Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell explore Egypt’s timeline, questioning mainstream dating of the Sphinx (2,500 BC) against Schock’s 9,000–10,500-year-old claims, mocked by academia. They joke about flat Earth absurdity while debating DMT’s potential alien or interdimensional links to human consciousness, critiquing fundamentalist Christianity’s suppression of natural bodily acceptance. Rogan dismisses moon landing conspiracies but notes unsettling gaps like missing footage and Armstrong’s later cryptic remarks, while Trussell ties Operation Paperclip’s Nazi scientists to corporate infiltration. They condemn modern ideological tribalism—left-wing violence advocacy and "Liberal Baptist" dogmatism—urging kindness and self-awareness over rigid labels, framing suffering as a path to growth rather than division. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, but he was so important to me, I would have fucking taken a raven note.
You know, I mean, he just...
If you've never seen the DVD series Magical Egypt, it's truly an amazing piece of work.
It's, I think, six DVDs all about the history of Egypt and the immense complexity of the structures that are built there.
The appreciation this guy had for what the Egyptians did was just off the charts.
He was just...
It's so deeply engaged with it.
It was such a giant part of his life and The passion and the curiosity that he had in the knowledge that he had in these DVDs Would come through and you would just be like holding your face watching him going.
Oh my god.
These are amazing just up what a crazy time in human history this weird blip in the middle of North Africa, where these people just went way past everybody else!
He is, and, you know, John Anthony West got vindicated as well by Robert Schock, who's a geologist from Boston University.
He went to Egypt and he studied the enclosure that the Sphinx was in, and he's the guy that determined that you were looking at fissures that were created by thousands of years of rainfall, which would push back, because what we know about what the climate was like in that area, apparently it pushes it back to somewhere around 9,000 years ago, which is crazy.
Because, look, however old it was, Sure.
everybody gets real weird about pushing the date back like when it happened.
There's no way it happened 30,000 years ago.
It definitely happened 2,500 BC.
Maybe.
Maybe.
But even if it did, let's just say it all was, it just came out of nowhere somewhere around that era.
Because they've been teaching one timeline for a long time.
They don't want to admit that they were wrong.
If somebody publishes a book about the timeline and just definitively says, we know now that Egypt was a hunter-gatherer culture that somewhere around 3000 BC erupted into this incredible civilization.
I am all for responsible people being able to own guns, but I'm also completely in agreement with people that say that there's too many people out there committing crimes with guns.
So you've been, remember the old, like how you used to be at the banks?
With the suction tubes where you take the tube and your mom puts the check in and it gets sucked in.
I'm going to do that with fucking buses under the city.
What do you think?
Write the check!
They're not going to let you do it.
But the thing where it connects to guns is it's like We're looking at the very, very, very beginning of private individuals having access to technology that normally was in the hands of the state or governments, and this is the very crazy beginning of it.
I didn't know he was shooting it at Mars.
For some reason, I thought that fucking thing was going to rotate around the Earth, which made me worry that we're going to end up with a ring of billionaire cars.
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Because it would be like the coolest thing for billionaires to do.
Hit the ice wall, but over the fucking ice wall, now we're in the land of the greys, you know?
I'm no longer trapped.
I'm not, it's like, it's a freeing feeling because like, even though it's not like I travel enough to feel stuck in fucking California, which is an insane thing, there's a little piece of us that knows we're never going to go into space.
We're never going to get past, we're never going to, how do you get off the map?
You know what I mean?
Like, there's something in a human that wants to get off the fucking map, where you end up in a place that hasn't been charted yet.
And that's an experience that's gone, basically.
I mean, I imagine swaths of the Amazon, perhaps, or someplace deep, deep in the Arctic, maybe in a cave or something.
But it used to be people just didn't fucking know.
You could go off the map, and you had no idea.
And I think that must have been the biggest rush, to be on a ship, And looking at the maps that you guys have, and you're like, fuck, dude.
Like, the Flat Earth one is my favorite one, because...
Could you imagine if they were right?
Imagine if the whole planet thought the world was round.
And there's all this information that shows the world is round.
Thousands of years ago, people were doing calculations or sticking sticks into the ground at equal distance and measuring them and trying to see if there's curvature.
There's always been people that suspected the Earth was round way before they could ever figure it out.
unidentified
They were trying to say, well, the moon is round, the sun is round, this is round, huh, probably this is round.
So now you get to live in maybe a not very happy world, but an exciting world because you're seeing vans, you're seeing fucking...
By the way, this is not to say...
That there isn't some massive, huge, unknown swath of reality that's sitting right in front of us at all times that's actively being hidden by the United States government and the military who has the technology that they finally detected the thing and they don't want us to know because they know if we know, who the fuck knows what the reason is?
Stop getting the check they're like you can't like we will tell you but you can't you can't completely reveal this seems like one of the videos that would play before you like were first loading up Half-Life 10 This is a new new Half-Life the government's hiding a dimension.
I always assume, and this is Captain Skeptical over here, I always assume if the government is ever saying that there's UFOs or something really crazy like that, it's to hide some shit they're doing in like Guatemala.
It's like they don't want anybody to be paying attention to something weird they're doing.
And there are people out there who say they have answers to why.
This idea is there's a gradual dissemination of information that's happening because they're priming the pump.
And then it splits into two versions.
One of the versions of the stories is Fuck!
If you want to dominate a planet, get them kind of like subconsciously, subliminally primed for the idea that, you know, I think there's some really advanced technology out there and there's aliens riding around in it and we've made contact.
We've made contact with, they call themselves the Galactic Council of Celestial Elders, and they've been making contact with us for the last 50 years, and they've been instructing us in how to not only reveal themselves to you, but to To let the technology come out in a way that's not going to be completely catastrophic for our society.
They're peace-loving, wonderful beings, but we've decided to follow their instructions to the T, and so now they're ready to introduce themselves.
And then suddenly an alien is on TV. Suddenly, the government is using a completely made-up thing to try to dominate the planet by saying, no, it's aliens.
We found them.
When, in fact, it's Project Blue Beam, right?
That's one of the ideas.
The other idea is, all that shit's true.
There's a thing that happens when a planet reaches a certain level of technological sophistication that it gets contacted by some kind of Order, council, federation of sentient technological Civilizations and they sort of begin to like walk the planet through phases of getting that shit out into the world in a way that isn't going to fuck up their planet and they know how to do it.
They have a system in place.
They don't come from the stars.
They're not something detectable by telescopes.
They're like in the DMT realm or they're like existing in some alternate dimension and technology is just one of the things that they use to communicate with us.
I've been toying around with this idea for a long time, most of the time when I'm really high, that ideas are a life form.
It's not as simple as your creativity putting together some pieces that weren't there before.
I think it's that, but I think it's also you're tuning into something.
You're tuning into some weird, like some of the ideas almost seem to write themselves, and it could be because of the subconscious process of your mind, but it also could be because that these, what ideas are, and what just the concept of thinking is, it's essentially the seeds of creation, right?
Everything that's ever existed on earth that humans have invented and built came from a mind.
It came from thinking.
How do I put together this house?
How do I put together this skyscraper?
How do I make a plane?
How do I make a TV? How do I make a this?
How do I make a that?
Like we're vessels for ideas.
We're like sitting there with all these neurons firing and electricity going left and right and all these areas of our brains lighting up.
Well, it's kind of like, imagine if there was a technology that could, like we send out these signals into space, satellites with fucking records in them, but perhaps other civilizations are blasting the planet with ideas, That are designed to be picked up by the scope of the human mind.
Yeah.
And so what you're doing is you're actually, like, popping into an alien frequency, which is filled with all these various ideas that are part of the cultivation of a planet to, like, try to get it to the point of, like, being able to make contact.
And they're just seeding us with...
I mean, fuck!
When you read, like, John Lilly and...
Read about Tesla and read about a lot of the great inventions that have happened.
The people who had the epiphanous moment, it wasn't like they were scrunching their fucking forehead.
It was like the idea came to them in a vision.
How many times do you hear over and over again, it came to me in a vision, a dream?
I believe it was like he was on a military campaign in the army or something along those lines.
And he signed up for adventure to go off into the military.
And during that time period he had a dream that something about to be able to harness nature, it would be done in weights and measurements.
I forget exactly the term.
See if you can find the term That was essentially what people say, this is really, when you talk about the very birth of, like, the earliest you could trace back the idea of modern science, like the ethics and the ideas, the concepts of modern science, came from a dream.
