Duncan Trussell and Joe Rogan dissect China’s cultural influence via John Cena’s Mandarin apology for Taiwan, questioning tech-driven manipulation like AI memes or CRISPR’s ethical risks—e.g., HIV-resistant twins with potential cognitive trade-offs. They debate gain-of-function viruses (100% lethal mousepox) and Fermi Paradox fears of self-destruction, then pivot to golf’s absurdity, Blippi’s scandalous impersonator tour, and Logan Paul’s wrestling past. Compassion for shared humanity clashes with societal narratives, even in extreme cases like Hitler, while Rogan highlights Pentagon UFO footage (David Fravor’s testimony) as credible despite hoaxes. The episode ends musing on tech’s inevitability and the need to balance empathy with justice. [Automatically generated summary]
That's some really really the most it's again like you know we're watching that fight oh my god when we're watching that fight last night and you're just watching it and you're trying to make sense of the new reality you know because it's like you got to accept it but he's wearing a pikachu medallion Fighting like the best boxer alive today, you know?
But you have to watch it from the perspective of like, well, this is what is happening now.
Because otherwise you get this weird spinning vertigo.
Like, what the fuck universe am I in?
Same thing when you're like watching John Cena do some...
Weird apology in Mandarin.
It's this sense of like, what?
This is a malfunction.
This is a breakdown.
I don't get this.
When in the history of the United States, imagine some old video of John Wayne doing some apology in another language.
It is weird, but it's a warning to everybody, right?
The people that don't, they're not taking this sort of cultural shift seriously.
When you see an enormous alpha male in John Cena, John Cena's arms are so big, it looks like they're supposed to be a foot longer, but someone sawed them off and put like a fist Here.
It's like if my forearm went down only to here and then the fist was there, his wrists are enormous.
He's such a gorilla, right?
And to see that guy saying it in Chinese and you read what he actually said, it's hard to say, right?
Because one thing, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I was like, what did he actually say?
Because I don't speak Mandarin.
I wish someone maybe that spoke Mandarin could translate it and tell me whether or not that was accurate.
I'm assuming it was accurate because I haven't heard anything...
You know, people who speak Mandarin must have gotten a hold of it since then.
You know, also that thing that just popped up, they said it was a mistake, but Bing apparently made it so that if you image search, the Tiananmen Square guy holding the suitcase didn't show up on the day of, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
And so everybody's like, what the fuck?
Just like, are you, are you like owned by China now?
You know?
That is a really strange form of invasion, isn't it?
It's like, it's not the normal kind of invasion.
We're thinking about invasions from old historical versions of invasions, but that's not how it works anymore.
Now it's, you know, if you get your technology into another country, if you become the supplier of a lot of their pharmaceuticals, all these things, then you don't really need to invade.
You could just warp people's minds any way you want.
I mean, you know, we have no...
I'm not just talking state agencies either.
I mean, just cobbles of, like, anarchists who feel like just fucking around with the zeitgeist could theoretically just...
Put out a shit ton of bots or phone banks of people, putting weird ideas into the culture that, you know, you hear it enough times, you start thinking, like, I guess that is true.
I don't know if you've ever had the thing happen where you're just scanning Twitter and you see some completely wrong, like, deeply wrong Fact and physics, but you were just shitting or something.
So you're like, well, that's interesting.
And then later you repeat it without looking it up to see if it's true, and then you go back to see it.
This happened.
I mean, you realize like three tweets above that tweet, it's like the guy's like, I'm the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.
You know what I mean?
You're like, oh fuck!
I repeated some fact I heard from a guy who thinks he's the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe literally at dinner!
You know, that's what I'm saying is it leaks out.
And so it's just trippy, you know?
It's just weird to imagine that, like, what country are we even in the United States anymore?
It's confusing because we're really governed by money.
When we have no money, we have nothing.
If we run out of money, all bets are off because we don't have money to fix the roads, we don't have money to keep the grid up.
So we have to have a certain amount of money.
And one of the things that became abundantly clear during COVID was that we rely on a lot of other countries to make our stuff.
When they were running short of certain supplies, and medicine even, they're like, hey, how come we don't make this?
We don't self-sustain.
And it made a lot of people think that, oh, I need to get a garden.
I need to have food in my house.
I need to be self-sustaining.
The same way a country needs to be like that, but much like the country.
As soon as we start getting the gears of industry back rolling and moving, we forget.
Oh, the grid's back on?
I forget.
Like out here, the grid went out for a whole fucking week, man.
Nobody had power.
It was wild.
The streets were covered in ice.
It was wild.
And everybody was like, dude, that's it.
I'm going to start storing food, and I'm going to start...
But then as soon as the power goes on, you've got to go back to work.
Most people forget.
And I remember when they banned Huawei...
When you couldn't buy Huawei phones.
And this is why, because I'm a phone dork.
I'm really into phones.
I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching MKBHD and watching Lewis from Unbox Therapy and watching Flossie Carter.
I really enjoy watching the technology of phones increase in this really crazy way.
I'm fascinated by it.
I don't necessarily understand why, because when I look at the applicable uses in my life, like, how much do I use my phone?
Like, all the capabilities of it.
Very little.
I text my friends, I'm like, watch a YouTube video, take a picture of something.
I don't do a lot of shit with my phone.
But I'm fascinated with these goddamn things.
I'm fascinated by where they go.
And I was going to buy a Huawei, I think it was like a Mate 10 Pro Porsche edition.
I was trying to figure out how to get it to work in America.
Because they work on like, you got to make sure that one works on the right CDMA, because they have like different systems overseas and other countries.
So I was trying to find out how to buy this, and Porsche Design was making the dopest phone.
And I was interested in doing this, and then all of a sudden I started reading on these forums, they're going to take it down.
They're going to not allow Huawei to sell anything in America, because we caught them Doing stuff with routers or some shit.
I don't remember the whole story.
But I remember thinking, whoa, when have you ever heard that before?
Where they said, hey, a company can't sell shit in our country because we think you're compromised by the government of your country and you're sneaking in.
Not just like, oh, they hacked into a router and now they got all the Facebook data.
No, no, no.
No, the whole company You can't sell shit here anymore.
You can't sell their phones anymore.
They were about to go, I think they're gonna be on AT&T and all these other big providers.
You know what, I have, cause generally I'm late on the record or I just don't, cause you know, you can trigger them real quick.
Like they get so mad and then they'll always say something about fucking your mom or like, you know, your mom's got the biggest dick and then they'll hang up on you.
But my friend Pemberton, Got one real, like he's got a call up where he got one really, really good.
It's just fun to do.
But anyway, man, my point is, you siphon all this fucking data, feed it to an AI, run that through some kind of voice simulator so it sounds like a person, and now you've got like a legion of fake Americans interacting.
People have done that with those guys and then called another one and had them talk to each other and they can't figure out for about an hour what the fuck's happening.
I mean, what they're doing with the Internet Research Agency, or at least what they were doing prior to 2016, if we assume that they don't get any more sophisticated over the last four or five years, who would it be so silly?
This lady, Renee DiResta, I heard her on Sam Harris's podcast, and I got her on mine, and she was explaining to me all the research that she did, looking into how the Russians were making these Facebook pages, not the Russians, just one agency, I should say, Internet Research Agency.
They were making these memes, and she's like, hundreds of thousands of memes, and a lot of them were really funny.
She's like, I was really laughing while I was doing this.
And she said she got to study how they created these pages, and that's where it was really interesting.
