Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan debate the Russia-Ukraine war’s potential to spark WWIII, weighing Putin’s nuclear threats against Ukraine’s sovereignty under Zelensky, who defied U.S. evacuation offers in 2022. They pivot to UFOs—Rogan cites Bob Lazar’s gravity-defying claims, Fridman questions transparency—before critiquing media sensationalism, from school shootings to O.J. Simpson’s racial trial fallout. Exploring fame’s legal shield, they clash over Depp vs. Baldwin accountability and deepfake porn’s chaos, then dissect power’s corruption, from Hitler’s alleged amphetamine addiction to Catholic Church scandals. Concluding with Bukowski’s Nirvana, they reflect on humanity’s paradox: fearing infinite repetition yet squandering fleeting moments amid crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, but in reality, the Tim Dillon thing was real.
It was April 1st, but yeah.
I think my world, my family's world, and I think the world in general was somehow fundamentally changed down February 24th this year when Russia invaded Ukraine.
I have a lot of thoughts about it.
I've been talking to a lot of people about it.
I have family in both countries.
I come from both countries.
First and foremost, it made me realize that a global hot war is within a possibility for the century.
That we're not so far from a World War III outbreak.
And the reason I realized this It's because of the behavior of the United States in response to this humanitarian crisis, this invasion, and the response of China that's currently quietly watching but for the most part supporting Putin and Russia.
India, for the most part, is supporting Putin and Russia.
And so you have this division in the world.
You just look at the population, the large economies, large military forces, nuclear powers, are just watching this conflict, watching this humanitarian crisis, and nobody seems to be shy about escalation.
Nobody seems to be shy about mentioning You know, the word nuclear.
And it just feels like...
I've reread recently, as a kind of therapy, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire.
He's a journalist that was there for the rise of the Nazi Party and the World War II and everything like that.
And you just have to put yourself, let's say 100 years back, 1922, nobody would predict World War II. In fact, everybody would be sure that World War II would never happen.
Surely there will never be another World War when you're sitting there in the 1920s.
And at the same time, you have Hitler, young Hitler, What is it?
1919 maybe?
He is employee number seven of the Nazi party.
So he's the seventh person to join the National Socialist German Workers' Party that ended up being one of the most consequential parties ever, political parties ever.
So from a party of seven people, 20 years later you have a party that's threatening the existence of human civilization.
If they had nuclear weapons, that would be the case.
So in a span of 20 years, that can happen.
So now we're sitting here in 2022, the possibility of nuclear war seems to be not as distant as at least I, with my innocence, had imagined.
And the possibility of hot war It's not that distant.
And there's escalation.
There's warmongering going on.
And at the same time, just the humanitarian crisis.
I mean, on a personal level, it's the biggest humanitarian crisis.
Six, seven million people, refugees.
Eight million people inside Ukraine displaced.
The biggest one since In Europe, at least, since World War II. So that's one perspective, that there's this authoritarian who invaded a sovereign land and laid claim on it.
I recently talked to two folks that have this different perspective.
One is Stephen Kotkin, who's a historian of Stalin.
I highly recommend people read his biography of Stalin.
And the other is Oliver Stone, who you talk to mostly about JFK. But he also interviewed Putin.
So Oliver Stone's perspective is, look, first of all, America throughout its history has blood in its hands.
NATO is pressuring through its expansion, pressuring Putin, pressuring the other non-NATO regimes.
And so they bear some responsibility for this.
And, you know, you look at post 9-11 wars.
In Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, the number of refugees there, the number of people displaced from their homes is close to 40 million people, 40 million people.
And the number of dead is over a million people.
And those are wars either started or catalyzed or propped up by the United States.
That's the Oliver Stone perspective.
You know this this idea that the United States is the good guys is a complicated one and so he has been starting from the Vietnam War a critic of the military industrial complex and this kind of imperial imperative of the United States that's that perspective then you have Stephen Kotkin you have just the Western perspective is like no Yeah,
America has blood on its hands, but you can't do this moral—there's no moral equivalence here.
There is good guys and bad guys in the world.
The good guys are flawed, yes, but the reality is Putin's Russia is an authoritarian regime.
No respect for freedoms of all kinds, including freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
There's a lot of basic violation of human rights, and there's just a straight-up invasion of a sovereign land, and that's a war crime, and Putin is a war criminal.
I'm much closer to that perspective, but it's not factual, it's more emotional, because I just see how much pain there is in that place.
I've been listening to a lot of people crying, angry, afraid, For me, there's been just so much personal emotion.
Because this idea that we're all one people, we're all one humanity has been challenged for me personally.
I know there's a lot of suffering in the world.
I know there's a lot of atrocities in the world.
But for me, it's just because I know directly the people.
It's like, you know, there's been recently a couple of shootings.
There's been a shooting yesterday in the United States.
It's different when you have nothing to do with the people, then you directly know the people.
I mean, I guess we think of it as differently because what Putin is trying to do is command resources and control a country that used to be a part of the Soviet Union.
And what happened yesterday is just beyond explanation.
It's just a completely fucked up situation where a sick person got a hold of a bunch of guns and decided to go kill kids.
And it happens in this country every now and then.
It's like...
How do you stop that?
No one knows how to stop that.
What is the answer?
Is the answer take everyone's guns?
Well, they're not going to give their guns up.
Only criminals are going to have guns.
It's not going to be a good situation.
And is the answer, make schools these armored compounds where you have armed guards outside of every school dressed like it's a military?
Boy, that's not something we want either.
But what do you do to protect the children?
And how many dollars is that going to cost?
Do we even have the money to do that?
But the Oliver Stone perspective, when you're talking about the difference between the way we look at the rest of the world versus the way we look at our own actions, when you start bringing up Yemen, Yemen is one that I've had Dave Smith on the podcast multiple times where he talks about it.
Dave is very, very well read about Yemen.
It's a horrific scenario because no one cares.
In the United States, this is not something that gets mainstream media attention on a daily basis.
But the bombings are ongoing.
We put up a chart once.
Where they talked about the bombings that are happening in Ukraine versus the bombings that are currently happening in Yemen and bombings that the United States...
It's wild because it's like swept under the rug and we don't think about it.
And we don't even understand why we're doing it.
I guarantee you if you just polled a random 1,000 people and say, what are we doing in Yemen?
No one would have any idea.
You'd have to have someone who really gets into the sort of esoteric, the details, like what is going on politically, what is going on economically.
Someone like Dave Smith even might struggle with the full explanation of what our motivation, not our, the military's motivation is to do this.