It goes, I mean, before Descartes, we're dealing with, like, it gets really interesting, because you're dealing with the alchemists, like John Dee, who were...
uh the enochian tablets or like the enochian angels basically john d was like an alchemist who was working with queen elizabeth to try to turn lead into gold which was a you know a big pursuit back then which is like if we could turn if we can transmute metals into gold it's like i mean yeah they all tried to do that right was that when they first started recognizing elements like when did they first start recognizing elements Probably that.
It must be through alchemy, because they're trying to break things down to their fundamental components.
Only we're not trying to turn lead into gold, we're trying to turn lead into a thinking machine.
That's what we're doing now.
Because better than turning matter into gold, if you can turn matter into a fucking thing that is thinking and sentient, then it can figure out how to turn lead into gold by its advanced ability to process data.
June 8th, 1637, Descartes codifies scientific method.
Wow, interesting.
He outlines his rules for understanding the natural world through reason and skepticism, forming the foundation of the scientific method still in use today.
There's a term that he had that he came up with like in a dream.
See if you can find that because there was like a phrase that he said, obviously translated from French.
Why does, like, Thailand and places that are Buddhist places generally, I mean, obviously there's violence everywhere, but generally more of a peaceful vibe, right?
Like Buddhist nations and Buddhist countries, a little bit more, obviously, flaws with everything.
I don't understand why that way of thinking emerged in the East and that connection with the self emerged in the East versus what happened in the West, which was basically decimation of a previous religion, paganism, whatever you want to call it, earth-based religion, connection with life and nature.
I'm sure we've talked about this in the podcast, but it's something I marvel over all the time.
I think about it a lot, which is the Catholic Mass.
When you look at the Catholic Mass, And you look at the New Testament, the Last Supper, and you look at, you realize like in the fucking Synoptic Gospels, in any of the Gospels, There's nowhere that Jesus is saying, what you do is take a piece of bread and utter these prayers over it to create my flesh that then you eat.
It's not there.
The ritual isn't there.
But the interpretation of that has turned into what is called high magic.
It's a ceremonial magic where you're transforming Bread into the flesh of a sacrificed God.
And people do that every fucking Sunday.
And they're like, this is totally normal.
Magic?
What are you talking about?
I'm not into fucking magic.
What I do is I eat the flesh of a God.
That was sacrificed by a Father God so that my sins could be purified.
Well, I mean, they said, yeah, they said, you know, this is the flesh of God.
Eat this and you'll remember who you truly are.
And they gave you the psychedelic and you took it and you merged back into the divine and realized your true identity.
So that for the rest of the week you were able to hang out with people and not be a complete asshole because you know you share the same soul and that you're basically made of love as opposed to thinking that you and I are separate and that we're mostly sinful evil things whose flesh is impure.
I mean that's another fucking sweet gift that came from Fundamentalist Christianity is the concept that our bodies are evil.
We can't be naked around each other even now.
You can't take your clothes off around people without seeming completely insane.
If you go outside in your fundamental body that you were born into the universe with, you will get arrested.
Like, you can't walk around as you are.
You have to cover it in clothes, or you're considered to be a fucking pervert nudist.
It doesn't bother you, because in the bathroom it's okay for a moment to profane the world with your fucking dick.
So it's like, that's the, when you start really looking at all the traces of not just pagan culture, but just insanity from a fundamentalist perspective of the universe that has its roots in what appears to be a misunderstanding of a really beautiful story, then it's like, mind-boggling.
Yeah, not just a misunderstanding, but probably a conscious misrepresentation of the original story that's molded to suit whoever's needs is in charge at the moment.
Unless you're going to say that Jesus transmitted the data after his death into some kind of mystic or seer who had the vision of this.
Now, I'm not knocking the fucking Catholic Mass.
I think it's beautiful, but let's just admit what it is.
Magic.
It's ritual magic.
You're doing ritual magic and you're doing something that's been going on for a very long time, probably before 1079. That dude wasn't just like sitting around and like, hey, I got an idea.
Let's start saying prayer over the bread and the bread's going to turn into flesh.
It was more like, hey, you know, we've been meeting, doing these rituals secretly.
Why don't we just incorporate the story of Christianity into this ritual that we've been doing for a very long time to sort of Purify ourselves by connecting to the universe and acknowledging the fact that existence itself is predicated on devouring the flesh of some other being.
Not, you know, like we're always in the process of inhaling the universe, exhaling the universe, eating each other.
The universe is eating itself, and so the Mass is this ritualized version of like, behold, we're eating the flesh of God in everything we do, and there's something really beautiful about that.
Even the various factions of people on the left and the right and people that are animal rights activists versus people that are butchers.
You're all eating something that's alive.
I mean, you can make the distinction that the plants aren't suffering like the animals do, and that's why it's okay.
I agree with you for the most part.
It's probably a less extreme form of suffering, but it also might just be a completely misunderstood life form.
They're finding out so much about plant communication, and I've read so many things about that I hesitate to talk about it because I really want to have all my T's sliced and, you know, I's dotted because it's such a complex issue, but it appears that they communicate.
It appears that there's almost like that they're using the soil and the fungus in the soil and the mycelium.
They all have this weird ecosystem.
It's not just like one plant by itself in the dirt.
This guy gave me this thing called a midi sprout, which is...
It picks up, I guess, the bioelectricity of plants, or anything for that matter, but plants, I've got it.
You stick it on your plant, and it goes into, like, whatever your music system is, and it translates it into MIDI, so you can turn the electricity of your plant into music.
Well, it's the electricity of the tree being translated into MIDI, which is then being translated into sound.
So it's a way to convert the data into music.
It's like you're converting the bioelectricity into...
It's not like that's the sound of a plant.
It's not making celestial noises.
That's just sending energy and creating MIDI, which is then being translated into the sound.
So it's a way to observe the data.
Instead of looking at it, I guess, on an oscilloscope or whatever you would look at that with, It's turning into audio so you can hear the pulsating kind of like rhythmic flow.
I love the, in different psychedelic states, I love how you witness how your consciousness is forming your reality in the most extreme way.
Not as though, like, you're producing matter with your thoughts or anything like that, but you can watch this undulation or this flow going from when you're getting negative and dark.
And it's interesting how different psychedelics portray this phenomena, but so like on acid, I might see, depending if I'm taking a high enough dose, you start seeing the faces and the stucco of your ceiling, you know?
And it's like, when you start getting really depressive or scared, then the faces start doing like, whoa!
Like hissing at you and they sink in and they, or even when you're looking at yourself in the mirror, similar things happens as you're just watching the way that your projection that's coming from the incessant flow of thoughts in your mind is reflecting on the reality itself.
And it's a constant like shifting of light that sometimes is like looking into the Deepest layers of hell, but then sometimes you see the most beautiful, sweet, incredible things because you're not being freaked out by the flow of thoughts in your mind.
That's the number one trick, you know?
This is why now in my old age, I really do understand why a good practice, meditation, chanting, whatever it may be, pairs so nicely with psychedelics.
Because if you have one without the other, well, you're missing out.
But also, you can really, like...
Go into some pretty terrifying places that don't resolve in the way that they could, potentially, if you are doing the work, putting in the time before you take the psychedelic, you know?
Not to sound like an old fucking guy, like, ah, you gotta get, you know, meditate and then take, but it does help a lot.
Well, there's a weird way that we want to dismiss it because it seems almost like a pompous thing to ever say you meditate or you encourage people to meditate.
It's the same as I always have a cringy thing when I tell people to do yoga.
Like, oh my God, am I going to say this again?
But I really mean it.
I feel like yoga is one of the very best things that will pair with cannabis use and with psychedelics.
Well this is, what you just said, exactly applies to meditation.
And also, you're fucking right.
The problem with even talking about it is you sound virtue signally and pompous, but when you hear Ram Dass talk about meditation, he will say, meditate when you want to meditate.
If it seems like something that appeals to you, give it a shot.
The definition of it itself, what's funny is when you think about meditation, your mind will summon up something that you think meditation looks like.
So you think, ah, it means like sitting down on a cushion with some fucking candles, or it means like whatever it is that your mind summons up.
And usually it's pretty austere, and usually it's pretty, it requires like a temple or a space in your house, or it's insane.
There's a great book I'm reading by Pima Chodron called The Wisdom of No Escape.
And she talks about how...
When people start meditating, they think, I'm doing this because I want to be a better person.
And she said, that's actually an aggression against the self that you are right now.
