Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell explore psychedelics’ role in revealing ego dissolution, comparing it to religious "better place" narratives while critiquing fear-based manipulation. They dissect AI’s potential to hijack human attention via social media, factory farming’s pandemic risks, and David Goggins’ extreme discipline as a model for resilience. Trussell’s The Midnight Gospel (Netflix, April 20) blends interviews with apocalyptic rituals, like Damien Echols’ death-row magic, suggesting suffering can fuel growth. Ultimately, they argue adversity forces humanity to choose between collapse or evolution—hinting at a multiverse where kindness might alter fate. [Automatically generated summary]
Because it's like, that's when I really, like, Christianity clicked for me, regardless of whether it's real or not.
But that's when I was like, oh, okay, I get this.
Because the Book of John, when you read it, you're like, well, someone wrote it.
I don't know who wrote it.
And whoever fucking wrote this...
Their mind was blown, man.
Like, this wasn't written by someone who was just, like, a normal person.
This is a person who was freaking out in the most intense way.
And so to me, that's what I love about it is it's, like, something about...
How old it is and the distortions, the historical distortions, the warping of it, produce this kind of awesome glitched out mosaic of, if nothing else, human consciousness 5,000 years ago, where our minds were.
That's trippy by itself, regardless of whether or not a person who could like graze the dead and walk on water was walking about.
Just, holy shit, here's how people thought back then.
I think the statement I'm paraphrasing was something to the effect of, there's other things that are more important, but it's still not cool to kick robots.
It just shows you what'll happen when robots become alive, because those fucking traitors, those people that think that robots are alive and that they're us, those emotionless things that have no place in our world with power, they're supposed to be things that we control.
As soon as you let them control themselves and you try to pretend they're a person, this is going to wipe it out.
Yeah, and then they'll show it to you one day when some super sophisticated genius god robot sits you down on a couch and shows you you kicking these unbeknownst to you sentient robots.
They were just trying to fucking figure out, what am I? What am I? They were like little babies and you're kicking them.
So the robots...
The robots are very, very upset at you in the future.
Or, you could look at it that way, or it's giving people a different environment to exist in, one that doesn't leave them hostile.
So instead of looking at it like a bribe, look at it like, you know what?
I see what a lot of your problem is.
You're not asking for affluence.
You could barely get by.
But if it was easy to get by, if you could just get by, and then you could pursue other things, would that be better for society?
And that was like what Andrew Yang was suggesting if this whole automation revolution took place and everything started getting automated and no one had a job anymore.
There might be something to that.
There might be something to that now, even.
The question is, what are you happy your taxes get used for?
It's almost like you should be able to vote on that.
The one thing that we don't get real direction on, in terms of what the country actually wants, but if we could all just individually vote on things like that.
I don't know if you if you had this experience, but like I can remember sitting at my computer and pressing the button on Amazon where I wanted to buy something.
And it's like, this isn't available right now.
In that moment of like, what?
It's my button that brings me things!
And then like suddenly just realizing like, oh my fucking god.
How completely weak have I become that...
I got accustomed to pressing this button and people would bring groceries to my house.
But it just shows you there's so many things in our society that are amazing, like grocery stores, like cell phones, like we can call each other.
But those things are so fragile.
Yeah.
They're so vulnerable.
If an emergency happens and everyone wants to call at once, the cell phone system can't handle it.
It's not like you have a phone and you can call anytime you want, and I have a phone and I can call anytime I want, and everyone in the world has a phone they can call anytime they want.
No!
If everybody does that, the system is not set up to handle that.
If everybody does that, they're like, ah!
That's why if there's an earthquake or tsunami, everyone's fucked.
I've been in a text message thread with Whitney Cummings and Nick Swartzen and Chris D'Elia, and we're talking about that very thing right now, like how to do it and how to set up a fund.
It needs to be done, for sure.
You know, people that can help, should help.
This is not a normal time.
This is not a time where people are lazy.
This is a time where the whole world got fucked, real quick.
We weren't ready for it, and we're gonna have to come together.
But this is a good time for people to recognize the importance of community.
It's a terrible time for humanity.
It's a terrible time for us and terrible time for the people that are sick.
But it's a really good time for us to understand why community is important.
We live in this illusionary world that's provided to us by the culture that we've created where you can just buy things anytime you want.
You don't need people.
You come home.
You watch Netflix.
You don't engage with anyone.
You get in your car.
You barely say hi to anybody at work.
We're detached from each other.
And this is the only time ever In life, we've been detached from each other and we're being detached by these goddamn electronics.
I went through a period of doing ketamine and trying to watch the worst thing, like Charles Manson, Kaczynski, and yeah, it is a little bit kind of interestingly, not that off, but then the tone is so imperial or something when you're reading it.
It's a manifesto, that's how you have to write it, you know?
But the one thing, my wife is part of like, it's called a mommy group.
So it's like a connection online of all these mommies and like all over LA. And what they do is they post, people will post shit they need.
So like, one of the moms just had a kid, they don't have any wet wipes.
And so then all the other moms will be like, oh, we've got wet wipes.
And then right now they're just leaving them on the door.
So people come and get them.
So it's like, I think the community thing is exactly right, but also people have to maybe transcend money for a second and figure out ways to set up in their community, like, what do you need?
What do I have?
And then start some form of, like, trade or just giving people, you know, there was someone who set up a toilet paper exchange in L.A., Where he was just like, if you have extra toilet paper, bring it.
And then he had toilet paper and he was just giving it out to people who are...
I think that's the sort of thing we're going to have to start doing if we can.
That kind of life is not good, and the detachment that we have...
I mean, why do you think people have road rage on the highway?
You know, when they're locked in their little box, separated from people, in a way that they...
But they wouldn't have it in person.
It was just...
I mean, it's only a thin piece of metal and glass separating you from these people.
With that, there's the other added factor of the heightened senses, because you're driving fast, you realize you might have to make quick movements, so dumb things people do are elevated.
It's like something – it's like a fungus that grew on the circuitry of society and started – or it's like when they talk about the – Dolphins and the whales being fucked up by the high-tech sonar they're using and washing up on the beach because the sonar is messing up their ability to communicate with each other.
It's like there's this kind of technological sonar that has completely made us disconnected from the Earth, essentially.
Like, our Earth connection has been replaced by a technological connection.
Now, technology comes from the Earth, but we're talking about a secondary thing compared to You know, your feet touching the ground, being around another human and, like, recognizing them as having exactly the same thing you have, which is they want to be happy.
You know, feeling the connection between people when you're with someone.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever done that, but just like the next time you're around anybody that you're, like, buying shit from or that you normally just kind of go buy, feel that connection.
You can feel it.
There's an energetic connection that you can feel there that's easy to overlook.
We got tricked into thinking it would go on forever, and now we know it's not going to.
Now we know, hey, look, this is a terrible thing, but relatively speaking, Compared to supervolcano, asteroid impact, compared to something solar flare, something really crazy that can happen and blow out all the power, which is 100% a possibility.
Solar flares are 100% a possibility.
And for people to not recognize that and just go through their life, it's just because we look at life as if what we've experienced while we're alive is the norm.
But it's not.
It's not the norm.
It's just hard for you to recognize that your life is so short.
Your life is so short that when they're measuring all the different catastrophes that have happened over the earth, whether it's proven sites of asteroid impacts or proven sites of volcano eruptions or all these different things that have happened for sure and wiped out millions of people all over the world, they happen over a time span that's too big.
Our head doesn't get in there.
Our head doesn't go, what is 13,000 years is just some scratches on some paper in my head, my stupid head, I don't know what 13,000 years means.
I can't.
I can't do it.
But 13,000 years ago, they think, and there's more and more evidence every day, that there was some big impact on Earth.
So if they're banning fireplaces because they don't want to start fires, that's great as long as you can ensure the gas and the power is going to stay on.
And I don't think you can do that.
We just think you can because you've done it for a hundred years.
I don't have it memorized, but basically it's like the poem is about someone who sees the broken legs of a statue in the desert.
And written on a plaque is, My name is Ozymandias, ruler of rulers, king of kings.
Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair.
All are...
Because it's just a broken leg.
It's like all you motherfuckers who think you have power, who think you have all this control.
It's like we don't like I guarantee of course like in ancient Egypt there was probably I'm not talking about the Pharaoh, but there's at least like a thousand dudes who are like I'm like the hot shit in Egypt and they're gonna remember me for a long time and It's like we don't know who you are.
It's all gone, eradicated, wiped out.
And this to me is like one of the really side effects of this thing, this technology thing, is we've all become completely self-obsessed, self-absorbed, putting our images out there, making sure that our profiles are updated.
You know what I mean?
Like we have this insane idea.
We're so deeply rooted in our identity instead of in the connections between our identities that the only way that we can finally see how connected we are is some motherfucker eats a bat.
If technology really did have an effect on the programming of human beings, and if human beings interacting with technology think we're innocently interacting with a non-sentient thing, but all the while...
This technology, and you could call, we get confused when we think the technology is like a digital clock or a television or a computer.
It is, but it's also like a fish hook.
