Duncan Trussell and Joe Rogan debate productivity culture, critiquing Harley-Davidson’s shift to Thailand while mocking OxyContin as "for pussies" against Rogan’s Adderall/meth use. They contrast exploitative work contracts with passion-driven jobs like game development, citing Musashi’s Five Rings for skill mastery and mindfulness to dissolve self-hatred. Rogan rejects mob mentality (e.g., Maxine Waters’ calls) amid 31% of Americans fearing civil war, while Trussell advocates Buddhist focus on local action over outrage. They propose mutual aid—like tithing to neighbors—as a solution to systemic neglect, blending personal anecdotes (parenting, trauma) with critiques of government inefficiency and military spending, ending with Rogan’s gratitude and Trussell’s "Hare Krishna," emphasizing community over bureaucracy. [Automatically generated summary]
It feels like they hired an alien at Apple that forgot that humans like to push buttons.
We like it.
It feels good.
It feels good.
They're ignoring a basic human trait, which is like, have you seen those dumb cubes nervous people get?
They've got buttons and shit and you spin it around.
It was the same thing as this thing.
It gives you this tactile little thing where you take all that extra energy and you put it in your stress ball.
People like to punch and press and click and switch and that's what Apple forgot.
It's like when I'm typing, man, I like that click, click.
Like in The Shining, when you hear, that means I'm typing.
I like the sound.
The flutter of the keys as you're writing.
That fucking Apple keyboard, man.
When I went in, I was so ready to buy a brand new MacBook Pro.
So excited.
Really excited.
Mine's from like 2014 or 2015. I mean, not to be a fucking Apple fanboy, but I will say that when I went in there with it, instead of trying to sell me the new MacBook, she looked at it and was like, what are you doing on the thing?
And I'm like, oh, I edit sound.
And she was like, I don't know that you even need a new one outside of the fact that it's new.
This is exactly the fucking problem of being interconnected by technology, is that we are paying for the sins of the small percentile of absolute dumbasses on the planet.
And because of that, you know, anytime I look at a sign, Any sign that's got an obvious thing in it, don't shit in the hot tub or on the roller coaster, don't get out of your seat.
When I look at that, I think, that's because of dumb, dumb, dumb, because there might be a person who's in the roller coaster who's like, oh, stand up!
He's doing this new psychedelic study, psychedelics and flow states.
So I retweeted Because he's like, they're doing research right now.
They need people to fill out a survey.
So I retweeted that to help Steven out.
Just like, ah, cool.
Yeah, that's a cool thing.
I think psychedelics probably do induce flow states.
I'd like to find out for sure.
But within like six comments, it's still up there if y'all want to look.
Some dude wrote to me something along the lines of like, You're hurting people and don't even know it.
That's six down.
It's like, hurting people?
I can't remember what language he used, but it's like, what the fuck?
This is a survey, dude.
What are you talking about?
Maybe he means by retweeting surveys, that sucks, because no one wants to see that on their timeline, but I think he meant you're hurting people by demystifying and destigmatizing psychedelics.
Because I want the explanation because it's like when someone says something like that, it's so terribly, absolutely, impossibly wrong from my reality tunnel that it's like I want to get in their reality tunnel and hear because that guy really believes it.
And people that get sober, like, people that have a real problem, they have, like...
We all know someone who's gone off the deep end with drugs, right?
When they come out of that, some folks turn into evangelists for sobriety.
And it gets super annoying.
And one of the things they do is they demonize all positive experiences that were with the same substance as their negative experience.
In their fucking crazy head, they've decided because they had a bad trip, every trip is bad.
The millions of people tripping all over the world, taking mushrooms, finding God and love and companionship and harmony with the universe and acceptance of their mortality, all that doesn't count because Billy couldn't keep his shit together at the Pink Floyd concert because this fucking asshole decided to eat the entire...
The entire bag of mushrooms.
And he tripped his balls off and was screaming they had to take him to the hospital.
And he called his ex-girlfriend and cried to her for hours.
And now her boyfriend, the new boyfriend, wants to beat him up and he doesn't even remember doing it.
That guy's an idiot, okay?
There's a lot of those people out there.
A lot of them.
A whole lot of them.
And there's people that just aren't geared for psychedelics for whatever reason.
You know, there's people that are like really close to losing their shit with regular reality.
That's definitely something that like in my old age I want to put in like Italics and underlined, that's what you just said.
Because when I was younger, when you're younger and you are in that evangelical part of your psychedelic life, you can become, like, if you're not careful, ridiculous and irresponsible, and you start throwing out there this, like...
Idea that is not only fundamentally wrong, it's fundamentally wrong in everything, as far as I'm concerned, which is there's not really one cure to your troubles.
You know what I mean?
But with psychedelics, people think, this is the answer.
This is the answer.
This is it.
This is what we need.
And it's like, well, it's part of what some people need.
But if you've got manic depression, for example, if you've got bipolar, you know...
Dude, I had this moment where some parents came up to me and were, did I tell you about this?
They came in to talk to me at a show and they were like talking about how their kid liked my podcast and And it was really sad because he had been at one of my podcasts, and I think he'd come on stage to ask a question or something, and they were looking for a recording of the live show because they thought maybe they could hear him talk or get some, like, his laughter or something.
But anyway, what happened was he—I think he had some kind of— Bipolar, I'm not sure what, but one of my friends, Raven, he uses the term gyro.
His gyro was off a little bit, you know?
Something was off a little bit.
But anyway, the kid went and did ayahuasca in Peru.
He did an eight-night...
You know how they're doing these?
I don't know how they do it every night or every other night.
Eight-night retreat, drinking the medicine every night.
And then after that...
Went to some kind of, like, other shaman or some woman.
I don't know who it was.
I'm not sure of the deets.
But then he came home and he jumped off a waterfall and killed himself.
Because what had happened is he was in a manic state.
And so it just for some reason, I think some people are de-emphasizing what it means to be healed by a psychedelic or to be worked on by a psychedelic or to enter into that state because it's becoming, thank God, de-stigmatized.
So if you took psychedelics, and it caused that thumbprint to change a little bit, and that's how they told words, they don't even want to look at your shit.
They have to scan your ass.
The print changed.
You did mescaline.
We're lucky it's in the piss.
But also, if you really think about the fact that we are in a...
World where people have to go, To work, to do a job that, by the way, man, if there is a dude you need to get on this podcast and there's a book that you would love, David Graeber wrote this book called Bullshit Jobs.
This guy is a fucking genius, man.
And this book, Bullshit Jobs, breaks down the phenomena of how many, many people are working in jobs that don't do anything for the world or the company they're working for.
And it's not like this judgmental thing where he's like, Yeah, that's a bullshit job.
You're a blah, blah, blah.
He's like an anthropologist, so he's very precise.
But one of the qualifications for your job to be a bullshit job is you know that it's really kind of a worthless job.
It's not really doing anything.
And companies have gotten so fucking big That they end up having departments or people running departments or extra employees that don't really need to be there at all.
And they have to pretend to work.
That's what he writes about.
He writes that if you really want to torture a person, not only give them the job of pouring a glass of water in an empty glass and pouring it back, But then add to it that they have to deceive their boss into thinking that they're doing an important job or they lose their job.
So not only are these some corporations and companies scanning your piss to see if you're taking a substance that is allowing you to connect with home what you actually are, they're also demanding that you spend many hours a day lying to To them that you're doing work that you're not doing.
If you're fucking efficient, you know, and this is another thing Graeber writes about.
Forgive me, David Graeber, if in any way I misconstrue this, I read your writings stoned.
The other fucking element to it that is absolutely atrocious and fucking horrible is that these substances are connecting us to home.
They don't want us to be in those states and they're asking us to fucking lie all day.
It means mind manifesting or soul manifesting, right?
So a psychedelic connects us potentially with the truth, what we are, our identity, right?
And these companies, they're asking us to lie, to be the opposite of our identities, to wear a weird suit or some kind of dress code, and to sit in a desk where, because you're efficient, you get your job done in 45 minutes, and for the next six hours, you've got to sit and...
Type and pretend that you're working knowing you're a person and knowing that this is unethical.
But if you go and tell your boss, hey man, I don't really have much to do.
You might get fired.
In the book, he cites one person, because he did a survey, and he cites one person who went to her boss, and she's like, hey, I can finish my job in two hours.
Can I have other stuff to do?
And her boss is like, don't talk about that.
Stay quiet about that.
Yeah, man.
That's the fucking world we're in right now because of automation.
There's less to do.
Computers are making shit fast.
Why are we working the exact same amount of time we were when there were no computers?
You know, if we're gonna, like, ask questions that are impossible to answer, like, how many people right now do you think listening to the podcast are in their bullshit job jerking off to porn while they listen?
I think it's interesting, too, because when you consider the act of shitting versus the act of jerking off, it's far more repulsive.
You're expelling foul-smelling toxins from your body into the toilet.
And if you say to your friend, hey, I gotta go take a shit, man, your friend's probably going to be like, well, you didn't need to tell me that.
Like, okay.