To be like, yeah, that you're actually being aggressive to your own self.
She said, meditation is not so that we become a better person.
It's so that we're able to be who we are in the moment fully.
And to begin to experience fully what it is that's happening inside of us.
Because for a lot of people, what's going down is that there is a...
Dude, this reminds me, I just watched the Texas fucking Chainsaw Massacre.
It's probably like the 16th time I've seen it but like I watched it and like man I had a very strong mint tea and like I was watching it and was like oh my god this is fucking unbearable like I can't deal with it I'm gonna go crazy watching this fucking thing like the woman who by the end is all bug-eyed and covered in blood and like she's lost her mind because these Texas fucking cannibals have like driven her insane I'm feeling like that but then I realized like oh my god That
woman running from Leatherface and the whole family, freaking out and screaming, how many people are secretly that woman inside of themselves constantly running in terror from parts of themselves that they can't deal with or acknowledge or look at?
So meditation is kind of like going into yourself To that creepy ranch house in the middle of nowhere in your heart and then exploring the places that you don't want to go into.
You know what, man?
It's feeling them.
Instead of cleaning or fixing or repairing, it's going in there and feeling the whatever it is.
For a lot of people, it's just grief.
pain sorrow regret regret you know and it's going in there not being like i'm gonna fix what i fucked up seven years ago because this is not time travel but what i'm gonna do is for 10 minutes five minutes i'm gonna let myself feel this thing that i've been trying not to feel by distracting myself with an incessant flow of thoughts right and that that That is when you start lightening up a little bit because really all
It's funny that you bring up Mr. Rogers, because here's one of the things that I was going to say when we were talking about gun control and violence and all the different issues in this world.
One thing that we don't concentrate on Is promoting being nicer.
No government official does that.
Presidents don't do that.
They don't get on TV. They sort of say it.
We need to work together.
But they don't ever say, folks, we just got to figure out how to be nice to each other.
We're not in conflict anymore, but we're designed for conflict.
And here's how you get rid of that.
Get a fucking heavy bag, go run hills, go to yoga class, eat better, stop drinking so much coffee or alcohol or sugar, whatever your vice is that's fucking with your body.
Get your body in order and get your mind in order and just be nicer to each other.
That would fix...
Almost everything.
If people just overall decided, you know what, male, female, whatever the fuck, whoever you're talking to, let's just be nicer to each other.
Like, there's no government officials, there's no big State of the Union address and go, ladies and gentlemen, our problems that we have with each other are ridiculous.
I've been hearing all this shit about how badass Berlin is, man.
That it's just, like, crazy over there.
And that this one club my friend was telling me she went to, everyone stands in line.
There's no VIPs.
Everyone stands in line.
Like part of the experience of the thing is you stand in line for like a long time and there's one bouncer.
He's giant.
He's like this giant scary German guy.
I think he's got like a glass eye or something.
And he scans you.
So you stand in front of him, and he looks at you and like does some kind of soul scan, and if he decides you're ready to experience the psychic effects of witnessing dudes sliding through cum, Because it's not as though he's trying to keep it cool in there, but he's also trying to keep people from losing their minds.
Because the one wrong person goes into the sub-basement and sees a bunch of people huffing Tupperware shit and sliding through jizz.
That could push you over the line.
That could lead you straight to fucking mail bomb land.
You could just end up in a cabin Building devices of destruction.
If you took any of the people from the Trumpy Bear commercial and put them in that gay club while those guys are smelling each other's shit and Tupperwares and jizzing on the floor and pissing on each other, if they just wandered into there accidentally...
They've made a comedy sketch that's comedy for people like...
Anybody who's paying attention, but for people so dumb that they don't realize it's a comedy sketch, and they think the way the people in the video think, it's like a honeypot for dum-dums.
Yeah, it's brilliant, because on one level it's like a really funny sketch, on the other level it's just like, people are like, God damn, I've always wanted a Trumpy bear.
We make really shitty predictions whenever I come on your show about what's going to happen usually, but what do you think is going to happen with Mueller and Trump?
I'm fascinated by his disdain for the intelligence community.
The intelligence community.
That, to me, seems to be one of the craziest things a president's ever done, is literally have beef with the FBI to the point where the FBI foils a terrorist attack in San Francisco, and the president doesn't even mention it on TV, doesn't praise them, doesn't make a big deal about how good our government is, that we've been able to stop these terrorists, and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to build this wall in the first place and tighten up illegal immigration.
I wish we had a perfect relationship with all the other nations and everybody just decided to work together for the survival of the species as a whole.
And we weren't so concentrating on owning resources, taking over governments, and controlling parts of the world that have, you know, things that we're trying to steal or get or buy.
But it is.
So as long as it is, you're going to need the FBI, you're going to need intelligence community, you're going to need the Army, you're going to need the Navy, you're going to need the Marines, you're going to need the Air Force.
You can only feel love for one person at a time, and you're definitely not going to put that general cock in anyone else but Lydia Petraeus, your wife.
Like, you know, people that think that there's some grand scheme to protect people and protect generals.
Dude, there's video of him when he was walking from City College in New York where he was teaching, and he'd have to walk down the street to where he was going, and the students were surrounding him, screaming at him, calling him a war criminal.
This is a fascinating one if you really want to fire up your conspiracy theory hat.
You really want to turn that bitch to nine.
Yeah, I do.
Yeah.
Michael Hastings was a journalist who was embedded, I believe it was in Iraq, it might have been in Afghanistan, but he was embedded in the Middle East somewhere and something happened.
Oh, that volcano erupted.
Remember when that volcano erupted and they canceled all air flight?
For a long time.
He was trapped over there with that, and they got way too comfortable with him.
And so they started talking around this journalist the way they always talk.
And he was joking around about Obama and making fun of Obama.
And they said a bunch of shit they probably shouldn't have said.
But that's just what fucking soldiers say when they're over there risking their goddamn lives for something they probably don't even understand.
You would want them to believe this is all for a good cause.
You would want them to believe everything that their general tells them, and if they gotta fucking crack some jokes at the president's expense to alleviate a little stress while we're out there killing strangers, no.
Intolerable.
INTOLERABLE! You were mocking the leader of the free world while you're out there killing strangers?
You can't do that.
So they made this guy resign.
So here's where it gets crazy.
Michael Hastings starts telling everybody, look, my life is in danger.
He's like, people are threatening my life on a daily basis.
If anything happens to me, I did not commit suicide.
Cut to him driving down, I think it was sunset, car going uncontrollably fast, slamming into a tree, the car exploding, the engine flying from the car.
He's dead as fuck.
They find amphetamines in his system, but that's Adderall, because that's what all journalists are on.
Meanwhile, there's people that have said with absolute certainty that with today's cars, it is incredibly possible Absolutely, credibly possible to control the car from a remote place and make the car do what you want to.
But we, I mean, this is, I love this line of this direction we're going in here, man.
Because you, it's great because it's like, this to me where it gets really, remember that thing that people would always say, the government is always, what is it, five years ahead, seven years ahead?
So, where it gets really interesting is when you start thinking about what that means in relation to computer intelligence and AI, and you start realizing, man, whatever the shit is that they have access to at this point,
Compared to what we think they have access to is so powerful, and so dangerous, that anybody who they want to take out, anybody they want to take out, they can take out.
That's a problem, having anybody to have that much power.
Especially over the rest of us.
It's bad for them.
You know, and Kennedy talked about this when he was in office.
He talked about secret societies.
And keeping secrets from people and that's just generally it's a bad idea across the board for humans It's just bad for our human nature and for groups to have ultimate power of surveillance who just look into your life It's I mean Edward Snowden proved it.
It's it's obviously it's too easy It's too easy for people that work there to check on their ex-girlfriends do you think there's secret societies out there that we're not really aware of?
I don't know if they, like, put you in a funeral garb or whatever, but my guess is, like, I mean, if it was me, I'd be like, you know, I prefer to be naked.
If you're gonna fucking splatter chisel over this fucking thing.
Like, Yeah, I know a guy who lives in one of those gated communities that has a golf course, and the golf course costs a quarter million dollars a year.
But that's, when you think about that, that there are these enclaves of wealth that are compounds surrounded by not just like financial walls, but literal walls with armed guards standing around the walls.
And inside these compounds, Our communities as a servant class, there are communities of servants that are having to serve these hyper-wealthy people.
That's a king and a queen.
It's a feudal compound that's being separated from the rest of the world.
Yeah, you start getting the real downloads about what's actually happening, because these little fucking compounds, all those people are connected to each other.