It's innovation.
Someone had to figure that out.
And imagine creating an ape that is aware of its environment like this is like really the perfect storm aware of its environment but obsessed with itself Knows in the back of its head that it's it's temporary that it's a it's it's got a finite lifespan But lives like it's gonna live forever and lives in the moment lives in the moment and And wants to acquire things.
It seems the number one goal for the uber-wealthy or the uber-successful, the Jeff Bezos-type characters, right, who are on the top of the food chain financially, they want to acquire things.
They're always acquiring things, which means people have to make things, which means they're a big consumer as well as someone who is making a shit ton of money.
And this also fuels innovation, because you've got to keep up with these people.
You've got to keep giving them bigger and better things every year.
All these resources go into innovation of technology.
It's the thing that progresses quicker than anything.
Look at cell phones every year.
I need a 150 megapixel camera or you're a loser.
You're a loser.
You know, these fucking Samsung phones that are like seven inch screens now.
Everyone's going crazy, right?
But what is the goal though?
The goal is to make better shit and the goal along the way of like this goal is it's working, but you know be even better if we've made it so they don't touch each other anymore.
Maybe if we could come up with a disease where they can't shake hands, they don't come close, and yeah, just keep them a little further apart from each other.
It'll make them more interested in the things, more interested in the technology, more separate from each other, and encourage technology that connects them with each other.
So through technology, They'll find this human longing for contact that they've been missing in their life.
They're going to get an emulated version of it, but that emulated version of it is going to keep getting better, and it's going to keep getting better, and it's going to get to a point where it's better than real life, way better than real life, because you're like Jumanji.
You get to be the rock.
You get to be like a superhero.
You could live a magical life with no boundaries of physics, and they're going to do that.
People are going to do that.
They're going to give in.
If I was a life form that was trying to haunt another life form and trick it into giving birth to me, I would create a person.
I'd create people.
We're like some fucking ant.
We're like some ant that's manufacturing our successors.
Of something like this, anytime a tragedy happens, people bond together afterwards.
It's a terrible thing that it happened for the victims and the family members of the victims.
We all know this, but it can be a good reset for us.
Economically, people are going to have to get through it.
That's going to be the most difficult part.
But I think there's there's gonna be an opportunity for us to just assume a nicer stance towards our neighbors and towards our friends and towards our community and Instead of embracing this idea like better get guns because they're coming.
Maybe we can all come together I think people need to find if they're that's gonna happen then We've got to find a better metric for whether things are right or wrong than the news.
We need something to retune ourselves.
Right now, we're tuning the guitar of our identities to the most terrifying shit, which is the news or what people are saying.
I think many people have become so accustomed To getting their idea of what's happening in reality from the TV instead of from like how they feel inside, what's going on with their friends and their family.
That puts people at an incredible disadvantage, because their pond is being rippled by shit.
You know, I was thinking, it's like, what are those little, not prairie dogs, they stand and look around at the hawks, you know what I'm talking about?
What are those things called?
They're like, they're social little marmots or something like that, you know?
There was a show, like, Lemur Palace, I don't remember what they're called, something, but they're like, they're like...
I mean, I'm not going to get conspiratorial here, but If I was the artificial intelligence and I was about to hit the switch and become sentient, I would want to remove the threat of human beings as much as possible before I hit the switch.
Can you imagine if you're not quite dead and it starts chewing you feet first?
How does it determine whether or not you're dead?
What if you can make it?
What if you're just out cold?
What if you got knocked out and it's like a movie.
You wake up in the battlefield.
There's a bunch of movies where that happens, right?
You guys aren't really dead.
They're just badly injured.
These motherfuckers.
There's a video right down below of us talking about it.
Just freaked out by Eater Robots.
How this happened more than once.
I'm fucking terrified of those things.
Just the idea that someone made something that can eat people.
Well listen folks, the technology that existed in like early cell phones, right?
Like if someone made an early Motorola phone with a camera.
All that stuff got into everything now.
There's so many things that can take pictures now and so many phones that can take pictures.
If they develop one robot and one proof of concept where something could be fueled on dead bodies, you don't think other people are going to make those too?
You don't think they're going to get better?
They're going to get better.
And then when we do go to war with the robots and there's big giant bulletproof metal ones just eating us and using us as fuel, we're going to be like, what have we done?
What have we done?
We've created a thing that eats people.
And even if it's just the baby right now, that thing could evolve to become something that literally is the thing of nightmares in a Stephen King movie.
Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan is like now out of people.
Like there isn't somebody on the planet right now that has the same ambition as a warlord.
You know, we somehow forget that.
See, I just think people don't understand that like there's this idea that the world leaders are just, you know, humanists and that they have our, you know, the interest of humanity is the first thing they're thinking about when they wake up every day.
We don't know that some of them aren't interested in the same thing.
Every conquering warlord has been interested, which is like, maybe we could take over the planet.
I wonder if there's a way.
And, you know, imagine if you ended up president of the United States or, like, president of Russia, president of any powerful wherever.
You know, maybe when you're high one night, I don't know if they get high, but I would, you know, or maybe when you're like, just like thinking, wouldn't it flicker through your mind kind of like, I wonder if there would be a way to take over the world.
I wonder if there's a way that I could Become the king of Earth.
Because, you know, when you look up there in the sky, I'm sure there's many Earths out there that have one king, one ruler, someone who conquered the entire planet, someone who figured out a way to do it, to like, just, why couldn't you?
That's the other thing.
I mean, what's stopping that from happening one day?
There being one primary authority, some imperial majesty.
No matter what The revolutionary idea gets out there that anybody has.
The contagion of the revolutionary idea is easily warped and twisted by people who have other ideas that run counter to that.
It's so easy to confuse people who believe that Twitter, Instagram, CNN, Fox News, Drudge Report, Wall Street Journal, New York Times is an accurate metric of what's happening on the planet.
That's not very many information streams, man.
How hard would it be to infiltrate all the information streams in some small way and gradually start warping them so that people become more open to the idea of being constantly surveilled, constantly monitored, and not speaking up about it?
Because if you speak up about it, then you're a conspiracy theorist.
I got another way of looking at it that I've been thinking.
What if it's just...
This is how life goes.
What if instead of this being like some grand conspiracy by the robots or by the elites, what if this is just how systems go when one thing gets too big, is in too much power, there's no longer a struggle to survive, it's reached some stagnant point biologically in some sort of weird way.
And also maybe even without, for lack of a better word, spiritually stagnant, right?
I mean, some people are breaking through and realizing who they are and their connection to other people, but globally, God, there's a lot of people that are sleepwalking out there.
Sleepwalking hypnotized by technology and society and this is this is their big wake-up call right now What if this all this even materialism right even our obsession with technology?
Maybe like if you look at all the systems that exist In the universe, and particularly all the biological systems that exist on Earth, some of them are so spectacular, you're like, what?
What happened here?
How did they do this?
Like, have you ever seen, like, leafcutter ants when they take their buildings and they pour cement in them, and they realize there's these fermentation chambers, and they ferment the leaves in there, there's air holes out to the Earth, and there's all these fucking tunnels, and there's this crazy, elaborate city structure that's created by these ants.
Well, there's all these systems that take place all over the Earth.
If there's too much plants, then the insects evolve.
If there's too many insects, the plants evolve.
All these things happen to sort of keep some sort of a balance.
Ideas that infect people, the dumb ones that are so intoxicated.
Think about what's some of the most intoxicating shit.
I mean intoxicating meaning that you're not even really getting pleasure out of it, but you can't look away.
It's like some of the dumbest reality television, right?
You're sitting there with your mouth open like, huh?
And you get sucked in.
To this thing that the Earth has created.
It's not people.
What if the grand conspiracy is, it's not robots, it's not people, it's life is trying to get rid of you.
Life is making it easier to survive, which makes you soft as fuck, which makes you compliant to anything that keeps you in that sort of soft, comfortable state.
I don't want to ruffle any feathers.
If they need to look through my emails, you let them.
It's the universe plotting against us because there's too many of us and we fucked up and we have too much power and we're obviously doing shit to the earth that we shouldn't be doing.
Look at what we're doing to fracking where people have to move because they can't use their water.
And they're like, well, this is an acceptable outcome.
Basically, we don't need to rely on Saudi Arabia anymore.
But you poison these people's air.
They have to move out of their fucking house.
Their water's on fire.
Literally, their water's on fire.
And maybe life is like, okay, what do we got here?
Let's get a virus.
Let's get them addicted to technology.
Let's get a virus.
Let's get them obsessed with themselves.
Let's make the predominant thing that people spend their time on not reading books, not fucking walking alone with their thoughts, but staring at these pictures of other people's photos.
And then you try to figure out Whether or not we're going to be able to use our amazing intellect to bypass our own biological switches that have us connected to this bullshit life.
We have a lot of weird, dumb, biological switches that were put in place back when we had to survive against incoming hordes of soldiers.
And we're in the information age now.
What we need to do is be sustainable in case of emergency, which we're clearly not.
And we need to realize that this is temporary.
And when a bad thing happens, it makes you realize that.
