Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell dissect skepticism toward religion, science, and identity—from the $22M AATIP UFO program’s black ops theories to Buddhist "eight consciousnesses" framing thoughts as projections from a shared global mind. They debate the Haast Eagle’s 25-pound weight, falcon hunting, and solar threats to civilization, comparing human tribalism to pheromone-driven animal conflicts. Trussell’s tulku system critique clashes with Seagal’s past-life claims, while Rogan slams ideological aggression, like forcing a raped 13-year-old to carry a child, calling it selfish. Both argue introspection and dismantling rigid identities could curb trauma-driven violence, hinting at a path toward deeper global connection. [Automatically generated summary]
Dude, when I was in college, we had to do service to get the degree.
You had to go do service overseas.
So we went to India, to Dharamsala, and we taught the monks English.
And I was sitting, listening, overhearing a monk in a conversation with someone teaching him English, and the person's trying to explain to him how there isn't a 13th floor in buildings in the West.
Well, in a culture that forces its citizens, if they want to run the country, you have to believe in something that, whether you're a Christian or whether you're a Baptist or Mormon, whatever you are, There's certain parts of your religion that if you just want to analyze them, just want to put them out on paper, I'm going to say, okay, did this really happen?
Did this guy really die and come back to life?
Is everybody agreeing on this?
Everyone's agreeing that a zombie, a guy became a zombie, and he came back three days later, and we're cool with that.
And we're still trapped by this thing where you have to pretend you absolutely know.
Look, live your life like Jesus is real.
Live your life like you want to follow those tenets and you'll probably live a better life.
If you really follow the actual true tenets of Christianity...
But if you really want to believe that a guy came back to life, and that it only happened once, and that you have to follow this book, and if you don't follow this book that was clearly written and rewritten and fucked with by people, and you know that people are known liars.
And in that world of known liars, we believe a crazy story that was written when people had no science, but we accept it because we think it makes the world a better place.
And there's like so many levels of that where it's like, yeah, that's one obvious level that if you want to take Jesus literally, which is you have to in certain forms of Christianity, you're going to have to deal with some pretty severe cognitive dissonance.
You'll be taught maybe to question your instincts, but then go one step deeper.
And start thinking – because the real question is, well, what is real?
Like, I mean, there's obvious shit that's clearly bullshit.
But wait, then when you start going down, you realize, like, you get to the point of the self.
And then you start realizing that the self and this Jesus that everyone believes in are very similar in the sense that – Like, you know, I don't say, I believe in gravity.
You would think I was crazy if I said it.
It would be a crazy thing to say, like, you know, I believe there's gravity.
There is gravity.
It's testable.
It works.
But what do you always hear when people are like, if you want to succeed, what do you do?
You believe in yourself.
And it's like, wait, what do you mean believe in yourself?
She was like, the problem is like growing up in that fundamentalist background, it makes me very susceptible to like healers and like psychics and clairvoyance and bullshit are spiritual people.
How do you rewire yourself when you've been trained to believe that a 14-year-old boy in 1820 found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus, and that all the Native Americans were the lost tribe of Israel?
It's like, for them to really take in the basic wisdom they got from the mythological creature, they needed a mythological creature.
The mythological creature said something to them along the lines of, you need to love yourself more.
You need to give more to your community.
Whatever the message is.
But if your Uber driver said that to you, It wouldn't get through, because it wasn't like phosphorescent, it didn't have multiple heads.
So, similarly, with these religions, what happens is you do get some real transcendent wisdom that's sort of timeless, mixed in with it, and then the people, because they realize like, oh my god, it was kind of a fairy tale, they also reject the good stuff inside of it.
And that, to me, is the big tragedy of any kind of The fundamentalist, literalist interpretation that's being forced on people is because within that is inevitably something great or it wouldn't be so viral.
Like, Christianity wouldn't be here right now if there wasn't a core thread in it that had a beautiful message in it.
And then there's the deeper symbolic shit that seems to be encoded in Christianity, whether from people projecting their own understanding on a pretty wild symbol set, or maybe it was intentional.
Either way, there's like a cool, like, you know, the, uh, if we talked about this, like, If you take a cube and unfold it, it makes a crucifix.
And, like, the cube represents pre-Big Bang conditions.
And what the zombie is, is when you're in mission control and you're trying to get an underhook, you push your hand through like a zombie rising through the ground.
You know, man, all this gut biome stuff that we're hearing now, like the study, I just read about the study today, like they found out that what the gut biome, what you're feeding your baby affects, there seems to be a correlation between their gut biome and the way they act when they're like five or something, or two years old or something.
There's a guy named Dr. Peter Hotez, and he was on the podcast, and he is an expert in autism and vaccines and diseases in foreign countries, particularly tropical diseases and warm, moist climate diseases.
And he was talking about how they've got it narrowed down to five environmental factors that happen during the womb that they think possibly contribute to autism.
But they don't think that it comes from something that happens later.
This is current science, according to him.
Obviously, I don't know what I'm talking about, like, for sure.
I should barely be able to say those words in order and pretend like I know what they mean.
But I listen to experts.
The mother's microbiome, the collection of microscopic organisms that lives inside of us, is a key contributor to the risk of autism.
So that might be one of the factors.
So it's during the womb.
And neurodevelopmental disorders in offspring.
Well, it would make sense that if your body's not getting the proper nutrition and your body's not healthy, that whatever's going on inside of you is not going to be the best environment for a baby to reach 100% health.
It just makes sense.
If you're eating terrible while you're pregnant, it's not going to be good for the kid.
But if you're eating really well and you're relaxing and taking care of yourself, it's probably better for the kid.
I mean, this seems like obvious.
It doesn't seem to make any sense that that wouldn't be the case.
The weird part of it, to me, this runs into like ideas of free will or like autonomy in the sense that how much is the gut and the neurons in the gut and the neurons in the heart and all the interactions they're having with things that have different DNA than us affecting what we do.
And also, this is something I've been thinking about, is like how much data we're eating, which is equivalent to Twinkies.
It's like you eat a bunch of Twinkies, your body starts hurting, then you're just slurping up whatever the fuck on the phone, right?
Which I, by the way, I'm talking about me.
This is what I do.
You know, my bouncing around from like Drudge Report to Huffington Report to Reddit Conspiracy to Reddit What the Fuck.
Zip-popping.
How long before you're looking at like a zip-popping video?
And then that takes you down into a place of like, oh, let's just move to animal cysts.
And then you fall asleep, you wake up screaming.
And that's the equivalent of getting like gas, isn't it?
From eating like a huge Taco Bell meal.
And instead of farting, you're just screaming in the middle of the night because you dreamed a cult was dragging you into the forest.
It's like, this is, to me, we seem to have not quite acknowledged that data is like a food, and that so much of the weirdness that people are showing these strange behaviors, it's got to be because of the crazy shit they're sucking into their optic nerves, right?
It's also the ability to affect people very rapidly.
Whether to get a reaction from someone positive or negative.
People are so addicted to that.
I watch people getting these Twitter beefs back and forth.
Fucking smart people, man.
A smart friend of mine who I respect greatly tried to get me to retweet something mean that he was saying to someone else.
I'm like, get the fuck out of here.
What are you doing?
What are you doing with your time?
We get...
One thing that I've done over the last week, we did a podcast with Bert and Tom and Ari, and we all looked at the amount of screen time we put on our phone, because Ari was proposing no smartphones.
Yeah.
My fucking screen time was like four hours for a day.
I was like, what?
And I'll lie to myself, and I'll say, well, most of that's email and taking care of business.
Look, man, I don't want to try to, like, enable your addiction, but honestly, I think the internet has come to depend on your wild animal attack videos.
Like, you have kind of become, like, a news outlet for the best wild animal attacks.
people need to see this shit man like we don't know i've never seen a vulture fight a rabbit or out of people do have a very weird idea of what animals are and i think that the average person i'm certainly no expert but amongst the average person i have a much better understanding of wildlife because i'm out in the wild several times a year hunting it's a different world it's a different world i'm no expert but my perception of it Is as someone who sees wildlife
in the wild.
They see dead ones that other ones have killed.
We came across a calf that had been ripped apart by wolves.
I mean, we see stuff.