But your friend's not going to be like, whoa, dude, what?
And yet, jerking off, really, if you think about it, it's like you're giving yourself a hand massage that ends with a little spray of cream coming out.
It's a gross relationship that the worker has now with the corporation, and it's an unnatural relationship, and it's a relationship that seems to have, like, Do you know what Ari told me?
I think if I wanted, for whatever reason, to dissuade people from jerking off, I could come up with a way better thing than a dragon to represent it.
There'd be some other thing, like a...
I don't know, man, like a...
What's like a...
What would be like the creature version of a rolled up ball of dried cum that you've thrown next to your bed and someone walks into your bedroom and sees the rolled up ball of dried cum Kleenex and it's just kind of like, that's gross, you didn't clean up your cum Kleenex.
The good thing is sex will be way more pleasurable.
The bad is it'll be way more desirable.
So, like, to mitigate your sexual urges so you don't do stupid things and hang out with stupid people and have sex with people you don't really like but you think are hot because you're horny.
I think that there is something to be said for figuring out how to deal with that kind of energy.
That's an energetic state.
Being horny is an energetic state.
It's energy.
If you're really horny and you sit and watch the feeling itself, it's electrical.
You can feel it moving around in your body.
It can almost make you twitchy a little bit.
It's like a very potent, energetic state.
Theoretically, the question would be, is there a way to release that energy That isn't through the tip of my dick in the form of DNA. Is there a way for me to release that energy in other ways or is the only way, the only valve on that to come?
I saw a book just yesterday in one of these boutique stores.
Someone had made a sarcastic kid's book called The Grown-Up's Guide to Mindfulness.
And whoever wrote that fucking book hates the word mindfulness.
Definitely has an obnoxious friend who's into mindfulness because the book is just like a...
First of all, the guy doesn't seem to really understand what it is in the book.
He seems a little confused about the nature of it.
And I remember looking at that and being like, oh, I guess people are getting annoyed with the word mindfulness now, like the pendulum swinging that way.
I took on, for lack of a better word, I'm working with an actual teacher of the Kagu lineage of Buddhism, which is like Chogyam Trungpa's lineage of Buddhism, and he's amazing.
And he's teaching me mindfulness meditation practice, this guy David Nicktern.
What's cool about him is if you asked him, he would tell you.
He wouldn't be like, how dare you ask me that question!
But I think that probably, I can't answer for him, I think it would fall in line with what you're saying with balance, you know, which is that it's really like sort of the concept with it is The thing that's happening right now, whatever it may be, you can just apply mindfulness to it.
You could apply being in the moment and being with the thing that's happening right now.
And so the thing he's teaching me, I love it so much, dude, because it isn't woo-woo-y or out there or crazy.
It's literally this...
It's a very simple way that you meditate, the way that you sit, which is you sit on a cushion, you put your hands on your knees, and you sit back.
And the word they use in this Kagu lineage for it is the warrior pose.
And what that means is that it's a kind of confidence.
It's the way people who are confident sit.
So you sit like that when you're meditating, your legs are crossing, you sit in a chair if you want.
And you look straight ahead, about eight feet, nine feet, and you watch your breath.
And when you go into your thoughts, which happens, of course, you go, you think, thinking, and then you go back to your breath.
So what you start realizing when you start this practice, and full disclosure here, man, you know me, Joe.
I have problems with discipline, and I have problems with sticking to stuff over and over again.
And working with this guy has been incredible because it's actually getting me to do it, right?
But still, I have like...
I did it today.
I didn't do it yesterday.
I don't want to get out there with some nonsense that I'm spending all day long meditating.
But what you start seeing is When you're doing it, is you realize like, oh, there's a cycle happening in my consciousness, in my mind.
There's a cycle that's happening in my life, which is that I kind of blink into the moment, following the breath, and I blink out of the moment into the thought realm, right?
We're like little fireflies.
We flicker into the moment.
We're here.
Now we're here.
We're not lost in our thoughts.
We're not thinking about the next thing we're going to say.
We're not thinking about the next thing we're going to do.
We're just here in this moment, and then bloop, We're off, you know, off and running, like thinking about the bills, thinking about the girl, thinking about the thing, thinking about that, and then that leads to another thought and another thought.
Next thing you know, you've been thinking for three years straight, you know what I mean?
Or three minutes or five hours or whatever, and then you come back.
And that's the cycle.
This is a cycle that happens.
So mindfulness Is starting to pay attention to that cycle.
And the breathing thing is kind of like a respiratory mnemonic device, which is that suddenly what's been happening to me now is I'll just be like walking down the street and then notice my breath.
Oh, shit.
I'm back.
Oh, I'm here.
I was totally up in my head.
Oh, I'm back.
That was thinking, you know?
That's all.
It's very, very, very simple.
But he's just teaching me the basic shit right now.
On my own, thinking about my own life and observing other people's lives, I've come up with this thing that I bring up all the time, the momentum of your past.
Like, so many people, as they're going down the street, so many people, as they're interacting with people, they're carrying the momentum of all the fucked up things that are going on.
on bills that they have to pay, and things that they forgot to do, and a career they never chased, and a girl they never called back, and a thing that they lied about, and a thing they stole, and the reason why they got fired from work, and maybe if I call my boss, and all this craziness you're bringing with you into everything.
And that is so hard to escape.
It's so hard for people to escape the momentum of the past.
You know, people sort of, they get into this thing of defining themselves by failures.
By past failures and never just learning from them.
Go, oh, I'm that fucking loser.
It's a real problem.
It's a real problem with people to be able to learn from something and to just look at yourself.
And it's painful to look at yourself.
So everybody wants to pretend that they didn't do anything wrong.
Everybody else is an asshole.
Yes.
And so what you're doing by doing that is you're stunting your own growth.
You feel like you're protecting yourself because you're protecting your ego.
You're like, you know, I didn't do anything wrong.
Fuck him.
He's the asshole.
But you know you could have avoided that.
You know you could have done better.
Yeah.
Everybody has moments like that in their life.
The more you avoid those and don't take credit for the ones that you actually fucked up, the more you actually hurt yourself in this ironic thing because it seems like you're protecting yourself.
No, I'm exonerating myself from guilt.
Fuck it, it wasn't me.
I didn't do it.
But you know you did.
So in your head, you're the guy who lies about making mistakes instead of you're the guy who mans up to your mistakes, realizes it was a mistake, and then vows to do better.
And you've got to be able to look at yourself all the time.
Not just when you fuck up.
Because you can avoid some of those fuck-ups.
Just look at yourself critically along the way.
But we all have to understand that we are all an evolving process.
I had this conversation with Dennis McKenna.
It's a crazy conversation because it's a ridiculous thing to say.
He was talking about Donald Trump And I was saying, isn't it possible that he could grow and learn?
Like, why do we give up on people?
Why does a guy get to a certain age and we say, oh, he's 60. He's set in his ways.
He's 70. He'll never change.
He'll never evolve.
You don't ever say that about a 20-year-old.
You see some asshole who's a 20-year-old.
You say, he just needs discipline.
He just needs love.
He finds the right people in his life, right person to love.
He'll be okay.
He's gonna mature and eventually he's gonna be a solid man.
But you get to a certain age, we just give up on you.
We're just like, you're still alive, but you've passed the cycle that I usually enjoy people to be ready to like sort of interact as valuable, creative, loving members of society.
You pass that by.
You're still thinking about yourself only deep into your 60s.
This is stupid shit.
This is shit you're supposed to do when you're 17. By the time you're 70, you're supposed to be going, oh my god, I don't have much time left.
Oh my god, what have I done while I'm here?
What is important?
What do I feel the best about?
I feel the best about love and companionship and friendship and real warmth and interaction between people that you care about.
This money thing, man, this is not – you can't keep chasing this.
Can't keep chasing power.
Can't keep chasing money.
You're going to reach a point where it's not going to matter because you're going to die.
So you really want to be that guy from the bumper sticker, he who dies with the most toys wins?
Because this is literally what you're working towards.
We have proclivities and tendencies and habituations.
And if you just kind of like, if you put you and me in a room and put a bunch of different objects on the floor, right?
You're gonna go towards something, and I'm gonna go towards something else, right?
You know, if there's fucking VR goggles in a goddamn badass, like some kind of badass compound bow manufactured at fucking DARPA, you know what I mean?
And there's VR goggles manufactured by DARPA. I don't know.
I'm going for the VR goggles.
You're probably gonna go for the cross or the bow, right?
So we have proclivities.
That's the momentum, right?
Is one way you can understand what karma is, right?
So that's the momentum.
That's the moment.
So that thing that you've got right now, when you begin to really look at it and think about it, You could ask yourself, when did this start, this momentum, right?
When did these proclivities and tendencies and things that I'm being, like, sort of pushed towards, when did they start?
And a lot of it is, you know, your parents taught you certain things, but...
So, you know, another one way you could actually say it is like every time you do that, you're planting a seed.
So every time you smoke a cigarette, you could imagine that you have this field, right?
And the field is your health.