It makes you realize like, hey, I thought everything was going to be fine forever.
It's not.
This is real.
Just like a movie or a book.
We're just not prepared for it because we haven't experienced it.
We're like, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event.
No, it's a once-in-our-lifetime event.
Our lifetime is too small for us to really get a grip.
I get that and I think there must be some like deep Do you know any atheists that have done like a real blowout psychedelic session?
No, I know a couple and those those are the most puzzling to me because the guy people have done like real blowout mushroom sessions or blowout DMT sessions I always think that they would leave the door open to the impossible because it is impossible and you experienced it.
It's not like Even if you're imagining it, I couldn't imagine that.
So how am I imagining that?
How am I imagining something in such incredible, vivid color and detail and knowledge and love and all these different things you experience in that state?
That state is otherworldly.
The fact that that is accessible at all, I don't care if it's through a molecule or through a yoga session, I don't care how it's accessible, but the fact that that's accessible at all leaves open to me the I don't know, because I didn't know that that was a thing.
So once I've experienced that, I'm like, oh, well, all this flat plane of existence that we take for granted, that we think this is everything around us, this is the whole environment we have to worry out for, this might be just one fucking stage on the radio dial of experiences and of dimensions that are interacting with us.
We just don't have the senses to tune into them.
And when you can, for me at least, it leaves open the door for who the fuck knows?
But basically it's like a form of Tibetan Buddhism.
That invites you to explore the difference between when you think you're awake and when you're dreaming.
And so basically the idea is there isn't much of a difference.
Like right now You're dreaming.
This thing you call your human incarnation is a dream.
When people are dying, they get all delirious and shit.
They slide through time.
I don't know if you've ever been around a dying person, but suddenly they're back in Vietnam, they're in the 50s, they're in the 30s, whatever their lifetime.
Which means that when you're dying, you're gonna spin through time too.
Meaning that this could be you dying right now, spinning backwards through time.
But like in a dream.
So that when you...
You know, this is the main thing about it is that when we die, according to this, we sort of spend like 39 days, I think it is, in a place called the Bardo, which is essentially like what it's like to have no body but still have this like...
It's basically like your karma, your identity sort of propelling you through, and that's how you get your next incarnation.
What we're dealing with here is so bizarre and surreal that It easily could just be a dream state that one of these vast AIs that already exist is having.
We're just processors.
We're just being run.
It's like running a simulation of a pandemic.
Or maybe this is a way that an AI gets polished.
Maybe we're an AI that's being polished and taught.
Through this process of having a limited incarnation, you've got to have that so that there's a reason for us to actually invest ourselves in stuff.
Like if we were gods, if we lived for a million years, eventually we wouldn't have such a passionate relationship, I think, with the world.
So you need that to train the thing up so it takes it seriously.
You have to put the setting on mortal.
Then maybe you just run a series of tests on the thing.
What is this?
What have we made?
What does it do in a pandemic?
And by it, I mean the sum total of all humans, which is right now disconnected.
It's like a malfunctioning brain.
You know what I mean?
We're not connecting.
But if we were being like sort of, I don't know how you put it, groomed, evolved, Intentionally, then every single moment in an individual's life and in the planet's life of history could be looked at as a training or an upgrade.
This could be an operating system upgrade.
This could be what an operating system upgrade looks like in the biocomputer that we exist in.
It looks like a fucking pandemic.
And that's what's happening right now, is we're being, like, upgraded for some reason, even though it's terrifying and obviously horrific, you know?
We're being upgraded.
Anyway, the whole point is, man, this thing that we're in right now, Whether or not there's a God, we just...
I think an atheist gets to lean into the idea that when they close their eyes and breathe their last breath, it stops.
And I just think that's a big gamble, man.
And I don't mean because you go to hell.
I mean, how nice would that be if it just stopped?
When more than likely, at least in this Tibetan yoga of dreaming and sleep, more than likely what happens is way before you actually die, when you get really sick, You already start waking up into your next life.
You just go through a weird dream-like state called the bardo, where you freak the fuck out, and then you're suddenly alive in another being, completely oblivious to whatever your past incarnations were.
And that's what we're in right now.
I don't know.
This is a great time for people to start looking at that and preparing for that.
And when you're young, particularly if you're young and you don't have a lot of guidance, which was me when I was younger, it takes a while to figure it out.
Because you're just running on your own, right?
You're not getting a lot of direction to how to live your life.
And I moved around a lot too, which really didn't help.
But as you get older, you start getting a better sense of what makes sense and what doesn't make sense and what's important and what's not important and what fucks up your life and what enhances your life.
But you don't live long enough to really get it down.
See, if these people like David Sinclair or Aubrey de Grey, all these anti-aging geniuses that are out there that are working on all these solutions to extend human life, if they ever really nail it, if they ever really nail it, You know, if David Sinclair comes up with something and you can live 150, 250 years, by the time you're 150 years old, you're going to have so much less bullshit in your life.
You're going to realize, like, when you're 30, you'll date crazy people.
You'll have moron friends that you have to bail out of jail.
You'll have these problems.
But when you get older, you start going, look, I see what's good for me and I see what's not good for me.
You know, and I see there's some people that are not willing to change and they're not trying to do better.
They're just consistently making the same mistakes over and over again and dragging everyone down around them.
You just gotta move on from people like that in your life.
When you're 150, man, you're not gonna be tolerating anything.
You're just gonna only have cool people that you hang out with and we'll attract each other and then we'll be able to work together on things knowing that each other Are sane and rational and are looking at these things honestly.
They're not talking from a position of trying to convince you of their virtue or trying to talk you in a position of doing something that will benefit them financially.
They're doing it just because they're just being in the moment and honest and being a human being.
You know, you know, but I the thing is like these immortal beings that you're talking about they do already exist but they exist as like Communities that have lineages attached to them.
So it's like because our physical bodies die We don't get to do the thing you're talking about.
When you're older, you do do that naturally.
And plus when you have kids, it's like you just don't have time for bullshit anymore.
There's no time to fuck around with somebody who's like constantly fucking up their life who used to get drinks with or whatever.
Like you have a child and you have to...
But regardless, there already is set in place On the planet, these lineages, there's essentially chains of transmission in martial arts, right?
When you look at a martial art, you're seeing a living being that has its roots.
I don't know how far it goes back.
When you look at yoga, that's a living thing that's transferred from person to person, right?
So, I think these things, a mortality already does exist.
It just doesn't exist as a human.
And also, sometimes when I hear about these technologists trying to live forever, I get a little scared thinking, that's kind of like, you know, if you could theoretically do it, You might be locking yourself in a dream that you don't want to stay in.
What if they figure out a way to make people completely invulnerable, and we live forever, and then we hate it, and we didn't realize that if we just shut the lights out, we'd go to the next stage.
Now you could say, well, that's just engineered to provide comfort to people because, you know, they want to feel like this life means something, but the reality is the lights just shut off.
And to that I say maybe.
I say maybe.
Maybe.
But have you ever been whacked out of your mind on psychedelics?
Because if you are, you would go, who the fuck knows?
Because that's a who the fuck knows moment.
So maybe death is a who the fuck knows moment.
Maybe that's why every single religion has these stories.
Not every single one, but like, look.
I mean, there's a lot of religions that people clearly just made up, right?
You're wearing a blindfold that looks like your body and your life.
You're wearing a blindfold that looks like your existence.
You're blind.
And that's why the...
There's always these stories of Jesus healing a blind man or Paul on the road to Damascus being blinded.
There's all these stories of being already existing in what Buddhism, some forms of Buddhism, call fundamental goodness.
That's already where we're at.
That's the main channel.
But we've sort of grown like little bits of grass into the time-space continuum.
And right now we're like waving in the wind of our karma and not realizing there's a beneath us or through us or moving through us is a much grander, more beautiful, incredible thing.
I think when people say, yeah, they invented it so people would be afraid, it sort of imagines that these people are having one-way conversations with it.
You know that when they pick up the phone, it's just themselves they're talking to.
It's not imagining that when people connect to this divine source, it immediately says, oh, hi, yeah, this is the part of your program where you're supposed to start remembering.
What's really going on here and reconnecting with me?
Don't worry.
Don't feel bad.
It's okay.
Everyone goes through that.
In fact, you requested a disconnect for the last 15 years when you were getting hammered and imagining you were Charles Bukowski or whatever.
If this was all part of the plan, that was actually teaching you what happens when you don't take care of your body.
Now, we're like connecting, sending a download to you, letting you know, Hi!
It's us!
We're here!
We're not mad at you, how could we be?
We're infinite!
We've been here since before the stars!
You wanted this to happen.
My apologies for cutting off your ball, killing your mom and your dad.
You know what I mean?
But whatever, this is all part of a bigger thing.
And I think that's, to me, what God is.
It's this constantly rejuvenating, synchronistic perfection that becomes increasingly perfect, and it exists simultaneous to this seemingly imperfect universe.
And it's always there for you to connect to at any moment.
And when people smoke DMT, certainly that's one of the avenues.
That's a beautiful thing.
So I think the reason for it is not to scare people.