Like, they would create these pages, and they would use them for a while, like maybe a Simpsons fan page or something like that, and they would get a certain amount of following, and then they would switch it over to Occupy Wall Street.
Or they would switch it over to Black Lives Matter.
Or they would switch it over to LBGTQPage.
And they would just get a bunch of followers and then just use those followers.
Use a ton of hashtags and connect people through hashtags and they would just try to figure out what sticks.
And they would have meme pages, and they would organize arguments.
So they organized a Texas separatist meeting across the street from some Islamic pride rally.
So they got the two of them on catty-corner streets.
So they're yelling at each other.
You ever see that video of the cat, and he's on a roof, and a crow gets behind him and starts fucking with him?
And then he gets the cat to fight with another cat.
And the cat's like, and then there's another cat that's on another rooftop, just like five feet away, and that cat, he looks at that cat, he's like, man, fuck you.
And then, why are you staring at me, man, while this crow's fucking with me?
It's like, this is what I've realized I've been doing is anytime any kind of crazy shit happens, I assign responsibility to some unknown state agency because we think there's no way Any normal group of people could do that.
It's got to be a country with a shit ton of money.
But I'm realizing that is just not the case anymore because the technology that everyone has access to is sufficient to at least like in a really degraded way imitate what you know probably what state agencies are doing meaning that now It's pure anarchy,
because you assume those, like, whatever the fuck they are, the UAPs, we are all like, oh, we know it's not a state agency, or if it is, it's like deeply secret.
It's like, motherfucker, you think it's a state agency?
What if it's just a group of geniuses who, like, Secretly crack their own thing in their basement and they're like just fucking around with this thing.
You know, that's the obvious thing coming out now that everyone suspects that the virus came from the virology lab in the place it was at the epicenter.
At first they were like, oh fuck, it definitely came from there.
And then they're like, well actually there's the wet markets there.
But anyway, the point is like, what if, What if you're like an hyper-eco-environmentalist group and you know that if you engineer this thing that's got like an extra two weeks or whatever asymptomatic, like you engineer a thing not to kill people but to fuck up economies.
It's like you're talking about the Uncanny Valley.
That thing where when you're looking at CGI and it's not quite right and it's fucking creepy.
It's that thing.
This seems to be happening across the fucking board.
Where you're seeing what does appear to be A kind of clumsy, alien attempt to express solidarity with something, but it doesn't quite understand humans.
It's not like it doesn't just understand whatever the fuck it's trying to express connectivity to.
It's like it doesn't understand the way normal people interact.
And I think if you get a political class and you put them in a city where they can get on underground subways that are just for them, ride around in these little fucking trams through D.C. to avoid the traffic, they live in this weird, weird bubble. they live in this weird, weird bubble.
And over time, you're going to get weird.
You're going to get weirder and weirder.
Are you really interacting with your constituents?
Probably a little, but also you're getting like you've got advisor upon advisor upon advisor articulating some expression of what's supposed to be the will of the people.
But that's been warped a little bit by the lobbyists.
You know what I mean?
And also, you are thinking like, fuck, I want to get re-elected.
I need millions of dollars to get re-elected.
And that's not going to come from anybody but certain corporations.
But then those corporations have kind of loose ties with...
Countries that are adversaries, as they say, meaning that all of a sudden it's not just like some lobbyist who wants there to be a lack of regulations on oil pipelines getting the ear of some politician.
But it's a corporation that's a little bit influenced by a completely different country getting the ear of the politician.
It's like suddenly we're getting like this thing that's some kind of like hybrid.
It's not a country anymore.
It's becoming more of a, I don't know, like just some hyper connected thing that is like probably not quite What you would traditionally call a country.
How do you stop that from happening with language?
What if people come along with a language that's easy to learn, you can learn it, it's fun, there's games you can play, you can learn it while you're playing a game, and you get points?
What if there's a Call of Duty language?
No bullshit.
You know how different video games are thought about creating their own coins?
Sure.
Different people have different coins, right?
They're making their own coins.
What's to stop you from making a language that goes along with a video game, and as you get really good at the video game, you learn the language?
Also, yeah, if like Musk's neural mesh works out, and so we can expedite the Ability to learn new languages.
So it's not just like new languages are being formed, but then also you can just digest them like instantaneously.
So now you get this like weird hyper-evolving language that is probably going to be the language that the settlers speak on the moon colonies and the Mars colonies and the asteroid miners.
You're not going to be able to speak You're gonna have to have some pigeon.
By the way, I watched the Stanford professor that you had on.
You know what I'm talking about?
You have so many people on.
You had a Stanford professor who's like a cultural biologist or something.
He's showing how gene expression affects just basically a lot of humanity.
So it tricks the rat into getting close to the cat.
There's some sort of weird thing that's going on.
That is a complex deception.
That's not a regular deception.
No.
You're like, no, I didn't work this way.
No, it didn't work that way.
How many thousands of times does a rat have to get eaten by the cat or killed by the cat before they figure out how to do it right, where it's real consistent?
It's definitely mutations, but I almost feel like there's a missing element To what makes things work that we're not tuned into.
We have these mechanisms, and this is no disrespect to the people that study this, and obviously I'm a moron, but all these people that are looking at this and looking at these mechanisms, I agree with all their work.
I'm not saying that I disagree that these mechanisms are in place and that they can show a clear cause and effect to certain genes and why they express themselves and certain Evolutionary traits that are beneficial to whatever animal.
But I think there's also some other weird shit going on, man.
I think there's multiple things going on.
And I think it's almost like there's information out there in experience.
And that information, when animals get jacked or when things go wrong, that information still manages to transfer out into the tribe.
You know, in some sort of non-verbal communication.
So I think it does that to like the parasites.
I think it works that way with people.
I think it works that way with a lot of stuff.
I think ideas and like tones, the way people see things, generally spreads almost like a virus as much as it spreads like information.
If you look at parasites, and how the fuck a parasite figured out a rewire, like, hey, when the rats eat us, we don't fucking breed, okay?
Because we can't reproduce inside the rat's gut.
We need to get in that fucking cat.
How do we do this?
So they figured out how to get in the cat.
And the way to get in the cat is to trick the rat.
And then it gets to people, because people love cats, right?
So they tell pregnant women, never touch kitty litter.
Yeah.
That stuff can get in you.
And if it gets in you, it fucks with the child's development.
It's related to decrease in IQ, increase in impulsive behavior, increase in...
Sapolsky was saying that there was an...
I don't know about the IQ thing.
Google that.
I might be wrong about that.
Toxoplasmosis in children leads to a decrease in IQ. The decrease in IQ thing is like, what the fuck causes IQ, right?
What are all the little pieces that are moving in place there?
Sapolsky said that motorcycle victims, when he was doing his residency, they would come in and there was a disproportionate amount of motorcycle accidents that have toxoplasmosis in their system when they would test him.
So the doctor that he was working with when he was doing his residency told him, let's test him for toxo.
And he's like, there's a disproportionate number because it makes him reckless.
Can you scroll that up so I can see if the arm is in the way?
Just up.
Just go that way.
Oh, sorry.
Analysis, a sample of 857 conscripts showed toxoplasmosa.
Positive subjects were significantly overrepresented among people with only elementary education, had significantly lower verbal intelligence, and significant lower factor of novelty seeking.
We got to think, again, you're dealing with poverty, right?
You're dealing with third world, a lot of third world environments where they have high incidence of that shit.
But that is fucking fascinating that a bug figures out a way to get a rat horny and get him chasing a cat so it gets eaten because it wants to get in that cat's stomach.