But it's happening.
And because it's not getting any attention, it's allowed to happen without scrutiny.
It's allowed to happen without real mainstream criticism.
If you comb the television news sources, cable, left and right, you're not going to find discussions of Yemen on a daily basis.
But that is the one...
If there's an area where we can't have that moral high ground, where we say, well, what about you?
Why do we have those?
Wouldn't it be better if the United States didn't have any of those that are unjustifiable?
Where you could say, oh, the United States did this in Vietnam.
Yes, we did, but it was in the 1970s.
Well, that would be ideal in terms of an example of learning and growing.
The thing is, there is, if you look at the details, a fundamental difference between what Vladimir Putin is doing and what the United States is doing.
Now, everybody's a victim of somebody's propaganda.
Now, I talked to Russians, which is a very interesting thing.
Both Russians and Ukrainians say that they are not at all under the influence of propaganda.
Russians believe there's no propaganda in Russia.
And Ukrainians believe there's no propaganda in Ukraine.
Russians think the West is influenced by their propaganda, by the CNNs and the Foxes, and Ukraine is influenced by their propaganda by the limited number of news channels they have that are state-controlled.
From our Western perspective, that seems ridiculous because it's obvious that Russia is under influence of propaganda.
So it's hard to know what is true or not.
But the reality seems to be that Russia is currently an authoritarian regime that tries to appear as much as possible as a democracy.
Because there is an election.
And there's an extra hard truth on top of that.
I don't know what to do with it, but Putin is still and even more so popular in Russia.
He's very popular in India, in China, and in Russia, and some small countries around the former Soviet Union.
What do you do with that?
That's real objective, well, as far as we can tell, data taken from outside of Russia.
And he said it's just a side effect of the steroids.
Yeah, his face is puffy, you know?
Yeah, Oliver Stone says, Vladimir Putin has struggled with cancer during his time in which the filmmaker focused on his work on the Russian president, pictured about Putin waves during the Victory Day parade, Red Square, May 9th.
He's formed a much stricter information bubble around him, that there is that isolation that a lot of us have experienced with COVID. I honestly think it might have to do with just the isolation due to COVID. You know, the basic distance you have to keep and all that kind of stuff.
As a political leader, you have to have extra precautions.
But, okay, so there's a bunch of differences in what they stand for, what they're looking for.
A lot of it in the recent years has been centered around the war with Russia, starting with 2014. And so some parts are Ukrainian-speaking, pro-Ukraine.
Some parts are Russian-speaking or primarily Russian-speaking and pro-Russia.
So in the east, you have the Donbas region, but around that as well, they want to be closer to Russia.
And the west part wants to be closer to Europe, closer to NATO, closer to the European Union.
That's one of the divisions.
You want to be Pro-democracy or you want to be pro-whatever-the-heck Russia is.
So it's like, are you pulling towards the West, the Western civilization, or are you pulling towards the East, the way of Russia, the way of China, the way of those countries?
I'm sure they're influenced and the ones who are pro-Russia, they're getting some signals from Putin or meeting with him and he's giving them indications that they would best be served to be aligned with him and be better for them.
He stepped up, you know, the famous thing, Biden offered him a ride and he said, fuck that.
I'm staying put.
Give me more bullets.
And he stayed in Kiev and held his ground where most leaders would have fled.
This is the failure we had in Afghanistan, where we fled.
Here's a leader that stepped up and held his ground, and that's rare in this world, and we admire that kind of strength, yes.
And the same could be said by the Russian people, the Indian people, the Chinese people that admire strength in Putin.
But we also admire Other values that make this country great, the United States of America, is this kind of respect for human freedom, human rights, and sort of the embodiment of this ideal of all men are created equal.
That's not exactly communicated very clearly by Vladimir Putin.
Germany is a great nation that deserves to be respected among other nations, and it was not respected because of World War I. Okay, but are you also going to mention that you're going to murder and imprison and torture millions of people?
You're not.
And the same thing with America.
Not moral equivalents at all, obviously, but we talk a lot about freedom.
What does freedom actually look like?
When we fight terrorism and evil in the world, what does that actually look like?
It turns out that it looks like you're bombing civilians, children, lose their fathers and mothers.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians die when you're spreading freedom all over the world.
So we have to be very careful separating the messaging from the actions.
And we have to, as Americans, make sure we live up to the ideal, and we don't always.
And I think when you just paint the whole world as black and white, it's easy for us to say America good, China, Russia bad, instead of the full complexity of that.
And that there's warmongers that watch Ukraine now with the money that we're sending there, and they get excited because they can escalate.
And if they escalate, they can get more and more money for manufacturing weapons.
If you're standing apart from a guy, and you have a gun, and he has a gun, and you have your finger on the trigger, and he has his finger on the trigger, and you're like, you know what?
I don't trust this guy.
Boom!
You pull that trigger.
That guy's dead.
There's no retaliating.
He's not going to retaliate.
That's what he's saying.
He's saying it's not like you have a gun, and he has a gun, and you are 700 yards away, and you have a pistol.
And he's 700 yards away, so you're out of the effective range.
And you say, you know what?
I'm going to move in on this guy and I'm going to shoot him.
But then he's going to shoot me, he's going to see me coming, he's going to shoot me, and we're both going to die.
That's mutual short destruction.
What he's saying is, no.
You can launch this thing and it looks like it's going to hit Seattle and it takes a hard left turn and goes right into Chicago.
And there's not a damn thing you can do to stop it and you can't predict where it's going to go.
I want to see their credentials and how much access they actually have.
Because, yeah, people that comment on stuff...
Okay, so just even with the limited access I've had, I've spoken with a lot of people in Lockheed Martin and all over, I realize how much secrecy there is in terms of how many incredible weapon systems there are.
You know, that's what I think more and more that these UFOs are.
I don't think that those things are from another world anymore.
I've been watching these videos of these things where these fighter jets are getting scrambled to intercept these objects that are flying in insane speeds over the ocean.
I'm like, why would we assume that those aren't just super fucking capable drones that we don't know exist yet?
But I think a lot of this shit that they're watching...
Like, here's one.
I've been thinking about this Commander David Fravor thing.
This Tic Tac thing off of the coast of San...
Why would he go there?
Why would it go there?
Well, that's where all the fucking military is.
Why would it go there and be completely undetected and be operating in the middle of the ocean and be operating over what looks like something that's some sort of a submerged base or some sort of a submerged vehicle that interacts with this drone that operates at an insane rates of speed?