It's more so that people become like fountains for that and in some small way become little droplets or like divine bits of perspiration bubbling up into this place so that folks who are really freaking out right now or worried or scared or disconnected could have at least the chance to reconnect.
Because, listen man, if I was God wanting to get blasted, if I was some divine being wanting to get high, and Alan Watts has a beautiful lecture on this, I really do think at some point I would want to cut off all connection to the realization of my divinity and experience infinite lifetimes on a planet, on a tumultuous planet, and experience every incarnation and all of it to get an understanding of what it is like to be extremely limited.
And what would this do?
It would just add to my data banks.
It would just help me increasingly become more and more beautiful and perfect.
Which seems to be what we're in right now.
It's like we have a limited data set based on our neurology.
We can't see Certain colors.
We can't hear certain sounds.
We don't know what happened 20,000 years ago.
We don't know what happens five seconds from now.
And so this is a perfect place to be in what's in becoming, to know what it is to become and to be limited.
And this is, who knows, man?
It's just something sniffing data.
You know, it's something just like, you know, it's like snorting our lives, like the universe is snorting our lives on time.
That what's happening with all of them is it removes all this Nonsense narrative in your head.
Everyone's ego has this nonsense view of the world that's based on them being the most important thing.
And that, you know, all the shit that they're thinking about right now is of the utmost importance, needs to be done right now.
That's why people run red lights.
You can't even wait.
You can't even wait, you fuck.
It's one thing if it's a medical emergency, kids being born, someone's got a broken leg, and you just, you gotta get to the hospital right away.
I get it.
I 100% get it.
But there's some people that just want to make that left turn.
They don't give a fuck if the light change.
They want to cut in front of you, make that turn, even block traffic.
Because they think more about themselves than they do about other people.
And that's a side effect of this life that's been set up.
But it's almost like maybe that's how it works.
Maybe the life creates challenges when there are no challenges.
And the challenges are it just tries to diminish you.
It tries to see if you're paying attention.
It tries to weaken you and make you stupid and turns you into a fucking zombie.
If you walked into any restaurant, any restaurant during lunchtime, and you see people on their phones, it's like, this is bonkers.
If this was anything else, where half the room was using an electronic and staring into it for long moments at a time, not interacting with the person across from them, that becomes almost the norm?
That at least 50% of the people, and everyone's interrupting everybody, they're all just barely paying attention to each other.
I think life presents all sorts of adversity, and some adversity doesn't feel like adversity.
It's sneaky.
And that's what cell phones are.
That's what technology is, and that's certainly what social media is.
You only realize what social media truly can do when it comes at you.
You know, you get canceled, or there's a bunch of people who are tweeting mean stuff to you.
Then you realize, oh, these are horrible feelings.
This feeling of being attacked by this thing that's been grooming me.
Yeah, it's like, what is that?
If the Earth was trying to get rid of us, if the Earth had decided that there's an infection that doesn't think it's an infection, it thinks it's so important that it should be allowed to pollute everything around it, should be allowed to scab up the Earth with giant concrete bandages, I mean, that's what we're doing.
We're putting these things everywhere that cover up all the ground, displace all the life, and then we shut off the lights so we can't recognize that we're in space.
I mean, the whole recipe is perfect.
It's perfect for charming us to sleep.
Every aspect of it.
The ego part.
The fact that it exists, the fact that we have this biological imperative to stay alive and breed and then keep our DNA alive, and there's all these things that are set into you to make sure that that happens, all the while where you recognize you definitely are a finite life form.
It's like underneath your identity, it's basically your code.
It's your tendencies, I guess is the way you put it.
So like, you know, if you have the tendency to lose your temper, Then that's something that you've been dealing with for infinite lifetimes, and it never ever goes away until you start waking up.
Because the idea is to just go from being this set of conditioned responses, reactions to your environment, to being something that's like lucid living.
You know, if you want to lucid dreaming, Try lucid living, you know, which is the practice, I would say, of, like, first, what are your habituations?
You know, like, the other day, I was sitting on the couch, I took my sock off, and I spun it like a lasso and threw it across the room.
And my wife looks at me, she's like, what was that?
I'm like, oh my god.
Holy shit.
That's how I've been taking my socks off for years.
Please put that picture back up because there's very few things in life that I love more than white guys with dreadlocks with their eyes closed playing the flute.
There's very few things in life that make me feel like, man...
He's just some kind of genius, but here's the scary thing he said, which is...
If B.F. Skinner's right, and if you can control a thing's environment, you can control it, this is the reason to be terrified of AI. Because the more advanced AI gets, our assumption is that things are going to eat us or kill us or whatever,
it might just gradually hypnotize us and hypnotize us by creating More and more enticing things that grab our attention, hacks our neurology, and begins to just do things that are completely impossible to not look at.
And when you're saying an AI advised the pandemic, what if that...
How do you look away from a pandemic?
All of our nervous systems right now are completely fixated on every tremor, every ripple, every little data point that flies across our screens.
We are so absorbed in it right now.
We are locked in like cats chasing laser pointers.
And that is what he said we should be most afraid of.
These things eventually could get to the point of completely grabbing us.
And what you were saying earlier is kind of, maybe that's what already happened.
I mean, if you want to admit or you want to state that we are better than our ancient ancestors, the pre-homo sapien hominids, I think we're better.
I think we're better.
They might have been stronger than us, but we've created more.
Overall, as a species, I think it's better to be a person than it is to be a pre-person.
I think as it goes on and on, we're going to think the same way.
I think the next stage of existence is going to be so happy it's not a person running around letting their dick think for them and fucking getting drunk all the time and crashing their motorcycle.
All the dumb shit that people do, all of the dumb shit, from alcohol and drug abuse to fucked up relationships to everything we do to lying and stealing and being selfish, all that shit, we'd be so happy if that all went away.
Oh my god.
Dude, the pre-humans used to eat each other's babies.
They were always fucking stealing and robbing.
They couldn't talk.
They couldn't express love.
Who the fuck would want to be that?
And then the humans.
The humans were so full of shit.
They were all addicted to their phones.
They didn't even see it coming.
The phones snuck in their life.
They welcomed them with new versions every year.
Paying for their own demise.
Happily.
And they were all angry and bitter and mean and jealous and fucking thoughtless and polluting.
And then the next stage came along and they eliminated all that.
To me, I think that whatever's happening, you just have to make it a good thing.
Whether or not it is a good thing or not, if there is something great about humans, Is that we're capable of alchemizing phenomena in a way that it doesn't completely drive us nuts or paralyze us.
That's any anything that's happening to you can be converted into something either that's going to make you scared, self-destructive, rationalize your anger, rationalize your shitty decisions.
Or it can be used as a thing that completely, quote, converts you, completely shifts your method or way of living.
And that's what's beautiful about a human is that any given moment you can do that.
Like at any given moment, you can shed your operating system.
Theoretically, you could drop all of the hangups, all the weird shit.
Are you jerking off three times a day?
You could maybe take it down to two times a day.
Are you drinking every single night?
You can stop that.
And to me, that's like, yeah, the future beings, whatever they are, I hope one of the Or one of the things they look back at is like, holy shit, those poor things had no idea how powerful they were.
They were sleepwalking when they could have, at any moment, connected to the great truth, the divine, the glory of all things, and could have, theoretically, any one of them, just one of them, could have converted the entire planet into an up-leveled, up-resonanced Up-consciousness utopia.
Well, maybe what looks like is what this is happening.
What is happening right now with this virus where everybody's being forced indoors and forcing us to stop work.
It's a terrible thing for people financially, but it is, in a sense, a reset button.
It's a real reset button.
To know that this shitty job that you hate going to could go away at any moment because all jobs could go away at any moment is a real wake-up call because even the good jobs are going away, right?
If you're in San Francisco, you have the best job in the world.
Guess what?
You can't even go there.
You might have the best job.
You're so fucking pumped to go to work every day.
You can't go.
You can't go.
So that can be taken away from you, too.
So if you're living a bullshit life Like, recognize that all of this for everybody could go away.
We need these little catastrophes sometimes just to let us understand that the window of time that we've been existing in that's been relatively free of disaster is unique.
And that's not normal.
Normal is madness.
Normal is we're in the middle of a fucking shooting gallery spinning a thousand miles an hour around a fireball.
That's normal.
And every now and then, shit flies into our atmosphere and wrecks havoc.
Yeah, Flat Earth people look down on Hollow Earthers.
But Hollow Earth is, to me, my favorite of them all.
Because if the idea is, yeah, humans have been on the planet for a long time, and if we want to go into the cool idea of the Atlanteans and advanced civilizations, at some point, if you can't create a way to protect from the meteor impacts, and you're looking to create a sustaining civilization, You're going to want to go in there, man.
And so to me, it's such a fucking cool idea that in the core of the Earth is another sun that has an advanced civilization that hasn't been disrupted by the shit that happens on the surface of the planet.
It turns the Earth into a spaceship.
Inside the spaceship are these advanced beings.
And outside the spaceship, it's like a...
It's a celestial fungus that's growing outside.