The implication, this is really creepy, but it is, when I'm looking at people with COVID are afraid to get the vaccine, or people are like, you know, we have this fucking thing, it's probably a bioweapon, man, and we got this thing, and people gathering together, you know, when it was soaring, just gathering together as sturges, you know?
You have to...
Like, I was thinking, like, fuck.
Did they not just engineer a bioweapon?
But did they figure out a way to make it so that part...
One of the things it does is it makes people want to get really social and, like, go against the thing that would slow it down?
You know, like, is this some kind of fucking insane new version of toxoplasmosis that makes people...
But I was thinking, you know, if like over zillions of years, toxoplasmosis can make rats get horny when they smell cat piss, couldn't someone whip some shit up in the laboratory that makes people just, I don't know, like a certain kind of sneaker?
But you know, man, to get back to your idea of shit, it feels like there is something that we haven't quite figured out yet when it comes to gene expression and the way that it gets genes mutate and the way evolution happens.
Similarly, with language and with data, We aren't at the place yet where we acknowledge that data is as much of a drug or a virus as anything else.
You know what I mean?
Because you're eating it with your eyes doesn't make it any less like you're getting infected.
You know what I mean?
When you said that, holy fuck, that's what advertising is, I had to pause for a second.
If data is alive, or is a form of life, or kind of like, you know, they say a virus is not quite alive, not quite dead.
It's somewhere in between.
So are information packets, you know?
And the effect that they have is so profound that, yeah, I wonder how laws would change if we start reframing what information is as more of a living thing.
It's more of a thing that lives in the mind and jumps from one person to the next, but it's actually kind of alive.
You know, we think that we're so awesome because we figured out how to make that Huawei phone that spies on your neighbors.
But what is that?
What is going on there?
Oh, the Communist Party is trying to take over.
Is it or is it the most successful vehicle for getting ideas through?
Is it the most successful vehicle for getting technology through?
Ideas that create things, which are the most important ideas to things.
Not to humans.
That's why we moan and we talk about materialism and how fucking shallow the world is because we recognize there's a disconnect between the things that are valuable to humans and the things that just make more things.
They're valuable because they allow more things to be created.
Well, then you go, well, what the fuck are these things?
What are these things and how'd they trick us into loving them so much?
They don't...
I'm talking about how I love watching phone videos.
They don't change my fucking life.
If I had an iPhone 6 and I just were good, let's stop right there, I probably wouldn't notice.
You'd probably send me a message, I say hi back, we're cool, call each other, hey, what's up?
You know, maybe my phone would look a little shittier for the FaceTime, but that's it.
Other than that, I wouldn't notice anything.
But we're all obsessed with these fucking things.
And these things have weaseled their way into our lives.
And then you get the commercials.
And the commercials show the things.
And it's usually a girl with long legs and pretty feet.
Someone who used to work at MKUltra got a job at Apple and was like, look, why don't you try this thing that we did during Project Stargate and we'll make this thing.
And then suddenly you get this Apple commercial.
It's just some woman.
And it's like beautiful, beautiful computers that I don't need at all.
My wife and I watch it and we're like, we gotta get one.
And like every once in a while, like today was their big keynote thing, but every once in a while the wizards show, behold the new spirits we've summoned, and then, you know, shows it to the villagers and we're all like, oh my god, look at that glowing cube of Anaxanax!
You know what I mean?
It's like, the cube of Anaxanax will now teleport six feet farther.
This is a spell of hypnosis 17. They're going to get you to accept those as your avatars and you're going to be more comfortable with them than your real skin.
Maybe that is part of why we're so obsessed with gender and race.
Maybe we're going to get to a point, maybe the universe is priming us, and we're going to get to a point very soon where you can really swap out your gender and race.
You really can change what you are because you're just electricity going through your fucking brain connected to some machine by some weird interface and now they figured that interface out and you will live the life of whoever you want.
Whether you want to be tall or short, whether you're a person who decides you want to experience life in poverty, whether you want to experience life as a genius, whether you want to be a girl or a boy, gay or straight, black or white, Asian, whatever the fuck you want, you can do it all.
Well, that's, you know, like, I opened up The Singularity is Near recently just to look, you know, look through.
It's a great book.
Kurzweil's got this definition of humans in there that's so beautiful, and I'm gonna butcher it, but it's essentially like, you know, he's got a lot of definitions of humans.
Some of them are really amazing, like...
Something like self-replicating, nano-replicator or something.
But, like, the other description is humans are things that...
Because in there, people ask, like, okay, if we learn to use nanobots to decode us and, like...
You know, not just transform our bodies, but, you know, merge humans with other humans.
You know, theoretically, entire collectives of people could merge together as superorganisms with one personality.
But what are we going to be after that?
And he says, what humans are are creatures that like to push past all boundaries.
And so the market pressure that is going into, like, people spending all the money they spend to build these insane fucking phones...
That is the thing that's pushing us towards that point.
And that there's no choice.
That's the other thing.
I didn't realize this until I was reading it recently, because somehow when I was reading the Singularity shit before, I used to imagine, oh, we have a choice in this.
Like, humans as a whole just put the brakes on and be like, you know what?
Let's slow down on the Singularity project thing.
I don't think we're going to do it.
There's no choice.
Like, we're part of a river that's going over a waterfall.
And no particle of water gets to say, hold on, everybody!
Let's not go over the waterfall!
What do you say we just hang out, turn into a lake or something?
It's like, no, there's no way out of it.
It's happening.
And all this stuff that's causing all this fucking turmoil in society is related to humans coming to this weird point of freedom where we might not have to be what we were born as in any way.
Like isn't this what we're thinking about just ego that like people have gone through this intense laborious process to become the greatest tennis player of all time?
But if you could just get there through technology, isn't it?
It's I mean I get that there's like all these signals of discipline and all these signals of being something special But it seems like that's just because it's hard to do, right?
There's a thing that's going on here where it's like we're praising things that are hard to do because it's an ethic, right?
It's like burned into our system.
And we think it's definitely positive.
The things that are hard to do make you a better person.
But we're basing that on the idea that that's the only way to make you a better person.
Like, that just taking these downloads and all of a sudden learning how to play concert piano or learning how to do kung fu or learning how to do calculus, like, instantaneously adds to your database.
Maybe you just become the same version or even maybe a better version of a better person because you're not constantly bitter about struggle.
Because one of the things that sucks about really famous people or really successful people or really exceptionally accomplished people is they want you to know.
When they want you to know, and I think we've all been guilty of it, and I know I've been guilty of it for sure, where I was happy about certain success and I bragged about it.
And in retrospect, it's probably gross, but in the moment I was being celebratory.
That is a thing where when people are trying to do something and it's difficult to do, when someone does something like that, we admire them because they made it through.
But ultimately, the benefit's supposed to be that it makes them somehow or another a better version of what they were.
With everything they do, whether they climb Mount Everest or write a novel.
Hard things make you a more interesting person.
Everybody that I know has gone through some interesting shit, and it's one of the things that I love most about comics.
Because I know the emotional rollercoaster ride that it takes to become a competent comedian.
Where you're working professional, it's fucking crazy.
And then to do what we do, what you and I do, which is even weirder, where you're just thinking out loud in front of the world, which is fucking bananas.
A ridiculous thing to do.
And while you're doing it, most of the time you're high or drunk.
Or a lot of the time at least.
All these things, they're interesting and we celebrate them because we know they're hard to achieve.
But why do they have to be?
Why can't people just become a better person with a download?
Do we want someone to fucking have to run marathons for 10 years to be a better person?
