Duncan Trussell and Joe Rogan examine DHS’s secret push to police social media, including a disinformation board shut down after backlash but with lingering surveillance efforts. They debate 5G’s potential as invasive tracking tech while questioning Obama’s UFO hints and ancient civilizations’ lost knowledge. Opioid addiction’s corporate roots and the Russia-Ukraine war’s stalled diplomacy reveal systemic failures, yet both argue personal self-control—over anger, addiction, or even psychedelics—holds more power than external battles. The episode ends with a Buddhist-inspired call to reduce aggression as the key to societal stability. [Automatically generated summary]
An investigation by The Intercept has found years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit as well as public documents illustrate the expansive effort by the agency to influence the tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clear view earlier this year when DHS announced a new disinformation governance board.
A panel designed to police misinformation, false information spread unintentionally, disinformation, false information spread internally, intentionally, excuse me, and malinformation, factual information shared typically out of context with harmful intent.
While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate, the war on terror, has been wound down.
So that's been wound down.
Apparently.
Platforms have got to get comfortable with government.
It's really interesting how hesitant they remain.
Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly.
Look at that.
Platforms have got to get comfortable with government.
A lot of people seem to be really upset with Elon for buying Twitter because Elon is saying that he's not going to censor Twitter anymore.
He's going to like let, you know, all the banned people are going to get back on apparently.
You know, it's like they're trying to figure it out how to do it.
And so, this has upset a lot of people who were happy with the idea that it was being hyper-moderated in a way, I think, that fits in with their politics.
That was the idea.
So their team was in control for a second, and now somebody...
You know what it reminds me of?
It's like when a new booker shows up at a comedy club.
Oh, that was a tweet where it's like the Santa Monica Observer or something like that was tweeting something about the Paul Pelosi attack.
And that Santa Monica observer has been known to tweet things that aren't correct, or at least has, or not tweet, publish things that aren't correct, at least has in one instance that they were citing, something about Hillary Clinton.
I don't know.
But, you know, I think what Elon tweeted was there's a tiny chance that we might not be getting the full story.
He went woo to Q. So like he apparently had some kind of blog or something.
I think he started off woo, super hippie, ayahuasca, mystical, and then gradually kind of devolved into Q. QAnon.
QAnon.
The best analysis I saw of it was a reporter saying that what the real story here is not like There's people who are psychotic all over San Francisco from doing so much speed, meth, drugs.
That's the real story.
The real story is that all over, like, the great cities of America, people are, like, high as a fucking kite and have been for so long that they're, like, spinning out of control.
And that's what it is.
That's the story of stories.
It's like, yeah, sure, this guy went woo to cue.
Very common, it happens.
You start off, you're into taking supplements.
That leads to a new supplement you've never heard of.
That leads to some weird website you go to.
The next thing you know, you're rubbing weird balm all over your body.
Under a crystal.
Still fine.
Still cool.
But somewhere along the way, you get on one of these slides that lead you down into Q. And then the next thing you know, you're completely deep in that.
Robert Anton Wilson, the great Robert Anton Wilson, his recommendation is maintain agnosticism when it comes to the exploration philosophically of anything, really.
So when you're contemplating this or that, let yourself believe it.
But don't believe it all the way.
Maintain agnosticism.
You can, like, play around with the idea that the Earth is flat.
You can play around with the idea that the Illuminati elite run the planet.
You can play around with any idea you want, in fact, in a great simulator of your brain.
But...
Don't go all the way.
If you go all the way, that's where you can start, like, spiraling out.
I think part of the problem with a lot of these theories is that some people, I'm just going to try to say this as kindly as possible, they don't have good brains.
And I say this as a person who has a decent brain.
And that thing can just sort of maneuver around ideas.
Oh, I see what's going on here.
Oh, this is a conflux of all these conspiracy theories that all come together.
And this person has unfortunately adopted these wholesale and hasn't looked into them at all and now thinks there's lizard people that are shape changers, that are behind closed doors, that are running the world and that are trying to collapse all the societies.
You know, there's a real benefit to letting the fucking culture figure out what's right and what's wrong.
But along the way, people are gonna get tricked.
They're gonna get duped.
And some people are gonna fall into the hands of very manipulative people that are very charismatic.
Yeah.
And they have wacky fucking ideas about lizard people or whatever it is.
You want to throw a monkey wrench into shit that doesn't work so that it like stops working and you rebuild instead of patching up old wobbly things that are like smokes coming out, gears are flying off, and you're supposed to pretend like it's working.
It's like, you know, if the machine that is failing Starts telling tech companies or whoever Like what is real and what isn't then a broken machine is then like articulating truth Which then so if someone starts telling the truth the emperor wears no clothes and then like Twitter throws up underneath like this is potential misinformation That's why this Department of Homeland Security
thing is so creepy and Because that would be the same people.
The same people that are telling you things that are factually inaccurate or that are getting fact-checked on Twitter would be the very people that would get to dictate what is mal-information.
If maybe you said something and you thought it was true, let's correct that.
But if you just keep doing that over and over and over again and you never admit that, and then you're the one who gets to dictate what's mal-information, it's like the death throes of a dying system.
And it's reaching out and it's acting and behaving the way it used to be able to behave when it had total access to what people get informed about or not.
So you get one, like, everybody's had a shitty manager.
You get one shitty manager in some job where, like, he's got a little more power than he's supposed to have.
And then he's probably got people around him who are like, this is a bad idea.