And you realize what that is.
What that fucking forest really is.
It's this competing ecosystem of life.
And it's going on all the time.
And there's big things jacking smaller things.
And there's birds snatching things off the ground and snatching other birds out of trees.
And it's happening all the time.
And it's magic.
And you have to have it that way because otherwise the whole population of the planet would be overrun.
You have to have your sorrow of watching the bear tear apart the fawn.
That has to happen.
Because if it didn't happen, you'd have too many fawns.
They'd be everywhere.
You'd have too many deer.
And you have to have someone who can take care of the bears.
Otherwise, the bears will overrun the city where the humans live.
And we need to think about that.
And people don't want to.
Because they don't want to shoot yogi.
They don't want to shoot yogi and boo-boo.
They're our friends.
This is a teddy bear.
I grew up with a bear.
You don't know what a bear is.
I've seen a bear in the wild.
When you see a bear in the wild, you're like, Oh!
You don't give a fuck about me.
You're some weird heartless beast that is majestic looking who runs around eating moose and deer babies.
That's what your deal is.
You eat grass and berries and you like to lay around.
It doesn't mean you hate it, but you gotta understand what the fuck it is.
It's not like this idea that people don't want people to hunt bears in certain places, particularly like they're trying to regulate the size of the amount of grizzly bears in certain parts of the country.
They're like, hey, we need to keep a handle on this.
A couple people get mauled.
People start walking through Yellowstone and get attacked.
It happens a little bit more rapidly.
The numbers get to a certain...
These things have no fear of people.
We can actually help the population if they hand out bear tags.
People start freaking out.
You can't kill the bears.
You can't kill the bears.
Don't you kill the bears.
There's a reason why there's no fucking bears in California, Duncan.
I'm always getting suggested videos from your podcast.
And I saw one because I've been cutting down my meat consumption.
Good for you.
But that doesn't mean I don't eat meat.
I just want to cut it down a little bit.
And I have...
I've been feeling a kind of enjoyable from time to time sense of, you know that, I don't know if you let yourself do this, you probably don't, but that feeling of like kind of bullshit, like, I'm a little better now, right?
And I was really like, I wasn't like overt, it wasn't like hyper obnoxious, you know, but just the kind of sense of like, I did it.
I cut down my beef consumption and I'm eating, you know, I'm eating, you know, a cheese here and there and Anyway, this video popped up, and it's some guest, I don't know who it was, talking about the number of animals that die in a bean field.
Like any bean field that you see, so many animals just ground up and murdered.
And it was great, because I realized, like, oh, of course, yeah, right.
The trick I was trying to play on myself is the 13th floor shit.
But it's a bit of a cop-out even saying that, my saying that, because the reality is there's another solution.
The solution is organic gardening, right?
So you can organically garden.
If you get a plot of land and get some friends together, you could all grow enough vegetables so you don't have to take place with large-scale agriculture.
Or if you're dealing, rather, with large-scale agriculture.
That's the problem.
The problem is we have to feed, just in LA alone, the greater Los Angeles area, what is it, like 20 million-something people?
That's so many goddamn people.
No one's growing anything other than weed.
So what do we have?
What do we have?
Someone has to grow this fucking food for us.
So they have to do it large-scale.
And when they do it large-scale, it involves combines.
And those fucking things are indiscriminate.
They're just chewing up the ground.
And things get caught up in it.
And that's why when they clean fields, when they pick whatever they're growing, you always see vultures.
After they run the combine, you see vultures circling the fields.
Also, the hilarious thing when it comes to assigning levels of sentience and then based on that, deciding if you should eat something or not, you run into like a lot of weird problems, which is like, number one, you're assuming...
A lot.
Just because they don't have this sort of nervous system you have.
I mean, and who knows?
We project most of everything we are into the world, and we don't really know what the phenomenon is.
But I saw some, like, video of an ant taking care of the ant's baby.
And I don't know if you've probably heard about how trees communicate with the...
And like how they'll send nutrients to their children.
And then you start running into, I think, which is a really fascinating problem, which is what if it's all alive and sentient and feeling for real?
What if there is...
Throughout the entire universe, just a sentient field of consciousness that is interacting with matter in a way that it produces what we call life, and that life is feeling terror, love, maybe in different ways than we would understand it, but it's still there.
Occam's the simplest, but it's also the most boring.
Like, you know, these crazy fucking UFOs.
I'm sorry if you've talked about this a bunch on the podcast, but the UFOs that we're seeing, that the, you know, Navy is releasing these videos of these Tic Tacs zipping around.
And it's Navy pilots.
It's not the people we interviewed in that show.
It's Navy pilots who are like, yeah, I don't know what the fuck this is.
And...
I have great conversations with Uber drivers.
And we were talking about it, and a lot of them are programmers and shit.
And this guy was like, it's probably a glitch in the type of radar they're using.
I felt bad for them because they didn't understand what had happened to them.
They had gotten caught in this weird loop of looking for secrets and looking for mysteries to be solved and looking for hidden conspiracies and they get caught in that.
And some of that shit is real, which is part of the problem.
Some of it you can come across.
The Gulf of Tonkin and the Northwoods, Operation Northwoods, you can come across a bunch of them that are real and raw.
And you can see how they put that together.
You're like, what?
You can see real crazy conspiring.
And then you can get lost and think it's everywhere.
The radar team didn't believe what they were seeing, chalking up the anomalies to an equipment malfunction, but after they determined that everything was operating as it should, they began detecting instances which the AAVs dropped with astounding speed to lower busier airspace.
They approached the Princeton's commander about taking action.
He said, I was chomping at the bit.
I really wanted to intercept these things.
What?
We have the fucking craziest people in this country.
Two fighters were diverted to intercept one of the strange objects.
When they first arrived on the scene, the pilots didn't see any flying objects, but they did observe what the lead pilot, Commander David Fravor, later referred to as a disturbance in the ocean.
The water was churning with white waves breaking over what looked like a large object just under the surface.
Then they noticed one of the objects flying about 50 feet above the water.
But going into the ocean part, that's the part I like the best because that kind of lines up with hollow earth theory and maybe they're flying down in the center of the earth.
I was going to bring this up in the middle of what you guys were talking.
There's a program here that was going on.
The AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was going on.
Just the AATIP. I'm going to fuck you out of your money, but I'm just going to use the AATIP. $22 million is what their budget was in 2012. That's a lot of money.
It doesn't still go on, but apparently it does.
Louis Elizondo says it's still operating, and he is part of To The Stars.
Well, I've been thinking this for a long time, that maybe ideas are living things.
And these ideas, even though they...
you think of them as something your brain's creating.
And maybe your brain is creating it.
But maybe it uses your brain to create it so that it...
it can manifest itself in the real world.
So when you have ideas, whether ideas that turn out to be art or music, like Jimi Hendrix comes out with Voodoo Child, you are inspired by that.
You see it, it gives you a great feeling.
You exchange currency to listen to it.
I mean, just that one song.
How much money has been generated by Voodoo Child?
I mean, it's one of the greatest songs in the history of the known universe.
The opening guitar riff, I've listened to that a thousand times.
Easy.
I listen to it all the time.
Whenever I'm like, I need a pick-me-up.
I mean, it's just, it's a masterpiece.
It's a masterpiece of music.
And where'd that idea come from?
Well, it came from his brain.
Right.
But where was it before it was in his brain?
How did his brain cook it up?
And what is it?
What are these things that are just floating around that you grab out of culture?
And how do you turn them into something that people go crazy for?
Because occasionally a guy will take one of those ideas and make Voodoo Child or make someone else's song or make someone else's Or, you know, make a fucking building that's inspiring.
I've been studying Buddhism and any Buddhists out there, if I fuck this up, I'm sorry if you're more advanced or know more about it.
So I'm probably going to say the words wrong and stuff.
It's really interesting.
So it's like there's like eight consciousnesses.
I think it's eight.
And the sixth one is your thought, the continuum of thoughts, right?
So that's like where most people hang out and they think that's who they are, is the infinite cycle of repeating thoughts in their head.
So below that is your senses.
And then the one right above that is the seventh, and that's what is considered your subconscious in the West.
So that's where all your memories are.