And in that field, anytime you like exercise or do something, you know, decide instead of eating the fucking ice cream, you're going to eat the seaweed chips or like anytime you do that, you could just imagine.
Obviously, it's not the way it works exactly, but you could think I'm planting a seed in this field, right?
So If I keep planting certain types of seeds in any type of field, and I cultivate those seeds, they're going to grow into something, right?
That's karma.
So for a person, when the cancer comes, when the muscles come, when the failure comes, when the success comes...
If you look at that moment, you realize this is actually the flowering of a thing that's been growing for a very long time inside of me or in the world or in time.
So that's the idea.
People already have within them planted all of these seeds that haven't been expressed yet into time because they're still inside of them.
Like the dude with the...
Like imagine a guy with the guy who like shot the guy because he had road rage, you know?
That guy...
For years, had a really bad anger disorder, and he knew it.
He would think at times in this very calmest moment, I sure get really angry all the time.
So, yeah, man, that's like cigarette smoking, any kind of behavior that, like, is risky or over time produces some kind of negative result.
It's just planting seeds.
And so the momentum you're experiencing right now is the sum total of all those fucking seeds that you planted and that were planted inside of you over the course of your life.
That's what you are.
You're like a walking field of karma at varying stages of growth, growing varying types of vegetations.
And some are good and some are bad, but it's like that's what you are right now.
And what's beautiful about that is that means that you can start cultivating that field.
You don't have to just let it grow wild and pretend every time you smoke a cigarette or do some stupid shit, you're like an unconscious farmer.
I mean, it's a person's choice, but to get back to what you were just saying, the ethics of the fucking thing, how about this?
How many people who run big tobacco own stock in companies that make chemotherapy drugs?
There's a big question.
Like how many of those people in their portfolio that they barely know about, they're like, well, you know, like a really big investment these days is gene therapy for cancer.
Kudzu is a plant that was introduced from Japan, I think from Japan, into the South.
And it's just a growing wheat vine that when it wraps around trees and it covers them up completely so the trees can't get any sun and the trees just die.
Yeah, it wasn't native to the United States.
So sometimes, I don't know, maybe they took care of kudzu, but when I was a kid, you would drive by these beautiful forests where the trees were just covered in fucking kudzu.
So that's like a really funny thing that like alcoholics will get their alcoholism wound up in their social life or like their creativity, their creative cycle.
So they will think like, fuck, man, without the booze, I don't think I'm going to be able to write as well.
Or, you know, whatever it is, like, mostly it's just people have this, a really smart way to avoid getting healthier or the learning curve associated with getting healthier.
And it's a really intelligent trick to play on yourself, which is to imagine that, you know, whatever it may be that's currently out of balance in your life, if you remove that, You're not going to be able to be as good as a person.
There's a lot of alcoholics out there, performers who think, oh, if I don't drink, I've got to have a beer on stage, man.
Where it gets hardcore is when it's actually fucking wrapped up in the art publicly.
I don't know if you're aware of this rapper who died named Lil Peep.
I don't remember who said that, but it's like, yeah, it's like, you know, you become this, like, character or something like that, and the next thing you know, your fucking addiction is, like, just riding you around like a horse, whispering in your ear, without me, you won't know where to go, and now you're fucked, you're fucked, yeah.
I don't know if it's true or not, but obviously it's probably not true.
But I got this crazy idea that, like...
And again, with you, I could just say this, and I don't have to preface it, but since people listen to your podcast, I have to preface it by saying, I do not believe this.
I am not going insane.
But this is a fun thing to think about, you know?
It's okay to imagine shit in your mind.
It's okay.
Like, you can imagine stuff.
So I was thinking, like, inspiration, right?
Specifically, I was thinking like J.R.R. Tolkien.
When you read Lord of the Rings, it's like that guy went over there.
That writing is so beautiful and so perfect and so interdimensional.
That inspiration is outflow from the DMT realm into this dimension through the processor of his meat computer.
And this is like a kind of drip coming out of a dam, right?
The dam is something that's been constructed by power structures who want to keep that realm out of here, right?
And so Over there, you get usually a kind of message, right?
And the message is usually something along the lines of, we need to love each other.
We could love each other here.
There's something more important than money.
That's to really be very reductive about it.
But some version of that story that usually involves some kind of Desire to no longer harm people or to reduce suffering or to be a better person or however you want to put it, right?
So there's a dam that's been built and the dam It's built by the people who scan your piss for LSD. It's people who have created an intentional, legal obstruction between one realm and the other,
which is the realm, mechanical hyperspace, in the realm that we're currently existing in, which is where there's a lot of scientific materialism, where people only believe that there is only matter here.
And what happens is, from time to time, a big crack in the dam opens up, right?
That's when someone like fucking Martin Luther King appears and is standing in front of so many people telling them, I think that We're all the same, is what I think.
I think we're all the same.
And he's doing it in this very charismatic, beautiful way, right?
That's a big fucking crack in the dam, because over on this side of things, they don't want us to be all the same.
They want us to be separated by a lot of different fucking things.
They don't want us to be all the same over here.
So the cracks in the dam open up, and the big cracks Bam!
The little cracks, they're like the good art, the good poetry, the great movies, the inspiration.
And now what's happening because of the fucking internet is all these fucking cracks in the dam are opening up.
They can't seal them up anymore.
It's like you can't seal the fucking dam anymore.
And the singularity that McKenna was talking about, the apocalypse, which actually means lifting of the veil, What that is, is when the dam reaches Like a point where the structural integrity has been permanently compromised and the DMT realm flows into this dimension in the form of some kind of technology that either unifies all of us or like rips a hole literally into whatever that membrane is that separates us
from the infinite.
And that is what, for whatever reason, over in this dimension, people have been trying to stop.
This whole thing of you exploring hyper-dimensional space and all that stuff, all that does is make you stupider, and you show up at work, and you're less disciplined, and you're not interested in getting the job done, okay?
This company is built on teamwork, okay?
And it's built on everyone pulling their weight.
Now, if you're off fucking off in hyperspace from Friday night to Sunday morning, and you barely get six hours sleep over the weekend, you show up Monday, I'm going to test your piss.
If you notice, sir, on this chart, they, again, published in the Landsat, it's peer-reviewed.
This is a very important study.
Professor David Nutt, of course, has since, I think, been disbarred in somewhere and accrued some kind of horrible punishment for being an advocate for psychedelics.
But anyway, sir, forgive me, but if you'll notice on this chart, psilocybin is considered the least I'm not interested in harmful, sir.
So, right, so the answer to it is that – oh, I'm talking to you.
Well, here's the problem, sir.
You don't realize this, but you're kind of a low-level priest in a religion that is spread far and wide, and in this religion – It's not really the money that you're interested in as much as it is the power,
because you've become a servant of a being called the Demiurge, which is essentially attempting to create a sort of authoritarian hierarchy in this particular dimension that's been separated from another place known as the Galactic You can call it whatever the fuck you want, but it's the aliens.
It's a galactic civilization that is about to pour into this civilization.
And so it really doesn't matter what you do because within the next 20 or 30 years through technology and through the unification of people because of that technology, you're going to either come to our side or go completely insane.
Boss, the problem is that, like, the thing you're doing with time or being on time...
That's a relatively new imposition into society.
And it started with clock towers.
During the Industrial Revolution, they put clock towers up so that people always knew what time it was so they wouldn't be late for going to work in a factory, you see.
There was a time when people weren't, like, obsessed with their fucking watch because the idea that you could sell time...
Here's what it is, sir.
You think you and I have entered into a contract where for some ridiculous reason I've agreed to sell you eight hours of time, my time per day.
It's essentially a form of slavery.
It's a kind of like slavery, except I get to go free for a certain amount of hours per week.
Yeah, we can call it that with less of the power I can leave anytime I want.
Indentured servants, I don't think they could because they were kind of trapped.
Dude, what's great about this game is not just the graphics, which are incredible, or the fight mechanics, which are also incredible, but the fucking story is really good, and the acting is really good, and the relationships between characters are really intense.
I don't want anybody to see any of the characters or to know what's happening because it's that good.
Like, it's such a good game.
Most games, the way I've played video games, is I try to rush through it for some reason, which is really dumb, to be like, oh, I gotta win this thing.
This one, you want to hang out.
Look around.
Like, see the...
The landscape.
You get really into it.
It's a glorious game.
To get back to what we were talking about, at Blizzard, one of the people working there told me, we...
I like building World of Warcraft because we like playing World of Warcraft.
We've created a dimension we want to be inside of.
We enjoy it.
They love it.
And that's why the game is so good, because it's being made by people who enjoy playing the game.
So I don't know how many hours they work at Blizzard.
I imagine it can be a pretty brutal schedule.
But...
And anything you do, even things you love, I know, become grueling.
But I think that example of a company versus a company where you're, like, either doing something that you don't even need to be there to do.
I mean, it might be massive hours a day, but I bet you're having a great time a lot of the time, and the actual result's insane.
You know, I was friends with a lot of those guys from id Software back in the Quake 2 days, and played Quake 3. I got to play Quake 3 before it ever came out.