But that would be, so that would be one of the big controversies, which is like, okay, so we've got one league of baseball players that achieved their ability to play baseball through a combination of skill and talent and practice, and then we have this other league.
They're all 14. But they didn't download.
So that now they're like 50 times better than any living baseball player.
Watching them is like watching some kind of like psychedelic geometry because they're so fucking good and the balls move so fast.
But that's the problem, is because you're going to have a group of people that rejects becoming whatever this thing is, and those people, they're gonna say things like, we're being ostracized, we're being pushed to the side, and it's like, well, kind of, but also what's happening is, You don't want to adapt, and the history of evolution is adaptation, for better or for worse.
It might be better to be a primordial person who hasn't done gene therapy, who hasn't transformed their genetics, which is coming.
The new vaccines are part of that, but the thing that's coming, because that shit sped stuff up.
What's coming is going to be...
Again and again, you're going to get this opportunity where it's like, do you want to get rid of your diabetes, maybe?
Okay, we're going to give you this thing that's going to reprogram your DNA so that your insulin is working, so everything's working.
Your pancreas is working.
And some people...
Who have diabetes are going to be like, no, I think I want to stay like this.
I don't want to alter my DNA. And other people are going to be like, yes, do it now.
Fucking inject it in me.
I don't want to have to go through a life like this anymore.
I want to see what it's like.
And not just that aging.
And not just that...
Cancer which I'm quite excited about because I had it and you know having had it it's like you it's it's it's any any Advancement in that realm is like exciting because it took my mom too and obviously for not just my own selfish ass But everybody out there is contending with it,
but like you're this is going to be Every you know few years there's gonna be a thing where it's like yeah, you don't want it Okay, you don't have to get it But the more you don't get it and then when it gets to intelligence man When it gets to just like, you know, or what if you want to give your workers genetic therapy that makes them faster, you know, or smarter or whatever, you know what I mean?
But yeah, if you look at, so the big controversy right now is virology gain-of-function research, which is taking some fucking virus, altering a little bit, and sometimes you need to do that to study it, right?
I was looking it up.
There's these mice pox, I think, in Australia.
Because basically, you want to take this virus, whatever it may be, that might pose a threat to humanity, like what happened in Galveston.
Two multiverses over where Apple's a wizard tower, a virus is a demon.
And so if you're one of the royal demon defenders, you've got to study what are the most possible 15 demons that might break out of hell.
And rampage through Earth, right?
And so in this dimension, that's like the coronaviruses, but not just the coronaviruses, Ebola, not just Ebola, like all the possible things we might have to worry about, the avian bird flu, right?
If you're like in one of these labs, you need to study it, but you gotta study it in a living thing that is easier to study than whatever it came from.
Gain of function, make it so that it infects mice, right?
Now you can put it in mice and start studying the way it works in living organisms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So that's gain of function research, right?
So like virologists, so now there's like a moratorium on it, at least I hope there is very strict, but virologists are kind of like, look, We have to do gain of function if we're going to study the shit that's coming because we want to try to at least begin the process of making a vaccine, understanding how it's going to affect civilization so that if it does come, if the demon comes out of hell, we know the spell is to cast.
That's the reason we got the COVID vaccines.
Everyone's like...
They started working on it six months ago.
It's like, no, they didn't.
They've been working on versions of it for a while because of this very thing.
But anyway, the problem is, the problem with gain-of-function, the double-edged sword is, You're making the thing.
It's like instead of waiting for the demon to explode from hell, you summon it in a sealed chamber of Lornax.
But the reason they're working on it is because you would rather understand it in a laboratory than all of a sudden mousepox naturally mutates And suddenly, shit tons of people are just dying, and we have no idea how to deal with it.
It's like if you go back throughout humanity, we hit a bunch of fucking pit stops.
Where things went real bad, and we had to restart the whole race.
And I think at times, human beings got down to, because of natural disasters, just a few thousand people.
And for sure, because of plagues, the human race probably got dropped down to multiple times, like half of what it used to be, or a third of what it used to be.
The sky becomes black with soot as this volcano bursts fire into the sky and it drowns out all the sun, kills all the plants, you have no food, animals starve to death.
It would be nice if when you're watching Fox News or whatever the left or the right fucking propaganda mechanism is, Every once in a while they would just admit, they're like, we don't know what we're talking about, y'all!
We're performing.
But you know what I mean?
I think that would be nice if every once in a while they broke the fourth wall.
A new study of DNA suggests North America was originally populated by just a few dozen people who crossed a land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age.
About 14,000 years ago, humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia to North America.
Most experts agree.
You know, I got called racist because I believe that.
Somebody sent me a thing saying, why is this racist?
People think that some folks, like colonists, believe that people came here across the Bering Land Bridge and populated North America, where some folks think there was Native people just here, period.
Like there was Native people everywhere.
And I gotta admit, I never even thought about it until somebody said that, because if there were Native people in South America, For sure.
Do we believe that all the Native people in North America and South America walked down from Siberia?
Well, by the way, during that time, 14,000 years ago, you know it was alive on that Bering land bridge that they think kept people from crossing over sooner?
They believe that the asteroids slammed into the planet, and there's real proof of that in terms of when they do core samples, according to these guys, in that range of when the Ice Age ends.
There's all this nuclear glass that indicates there was some sort of impacts all over the place, all throughout Asia and Europe.
And here's one thing that me and my wife don't get along, or don't agree with, rather.
I'm into, I am not just into, I have this weird obsession with ancient Asian art.
Weird obsession.
Like, the Buddha figure, I have a bunch of Buddhas, I have different Ganeshes and all these different things from Thailand and China and I'm obsessed with that shit.
I don't know why.
I've always been.
I've always been obsessed with that.
I see that and it's like, part of me goes, I want that near me.
She just remembered this other time, and she apparently identified aspects of that culture that they didn't believe at that point, but then later they realized she was right.
Well, look, I mean, regardless, I do think like...
From my perspective, that's just good karma.
We call it whatever you want to call it, but to be sort of...
I think anything that you're drawn to like that, whether it's like, you know, religious imagery or whether it's a style of literature or whatever, you're supposed to...
That's like the X marks the spot.
Like, you're supposed to go deep into it to understand.
Because, you know, those images, there's so much associated with those images.
Well, it appears when you're under the influence of psychedelics.
That's the weirdest thing for me.
My first psychedelic trip ever, there was an infinite number of Buddhas in a lotus position.
There were these golden Buddhas floating around.
They represented perfect symmetry with the way they were seated.
Because they're seated in a lotus position, and from the top of their head, the peak of their head, it went straight down, and they were floating and moving all around in synchronicity, and I was like, whoa!
It was heavy!
And they didn't want...
You had to abandon...
This is the first thing I remember about the DMT experience, the first one with the Golden Buddha, which is literally why I got this tattoo.
Because it was one of the most profound moments of my life.
Because it was the first time where I felt 100% clear that there was no room for bullshitting anybody.
You can get by with charisma, and you can say things the right way, and you can pretend, and maybe have a little bit of luck, and maybe have some genetic gifts for certain things, but who are you?
What are you?
Who are you really?
And you realize, oh my god, I'm carrying around all this nonsense for no reason.
And it don't work on them anyway.
When you get over there and all those Buddhas were floating in and around me, they knew I didn't sleep as much as I did.
They knew I used my phone more than I say I do.
They know everything.
They know all the lies and all the painful memories of regret that you have from the time you could remember from being five.
I hit my cousin in the face with a bag of cookies when I was five and I still feel bad about it.