And it has active radar jamming, so it actively jams you.
Doesn't the deep state imply there's a deep, like, corruption and manipulation of the populace to sort of, like, a conspiratorial, like, controlling the populace?
The goal is to, like, for the people that are really in control to get richer and more powerful and that kind of stuff.
Googling underwater drone stuff, you know, and I found the sales, this looks like a sales video from 2016, showing a drone that could be launched and controlled from a submarine that's underwater.
This was, you know, around the time of that Tic Tac thing, wasn't it?
So if you're looking at a small thing, if they make something that's the size of a Frisbee, and it's going 300 miles an hour, it's going to look preposterously fast.
Yeah, he didn't know the physical speed of it because they never figured out how to do it.
All they figured out how to do it was to get it to move around a little bit.
They never figured out how to get it to just like completely manipulate gravity, but he said the function, the way it does it, It manipulates gravity around it.
The way he described it, he said, would be like putting an insanely heavy bowling ball in the middle of a mattress.
So it pulls everything around it like that and bends space and time through its manipulation of gravity.
And by doing that, it can go from one point to another point insanely fast.
So like when Commander David Fravor described this vehicle that was more than 50,000 feet above sea level and went to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second.
Well, there wasn't a record of him being at Los Alamos.
They lied about that.
I mean, he was on the employee register.
Not only that, when they took him to Los Alamos, he navigated his way through the entire building.
He knew the security guards.
He talked to people that had worked there when he worked there.
Some of them went on the record.
Some of them were unwilling to go on the record.
He knew the very machine that they'd use to detect the length of the digits in your fingers, you know, through some sort of a, I don't know what kind of scan it is, but you put your hand on this and he described it and someone took a photo of it that had existed in Los Alamos.
He's like, yeah, that's it.
He went from there.
I mean, it was clear that he has a very high level of scientific sophistication, right?
He developed this rocket engine that he put in his Honda.
So he put a fucking jet engine in a Honda.
He developed a hydrogen engine to put in his Corvette.
This is all working functional stuff, and he talked about it, how incredible it was.
I mean, there's a video of him describing his Corvette.
See, I'm inclined to believe that we are being visited.
And if we are being visited, the level of sophistication of any civilization that's able to send, whether it's a drone, you know, piloted by AI or by some sort of robot creatures, like...
I would measure us.
I would watch us.
I would keep a fucking very close eye on our capabilities and the stories of them hovering over nuclear facilities and shutting down all their facilities.
Shutting down all the weapon systems?
That would make sense.
Like, if I was monitoring from another world, I would say, look, these are territorial apes with nuclear weapons, and we need to figure out a way to stop them in their transition.
They're making a transition from...
Extremely primitive to using tools, to engines, the industrial age, to the technological age in which we're at now, where things are accelerating far beyond our capacity to understand the implications of what happens if, like your field of study, AI. If AI gets implemented on a large scale and becomes sentient and then Countries that have...
I don't even know what our morals are.
But if we had that capability in a brutal military dictatorship and they decided to use it to control the entire world...
Oh boy, I've been listening to a lot of people tell me how they feel about America.
A country, by the way, I love.
And I should say, this is, you know, I joke around about this, but I am American.
I'm now, I believe in the ideals of this country.
I will die an American.
I love this country.
And also, my heart is the only thing I care about is with the people in terms of the war in Ukraine, is with the people of Ukraine, and I do think that the invasion of Ukraine is a war crime, and I think Putin in this act is a war criminal.
I just want to put that on the table because we're talking about Oliver Stone a lot.
We now know that plants have some sort of innate intelligence, some sort of ability to communication, some sort of a community that they share with the mycelium, with neighboring plants.
They allocate resources to plants that are in jeopardy.
They release defense chemicals when they know they're being eaten.
And, you know, aliens obviously would be able to know this kind of information much better.
If you have a deep understanding of what is life, of what is a life form, how you go from non-life to life, you're able to understand...
What is the nature of consciousness?
What is the nature of suffering?
And then you could see maybe plants do suffer, maybe to a lesser degree than humans.
But at scale, we're basically parasites and torturers of all life on Earth, we meaning humans.
So they could have that perspective.
But I just think the most advanced alien civilization would be the one that reaches us first.
And so they would be just orders of magnitude more advanced.
So anything we see visibly in terms of stuff that Commander Fravor saw, that's them trying to sort of talk down to us, like dumb down their stuff to be able to communicate in some kind of way with us.
Otherwise, if they wanted to be invisible, I think they could be invisible to us.
Well, I think they probably are, for the most part.
I think that's why there's these unique experiences where people have these interactions with them and then they don't know what to do or what to say because it seems so bizarre and no one wants to believe it because we have an inability to really think rationally about something that we have no evidence of.
If someone has an experience, it's a completely unique experience.
If you walk outside of the studio and you get in your car and then all of a sudden something hovers over your car, all traffic stops around you, time stands still.
Your car stops.
You get outside the car and this thing hovers and these creatures come out and they communicate with you.
And they communicate with you telepathically and tell you that this civilization, that life itself on Earth is in grave danger.
And that you have to do your best to try to implement artificial intelligence in a way that's going to subvert that.
That's going to save people.
And this is imperative.
And if you don't do that, there's a real possibility with the capabilities of weapons now that they're going to miss something.
And something's going to detonate.
It's going to start a domino chain of events that's going to be unstoppable and it's going to wipe out life on Earth.
And then they go away.
And then you're standing there in front of your car and then traffic starts moving again.
And you're just standing there and you're going, what the fuck happened?
I mean, Pressfield always talks openly about the muse and he treats it that way when he sits down to write.
He treats it like it's a real object that's giving him information and that he treats it with respect because that's how the muse rewards him for his hard work.
Maybe this kind of consciousness that we have, the ability to richly experience the world in a really interesting, complicated way, maybe that's a gift from elsewhere for us to be able to understand ourselves and to create something that will save this place.
Or maybe it's a function of the universe that constantly encourages innovation.
If you look, I mean, I've said this ad nauseum, but I'll say it again because it fits into this conversation.
If you were observing the earth from afar, if you had no context, if you didn't understand the human species at all, if you were completely alien from it, You're being made of light, and you're observing what these creatures do.
Well, what's the predominant change-oriented creature on this planet?
It's humans.
And what do humans do?
Well, it seems like they make better and better stuff.
That's what they're always doing.
And maybe that's what materialism is all about.