If you've never played one of those games before, the three-dimensional games when you're running down, you hear things over here behind you, and you can turn around and sneak around corners, and people are chasing around the map, and sometimes you can walk and it doesn't make any noise, or you can run and you can hear the footsteps.
So it's the concept that if I practice something, for example, like right now, like I'm learning how to do modular synthesis.
Like I have modular synths.
They're badass.
It's like for making music, right?
I'm 44. I'm not like thinking to myself like, man, one day I'm going to be fucking...
Space Nectar!
I'm not thinking that, you know what I mean?
I don't even think I'll perform live with them ever.
But I got sucked into it, and now I'm taking it seriously.
So I'm learning how to do it for real.
And then that pulls you into, like, music theory, right?
So now you start looking at, well, what is this song?
And why does this song...
Why is a song set up like it is?
And what are notes?
And what's a tone?
Right?
What's an oscillator?
What are these things?
And then, like, from that you get pulled into, like, Pythagoras, you know?
And then suddenly you're, like, reading, like, shit by Pythagoras, who, like, had another great quote, which is, do not take the roads traveled by the public.
That's pretty awesome.
Which means, isn't that badass?
But anyway, the point is, like, Because I've been studying the modular synthesizer, now when I sit down and play guitar, I'm a little better at it.
But then where it gets fucking weird is, when I sit down and play like God of War, I'm a little better at that too.
And then when I'm thinking about cutting tomatoes, for example, something really basic, and the pressure I'm exerting to cut the tomato versus the sharpness of the knife, I think about music, and I think about, whoa, in a weird way, my knife is like a...
You won't know what this is, maybe.
Like, my knife is like a CV gate, which is like...
If you have a tone, like...
A gate might be an on-and-off, like, switch that makes the tone go...
Right, right, right.
So suddenly the shit you're learning from like, and by the way, synth nerds out there, I don't know what I just fucking said.
I've already fucked it up.
I'm sorry.
I'm learning.
Synth nerds.
But what I'm saying is it's like what he was teaching is so powerful, which is like you don't just get good at one thing.
That is an incredible thing for me to realize, man.
It's been pretty intense because...
Like what you were saying, if you're a 20-year-old, people expect you to be learning something, this or that.
But when you're in your 40s, you could trick yourself into thinking like, I don't need to learn how to do anything anymore.
And then you're basically turning down all the lights in your life, because when you start working on something, This is why I was going to ask you, man.
We dismiss them because they were thought of as frivolous exercises and we embrace chess and go and all that.
And even poker.
Because we know that it's an intellectual pursuit.
Real poker players are all super fucking smart guys.
The guys that were really good at it.
I think that we do that with video games because at one point in time they were just Pong and then they were Mario Brothers and they were silliness and fun.
You get the mushroom and have a good time.
And Pac-Man and all that shit.
But now, when you see God of War, you're like, okay.
Well, clearly your brain is firing on all cylinders when you're doing that.
You're swinging that axe and switching to the spear and doing this and jumping there and chopping this dude in half and getting away from the guy with the fucking flying log he's throwing at you.
Yeah, so I think that potentially through anything...
The problem with video games is you can play them and actually not get better at them because you just are slashing and pressing buttons and shit.
You can focus, but I think when your attention and focus gets put on improving anything, Like, theoretically, I imagine if you just started working on drawing a circle, or drawing like a perfect circle, and just spent day after day working on that pursuit, sounds insane.
Like, you'd look crazy to your friends.
But potentially, Other shit in your life, you'd start improving at too.
Your mind gets a little sharper, maybe.
Maybe it's just some kind of neurogenesis or something.
For sure, your brain is very, very active when you're playing a video game.
You know, I know when I would play Quake, my hands would get so sweaty that I would put antiperspirant on my hands.
I would spray antiperspirant all over my hands and then I would blow on them to keep them from getting so sweaty because my fingers would barely, they would slip around all over the keyboard.
I'd leave puddles in the keys.
My mouse would get soaking wet.
I would be dripping all over the mouse pad and the ball would get stuck.
Then it eventually became a laser beam, laser tracking.
First it sucked, then it got way better.
First it was like you wanted that ball.
You wanted to feel the ball underneath the mouse.
Because you got that tactile sensation.
But then it got to a point where these laser ones were so much more accurate.
Yeah, some guys, when the adrenaline would kick in, they would like a slow mouse speed and a big mouse pad, and they would move the pad around like that, and they felt more precise that way than they were with a small pad and a high speed.
Because some guys used to, like, do little wrist flicks with, like, super high speed, and you would try their mouse.
You'd be like, hey, man, Can I try your setup?
Because everybody's setup is different.
And I would try their setup and be like, Jesus, how do you even concentrate?
There was some video that popped up of that new game, Fortnite Everybody's Playing, and it was on Reddit.
It was like the worst Fortnite player ever because it's someone who clearly got up to go get chips, and the dude's shooting at them and can't hit a still person.
Yeah, man.
Games are badass these days, man.
I really love them, but I do think to myself, probably just because I'm like...
An older person, I do think there's like a hierarchy of like, what's good to do.
And I think it's better.
For me, it's better.
I like learning music right now.
I like sitting down, picking some basic thing about music, figuring out one little thing about a module, one of my synths and what it does and understanding it and then like unfolding that into something bigger.
And that can lead to hours of it.
Whereas like if I sit down and play God of War, You know, that's also going to lead to ours.
But at the end of it, I'm going to know more about a story.
Whereas the other one, I'm going to know a little bit more about math and like how sound works in general, which is a fascinating thing altogether.
And all these guys are gathering around watching the World Cup.
To me, it's just some dudes running around.
I don't know what's going on.
I like it.
It's fine.
It's great.
It's good.
But for them, there was clearly, and for the world, for all the people watching in the stands, there's an elevated level of passion for that.
Now, if that was your thing, I would say, maybe you could be a commentator, or maybe you could be a player, or maybe you could be someone who produces one of those soccer shows or something like that.
And his cousin was Billy Downs, who was one of the owners of the Comedy Connection in Boston.
So his cousin was a former comedian who owned a comedy club and just randomly became friends with him from an ad on, like, you know, like one of those newspaper ads for a job seeking a private investigator's assistant.
And he was always the guy that if a bunch of people were saying around, he would say something totally ridiculous, look you in the eye and say it, and everybody would be laughing.
Most of the time he worked for insurance companies.
Most of the time it was like, say if you were married and you were a woman and you had a different maiden name, you would get injured on the job and then you would start using your maiden name and take a job on the side while you're getting workman's compensation.
People would leave their jobs super early in the morning.
So we would camp out in front of people's houses where we would get there at 4 o'clock in the morning When everybody's asleep, we'd sit in the car across the street, and we'd wait.
Sometimes earlier.
And we'd wait.
And we'd wait.
Five-thirty roll around, and then you'd see some light go on, and then you're like, he's up, he's up, he's up.
Here he goes, here he goes.
This motherfucker's going to work.
And this is a guy who's supposed to be laid up in bed, and we'd catch him working as a roofer.
I say that like they didn't think they were going to get caught.
They didn't think it was that big a deal.
They didn't think through it very well.
There was one lady who was so nice.
He had a scam.
This was a scam.
Say if your license plate number, he would write down your license plate number and then write down one that was really close to it and write down another one that was really close to that.
And then he would knock on your door.
They'd say, I hate to bother you, but my girlfriend was in a car accident, and the police report where they had the witness's driver's license number, some coffee got spilt on the report, and they don't know exactly what the license number is.
We've checked these two.
It's not them.
I have a friend who works in the DMV, and they hooked me up.
And then you tell her an injury.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Well, what happened to her?
Is she okay?
She's okay, but she did this.
Oh my God, I had that same injury.
You tell them the injury that they had that's giving them workman's compensation.
Yeah, I had the same.
That's terrible.
Do you guys want to come in and have a cup of coffee?
She invites us in the fucking house.
Strangers.
This is what people did in the 80s, dude.
They invited people in the house like pilgrims.
This lady invited two guys into her house and...
He spins her a yarn about his girlfriend being injured.
And she said, I have the exact same problem.
And he said, well, what happened?
She said, well, I was on the job as a flight attendant and I fell down and hurt myself.
And he goes, well, you're getting paid, aren't you?
And she goes, oh, not only am I getting paid, but I'm also working under my maiden name at another job.
Like you want to create a version of that woman where like inside she didn't feel at least a little bad, a little bitter, a little weak, a little off balance.
I would have never been a good private investigator.
I feel like a lot of those people, and I was 20 at the time, 21 at the time, at the most, 21 I think.
At that time, I was really well aware of like...
The neighborhood where my grandparents grew up in, and being around them, and being around my parents who grew up in the 60s, and then my grandparents who grew up...
I mean, they were here in the Depression.
And there was a different attitude about opportunity.
Everybody was poor, right?
So everybody would take advantage of every opportunity.
And if you got an opportunity to run a scam, you did it.
And that's a terrible thing that happens in poor communities, is that people do think of insurance scams, this kind of scam.