And that was one of the first times that I had ever made an epic mistake, where everybody around me wanted these cookies.
Because we were in New Jersey, and there was these delis, or bakeries rather, that would make bread, and we'd go with my grandfather all the time to get bread, and we would get cookies and little pastries, and I would look forward to them so much.
The problem with Twitter is the same problem with how easy it is to pretend you're a person on Twitter because it's so impersonal and so little of you comes through in text that it's easy to start thinking of people like their text It's easy to say mean things or be disrespectful or dismissive or completely lack compassion.
And as a person who's been the subject of it, it's fascinating.
And my strategy has always been like, I'm just going to just not pay attention to this.
Because I don't want to argue with anybody.
I genuinely try to be the best person I can be, and like all of us, I'm flawed.
And I know what my intentions are, and I know how I try to go about business and life, and I try to be as nice as possible.
That's my goal.
So when I see people communicating the way they communicate on Twitter, I'm like, there is no way that that syncs up with my view of the world, and I can't argue on it either.
Like, if you argue on Twitter, then you're synced up to this really low vibration.
Now, here's the problem.
Occasionally, it's a resource.
Occasionally, you learn some really interesting stuff.
You see a funny meme, someone informs you about a documentary or a book that you really, you read it and like, holy shit, thank you so much.
Occasionally, it does that.
But it also harbors so much negative thinking.
It's so bad for the people that are slinging that shit.
You're just thinking about it all day long.
That's all they're thinking about, and they're engaged in some sort of verbal battle.
And the problem is I know a lot of them independently, right?
So I know I'm outside of Twitter, and I'm talking to them, and they're on medication, and they're doing all kinds of weird things to deal with their anxiety, and I'm like, hey man, do you ever think part of that?
Might be this battleground you're engaging in, this impersonal, emotionless battleground where it's 70% insults.
And you know, it's weird, because again, this is stuff you hear, this is stuff that anyone could say, but somehow when it's coming out of the Dalai Lama, who, by the way, has this translator who's been with him forever, and you see those two on stage together, and then you will understand what Buddhism looks like, because it's not serious, it's not heavy, they're talking to each other to translate, they're laughing to each other as they're translating.
It's just so in the moment and fun, and you look at that and you're like, Oh, that's not the boring thing that I thought it was.
This is alive and sweet and fun, and they're enjoying what they're doing.
It's really, really cool.
But one of the things that came up was this issue of when someone insults you, when someone says something shitty to you.
And I don't remember the question, but someone's asking this question.
The way the Dalai Lama put it was, they don't know you, number one, but what you're seeing is an echo.
Someone did that to them, it got inside of them, and then it is echoing.
They're like the wall of a weird, infinite, geometric cave, and this wave of negativity is bouncing off of them, bouncing to you, and you have a choice to react to it as though it were real.
And if you do, you become solid enough to bounce it onto somebody else or realize what it is.
You're just looking at an echo.
Once you realize that, you don't feel as defensive.
If it's a person attacking you and you feel like, I've got to defend against this person, but if you realize, really, Most people, when they're saying shitty things to other people, they don't know that person because they don't know themselves.
Well, the problem is even if they do, like Louis C.K. said something that's really appropriate here.
We were talking about it.
He goes, it's just talk.
He goes, it seems like it's different because it's written down, but it's just talk, which is one of the most ultimate Louis C.K. things to say.
People have always just said crazy shit, but it didn't necessarily mean anything.
But now, because it's written down, all of a sudden we think it means something, but it's basically just people talking shit, right?
But they're talking shit, and some people...
Unfortunately, it's like too much of their life.
I've been around too many people where they're hanging out with you in the middle of the day, and then they pull up Twitter, and you see their eyes gloss over, and they start arguing with someone on Twitter, and then they check it every five...
It's not so much the, you know, micro moments of feeling butt hurt because someone that you will never meet decided to say the meanest thing anyone ever said to you.
That sucks.
But what really sucks is all those moments when you're completely glue-trapped into this technological opiate and you're not interacting with people around you.
And then also you're carrying the weight of whatever the particular thing is like, my god, it's not like everyone out there is just like, you know, there's some precise archers of pain out there.
But see, this is the difference between those Buddhas you saw and humans.
Because a human identifies that thing and, number one, pretends that it's weird that another human should have a...
Flaw, a paradox, a fucking contradiction, that they're not perfect.
And then for whatever reason, we'll also think, because you're not perfect in this specific way, I'm going to fucking do everything I can to expose and hurt you.
Whereas those things that you saw, they love you anyway.
They love it itself.
unidentified
And so this is the difference between- Humans are affected by demons is what you're trying to say.
I think surrounds what the nature of human identity really is.
It's a confusion.
It's a problem of...
The term ignorance comes up in Buddhism a lot and it doesn't mean like dumb.
It means active ignoring, right?
So like any given person has within them stuff they're not proud of, but not just not proud of like you'll admit it on a podcast, you know, like, man, I just love to like suck a woman's feet while I jerk off.
Is it the most appealing thing?
No.
Do I feel weird admitting that?
Not at all!
Who cares, right?
But I'm talking about the deep shit.
There's stuff you don't want to say.
You're literally so ashamed of it that you don't want to look at it yourself.
So that's called active ignoring.
And so what that does is sweeping the shit under the rug.
So then, now you're going through day-to-day ignoring whatever the fucking thing is.
You smack the person with cookies, which is not that big a deal.
Some people burnt their fucking grandparents' house down and never told anybody.
You know what I mean?
And so you're going day-to-day and you can't really...
You pretend you don't look at it.
You don't look at it.
You don't look at it.
And then, this is where aggression comes from.
It's because you are pretending you're Something.
And that takes so much energy, too, because you always have to, like, avert your eyes from this aspect of yourself that you consider to be subpar or whatever.
And so this produces all this aggression, but because you're not looking at it in yourself, you see it in someone else.
So now it's all reflected all around you.
Your entire life has become a disco ball upon which the shit you don't want to look at is being reflected back at you over and over and over again.
Now you're in hell!
Because the thing you thought you could just ignore is in your friends.
It's in the government.
It's in your dogs.
It's in every single thing.
Some version of it weirdly reflected.
So that's called the act of ignoring.
So one aspect of Buddhism is the invitation.
Look it in the eye.
See what happens.
What happens if you stop ignoring it and not just look at it like it's separate from you, be it.
Fully, completely.
Chogyam Trungpa calls it like, compares it to when you go out to the Badlands.
And yeah, is this a beautiful place by normal standards?
No.
Or even like volcanoes, like in Iceland where that volcanic eruption happened.
It's lava and cracked and inhospitable.
Is it like beautiful in the sense of Hawaii?
No.
But it's fucking beautiful.
And so when you start looking at the entirety of what you are, You stop focusing on the Hawaii side and give some equal attention to the fucking Mordor side and in that you become a real person and all of a sudden the people around you that you used to think were fucking like you know assholes or out to get you or this or that You stop seeing it in them anymore, and the reason is because you've acknowledged it in yourself.
This is the idea, and then maybe you can become like those Buddhas you saw.
Because when you've done that with yourself, and you see someone who thinks they're being clever and hiding the fucking thing, and the way I think I'm hiding my bald spot because I can't see it, and then when I'm trying on clothes, I see it in the mirror, and I'm like, oh my god!
Do you think that there's something that's happening with the understanding of this, for the most part?
A lot of what you're saying resonates with people.
It resonates with me.
I'm sure it resonates with a lot of people that have embarrassing moments or disappointing moments in their life.