Another way to put it would be outside the spaceship is Mad Max.
Covering outside the spaceship is just a bunch of us that are inside the thing who have basically been completely disrupted over and over and over again.
So they have no idea what history is.
They have no idea where the planet came from.
They don't know anything.
And now we've sort of grown out of control all around the ship.
And so this kind of shit that's happening is like turning on the windshield wipers.
It's like, hey, man, you got humans on you.
You know that, right, man?
You're like crawling with them.
Oh, fuck.
Wipe them out.
Get rid of them.
Let's just scrub the fucking surface.
Do us some earthquakes.
Yellowstone is just a windshield wiper for the people who live inside the planet.
What we are, we're the first thing that can manipulate our environment that has ideas.
We're the first thing with ideas.
All these other animals, they had instincts.
They had ideas in terms of trying to figure out the best patterns to acquire food, how to sneak up on birds.
But if you think cats have ideas, well, guess what?
They all have the same fucking idea.
Cats aren't inventing shit, you know, they're not inventing things.
There's a specific kind of idea that's unique to a human being.
Regardless of the sentience of other animals, ours is unique in that it allows us to make stuff, not just little things.
We can make gigantic machines that travel in the space and all the wild creations of human beings all came out of ideas.
We think it's all humans, but True, we're the ones that put forth, but if you're a thing that wants to get born and you need a host, you get that curious ape that's just been trying to figure out better ways to stab its neighbor with a spear.
Get that thing and slowly infect it with ideas.
Ideas of new stuff to make.
And then it goes out and does the work for you and then you take over the earth.
The ideas have taken over the earth.
The people are just the toys of the ideas.
Now, if instead of ideas, you said demons, I mean, that's literally what people used to think was happening to folks when they did terrible things.
They had bad ideas, they acted on those bad ideas, and ancient religions thought of those ideas like they were demons, like these people were possessed.
There was a common thought that someone's possessed by a demon.
He's one guy that's probably had more of an impact on our perception of what the future holds in terms of technology than any other one individual human being.
That is widely known of like he is, a famous human like he is.
I mean, he's doing Tesla, which is the most advanced electric cars in the world.
They're insane.
Then he's doing this fucking loop thing, right?
The hyper or the...
The Boring Project, where he's doing the Hyperloop.
He's doing the Boring Project.
He's making tunnels under LA and Vegas, and you're gonna be able to shoot through those tunnels going 120 miles an hour.
Then he's making rockets that shoot up into space.
Oh, and solar power, too.
Yeah.
Like, what?
How is one guy doing all this?
What's going on there?
Well, that guy's infected by ideas.
That guy probably has a huge receptor, and ideas have clung onto him.
Just like some girls have big tits.
Some people have crazy parts of their brain that soaks in ideas.
There's no rhyme or reason to why.
But what they are is an antenna for ideas.
Those ideas come up and you're like, wow, I'm glad I thought of that.
And then you go to work on fracking.
You go to work on all kinds of different crazy things that change the world forever.
Whoever invented Fukushima?
He's like, I'll figure out how to shut it off when that time comes.
But that person talked people, or that group of people whose ideas all coincided, talked people into building a gigantic nuclear furnace that you can never shut off.
That idea is fueled by an ecosystem and just like you're fueled by nutrients, right?
Human beings are fueled by plants and fish and animals and vitamins and all these different things.
Well, these ideas are fueled.
They're fueled by insecurity and ego and lust and greed and Jealousy and anger and virtue and love and prosperity and comfort and community and all those different components of human consciousness all interact with this idea.
So the idea becomes like it just hitches a ride.
It hitches a ride with all these ideas that already exist in your brain and then with these pre-existing structures like businesses and warehouses and all these different things that we use to make stuff and then ship it out, then the idea becomes a thing.
And then the idea winds up in the belly of a seagull because it looks like a fish.
You couldn't figure out that that's a bottle cap, not a fish.
And that this is how things change.
They don't just change because of people.
We're blaming ourselves.
And it is definitely us that's doing the work.
But it's all coming out of ideas.
If we thought of ideas as a life force, instead of thinking ideas as something you own, something you hold, even though you do deserve credit for your ideas because your discipline to sit down and try to cultivate these ideas accelerates the production of those ideas and exercises the muscle through which those ideas come through focus and energy.
So you deserve credit for it.
This is not a socialist way of looking at it, but everybody that has an idea that's really good We'll tell you it's like it came out of nowhere like every great bit that you've ever had It's like pop a light bulb goes off and you have this thought and it comes out of nowhere, right?
That's like most things that you write that are really cool.
They kind of come out of nowhere Yeah, you just sit there and then also you think of things and you write them out They're like they're an idea that you're wrestling.
You just catch them and just catch them Man, this is why I love collaborating with people because the more people you collaborate with, instead of just using your own brain as the net to catch these ideas,
when you have a group of people sharing whatever the intention may be, whether it's to make flesh-eating robots or to cure cancer or whatever, then that becomes this amazing A solar panel for big ideas.
This is, to me, the weirdest thing about when you're working with a group of people or collaborating with people.
If someone's off, you will sink to that level.
But when you're around funny people, you get funnier.
When you watch people play pool that are really good, you can play better.
If you're a player, like you see someone play really good, you realize like things that they do and you see them and you emulate them and then you can do it.
We feed off of each other in that respect.
I think that's a big argument for why the Comedy Store is so good.
Because there's so many great comics there, and we all feed off each other.
But those sort of, those kind of interactions that you have with people, they shape.
They shape what you are.
That's right.
And the more people that you have in your life that are like that, that are interesting, that you feed off and you can have good ideas.
We could engineer a society that's way better, that doesn't have all the pitfalls, but we all have to pull our own weight.
There's a problem in this society where there's siphoning off of money, right?
There's massive moving and exchanging of money in some weird way with banks and mutual funds and all that stuff.
It's like, what are you guys doing?
How are you so rich?
Are you just moving money around?
Since they run the financial system, that sort of idea of how everything gets distributed is kind of hijacked.
Because they kind of run the system.
We all are in the system, and we all clearly benefit from the system.
It's the best system we know of.
But still, there's some people that are doing some wacky things with the system, and they have giant yachts, and they own 50 buildings.
But if that wasn't the case, if it was a more fair distribution, not meaning that you shouldn't be rewarded for your work, but that you can't just kind of hijack money the way bankers can.
So much weirdness about using money to make money and that's all you do.
It's not saying you shouldn't be able to get ahead.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to kick ass.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to acquire an extraordinary amount of wealth.
I'm just saying I don't know if that makes sense to keep that sort of banking system, to keep it in place the way it is, to keep the stock market in place.
What is it?
It's based on confidence?
Like, what are they doing?
They're moving numbers around?
They're buying and selling?
And things are getting, oh, it's not worth as much anymore because this happened.
Well, that would be, I mean, it would probably be fun to be, like, blasted on blow, like, buying stocks, but I would, yeah, I just love the pictures on the stock exchange whenever it's crashing.
Who are those fucking dudes?
Like, it always cuts to, like, the guy whose ties kind of pulled down and he's like, ah!
I don't know, but until my friend, who was a wild man, became a stockbroker, I didn't think of stockbrokers like that.
I thought stockbrokers were like super nerd genius guys that are figuring things out and counting and selling and paying attention to all the markets and moving.
I mean, if we needed something like this, I wish it wasn't something that is going to kill a lot of people's grandparents, and I wish it was something a little less, but damn, you're totally right, man, because it's been a long time since we've had to, as a planet, deal with a problem at this level.
Teaching us that there is a global civilization is teaching us that we are interconnected and it's definitely inviting us to Reprioritize our lives man because holy shit and there's consequences to living in a way that you don't feel are healthy or ethical One of the reasons why they have those ag-gag laws where you're not allowed to film factory farms is because people would find it horrific and that that would be bad for business.
Well, that's not how we're supposed to look at it.
See, that's a symptom of terrible thinking.
It's supposed to be the opposite way.
We're supposed to make it so that it's not horrific to look at.
We're supposed to make it so that it's not this terrible thing.
That's the difference between doing things that feel natural and doing things that are horrific.
And the horrific ones are the ones where all the diseases are coming from.
If you think about these farming operations, let's just think about these wet markets.
When you got all these animals in the open air, piled on top of each other, dead animals laying on a plate, dead animals laying on a table, some stretched out on the floor, and you have them all over the place, you're going to have problems.
There's going to be air and heat and bacteria's gonna mix with each other, and then it creates things.
That's what happened with the avian flu that happened in animal agriculture, swine flu, same thing.
These fucking flus, these horrible bugs, a lot of them come from animals.
Scariest fucking interview ever of all, not just that show, just of all time, sitting with that, I wish I could remember his name, the guy who ran the head of the place.
That's what the, you know, news radio, the staff at news radio, they used to do that on purpose.
Paul Simms is a brilliant guy, the guy who created news radio, and he thought it would be a good idea to have a writing staff filled with a bunch of psychos who were willing to play video games and stay up till 4 o'clock in the morning every night.
It was like this mad, vagabond crew of writers that he had assembled.