Yeah, but the main problem with stealing Like, you know, sometimes I've been hanging out with people, you leave a grocery store, and somehow they didn't charge for, like, I don't know, a bottle of water or whatever.
Like, they didn't see it in the car, right?
And the people, some people are like, yeah!
I did it!
Free water!
They fucked up, right?
And, like, man, I think those people are unaware of this, like, weird law in the universe, which is that you seem to, like, have to – you get shit back times three, it feels like, maybe a little bit more than that.
So, like, if you steal a $2 bottle of water – now, this is my superstition – You're gonna end up paying like at least six bucks for that bottle of water in some other way.
But I think also there's another side to it that is more than just like the feeling you get of knowing you've been generous and you're not that attached to money.
Those, man, those spread, that person might do it to the next person they meet, and then boom, everybody's saying hi to everybody, everybody's hugging everybody.
We talk about this probably every time, because we both agree that this is like, probably, if there was going to be a non-violent revolution...
In this country that wasn't based on voting, it's going to start with that.
And what is that, you know?
And the thing I'm being taught is like that thing you're talking about, it can be cultivated and like refined.
So you can sort of – that's why it's called a practice.
Like when you're sitting and you're watching your breath and you're learning how to be in the moment – Instead of thinking, I'm doing this for this reason or that.
I'm doing this because when I'm talking to somebody, they're going to think I'm spiritual.
I'm doing this because I want to be more focused.
I'm doing this because I have an anxiety disorder.
I'm doing this because of this or that.
That's great.
But there's another reason to do it, which is that if you get really good at being in the moment with people, and also when you're sitting with yourself, And learning who you are, you have to start applying a lot of compassion to yourself because you're gonna sit, man, and some shit's gonna float to the surface of the stream that you wish had stayed under some rocks, man.
You're gonna see not just shit that's been done to you, But you're going to see shit that you've done to other people.
And you're going to have to deal with that, right?
And the way to deal with that is not to do like, I don't know if you do this at all, but sometimes I will remember something from when I was very young and be like, you fucking dick.
And like, so that's like the opposite of compassion for the self, right?
So anyway, the point is, if you can like sort of cultivate compassion for who you are right now, that's not to say Use that as an excuse to not try to become a kinder person, but I'm saying cultivate compassion for the fact that like,
man, your dad had PTSD and your fucking folks got divorced when you were three and your dad remarried An abusive woman who hated your fucking guts for seven fucking years and she did some really bad things to you over the course of that time that you were way too young to...
When you're in your 20s or your 30s, you're realizing that you seem to be kind of a selfish cunt.
And it's like, well, yeah, the reason you're being a selfish, quote, cunt is because you had to build up a very high-powered...
Defense mechanism to deal with the fact that you were abused for almost a decade when your brain was forming more neurons than it ever will at any other point in its life.
And now we can start having compassion for ourselves.
Instead of thinking I'm a selfish cunt, we could think Oh, I've got too big a force field up.
I've developed a thing to protect me from an environment that I'm no longer in.
And then the point is, once you start becoming compassionate to yourself, that's when you run into the person who's being a selfish cunt.
Who you can look at and say, oh, I see you.
I know who you are.
I don't know what it was.
I don't know if it was an abusive parent.
I don't know if it was a heartbreak.
I don't know if it was something you read.
I don't know if it was something...
I don't know.
Maybe genetic.
I don't know.
But I know from looking into myself enough to know that you deserve more compassion than you're getting.
But don't live in this world of 20 years ago or 30 years ago or whatever that one instance where you wish you didn't say this one thing to some person or hit some person or drive your car where you shouldn't.
Whatever the fuck it is.
Whatever thing that it was that you still sit back and go, God!
I rear-ended somebody once with my car when I was on my way to selling it.
And I wasn't paying attention to the red light and my car, I think it was a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass.
And the front end, I crunched this guy's bumper with the fiberglass part of my car.
I didn't do shit to his car.
He had a truck.
But I fucked up my car on the way to selling it.
And I brought it to this person and the grill was like half hanging off.
And I remember in my car just going, FUCK! Fuck!
I just fucking...
I was so broke and such a loser and barely keeping it together.
And on my way to selling this car, I fucked it up.
And I was just like, you fucking loser!
And I remember being in my car screaming at myself, you fucking loser!
And I remember the guy bought it anyway.
He just took a bunch of money off of it.
I forget what we agreed on.
But...
But this feeling would haunt me for months for months I'd be doing other things and I would think of rear-ended that car not paying attention fucking up the front because it wasn't even like an accident It was like I left my foot off the gas and I just slammed into somebody because I wasn't paying attention Yeah, man.
I let my foot off the brake, rather.
It was something that I literally was defining myself by for months.
You know, there's also the idea that there's parts of your body that retain memory, not just your brain, but there's neurons in your body and perhaps they retain memory.
And this is what a lot of people believe was responsible for this idea of, like, follow your heart.
Follow your heart.
Maybe if those are your memories and your database of collective emotional ideas, if there's really something to that, like, maybe it's not just in the brain area, but also in the heart area and in all the neurons, maybe we just think because our consciousness resides in the brain that all of our memories reside there as well and that they're not in various areas of our body.
I've seen people raise their kids and try to force their kids into holes.
You gotta support them and love them and let them find their path.
You have to.
You have to let them find their path.
You can't decide they're gonna be a doctor or decide they're gonna be a lawyer or decide they're gonna be whatever the fuck you want them to be.
They gotta be what they are.
We're all so different and you are literally robbing a kid Of their future if you over influence their choice making in terms of like not following their passion or their dream or their ideas.
Yeah.
And it can be done.
To say that it can't be done is, oh, so many people can't do it.
So many people don't get their doctorate.
So many people don't ever become scientists or astronauts or fucking mathematicians.
But he's got this killer fucking joke about how...
Pregnant people are like heroin addicts.
They're like, just try it.
You'll love it.
Just try it.
And then when you do it, you're stuck, you're trapped, which is how I used to think.
But man, it's so humbling to realize that all the shit you heard Was true in the sense that you hear people say, oh no, it's psychedelic.
It's psychedelic.
Now, I always associated that with like when the baby's born.
There must be some serotonin or dopamine that gets released, not just in the woman.
We know the woman's brain is flooded with oxytocin and a variety of things, the mother, the bonding chemicals.
But, you know, I thought, well, that clearly would happen for the father, maybe just not in the same level.
So when people say it's psychedelic, that must be what they mean.
But now I know, you know, the birth hasn't happened yet, but just being in the presence of a person who's growing a life inside of their belly And realizing that the bonding that's happening there and the sacred duty is coming up of you being a father and that a soul is coming into this dimension that is going to be completely dependent on you.
And my wife, of course, wanting to keep her safe.
And then...
Man, the combination of all these things is so incredibly psychedelic in the most beautiful way and so humbling because it's like, boy, oh boy, did I fucking tell myself that I'd figured out something really smart.
And that was like...
Reproduction is a trick of the DNA and this marriage thing and the baby thing is some kind of vestigial societal organ like the appendix.
We don't need to do that.
There's nothing to it.
Obviously I wasn't using that voice but like it was such a pretentious Fucking pompous, ridiculous place that I was standing at, which is to judge people for reproducing.
Enjoying the ability to judge because my parents reproduced, you know what I mean?
So it's so humbling to realize like, oh, I was wrong.
But I wasn't just kind of wrong.
I was deeply, fundamentally, completely wrong about this phase of life and this...
What's the word for it?
This...
Well, I like in Hinduism, they call it an ashram, like a monastery.
It's called the Grihastha Ashram.
It's like a temple.
It's considered to be like a temple, the family.
Holy fuck, man.
It's real.
The rubbers hit the road, man.
And it's like, it's really, really beautiful, though obviously a little scary.
And it's love where you know you're going to be able to love your children unconditionally in a very strange way that we really have a hard time with other people.
And I think the thing about it is not just that you're bringing a life into this world which is very psychedelic, but that your love bond with this kid is so ultimate.
It's so intense.
The love that you have for each other, too, raising the kid together.
There's a thing that happens with people when they are just really deeply connected at a DNA level.
This is a little person that has literally come out of nowhere from two bodies.
And it makes you realize how precious life is, how vulnerable we all are.
And it makes you realize that, I mean, it's such a cliche phrase, the actual power of love.
And the worst aspects of it, some of the chaos and the social upheaval and the infighting between people, people getting kicked out of restaurants.
You see Maxine Waters telling people that if you find people that work for the Trump administration, you find them in a restaurant, you find them anywhere.
You go and you get together a group of people, you build a crowd, and you let them know that you don't agree with their policies.
Like, whoa!
We're calling for gangs.
We're calling for gangs of people randomly in the street to interrupt people's meals, interrupt people in stores, get a crowd together, don't let them be safe in public because you disagree with their policies.
Well, I mean, because he wants to fucking be in a goddamn civil war.
But, you know, for me, when I see shit like that going down, I... See, I've like come up with like, I didn't come up with, I got it from the fucking Dalai Lama, but I've come up with like a good little equation to go back to, which is, does this reduce suffering, right?
