like 6% or 10% of the money to charities is wrong, because they are doing shit.
They are doing stuff.
The foundation goes into the world, it has worked with AIDS, so you can't villainize the entire foundation.
But what's fucked up is the Clintons, when they go to give talks to people who then donate to the foundation, they get paid, and that money's separate from what goes to the foundation.
So when Hillary Clinton goes and gives a speech, And then they donate to the foundation.
The amount they pay her for the speech doesn't go to the foundation.
I guess that's the one bitter comfort that we have, is that this person who's going to become president is very, very sophisticated when it comes to manipulating people.
Sophisticated in a way that...
God, man, I kept looking, I kept trying to take pictures of her, and you get up close...
I imagine what a Trump strategy meeting looks like is people sitting around eating cheeseburgers doing blow.
You know what I mean?
They're like, Trump's already making deals for his next TV show.
He's like, fuck, whatever, yeah, the president thing.
They don't care.
They're like, you know, he probably is getting fucking calls from Putin.
They're like, wow!
You know what I mean?
And I think if you look at a Hillary Clinton strategy meeting, she's like sitting in some kind of like geodesic dome surrounded by CIA agents who are like, we've done a thermal analysis of Donald and here are the moments that you should hold still.
And at this moment, we recommend that you say this, and then this, and then this.
Like, she goes through the whole...
They're like, he's definitely gonna bring up the WikiLeaks.
Here, according to our psychological analysis, and also some of the DNA data we got from one of the cheeseburger crumbs that fell out of his fucking mouth at one of these rallies, is like, he's going to react to this.
And, like, she just memorizes it in a kind of alien way, sits there, and just does it.
Like, the fighters, I'm sure.
I remember when you were like when I realized because I don't know at the time I didn't know anything about fighting but then you were explaining how like They have these insanely deep combos.
If this person does this, they have all these moves, like, 19 moves deep.
That's incredible.
So I think she's like that.
She has, like, if he does this, you do this.
And if he does that, then this, this, this, and then that, and then that, and then that.
And they've done it all with, like, a government team of psychologists who have fully analyzed him and know how to fucking set him off.
And she did it last night.
She did it in every single fucking debate.
And it's not like she's the one who's coming up with that.
She's got a team of the smartest, most manipulative people on planet Earth who baited him in to the fucking elections in the first place.
You saw that email, right?
Where they picked the three candidates that they wanted to empower, you know, or to like build up, which was Trump.
But I have a feeling, I mean, I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that if you wanted to find people who said, yeah, Trump grabbed my pussy, it wouldn't be that fucking hard.
And so it's like when you realize like that, then you start feeling this weird compassion for him.
You're like, My God, even with all his maliciousness and weird perviness and stuff, ultimately he's like a fucking bull that got put into a goddamn ring with a matador who's been doing this kind of bullfighting for like 30 fucking years, for better or for worse.
And we're watching what we saw last night, I guess.
I want to be on the winning team You know to be a lot of that I think really though man like if people like what that the effect that that actually has is people who might have been terrified of Trump being president Oh, yeah If they're like, she's already ahead by 12%, I'm not gonna fucking drive out to the polls to vote.
They don't come out to vote.
Like, it would serve her more if there was some collusion between her and the media, which, according to the Podesta emails, there certainly has been.
There's like, you've got the, like, the editor of Politico, you saw that one where he's like, fuck it, I'm a hack.
So, like, I don't know if it was the editor, I don't remember which guy it was, but the point is, I think it's a pretty safe bet That she's going to be the next president.
And I don't think that that data that we're getting is necessarily some kind of collusion between...
I'm saying that even if you do legitimately, objectively poll a group of people and you get a result from that poll, it's not really representative of 100% of the people.
But once you start thinking that it is, and once people start deciding that it is, it has a massive impact on how people vote.
Well, I gotta tell you man, before the fucking buses go riding through Varying neighborhoods and scooping up illegal immigrants and before the fucking abortion cops start arresting fucking women for getting abortions and before all the Insanity that like apparently he's gonna do starts happening.
That's he Trump that if he gets elected if he gets about arresting people for abortions Yeah, he said that women should be like punished for that's one of the main one of his many fuck-ups is he was like yeah women should be there should be some punitive Legal shit if women get a legal abortion.
But think of the irony that fucking pro-abortion Hillary Clinton is anti-marijuana.
So she's like, I'm going to tell you, no, it's not our place to say what a woman could do with her body, but I'm going to fucking tell you what you can put into your body.
It has to do with banks having interest in pharmaceutical companies.
The company that makes fentanyl, we've talked about this ad nauseum, they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Arizona to try to stop the Medical or not even medical.
They're trying to do recreational.
Recreational marijuana from being passed in Arizona.
Because they know that it's way cheaper, way easier, and way more effective pain relief.
It's going to fucking cripple their creepy-ass business.
And, guess what?
No physical addiction properties.