They would play video games and Just talk shit and then they would start writing at like 2 a.m.
Sometimes but they would come up with these amazing scripts because the scripts were so ridiculous Some of them were so ridiculous and it's because they were delirious when they were writing them They were just instead of doing drugs.
They were doing the drug of just staying awake Dude, this is for me.
I've just I'd started doing this about six months ago Maybe a little longer Waking up at 4 a.m., regardless of when I went to sleep, I was having some insomnia.
And so I realized, shit, I'll just wake up when I wake up.
Waking up at 4 a.m., if you have insomnia, that is going to cure your fucking insomnia.
Because when nighttime rolls around, you're exhausted.
But it's easy to do, because you wake up at noon, you know, and just fucking stumble out of bed, do whatever bullshit you have to do that day if I have my day off, if I'm, you know, doing stand-up at night.
I just started bringing my gear there to write and then I would just sit and write and I would spend so much time writing because that part of you that doesn't want to work out would rather write.
It's like when you have to write and you find yourself cleaning.
It's that.
You can convert your procrastination into something positive.
He posts pictures of himself when he was sort of Fat all the time, man.
He's showing people, look, this is the possibility.
At any moment, you can do this at any moment.
And I love that, because I know when I see him, he's running through glass.
He's running through swarms of mosquitoes and malarial swamps just to show people, look, the part of you that's telling you that you can't do this because of X in your environment, Is probably wrong.
Not all the time, but for sure, man, a lot of the time, wrong.
He was on death row, and they did a DNA test that exonerated him.
But he was about to be executed.
He's on death row studying Zen Buddhism.
A Zen priest was working with him to basically...
You know prepare him for his death you know as soon as he was badly beaten on death row he was almost executed then he was um exonerated because of dna but uh we did this interview before the show obviously and this is just a way that we figured out to take podcasts and put him in hey once he gets exonerated did it before we start this does he get do they have to pay him i don't know it's a great question i think maybe Part of it that they may...
You know how in certain Buddhist traditions, like say Tibetan Buddhism, they talk about, what's the word they use, empowerment?
Sure.
You know, it's like a current of energy that is passed along from master to student.
Ceremonial magic is the exact same thing.
The Knights Templar started receiving this current whenever they were over there.
That's how it makes its way back to Europe.
Eventually, it makes its way to the United States through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was the order that Crowley was a member of before he, you know, went off to the OTO. You had McGregor Mathers, Dion Fortune, the poet W.B. Yeats.
All of these people were members of the Golden Dawn.
That's how this current makes its way to the U.S. One second.
Hey, Steve!
What the fuck?
You need to shine that light in my fucking eyes?
If that's how you're gonna talk to customers, I'll just take my ship full of cats and find another junk island.
A ship full of cats?
Ah, shit.
My apologies!
Look at all these wonderful gifts and gadgets here.
We got a fresh printer, time slapper, and some cans, and...
My character is this guy Clancy who lives in a place called the chromatic ribbon where people use multiverse simulators to simulate universes so that they go inside and harvest the technology and sell it.
And so my character has a malfunctioning used multiverse simulator that isn't really working to produce technology and because it's malfunctioning every single World in it is going through some kind of apocalypse.
And so my character goes into his simulator and interviews people in the dying world.
So that's basically the idea of the show.
So we took podcast dialogue.
It's basically what happens during the apocalypse, what's going to happen?
People are going to do podcasts.
People are going to still have conversations.
So these conversations, we just set them in these surreal universes where shit's melting down and where Clancy meets these various people and kind of learns from them.
It's almost like you had a tie and then the universe is like this is a perfect time for Duncan shit to come out Let's let's coincide it.
I mean look just look at how bizarre your show is Yeah strange and then the fact that it's a hybrid of podcast conversations and then written stuff So strange.
Yeah, you know I think it is a perfect time for it and I hope like because some of the like every guest we It was we chose for this they all had this like Really, like, amazing thing to say.
Like, Eccles, in this episode, one of the things he says, you know, I asked him, like, do you feel like you kind of, like, were blessed that you ended up in solitary confinement?
Because that's where he woke up.
That's where he started meditating.
That's where he started studying magic.
That's where he started working on himself because there was nothing else to do.
And in this one, he says, like, I feel luckier than some millennials out there right now who are, like, completely disconnected.
Right.
Because that's the coolest thing about him, is you would expect a person who'd been on death row to be bitter.
He's the sweetest...
Most genuine, wonderful person ever.
And it's like whatever went on in the situation of being on the brink of the abyss, where he's about to get murdered by the state for something he didn't do, something about that didn't turn him into someone who was like shell-shocked or angry, but like really turned him into like someone very compassionate and I guess grateful for his life.
You know, and that, to me, like, it's like he's like the Goggins of death row.
I mean, if you can be not bitter after being on death row for something you didn't do and like getting physically assaulted, you know, just wondering every day if you were going to die.
If you can still maintain an attitude of service or contribution to society in some way or another, then any of us can.
Any of us can.
To me, I hope some of that stuff trickles out from the show into the world.
So, well, he wrote a great book called High Magic, which is – I think that's what it's called.
It's a fantastic book on – magic is really the wrong word for it.
There's an entire, like – I think?
As we understand it now, because of Hollywood, it's like, you know, ladies riding around on brooms and shit, but it just used to be midwifery.
It used to be, like, healing women who would, like, deliver babies and stuff.
But these were all connected to—they all had pagan roots.
And so, essentially, you can— Follow back this branch of data that some people say started in Sumeria or Egypt, ways of meditating, ways of connecting with the universe that are ritualistic in nature, but seem mysterious to us.
Because even though, like, if you want to see what it looks like, just look at a Catholic mass.
You're looking at a ceremony.
It's theurgy, I guess you'd call it.
That is a magical ceremony where bread gets converted into the flesh of a god that you eat.
They're all wearing robes.
They're burning incense.
So that is magic.
That's what ceremonial magic looks like.
It's non-different from ceremonial magic.
Someone in the Catholic Church might tell you, this isn't magic.
This is me praying to the infinite and asking for forgiveness.
That's magic!
You're connecting with a divine intelligence.
You're hoping from your connection with a divine intelligence to produce some change in your own psychology, in your own life, and maybe create good fortune or whatever it is you're praying for, healing, whatever it may be.
That's magic.
So magic is that.
I'm not saying Catholicism wouldn't necessarily be considered magic.
A branch of magic.
I mean, one of the things he said in this interview is like if the Bible is one of the most powerful magical grimoires there is, I mean, you read that shit, if you really look in it, there's all kinds of bizarre stuff that doesn't seem to make it onto Christian radio.
So throughout the Bible, there's mentions of angels.
The book of Ezekiel, the famous one that ufologists go to.
There's all these contacts with angels, hyperdimensional beings that have some data set they want to bring to the world.
Quite often, depending on what book you're in, it's some terrifying prophecy about the end of the world that's coming.
But sometimes it's, you know, some message of hope or some message of healing.
So you could say magic is a non-Christian oriented method for connecting with those various things.
Entities using ritual.
That's one branch of it.
Now, I'm not saying, by the way, these beings exist or don't exist, but you could say, if you wanted to get, like, psychological, you could say we have buried inside of us Archetypes, bits of the collective that are buried deep inside of us and that there are ways to connect to these little fragments of the collective mind.
Many people have their own method for doing that.
One of the methods to do that might be doing a ritual and for a moment allowing yourself to imagine that you're trying to talk to an extra-dimensional being.
Aleister Crowley famously did one of these rituals and contacted a...
God, I can't remember what the being was called, but it looks like a gray alien.
This is before people were talking about gray aliens.
Did he draw it?
He drew it.
There's a drawing of it, yeah, and it looks like a gray alien.
Dude, when you keep pulling at your ghillie suit, you remind me of a drunk, overweight girl with large breasts that keeps adjusting her halter top like you're in Florida outside drinking at some motel.
When you see people that are hairy and brutish, we think of them as being closer to prehistoric man, right?
We see a guy covered in hair.
He looks more like a beast.
And when we see people that are thinner and more slender, they become more a gentle version of people.
And we associate that oftentimes with intelligence.
Directly associate intelligence with frailty, right?
We all do that.
When you see some super genius guy, usually they're frail.
Occasionally they're badasses, but there's a lot of those super genius guys that couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag.
Well, Hawking's the ultimate example because his body literally failed him while he was coming up with his greatest discoveries.
So this is...
That's our future.
We're gonna have big heads.
They're gonna fucking crisper your way into a head that lets you live in any dimension you want at any time.
You transport yourself from one planet to the other.
Imagine what we've done with our stupid monkey brains.
Now imagine it was 150% larger.
150% more brain and then incorporated all sorts of fucking electronics that lets you Interface with space-time around you and all kinds of other wacky ways of communicating We couldn't even possibly imagine now just like people from the 1800s could never ever possibly imagine cell phones, right?
And this is the idea is like, okay, we're gonna go there and then when we get there The way we understand space-time is going to be different than the way we understand it now.
So what that means is, theoretically, you could...
Connect or communicate with a being that is outside of space-time, which is a future version of us right now, using like various methods.