Maybe our obsession with materialism is an insurance policy that fuels constant innovation.
I have a phone, an iPhone, one of my other phones, that's three years old, maybe?
When I use it, I can't fucking tell.
But when the new one comes out, I'm going to be one of the first dorks to get it.
Why am I going to get it?
Because I'm a fucking idiot.
Because I want the newest, latest, greatest shit.
And I want to fuel this innovation.
Well, why is that?
What are we doing?
Well, we're eventually moving towards more and more capable things, more and more capable machines.
We are the electronic caterpillar.
We're giving birth to the butterfly, and we're making a cocoon, and we don't even know why.
We're just fucking constantly trying to buy the newest.
And we're constantly involved in this pursuit of technological innovation.
Now if you think of ideas, every single thing that exists on this planet, whether it's a mug or a house or a fucking windmill that creates electricity, all of those came out of the human imagination.
All of them.
You had an idea, a guy Collaborates with this woman, and she has an idea, and her idea fits with your idea, and it makes your idea better and more capable, and then you get together with a group of people, you form a startup, and your ideas all gel together, and you're working 16 hours a day around the clock to make the world a better place with this new idea, and this new product, and everything gets better over time.
Nobody goes, you know what?
These phones we got here right now, we're good.
Let's just stop innovating.
Let's tell Samsung and Apple, let's just leave it the way it is and we're good with phones.
And let's channel this into cancer research.
Let's channel all this creativity into fertility work.
Let's try to take the phthalates out of the fucking bloodstreams and the microplastics out of people's water supply.
It seems like the whole universe wants constant states of complexity.
Just from the time the Big Bang exists, to multi-celled organisms, to conscious things, to conscious things that manipulate their environment like human beings.
It's this constant state of ever-increasing complexity.
In all different forms, which makes me wonder what that looks like.
Because there's probably life here in the solar system Probably, it might be dead, but maybe living on Mars and Titan, different moons throughout, and what that fucking thing looks like.
Because there's moons that are volcanoes, there's moons that are ice, oceans, and that's going to be all weird kinds of life.
It could be microscopic, it could be gigantic things that span, I don't know, kilometers.
And not only that, it might have come here from panspermia.
It might have hitched a ride.
Spores exist.
They can exist in a vacuum of space.
They can exist at insane temperatures.
They could have come here, like psilocybin and all these psychoactive compounds that Terence McKenna believed were responsible for the development of the human brain, the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years.
And is watching from a much larger distance, which would better explain that the technological advancements of the aliens that visit us are similar to ours.
If you had neighbors, and your neighbors were a bunch of 18-year-old kids with guns that maybe even admired you if they met you, like, Lex Friedman, what are you doing around here?
Well, I'm trying to get you guys to stop fucking blowing up refrigerators in your backyard.
You guys are doing stupid shit, and it's causing real fucking problems in the world.
Tannerite, what they do is they fill up refrigerators, and then they'll shoot it from a distance, and on impact it explodes, and so many people have died fucking with this stuff.
Well, that particular activity is not the worst thing in the world.
That's dangerous and you're probably going to die if you're...
You don't...
A lot of times people don't understand that the physical force that that stuff generates that you think this refrigerator like they've done it with safes where they've detonated safes and these enormous vault doors like bank vault doors going a hundred and fifty miles an hour through a fucking tree like it's it's immense amounts of power and miniscule compared to you know nuclear explosions So if,
you know, you take me visiting the neighbors and say, hey, let me just explain what's going to happen.
If you blow that thing up, you guys can't be anywhere near here.
You're going to have to be like a mile away.
What?
No, a mile away.
Like a mile is only 5,000 feet, kids.
And you go, do you know how 5,000 feet is?
It's not that far.
You can run it in four minutes if you're fast.
Dallas County explosion caused by teens using tannerite while target shootings.
Yeah, see?
This is fucking normal shit.
Yeah, you can get it.
But tannerite is very dangerous stuff and readily available.
Because there's been a lot of drama lately, and one of the things that happened was somehow or another my name got entered into this thing, and I don't want to get into it in too much detail, but I'm like, okay, I must call Bobby.
And I called him, and I said, listen, I don't know what kind of...
I'm just hearing about this nonsense now, but I love you.
I would never let anybody talk bad about you.
I would never let anybody come on my show and talk bad about you.
I think you're an awesome guy.
I think you're incredibly talented.
And I know that you have fear of, like, performing and putting out a special and stuff like that, but I really think you should because I think you're one of the best comedians alive.
And I've said that to him many, many times.
I always give him shit like, when are you going to do a special?
What are you doing?
Because Bobby Lee, like, first of all, his special is so tight because he's been doing the same material for so long.
No, she's trying to figure out how to get out of there, too, because they were trying to make a decision.
We wound up actually getting a car service to drive us all the way back to L.A. It's like a four-hour drive all the way back to L.A. That was fucking odd.
Well, me and my wife have been having these conversations recently about people that we know now because there's a level of fame you get where other famous people reach out to you and you go hang out with them.
Well, they know that I'm going to just be a person around them.
And also, if they're fans of the podcast, they know that I am just a person.
You can't hide three hours a day for thousands of episodes.
I think everybody listening to this podcast knows me as well as probably anybody in my life, other than my wife.
So it's you get to get an understanding of that person.
Then you go, you know what?
I think I can hang out with them and it'd be normal.
Whereas a regular person would be like, oh my god, Matthew McConaughey!
I loved you in Interstellar!
You're so amazing!
Can I get a selfie?
I become friends with Matthew McConaughey.
And had dinner with his family and we went to the soccer game the other day.
He's a beautiful person.
Sweetheart of a guy.
Super normal.
Like movie star.
Oscar winner.
Greatest guy.
So normal.
Like normal.
Like you hang out with him.
He and I just chill.
We talk.
Like it's just a guy.
But he's a movie star.
But he needs someone around him who can also just be normal.
And I think most people are just so, like you were with Bobby Lee or you were with me when you first met me, or I was with Anthony Bourdain when I first met Anthony Bourdain.
I was such a fucking dork because I couldn't believe it was him.
I'm hanging out with him and he knows who I am and he likes me.
I love his thought process and the way he, you know, he wrote all of the narration of No Reservations and then of Parts Unknown.
He wrote all that.
And he's a brilliant writer on top of being like this amazing just thinker.
Like he's capable of, he was capable of Putting that down in a way where the way he flavored these conversations was like the way a great chef would flavor a great meal.
It's like there was something to it that was I really admired his His appreciation of creativity and of rebellion and of art and someone who's really good.