That's where all your, like, just all the shit you can't remember that happened to you that's stuck back there that appears in people's ARP or appears in your neurosis or whatever.
And then above that is the eighth consciousness.
And that's the stored...
Experience of all human beings that's happening.
It's like the global mind or it's… Akashic records?
Yeah, the Akashic records, yeah.
And so basically that one drips down like water in a cave.
It drips down into your subconscious, which drips down into your thoughts.
So when you're having these thoughts, according to this model, it's not necessarily your thoughts.
You're getting a kind of distillate that's rolling down through the… It's a projection of some, like, shared mind.
I was listening to a podcast, the Stephen Rinella podcast, Meat Eater, and there was a guy who was an expert in moving wildlife around, how sometimes they'll move wolves into certain particular areas.
They had too many moose in this one island.
And so they moved wolves in.
But the wolves, there wasn't enough of them, and they were on an island, so they all started fucking each other, and they were fucking their kids, and their DNA just was a mess.
Yeah, just all sorts of inbreeding, and it was just terrible, which is...
Also fascinating it's like Nature's like no no no you can't just stand around and fuck each other You gotta get out there like nature even with animals nature's like no no no this is not the game we're playing The game we're playing is not male and female the game we're playing is male that doesn't know female That's the game because you can't fuck your sister and you can't fuck your mom stop if you do it a few times But after a while your kids are just not gonna come out good, which is weird, right?
Like how come?
If you're good and your sister's good, how come if you have sex, there's a high likelihood that the kid won't be good?
There's something wrong with the child.
And if the child fucks the sister, and then they have a child, it's even more likely.
This is what inbreeding is, and this is one of the reasons why you have a lot of problems with certain dog species.
It's a weird little thing that nature's got built into it.
And there was one of them that I watched on the Harpy Eagle, which is a beautiful animal, where this guy who was a photographer, who was one of the scientists who was studying him, got attacked.
The eagle swooped in and fucking took a swing at him.
If I was in Vegas and I had to bet whether or not you looked up the weight of the biggest eagle, I would bet a million dollars that you have definitely looked that up.
It's this woman who's like, I wish I could remember her name, but she goes up to, I think, Tibet.
And they took her in and taught her how to hunt, because it's the way they hunt, with birds.
The whole relationship you have, you sort of have to raise the falcon from a baby, and they're connected to it.
But it's the most insane thing to witness, because it's such a remote place.
And it's such a, like, traditional people.
They don't watch TV. They don't know, you know, they're not, like, absorbed in shit like we are.
They're just out there hunting with giant birds.
And, you know, they figured out how to do that.
You know, that's, to me, all the stuff, like horse, ride, any human-animal relationship...
When you think back to the first person who saw a falcon and was like, I'm going to catch it, and I'm going to train it to catch rabbits so we can eat.
You know, I used to find them headless in my backyard.
There was like a little bit of a war between the hawks in my yard.
We put in this...
of the yard and the hawks couldn't figure out the fence and they fucking yeah dank and they a couple of them got k-o'd one of them one of them we managed to save we brought him to like a wildlife rescue place and they rehabilitated him and saved him but another couple of them died and then we would find dead hawk so i think that one of them was like the dominant hawk and he died And then other ones just started moving into the area.
Like they were flying around my chicken coop and like little juvenile hawks.
They were kind of assholes.
Almost like teenagers.
I was like, what the fuck is going on here?
And then I'd find one of them with his head missing.
I think there was a fucking time where people's neocortex hadn't formed enough to separate their subconscious from their conscious so they were like hallucinating more and also they were like they had a kind of they were projecting a lot of crazy shit into the world also imagine when you found out you could lie like the first liars yeah this is like there were people that would have language and then people once they started communicating like hey who fucking ate the tomatoes?
Well, I guess you could say lying is the equivalent of camouflage, in the sense that when you see some of these insane animals, bugs in particular, that look like flowers, that look like...
To me, what the funniest fucking thing is how much we lie to ourselves.
That's where it gets amazing.
It's like, you know, you were talking about, and I've done the exact same thing with screen time when you're presented that humiliating number of hours and you've been telling friends you're busy and you're fucking looking at that just thinking like, dude, I've been like...
You know, looking at bullshit, but then before you do that, you're like, but it's my job, you know, I've got to kind of be online.
It's like, no, you're addicted to technology.
And because you can't stand the fact that you don't have the discipline to stop using it, you would rather make up a story involving some absolutely verifiable bullshit, so that you don't have to deal with the fact that you aren't in full control of yourself.
And it's a non-rewarding addiction, which is really strange.
It's like when you're looking at stories on, like, the Apple news feed or something, you're scrolling, looking for something that's going to captivate you.
Maybe not a purpose in the way you're going to be as a human, but a purpose in the sense of if you apply a little bit of mindfulness when you're using your phone, how do I feel right now?
You know what I'm talking about?
How do I fucking feel?
You'll realize you feel a specific way.
It's a kind of like numbness.
There's a quality of like, a kind of like sedated numbness to the hypnotic state you've been lulled into by the algorithms.
And there's some pleasant kind of like, I guess you could compare it to some like low level euphoric painkiller, but not very euphoric, mostly just a mild numbness that is pretty good at turning off Anxiety.
Or you could at least displace your own personal anxiety.
Like, if I'm scanning through my phone, and I find the inevitable bad news, whatever form it's in, I could pretend that my anxiety is related to that news, you know?
And then that's when you get people who are very anxious, and I've seen it.
Who was that famous?
Some person tweeted, I'm here in this beautiful place, and I can't enjoy it because of our president.
You know what I mean?
It's like, whoa, I'm not sure that's the real reason why you can't enjoy that place.
I think it might be, actually, that you haven't dealt with the fact that you're freaking the fuck out, right?
That, to me, is the purpose of a phone.
It's very good at tricking yourself into thinking that the reason you feel like shit is because of something happening in the world.
Sometimes you have, like, these legitimate thoughts.
And when you have these legitimate thoughts, meaning, like, something you're working on, something you're, like, whether it's an idea you're trying to do on stage or something else, another project that you're doing, these things, they require your bandwidth, right?
And when you're always looking at your phone, it chips away percentages of your bandwidth.
Ten here, five there, twenty there, seven there.
And you don't think about it because, nope, I'm still concentrating on the project.
I'm still on the project.
The project, the project, the project.
But really, no.
Really, you're in two rivers at the same time.
You're in this wacky river of nonsense and wondering who got this and how much they're getting in this divorce and who died in the Dominican Republic.
Oh, my God.
Another person?
Another tourist?
Oh, my God.
If you want to look at all the bad stuff that happens amongst 7 billion people, you have to think of all the interactions that humans have.
Literally billions of interactions every day.
People constantly, and occasionally one goes fucking Western!
One goes sideways, and that's the one you see on YouTube.
Jesus Christ, this world's going to shit!
And then you watch another one, and you watch another one, and you watch...
Infectious diseases and snake bites and what happens when you get necropsy, when your fucking flesh starts falling off.
And it's like, then that gets inside of you and now you're just a turbulent, you have a turbulent self that has digested a version of the world that's only half true.
And so because of that, you're going to be half a person because you're not looking into like your own, whatever the fuck you are.
We were talking about the sex drive being this insane, compulsory engine inside every sentient being that I know of.
Of course, there's exceptions.
But like...
This is, if you're writing a computer code, right?
This would be a line of code, right?
It keeps you going, keeps you going, keeps you going.
So to me, something that's fucking astoundingly weird is why the fuck can people not sit still and be quiet for periods exceeding 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, literally the least Metabolically, outside of sleeping, right?
You're not really exerting energy when you're sitting still and being quiet.
You're not really doing much.
And yet, if you ask...
I could ask a person if they wanted to go for a walk.
Sure, I'll go for a walk.
But if you're like, do you want to sit with me for like 10 minutes?
Quietly?
It's weird.
I get it.
They're like, no, I don't want to.
I'm not into that.
No, I don't want to do that.
What the fuck is that?
To me, that...
Not that I believe in simulation theory, but if I wanted to prove it or play around with it, the idea that we're non-player characters in some super advanced simulator, one of the ways I would experiment would be like, oh, sit still.
Why the fuck can't you sit still?
Why is it that suddenly your mind goes insane?