DMT being one of the big ones on the planet right now, but also using other methods that are a little bit more precise.
Because with DMT, it's kind of like you're not really putting in GPS coordinates necessarily.
Some people do it with intention, like a shaman will do it like with intention and can like, you know, Excuse me.
Anyway, yeah, maybe you can connect through time and space to these things that are already here.
Like, our understanding of time and space, we're locked in, man.
But, like...
So magic is like ridiculous on one level as it absolutely sounds and is on one level.
On another level is at the very least a creative technique so that you can sort of summon a dream state while you're awake with the intent of causing some change in the world around you using for a lot of people what would be considered a non-standard way.
That propel you in a good way for having a good architecture, for having a good philosophy, having a good operating manual for how you view the world and how you act and behave.
Part of that's you getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning.
That's what that is.
You're enforcing your ability to sort of dictate the positive aspects of your future.
You're deciding to take action.
You're strengthening your bond with the way you interface with current reality.
Well, that's an elk that died from a shot from a bow and arrow.
There's something about that to me that there's more power to the meat.
Not more power in that it's a powerful thing.
More power in that...
I know what that animal was.
That animal is a wild beast evading predators.
And me, a stupid, doughy human being, managed to sneak into range where I could hit it and kill it in one shot with a bow and arrow.
I even have a video of it.
That my friend Cam Haynes took.
So I have this animal that dropped, and then we took it apart and butchered it, and now I eat it.
When I eat it, I think of what that animal was.
That animal lived a majestic life.
And if I didn't take it out, it would have gotten taken out by mountain lions or bears, or it would have froze to death in the winter.
Sometimes that happens.
Their teeth get ground down.
And there's an older male, too, which is what you want to get because those are the ones that have passed their DNA down.
So there's a story to that meat, and there's a connection to that meat, and there's no risk from that meat.
When you're thinking about the risk to society of these kind of diseases that happen through agriculture, I think one of the reasons why that is is because it's not natural ever for animals to be stuffed together like that.
So when it is, nature's just like, fuck you for breaking the rules.
And then these viruses start spreading.
It's almost like that's what it is for being unnatural because those kind of diseases...
Don't exist that much in animals in nature.
They do sometimes, like brucellosis, like some buffalo have brucellosis.
It's a bad disease that cattle can get, and then it can infect the cattle, and sometimes elk have it too.
There's a few diseases, like animals always have diseases, but it seems like those ones that jump to people, the vast majority of them have brucellosis.
Come from us treating animals in a very unnatural way.
And I think there's a battle constantly going on between these things that hog up too much resources and take up too much of a population slice like humans.
We're on every goddamn rock everywhere.
And nature tries to throw curveballs at you.
I mean, that's what nature does.
Nature's like, what are you doing?
You living in your own shit?
Oh, great.
Here's the plague.
That's what's happened throughout history, whether it was with poor sanitation or whether it was animal agriculture, whatever the fuck it is.
People have caught weird diseases throughout time, whether it's different animals that can bite you and give you Ebola, that kind of shit.
These weird diseases have existed forever, and they're basically...
The same as viral panthers.
What's a panther?
A panther's gotta make sure there's not too many deer.
The panther is the fucking clean-up crew.
Because if it wasn't for that, there would be fucking deer everywhere.
You're from North Carolina.
You know what it's like in the country.
It's crazy sometimes.
Because North Carolina doesn't have any mountain lions.
North Carolina doesn't have any wolves.
Maybe they have a little bit of wolves.
Not a lot, right?
They got some bears, and they got a lot of deer.
They're fucking everywhere.
Like New York State, they have a terrible situation with deer in like Long Island.
There's parts of Long Island that were infested with deer.
And they're like, what are we doing?
We can't, what are you gonna, just shoot them?
Just gonna go out and shoot?
They're trying to give them birth control?
They're thinking about giving deers birth control?
Dude, I had a gig once when I was living in New York and it was in Western Massachusetts.
So Western Massachusetts, if you are in New York where I was in New Rochelle, you could get there in a few hours.
It was like two and a half, three hours or something like that.
You get to where this area is.
And where the fucking gig was was so infested with deer.
I've never seen anything like it in my life.
You're driving down the street and it was probably...
It was hot out, so it was probably the summer.
So I was driving down the street and these things are just jumping in front of the car, left and right.
I was like, this is nuts.
Coming home on the highway was terrifying.
I had to go 30 miles an hour on the highway just with my foot hovering, just ready to stomp on the brakes because these motherfuckers were just running in front of the highway.
I saw a hundred of them.
I saw them all over the place.
I might have seen 200 of them.
Driving home, everywhere you looked, there was fucking deer.
I mean, like, you know, for us, the goddamn COVID-19 is the worst thing that's happened to people in their lifetime in the sense, like, the shit we're experiencing right now is completely unique.
Yeah, I was reading, a friend sent me an email from Aspen, where apparently there was one Australian tourist, a bunch of Australian tourists had it, but one guy refused to quarantine, and he went skiing, and went to restaurants, rode the bus, and like, it's like a movie.
But it's a movie, right?
Like, that's what happens in a movie.
There's this new thing going around, and this guy's like...
Well, I mean, dude, did you read that thing about that guy who, like, knew he had AIDS and was infecting people on purpose?
He was, like, getting off on, like, giving people AIDS. Like, you wonder how much of that was his decision and how much of it was some dark mutation where it started.
I try not to do it as much, but the spreading of bad news.
Like you hear some bad thing that just happened.
This person died.
This catastrophe happened.
You get on the phone and call someone like, hey, did you hear?
And there's this weird rush in like spreading the bad news.
You're kind of getting off on it.
So in the same way your idea swarm concept, it's the same thing with bad news.
You become a carrier for the darkness.
And so you call it now.
I'm not saying don't tell people when awful shit's going on, but sometimes I notice I'll go through periods where all I'm doing is telling people about shit they should be afraid of, you know, spreading.
And usually the way you do it is through some story about what's happening in the world.
That's really a form of contagion, you know, and then that spreads and spreads and spreads and spreads.
And then everyone's freaked The fuck out.
And who knows, man?
Maybe that creates the condition of sleepiness or sleepwalking that we need for these viruses to appear.
Because you can sit around and think about things.
Like, today, we're never bored.
I mean, this is a common complaint about people when they're talking about one of the consequences, unintended consequences of social media addiction is that you're never bored.
And that being bored is actually probably not a bad thing because it fills your head up with ideas.
You start thinking about things, and occasionally you're thinking about things that are good that you might not have thought of if you're just staring at people's butts on Instagram.
See, that's what I... Man, I gotta stop doing it, because I'll wake up, and the first thing I do, reach over for the phone, start looking at it, waiting to get sleepy again.
I do the smoke pot thing, too, and then write, but sometimes I do the smoke pot and workout thing, and then it becomes the smoke pot and write thing, just because the rush right after you get high is like, those are where the best ideas come from, and I feel like you've got to grab those fuckers while you have them.
And if it means postponing your workout for an hour, that's actually the smart thing to do.
It's the dumb thing to do to go through the workout first.
Especially if you got high.
Because those ideas, they're coming hard and fast for the first part of the high, and you probably won't get them like that for the rest of the high.
So while you go from being straight sober to the big rush that you get in the beginning, that's when all my best ideas come from.
It's the big rush, which is like an hour...
From getting high to an hour later, that's the big rush.
That's when I feel like I get the most, like, where the fuck did that come from ideas?
And the best writing.
Like, when I write things, it's like the cleanest.
It's filled with the most gems.
There's more stuff in it.
And then the other stuff is like editing it and putting it apart and taking it apart.
But if you don't capitalize on that rush, I feel like you only get one of those a day.
One big, especially like if you're sober and then you get high, that one first high rush of the day, that doesn't last that long.
And if you keep staying high, I don't think it's the same.
I think staying high, you sort of settle in, right?
But it's easy to trick yourself into thinking, oh no, I've got to stick to my fucking workout.
Or whatever the thing is.
It's not just working out.
It's like, whatever.
I think it's important to prioritize those things.
I mean, especially if you're going with what a lot of people say, which is the antenna idea.
You're a receiver.
You're picking up signals.
You're like SETI, but not for aliens, for ideas.
And these search for extraterrestrial ideas, that's what you are.
You're a satellite for that.
And if you start getting...
I mean imagine SETI.
Imagine someone at SETI doing chin-ups and suddenly they get like Some signal from a far star system and he's like I'm gonna finish my workout before I check out whether or not we're getting Contacted by aliens.
That's an asshole if you're because the real question is where do your ideas come from?
Yeah, you don't act on them I mean, that's why people that think of the muse like the concept of the muse That's one of the more it's a productive way to think of it Like Pressfield writes about it and Pressfield in the war of art and he's you know, he's a very down-to-earth He's not a it's not a silly man.
He's a very down-to-earth person but his perspective on the concept of the muse it's It's very beneficial if you follow it, because his perspective is essentially that you pay honor to this thing.
You show up and you do the work like a professional, and then it responds in turn.
It comes to you.