They send each other Christmas cards, and they go to each other's parties and stuff, and they talk, and they know stuff, man.
See, this is why I think it would be scary to be friends with a billionaire.
It would be scary to be friends with someone way up at the upper ups because you almost don't want that level of access.
It's almost like, Look, man, you guys fucking do whatever you're doing up in your compounds, drink from the Iron Skull, come on the fucking coffins, open the portals, pull out the squids.
If you could, if I could give you the gift of being able to travel through space, wherever you wanted to go, but you had a nub down there, your cock's gone.
No, I think you're going to, you're accidentally going to get access for some reason.
I think somebody's going to give you something or show you something and you're in like, I worry about you, man.
Because it's like, yeah, because you've got like, you now have A platform that is unlike any platform that's happened, you know, because you're doing like a comedy podcast, radio show style thing, but you're also interviewing people about really heavy-duty shit.
And sure, you like pepper it up with freaks like me from time to time.
If I have my all-time favorite group of people, if I had, like, a handful of 10 people to pick forever, just do podcasts with them forever, you are 100% on that list.
But dude, I'm telling you, knowing all this shit...
And there's so many times when we've done this podcast where you and I have started talking, and the hair stands up on my arm, and I'm like, dude, we shouldn't be talking about some of this shit.
It gives me the real heebie-jeebies.
And then sometimes, I'll admit this to you, sometimes when I'm super stunned, I'm thinking about all the podcasts we've done, sometimes I think to myself, fuck Maybe Joe does know something like maybe you did End up getting some kind of little like shoulder rub with them where they're like not literally your shoulder up you just brush shoulders and they were like Hey, we love your show.
We love your show man.
They didn't even say anything They just showed themselves to you a little bit to be like hey look don't fuck around man.
Don't fuck around like you could talk and You're funny.
But it was kind of, as the show progressed, we became increasingly sort of despondent upon realizing, because we're both so retarded that we thought maybe we were going to find an alien.
Well, it became very frustrating because you saw the same thing in everybody.
You saw this delusional belief in illogical things that they would argue illogically.
They weren't objective about the actual evidence versus what they wanted to perceive the evidence to point to.
They were all biased, which I've been biased before.
Everybody's been biased.
But it was just delusional.
Everyone was delusional.
Everyone.
From the first UFO guy to the first chemtrail guy.
To the first Bigfoot guy, they were all either liars or delusional or they had errors in their thinking.
And then occasionally we would talk to a guy like that one dude that we met that was in the trailer that told us about the balls that would fly through the air.
But this ball lightning is not only possible, it's been observed many, many times, and it's even happened inside of an airplane, where it floated down the aisle inside of an airplane, and multiple people witnessed it.
People have seen ball lightning, they've gotten video of ball lightning, and what it looks like is exactly what that guy was describing to us, that this thing came through his house and then just disappeared.
And I think that area, near that Skinwalker Ranch place in particular, is, for whatever causes that phenomenon, it happens more frequently in that area.
It's very possible.
Because there were a lot of people over there that saw some shit.
Do you ever do this game, this is a fun game, where you start thinking about who the smartest person on the planet must be, like the Continuum of Intelligence game, where you start thinking like, okay, I know I land somewhere on the Continuum of Intelligence, I know there's people that are probably not quite as smart as I am.
And I know there's people who are way fucking smarter than I am.
And then you start thinking to yourself, who are those people?
And what are they up to?
And then you start thinking, see this is what I'd think about if I were you.
Then you start thinking like, fuck man, I've got this podcast that lots of people listen to.
Has it ever happened where maybe some really intelligent person has manipulated me in an attempt to get me to disseminate some kind of information out into the world?
But it's fun to think, because it's like this, like, okay, like, let's imagine, for the sake of just fun, we've established they're these fucking billionaires, and they live in these compounds, and they, and we've also established that certainly people like Michael Hastings and other people, they get killed all the time.
With Occam's Razor, with these kinds of things, is just think, okay, I have $100,000, and I'm going to put bets in this awesome casino where the truth is revealed.
So, are you going to put the money down on him being assassinated?
Are you going to put the money down on him being on speed and driving into a tree after he said, if I commit suicide, it's not a suicide?
He was a guy that, when he was running for president, I was like, okay, well, this guy's clearly a very honorable person.
He's clearly a very honest person.
I mean, by all accounts.
Let's see what he does.
Let's see what he does.
Let's see what happens.
It's got to be better than just knowing you're being bullshitted.
So many of them are just so obviously bullshitting you that you're listening to these canned fucking speeches and you're like, goddammit, I don't resonate with you at all.
People have a real hard time with the idea of gay people raising kids.
They get real angry.
I just can't think that all gay people are the same.
Why would you not think that some gay people would be good at all kinds of things?
There's gonna be gay people that are great carpenters.
There's gonna be gay people just like straight people.
There's gonna be awesome ones, and there's gonna be ones that are fucked up.
The idea that they wouldn't be good parents.
Wouldn't you rather have two gay parents that loved you than a mother that's a fucking crackhead and a dad that's a piece of shit and beats you?
Two gay people that let you be yourself.
They're cool and conscientious.
They just happen to be homosexual.
They love each other.
They hug in front of you.
You realize we're all wrapped up in this bullshit of men and women should only be together.
Heterosexual people like ourselves.
We get weird when you think of someone who's homosexual.
Like, I'm fully in support of it, but if they started fucking right in front of me, I'd be like, hey, I gotta go.
Whereas, like, if Duncan started banging his girlfriend right in front of me, I'd be like, um...
You'd love it.
Do you want me to cheer you on?
Just watch.
Just watch.
Okay, don't look at me when you come, though.
That last time was weird.
Just, like, look over.
Make eye contact with me.
I've seen guys kiss in public, and part of me is happy for them.
Part of me is like, that's awesome, that they're so comfortable.
In 2018 now, it was 17 at the time, maybe even 16. I've seen it a couple of times.
One time I was driving, and I was going from the Comedy Store.
I took a right, and then I went down...
Is it Doheny?
Which street is it?
One of the streets that goes right to Santa Monica Boulevard, which is like...
Full rage gay central.
They're just dudes in the streets partying.
There's this big gay club with guys on poles and shit.
And there's these two dudes.
And they were hanging out.
And they were belt looping.
Where, like, they each had their hands on the other's belt loops, like, anchoring in, and they were just grinding on each other and kissing, and I was just, I was in my car, I was like, oh, Jesus!
Jesus, keep moving!
Don't stop here!
I was, like, terrified, I was like, the car was stopped, and they were right there, like, belt looping and making out.
Well, I think if we did an experiment where we both took a journey like that, where I'll see you, we'll be just like we are now, but it would be 100,000 years of whatever you want later, okay?
We'll show up 100,000 years from now, you'll have dick on your breath, and I won't.
I would have gone through the whole hundred thousand years with no gay sex, because I could do whatever I want.
Why would I fuck dudes?
I would have sex with girls, and then when I was done having sex with girls, I would take a nap or I'd do some other shit.
Meanwhile, you'd be like, I gotta stick it somewhere, man!
I will fully admit that at the end of the 100,000 years, I've sucked dicks in the sex simulator, but the fact that you think you haven't, I would like to do a poll.
He does this great thought experiment, which is like, okay, if you were able to do anything you wanted, you've definitely heard this.
But if you were able to do anything you wanted, if you were an infinite being, omnipotent, and you could do whatever you want, You would experiment with making everything, and you would try everything, and you would do everything.
We're talking about infinity.
You're literally in this state of creative flow for infinity.
And he has a great lecture that I'm going to butcher.
You should look it up, because he's such an articulate genius.
But the essence of the thing is, eventually, Eventually.
Upon doing everything and creating a universe and creating planets and creating a planet where there's life on it and being a God that communicates with the beings on the planet, you're going to start thinking to yourself, I wonder what would happen if I made myself one of the beings on the planet and couldn't remember that I was God.
And that's what you are, that's what we are, is we are one of the experiments of the Divine seeing, shit, I wonder what happens if I forget that I'm capable of creating anything that I want whenever I want, that I've made the entire universe.
Let me turn myself into this hyper-limited version of myself with no memory of what I was and play that game at that level, because it's a lot more fun, it's amusing, it's exciting, right?
And that's when Alan Watts starts talking about Which cocks he would simulate inside that machine?
You could watch McLuhan talk, and he doesn't look anything like you'd expect.
It's really interesting.