And they just don't like who they used to be.
And they want to move forward.
Whether it's whatever it is.
Losing weight.
Whatever it is.
It's applicable to anything.
Kicking addiction.
Do you think that this and this new ability to discuss shit like this, like where in pop culture did this conversation ever get to take place up until now?
In terms of the past, in terms of like, if you wanted to reach millions of people, how the fuck could you do this on VH1? How the fuck could you do this on MTV? Oh, right.
But in the very beginning, she says these people, they take up this process of meditation because they want to become better people.
This is an aggression to yourself as you are right now.
It goes back to this idea of like, the thing here, and this is not to say, so therefore we don't improve, but the idea is like, right now, what happens if, because the thing you're talking about, the tortured mind, the way the mind produces thoughts,
the way the tongue salivates, it just produces an infinite form of thoughts, an array of thoughts, many of which are completely mundane, some of which are horrible, It's horrifying, some of which are just basic day-to-day bullshit that you have to do, but it's always doing this thought production situation within which is encapsulated all of your neuroses, all of your complexes, all the things that you feel awful about, all the karmic shit from your whole life, right?
So if you begin to realize, oh shit, that's in me, but I'm not sure it is me, And then you start attacking it.
In other words, you're like, try to fix it.
It's a project now.
So I'm going to take this thing in my mind.
I'm going to fix it.
Now you're interacting with it.
You're affirming it in the affirmation.
It becomes more condensed and crystallized.
Then you become a person who's deeply engaged in the process of getting better.
I don't know if you've ever run into those people.
They've been reading self-help books for the last 30 years.
They're just constantly like, I'm working on myself.
The only thing that really shows is where are you?
What have you done?
That's what shows.
What have you done?
Where did you used to be?
Where are you at now?
Like right now, where are you at and why are you there?
Are you there because you just got kicked out of your parents' house and you're trying to get back on your feet?
Or are you there because you're 40 and you've made every wrong decision over and over and over again and you're mad at everybody around you but you're not mad at yourself?
Yes, and the invitation here is instead of coming to that conclusion, which is called waking up out of a dream, you wake up, you're like, oh my fucking God.
You know, so the idea is, it's really an intense idea, and these days it's weirdly controversial, and there's certain times when it's not the right thing to say to people, but essentially the idea is where you're at is perfect.
Play around with that just for fun.
Give yourself one minute.
After the one minute you can go back to whipping yourself with the fucking belt of your mind because you didn't make the right choices or you're a bad boy or a bad girl.
But for a minute, play around with the idea that where you're at is perfect.
It's exactly where you need to be.
You're there in the same way people go to a gym.
Because this situation is going to teach you everything you need to know about the universe and start living your life from that perspective.
So in other words, you don't become passive and think, oh, this is perfect.
I'm addicted to fucking meth and my apartment is covered in cat shit.
No, it doesn't mean you just leave it like that, but instead of beating yourself up for it, just allow that to be perfect and then see how you start acting.
You know, man, when I've started taking these fucking vitamins and, like, you know, I've been drinking more water and trying to eat better because the pandemic, I got a little unhealthy and now I'm feeling, like, good.
It's fucking awful, if you're me, but to be fully honest, that was when I was addicted to ketamine, so I was on a bit of a rampage, man, I will admit, so it's hard to say it was necessarily because of ketamine.
Well, look, you know, man, I think these days the big trick is just kind of temporarily...
Give up the project of crucifying all the people that you view as being, like, villainous, and realize that you've kind of been crucifying yourself, and you're not fooling anybody.
We all know that you have been tormenting yourself, and really you've been so hard.
A lot of people don't have a mom.
I see the way my mom, that's a fucked up Freudian slip.
I see the way my wife acts with a child and that love.
And then the children just eat it up, eat it up.
It's like watching like rain fall.
And it's like, I think how many people in the world do not have that situation.
They don't have it.
No one's loving them like that.
No one's eating them up and loving them no matter what.
And no one taught them to do it for themselves.
Oh, God, it's a disaster, man.
And because of that, they secretly think they're just abject failures.
They're comparing themselves to, like, LeBron James.
You know, like, when I'm writing, I compare myself to, like, Bukowski.
And I'll look at my writing and be like, this is the worst writing I've ever seen in my life!
Well, no shit, because you're comparing yourself to, like, one of the greatest writers that ever lived.
And so, in my opinion.
And so, anyway, all I'm saying is, like, damn, on a planetary level...
Take, you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it, but let's fucking have a little, like, a little armistice, like on that Christmas Eve when the, I think it was the French and the Germans, it was Christmas Eve.
Let's have a little armistice and for a second, like, just...
Give yourself an hour of not thinking you're the most secretly rotten piece of shit that ever wandered across the planet and just realize you deserve all the love in the world and where you're at is just great and like you're great and I know no matter what you're like someone's listening to this who's like actively who's probably got a bowl of like hot dog shit they're just They're just eating it.
But even that, just give yourself a break.
I'm not saying start some bullshit sweet nonsense like be nicer to the people around you.
I'm saying just give yourself a 30 minute respite from the never ending constant secret self-loathing horror you've been subjecting yourself to because that's going to be a great 30 minutes.
That might be artificial intelligence from Russia that created some video to try to make us think that some people out there are really mad about Elon.
This is why, this is one of the Fermi Paradox things, man, which is like, if you look at human personalities, most of us, when we get a technology, we're totally cool with it.
I grew up in the South.
My dad had a fucking arsenal.
I've never seen so many guns.
He had the number of guns a general in Eastern Europe would need.
That many guns.
The worst thing that happened to him is apparently he was hunting doves, hit a vulture, and it threw up on his face.
It's like my mom would happily tell that story after the divorce.
But that's it with the guns.
But one tiny percentage of us is so insane that we're going to take that fucking thing and ruin it for everybody else.
So that is a problem because right now it's guns and definitely computers for sure.
People have already been using computers to do more than just like, I'm going to make a cool app where you can learn how to code.
People have obviously been using computers, like the people who made the early computer viruses.
I used to work in my computer lab at my college and I had like a cork board of viruses that I like found in computers in the early days just for fun, you know, it's cool.
But like, so clearly people are going to do that with computers.
So, okay, CRISPR gene editing.
Oh yeah, right now, if I wouldn't know how to get all the shit I need to have whatever a CRISPR gene editing thing is, I would never in a million years probably be able to get the stuff to do gain of function, you know, genetic engineering on things.
But what about in 20 years?
What about in 50 years?
Eventually, if we have around the entire planet, one person who's butt hurt, That's the apocalypse.
So this is the Fermi paradox where they say, like, why aren't we seeing things out there in the universe?
It's because on these planets where they developed a technology that could easily have created a utopia, there was one supreme asshole who was like, let me see what happens if I fuck with the mousepox again.
Like, you feel this—I don't know, because to me, when I look at it, I think, that seems like something you should have to pay people to do.
It's like you're hitting a ball, and it's like, with the tools you're using, you're horrible for— You could pick it up, but so many people have given over their entire lives to this thing, indicating it's got to be the most joyful thing on Earth.
Other than like beautiful things involving people that you love dearly, like real love and emotions and real moments, like regular shit you do like watch TV is never exciting as a game of Quake.
If you and I were sitting in front of two monitors, playing Quake, calling each other pussies, yelling at each other, laughing when we died, it's a cackling, ridiculous fun time.
We would walk out of that studio and our fucking heart would be beaten too fast.
I need to have it explained to me, but in England and Scotland, on some of these courses, if you don't Turn in your card with your handicap correctly written with your score, you're going to be like banned from the course.