Some people get addicted to it, but they're the same people that get addicted to a lot of stuff, folks.
And it doesn't mean there's, like, physical addictive properties to marijuana.
There's not really a mechanism for you to get physically addicted to marijuana the way you can get physically addicted to painkillers.
It's like, the dream is, like, man, can you imagine?
If the fucking Republicans had come up with just a normal dude, like if they just somehow come up with one normal guy, like just a non-religious nut, and somebody who doesn't have a checkered past, just a kind of balanced guy who's like, well, we need to work on the economy.
This is a fucking guy who spent two fucking years in Vietnam by choice because he thought he was going to fight for his country.
So these things mean a lot to him.
And it's like to see this fucking barely, at least in the debates that I've seen, you see barely anyone talking about the fucking...
Like, no one's fucking talking about the fact that the VA is fucked or that, like, some of these people aren't getting any of the medical care that they need.
It's, like, crazy.
They're up there fucking talking about Trump grabbing pussies or, like, Hillary Clinton's fucking stupid foundation.
What about the fact that, like, people are blowing their goddamn brains out all over neighborhoods across our country because they made the decision to, like, go over and fight in fucking Iraq?
The fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for anywhere from one out of three deaths in the military from 2005 to 2010 to more than 46% of the deaths in 2007...
According to the height of the Iraqi, during the height of the Iraqi surge.
More than 6,800 troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9-11, and more than 3,000 additional service members have taken their lives in the same time, according to Pentagon data.
So keep going now so we can find out where...
That's it?
Wait a minute.
Hold on a second then.
Go back to the bottom of that, please.
It says more than 6,800 troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 3,000 additional service members have taken their lives.
So how is that the same amount?
Go back up to the title?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Is this a bad article?
Suicide surpassed war as the military leading cause of death.
Jesus 27,258 of those we honor for their service on this Veterans Day have died by their own hand 27 fucking thousand people That's from how many wars?
Yeah, you don't get any help because part of, I think maybe part of PTSD is you don't want to reach out for help.
So that's like part of the disorder is you're all numb down.
So like, yeah, man, not to mention you have, many of these people have brain trauma.
Like they've got like, there's a lot of, anyway, I'm sure that if you're sitting in a, like if you're in a family, That's been impacted by that, and you're watching the debates.
Because, you know, for me, I watch the debates as a form of entertainment.
You know, to me, it's like there's something in it that's grim, yet hilarious, and it's interesting to see this kind of unraveling of our political system in this way.
But, man, it's like...
When you just spend a little bit of time thinking about how the whole machine is impacting families in the most fucked up way, man.
A lot of kids, they don't know their dad has PTSD. They don't even know why their dad is drinking so much or is acting angry or unpredictable or seems fucked up.
They don't even know it.
They just think that's how dad is.
And then they develop They begin to imitate that behavior, you know?
And then the next thing you know, you've got this echo of this terrible thing that war is echoing out into our communities and into everything, man.
I imagine when you're watching the debates and you're realizing that these two people are spending I don't know what percentage of time talking about that.
I don't know what the percentage is exactly that they've talked about veterans at all, but you probably start getting really, really, really depressed when you're like, well, I guess that was just a bunch of bullshit that we did out there for real, because these guys are barely talking about it.
It's just a weird popularity contest for them to get into this position of power.
That's all it is.
And they're saying whatever is popular in the moment.
What's popular in the moment is grabbing pussies and email scandals.
I mean, that's what everybody seems to be focusing on.
Because the war has been going on for so long, the people almost got numb to it.
And if you drudge that up, it's not going to get the same emotional sparks, the current event spark that we love.
We love a current event spark.
Right now, the current event spark is grabbing pussies and email scandals.
I went back and forth the other day during the debates, post-debate, from CNN to Fox News, CNN to Fox News, CNN to Fox News, just listening to the different sides and how they talk about stuff.
It's so bizarre.
It's so bizarre.
I mean, you never...
More aware of the fact that you are being...
Propaganda is being projected in your way.
Just blatantly unapologetic propaganda.
The CNN people aren't even remotely considering the impact of her...
The controversy with the Clinton Foundation, this WikiLeaks stuff that's come out about the bankers and her trying to keep marijuana an illegal drug and keep Americans imprisoned, therefore, because of it.
None of that gets brought up.
Nothing.
Not a thing gets brought up.
The idea that 30,000 emails were about yoga classes, how much does this bitch take yoga?
Manipulated Ecuador into cutting off Assange's internet connection, you know, so it's like on top of that They just like shut him down.
They're like so like our country was able to manipulate another country to shut the internet connection off of a guy It's like, you know, you hear about how like who's the new leader of Korea?
It's Kim Jong-un, right?
Il was the first, Un's the second.
So like Kim Jong-un The South Koreans, they put propaganda weather balloons into North Korea, and I guess the North Koreans see this shit and they're like, what the fuck?