His scientific dissection Of what's happening with media and what's happening with technology and where the future lies is so fascinating because it's from the 1960s.
And he's talking about the media is the message, I think is the name of the lecture in the book.
That was the same book where he wrote one of my all-time favorite quotes that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world Like this guy had no internet.
He had I mean nothing was like anything to the most electronics they had was a goddamn calculator Yeah, they had nothing the computers they had were giant rooms filled with shit, you know like yeah, but somehow or another he saw where it was all going He was seeing things And pointing things out just with the very nature of our ability to communicate and our ability to innovate and where it was all headed.
Where people can just find out the answer to, like we've done so far today, about scientific questions, about Descartes, and fucking periods that this was constructed, and when did this happen, and 1079, what?
You're getting a download unlike anybody that's ever lived.
This is the thing that's making the boundaries between us and the leaders of the world.
This is why there's such a problem.
It's because we have all the information too.
Everybody has all the information.
And the only thing that's keeping it all glued together is tradition.
The only thing that's keeping the hierarchies into the position of power they're at right now without being completely abandoned and restructured from the bottom up, the only thing that's keeping them together is tradition.
The only thing that's keeping government and just borders and nations and the whole concept that we're existing, that there are a bunch of different countries and there's a bunch of different leaders and this guy controls the truth.
The only thing that's keeping that together is tradition.
The only thing.
If we eventually can communicate with each other in a way that foregoes all of the current limitations and all the past limitations.
Something that bypasses all that stuff.
One of the first things that's going to go is the illogical traditions.
But that crazy fuck is saying it publicly like it's real and it's not.
And just the fact that, like, that man is allowed...
to continue having his job which theoretically somebody who's in his position should be so hyper aware of the data on all drugs because a person in that position we need a person just like you're saying we need shepherds like this fucking fentanyl shit man yes one of my friends he lost his his his wife to this so many people are dying because of this like we know a couple people that are dying from it It's terrible.
And if they're willing to abandon their previous notions.
But the problem is so many people are so invested in their identity that it's impossible for them to give up their notions.
Just like the Egyptologists that don't want to look at the possibility that maybe they've been doing these fantastic constructions in Egypt a lot longer than we think.
No one's doubting that the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed somewhere around 2500 BC, according to all the data that we have right now.
Because they've been able to carbon date stuff that they find in between the stones.
They're pretty sure that it's somewhere in that range.
They're off here or there a little bit.
But there's some other construction that...
John Anthony West pointed out that's buried under sand they find.
It might have been buried for who knows how fucking long.
And it's a different style of construction.
And it looks really old.
One of the things about the styles of construction and the things that they find in Egypt is a lot of it is buried in sand after a while.
Even the Sphinx itself.
You know, when they found the Sphinx...
And one of the things that...
One of the people that is in some of the ancient hieroglyphs, it's attributed to being alive at the same time as a scroll, I forget which pharaoh, but he heard in a dream that if he uncovered the Sphinx, that he would become pharaoh of Egypt, because it was covered in sand.
Like, he had written down at that time, and this was like 2000 BC or something crazy like that, it was covered in sand back then.
Beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert, scientists have discovered evidence of a prehistoric mega lake!
There's a monster down there!
Using images of windblown sediments, sediments produced by running water and bedrock seen by radar beneath the desert sands, the geologists pieced together the profile of an ancient mega lake.
Is that, not the problem with the moon, but if you jump on the moon, you can escape the escape, like it's easier to get out of the escape velocity of the moon?
But what they're doing is springing up, and you can see the kinetic energy from their legs that's forcing them up.
They're super athletes.
They show off.
Those guys do backflips and shit all the time.
They're physically capable of doing things that a normal person can't do, but they're not physically capable of defying physics.
What you're seeing in a lot of those moon videos looks like someone's defying physics.
They pitch forward and they bounce back up.
I think they shot a bunch of shit.
And I think some of the video, if you're going into space and you're experiencing deep radiation, the Van Allen radiation belts and from the sun.
Dude, you can't even go through the fucking x-ray machine at the airport.
The old x-ray machines with film.
They wouldn't let you.
Because if you went through with film, it would kill your fucking film.
So how are they getting these perfect videos and photos and none of them are fucked up by radiation?
It's entirely possible that they did go to the moon, but they faked a bunch of the film footage because they wanted to have something and they couldn't really bring anything back.
It's entirely possible.
There's faked footage from the Russians, 100%.
There's a precedent.
The footage of Yuri Gagarin when he's circling Earth for the first time and he goes in a rocket and the first guy in space...
I saw a few breakdowns of the moon landing, too, that said it would be way, way, way harder to fake it back then than it would have been to actually just do it.
And then you went through a phase because of the podcast and having a lot of conversations with different people or something happened where you started shifting your ideas and thinking we did go to the moon.
The moon landing is just an example that's an extreme example of a position I took that I think represents...
There is mystery to that story.
There's a lot of mystery to that story still to this day.
There's a bunch of weird shit connected to the moon landing.
A lot of it.
And people are like, no there's not!
Shut up!
No, there is.
There is.
There's a bunch of weird shit connected to it.
How about the fact that they gave a fucking moon rock to, what was it, the Prime Minister of Holland?
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins signed on this plaque and they gave this moon rock to this guy in Holland and it turned out to be petrified wood.
It was fake.
There's so much weird shit connected to the moon landing that it makes you go like, wow, the creepy speeches that Neil Armstrong gave 25 years after the moon landing, talking about uncovering hidden truths, truth-protective layers that are, you know, Ooh, great deeds that can be done to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers.
There's a photo of Michael Collins, who's on a moonwalk from, like, Gemini 15. And it's not a real photo.
It's a photo of him from the test runs that they did that's in a warehouse, and they blacked out all the background.
It's been proven.
They reversed the image and blacked out the background.
You could see the two of them.
If you overlay them, they line up perfectly.
It's the exact same image.
So, someone...
Whether it is an overzealous PR agent for NASA or a journalist at the time.
Who knows who actually made that photograph?
But somebody did and tried to pass that photo off as space.
So there's some deception.
We know that one is 100%.
So then you look at the other ones.
You look at the videos of guys falling down, getting yanked back up and bouncing around like they're on trampolines in some videos where they're hiding behind the lunar rover.
You guys are jumping around on the moon like you're having a party up there?
Is that real?
How come I can't get a fucking regular camera through the radar machine, the x-ray machine at the airport, but you guys can fly through the radiation of space, and that shit comes out, but, well, those cameras were insulated.
They were a different kind of camera.
The camera was...
Not true.
Hasselbad said it.
They were the same goddamn cameras.
It's a regular camera.
There was no specific protection.
There was nothing unusual about the protection that those cameras had.
And one of them they put as the head of fucking NASA! Yeah, this is where it gets really cool.
Someone's explaining all this to me about how basically the thing is like, okay, you think in World War II that we just rounded up all the Nazis and they just disappeared.
And it's like, where do you think all the Nazis went?
I'm so sorry to ask, Jimmy, but do you mind looking up Bayer Aspirin and Cyclone B? And the Jewish slaves, I think, working for Bayer Aspirin.
But when you look at a lot of the ideas that the Nazis didn't really go anywhere, they just started corporations and some of the biggest corporations we have right now.
And where it gets really weird is like, this is one of the great conspiracy theories.
I think the Bush family is somehow wrapped up in it.
That's where it gets weird.
It ends up getting wrapped into American politics.
It's like, oh, do you think that the Nazis just became rocket scientists?
Do you think they just...
No.
They became pharmacists pharmacists and they started running companies and corporations and then like they and they're still here And their descendants have lots of money and like to think that they went anywhere is nuts.
The Nazis didn't really go anywhere They just went deep into hiding They just sank back into the immune system of society like you know, like the way AIDS hides in different parts of your body and They just hid in the shadows.
And this is one of the reasons people are freaking out about the kind of, like, friendly emergence of some people who are, like, clearly white nationalists, who are just kind of, like, being, like, interestingly accepted and embraced for, you know, let's at least have a rational conversation about how you want to start a white ethnostate, you know, that kind of stuff.
But I think like, for example, when you look at Trump's reaction when they were saying, asking about the KKK, and he's like, I'm not going to talk shit about this group.
He also said something about there was people, bad behavior on all sides.
On all sides.
And that's one of the white nationalist groups picked up on that and said specifically that Trump didn't criticize them specifically, so this was a good thing.