Why is it suddenly that you gotta get out?
Why do you feel bored or crazy or fucking overheated or anxious or nervous?
yeah want to contribute more yeah people i mean i think it's that's what someone might say is an explanation but i think the fucking real reason is like people are carrying a disordered universe inside of them and when they sit down and there's nothing to look at except what's around them
they're forced to deal with the fact that actually a lot of the disturbance in their life is more related to an interior like maelstrom of thoughts and unexplored feelings and then this is just basically shaping their entire existence they're They're, like, in every single moment recreating a universe of disorder.
And then getting really upset because if you see disorder in the world and it keeps reappearing, like your friend who's like, why do I get taken in by these people all the time?
It's like, well, you get taken in by these people all the time because inside of you is a behavior pattern that is replicating this phenomena.
And you're pretending that it's not in you to the point where it's a mystery.
It's like, you know, when I drive somewhere, I'm not like, why did my car drive me here?
You know?
Unless I'm like fucking high out of my mind and shouldn't be driving.
Having an addictive personality, man, I like it because it's like it's fun to play around with it, meaning that when I am reaching for the thing, whatever it may be, that I know I shouldn't be doing.
Well, I like watching the rationalization that my mind starts spitting out for it.
You know, like, oh, I'm doing this because it's like, you know, I'm relaxing.
You know, it's a celebratory moment.
I feel a little bummed out.
And you look at like the instant way your mind tries to come up with a bullshit story to write off the fact that you are riding around in a vehicle that you can't control.
And that is not a very appealing way to be.
No one wants to hear the pilot say, guys, Taking my hands off the wheel.
Let's just see what happens for the next 10 minutes up here.
And yet, their whole lives are like that.
They've just taken their hands off the wheel, but then they're trying to make sense of it, you know?
Like, how many times do you meet an alcoholic who hasn't accepted yet they're an alcoholic?
And they're, like, telling you all these reasons for...
You know, the narrow band that we can live in, we're so fragile as an organism that we should be terrified of this giant nuclear explosion that's a million times bigger than the earth.
I mean it is, when you think about it, it's like we've built this fragile civilization using this super advanced, brand new, interconnective, technological matrix that is dependent on satellites giving GPS coordinates to keep everything running and we're right next to a ball of fire that has historically,
from time to time, blasted so much fucking crazy shit at our planet There was a time that it caused like telegram wires to spark.
It's like if that shit hits the satellites, they're gonna go out.
And that, so, this is, like, a reality that nobody seems to really, like, think about.
I mean, that, to me, is the funniest thing when everyone's fighting each other.
We're all, like...
Furious at whoever the fuck.
It's like nobody wants to accept, like, mountains fall out of the sky, the sun from time to time burps fire so bright that it causes fires to break out on the planet, and then all the other shit we don't know about.
Dude, it's like our entire civilization is living the way like a middle-aged alcoholic who's starting to realize all the trouble they cause lives, but still gonna keep drinking kind of like...
It's like, if you look at like our whole species...
as one thing it's like right now we're dealing with like the same thing maybe smokers deal with after a lifetime of smoking like suddenly health effects are starting to happen right we've had like a a nice run but now we're starting to get a little bit of payback for all the decisions past generations have made we've got radiation pouring into the ocean the ice caps are melting and then on top of that The majority of us can't deal with that.
We either say fake news or we say, I'm going to be dead anyway, man.
Those are the two things.
Because to me, the fucking amazing thing about being a human is that we are like a technological hive that has built itself around a planet using the materials of the planet to make technology.
And we're still at the point of hive life where we're pretending there's different...
Bees!
When we're all the same fucking bee!
You know, it's just some of us are running weird operating systems and we can't accept the fact that it's like, listen, we're a fucking hive of super-vance primates that are all living together in a hive.
Because that's the overview effect, man, where astronauts talk about flying over and looking down.
It's like, it's all the same.
The cities are mostly all the same.
And all the structures all look pretty much the same.
Of course, it's a fucking hive.
A schizophrenic hive.
Where pieces of the hive are like, yeah, over there!
We gotta bomb that part of the hive!
Because that part of the hive is different than us.
So that part of the hive wants to hurt us.
You know, pheromones being released, you know, not by queen bees, but by influencers.
You know, like the news, the media, blasting out this data pheromone that gets us ready for the wars, gets us ready for the violence, tries to justify it, rationalize it.
And then there's other weird new, like, little mini queen bees popping up, releasing weird pheromones.
The influencers, you know, they're like...
Some of them are making people dress a certain way, fashion or whatever.
Some of them are making people freak out.
Some of them are making people more calm.
But we're dealing with the fact that we're all starting to wake up, right?
We're all going to have to wake up to the fact that we're all the same thing, living in a hive.
And if we don't come to that epiphany as an individual, I mean, we're probably fucked.
Like, we figured out how to split the atom, and we've got the technology as it's coming in is making the ability – It's like – I'm sorry.
And it's like, the thing is, the impulse is noble.
But unfortunately, it's like trying to build a fucking second story house when you haven't built the first story.
Which is like, you need to, like, get your own house in order.
And then maybe there's some teaching, but usually by the time that happens, you're not a talker, you know?
And so, to me, that has been, like, a real exciting thing to realize.
Jack Kornfield says this – I'm sorry if I've said this before – tend to the part of the garden you can touch.
And that's it.
So, it's like – To me, it's just a big relief.
Number one, you can't do shit for anybody else but yourself.
Number two, you don't need, none of us know, we don't have to impose some moral thing on you, but there is one actionable thing, an action anyone can take, which is amoral, which is find out who you are.
That's it.
Find out who you are.
Who are you really?
What are you?
Explore that shit.
And then see how you start changing.
I think that's a real pragmatic solution to all this stuff.
And actionable, too.
And it's like, you want to find out who you are?
By rubbing mayonnaise all over your dick and letting your dog lick it off.
Well, you can, but if you do that, you're going to suddenly, and it'll be, I think for anybody who's done shitty things, the moment you just say it, you get to be standing again on the real ground, like the real terrain, instead of like the bullshit.
You've been living in, but when you decide not to do that, then you do have this, like, it's like the Uncanny Valley.
Like, you have this, like, android quality to you because you're not reflecting reality.
You're reflecting reality after you put lipstick on it and sunglasses and combed its hair.
Put some perfume on it, got a nose job, got its ass, got ass implants, and that's your fucking reality is this super plastic, like someone who's been getting plastic surgery for years.
And so you're pretending that that's your existence.
You see it, man, when people are getting sentenced for killing people, and they're like, the look on their fucking face is like...
So confused because they have created this valley in between that person and the person they are.
They've split in half, essentially, and they can't deal with it.
That's why so many people who have murdered people will say, I wasn't there.
I don't remember.
It was a dream.
I didn't know.
I didn't do it.
And Gacy, I should be sentenced for running a funeral home without a license.
He was saying when he was out of town, people were burying dead kid bodies under his fucking house.
Because otherwise you have to deal with the fact that you are a murderer, that you killed fucking, you strangled fucking kids, that you dressed like a fucking clown, you know, and like killed kids.
Like, it's so unpalatable to deal with that shit.
Because you're just a crazy lunatic who is out of control.
So you'd rather make up a story.
Usually it's conspiratorial.
Somebody's like, hey man, you know where you can bury those kid bodies?
Because, like, guess what he did was he put OJ's video where he was talking, and in the background he had someone screaming, help, call the police, help, help.
And so then OJ sends him this direct message, allegedly.
Norm said, hey, Juice, I just wanted to tell you that through that video, I know the golf course that's behind you, so I could figure out where your house is, and I wouldn't do that, but somebody else might.
Well, for someone like you or someone like me, it's easy for them to do it because they basically got a library of all the sounds that we can make with our mouth.
And so they put it in a database and then they can get you to say words you've never said before in an order that you've never said them before in a way that you can kind of distinguish.
For now, I kind of can hear that it's fake, but it was me talking about sponsoring a hockey team filled with all chimpanzees.
And teaching chimps to play hockey, which sounds exactly like something I would do.
And it's close.
I mean, they had one a few years ago that they did with Ronald Reagan, where they had a fake speech.
And this was way, way before the internet.