He wrote in his Twitter bio, it just said, Enthusiast.
That's what he was.
So it took a while for me to hang with him.
But fortunately, I got to hang with him quite often.
And maybe not often enough.
Yeah, you know, I just get fucking sad about that one.
That one's a hard one.
That one's a hard one for me because that's a waste.
It's just so unnecessary.
It's like you hit a low point and you pulled the chute and the world suffered because of that and his family suffered and his daughter suffered and it's like, fuck man, I know that those feelings are there but you can fight those off and there will be a better day.
This too will pass and there'll be a better day and the thing that helps you in those better days are friends.
And I don't think I was quite close enough to him for him to reach out.
But if he did, I think I could have helped.
Because I've had a lot of experience with crazy women in my life.
I've had a lot of experience with what he was going through.
And sometimes you need a guy to go, hey man, I'll tell you fucking exactly what's going on.
And there's a lot of these people out there in the world.
And they'll get close to you, and then they'll try to damage you.
And they'll try to hurt you because they're hurt.
Because they're fucked up.
And they're fucked up because someone fucked them up.
And it's a fucking endless cycle.
It's almost like a cycle of you hear about people that were molested and then they go on to molest other people.
And not only that, but there's value in those experiences.
And this is something that really needs to be...
It needs to be addressed and you need to understand it is that you will become stronger through your overcoming of these terrible moments.
These terrible moments in them is an opportunity for growth.
And also, perspective-wise, whatever these terrible moments are, relatively speaking, we're talking about Yemen, we're talking about people that live in the Congo, people that are in the middle of a civil war, these are nothing.
And there's that old expression, the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
Whether it's you're a spoiled kid who doesn't get the toy that they think they deserve, Or whether you're an adult whose relationship with this woman like Bourdain turned out to be insanely toxic and you're deeply embarrassed and you're going to be exposed because you paid off a child that she was having sex with and you know it's going to come out because you were a vocal proponent of the Me Too movement because you thought it was a good and just thing and you're trying to be a good person and
you know and then It's a lot, man.
The whole thing was a lot.
But it was just, when you lose a great one, and in my opinion, I mean, you've seen the giant artwork I have of him around here.
I think he was a great soul.
Like a great, creative, innovative, fascinating person.
Well, no, I've interacted with a lot of tech leaders, and a lot of them are not quite normal.
That's a political way of phrasing it.
I just felt that the human being is compassionate.
It's the small things, the details.
The way he's presented is robotic.
But the way he pays attention to people and people that work with him, for him, just small details, the kindness he has, it's interesting.
I mean, I didn't expect that because the public paints him as a kind of maybe, not necessarily a monster, but somebody who's almost like a sociopath or something like that, who's not able to feel other beings.
And he did not, that's not how he came off.
What that shows to me is, you know, Facebook is a machine.
And perhaps the leaders of the machine don't necessarily have power to control the machine always.
Well, I think it actually has to do with how much power you want to take.
Which is like, there are certain leaders like Elon or Steve Jobs that I think like to be in control.
And they like to make big decisions and revolutionary decisions.
Saying, no, no, no.
The way we've been doing things, let's change completely.
Let's change the direction of the company completely.
His bid for Twitter.
You know, having the sort of...
The character and the guts to go in and say, we're going to change the way things are done completely.
That's a certain kind of personality.
I think those are the kind of personalities that lead to the creation of great businesses, that lead to the pivoting of businesses that are becoming stale into becoming great businesses again.
So I think that we admire those people, but they have also sort of downsides of You know, yelling and being passionate and being, you know, anger issues, all those kinds of things.
If you're polite, that's a difficult thing.
You know, how much politeness, kindness, and compassion do you want in a leader of a company?
Because if you're too polite, you're going to have corporate structure that's going to just become stale.
There's going to be momentum.
You know, you see that in Silicon Valley with a bit too much wokeism taking over.
And it's also an expose of a culture that has immense power.
And so if you can get these rare windows into how it actually functions, that might be the only way to do it, is to get these people in these intimate moments where they're candid, where they don't know that they're being recorded.
And they say things and you get an understanding of the fact that you could just take time off whenever you don't feel well, mentally.
You could take a week off, you could take a month off, no one cares.
And that the entire operation is essentially, they think that they're communists.
And that they think that, you know, capitalism is inherently bad and that these are the people that are running the discourse of the biggest social media site in terms of the ability to disseminate information the world's ever known.
You might bring them up as part of a conversation, but you have a sense that you might be very wrong, and that's the kind of humility you have to bring to the table, and then that's where you have to have actual diversity of ideas at the table.
That's why I think Elon is a really good pushback at Twitter against the sort of woke culture, corporate culture that emerged in Silicon Valley.
I admire the man for doing that.
I think he brought onto himself a lot of political division and hate that comes with the political division, saying he's not going to vote Democrat anymore.
You need very unique human beings to take on any of those jobs and do it in a compassionate...
Humanitarian beneficial way for the society at large because it's going to be at a detriment to you and I think part of the problem with politicians as we know them is that they do things for the benefit of themselves that are ultimately at a detriment for their constituents because they're doing things and they get corrupted by money like money comes in and you know they start you know moving in this way or that way depending upon their relationships and this sort of And money is delicious,
It makes me feel like I'm not on sturdy ground in terms of what is good and what is evil.
The same thing with Ukraine and Russia.
I've been getting so much information from so many people that is so heartfelt, both actual journalistic information and spoken information from people.
The same thing, like, racism in America, right?
You have the BLM movement, you have African American people on Clubhouse or wherever I get a chance to speak with them.
There's a particular message.
Like, there's significant institutional racism in America.
And then you listen to, like, Douglas Murray or whoever is saying, no, let's look at the data.
Like, you have to be very rigorous and analytical about this, and there's not institutional racism or something like that.
And you listen to both these, like, groups that are very passionate about this, and you don't know exactly what the truth is.
You have to kind of think, you have to keep an open mind, have a humility, read, try to control your emotions, all that kind of stuff.
I'm trying to do that with Ukraine and Russia and China and India and Western press, and I'm trying to do that with these weird elites who are, like, you know, that I'm not exactly sure.
Like, I'm really afraid of becoming corrupted, either by fame or money, all that kind of stuff.
But I know what you're saying about the elites, and I think part of it is there's a thrill about being able to do things that other people can't do.
There's a thrill about...
One of the things you hear...