And then Kim Jong-un threatens to shoot nuclear missiles into South Korea for distributing information, like, hey, you guys Guys are in a fucking hell bubble over there.
You know the world's not really like that?
They don't know that over there.
So in the same way, Assange has started leaking this information to us.
It's like, hey, check it out, man.
You're politicians.
This is how they fucking work.
This is how they work.
And instead of us being like, whoa, let's reform this system.
We gotta reform this fucking system, man.
You can't do that.
Even if it is above the board.
Even if what you're doing is above the board in some kind of weird, gray, liminal It shouldn't be.
And it's like, you know, the reaction we should all be having should not be like, I don't know, anger at Russia.
The reaction we should be having is anger at our political class.
You know, it should be, and that was Assange's idea, right?
That's his idea, is like, if we expose, he wrote this essay, I read an article about it, if we expose the inner workings of our political class, And we show that the level of deceitfulness that is involved in this game of chess, which now people are just saying, well, that's just the way it works.
That's how it works in the modern world.
You've got to be cutthroat and you've got to lie and you've got to trick and you've got to do all this shit.
If we expose them, then what that hopefully is supposed to do is make them reform on their own or create what he called a The idea is you want it to be very expensive to lie.
And also, he's created a situation where all of them are living in a terrible world of paranoia, which I think is kind of hilarious because, like, Assange has done to Hillary Clinton what the NSA has done to all of us, you know?
Like, he has all this fucking data and she doesn't know which data he has.
She doesn't know what he's got.
A lot of politicians have no idea what WikiLeaks has.
That's the strategy behind, I think that's the strategy, behind the trickling release of this information, is because it's like the Japanese water torture, little drops, so that every day they have to sit and think, fuck man.
Did they get those fucking pictures from the Bohemian Grove?
I mean, I posted something on Twitter the other day about a soldier who took photographs with his camera on his phone of some inner workings of a submarine, and he's going to jail because of it.
Well, the conspiracy argument is the best because you would think that everybody would have to be in on it.
Everybody who's ever been a part of space travel, whether it's the Russians or the Chinese or the Americans, anyone who has ever been an astrophysicist has to be in on it.
That's like one of the best fucking tweets that I ever got from somebody.
I'd love to see that meeting where you and Sussman are sitting with these reptilians and they're like, listen Joe, you know the earth is flat, we know the earth is flat.
If you knew the earth was flat, like, I don't know how you knew, like, fucking Dana White, or the people who run the UFC, they're like, look, man, it actually...
I mean, I'm not going to try to get into their theory about it, because they actually have a pretty deep philosophical...
It seems to be a fairly deep philosophy that a lot of it's really hard to understand for me.
But Dadaism is part of it, and this concept of this thing called the zone.
Actually, Hakeem Bay's temporary autonomous zone is kind of...
related to this idea that you can create these little bubbles that temporarily sort of where the normal rules of society just don't exist in that moment and so people who get to be in that bubble with you get to experience a kind of respite from the never-ending flow of society which can produce like
Huge changes in a person's life to suddenly no longer be afflicted with the humdrum normal day-to-day Materialistic consumeristic bullshit that we call everyday life to create a tiny little bubble where that doesn't exist and where you're like there are two rules I don't know if you can call them rules, but their rules are you don't do a cacophonist event for money and you don't do it to promote your religion.
So you're doing this for no reason other than like subversions for subversion's sake.
So the profit that you're getting from it is just the incredible moment that you find yourself in a salmon outfit running the opposite way.
But what it does is it That temporarily disrupts the hypnotic trance that a lot of people are in.
Like, when they're living, you know, you're just- And this is by design?
But then what we did is Brendan Walsh, because we had him give this speech, you know, because I was like, everybody, I don't want this meeting, our final meeting, to be caught up in how Brendan Walsh ruined the Ukrainian branch of the L.A. Kikofmy Society, so let's just not think about that.
And then he gives a speech and he reads the entirety of Tiger Woods' cheating apology.
Suddenly this dude in pajamas is reading Tiger Woods' cheating apology in front of a group of people in pajamas who, whenever Brendan would say one of Tiger's weird apologies, everyone would applaud and then shush ourselves at the same time.
So it's like clapping like, shh, let him talk, let him talk.
And then we sang fucking Do You Want to Build a Snowman from Frozen?
The whole point of the thing, though, which is really beautiful.
All this shit happened because I realized, okay, well, Burning Man was the coolest thing I ever experienced.
And then I traced that back to the Cacophony Society.
And then I kept hearing this guy's name, John Law, John Law, John Law.
So I found him.
And I emailed him, and then he just wrote back, like, yeah, just call me.
Here's my number.
And then I called him, and then we started talking about what the events were like.
And he said, the main thing about it is inclusivity.
He's like, this is what makes it so cool.
If you really form a branch, this is more of an experiment, but if you really do it, then everybody who decides to participate, they come up with their own events.
You know?