And someone had pieced together a fake...
collaboration of a bunch of different Ronald Reagan speeches and then used them with sound editing and turned it into a whole statement that he never gave before and then the White House went on television and showed how they did it and showed on the news all the different speeches that they pulled from and the actual sentences where they pulled from they showed it to you so there could be no denying someone I forget what it was Maybe it was the Russians.
To me, fuck the sun and all the things to worry about.
This shit is really intense, man.
Like, you know about the hostage, the fucking weird hostage phone thing people are doing where they're like, you get a phone call from the phone number of your wife and you answer it and it's like, we've kidnapped your wife.
You know, it's someone freaking out in the background.
They're like, send us money, or she's fucked.
And like, they've been, right now what they've been doing is they've been, you know, someone will say, let me talk to her.
And they just hand it to some lady.
Who's like, I didn't fucking have that!
And you think, oh my god, it's her.
I'll give you whatever you want.
People have been sending them money, you know?
And, like, when you consider, like, what happens when deepfake technology intersects with just the ability to, like, call people from spoofed numbers, and that suddenly, if someone gets your phone number list, they're going to be able to call your friends as you.
And record conversations as they sort of dredge up, you know, who knows, whatever they want.
Maybe they want to blackmail you.
Maybe they want to get money.
Maybe they want to embarrass you.
That, to me, is like so spectacularly fucking weird that we're going to end up having to have passwords that we tell each other away from our Lexus, which is like, listen, if I call you and I'm seeming strange...
You know, the password is like, go for 69. Otherwise, it's not me.
You know?
Because that's a reality.
I mean, just look what people are already fucking doing with spoofing numbers.
That's fucked up, man.
And like, that aspect of it, and also just like supply and demand.
In other words, there's one Joe Rogan, right?
Right now.
But if an AI starts duplicating you, And improving on you?
Like, and I'm saying, you know, five or ten years.
No offense, man, but maybe an AI could, like, turn you twice as smart, you know, make you, like, whatever.
Who knows what?
And then suddenly, you're no longer in demand in the sense that once the Joe Rogan AI package goes on the dark web or makes its way into wherever, people are going to just be able to download you and have conversations with you and make videos.
You know what I... That, to me, is the...
One of the most bizarre realities that we are entering into is one where you're going to go on YouTube and there's going to be a video of you Looks like you, sounds like you, but it's like 50 times funnier than you, 50 times cooler than you, 50 times smarter than you, because it's an AI pulling from the internet.
It's just you, but better.
And no one's going to want to watch you anymore, because they're like, I love the real Rogan, but I want to watch the Rogan whose brain is functioning 50 times the speed of a normal human brain, because that guy, wow!
People were pointing back to this being like the Weeping Angel program where the CIA can use your TV to listen to your conversations and they are doing that and they're recording it.
You know, the implication that they, in your deep fake, that they sent out to the world was it already happened.
You know, they're like, how do you know this hasn't already happened?
In other words, like, how do we know we're not duplicates?
How do we know we're not one of an infinite number, an array of, like, you know, versions of us that are being populated all over some server somewhere?
Well, that's the thing about the simulation theory is that one day we – if things keep going the way they are – I was going to bring this up when we were talking about people like looking at cities and looking at the grids and looking at the hive.
Like what are these cities doing?
Well, they're spreading and they're being productive.
They're making things and they're making better things all the time.
Well, if they're making better things all the time, what are they interested in?
Well, they're interested in computers and CGI and artificial intelligence and artificial life.
And they're all definitely moving in some sort of a greater technological dependency.
Like, we're pretty dependent now, but it's going to get greater and greater.
We get more and more.
Well, one day, they're going to have...
A reality that isn't tangible in the sense that Without this system, you wouldn't be able to experience it.
But it will be a reality once you're in the system.
Once you're in the system, you will feel your elbows on the oak desk.
You will feel the sweat on your palms.
You'll feel the sunglasses on your nose.
You'll feel all those things.
So who's to say that that's not real?
Well, if that can happen one day, if they can create an artificial reality that you cannot discern from the reality that you're currently experiencing, how do you know it hasn't already happened?
You don't.
You don't.
And, you know, some super fucking smart people think that we should keep open the possibility that that is what we're operating under.
Or that the stability and the rigidity of the dimension that we exist in is not nearly as firm and not nearly as permanent as we like to think it is.
Which is one of the reasons why psychedelics is so exciting.
And so, there's so...
They're transformative, but they're also...
They illuminate the possibility of others, of other things, other dimensions, other life forms, other levels of consciousness, other ways of interacting with each other, especially mushrooms.
Well, kind of all of them.
All of them, when you take a transformative dose, you experience some weird thing where you're like, oh, this is possible too.
Who's to say that if – human neurochemistry, right?
If that's what's causing depression and elation and dopamine and serotonin and all these different wonderful things, it's what causes melatonin and all these different things that happen when you're sleeping and then the psychedelic ones like the DMT. Who's to say that we have to exist with this mixture, right?
Who's to say that life with a thicker mixture isn't also possible and might be going on around us all the time?
There might be these porous...
Sort of entryways into these other dimensions that are consistently open and closed, and they're constantly around us all the time.
But when we're just in straight normal consciousness that we experience without perturbing it with alcohol or pot or psychedelics, we want to think that this is reality.
This is rigid.
This is it.
But maybe it's a reality.
Maybe there's a fuckload of them.
Maybe when you make decisions, you enter into different ones.
Maybe you're constantly shifting the one that's around you and how you interact with people.
If you just think about how little we understand about consciousness, about what happens when you die, what happens when you sleep, how little we know about what is going on when you're communicating with people, what is going on when you're interacting with people, where are these fucking ideas coming from?
Are these ideas little life forms in a non-observed state?
And like, you know, as I've been taught by some people, the...
You know, if you start breaking it down, just logically, like, you know, your past, for example, you know, you ever do that, spend any time with your memories, and you realize, like, well, your most vivid memory, whatever it may be, You can't really taste what you were eating or feel the euphoria that you were feeling or the fear you were feeling or whatever.
Because if you did, then the memory would not work for a person who was trying to like stay alive.
Because if you just remember the last time you got punched in the face, you would feel it.
And also, if you could remember tastes, you wouldn't be so inclined to eat because you could just go back and think to the last chocolate bar you ate and you would taste it.
Obviously, if you could remember orgasms as they are, you wouldn't really need to fuck.
You would just think about having sex whenever you had it and you would come.
You would feel like you were coming.
So, if we look at memories experientially, there's a lot of senses that aren't gratified by memory.
And also, if you look at them from the visual field, Even the most profoundly, quote, photographic memory is wavery at best.
It's not HD. It certainly wouldn't be a 4K TV. It's got a kind of, like, quality to it that is just, you know, it's a little transparent.
Yeah.
When we think about the future, obviously that doesn't exist.
Like, there's just no future.
Nothing is outside of this point in time.
And so then, now you've basically, just from a simple analysis of your memories, which a lot of people imagine that's who they are, like they're a snake.
In the present moment's the head.
In the back is the past with all their memories sort of intertwined.
But you realize, like, no, that's really a foggy approximation of what happened at best.
And you really don't remember most of the shit you did anyway.
Like, you don't remember what you ate three days ago, ten days ago.
So, then you realize your whole past, the thing you've been using to define yourself as a person, you barely remember it.
And the parts you do remember it, they're not really clear.
So, that's gone.
Now, that's death.
You're dead.
Anything that happened before this moment, that's death.
It's gone.
There's just this.
For real.
Now, there might be some neurological encoding, but there's no past.
When he does that, he knows that he had those experiences.
He learned how to do that.
He has a skill.
He has a very unusual skill.
Like a breakdancer.
They know they can do that crazy shit where they can hop around on one arm, with their feet up in the air crisscrossing and going into the lotus position.
I think that if that has happened, it's one of the memories...
My brain's like, we're not going to remember that.
We're not carrying that with us.
Too much.
Because it's a hostage situation, let's face it.
Once they sit down and start strumming that shit, if you're the guy who walks out...
Look at that fucking hater.
He can't play guitar.
His ego's being challenged.
When the reality is you're like, I don't want to deal with it, man.