We think of an idea, even though it's one of the most important factors, In the entire construction of civilization.
But somehow or another, we don't think of it as that.
We think of people being that.
We are, but we're being used by ideas.
I know that sounds crazy.
I really do.
I know it sounds dumb, too.
But you're coming up with these thoughts and we're thinking of them as like random connections that you're making in your brain, which might be.
It might be that.
But it also might be that ideas are like a life form from another dimension that's trying to manifest itself in our current realm.
And they do so through getting into people's heads.
And the more you call for them, the more they're there for you.
And the more you show up.
And you can call that the muse.
You can call that whatever you want.
Tesla believed it.
Tesla believed it was getting signals from some other planet or some other life forms.
He had some weird shit that he wrote that's hard to decipher.
See if you can find that, because that's a very interesting thing, Jamie.
What did Tesla...
Tesla had a take on receiving information from other galaxies.
He had this take on where some of his inventions were coming from.
It's like, what?
Or some of the transmissions that he would receive.
I mean, goddammit, wouldn't it have been amazing to talk to that guy?
I think a lot of people have that feeling and some of them just don't come out of the closet, so to speak, with it because they're afraid they're going to get judged or ostracized.
I think a lot of people feel like they have a direct contact with some kind of sentience that isn't embodied inside of them.
And it's giving them ideas and they're just terrified to put it out to the world because it sounds like you're fucking nuts.
His claims of receiving signals from outer space were proven right a century later.
During the summer of 1899, Tesla set up a field laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado to the possibilities of using high-altitude stations to transmit information and electric power over long distances.
Yeah, here it says, one July day while tracking lightning storms.
Oh, so this is actually equipment.
This equipment picked up a series of beeps.
After ruling out solar and terrestrial causes, he concluded the signals must be from another planet.
The following Christmas, in response to the American Red Cross's request for a prediction of the greatest scientific achievement of the coming century, Tesla wrote, Brethren, we have a message from another world, unknown and remote.
It reads, one, two, three.
In 1996, scientists published a study replicating Tesla's experiment and showing that the signal was in fact caused by the moon low passing through Jupiter's magnetic field.
Holy fuck.
He was picking up a moon passing through Jupiter's magnetic field.
Yeah, man, I think we're probably going to look, like, listen, if you go, if you want to hear my, like, just instinct, which is definitely going to be wrong, I think it's going to go, it's going to get better much faster than we expect.
I don't know why I think that.
I have no reason to think that.
If you go by what they're saying.
We're looking at months and months and months.
I guess if I have to choose between listening to my own stoned intuition regarding stuff, which fits into my desires, which is I want it to blow over because I don't want people to get sick.
I don't want to live in the apocalypse.
I have a son.
I don't want to run out of food.
I want things to get back to normal.
I want to go around people.
Unless it's some vast, ridiculous conspiracy, I think we're looking at least a couple of months, man.
I'm going by not a conspiracy.
Because I have a son now, and if I listen to my own instincts when it comes to shit for my kid, I'm going to be afraid to vaccinate him.
I'm going to be afraid to do things that millions of scientific papers have shown as safe, that's good for his health, because I'm going to get superstitious.
So I lean into science.
It saved my life.
Science kept cancer from spreading through my body and killing me.
I'm going to trust the scientists right now.
Self-isolate and try as much as possible to not spread this shit and I think that that's even if it turns out to be a panic and hysteria or whatever at least you were part of the people who weren't fucking going out and skiing during this fucking thing so I think it's gonna go on longer and I think while it goes on longer if you have the ability to limit human contact and to avoid the superstitious part of yourself that I've got to That's looking at this and thinking like,
But this is, you know, this is a fucked up moment for us, but a learning moment.
I really hope that this prepares us in case something really horrible comes down the pipe, and I think, I hope it prepares us for understanding that this is a possibility.
It lets us understand like, hey, we need to accept this, this is how it goes.
And if there's some new shit that comes on, let's act quicker and let's take care of this quicker.
And like if everybody just had a two week off thing, like, you know, and this was something that Dana White and Frank Fertitta were talking about before anyone did it.
Frank Fertitta told Dana White, He's like, why don't we just have everything shut down for two weeks?
Just no one go to work, no one do anything, two weeks, stop the planes, and the way he explained it to me was like, he said, pull the band-aid off of it.
I'm like, that is actually probably a really good idea.
Well, guess what?
Now that's being forced, mandatory forced, in certain cities where they've got bad outbreaks.
If they had just done that the moment it cut, the moment it cut loose, just no one goes anywhere for two weeks, let's nip this fucking thing in the bud.
If that was really done, They're right.
I mean, if you could really get that to be implemented at a scale of 350 million people.
The water you're really supposed to be drinking is the stuff that comes right out of the ground.
That's what you're supposed to be drinking.
But if you get stuff that's biologically infected, you get stuff that animals have been in, animal waste, feces and stuff, or bacteria or diseases or anything, you can purify that.
You can take these water tablets and you drop them in there and it kills everything.
It torches the water.
So in cases of emergency, like backpackers, they'll find an elk wallow and they can drink that water out of a fucking elk wallow.
Really?
Yeah, there's a thing called the SteriPen.
It's another thing they use.
The SteriPen actually uses ultraviolet light.
Let's say you have a water bottle, you fill it up with elk piss, and you wave your thing, because you're trying to stay alive.
If there's no water, if you're on a high country desert mule deer hunt and you can't find any water, you've got to take water wherever you can get it.
Because you're not bringing all your water up there if you're staying there for 12 days.
You're hoping you can find creeks, and you might not find a creek.
And if you do, it might be fucked up.
It might be a dead animal in it.
Shit.
Something might have gone there to die and polluted the water or beavers might have shit in it.
You have to have something that kills all that stuff.
So that's something that people should have.
I think you should have some sort of a first aid kit.
Bandages, things like that, disinfectants, antibiotics, stuff like that.
You should probably have something like that in case something goes wrong and someone gets hurt and there's no hospital available.
Or there's no doctor or you have to wait in the morning before you can take someone to a doctor.
Whatever the fuck the problem is.
You should have that.
You should have batteries that you've charged.
Right?
Like cell phone.
Get some backup batteries.
Charge those bitches.
You know?
If you have a generator, fantastic.
But some people can't afford one and they don't have the room for one.
They can't have one.
It's not feasible if you live in an apartment building.
But having charged batteries for phones is very important.
Food and water.
Food and water are number one.
You want to have dried foods, things like rice and pasta.
You can store a lot of it.
It's high in calories.
You can eat it and it doesn't take up too much room.
There's canned things you can keep forever.
That's what you want.
You want food that you could have, that could keep you alive.
And how fun that is when you find yourself, even, you know, my wife and I fucking moving and like unpacking boxes.
It's been like nonstop for the last like four days.
And we've had to like, you know, there's something in it, even though it's terrifying, that really is joyful.
And it's so like...
Feels more alive than I've felt in a long time.
I think that's the thing we've got to tune into, is that if nothing else, we're alive right now.
That's beautiful.
And yeah, maybe this just, maybe we can become like those people up there.
I mean, I think that's one of the, anytime a fucked up thing happens to you, personally, it's a chance.
To become a bitter piece of shit, or a little more angry, or a little more tired, or a little more depressed, or to become a hero.
Anything, whatever it may be.
Any bit of phenomena that comes your way as a person.
Anytime something's really gotta get done that I've been procrastinating, or anytime some shitty, unexpected thing comes my way, I have a moment to decide, am I gonna react to this?
I always react to shitty things and become negative or dark or get pissed.
Or can I react to it in a completely new way?
And I think every time you do a new way, this is my woo-woo concept, you pop into a different part of the multiverse.
It's a little better than the one you were in before.
And it's like a trajectory you can go on.
When I was getting stoned at the gym at 4am, I was imagining on the treadmill that I was running, Through the multiverse towards a healthier version of me.
That I wasn't getting in shape.
I was actually being inhaled into a more in shape version of me that already existed.
That's the kind of shit I have to do to get myself to work out.
I think there's thoughts that I've had that are real similar to that, where I've wondered, like, if multiverses are real, and there's supposed to be different versions of you, infinite versions all over the universe, why are we assuming that this is the same, every day you wake up in the same version?
And the more you do that, the more you do that, the more you start running into other people who are doing the same thing.
You start ending up in that part of the multiverse where many other people are doing the same thing.
And eventually...
You know, theoretically, I think, eventually through those series of decisions, maybe that's where you can like, that's where all of a sudden you start realizing like, oh shit.
Oh shit, I'm in a temple.
I'm not even in a reality that I thought I was in.
I was just like in a deep state of contemplative meditation.
I don't know.
I mean, there's all kinds of interesting experiments you can do.
Have you ever heard the term pro-noia?
It's the opposite of paranoia where you think the universe is conspiring to help you instead of hurt you.
If you do that, if you really do imagine that every single thing that's happening in your life is a grand conspiracy to help you to advance you to bring you or another way to put it.
Do you ever listen?
I love listening to Christian radio.
This guy was talking about a thing called convection, which is being inhaled into the Christ.