So like, and I don't think it reduces suffering.
And these people who are really upset, On both sides of the fence are suffering.
We're really looking at a world where a lot of people are deeply upset and deeply suffering and really scared and really, really, really freaking the fuck out.
And as I've been watching this thing emerge on the internet, on Twitter, where people tweet things that paint...
You look at it and you think, It's almost as though you're living in another world than I am.
The world that you're talking about Man, it's fucking terrifying.
It's scary and it's really fucked up.
And maybe the reason I think that is because I started doing LSD when I was 16. So when I was 16, I became brutally aware of the fact that the current government and the past government Was repressive.
And something about that drug, which I don't do anymore, because it's illegal.
I was a crazy kid.
But something about that drug really shows you the conditioning, right?
And so I knew From a pretty young age, I was like, oh wow, I don't think the United States is dropping bombs on other countries because of justice or some threat.
It appears to be that some people are making money off of this shit.
And I don't think these drugs are illegal because they're bad for you.
you.
I think they're illegal because somebody doesn't want the herd to experience these states of consciousness because it will make them more difficult to shear.
I had this conversation with Hamilton Morris yesterday, and he strongly disagrees because he's talked to the people actually in the DEA.
He's talked to the people in drug enforcement.
Oh, sure.
That what really is happening is they have zero experience with these drugs, but they know these drugs are illegal, and so they pursue it as if it's a viable target.
And we talked about it in terms of the real problem with law enforcement being that it's a game.
I've always said that the real problem with cops is not cops.
The real problem with cops is human nature.
This is a bad guy.
I get a point if I take him out.
You start looking for bad guys.
You start looking for bad guys that aren't even there.
And I don't mean the DEA. I've heard the exact same thing about the DEA. But I don't even think people above them have experience with it.
I'm not even talking about people above them.
I'm talking about tendencies.
So if an individual has a tendency, right?
Tendency.
So a person has a tendency, then a group of people might have a tendency.
For example, if I get a group of Swedish people together, and I bring them to the World Cup, they're going to have the tendency to cheer for Sweden, right?
Then you think back to the way all your other bosses acted and you realize like, wait, there seems to be a tendency when people are in that position of power to behave in a certain way, right?
But what I'm saying is, is the person who's in the position of power...
Is that thing coming from inside of them, or is it that there's something, like, built in to the DNA of a leadership position?
They say that, like, in the same way, like, when you've got a pregnant wife, some new thing kicks in, and I was reading about it.
Built in, it feels like, where it's like, I'm getting a fucking...
You know what I mean?
I want to make her safe.
I want to make sure that we're saving money.
You know what I mean?
I'm working harder than I've ever worked in my fucking life because I want to make sure that there's plenty for her and plenty for the kid and something kicks in.
There's a tendency there, right?
So what I'm saying is there seems to be a tendency that happens when there is a A convergence of people in power, right?
It starts behaving in a certain way.
It builds walls.
It starts taking people to jail who don't belong in jail.
It dehumanizes, essentially.
That's the fucking tendency, right?
And so when you're taking a psychedelic, And you look around and you realize, oh, I see.
The government, though, it's filled with people who are wonderful.
There are people in the fucking DEA who listen to your show and guaranteed love the show and are like, you're fucking right, man.
I don't want to enforce these goddamn laws arresting people for a thing that is like being shown not only to be harmless, but potentially therapeutic.
There's people in all branches of government, and there's some people who just need a job, and maybe there's some assholes in there.
So, now, I'm not saying, like, therefore, your fear or your terror is unjustified.
I just think maybe because of the garishness of the current administration compared to, like, Obama, who is, like...
You know, we know what happened with Obama and the NSA. We know what happened with Obama and the drones.
We know what happened.
Well, we don't know what all the shit that probably happened with Obama, but we do know with Obama, and I remember hearing this and then looking it up and then looking it up again.
He apparently deported – in fact, maybe please find out if I'm wrong about this so I don't have to deal with 7 billion people calling me a fucking motherfucker for the rest of my life.
But apparently he deported more people than any – than all American presidents combined his administration did, right?
And so now Trump, he's at the beginning of the fucking deportation race.
Like by the time he's done, he might have beaten Obama's score by a fucking long shot.
I don't fucking know.
But the main thing is, what I'm saying here is like, I think I've been aware of the fact that That there is something wonky going on.
And it's wonky in the most rotten, brutal way.
It's wonky in the sense that it kills people.
It separates children from families, not just of immigrants, but of farmers.
Some people were growing marijuana and guaranteed their kids are in foster care now and they're in fucking jail, right?
This has been going on and on and on and on.
I think maybe now it's great.
About the fear that we're seeing and the hyper reaction is, if there is anything great about it, is that people are waking up to the fact that our government right now, the American government, is out of balance.
We've been at war for 90% of our history, right?
And there's a lot of shit going on in there that doesn't need to be going on.
And we're waking up to it.
It's just some people are like, they're waking up to it like they were asleep and someone threw water in their face.
And they're Like, holy fucking shit!
Holy fucking shit!
This is like, you know, this happened.
This sounds condescending.
I don't mean it to be.
But when I was like 18 or 17, looking at a fucking dollar bill, tripping balls, looking at that fucking green pyramid and the weird symbols, and then thinking like, wait a minute.
But I guess what I'm saying is like, if there is something positive about...
And the mobs of people doing this or that are the hyper outrage, almost as though we're looking at an immune response that's kind of going overboard, right?
But if there's something positive in it, it's that it seems that huge swaths of people are becoming familiar with the machinations of the American empire and understanding that here's how it's working right now.
The way he's talking about it, it sounds like someone running for a conservative position now.
It's not like this democratic socialist idea of eliminating ICE. You know, there's a lot of people that their idea is that immigration, customs enforcement, those people are monsters, and we should eliminate the position, we shouldn't have it anymore, and we should have open borders.
And those same people would love to have Obama in office.
You know, they would think that it would be great if Obama was here.
You know, we are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law.
I've looked up that Obama has deported more people than any American president, but we have to be very careful these days, because if you look, his lips aren't tracking...
That's what I was looking up before you asked me to find the video.
And I'm finding various problems in that statement or statistics.
So Snopes has it, but they've changed it to a mixture instead of being true or false because the definition of a deportation was changed at some point in the last couple of years.
I think that imbalance is being exposed by people's real opinion.
And this is one of the reasons why actual education and actual...
Raising of human beings is going to be critically important, whereas we ignored it as being non-important for a while.
Well, it's way more important now because the community has gotten closer than ever.
The community of humans.
And by not respecting this community and not Really concentrating on the way people behave and think rather than what they own or what their job title is or what degree they have.
Instead of concentrating on one of the things that's most important for us is the way we interact with each other.
We have created this issue where now that everyone has a word in, You've got all these broken people chiming in, throwing in insult bombs.
And look, any time a woman is in the news who does something remotely questionable, the cholera cunt brigade comes out in full force on Twitter.
And it's all these fake accounts and eggs, and some people in real accounts just want attention, and they just attack.
I mean, this is just a real thing.
It's not just women, but they do it to men, too.
But to women, it always takes on a particularly vile, creepy quality.
It's like, finally I get to say this thing.
And what has happened there?
Well, somebody got raised badly.
Somebody did a terrible job raising a man.
They got him to this position where there's this broken bundle of emotions and memories, and they're all fucked up with no self-esteem.
And they find some little target online, whatever it is, and fuck You Duncan Trussell, you fucking sellout faggot, and next thing you know, they're attacking you, and you might just be about to go to the movies with your wife.
And you read that, like, what the fuck is this guy's problem, man?
I didn't do anything.
You put your phone down, and you go into that theater, and you're all pissed off.
We're going to get through this and reach a much higher level of understanding of each other and a higher level of understanding of community.
This is why all these school shootings are happening and all this chaos and people driving trucks into crowds and shit.
It's because people are feeling out of this project of civilization and culture.
They feel horribly suicidal and depressed and confused and hateful and angry.
And they're filled up with chemicals and pharmaceuticals and loneliness and despair and anger and resentment and religious fervor and whatever the fuck.
What the fuck else is pushing them through this life?
And then they react.
They explode.
More explode all over the place.
We've got to take away the tools of explosion.
No, you've got to figure out why people are exploding.
How come no one is concentrating on why people are exploding?
The women want to go, oh, it's toxic masculinity.
And the men want to go, we're raising pussies.
And nobody wants to figure out what the fuck it is.
And they just hope that it doesn't happen again.
And then it happens again, and the argument starts up.
And Ted Nugent calls everybody a cuck, and the people that want the guns taken away, they all fucking storm in, and they demand, and they shriek in front of the senator's house at 2 o'clock in the morning.
This is where we're at, where we're not examining the behavior and the development of the human being.
It's a non-issue in our culture.
It's one of the most important things about being a person.
You've got to wait until you get to be 30 and you take a fucking Anthony Robbins seminar and try to get your shit together with some voodoo preacher down in Malibu that's doing some rock and roll church Christian thing.