But that could have been just him just not doing a good job Preparing what he's going to say about something and talking off the cuff, which I think he does with most things.
I think that guy does most of his shit off the cuff.
You know, he said that.
And one of the things that he said, like, he wrote that book, The Art of the Deal, he doesn't make plans.
He just goes to work and gets things done and just work off instincts.
Like, I don't want there to be a like, well, maybe he does have some kind of ideas that are based around the importance of upholding European culture and making sure that we do everything we can to prevent people from having sex with people from other races.
I don't want there to be any question.
But like, I have zero problem with Everyone humping everybody whenever they want, mixing the paints and doing whatever.
We look for shit on the moon, or in space in general, and a normal thing in space is fucking amazing.
Like, if we find a microbe on the desert floor, no one gives a shit.
Oh look, it lives in the sand!
It's incredible!
Nobody's gonna pay attention.
But if you find something in space and you can prove that this thing exists, it was a living organism, a primitive organism that's on Mars.
So we know that some life existed on Mars.
Right?
And then take it another step further.
If you ran into some dude who was jerking off in your apartment building, you just open the wrong door and some dude's in there jerking off and he's screaming at you and he's an old man, he's got a tank top on.
What the fuck?
And you tell your friends, we'd laugh at it.
But if you found that guy on the moon, just some old dude jerking off on the moon, man!
It's just like the universe is so infinite that there's an infinite number of possibilities that lives can exist.
Yeah.
I explained this the other day, that the infinite is so vast that literally it's entirely possible there is a Darth Vader somewhere.
Like a real, legit Darth Vader who runs the Empire.
Like it's a real thing somewhere.
That's how many possibilities exist.
So if that's the case, why can't there be a possibility on the moon of an old dude who eats dirt and he's got a tank top and spaghetti stains on it, he's knuckling up on the moon.
We find him.
We have to film him.
Front page of the New York Times.
They found an old man jerking off on the moon.
Do you think they tell us?
If they found an old man jerking off on the moon.
If that's what they find.
Space probe lands.
And then right in front of him is like, fucking look at this.
We're seeing cascading levels of absurdity and like the more that it the more that Absurdity happens the more normal it seems and that's kind of this is what I've been thinking is like What what the apocalypse really looks like because everybody thinks when you think about the apocalypse when I think about the apocalypse I think of meteors Volcanoes, the classics, you know, the ocean dying, like, just cataclysms, right?
But, really, it's like more, like, absurdity starts avalanching into time to the point where things start happening so quickly that we can't even catch up.
Like, now we gotta deal with the fact there's a fucking Tesla infinitely flying through space.
That's the funny thing about existing on the planet is because everybody walks around imagining that the world that we're living in is permanent and stable.
And not just our world, not just society, but your own life.
Like, people walk around through their own fucking life.
This is the thing I was thinking about, that terrible, it keeps happening, but the Amtrak train crash?
Because it's like, when you think about that You're just going to work.
Here's the thing that disturbed me the most, and it's disturbing me a lot lately.
This is a real issue.
People that were on the left were saying that they were happy that it happened, that God had done something to kill these politicians because there was a lot of right-wing...
So basically the idea is like, You know, like in fundamentalism of any sort, really like the idea is when you're saying that you're religious, you're not really interested in another person's soul or saving another person.
What you're interested in doing is creating an ethical hierarchy that you can dominate by being at the top of the ethical hierarchy.
Right?
So what you're running into with this shit that you're talking about is people who don't really seem so concerned with how society is supposed to be as much as using their refined system that they've come up with, which is like they call being woke or you know what I mean?
It's like this is crazy.
It's hard to even keep up with it.
But they use it to try to dominate the people around them by making you scared to speak your mind.
One of the guests on my podcast that I get fucking yelled at more than anybody else for having on, Jordan Peterson.
That really pissed a lot of people off that I had him on my podcast.
Why?
Because they feel they misunderstand him and they think that Jordan Peterson hates transgendered people, I think, or they think that he's like alt-right.
They think that he's like some kind of alt-right spokesman.
And the truth of the matter is, I don't fully know all of the spectrum of Jordan Peterson's views on things, because it would take me a very long time to do that.
I know he's fucking smart.
I know it was really cool for him to come on my podcast, and I know we had a really great conversation that didn't really talk about that stuff.
Right, but it didn't fit the narrative that they want.
The narrative that they want is that he's a hateful person, and that he hates transgender people, and that he's a bigot, and that he's this right-wing, alt-right poster boy.
But it's not real.
The problem is people aren't willing to adjust that.
Once they stand on that stance, once they have that position, that this is, I'm left-wing, this guy's right-wing, he's a pig, he's ruining things, they just make up their mind.
Imagine Jordan Peterson and I don't honestly I don't know but just imagine there is a piece of him That doesn't for whatever reason like it.
I don't know I'm again.
I'm not saying this isn't I have no I'm not implying it either I'm just saying imagine fucking Jordan Peterson.
I don't know I'm trying to think of some offensive Thing that he just imagine he had some piece of him right that was definitely Politically not correct, right?
Yeah, but the idea that we have gotten to the point now where just like free-balling and throwing around ideas, just like we've done all over the place here.
I guarantee you when I look at Twitter, there's going to be at least like five people being like, you fucking cuck piece of shit, only because like I'm throwing around ideas, because my hope is through that process, I'm gonna get closer to the truth and I'm gonna be able to look at myself like what you said about the cock The coke boy.
You know what I mean?
I liked it, because you're right, and I like what you did, even though it's comedic, it's funny.
But I like having these kinds of interactions with friends because it helps me adjust.
Even though I don't have any real animosity for the Koch brother, from that kind of thing I can look at my own fucking pattern and be like, whoa, shit, yeah, that's something to think about because I could be more compassionate there.
So my point is, What ends up happening and what leads to someone who started off being, you know, who considers themselves part of a group that's trying to stop war, that spawned the hippie movement, and now they're like thankful that a train accident happened.
That is a result.
Of gradually shutting down their ability to understand that a human is much more than just one fucking thing.
Jeff Sessions is not just an anti-marijuana person.
Jeff Sessions is probably an elf and a sweet elf at that.
And a person who's got a lot of love in him, and has done a lot of good things for a lot of people.
But also, he's got the worst fucking concept of what marijuana is, and that sucks.
But that doesn't invalidate any of the love he's expressed throughout his life.
And this is unbearable for some people to deal with, because we want a Darth Vader.
Well, it's because we are inclined to gravitate towards tribalism.
It is a part of being a human being.
It's always going to be a part.
It's the same reason why those Egyptologists were rejecting these ideas from John Anthony West and Robert Shaw because they weren't a part of the tribe.
These new people coming in with some shit that they didn't figure out on their own.
There's a thing that people do on whether it's male versus female.
You're seeing a lot of this when it comes to this Me Too stuff.
One of the weirdest things that happens is that you start getting this divide where the men are mad at the women and the women are the mad at the men.
Even people that are non-offenders and non-victims.
They shore up on teams.
And yes, it's good that people are being exposed for doing bad things to people, but it's also very dangerous for us to just, men and women, be on opposite teams.
We're humans.
We're supposed to be nice to each other.
It goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
We don't say that enough.
I really don't think we say that enough.
I really think we need to, it needs, it should be reinforced.
And it sounds like, oh, it's a fucking great thing.
That's your advice, bro?
Be nice to each other?
Yes, it is my advice.
It's not my only advice.
I think you should also get your shit together.
I think you should have some fucking discipline.
I think you should eat right.
I think you should do a lot of things.
I think you should read books.
I think you should pay attention.
I think you should try to educate yourself.
I think you should try to be aware about objectivity and tribalism, aware of the influence.
But I also think...
It would be really nice if we all just agreed to be nicer to each other, and just have it as a conversation that the country has, and then ultimately the world has.
But that list of things you just gave before that, I think that all fits into the category of being kind to yourself.
And I think that the way you're gonna learn to be nice to other people is by learning how to be kinder to yourself.
And being kind to yourself means treating your body better.
You know, that's loving yourself.
And like, this is actually one of the things This guy Jack Kornfield taught me, which I like a lot because I was talking to him about, man, you know, I want to fucking get in shape and like I feel bad because I want to be more in shape and he's like, okay, but the way you're talking about it, you're hating yourself right now.
Barely educated, 21-year-old man who's mostly just read books on combat sports and fighting philosophy and psychology.
I had a very limited amount of information in my head, but I realized there were some flaws in the way I was thinking.