So, like, everyone's like, alright, we're gonna be doing this next Tuesday.
If you wanna come, come.
If you don't, don't come.
The following Tuesday we're gonna be doing this.
But there's no, like, pushing people out.
It's like, whoever wants to be involved, let them be involved.
And then everyone kind of gathers together in this little weird bubble that forms.
Which is like, dude, when you're in pajamas at Gelson's, watching people, it's what we were talking about earlier.
What is the sane way to live, right?
So when you're in Gelson's, wearing pajamas, singing, do you want to build a snowman, and you look out, and people are kind of like walking with their shoulders down to buy their evening groceries, and they're just kind of like, look over at you, they get the biggest smile on their face.
They don't know what's fucking happening, we don't know what's happening, but at It feels so cool.
It's like a really exciting moment of really minor rebellion that has no impact ultimately in the flow of society.
But in that tiny moment, it's like, fuck, we're in zero gravity here, man.
Yeah, and dude, you'd look over, because it was right next to the deli, so people were sitting at the deli pretending to be eating their dinner, but they kept looking over at Brendan giving the Tiger Woods speech.
But that's the other cool idea that they came up with, man, which was...
It's like the way we do entertainment right now is so weird because it's like and I guess thank God for it because it's our jobs but like people pay a cover and they go in and there's the audience that sits and the audience and the comedian that talks or the entertainer that talks and there's this weird distance between the two and it's like so that relationship between entertainer and entertained their idea is like let's merge it together so that we're entertaining each other For no reason other than like,
let's just fucking get together and like see what happens, you know?
Now, this was a non-risky thing.
Like a lot of their thing is like, elevate the risk, elevate the risk, elevate the risk.
The more you elevate the risk, the more it's like a crucible kind of that really brings people together.
Which is, I think, the idea of taking people out to the fucking desert originally.
It's like, let's just take a group of these people.
Right behind that is this incredible, just never-ending field of art.
And lights.
All LED lights shining on the fucking art that people are spending all year building for no other reason than to fucking bring it out there and give people just beautiful art.
Capture it in pictures like you've just got to go there because if you see the pictures it kind of seems ridiculous or dusty or whatever, but my god man.
You just come, and we'll spend a week having fun there.
Because, dude, here's an example.
This is one of my favorite fucking places there.
It's called...
So it's all free bars.
There's just bars.
People put up free bars.
It's free booze.
You can't buy anything there.
So one of the bars, and forgive me if I say the title wrong, because now it's a little fuzzy in my mind.
It was my favorite bar, and it was called something like the Ministry...
Of disinformation, but it's set up to look like an information booth.
And so we're riding by on these, you ride around bicycles.
My friends who have been there forever, they're like, dude, go to that bar and they'll just lie to you.
Like, that's all they do.
The bartenders just lie to you.
That's hilarious.
And you like, so like you said, and they're so good at lying to the point where, because everyone knows that they lie.
So people come there to get lied to.
And so like, you go there to get lied to, but they know everyone knows that they're lying and they lull you in to thinking they're done with the lying part, right?
So like, we're sitting there drinking, me and Cora are sitting there drinking, and like, you know, the guy's like made some pretty obvious lies and then we're drinking, he's like, hey...
So it really feels like, oh yeah, okay, now we're just talking like friends.
He's like, so hey, do you guys want to try...
Some vodka that I homebrew?
And we're like, yeah, we'd love to try some.
And so he pours it, and we drink it, and we're like, wow, this is actually really good, man.
You could probably sell this stuff.
Are you going to start selling it?
And he's like, yeah, yeah, we worked out a deal with South Korea.
You slap an American flag on anything out there, and they'll buy anything.
And we're like, wait, wait.
Wait, you're still lying to us.
Like, you didn't make this vodka.
You're just lying.
He's like, no, I'm serious.
I'm serious.
Look, look, look.
Then he pulls his phone up, and there's pictures of, like, this is the still that I used to build it.
And it's this ridiculous still that, like, definitely, definitely isn't like a fucking still.
I'm like, other people will lie to you here, but I definitely don't do that.
So they go deep and they commit.
But it's not malicious.
It's a very funny thing.
And that's one tiny little part of it.
Imagine that spread out Over and over and over and over again with just different types of like bars or art.
Imagine like, let's say, and you know I don't take psychedelics and if I talk about it on the podcast I do it as a joke because I want to seem cool.
But imagine if you were in the middle of the fucking desert on psychedelics that had just started kicking in.
On your bicycle, covered in LED lights, surrounded by other people and blinking LED lights on their bicycles, and you're sitting in front of what appears to be a massive brass, what is either a locust, a firefly, some kind of Grasshopper cricket sculpture on top of another cricket sculpture that has combustible gas exploding out of it.
And it's like 10 feet, 15 feet high with combustible gas exploding out of it.
With all that being said, there's a place there called the Temple.
And a lot of these are built by like...
The temple...
I can't remember how much they said it cost to build.