There's nothing crueler you can say to an artist than to say, you know, the thing you made is not that great, but there's a universal right based on it.
So that, the Blippi on the left, there was some controversy because the Blippi on the left started doing tours, saying he was going to be at the tours, but the Blippi on the right showed up at the tours.
I didn't find out until five seconds after I submitted my payment and Ticketmaster refused to refund me, said Angelina Sakowski, who spent $126 on tickets to the New Jersey show.
Angelina Sakowski in New Jersey would be a fucking blast to do coke with.
Ticketmaster didn't seem to have any info about it being an actor on their website.
The info is buried on the bottom of the frequently asked questions page on Blippi's website.
Because what's cool about Blippi is he, like, you know, in the way you go to Walt Disney World, and Walt Disney clearly respects kids, there's, like, the toilets are the size for kids, and, like, there's a sense of, like, understanding child intelligence is astute as an adult.
They just don't have the words yet.
He's really good at that.
So when he's showing a fire truck, he's not brushing over anything.
He's pointing out all the things that a kid would be interested in, which is like, what's that?
What's that?
That's what I like about it.
I think it's really...
Of all the crazy shit that we've watched with my kid, it's the most...
At least it acknowledges that children have some intelligence.
So that being said...
The way YouTube works is you're just watching Blippi videos.
We're living in a clown world Logan Paul went eight rounds With the greatest boxer that's ever lived Dude, I mean, like, there's no, because there's, like, you know, many people, and I think Logan Paul is aware of this, were looking forward to the satisfaction of watching Logan Paul being knocked out by a great boxer.
There was a sense of, like, we are going to see the hand of justice in the world.
You can't just decide you're going to fight the greatest boxer that ever lived and come out of that unscathed.
You're dead.
We were watching it the way we, like, people used to watch Gladiator.
Where they would put the fucking short-faced bear out and let the gladiator fight it.
I wrote an Instagram post about it today because I was genuinely...
All day, I was thinking, before I got here, when I was at the gym, I was working out, and I was thinking, I was like, there's something about that that's really intriguing to me.
Like, what is it?
And I tried to figure out what it was.
Like, what about the novelty of the moment?
Like, you, me, Tom Segura, Tony Hinchcliffe, Ron White, and Curtis.
Curtis Nelson, we're all sitting in my house.
We couldn't wait.
The thing is about to happen, we were all like, I can't believe this is happening.
I can't believe this is happening.
We're looking at them across the ring from each other.
Jake Paul's like three feet taller than I'm like, this is bananas.
This is so wild.
And he survived.
Floyd Mayweather made, like, $100 million.
He made, like, $100 million fighting a guy who had never won a professional boxing match.
I'm like, there's some interesting things that are happening here.
First of all, Floyd is consistently putting pressure on him and moving and putting pressure on him and moving, putting pressure on him.
And after the third and fourth round, everything comes out a little slower.
So he has to be more measured.
So what Floyd is doing is consistently engaging with him and then pulling out.
And consistently engaging and making him swing and miss and swing and miss.
It's brilliant.
For people that got mad at it, I get it.
It's not Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather five years ago.
But what it is is one of the best boxers of all time making $100 million fighting a guy who's three feet taller than him and 35 pounds heavier than him who can't win.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
Dude, that fight was amazing.
And there's a lot of amazing things.
First of all, Floyd's amazing.
The fact that Floyd has the balls at 44 years old to decide, oh, I'm just going to go ahead and fight some dude who's 35 pounds heavier than me at 26 years old.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
And then the fact that he could put it on a guy like Logan Paul.
And here's another one.
The fact that Logan Paul went all eight rounds, that's astounding.
You have no idea how tired you would be if you were boxing with the greatest boxer that's ever lived.
I mean, maybe he's not the greatest, because that's subjective.
But in my opinion, he's the greatest.
The reason why he's the greatest, in my opinion, is he's only been hit hard and hurt like three times his whole fucking career.
There's no one that can say that.
The art of boxing has always been hit and not get hit.
And in my mind, no one's ever done that better than Floyd Mayweather.
Now here he is in his 40s.
He's made hundreds of millions of dollars fighting people who have really no chance of beating him.
And Logan fucking scrambles on this guy, and he looks really good.
He can fucking wrestle.
So when you see that, he's not knocked out, you knuckleheads.
Stop talking about fighting.
He's holding on, and he's protecting himself, and he's controlling Floyd, and he's pushing his head to Floyd's chest.
This is what happens when you don't get commentary from a guy like Daniel Cormier or from a guy like Teddy Atlas or Max Kellerman, Jim Lampley, all the people that really understand boxing.
Andre Ward, Roy Jones Jr. Those are the people that are supposed to be commenting on boxing.
It's just going to require a tremendous amount of effort and growth.
But it's not impossible.
See, the difference between someone who tries to get really good at fighting, who's obviously a really good athlete, like Logan Paul, and someone who gets really good at chess, is you don't have any inherent advantages anymore.
Because if you're a strong, fast person, you have advantages.
And those advantages ultimately trip you up in your mindset of learning, right?
And I realize this from martial arts, both from myself and from other people that I watched.
There's certain people that they were really physically talented and ultimately it was bad for them.
Because the physically talented people relied on their physical talents and didn't learn the technique as, like, cleanly as the people who weren't physically talented.
There's nowhere that's more true than jujitsu.
In jujitsu, the best fighters are not the most physically talented people, necessarily.
The best ones to learn from are usually the smaller people.
Like, Eddie Bravo was not a very big guy.
You know, there's a bunch of people like that, Hoyler Gracie, not a very big...
In other words, the idea is what's cool about Buddhism is it's so beautiful and the system is so beautiful that you don't want to...
In the same way if you were talking about jiu-jitsu, you wouldn't want to say a thing about how to train that was slanted a little bit because you wouldn't want to hinder someone's ability to become good at jiu-jitsu.
It's a great account to follow, but all I'm saying is the reason when I'm saying that I'm confused regarding Buddhism is because I would never in a million years want to be the person professing to know a thing they don't understand.
And I think it's important in both Jujutsu and any kind of path that there has to be some acknowledgement that there are actual teachers There is a way of conveying the ideas that has been evolved over thousands of years that is the best way to convey the ideas.
And then there's also people like us who just love talking about it, but it's good to make a distinction because at least you alert people if you wanted to go deep into it.
There's an Eddie Bravo.
There's a David Nicker.
There's a Ram Dass.
There's a person you could go to if you really want to go deep into it that's there for you.
Or you can just listen to us talk about it and talk about it like us.
But the point is, if you could just be yourself, And whatever's stopping you from being yourself, figure out how to control that and then be yourself again.
But don't give in to that thing and stop being yourself.
One of the main problems I've had with this podcast as it keeps growing is people expect me to be someone different now.
I'm like, you don't understand, like, that's how it reached more people in the first place.
And that's all I have to offer.
Okay, if I can't do that, look, I can talk to brilliant people and ask them the best questions I can ask them and try to provide you with an insight into how I'm looking at whatever particular weirdness I'm talking about on the podcast.
But I can't change just because a lot of people are watching, more people are going to complain.
Like, here's the thing about cancel culture, right?
A lot of it is like people looking at what they think of...
Cancel culture reacts differently on different individuals, just like a lot of things do.
And if you're in a situation where you can get fired, right?
Like you're working for a major network, and if you get criticized, you do something terrible, and a bunch of other people chime in, and then other people can lose their jobs, right?