About, like, elites is that, like, sometimes they'll have these parties and then the help will be the ones who talk about it, like the people that are the caterers or the people that are the maids.
And it's like the arrogance to be naked with a crow mask on wandering around the maid.
Like, what is that?
Well, it's like part of what they want is they want someone who's not them to observe the How much freedom they have and how the rules don't apply to them.
It's like something they want.
I think that's like why people like to take photos in front of private jets.
It's like, I'm not doing what you're doing.
I'm doing something different.
Look at me.
Look at me here with my Gucci bag and my fur coat about to step on a fucking...
He had a fucking island and he would fly these beautiful, I don't want to say women, because some of them weren't women, some of them were girls, and fly them there.
And he curated these experiences and by all accounts, there was at least some connection To intelligence, whether it was foreign or domestic, there was some sort of a connection to intelligence agencies.
And they used this sort of very relaxed social climate.
I mean, if you were in this sort of geopolitical game, a lot of it is about relationships and influence, right?
There's decisions that can be made one way or another, and sometimes you make these decisions based on the relationships that you have, based on the influence, based on what the other people around you are also being influenced by these groups.
And you go in one way or another, and you can shift things so that one group of people make enormous amounts of money, or one group of people, their business dies.
But how many people, that's what I ask of myself, how many people are willing to cross the line of compromising others, installing shit on- It's funny people.
Secret CIA files say staffers committed sex crimes involving children.
What the fuck is this?
Declassified CIA Inspector General reports show a pattern of abuse and a repeated decision by federal prosecutors not to hold agency personnel accountable.
Though most of these cases referred to U.S. attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime.
Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances.
That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as Department of Homeland Security.
The Drug Enforcement Administration's CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecutions of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.
We were talking about people who get molested, like boys who get molested when they're young by men, oftentimes will molest other boys.
This is a horrible, it's almost like, I've always thought about it, it's like I wonder if it's where the concept of being a vampire comes from.
Like you're stealing life.
And that you, by biting someone, you turn them into that.
That's almost like an analogy of that or a metaphor of that.
It's a crazy thing that it happens so often.
One of the things you hear about when men are molested when they're children, that they'll go on, like a lot of these guys who molest children, they're molested when they were children.
A lot of these men who go to rape boys, like these Catholic priests were molested by other Catholic priests.
And there's also probably an insane amount of power psychologically that's involved in doing something to someone that was done to you when you were a boy.
It's fucking dark shit, but when you find out the prevalence of it in the Catholic Church, it's like, holy shit!
Holy shit.
There was one guy that Pope Benedict had moved from one place to another place because that's what they would do.
They would catch these guys molesting children.
They move them somewhere else.
And this one priest went on to molest a hundred deaf kids.
They brought him to a place where the kids were deaf so he could apparently do it and there would be less likelihood of them...
I mean, if you went over the history of the Catholic Church from whatever, as far back as you could find, what are the numbers, man?
I mean, is there another organization that's so inexorably tied to child molesting, like the Catholic Church?
They're pretty open to sort of acknowledging the fact that if you're somebody who's a pedophile, What better way to get access to children than to become a priest?
So it's not that necessarily...
I mean, that's their defense about saying, like, there's, you know, taking the vow of celibacy is not the thing that creates pedophiles.
What creates pedophiles is that oftentimes pedophiles will become priests just so they can get access to children.
Because it's an atrocity and that needs to be taken into consideration when people talk about gun control, when they talk about psychological problems that people have, all sorts of psychological disorders that people have, medicines that people are on.
There's a question of correlation versus causation, right?
A lot of these people are on disassociatives or they're on psychotropic medicine.
Is that causing them to be able to do that?
Is it just because they're fucked up already and that's why they're on this medication?
If you look at the number of school shooters and mass shooters that are on psychiatric medication, it's astounding.
And so it seems like there's an over-the-top artificial drama conjured up by the press to get more attention versus sort of properly putting this thing in its context.
And this...
I think any one event deserves the press it gets, but...
It's worthwhile thinking about the fact that, not the fact, but I think every coverage increases the chance of it happening again.
And if the press tells you that this is one way to be heard, I think that a different message is better.
First of all, a message that all of us struggle.
That life can be hard.
And then a message of health, of sort of this too shall pass, of challenging yourself, of being optimistic about the future, of Trying to grow, trying to survive, whatever the hell you're feeling, going through, trying to survive that, and growing from that, all of those things.
As opposed to, sort of like, nobody cares about you.
Nobody cares about you if you're struggling, nobody cares about you if you're on medication, all those kinds of things, and you get side effects that are resulting in all kinds of sort of mental or physical struggles.
I just feel like the press wants the drama Of the shooting.
They're hungry for that drama.
I see that with Ukraine.
And what worries me about Ukraine as well is that the press will move on from the war in Ukraine.
And then the war will still be going on.
And they will no longer care.
And there was just a temporary moment of time where it could be used between the Johnny Depp trial and the Will Smith slap to get the world's attention.
And the suffering of the humanitarian crisis will continue, as it does in Yemen and Syria.
There's something that seems to be broken about that kind of mechanism of jumping from point to point to point, and nobody's talking about the nuclear war.
When you're dealing with a school shooter type situation, how else would you address it?
We want to find out what's wrong with this kid.
He's dead, so you can't interview him.
What caused it?
Will we get an understanding of it?
Do you hold the parents responsible?
Like, what if you find out the parents were horribly abusive?
Or what if you find out this is the product of schizophrenia, of bullying in school?
Like, how does one address it?
I wrote this thing once that I said this country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.
And that's what it is.
There's so many guns.
There's more guns than there are people.
I don't think it's a gun situation.
And I don't think you can change the fact that there's...
And I don't think it's wise to take the guns away from the people and leave all the power to the government.
We see how they are even with an armed populace.
They still have a tendency towards totalitarianism.
And the more increased power and control you have over people, the easier it is for them to do what they do.
And there's a natural inclination when you are a person in power to try to hold more power and acquire more power.
And it's never, there's never an inclination to give more power back to the people, to give more freedoms back to the people.
Freedom's loss are rarely regained.
And so, the situation is, should you be able to own a gun to defend yourself if you're a law-abiding citizen and you know that the police are horribly understaffed, and you know that crime and violence are real things, and I, you know, I personally know people have been robbed.
I know people who've had home invasions.
I know people that have been in gunfights.
What should we do?
Should you leave these people unarmed and to be at the mercy of a criminal?
Or what should we do?
Should we red flag any kid who writes an awful poem or draw something fucked up on his notebook?