It might have been like $75,000 or $750,000.
I can't remember.
It's this incredible...
You can pull it up.
Look up the Temple Burning Man 2016. Or you can look at all the different versions.
There, there, there.
That's it.
So everyone's like, go to the temple.
But it's really heavy when you go there.
So we didn't even know what they were talking about.
So you pedal in and you see people standing in front, like people seem to be crying, people are hugging each other.
Dude, you go into that thing and it's filled with pictures of people who've died That year before.
Baby clothes, pictures of dogs, pictures of like...
It's where people go to burn their...
To grieve for people who've died in their lives, man.
And so you walk into that place.
And this is in the middle of this incredible festival.
You walk into that fucking place, man, and like...
You just start crying.
People in there, because you can feel this nexus of grief bubbling up, and it's the most intense.
The only time I've ever felt that kind of energy is in a place called Varanasi in India, where they burn bodies there.
It's that same kind of sweet grief of people mourning.
But then that's the last thing they burn at Burning Man.
And whoever's left when they burn it, which is probably like 60,000, 50,000 people, they all sit around it completely silently.
They sit around it silently.
You might hear someone playing a flute in the distance or something, but it's just imagine 50,000 people sitting around that thing on fire quietly as embers of all these pictures of people who've died the year before, or whenever they've died, go flying through the air.
And then when it finally burns to the ground, the entire group of people, they howl like dogs.
Well, this is growing at a staggering rate every year.
What's to stop these people from claiming a city?
Like, if everybody just decided, like, hey, let's all move to Portland.
If all those people that are Burning Man type folks just decided to try to have the same sort of impact on a community, that's not outside the realm of possibility, right?
Well, it's happening wherever there's people who've been influenced by that festival who come back into the world and try to not be such selfish shitheads when they're in the world, or maybe try not to waste so much stuff.
It's also happening because you realize, oh fuck, this is not only a festival, this is preparing for the fucking...
A possible economic collapse, because if we can all get together and survive in the desert, in this way, and work together, then there is a possibility.
You know, actually, I went to see Alex and Alison Gray.
They have a camp there called Re-fo-mation, right?
They basically are just hosing down all these filthy Burning Man people out in the desert to clean them up, right?
So after they hose them down, they've constructed a tent where there's a DJ playing music, and it's dripping water down, and everyone's naked, dancing.
And Alex and Alison Gray are painting this beautiful mural in that tent.
And so like, you know, Cora and I went to visit them and we walked up and like, you know, those guys are so fucking cool, man.
But then Alex like starts talking to me and he's like, you know what this is, right?
And I'm like, what do you mean?
He's like, Dr. Bronner's family was in Auschwitz where they had the showers.
And so this is the opposite of the showers at Auschwitz because it's like naked people In real showers, dancing to music in this fucking super loving environment.
So their idea was to mirror the Holocaust.
Not that you could do that, but to create a response to it that was like, here's what it could look like.
Instead of gassing people, there could be a DJ dripping...
Yeah, that's what they do.
They spray you down.
But anyway, man, yeah, like, you know, one of the things Alex Gray was saying is like, this is the seed of a global civilization.
I mean, there's people that are resisting it hardcore.
There's a lot of hardcore Trump fans that are resisting illegal immigrants, and they want hardcore Republican values.
There's a lot of people that are still clinging to that.
But then there's a lot of people that were going the Bernie Sanders way, too.
And there's a lot of people that are realizing why you watch these two duke it out like King Kong vs.
Godzilla.
What's interesting is the real loser Is the system itself.
Our confidence in the system.
Our confidence in the system is at an all-time low.
And people that are your age and older people, like me, I'm 49, what are you, 43 now?
42. 42?
I think I'm 42. We're like middle-aged folks, whether we like it or not.
But we grew up with no internet, and then we were exposed to the internet, and now we're seeing things like WikiLeaks.
The kids of today, they're going straight Wikilinks from fucking high school, right?
They knew about that in high school.
They watch all the videos in high school.
Those are the ones that I get the most upset about when someone posts a video about the flat earth or any kind of fucking stupid shit where you're gonna waste a lot of time paying attention to nonsense.
The world's goddamn round.
They have a lot of video of it.
You can go around it in a satellite.
You can go around in a jet.
It's not a fucking hoax.
Stop thinking about that.
It's a waste of time.
There's a lot of other shit to concentrate on.
But you'll get lost in that.
You'll get lost in that.
And that upsets me.
That pisses me off.
And I've been responsible for it myself.
I'm sure on this podcast we've said a lot of shit that turned out to not be true.
One of the guys Louis was hanging out with was a hardcore He hated white people.
White people are the devil.
You're the devil.
But he was actually really sweet at the same time.
He's really smart.
This is a guy, I can't remember his name, Dr. Khalid.
He actually...
I looked him up because I was really wanting to follow him on Twitter, but he died of an aneurysm.