And I realized I was spending all this energy getting mad at people that I didn't know, hating people that had things that I didn't have.
And I really I was sitting around thinking about this once and it was as I was becoming more successful As a martial artist I was realizing that one of the things that was holding me back before was my mind And it wasn't just my physical talent my skills, which also got better But it was also that I had a better way of approaching competition that I had when I was younger because I didn't carry as much anxiety I was I was still anxious but less anxiety Because I was more at peace with being around all these different people.
Instead of like, fuck this guy, who's this fucking guy?
I changed my strategy.
And I changed who I am.
And then as I got into comedy, I was alleviated by the actual real threat of competition, which greatly relaxed me.
It was a giant weight lifted off my back.
But that carried a little bit of that in the early days of stand-up.
I would look at other comedians like, fuck this guy.
I get jealous of guys that were doing well, rather, that were successful.
I got jealous of guys who were funnier than me.
Like, why is he fucking funnier than me?
It was a stupid thought process.
And it took me until I was, you know, like 22, 23. I started realizing, like, I got to snap out of this.
This is unhealthy.
I'm wasting this energy where I should be concentrating on positive things.
So I started supporting my friends.
I started being a more complimentary person.
I went out of my way to just be nicer to people.
Be nicer to people, not because they could do something for me, just to be nice.
It feels good to be nice.
And I just slowly cultivated a better philosophy.
And it took me a while, man.
It took me until I was in my 20s, until I really, like, as I was, like, getting closer to 30 is when I started really getting good at it with comedy.
You know, like, bringing comedians on the road, helping people.
Yeah, that's right.
Fostering other careers, telling kids that were, like, seven years before, you know, behind me.
Like, they started out seven years after me.
I'm seven years ahead of you.
You could do this.
Anybody could do this.
Just do it just do it and if you fuck up learn from that fuck up get better This is this is the thing that you can do.
You're a funny person, right?
You just all you have to do is just keep doing this.
Yeah, and you're gonna you already made it Yeah, you know, this is the so this thing that you're talking about the thing that I that the Ram Dass people teach me which is invaluable and to me and it really inspires you is It's like they talk about Ram Dass's guru, Neem Karoli Baba, and how when he was teaching, he never said, here's what this is going to do for you.
He was never like, this is how it's going to help you.
He was always saying, here's how this is going to help the people in your life.
And so the moment you make that little shift Where working on yourself, as it's called, is not about doing something so that you can fucking have a fucking six-pack and get laid.
But the moment you start fucking doing this stuff...
Because you know that it's going to directly help the people around you in ways you can't even imagine.
Like, you don't even know yet.
Because there's going to be a moment in every single person's life where someone comes up to you who's in a lot of trouble and they need help.
And it might not be money.
It might just be something you could say to them.
It might just be something you need to be lucid in that moment.
And because you've been like...
You know not paying attention and you're blurry and you're angry and you're fucking shut down that you're not even gonna see that person right that person is gonna Just be another face in the crowd that you don't even see but that's the whole point is like this practice your practice It ends up helping so many fucking people.
And if you want to get excited about something, at least for me, it's really kind of difficult for me to get super excited over, I don't know, some kind of thing that's going to give me an extra thing.
It's way less exciting than to think that, like, shit, man, if I can be more calm...
And more connected, then the next time I'm around somebody I love and get angry, I'm not going to hurt them because I'm learning how to not react to my own bullshit.
Me growing up as a person who didn't have money and thinking as when I was a child, my family was on welfare.
I still can remember, at least I have, an idea of a memory of us drinking powdered milk.
I remember that.
I remember being really...
Embarrassed if people would come over our house.
We had powdered milk.
We were poor.
And that memory of being a young man, of being a struggling young comedian, doing a bunch of odd jobs, trying to make it, this real hunger and worry.
I remember one of the most embarrassing moments of my young life.
I had this thing fall out.
It was like some management company was interested in me.
And they were like a music management company.
And they were thinking about branching off into comedians.
This guy was talking to me about it.
And it was falling apart.
And I was driving with my girlfriend.
And I was 21. And the whole thing was so frustrating to me that I started crying.
Tears rolling.
And I remember she looked over me.
She's like, are you crying?
I was like, yeah, fuck.
Yeah.
And she's like, ugh.
Like, she was, like, mocking the fact that I was crying.
She couldn't help herself.
You know, she was same age.
We were both, like, 21. We're both kids.
You know, and she just thought it was a bitch move.
Just be crying about being frustrated about your career.
And I remember being so embarrassed.
Like, why did I let that out to her?
Like, why did I let that out in public?
This frustration of not knowing where the future lies.
But that frustration and that hunger of wanting to figure out a way to get out of this cycle of working shitty jobs and figure out how to do something that I actually love doing, like be a comic.
That burning hunger because you don't have shit.
That's where it all comes from.
When you don't know where the fuck you're gonna pay your rent.
You're trying to figure out what's the next job you're going to get so you can feed yourself while you try to figure out this weird thing that nobody could really tell you how to do.
But going through that struggle, that is everything.
But people need to hear that you went through it too.
They need to hear that during the dark days where it doesn't seem like it's ever going to work out.
Are you alive?
Can you see?
Can you talk?
Can you think?
Get better.
Get better.
Get better at whatever you're doing.
Just get better.
So you suck at it now.
Everybody sucks at everything when they first start.
That's the whole thing about getting good at something.
But if you love it and you're really honest, don't lie to yourself.
Don't lie to yourself.
Look at it for what it is.
Look at it for what it is and work on it.
Whatever the fuck it is.
Whether it's writing books or making music or composing computer code.
Whatever the fuck you want to do.
If you suck at it.
Get better.
But look at it for what it is.
Look at it for really what it is.
And that's one of our biggest problems.
One of our biggest problems is that people have a really hard time looking at things for what they are if they're not flattering.
Yeah, but you know, man, the thing is that the guy you're making, you're like creating an image of, the guy's like, fuck Elon Musk or that guy, is real.
That's real.
That's me when I was 21. Right, and you felt like fucking queer and you felt like shit.
That's the important thing.
That's all coming from feeling like shit.
And when you get around somebody who's acting like that, if you've looked into yourself enough to see where you feel like shit, and then you get around somebody and you realize like, oh, this person who's like being a complete fucking cunt to me right now feels like shit.
But anyway, the thing that he said that has stuck with me, is he's like...
One of the things he says is so simple, and it reminds me of what you're saying now, is he said, you can always be kinder.
And then the other thing he said, and it sounds so simple, but really people don't realize that, you can always be kinder in any moment.
And then the other thing he said is, if someone's being unkind to you, It's not them being unkind to you.
It's an echo, is what he said.
Like, it's literally an echo of the unkindness, people being cruel to them throughout their lives, and that shit is bouncing off of them like sound.
It's bouncing onto you.
And so, when you get around someone who's, like, being a shit, what you're really experiencing is a lot of sorrow from a lot of places you don't know.
And that doesn't mean You're supposed to lay back and let them spit on you or be a shithead to you or whatever, but it also helps you find a little bit of compassion.
That's all.
Just so you can be with that person and let them be what they are without adding more suffering to it, which only compounds the situation.
Is there's a part of me that and I like what I know sometimes you just have to put someone You have to like avoid their presence.
I thought you're gonna say put them on blast I thought you were going not put them on blast No, because it doesn't work.
That doesn't work, but maybe it does for you.
I don't know but doesn't but there's a they just get mad at you But right so but there is a thing of like I this is where I might just be fucking naive or crazy Or one took over the line sweet, but I believe That with any body that you're around,
if you've cultivated love, like if you can really love them, even in the midst of that cyclone of bullshit that you're talking about, if you could look through the cyclone into their soul, like into what they are that's love and see that and love it, then the cyclone will start calming down a little bit right in front of you.
I think it's possible.
I think it's possible that if, and this is why I think it's fucking worth figuring out a way To cultivate this shit that you're talking about, so that when you get around a turd cyclone like that, you become potentially the person who,
not by giving them money or giving them advice, but just by giving them love and letting them be this cyclone of shit for a second and loving it for real, You might be the thing that, just like Musk's fucking Tesla hits the meteor and sends it into Earth, you might be the thing that dings the meteor of their life and prevents the catastrophe that they were spinning towards.
Yeah, and that's the thing, man, because you were like, in those moments when you were like, when we're riding in my fucking Mini Cooper and I'm trying to listen to Elliot Smith and you know I'm depressed, and you're like, dude, what are you listening to?