And all the cool people go, I want to go and sing along.
Jesus, I love you.
Oh, it's amazing.
The guy plays piano and he fucks everybody he can.
It's chaos.
This is where we are.
This is where we are.
We're this tumultuous stage where all this information's flowing around and we gotta come up with management skills.
So it's like in all that chaos that you just described, where like you see the thing and you realize like whatever it may be, the thing, the school shooting, the immigration, the bus, the whatever, and you really – you get this – Sad feeling.
There's nothing I can do about that.
And so you end up online.
You're scared.
Fear in Buddhism is cold anger.
When fear gets hot, it turns into anger.
So you're going to be angry because you're scared.
And then you start firing these shots online.
And the entire time you're doing that...
The entire time you're doing that, your mother, who lives at the other, you know, somewhere in the middle of the country, is living by herself in a house where she doesn't have enough money and the house is dilapidated and you haven't been paying attention to her.
She needs your fucking help, right?
It's not time for you necessarily, even though your aspiration to rebalance a democracy is beautiful and we all want that.
You're fucking neglecting one of your best friends, not your mom.
You know what I'm saying?
Someone you know is exhibiting some fucking behaviors that are off a little bit.
Or somebody in your neighborhood.
So it's like the whole time your mind through anger is focusing on the fucking press secretary.
Who, by the way, Joe, I don't think the press secretary...
I could be totally off on this.
But you want to talk about shooting the fucking messenger, man.
his name Acosta whatever his name is but that guy gets heckled everywhere he goes now they put signs up behind him to say CNN sucks there's some really fun things about the Trump administration some really fun things and one of the fun things is these people that are journalists that take themselves super serious are the for getting shit on for the first time I mean they're getting you know they're getting called out for some of their ridiculous behavior like yelling out questions during a press conference like your question is more important than all the people around you that
You've decided.
The world needs to know!
The world needs to know!
And they're going to hold these people, hold their feet to the fire.
Okay.
Maybe.
Maybe this is not the way to communicate with people, ever.
Maybe this Maxine Waters idea of getting people to protest, people in restaurants, and build a crowd and let them know that they're not welcome.
Okay, maybe that's the only way, right?
Let's just play devil's advocate.
If you're looking at all these people that are imposing these immoral policies, separating children from their parents, which seems to be the most egregious, that's the one that bothers us the most.
If you just let it happen, these smiling demons just pass these laws and laugh in your face and there's no pushback?
That doesn't work.
So what's the pushback?
How do you get pushback?
Well, this is where it gets weird.
They might have a point.
Okay, if you're dealing with something that's that disgusting as long as there's no actual violence if you're dealing with something that's so heinous Right, you're separating poor people from their parents that are just coming over here trying to take a chance to get a Migrant labor work job.
Yeah, they're trying to pick strawberries or something Yeah, and then you have ice come in and steal them from their kids and steal their kids from them Yeah, no you don't you can't come over here.
Who are you protecting man?
Who's?
Who are they competing with to get these fucking strawberry picking jobs?
Nobody.
This is bullshit.
How do you stop that from happening?
Well, what about the law?
So in the middle, until this law gets changed, until we reconsider the humane aspects of this law, how many people's lives are going to get ruined?
How many thousands of kids are going to get traumatically separated from their parents and develop to become a more fucked up person who truly resents and hates the United States?
I don't know how you would stop that, but one of the only ways that I could think of being really really effective in getting a message across is to make it super uncomfortable for people that push that message through sure what people that support that policy people that think it's not a big deal Jeff sessions gave a speech where they made a joke about Separating kids from their families and the audience laughed pull it pull that up It's it's on it was on the cover of like every
news source today.
Here we go fucking sessions But this poor little fuck It's the same thing with him.
Like, this guy, he just stopped evolving.
And he got into this, and he's not getting information.
He's not getting it.
He's not interacting with people.
He's not evolving his ideas.
He's stuck on this, people who smoke marijuana are bad people phase, which is like some 1930s shit.
It's the product of his interactions and the ecosystem that he exists in.
He exists in this bubble.
Jeff Sessions speaking out about separating families.
unidentified
From the other side on this issue, as on many others, has become radicalized.
We hear views on television today that are on the lunatic fringe, frankly, and what is perhaps more galling is the hypocrisy.
These same people live in gated communities, many of them, and are featured at events where you have to have an ID to even come in and hear them speak.
I like the little security around themselves.
And if you try to scale defense, believe me, they'll be even too happy to have you arrested and separated from your children.
It seemed like that joke was actually written for him.
We have a law, and this is how we keep a beautiful country like America.
The reason why we have nice, clean streets, the reason why we have cops, and social security, it's because we have rules.
And as soon as we just allow people to bypass those rules, people that don't agree with our way of life, they don't support our way of life, they just want to come over here and mooch off the system.
That's harder for you, it's harder for him, it's harder for everybody, Everybody else, all Johnny Taxpayer out there, has to pay for these migrants that you don't even know.
Everything you just said, Mr. Sessions, Too legit to quit?
As far as like the rules of the game, in some ways I guess it's true, but like if we look at it from a bigger perspective, which your type really doesn't like at all for some reason, but maybe it's just because you're old and your body probably hurts a little bit and also that fucking butt plug that I would bet $200,000 that you have shoved into your ass All the time, you think?
I think all the fucking time.
And I think it's like, I get a big BDSM vibe from that dude, but that's just me.
I don't think it's true.
I don't know.
Here's my point, man.
There's a bigger thing happening.
And that bigger thing is just, for a lot of people, it's unpalatable because it's so complex and we don't yet know how to do it.
But we live on a planet And you say this all the time, where we are all people.
We are planetarians.
We are earthlings, right?
We happen to have been born into a country, this country or that country.
Some of these countries have big fucking walls around them because there's prosperity inside that country.
And there's prosperity inside that country and there's not prosperity in other places.
And people are suffering.
They're suffering bad, dude.
Bad, bad, bad suffering where it's like, there's like, they can't They can't live in some of these places without getting killed for sure.
The chance of them getting killed is high for whatever reason and they're just doing what any living organism does.
They're trying to get to a better spot.
Also, Mr. Sessions, you probably don't believe in it, but once those fucking ice caps melt, holy fuck!
When the cities in the next 50 years or so become inundated with water and people have to start moving more and more and more from places that are becoming uninhabitable.
Mr. Sessions, I don't fucking know, but I can tell you this.
If we start approaching this from the perspective of love, which is the perspective of, like, we don't need to separate them from their kids, and there might be a way to do this that eases their suffering a little bit more.
I don't know what it is, but from looking at what you're doing right now, that ain't it!
And I think we can do it better.
I don't know what it is, but I think if we get a lot of people together and really think about it and figure it out, I'm not talking redistribution of wealth or some kind of crazy communist shit.
I'm just saying, I know for sure we can do better than those goddamn aluminum blankets you're putting on those fucking kids.
Can we get a guitar player in here?
Hey, maybe we can get some beds in here.
Is there a way to like, you know, there's just all kinds of shit we could do, I think, that's better than what we're doing.
Response to that which isn't gonna be right because I don't really and I don't understand the issue at a level deep enough right so can I just say like one I There's many there's it's a complex situation.
But we'd have to have some sort of faith in their records.
So we would have to help their record keeping.
So really, what we want...
Really, the way to do it correctly is, first of all, anyone who's attached to us, whether it's Mexico or Canada, make sure they're okay.
Make sure that they are viable and stable and help them.
That's the real thing.
Treat them as if they're a colony of the United States.
They're, like, not that they're not sovereign, that they're still Mexico, but, like, treat them like they are connected to us and we don't want them to be fucked up and crazy.
Instead of building up a wall, make it so that nobody wants to come over here.
Like, that seems to be the prosperity way to go about it.
Like, to say, hey, you know, Mexico's fucking beautiful.
There's a reason why people vacation in Mexico.
It's fucking amazing.
You go to Punta Mita or fucking Puerto Vallarta or Cabo or Tulum.
It's fucking beautiful.
The idea that it's beautiful and also dangerous and scary and filled with crime, that's fucking stupid.
So then you would go, well, what's the problem here?
Well, the problem here is that drugs are illegal.
Drugs are illegal, and the United States wants to buy a bunch of drugs, so all these people are making billions of dollars selling drugs.
There's only one way to do that.
You've got to kill cops.
You've got to kill cops.
You've got to kill rats.
You've got to kill rivals.
You've got to kill whoever the fuck you've got to kill.
And you've got to send a message.
You've got to hang people from fucking bridges and shit.
You've got to do things to send a message that you're ruthless and you're here to get that money.
And there's a lot of that going on, and that is no different than Al Capone during the fucking prohibition of alcohol in the United States.
There you go.
to a thriving criminal economy with no management of it whatsoever other than bullets.
Right.
So occasionally they throw some bullets into these people and then they come back stronger than ever because there's more drug money and there's less of them and the one person gets stronger and El Chapo digs a fucking hole a mile through the ground and gets out of jail again.