But, whoa, what a crazy, hardcore, charismatic guy who wants the United States to give back a swath of land to black people so that they can go live there.
But, you know, Louis Theroux is such a likable guy.
That you could see that they were both kind of liking each other when they weren't, you know what I mean?
And it was really sweet to watch and really cool.
But you could also see that he was being moved by recognizing how much a lot of these people have gone through and how fucked up it could be.
And this is before any of this shit happened with the recent police shootings.
This was another police shooting in 2001. And they were going to go march about...
And Sharpton was going to get arrested.
But then...
So anyway, like...
Yeah, Sharpton was like, you let yourself down by not being part of this, by not getting arrested.
It's true, man.
While these people are up there fighting like those fucking goddamn cats that the crow lured into a fight, while they're up there debating and fighting and our eyes are fixated on that, we can easily lose track of all the stuff that we have definite control over, which is we don't need to be so selfish.
You don't need to be so selfish, and if you start experimenting with giving stuff away, because you guaranteed, man, there is stuff that you have that you don't need, you literally don't need, like in your garage, that you covet, kind of, like there's shit you covet that you don't need, you're not going to use, or you have like a hoarder mentality where you're like, well, I might sell it one day, or who knows, I'm going to definitely need this vibrating bed one day, or whatever the fucking thing is that you have.
You don't need it.
So you could do an experiment where you try to give it away.
Not to a charity or foundation, but you figure out someone in your community who maybe needs that thing for real.
Like someone who could actually use it.
It doesn't have to be some lofty thing either.
Maybe you got like an old fucking Xbox in your garage and your friend doesn't have an Xbox.
Give your friend the Xbox, just for fun.
You could do these little experiments and when you do it, Wow.
It feels good.
It like is a really great feeling to start offloading shit you don't need into the community of friends and family and people around you who are fucking...
Some people really need stuff, man.
And like it won't hurt you at all.
And so that to me is like when you talk about, well, can we...
Could Burning Man turn into a civilization?
I don't know.
Probably not.
Like you know who...
Well, I won't say who it is, but one of my friends was out there and he works out there.
And I'm like, not high on psychedelics, but I'm looking around and I know he's been going there for a long time.
And I'm like, could this become society?
And he's like, no.
He's like, if these people were out here for more than four weeks, they'd start killing each other.
I tried to explain this to someone who was saying that it was a stupid thing to do.
I was like, you have to think of...
They were saying that they're going to expect it Every time a rich person goes there, they're going to expect larger tips, and it's really not proportionate to the service they've given you.
But you make someone happy.
You make someone happy, and you don't feel the difference.
The difference between you leaving one number on a check for a tip, and they go, oh, that was a good tip, or another one, and they go, holy shit, now they feel really good, like they just got a gift.
It's one of the rare things that we have in our culture where you could express gratitude in a numerical amount.
I mean, I'm not saying that's the only way to express gratitude because, of course, there's a way to express it with your words and your love and all that good stuff, but you can express gratitude in a tip form where there's a number you can attach to it.
If the bill is 50 bucks and you leave 50 bucks, people go, holy shit!
To a lot of people, the difference between $100 in your bank and $50 in your bank, you're probably not going to feel that.
It's like, when you drop these love bombs off, this is not a one-sided thing.
You're walking away feeling really good, because you know what?
You just did.
You impacted a person's week.
This person might not have money to get their kids fucking groceries that week, man.
Now they do.
They might not have been able to make rent.
Now they can.
You're walking away having created that shift in a person's universe.
As temporary as it may be, it's still a shift in the direction of the positive, right?
So what you've done there, as far as I'm concerned, is a kind of magical act, a kind of miracle.
And anyone can do this, man.
Dude, there were people who would go around with spray bottles and just spray your sunglasses off for you, which out in the desert is really important because all the sand gets caught in there and you can't fucking see.
That's what they had to give.
It was just helping you in that way, but just that was still fucking cool, man.
There is definitely something you can do that you're not doing, and you're not doing it not because you're selfish, you're not doing it just because you haven't even realized you can do it.
It's like having a superpower that you're not aware of, which is like, fuck, just give something away.
You know, I just had this conversation with Chris Ryan on my podcast.
We've got to do a shrimp parade soon.
And he said that he was talking about post, you know, after disasters.
Everybody gives to each other and people are very kind.
So if there was some kind of economic collapse, some calamity or something, then I think what people would suddenly realize is like what would happen is the pendulum that swings in front of the eyes of the sum total of all people in this country and convinces us of the importance of this small group of Secretive people.
Maybe for a second that thing stops swinging and we like look away from it and look at each other and we realize like, oh shit, we've got each other.
We're gonna be okay.
The fantasy of the fucking people like Grab your guns!
Go rob the rich people!
All that stuff.
The idea that it's gonna be some kind of like the LA riots times a million.
You're always like, oh no, that's not what it's like at all.
Actually, they do have a full hospital at Burning Man.