I vaguely pay attention to the details, but you're talking about...
So for ammunition, it's pretty expensive.
And so he somehow was able to afford two rifles and ammunition.
There's complexities around that.
But there's a lot of people saying, well, you should red flag it if it's...
If you post pictures of guns or have any kind of the symptoms of somebody that might be able to commit this kind of crime, but that's pushing surveillance.
I think also people try to formulate solutions to problems as if these problems have a limited amount of variables.
Like if you have a hundred people and you have a gun violence problem versus 330 million people.
That have all sorts of problems, all sorts of issues with their past, psychology and fucking abuse and trauma, medicine and psychoactive drugs and psychiatric disorders.
She's in the middle of chaos right now, and she knows it.
It's all over.
It's never going to be the same again.
No one's going to ever look at her the same way again.
If she had never taken that stand, if she had publicly apologized, if she had done something to get out of it, if she had not pursued it, if she had not written that op-ed, which, by the way, she didn't even write for the Washington Post.
She had the ACLU ghost write it for her.
It was part of the deal where she was going to give them $3.5 million, which she never gave them.
If she had just done that, she would have been like so many other actresses and actors in Hollywood.
They're fucking sociopaths.
There's a lot of them.
They're broken, narcissistic weirdos that pretend for a living.
And in her case, she happens to also have this spectacularly beautiful face.
And she's irresistible to a lot of men.
And so there's a power in that.
There's that expression, beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
I think they were recording each other to help the relationship to understand because the claim was that he was too drunk or drugged out all the time so he wouldn't remember the different things.
But it just shows you how in a relationship, crazy can become normal.
I mean, there is a Hunter S. Thompson quality from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, like the character, the fictional character, not the real character.
Yeah.
I mean, there is like fiction imitates life.
There is an element to where I wonder to what degree he started becoming that.
You know, he spent millions of dollars to fulfill Hunter's dying wish of being launched into space, or launched into the air, have his ashes blown out of a cannon that had the gonzo fist, the two-thumbed fist, holding a masculine tab in the center of it.
He feels like he was, somebody wrote in the comments that he feels like a patient who escaped from an insane asylum and is pretending to be a psychiatrist.
Well, also to be fair to this whole trial, I don't know how much they're aware about public opinion, but this being televised, it's almost unfair to the judicial process because I feel like the lawyers aren't as terrible as they look.
They're probably just following the game of how, like, trials usually are, but they just sound disingenuous.
She sounds disingenuous.
She sounds like she's lying.
Maybe to the jury it doesn't, but to us, observing from the outside, it just looks terrible.
You might get a jury filled with brilliant, sensitive, compassionate, kind, caring, intelligent, objective people who really want justice to be served.
Or you might have nutty people.
Who knows?
Who knows how they chose the jury?
I mean, look at the jury that convicted or that exonerated O.J. Simpson.
That's wild.
The fact that they looked at that case and said, not guilty.
That is wild, right?
So that's real.
That's a jury.
That's the problem with the jury.
It's like you're getting judged by people and how much do those 12 people actually know about what the fuck is going on?
I think the O.J. Simpson case is an unusual case because it was right after that extremely high-profile case.
What the fuck's his name?
The guy got beat up by the cops when they exonerated the cops.
Do you know the Los Angeles case that started the riots?
Rodney King, thank you.
When the Rodney King video got released, and those cops were beating Rodney King with batons, and everybody saw it, and then those cops got released, there was riots, everybody was furious.
The OJ Simpson trial happened right after that, and a lot of people felt like that was...
Some sort of a payback.
Like, you know, here's an African American representative and if we make him not guilty, somehow or another we get that back.
And I actually saw people say that.
There's a friend of mine who went on stage and he was talking during the whole thing and he was saying that he didn't believe that O.J. Simpson was guilty because he's black.
So if there's any kind of dark shit that you know you won't be able to really get to the core of with the person, you're not interested in talking to them.
Well, you wanted to interview Putin, and you were going to be able to do it in Russian, which was much different than any way I would be able to interview him.
The richness of the Russian language and your understanding of the Russian language, you'd be able to interview him in a way that a person like myself would never really be able to talk to him.
Which is the reason I was interested in it, because I would be able to bring the full perspective of the intelligence, the nuance of that human being, no matter what evils they have done.
I mean, I think it's important to...
I mean, I would interview Hitler in 1941 and 42. In 45, I would interview Hitler.
That's really important to understand.
People like to paint those people as...
As bad in a way that is somehow distinct from anything we are.
Like it's another creature.
No, it's a human being and you too are capable of that.
If you're given power, a lot of us will become corrupted, especially over time.
And if you get away with a certain amount of things like killing your political enemies, you're doing it over a period of time, and you exist in a world where that's commonplace, right?
So the interesting thing about propaganda, it's not only a tool to convince the populace of something, you start to believe it yourself.
I mean, most of the propaganda machine of Hitler, he started to believe.
There's no evidence he didn't believe.
Everything about Jews, everything about the German superiority over the Slavic people, just the thing we think of as hateful and idiotic, he truly believed.
That he's actually spreading the pure, the strong people across the world.
Well, if you're well off, if you believe, what is it called, heart, that if you're well off in your life, you can try heroin, you can try cocaine, you can try crack.
Well, Steven Tyler just had a foot operation, and they put him on pain medication, and he's been sober for years, and he just had to check himself back into a rehab because he was getting whacked out on the pain meds, so they canceled their residency in Las Vegas for Aerosmith.
I've gained weight since Ukraine, which is stress.
And the way that I take that out is I just hide from the world, listen to Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or different books about the dark periods of history and eat excessive amounts of fruit.
And then call relatives and listen to them cry and then go back to eating fruit.
At the very least, is he's forcing Twitter's hand to address it and expose it, and it's very likely that they've been lying.
First of all, something's weird happening over at Twitter.
When he said that he was going to start, when he started this process, and then announced that he was making an offer for Twitter, and then Twitter accepted his offer, Since then, I've gained 800,000 followers.
It's not that long.
It's very quick to gain that many.
And it makes me wonder, like, was I in Twitter jail before that?
Probably.
I was probably in some sort of shadow ban type situation.
And why am I released?
Am I released because they realize that these algorithms that they're using are really fucking creepy and that they're going to be exposed and these people are going to get in trouble?
Instagram, all of the, they, listen, I've talked to a lot of those people, and they actually mean well, and they're great engineers, but they've become stale in terms of the amount of innovation they're doing, and they've become arrogant And dismissive.