The whole thing is crazy, but this is what we're next to.
And so instead of saying, hey, we've got to make a fucking wall, what we should be saying is, what do we have to do to not just fix Mexico, not just help them and come up with some sort of strategy and a plan to build them up almost as equals, but we've got to fix our fucking poor neighborhoods.
We've got to fix these fucking neighborhoods that have been drenched in poverty since the 1920s.
How about fix them?
Fix them.
Put some energy into it.
Put some planning.
Hire people.
The same way Halliburton hires people to fucking rebuild shit we blow up in Iraq.
They should be hiring people to figure out how to rebuild these communities.
Figure out how to give people jobs.
Figure out how to develop community centers so that kids have somewhere to go there where they can learn and be productive so you're developing less losers.
Giving people hopes and dreams, giving them things that they can put their energy to that make them feel good about life, right?
Give them skills and games that they can play, and things they can do where they get good at it, where they develop self-esteem, which is one of the most terrible things about growing up in an impoverished, crime-ridden, gang-infested neighborhood, is you feel like you're nothing.
You're nothing.
Your life can be taken away at any moment.
You gotta be careful where you go.
Bullets are flying.
People are getting killed.
People are killing people over words, and insults, and fucking territory for drugs, and your aunt's on crack, and your uncle's in jail, and it just seems like there's no fucking hope.
And no one does anything about it.
A few people do things about it.
A lot of people dedicate their lives to it.
But it's not enough from a governmental level.
No one in the top of the organization is looking at this big thing and saying, they're all going, hey, we gotta drill more oil.
Hey, we've got to do it with the resources.
What about our greatest resource?
Human beings.
The greatest way to make America great again is to have less losers.
The way to have less losers is you've got to find the spots that are sick and heal them.
Yeah, find these communities that have the momentum of poverty and crime and violence, and it's existed for as long as we can think.
For decades.
Fix them.
Fix them.
And have a concerted effort to fix them.
And bring everybody together.
Bring everybody together.
And instead of this idea that we're all separate and we're all fucking two-party right-left nonsense, this civil war between Trump supporters and people who want to kick people out of restaurants, How about we all realize that if we're going to treat each other as Americans, we're going to agree that we're on this team, we've got to start acting like teammates.
Instead of always searching for the negative in things, instead of reinforcing ridiculous ideas because you know that that's what your team supports.
Like I see a lot of people online talking about this immigrant issue and they either don't have kids or they don't think it could happen to their kids.
Their ideas hey shouldn't have fucking come over here.
You get those kind of people broke the law Shouldn't have fucking come over here if you kid you didn't want to get your kids separated if you were in the presence of a Woman who came over here from Guatemala and she's poor and she's starving and they're taking her baby away and she's wailing and screaming from a primal a primal place in her her DNA that the one thing she loves more than anything is being taken away and A baby!
If that doesn't freak you the fuck out, you're not a part of the team, man.
You're missing it.
You're missing it.
What are we here for?
We're here for a hundred years of whatever.
That's what we're here for.
If you want to spend a hundred years saying, hey, she shouldn't have fucking broke the law, I don't want you on the team.
You're an asshole, right?
And I don't give a fuck if you're right or left.
I don't care if you're religious or I don't care if you're an atheist.
If that's what you support, you're an asshole and we don't want you on our team.
Okay?
But if you agree with certain economic policies that I don't agree with, and we could have a discussion about it, we could figure out why you agree, and we could figure out why people are allowing all this money to get into politics.
Why are we allowing all these special interest groups and lobbyists to interfere with our laws and influence our politicians and create all this shit that we don't want?
Well, here's the number one reason.
You can't just vote online.
You can't just vote.
It's not one person, one vote.
It's the Electoral College, and there's a lot of checks and balances that are in place.
It's all wonderful and groovy, but it's not giving the trust to the people.
The trust to the people that are informed, that they can make their own decisions, that more people should be able to make these decisions.
Whether I agree with her or not, and I don't know if I do or don't.
I bet I agree with her on a lot of things.
I think education should be free.
I think we should figure out a way.
If we could pay for bombs, we could pay for schools.
I think this idea that everybody should have health care, it's a great idea.
Who the fuck wants people to not be healthy?
Who wants people to be hurt and not be able to fix it?
Are you really saying that struggling people should have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get fixed when we can maybe chip in and help members of our team?
That's stupid.
Can you fill it up?
Figure it out yourself?
I had to.
You got lucky, bitch.
You got lucky you don't have leukemia.
You didn't break both your legs when you were 18. Your parents are dead.
You got lucky, piece of shit.
These are people on our team.
I'm not talking about people who are lazy, good for nothing, losers, mooching off the system.
You're going to have that, too.
Well, we got to figure out how to educate people so that that happens less and less.
The real problem is how efficient and good is the community pile?
Are there a bunch of lazy cunts in the community pile?
Is there waste and nonsense and bullshit?
And these people that have those jobs you were talking about earlier that are told, slow down, slow down.
I know you could do this in two hours, but you can get an eight-hour day out of this.
Just don't fuck this up.
How much of that's going on?
I don't want any of that going on.
But if the community pile is taken care of and managed in a...
An honest and a way that's trustworthy and great for all involved and beneficial to the community and supportive of community values and love and this idea that we're all on a team and that you're gonna be okay.
Did you break your leg, Duncan?
Hey, you're gonna be okay.
And we make fun of Canada's healthcare and it's not the best.
It's not the best.
I have friends, my friend Jen, she broke her fucking knee.
She had to get a ACL reconstruction and they kind of botched it and they had to go back in and fix it again.
They're going to put in their time in the public sector or doing it for the public defender, and then they eventually go on to maybe even not do that.
Maybe they just get satisfaction out of helping people that don't have any money.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have high-priced lawyers as well.
And it doesn't mean that people shouldn't be able to pursue excellence and be rewarded for that excellence and be able to do whatever the fuck they want with it.
Whether they want to be charitable with that money or whether they want to be selfish with that money, if they're pursuing excellence and through their excellence they manage to amass an extreme amount of wealth.
Playing the guitar, whatever the fuck they do.
There's nothing wrong with that either.
We've got to stop thinking there's something wrong with that.
Chipping in and everybody putting into the company pile is, in a sense, some form of socialism, right?
Like, we agree on some kind of socialism.
When you consider the fire department, the police department, this is like social things, right?
We put money into it.
It's not a total redistribution of wealth, like deciding how much rich people should make, but it is deciding, you gotta chip in.
We all got a chip in.
Everybody's got a chip in.
We just don't feel like the chipping in is good.
We feel like it's all fucked up.
We feel like there's a bunch of dummies out there like this Jeff Sessions guy.
That guy gets paid for my chip!
This fucking dummy!
And all these fucking people that are robbing the system with their two hour a day jobs that they're stretching out to eight hours.
That builds resentment.
It's poor management.
And it's also people that are listless.
They're not valuable jobs.
They're not like a job that commands the same sort of attention as some of the more attractive jobs that people seek out.
Instead of thinking like, okay, yeah, all that's true.
Let's figure out a way to get more taxpayer money out of the military industrial complex, out of the prisons, and let's put it in the neighborhoods that need it.
Let's get it for funding education.
All of that is really beautiful.
But it's still...
And you want to vote and make all that happen.
Grassroots movements, all of it.
But...
Also, think of the term socialism, right?
Just what is it?
Social.
It's like you don't have to wait for the state to come and start figuring out ways to tax people to make that pile of money happen.
This is where I think it's an interesting thing to start exploring the idea of intentional communities.
I'm not saying starting a commune or anything like that, but you can actually push your friendship group To the next level.
Like, it doesn't just have to be a random group of friends who knows each other.
Like, you can start that pile of opulence with a group of friends.
Where it's like, you know what I mean?
A group of friends can just agree with each other.
Like, hey man, just so you know, you're not going to be homeless.
I got you.
I'm not going to fucking give you money all the goddamn time.
I think it does count, but I think that it would be easy to do things like that and still forget about something that's really basic, which is now that I'm talking about this shit, I'm thinking to myself...
Right now, like, in my neighborhood, I'm thinking like, wait a minute, like, what am I not doing?
I don't know what it is yet, but I guarantee there's something that I could do.
So to me, I think we may have talked about this before, but I get it and all.
But that has always seemed like a really boring way to do it.
The plate comes by, you throw some money in, it goes to church stuff, you don't know.
But the idea of tithing.
I think there's something to it, which is like if you just kind of look at your income and you think, all right, 5% of this shit is going to get spent or 10% or whatever you're comfortable with, I'm putting that in a pile.
And that pile is going to helping people in my neighborhood or my friends or my family.
And I'm just going to give that away.
And I think there's something to be said for that because right now I think we were a little too fixated on the daddy state helping us.
And I think it's more important that we start helping each other and forming communities that are based on love and friendship and just figure it out.
Some of the communities are going to fail.
Some of them are going to get a couple of assholes in there who are con artists and trick everybody or lazy people.
But the main thing is, let's start thinking in terms of Organizing into communities that aren't based on a fixation on the government right now.