I didn't go visit it, but they say they have an urgent care medical facility there that's really nice, and they fucking need it, too, because you think I'm a fucking super hippie, man.
But no, that's the Zendo project that MAPS is doing.
So one of the cool things that Doblin is doing is they have a thing called Zendo, which is, it's called Psychedelic Harm Reduction.
And so they create, like in the Port of Johns at Burning Man, there are these signs that they put up that say...
Night a little weirder than you expected.
Come here.
And so you go to this place and it's like, dude, you gotta have this guy on your podcast.
His name's Dr. Cole Marta.
He's a psychiatrist.
He's like one of the people involved in the MDMA for PTSD Experiments that they're doing there in the phase three of the clinical trials maps is but so he will volunteers at the Zendo, but basically what happens is it's the safe space that Doblin's created Where you go there if you're freaking out and you're like am I gonna get fucking arrested?
I And they're like, no, man.
Just sit down and relax.
And these are trained.
This guy, Cole Marta, man, they're smart, trained clinicians.
And if they're not clinicians, they're people who have been through this program who just sit with you and let you freak out without judging you and just sit with you and let you relax until you're having an okay time again.
And then they let you go back.
So instead of losing your shit and getting arrested or losing your shit and being around your friends who are like, what the fuck's wrong with you, man?
You get to be around really smart, trained people who know how to not just Help you relax, but help you use this event to like transform your life.
Because a lot of times a bad trip is like a transformative moment for someone if they're around the right people.
When you look at the, how much, he spent his entire life, like, you know, we sit here, And we fucking rail against the system and ah marijuana and like ah!
But Doblin, man, he's like on the front lines.
Like this guy is like deeply, deeply involved in this.
Like he was detailing, like getting it passed and what was going to be entailed and getting this therapy through and then what would be next and how it's a long term thing they're doing over long, many, many years.
He gave like he gave a talk at Burning Man that was just like when you like he's just detailing the like the war on drugs and like why it's happened and what it is and then like his step by step plan.
And then you realize like this guy is in phase three, phase three of clinical trials, which never happens like with a schedule one substance that theoretically could like.
The results that they're getting are very good, but if...
People who have PTSD, if they go to the doctor, the doctor will be like, well, I'll prescribe Xanax, and maybe they'll give you cognitive behavior therapy or something.
But the idea that there might be a way to give someone...
MDMA. MDMA mixed in with a specific type of therapy, and that that could actually...
Apparently it's something to do with short-term, long-term memory.
So when you have a traumatic event, it gets stuck in short-term memory.
Somehow it's looping there.
It's not getting filed away in the right way.
God forgive me, everyone listening, Doblin, Colmar, whoever I'm ruining this in front of.
But apparently something about...
Revisiting the experience under the influence of MDMA causes it to somehow be refiled in the right part of your brain again, so it's not sticking out in the forefront of your experiences.
So it's not like the thing isn't always there like a flashbulb light or something.
I mean, that's almost to me as infuriating as Teenagers getting hooked on flat earth videos.
It's more infuriating even that this has always been there.
This has always been there.
This has always been there and they made it illegal and all these people that suffered could have could have gotten relief through this a long time ago.
If they just recognized this early on and been super objective about it, look, we clearly have an issue with PTSD and soldiers and policemen and people that have gone through domestic abuse.
There's a lot of people with PTSD. This can literally change the course of our nation.
But to keep up the fucking DEA's corrupt system, to keep up this nasty business of arresting people for the wrong kind of drugs while they're selling drugs everywhere you look, to keep up that system, they literally stopped something that would have helped everybody.
Right, but they would just have to ramp it up based on how many people buy tickets.
As long as you just keep having tickets, then you'll have more money to spend on more hospitals, and you would just sort of plan it accordingly.
But maybe they're trying to slowly develop it, where they don't want it to get completely chaotic and out of control, which is what it definitely would do if they had no restrictions whatsoever.
Duncan, while you were urinating, we were talking about the restrictions on the population at Burning Man, and I found that to be a little bit odd.
Makes sense that they're selling tickets to it, because we found out how much it cost for the hospital.
Burning Man was once a scrappy little desert gathering.
It's become a multifaceted professional operation.
Today, the Burning Man Project produces the nation's largest permanent event on public land and supports an extensive global network of events, artists, and civic initiatives.
So what they do after the festival, they will go from camp to camp looking for where the trash is, and if they find any trash, if someone's, let's say, broken a bottle or something, right?
They will bring like a team of 11 people in to sift through the sand to get every single bit of glass out of the fucking sand so that it goes back to being just what it was before.
When people give up the ideas that have sort of imprisoned each generation about keeping up with the Joneses and about belonging to the right country club and about all the things that people strive for.
Moving up the corporate ladder, you know, all that stuff.
And clinking glasses, like you're in a fucking Leonardo DiCaprio movie before it takes a turn for the worst.
And, like, you know, we're learning a lot of stuff.