Like they become arrogant in thinking they know what is information, what is misinformation.
They've become arrogant in thinking they can know what is good and not.
And also they become dismissive of these other conspiracy theories or theorists or these other humans that are trying to manipulate our platform to do bad to the world.
And that starts to fuck with your head.
And if you just hire everybody that believes the same thing as you in a room, that you can start to believe that there is this particular thing that is true about COVID and everybody else is lying.
And not only are they lying, but their lies are going to have mass damage on society.
They're going to hurt a lot of people.
And that kind of arrogance can build and build and build until you're actually just...
Until the algorithm...
That you use for your platform for both the search and discovery and for the recommendation and for the feed is no longer actually a great product.
It's no longer serving the people.
It's not just like it's violating freedom of speech and all those kinds of things, which is very important, but it's just a shitty product.
The timeline is shitty.
Some people might feed some kind of echo chamber thing, but a lot of people are not going to enjoy it.
A lot of us enjoy being challenged.
And a lot of us enjoy seeing multiple opinions and growing from it and all that kind of stuff.
I don't think they created the algorithm with the intention of making people upset.
That's like a false narrative that I think gets tossed around about a lot where they say that these algorithms exist to encourage engagement and encourage people to get angry.
People get angry and people engage with things that they get upset by.
All the algorithm does is find out what you like.
If you look on my YouTube algorithm in general, it's mostly professional pool, Muay Thai matches, muscle cars, and food.
Yes, and they do suck and we need to make them better and improve them because they have mental health consequences because the drama seems to be maximized and there's journalists that feed this algorithm that use the ads for income so they're going to feed the most engagement It's not the social media algorithm, which is a platform.
It's the people that feed the drama, which is often journalists, I think.
But I mean, you know, I think that the institutions themselves are shitty, and they're trying desperately to try to maintain relevance in this day and age where people don't want to buy print anymore.
They don't want to pay for it.
And there's so much available that's free, and they're sort of playing catch-up now.
And a lot of the free stuff, the model that is most successful is clickbait, unfortunately.
And I think what we're talking about with YouTube and Twitter and all that stuff is one of the problems is managing its scale.
Imagine the sheer volume of tweets you have to go through or the sheer volumes of YouTube videos get uploaded every day.
The problem is censorship.
It's not the problem of the algorithm.
If the algorithm existed independently of censorship, I don't think people would have as much of a problem with it.
It's that the algorithm exists and then on top of that they censor things.
You know, they remove things where it's like YouTube will remove a video if it is a discussion of a peer-reviewed paper, scientific paper, that doesn't fit in with whatever ideology they're pushing.
That's like the most blatant and ridiculous censorship.
And that exists.
People have had videos removed.
For discussing trials of ivermectin on yellow fever because they're doing things about ivermectin and they've decided that ivermectin is negative because of the political consequences.
Or they also do something, I would say, worse, which is, I think they call it deceleration, which they don't, you know, I guess people call that shadow banning.
They don't recommend it or recommend it much less in the search and discovery process.
The problem is like with stupid shit, it's like if someone makes a video about the world being hollow and aliens live underneath it and they're using marionette strings to control our dictators, that's funny.
It doesn't, it doesn't, I don't believe in it, but somebody might.
And the problem is we're protecting dumb people from bad ideas.
There's a lot of people out there that think that they are smarter than other people and so they're worried about people being influenced by ideas that they think are invalid.
Whether it's ideas about the Illuminati or ideas about whatever the fuck it is.
It's like you're protecting people because like if there's flat earth videos and you're banning them.
I'm not exactly sure why that bothers me so much, but I sense behind that that, first of all, a lot of them probably, if we sat down, wouldn't be able to prove to me that the Earth is round.
Without rolling your eyes during the video, which is what they often do.
There's a kind of mocking of the other side.
It's an opportunity to educate.
Most of us, even the people that believe the Earth is round, don't know 99.999% of, cannot explain how this universe works.
99.999% of it.
Science is the very early stages of understanding.
We don't understand most of anything about the human mind, most of anything about the universe, about biology, it's a giant mystery, and we congratulate ourselves because we made a lot of progress in the past century or two centuries, depending on the discipline.
But the world is shrouded in mystery, and I think humility should be the driver for the recommender systems on YouTube, on Twitter, on Facebook, and so on.
And always err on the side of free speech, I think.
I think so too, and I think it's also an interesting opportunity to explore why people believe stupid shit, why people believe the Earth is flat, why people believe space is fake.
You know, there's a thriving community of people that think space is fake.
And a lot of it has to do with, like, religious beliefs.
They believe that, you know, there's, like, a dome over the Earth, and the Earth is like a flat disk.
Well, I also, I mean, I can empathize because there's something, I mean, I'm sure there's something genetically, biologically wrong with me or right with me, but I find those things fun to think about.
Did you know that the Osmond Brothers had an album that was dedicated to that belief and that inside the album is like all these worlds?
It's like in the jacket of the album when you open up the album cover there's like these worlds and this is all based on this Mormon principle written by a fucking 14 year old con artist Allegedly.
I mean, imagine if you found out that your life was really a simulation, and that all of your interactions with people were pro and con, were all these little lessons that you learned, and you're just going through this thing to experience enough different scenarios to have a better, more comprehensive understanding of who you are as an individual.
It's like a meditative journey exploring your own mind.
If you think of what VR would be in the future, you create a whole world.
That's what video games are, right?
You create a whole world just to be able to understand yourself better.
That's what a therapy session will be of the future, is you create an entire planet, See, the Mormons are onto something.
You create an entire planet, entire civilization, and places you into a particular aspect that helps you to work out your ancestral issues, like your relationship with your dad, your relationship with your mom, your, like, former girlfriends or whatever.
You have to figure all that out, and it creates just the kind of crazy people around you, or healthy people, to help you figure that out.
And then, at the end of your life, you come to that realization, and then you return back, To the eternal self with the deep realization of resolving some of the deep psychological issues that you had before.
If you tell people that they feel trapped, they feel like locked into this existence over and over and over again, having to live your life over and over and over again.
If you treat it with care and understanding and humility and compassion and intelligence, it's possible to enjoy a lot of them.
Obviously, there's horrific accidents and terrible tragedies and there's things you can't enjoy.
But overall, if you're alive, especially if you're you or me, and you're very privileged, and you're very fortunate, and you live in America, and you have a job that's rewarding and fascinating and great and all these good things, why wouldn't you want to keep doing it forever?