I don't want to deal with all the levels of having to face the fact that you fired a neuron that made it seem okay that in the middle of a party where nobody was playing music, or maybe music was playing, you turned it off.
I mean, I think if you look at, like, anytime I've done that shit, I'm too high, I'm getting paranoid, and I'm trying to get some affirmation from a friend.
You know, that's usually the feeling is one of need.
Like, you know, like when you're around someone and you realize, like...
They want me to compliment them right now.
And you feel the...
Like when they open the fucking doors on a spaceship, they temporarily open the doors of the infinite vacuum of it.
You'll be known forever as the great sandcastle maker.
That's the funny thing.
And also add to that the very same sort of person who is intent on getting you to acknowledge their fucking sandcastles, which is a great description of it, because no matter what you're doing, it's a fucking sandcastle.
Look at those glaciers.
Whatever you're doing, forget it.
But then you have these people who on top of this sick need for a person to affirm their existence by complimenting their ridiculous sandcastle art, they also want to leave a legacy.
That's the funniest shit!
It's like, it's not enough that we worship you now.
Right, but if you like life, why wouldn't you want to do it again?
What's that?
If you like life, do you like life?
Yes.
If you found out that this was what you were going to do forever and ever and ever, and it's going to repeat itself over and over and over again, would you be like, no, it's pointless!
It's pointless now, and it's finite.
Is it different if it's pointless and it's infinite?
Is it different?
Is it different?
Don't you just enjoy life?
Is that the key?
The key to just enjoy life?
That's where it's ironic when you pick up a skill like learn to play the piano or learn to do backflips or in my case learn to do martial arts is that you actually become a better person through learning how to do something because it's hard so you learn about yourself.
Right.
shit that you tell yourself like to really get good at something like if you want to get that good at doing backflips man you got to fucking actually practice you can't bullshit yourself oh i really don't need to come into that you know to do what that guy can do you got to fucking practice and by practicing you put yourself through this rigid exercise routine and you do it correctly and you exert yourself and you have
it requires 100 of your focus and in doing so whether it's playing piano or throwing kicks or whatever the fuck it is in doing so you understand Yeah.
So even though, ironically, you're kind of defining who you are as a person, and you're giving yourself extra clout because you're the fucking man dunking a ball into a net.
I'm the fucking man.
Everybody watching?
Watch this.
Yeah.
But by doing that, you actually learn how to become a better person, too.
Because it's hard.
Because it's hard to do.
And if you can figure it out, the puzzle will help you get a better hold of all your human skills.
Because it'll be a difficult thing.
If you really want to get good at something, if you really want to leave behind a legacy, you have to achieve a level of focus and a level of intense focus.
Thinking and concentration that most people are just gonna peter out before they get to that spot.
I mean that's what I love about what you're talking about is it's a force field In between you and an elite, like fuck the Illuminati, the force field of the learning curve separates every single person from a terrain that cannot be reached with money.
Like, I don't care how rich you are.
If you want to learn how to do a backflip, you might be able to pay for great trainers, but you still got to do the fucking work.
So this is cool, because now you enter into a realm that is inaccessible by money, is inaccessible by power, but is weirdly generally accessible by anybody.
In other words, the only thing keeping you from whatever the fucking thing is you want to get good at to show yourself that it is possible to...
Leave the reality that you're in and enter a completely different reality.
Because for me, if suddenly I was in a world where I could do fucking backflips, might as well be an alternate dimension.
Like if I got home and did a backflip in front of my wife, she would probably be more amazed than if I levitated.
You know what I mean?
She'd be like, what the fuck have you done?
Reality must be fragmenting.
So it's like, in other words, the you, wherever you're at, whatever the thing is that you are, there's always this interesting, mountainous, rugged terrain separating you.
From a completely different universe where you can do backflips, play the piano, play the guitar, whatever the fucking specific thing it is you want to pick up.
That's kind of cool to me.
It's like the only thing keeping you from it is consistency.
It's not money, usually, unless it's like you want to be a falconeer or some shit.
You got to get a falcon.
But in general, you know, you could like...
That's what I love about that Goggins, man.
I like that guy.
It's weird how much he impacts me even though I'm still not fucking But in the morning, I will look!
At one point, I thought someone was running next to him, filming him, before I realized it was a car.
And I'm like, I want to know who's filming Goggins.
Yeah, well, I mean, I like both, but I just, I like the, with musical synthesis, I really, there's like a weird kind of philosophy behind it, which is, not only do you not have to worry about making, you know, whatever it is, an album or something, but...
Kind of like, allow yourself a break from imagining you even need to be musical.
Just like, you know, you give kids pots and pans and they fucking bang it together.
A friend of mine, Billy Mays III, he's actually the son of Billy Mays, he travels around playing music under a name called Infinite Third, and he does a thing called Mouth Council, which sounds like almost what you're doing, where he takes a loop pedal, has a microphone, he starts and makes a sound, and then he passes it around to the next person.
It's like, you would have it, you make a sound.
Then Joe would make a sound, and then by the end of the eight-person, nine-person thing, he knows how to use the pedal enough that it becomes basically a song, almost like a song.
It's just a droning loop, so it's not really super musical, but it's almost like this, and he does very similar things by himself.
It gets real cool, but it's just like what you're saying though, it's not music to listen to necessarily.
It's got structure.
It's to have on and like the background sort of and like whatever you're doing really can be used in lots of ways.
Whoever this is is clearly a great musician, but also you can just enjoy dialing in these insane howling alien noises for no reason other than you just are trying to make sounds, and that's it.
I mean, it really is.
You take that and combine it with most any psychedelic Marijuana, and what you have there is the ultimate fucking spaceship, essentially.
That you're just like, you don't need, we're just talking about how, the idea behind this is you can get good at it, and these things are so precisely dialed in that if you wanted to be like the, you know, they teach you music just from interacting with it, but also there's just this visceral, like, pleasure of making noises through synths, you know?
You know, like, you hear this, like, usually you find out this way down the line, but, like, some phenomena in society was, like, cooked up in a boardroom, right?
Like, for example, let's say, I don't know, you made Twinkies, and you realize, like, shit, man, people, like, really getting into this...
Ketogenic diet and working out and there could be a potential, you probably have some AI saying like, hey, we've got like a health craze predicted for 2021, meaning Twinkie sales are going to drop by like 50% because guys don't want to be fat.
And so then you start disseminating into the world like, alright.
Let's come up with this thing.
What's a way to call somebody out of shape but like to connect it to their virility because they're a dad bot.
Yeah, dad bot.
So then you start getting it out there.
Like, you know, it helps if any product that is like bad for you kind of depends on two things.
That it tastes fucking good.
And two, that you can trick yourself into believing it's worth eating, right?
Like it needs those two things.
Like, in other words, if there was like delicious uranium, like some lunatic created like the sweetest, most flavorful uranium biscuit.
You're not going to eat that shit, you know?
You're going to go Chernobyl and fucking, oh, your stomach's going to melt at the dinner table.
But if you could come up with, like, you know, a nice IPA, like you were saying, or some kind of thing that's, oh, it's just poison, basically.
But it's really interesting when you consider his idea that at one point in time there were psychedelic cultures that really didn't have our standard intoxicants, right?
So they didn't have antidepressants.
They didn't have stimulants.
Unless it was something like coca leaves that they were eating, right?
They didn't have processed cocaine.
But what they did have was copious amounts of psilocybin.
Yeah.
Lysergic acid and different plant forms.
There was a bunch of different things the Mayans used.
Ayahuasca, DMT. There was that shaman when they found his bag.
Because it's like these, you know, as much as I love hanging out with you and, like, my friends who take psychedelics...
It's really inspiring to be around scientists who are sort of figuring out a way to translate that experience into a data set that can convince legislators to change draconian laws because they're doing the hard work.
You know, you and I, we get to go on and on and on about the multiverse and the DMT entities.
It doesn't matter if they've taken it and had a real experience where some advanced Whatever you want to call it, has appeared to them whether a part of their subconscious or an alien and said, listen, here's what's going on.
We do this with every planet.
The first step is we've got to like undercut the hierarchical centralized power structure and we know the only way to really do that is Is by teaching people that their identity as they think it is, isn't quite right.