And part of, I think, hopefully what we're learning is that...
Certain things cannot be commodified that there's no way to really put a price on certain things and You know a lot of people there it's not like they're against money or against people making money or anything like that ideas is like Make money spend the whole year making money, but then let's fucking ignite it in the form of your Amazing sculpture that you brought out into the desert.
The other cool thing is dude when you're looking at these sculptures and You don't see, like, a plaque that's like, this was made by Tim French!
So, like, you're out there and it's like, you're standing underneath some alchemical, like, spherical laser globe that's spinning in a way that the lights make it look like the ground you're standing on is, like, rotating and shifting.
Who made that?
Why did they make that?
How did they get it out in the desert?
How are they fueling this?
What the fuck is this?
There's Tesla coils everywhere out there.
Tesla coils sparking in the fucking middle of the desert.
Someone got a Tesla coil out to burn it.
When you consider getting a Tesla coil into the middle of the fucking desert and then setting it up so it works, I think they have videos of it if you look it up.
Oh, dude, when these dust storms kick up, it's the most beautiful, insane thing.
It's just all of a sudden out of the blue, everything goes from being completely clear to just being completely obscured with this very fine dust, which is why everyone's got LED lights on, because the lights glow through the dust so that you don't run into somebody.
I think that originally the idea was the cacophonists had this idea of what's called the zone trip, which is that if you take a group of people and bring them out of their natural habitat, then something kind of magical happens.
And so there's a story of how the first time they went out there, they drew like a line in the sand and they were like, everything After this line is the zone and like that's when that was the first Burning Man is it just was like they just picked a desolate place so they wouldn't get bothered by people because what was happening is I can't remember his name.
I think it's Larry.
Will you look up Larry, Burning Man Larry?
I can't remember his last name, really.
What?
Larry Harvey.
So what was happening is Larry Harvey was going to the beach.
He went to the beach and they just burnt this like effigy of a man, right?
They just ignited this effigy at the beach and Larry Harvey Won't say why they did it.
It's really cool.
Everybody wants to know, like, well, what was the reason behind it?
So, like, they just went and burnt this effigy out there, and then they were doing it, like, I think a few years in a row, and it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and then somehow the Cacophony Society got involved, because it got so big one year, the cops wouldn't let them burn it, and so then they were, like, they ended up scheduling a cacophonist event, I've got the flyer on my phone.
It's like the Burning of the Man in the Black Rock Desert.
And so they redid that event and took the Burning Man out there.
That was the first Burning Man.
And then they started doing it every year, just like they were doing it at the beach in San Francisco.
But it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then it became like a...
It was a cacophonist event, basically, that spun out of control.
And now it's turned into this...
I think what is one of the largest festivals on earth.
Yeah, because it's like, the problem is, like, there's, like, you could be a little too inclusive there, and so you end up, like...
Part of what's cool about that thing is, like...
This is the thing I saw in an interview with Larry Harvey.
He's like, this is a survival situation, right?
So it's tough.
It's not easy all the way through.
You gotta get out there in a fucking RV. We drove an RV out there, man.
Not that that's hard or anything, but it's like, when you're driving an RV... Out of Burning Man.
It's not easy because it's an eight-hour line to get out of Burning Man in the morning in your RV. You're sitting in a fucking RV for eight hours in this massive line of people who are being pulsed out of Burning Man because there's only one road out.
Like, it's like part of it's really fucking hard and like really tries you for real.
Like, it's like you're going to get, you know, it's not easy.
So some people...
I think that they're people who are subverting the experience a little bit by flying in on a private jet and then being brought to a place that's already been built for them, where they get to hang out.
And then that place is like, theoretically, it's not so easy for people to get in there.
Even though White Ocean, one of the things they said was like, well, we're giving food to people.
There's an embarrassing post one of the guys from White Ocean put up, like, what you did to us?
And it was like a guy who clearly didn't get the whole point of the thing, which is like...
Eventually, after a bunch of people walking around naked for a week, you stop seeing naked people.
And one of the people in my camp, it could be a lie, they say they have something called Acceptable Boner Tuesday, where guys will take fucking Cialis and just walk around with fucking boners.
It's crazy, dude.
I got my own ideas of it, but there isn't one idea about it, man.
I gotta tell you, man, most of the cops I saw, they seem to be having really funny conversations with people at Burning Man who are just talking to them.
Some of them are, you know, there are arrests, but from what I saw, it's not like, I think for a cop, after being at Burning Man for three days, I think their perspective starts changing maybe a little bit because they're in this weirdness just like everybody else.
I don't know.
Maybe that's naive to say.
There's undercover cops there and people from my camp said one of the things that people do is they'll go to where there's like a party.
But like one of the things they do is they'll go to like...
With Monopoly money, with like fake money and fake plastic bags and do fake drug deals so that suddenly the undercover cops will come out and then they'll follow the undercover cops, you know, because it draws them out.