Like different people that are directors or executives or like...
It's a different thing.
You just gotta, if you're doing something creative, you gotta figure out a way to get to a position where you can be independent.
It's almost not their fault if they're mad at you, if they're trying to mold you, if their mortgage depends on it.
It's all set up in a weird way.
People think it should be cooperative.
I mean, it kind of should be, but maybe not.
Here's the thing.
It's like, you do your shit, I'll do mine.
And when it comes to someone expressing their self about the nature of the world they see, It's really important, if you want to resonate with people, that you come with no pretense.
You come with no filter.
You might be wrong.
You might sound stupid.
You might say something, and the next day you're driving, and you're like, why the fuck did I say it that way?
Like, you don't even know.
I don't know what the fuck the next word out of my mouth is right now as I'm talking to you, right?
We don't know.
This is what we're doing, right?
And while we're doing this thing, we got to acknowledge that it's a weird touch-and-go situation.
Sometimes people can have a legitimate intention to help, but they're a little confused.
And so the shit gets mixed up.
And so what ends up happening is something that, in the moment, if you freeze that moment in time, And lay that as the only reality of what this person is.
Oh my god, you've got a monster, friends.
But if you recognize this is a process, you're looking at like a process.
This is one part of a process that maybe, I know you don't believe this, but I do, extends through lifetimes.
The problem with, like, right now, the problem is, like, people are getting confused regarding their identity.
So people are beginning to think their identity is a singular thing, and they're not willing to admit that they're a process.
And so it's fundamentally, like, disastrous to Imagine this is the case, you know, it's like you look at a tree, you're seeing the process of a seed.
That's not a tree, that's a river of molecules flowing into time that looks like a fucking tree.
It used to be a seed that a bird shit out and it's like if you look at some of the most majestic trees and imagine that at some point that was in like a crow's asshole.
You know what I mean?
It's like, what the fuck?
But this is a process.
So I think the problem right now is we gotta acknowledge that we're all a process.
And if as part of that process, someone is manifesting aggressive traits that are fucking with society, the answer is not to imagine this is who this person is, but to recognize, oh, this is something you're going through right now.
So you look at that and, like, subtract everything other than that Feeling in a person which is like I know you're me and I know you're me in a different timeline and so I'm gonna I guess I'm gonna I'm gonna trust the process and let you do this thing and then you get this collision between that and the other versions of you who are on the same timeline or on a different timeline that are like I Yeah, but that's where my business is.
And so now you have these two colliding possibilities and we don't know how to deal with it yet.
We don't know what to do.
It's so brutal because on one side you have the most incredible, the heart of Christ, the deepest compassion, which is you or me.
When Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself, He doesn't mean pretend that you were in your neighbor's shoes.
He literally means those are you.
Your neighbor is you.
You should love your neighbor because they are you.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
That's you.
So now, if suddenly we're dealing with this reality, What are we going to do, Joe?
Because now it's like, yeah, great.
You have this incredible podcast and you have achieved this amazing apex in this little period of human culture that we're in.
But it's like, what about all the non-news?
Especially the ones who are camping out.
You know what I mean?
Now what are we going to do?
If you look at things like that, which is actually...
This guy Bob Thurman, Uma Thurman's dad, he's this incredible Buddhist scholar who's explaining this to me.
So he said the idea is like when in compassion or in thinking of other people, and God, I'm sorry, Bob Thurman, if I'm misquoting you or something, this is how I remember it.
It's not like I'm looking at you and thinking, God, what if I was in that person's shoes?
It's like you're looking at them and thinking, that's me.
I'm looking at me.
That's me.
I am them.
This is me.
And so in this mindset, this is where you start making decisions.
And so it's radical and wild because it's not like you do the thing where you're like, God, it'd be rough to be in that person's situation as me.
You're thinking, I'm looking at me right now.
In different circumstances.
Exactly.
And so that's how real compassion starts appearing.
That's real compassion.
Now you're like, oh fuck, that's me.
I must help.
I'm going to help.
And that's all that ends up happening.
You know, we look at these people who we call saints and we're like, oh god, they're saints.
But really what happened is they clicked into that reality and couldn't click back out.
And all that was left was like, I'm just going to help.
If we can just come to grips with that and have some sort of...
But here's the thing.
You can disagree with someone if it's you living another life, but if you really felt like it was you living another life and you're talking to them, you would have more compassion than they were.
We're always looking at other human beings like, this guy's going to hurt me, or he's going to steal, or she's going to take, and this person's going to do something bad to me.
Right.
They might.
But if we could get across the idea that we're all the same thing, exactly, living different versions, Of the same life.
Like literally, the life is a thing, and the life goes through different personalities, like a river goes through creeks, right?
Like the ocean filters into a river, and it goes through creeks.
That's what the life does, and the life does this with...
With all different colors and races and sexual orientations and proclivities and hobbies and intellect levels and it just goes through all those things.
And the key is recognizing that at the core of who you are is the same thing as the core of everybody else.
It's just that thing is powering different meat vehicles with different personalities and different loyalties to states.
I'm going to vote for the second of those three possibilities.
But, you know, I think like what you just described, by the way, I mean, it's such a beautiful reality and it's hard for people to understand that a lot of people feel very defensive when they hear a thing like that.
And so a lot of people who've invested their entire lives in a perceived being better than this person or that person, they've put a lot of energy into Into a really horrific mode of existence that isn't really making them happy.
But I think that's one of the big secrets.
People will have great achievements and then they'll find themselves in this weird enclave of other people who have all these great achievements.
And at the end of the day, God, I said at the end of the day, I hate that saying, but literally at the end of the day, they feel so sad and empty and lonely and broken and numb, but they don't want to say it out loud.
I repeat this saying she has to myself every other day, which is, the healing is in the return.
Meaning that if you fucked up for 50 years straight and you've been making the wrong decision every day for 50 years and your ego has become so invested in this pattern that you're stuck, what she's saying is all those 50 years of going off track,
the moment that you admit it and you're like, oh fuck, that was wrong, that was not the way I want to be, and go back to where you were at It's the most glorious reunion with a you that you forgot even existed.
I think all this is dependent, like the reason why these conflicts exist, like what you're just talking about, is dependent upon whether or not people have embraced the idea that we're all the same thing.
If we embrace the idea that we're all the same thing, if we could just figure out a way to use that and just put it in the back of your head.
This is all tracked by multiple sources, including the best weapons system the fucking Navy has to offer.
And you've got commanders like a guy like David Fravor, who is literally a Top-notch fighter jet pilot who has a deep understanding of these weapon systems, and they're locking in on this thing that looks like a Tic Tac, and it zooms away at what they estimate be thousands of miles an hour.
But the point is they're talking and so he understands this kind of crazy super technical lingo and he indulges David Fravor in this explanation of the weapon systems that they use and the visual systems and all the different things that can shuttle back and forth between different sources.
It's wild shit, dude!
So people that don't understand that and never heard that guy talk about those things, they don't understand how I gotcha.
Specifically, they know this thing moved off at thousands of miles an hour instantaneously with no visible means of propulsion.
I can send you this one thing, Jamie, because there's this one guy who does a really good job of this.
There's one guy that Jeremy Corbell sent me, and this guy does a really good job of explaining why there's no way that these things, whatever the fuck they are, could be like a goose.
And he's basically explaining how sophisticated and complicated these systems are.
And one of the things he used, if it was not on this video, it was on another.
He said catching one of those things on one of these weapon systems just randomly without any other input, whether it's radar or any communications from something else, would be like finding a person, Through a straw.