If we can expand the human identity, selfishness goes away.
If we can get rid of the problem of trauma and people dealing with trauma by being aggressive to the outside world, Then over time, the circumference of the human identity expands beyond the perimeters of me and into us.
And if that happens, then we can enter into a type A civilization or whatever they call it, the beginning of a global civilization.
But first, we've got to get the fucking monkeys to climb down from the tree of their selfishness.
And if we can do that and we can lure a few people out of themselves, just like getting a buggy out of the tree, so that people are like, wait a minute, I don't think I'm just a me.
I think I'm connected to everything, purely interconnected.
In fact, I don't think I'm anything.
I think what I really am is the connection between me and others.
I mean, to say – yeah, because otherwise you sink into nihilism and you like imagine – What's the point, man?
Right.
That's not it at all.
It's that you don't exist in a vacuum.
It's like that's the main thing.
To me, like, the fundamental problem right now is selfishness.
It's like, when you're mad at someone on the interstate, what do they do?
Something selfish.
When you're mad at someone in your life, what do they do?
Something selfish.
When someone's mad at you, what did you do?
Something selfish.
Almost always.
And, like, this is the reality, is that selfishness is an innate quality of being a human.
We are a self.
There is a sense of a self, rather, and we feel mixed up in it, but What you realize is like, you know those fucking times where you authentically, not because you're filming it for your Instagram or whatever, help somebody, and you don't talk about it?
You just suddenly do it?
Not like giving someone money either, but you get engaged with a person, and you're there.
And then it's...
One of my favorite mushroom trips was when I started coming back, and before I really came down, I started thinking like, what was I doing?
I was doing something.
I was being something.
I was being a human.
I was being a fuck, oh fuck, I'm a human.
But for a second, I wasn't a me.
I had merged into something bigger than me.
Similarly, if you just get really engaged in helping people, you'll notice that for that amount of time, you don't feel quite as shitty.
And it's not just because you're doing something good and there's some angel casting blessings on you.
It's because you got out of yourself for a second, in the sense that you became more than just you.
You were you and the person you were helping.
And that, to me, is a really interesting aspect of where we're at as a species, is that The reality is, man, yeah, we're all special and beautiful and wonderful, but also, you're not happening in a vacuum.
You're completely, inexorably interconnected with everything, and you can't get out of that.
You're in it for real, and the boundaries you've constructed around you and whatever you think the rest of the world is, they're just in your head.
It's not real.
You made it up.
You told yourself a story and you believe that story so much.
Like the poor motherfuckers who get in like the most psychotic cults.
You know where at the end of 10 years they reveal to you some crazy, crazy shit beyond crazy?
You spent like $900,000 in this fucking thing and they're like, yeah, we all got shit out by woolly mammoths.
And now you have to be like, I fucking either believe this and dive in, or I'm like, fuck, I was wrong all this time.
Similarly, most people have constructed this ridiculous armoring boundary around them based on...
You know, this is bad, and this is good, and that's not good, and that's good, and here I am in the midst of it.
And that's a real painful situation to be in, because you have to fucking constantly exert that force field situation.
And it's really, I think, why so many people are depressed and exhausted and can't really relax.
Because how can you relax if you're constantly in a state of creating an imaginary barrier between you and infinity called yourself?
It's a really exhausting, probably, practice to be engaged in.
And it's like our whole – from like our family structures usually to like the entire way we run our government is usually centralized around one key identity.
And you've had this conversation many times on the show, which I like, the preposterous nature of a king, a president, a pope, a bishop, a world leader, a teacher, whatever the fuck it is, it's preposterous.
And it's also quite dangerous, you know, because it's like, not only do we have the situation of the parasitic friend, but even worse, you can get into the situation of the charismatic friend who's tricking you into the idea that you could do something called cosmic hitchhiking.
That's what Chogyam Trungpa calls it, which is basically the idea that, like, I'm going to use you because you are so great, and you will be the thing that helps me become a real person.
So it's the tulku system, and the way it would work would be, you know, because you have, like, if you look at the history of Tibet, it was called the Hermit Kingdom, and it was closed off from the rest of the world.
It's very hard to get in there.
Seven years in Tibet is about somebody who made it through and became friends with the Dalai Lama as a kid.
Anyway, so within this system, there is this idea that Beings reincarnate.
And if you're awakened enough, if you're like really like at the sort of last phase of the sort of, what would you call it, the cycle you were talking about earlier, then you stop losing at least some of the amnesia that happens when you get processed through the liminal in-between period called the bardo between this incarnation and the next.
So anyway, they go to children.
They put in front of them the particular items that belong to the previous incarnation that they think they are.
Oracles, visionaries bring the monks to a particular village.
Well, I think it has happened where tulkus are like, it's similar to like, what the fuck is the, what is the thing where those kids get one summer to go, like the summer of fucking?
I believe that was one of the ways they studied the impact of MDMA, wasn't it?
If you find someone who's taken MDMA, but no other drug, it's pretty rare.
So, you need to find a person who's only taken MDMA, otherwise you can't...
Like, assess if there's some cognitive damage, because it could have been the acid, it could have been the mushrooms, it could have been the time you fell on your ass when you were hammered, who the fuck knows?
But these kids, some of them have only taken MDMA, and so I believe that they used them as a sample to, like, determine if there was any kind of neurological damage caused by The drug itself.
So I think a symbol or phenomena happens within that system where some kids are like, I'm not a reincarnated being.
Well, that's comforting to know he's always been with us, you know, because it's like one of the things that does bother me is to imagine a world without Seagal, you know?
So it's cool to know he's always been here, coming back again and again.
Well, also, there's talk of ending the Tolku system, and the Dalai Lama has even said that, and recognizing that, because what's cool about the Dalai Lama, among many things, is that he said, you know, he's very rational, and he said if science proves Something in Buddhism is off, we'll change Buddhism to fit the rational mind.
And that's the beauty of Buddhism.
There's pageantry in it, there's ceremony, there's ritual in it, just like any other religion, it's beautiful.
Personally, I think that there is a sort of area of experience accessible through their practices that I guess could best be compared to psychedelics or something like that, but to me what I love about it is All the pageantry aside and all of it aside, it's not faith-based.
It's a very basic series of ideas that you have to digest, you have to think about, you have to look into.
You don't just get to be it.
It's like, you know, maybe some forms of it, there could be an example of that, but in general, it's more along the lines of here's the basic fundamental principles behind this Not in the courting of a human life that we've discovered.
Here's where some suffering is coming from.
All the suffering, in fact.
And here's how to fix it.
That's the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
And just hearing it, who gives a fuck?
You could hear life is suffering, the cause of suffering is attachment, get rid of attachment, suffering ends, here's a system to get rid of attachment, and, you know, whatever.
Life is suffering, what does that even fucking mean?
What does life even mean?
What does it even mean by suffering?
This first noble truth, it gets completely mistranslated anyway.
Dukkha, it means wobbly wheel.
It's more akin to, like, if you're riding a bike that's got not enough air in it, It's going to be a rough ride.
But it's going to be even more of a rough ride if you have somehow tricked yourself into thinking there's enough air in the tire.
So that anytime you hit some bumps, you're like, what the fuck is wrong with the world?
You know what I mean?
That's it.
That's it.
It's like wobbly wheel.
The thing's wonky.
You think you're not going to get disconnected when you've been on the line with Verizon for an hour?
You're going to get disconnected.
It tends to happen.
You're going to get cut off in traffic.
You're going to fail.
You're going to be disappointed.
This is reality, but somehow you've...
I've imagined that it doesn't work like that.
And every single time you're met with the truth, you're like, oh, God, this sucks.
And, you know, so that creates a lot of problems, and it creates some ways to deal with it, which is desire and aversion.
So you're somewhere and you want to be somewhere else, basically.
You know, you're somewhere and you're like, I don't want to be in this place.
Or, you know, you're imagining that if you get this thing or that thing, the pain you're feeling of the wobbly wheel will go away.
Do the experiment.
See if it's true.
See if it's true.
That's all you can do is like really look at the shit that you want.
Like, I could come home and Moog could have pulled up and given me seven Moog ones, right?
And I'm gonna sit and play those fucking Moog ones for weeks and weeks until I'm sweaty and smell like fucking just someone shoved a salami under the balls of an ape, you know?