What the fuck are you listening to?
I'll never forget that.
And I'll tell you, man, in my head, I'm like, what a dick.
And I needed, and I didn't, in those moments when you were doing that shit, I was, like, in my head resisting, and I'm like, you know, but that's the other thing.
When you decide to help somebody in that way, you can't expect it's going to happen, their shift or change is going to happen instantaneously.
But because of that, I still, to this day, when I put on Elliott Smith, I think of that moment, man.
I still hear your voice in my head going, Duncan, what are you doing?
Because, and I'll tell you why, man, because sometimes you can listen to Elliot Smith and not be wallowing, and it's just really pretty and sweet, but don't listen to that shit if you're wallowing, because it's like, it's only...
Yeah, don't feed that wallowing spirit inside of you.
You don't need to feel that.
Everybody experiences loss and everybody experiences bad moments.
You're just going to.
You're never going to get life perfect, right?
So during these bad moments, what you've got to realize is just accept it, feel it, get through it.
Realize it's a journey that you're going to get through, but realize that there's better ways to navigate it than some.
And some ways are really bad.
Heroin's a really bad way to navigate it.
You start doing heroin and start fucking listening to Elliot Smith and go holding a knife over your stomach in the middle of your fucking bedroom going, Fuck it, man!
It's like when you get around someone who's like a teacher figure like you, or you get around someone who's really doing it from love and not trying to fucking fuck with you, because that can happen too.
When you get around somebody who's doing it out of love, there is such a massive difference in the way that feels.
And what they do quite often, or what a lot of my teachers do, which is really fucking cool, because in the same way you've seen me shift, a lot of my teachers from the Ram Dass camp, like in the beginning, When I was actively trying to offend them, because that was what I would try to do.
Not be funny, because I was thinking, if I can offend these people about the practice they're teaching me, and they're like, hey, you can't say that, or that's blasphemy, or anything like that, then I know to get the fuck out of there.
The same way you're doing that with him, I would try to do that with their teachers.
And I would try to do that, too, because I was like, fuck it.
If they get mad at me...
Then I know, if there's a thing where I don't like blasphemy, I don't like the idea I can blaspheme, man, that freaks me the fuck out.
But it was like, with Neiman Crowley Baba, you know, they tell me these stories, and I'd be like, you know, I just don't, I just don't really believe that, man.
Like, I don't know if it's, I don't know if I believe that shit.
And Raghu, I still remember saying that, walking in this, at the retreat with him in Hawaii, and he gets a big smile on his face.
He's like, yeah!
Yeah, don't blame me for not believing it.
It's like, whoa, cool, man!
This is fucking cool!
And like, it's that, that's the, so when you get around a real teacher, what I'm saying is, the place that you're at, they let you be there, but they're not like, in the sense that they're letting you do the pattern that you're in, but by allowing that to happen in its own way, and then adding to it the intention of like, I think I'm going to help you grow here.
That's when you really start changing.
Not when someone's like, when you were in the car and listen to Elliot Smith, and you were fucking recognizing in me a lot of sadness and a lot of fucked up-ness, you weren't scolding me, dude.
You were giving me love, but the way you were giving me love Was by making fun of me in this really sweet way.
And it worked!
You know what I mean?
So that's the thing.
That's what a real teacher does.
And that's why it's like, you know, to learn how to get to that spot is one of the most important things you could do.
Well, it's also, from a selfish standpoint, when you have a good friend that is all of a sudden looking for a place to live, and then they could live with you, it's cool, it's fun, but it also feels really good to help somebody, and to help somebody that you love and you really care about.
So, I mean, I don't even think I thought about it for three seconds.
When you called me up and you were in a hotel room, I go, dude, come live with me.
It was like instantly, it was like, hey, Duncan's living with me.
Instantly, I was like, you got a place to live, dude.
You never have to worry about having a place to live.
I wanted you to, you know, and also you were, I've had a lot of people that have offered the tank to.
Anytime you want, come on by, you can use the tank.
You were the only guy who used it on a regular basis.
Like when Tate lived with me, he didn't touch that fucking crazy thing.
He's like, fuck this.
He might have got in there once.
I don't know.
But that was not his style at the time.
But you were in there all the time.
And you were writing journals and shit when you get out of there.
We would talk about it.
You would talk about your inner voyage.
When you'd go in that tank and just think about your life and what you're doing and what happened and what went wrong and where you're headed to.
Just, look, man, the fucking stress of trying to be a professional comic, it fucks you.
You know how I know it fucks you?
Because it fucks me every two years.
Every two years when I abandon my act and put out a special and then have to write a whole new one and I'm goddamn sweating just thinking about it right now.
Like, Tom Segura's going through that right now.
Ari's going through that right now.
That's the shedding of all you've got.
And then you've got to start from scratch.
It's fucking terrifying again.
It's the thing that makes you keep growing.
It's the thing that makes you keep growing.
But when you haven't had any success, like when you were in the beginning of your career and it just hadn't happened yet, you don't really believe it can happen.
But once you do have it happen, then you go, oh, I see.
I know, that's why I deserve to be made fun of for it and I'm not gonna ever use that in a book or in a blog post or anything but I really do like the concept of like finding the place you're stuck and realizing that that's not a place you should avert your eyes from but in fact more than likely that's a door.
That's a fucking door and you can go through that door into a whole new existence where you're no longer horrified by yourself and that is really exciting.
It's a really fucking wonderful moment.
You know, not just in comedy, but I think in anything.
That's one of the things that's good about doing things that you're not good at.
Is that you get the opportunity to see what happens when you work at something and then you improve.
And I think that applies to everything.
I think if you learn how to play a game and get really good at a game, I think that figuring things out in your mind how to get good at this game applies to life.
You could get caught up in a game where like chess or whatever it is becomes your whole life and then it's almost too much, right?
But you could also use things like chess or a lot of different things.
People have a heavy prejudice against video games, but it's been absolutely proven that video games can enhance many aspects of the way people think and problem solve.
It's been proven.
I mean, there's studies that people are doing on it, but we associate video games with wasting time, slacking off, being a loser.
Meanwhile, Jamie, what the fuck were you just telling me the other day about how much money these guys make when they're playing Twitch?
And it's like when you're looking at like the community that forms around these people and like, then you realize like, man, there really is something really soothing and addictive about watching this.
Dude, have you seen that Twitch guy who trolls people in, uh, what's it called?
This dude goes into different video games, playing a character, and trolls people inside the games, and it's some of the funniest fucking shit you've ever seen.
Like, he goes into...
What's Second Life?
He goes into Second Life, somehow makes it into an enclave of people playing the part of bikers in there, and he goes in there, and they're acting like bikers, so they're like, how'd you get in here?
And he's like, I don't know.
I'm just, you know, I'm here.
He has this very calm voice.
They're like, you need to get out of here.
And he's like, you know, I'll come.
I'm going to go, but I'll be back tomorrow.
And they're like, no, you will not be back here tomorrow.
The rail gun changed a lot of shit in Quake 2. But the point being that you would have these strategies, because you had a map, and it would all be about controlling the respawns.
So all of the items, whether it's a rocket launcher or a shotgun or whatever the fuck it is that you're picking up, And the ammo, all of it would respawn as well as the health.
So it was all about controlling where the respawn is, keeping your health up really high, and then making sure your opponent never gets any good weapons.
And so they would, it was really strategic, and they'd chase each other around the map.
This one dude just fucked everybody up.
I mean, and he lost a couple times too when he was, you know, starting out, but he eventually got to a point where he was like the Michael, like right there, boom, he sees that guy, boom, jacks him.
He knows where you're going.
He's firing rockets down hallways.
He anticipates you're going to be going down.
And when you would watch these guys play, you see like right there, that guy was there and he's just waiting for him.
Boom!
Boom!
And he just killed that dude.
And I would watch these guys in these demos and try to learn from like how they were maneuvering.
There's another guy called Fatality.
He was really good at it.
And there was different games that guys would play, too.
There was this game, and some guys went over to Unreal, and they played Unreal Tournament.
Every time it respawns, he's going to be running back there to get that armor.
Running back there to get the shotgun shells, making sure that his opponent doesn't have a rocket, and you just keep killing him.
And then when he respawns, you chase him down, kill him again, or weaken him.
These are fucking really complex, multi-level games.
You have to think in advance, and you have to plan things out, and guys would even have timed things that they would put in a program so that it would show on their screen.
Rocket launcher respawning in 10 seconds, 9, 8, and then run after.