I'm not gonna take showers.
I'm going to just be oozing a stink and like probably weeping into the mug and sneezing into it.
Anyway, the point is, eventually after the distraction has gone away, I'm going to return to my fundamental self, you know, the fundamental condition of existence as it is, regardless.
And so this is sort of the...
Some of the principles as I understand it, which are really quite intelligent, you know?
It's really – and what I love about it most of all is there's always this invitation which is, go see!
Go see!
It's not – because I'm telling you this, believe it!
It's like, go see!
Maybe it's different for you.
But you need to go check.
Like, every time you're doing the thing that you've been repeating over and over again, is it making you happy for real?
Is it really working?
Is it working?
And if it's working, great!
But if it's not, and you're trying to pretend it is because you've been doing it so long, well, who's winning this game of self-deception?
There's no winning if the game is tricking yourself.
And it's almost exactly like what we were talking about with religions, that you look down at these grids and these grids are run by different operating systems that require different behavior from their women.
This operating system, you can't drive.
You got to dress like a beekeeper and you have to do this and you have to do that.
This operating system, you put a plate through your lip.
And you got a bone in your nose.
In this operating system, everybody gets face tattoos.
In this operating system, no one eats pork.
No, no, no.
God does not.
In our operating system...
You get the same thing, I think, with right and left, with vegan and meat eater, with pick your poison, whatever the fuck it is.
Whatever thing it is that you're into, especially ideological, especially lifestyle-based, there's always an opposing one.
Like the people that don't want people to be gay.
Even a lot of the abortion stuff.
A lot of the abortion stuff, it's like, how much of this...
Really well thought out behavior and how much of it is how does your tribe respond to this?
And one of the ways you can tell, especially if you're talking to a hardcore lefty, Or a Republican, for that matter.
We can offer two examples.
But one of the ways you can tell is hardcore lefties do not like to discuss late-term abortion.
You say, well, what if it's a fetus?
What if it's a baby?
What if we're talking like eight months in?
It's a woman's right to choose.
No, it's a baby in this person's body.
Like, when is it a baby?
Look, I'm 100% pro-women's right to choose.
I'm 100% pro-choice.
But late-term abortions are fucking weird.
It's dark.
It's strange.
And everybody knows that.
Everybody knows that.
But if you're a hardcore lefty, you won't say it.
And then hardcore righties?
What if you were raped?
What if you're a little girl, a 13-year-old girl, and she was raped?
You want that girl to carry her fucking baby?
Are you crazy?
She was raped four weeks ago.
We found out she's pregnant.
What do you want me to do?
You want me to pray?
How about fuck you?
How about fuck you, my raped little girl is not going to have to carry someone's baby, you fucking asshole.
And the idea that you're an invisible man in the sky that watches over everything you do but allows rape to occur, allows little kids to get raped.
Well, this is, if you want to find the commonality, the common thread, it's just the way you were describing, which is a natural reaction to someone saying that to you or controlling your life in that way, it's aggression.
So, like, on both sides, it's not that there's an articulation of a point of view, it's that the point of view is being flavored with anger, with aggression.
From the evolutionary perspective, you're just barely waking up.
But, because you've been a monkey, inside of you, there's some serious, serious aggression, because that was the way to deal with the eagle that was bigger than you, that carried your wife away to feed to its You are going to have a sit down with the eagle and be like, listen, I know you need to live.
And my wife, I imagine she was delicious.
I've been farming for the last several years and feeding her.
And you know, the baby's gonna die because he was drinking her milk and all eagle, but listen, I wonder if maybe you could just spare the rest of my family.
What you're gonna do is kill that fucking eagle any way you can.
Fire, spears, whatever.
So now, to think that that has gone away is very similar to a person who takes a vacation and suddenly realizes, I can't relax.
Well, you can't relax, because for the last fucking year, you've been going non-stop in a state of constant stress, freaking out.
You're on vacation, you think that momentum's gonna go away?
No, it's just gonna be more apparent.
So you're gonna like, I'm not gonna guzzle it down and try to fuck it away, but...
And then you're on the airplane hungover and it's like, you know what I mean?
You're all fucking hungover and it's like, what happened?
That vacation's already over.
That's what has happened to us, which is like, listen, we've got it good right now, but it wasn't that long ago that saber-toothed tigers were dragging our children into the fucking jungle and eating them and we find feet that were our kids' feet in a bush somewhere and this trauma is in us epigenetically.
So, anyway, the point is, give yourself a fucking break.
But...
The other point is, that being said, recognize you're being aggressive.
Your approach using anger and intolerance is not working.
It is as noble as your purpose may be.
You want a global civilization of joy, whatever the fuck it is, It's not working if you're using the exact same momentum that causes the wars that you're hoping to stop.
So the first step has to be, I think, an internal personal exploration to create some – not to even get rid of the aggression or to be like, I'm bad because I'm angry or I'm all that bullshit, but to create some – to find out what is the circumference of the self.
And then within that you realize the thing you thought was all of you, that coiled up – Fucking anger is, in fact, a tiny piece of you.
It's still there, and it's still useful at times, but it's not all of you.
And because the circumference has widened, the next time the angry part of you starts bubbling, it's just like, it's the difference between somebody throwing a brick in a bathtub and a brick in the ocean.
It's like, a brick in the ocean, no big deal.
A brick in the bathtub, fuck you, dude!
Why are you throwing bricks in my bathtub, bitch?!
Get the fuck out of my two, are you?!
So that's the idea.
We're not trying to annihilate the self or say, this person, this human being you are, it's irrelevant or it's not worth this or that.
It's just, what is the circumference of your identity?
And that's the exploration, I think, that Buddhism invites people to do, or any religion that is real and good.
It's inviting people, like, find out what you are!
And then as a natural byproduct of that exploration, you become a little more gentle.
And because you're gentle, you're more effective.
That's where it gets really weird.
Gentleness seems to be quite often.
What was my friend saying?
He's like, you know, if my dogs are outside, I'm like, get the fuck out the fucking house!
They're not coming in.
But if I'm like, come on, come on, I love you, and you really mean it, they come running into the house.
I think that's part of the appeal of the dad bod, part of the appeal of like...
Someone talking about unrealistic body expectations, you're really talking about less reliance on the flesh, the virility, the athletic ability, the ability to conquer, the ability to breed and spread your genes and fight off predators and enemies and invaders.
Because, you know, like Eddie Bravo, he's nice, man.
When I'm around him, like, I forget that I could just suddenly be dead.
I mean, if you didn't forget it, you'd be nervous around him all the time.
Like, you know, you're in a great conversation with him, enjoying his company, and then, like, you could just, that's it.
So, similarly, like, this is what happened.
So, the idea is, like, you've got a continuum of possible...
Ways that humans express themselves on one side you have the condition of like the noble warrior Which is a trained disciplined person who's literally putting themselves in front of others the samurai you talk about it a bunch You know who's fading into the background who doesn't even give a fuck if anybody knows they did anything heroic Because they've given up on that it's a very spiritual way of being well Then there's also the concern about the warmonger like why does the warmonger exist is the warmonger like the firefighter that starts their own fires?
If you want to sell umbrellas, you need it to rain.
Yeah, yeah.
But this is, again, corruption of a potential ideal, which is like, regardless of the fact that we've all kind of witnessed various...
There's examples in pretty much every profession of what it looks like when things aren't so great and imbalanced.
There's also examples of people who are the opposite of that, who are like completely, you know, in service, who like, you know, how many firemen got fucking incinerated in September 11th, man?
You know, and the truth is, I can't name, unfortunately, embarrassingly enough, I couldn't name one of them if you paid me to.
These are people who literally gave their entire life up, who went up that fucking thing.
They didn't think they were coming back down.
They're firemen.
They looked at that and they were probably like, yeah, I'm gonna die.
I bet I die today.
But they're like, if I don't do it, well, no one does it.
So that's an example of how good it can be and why we need it and what it can really be.
That's a sacred way to be.
And the exact same is true for pretty much every profession.
And yet, when aggression gets in there, It fucks it up.
It sours it.
It imbalances it.
And it's, like, ultimately completely ineffective, you know?