And he's like, well, you're fired.
And then people come in who are like, this is a really good idea.
He's like, you're a genius if you think this is a good idea, because it is.
Then you have this terrible geometry of where a contagion happens, where this one asshole starts getting surrounded by concentric circles of assholes, and then those people have so much power.
And that's, I think, what's going on with it.
There's just too many people running things.
And of those people, there's got to be some that are great.
I know there is.
And there's some that are just abject, monstrous, power-hungry, coked-up assholes.
And I think that's when you start seeing shit like that.
It's clearly a sign of...
I mean, again, maybe I'm being naive.
But I'd like to imagine that that's coming from, like, a few assholes.
That's not coming from the totality of the U.S. government.
All of it.
It's just coming from, like, what, a thousand assholes?
I'm, like, always getting caught up in bullshit online.
I, like, go through, like, phases of, like, yeah!
Oh, my God!
I pendulum between teams, or I'll get caught up in some, like, deep, crazy conspiracy.
Like, it's a very potent...
By the way, I'm not saying it's potent because I get manipulated easily, but it's a potent...
Yes, it is.
The internet's a potent drug.
There's all kinds of operators.
It's not just Russian troll forums.
It's Discordians.
It's just basic, like, trolls who are bored.
It's who knows what.
Probably some cult will never know about.
Just some weird cult on an island somewhere with some nefarious purpose that's like trying to put some certain information on the internet.
It's an ocean of madness.
And maybe, like...
The horrible idea is, okay, we can control the ocean of madness.
That's what we're going to do because some of these people are other states trying to cause discord in our society that could lead to a civil war, the collapse of the United States.
We've got to do something about this.
Call up Twitter.
Listen, it's a problem.
You gotta let us tell you what's real and what's not real.
And at first, maybe that's great.
It's like, look, this is 100% coming from Russian trolls.
This, whatever this is, this is Russian AI trolls.
But then, all of a sudden, the president calls that department.
He's like, hey, is there any way that you could also start applying that to people who say that I seem like I'm kind of out of it?
To be in a position like that where you have a notebook in front of you and you have to answer these complex questions of what the fuck is going on in Yemen?
They're going to tell you like, look, they're going to ask you about this for sure.
Yesterday, we saw the vice president and the vice president...
This obviously didn't happen.
The vice president grabbed a baby and...
Out of someone's arms and threw the baby on the ground.
Now, the reason this happened is because we accidentally dosed her with some new MKUltra shit and she thought that she was like a Greek goddess and the baby was like a Hydra head.
Don't worry about it.
It was a bad experiment.
But...
Anyway, they're gonna ask you why did the vice president throw the fucking baby on the ground?
You don't tell them we drugged her accidentally with an MKUltra drug.
You gotta say low blood sugar.
The vice president is having low blood sugar and her hand shook and she didn't really throw the baby, obviously.
You've got to like go out there with that just load of shit and figure out a way to say it.
Not just to like one reporter, but to like 20, like one will ask.
What we were able to witness today and what the President was able to lift up at this conference, at this event, was how her focus on wanting to deal with, combat food insecurity in America.
Imagine if you're in an office somewhere, Duncan, you're the CEO of a corporation, and something like this happens, and this person explains what happened to you, you'd go, I can't have you work for me anymore, because you're a liar.
I want to thank all of you here for including bipartisan elected officials like Representative Governor, Senator Braun, Senator Booker, Representative...
Jackie, are you here?
Where's Jackie?
I didn't think she was going to be here.
To help make this a reality.
And thanks to Senator Stabenow, Representative DeLauro, for their leadership.
So they give speeches to these people that help them get into position of being a president.
So, like, say if there's a large corporation, a large corporation, they donate a lot of money towards campaigns, and they also, oink, oink, we'd love to hear you talk someday.
Wait, you're not saying the corporations that give hundreds of millions of dollars for the president to come give the speech are actually secretly bribing them?
I mean, it's like, what's funny about this sort of thing is, it's inarguably true.
Like, it's just, you can't describe it in any other way.
It's like, we can't just hand bags of money to people when we want them to, like, do things for us and the government.
But we can, like, hide it and do a speech.
You can't—the funny thing is it has to be a speech because, like, that is a thing where it's like, well, how do you quantify the worth of a presidential speech?
You can't have them come and say, like, paint the wall or, like, clean a bathroom and you give them $400,000.
It has to be a speech.
And so— It's like all of this stuff, it's all out there.
It's 100% true.
We're not being cynical or conspiratorial.
It's fucking weird to pay anybody that much for a speech, much less somebody who's still in power and is going to be responsible for potentially passing legislation or helping legislation pass that's going to massively impact whatever your particular industry is.
It's obvious what's going on.
Well, this is the kind of stuff, speaking of hypnosis, that's like just on the periphery, right?
Like if you want to hang out in default reality, you're not really supposed to spend too much time thinking about that.
You're not supposed to spend too much time thinking about the fact that private corporations and public government sectors of government are weirdly the same thing.
They're connected by an invisible It's not even invisible.
Barely invisible.
It's just kind of shadowy.
The idea is the private sector is supposed to be separate from the public sector.
The private sector, if it influences the public sector, it does it via voting.
That was the idea of democracy, voting.
Not through donating money to the campaigns that make them get elected because they have the most money.
There's probably the most charismatic, incredible, brilliant dude out there.
He's got it all figured out, for real.
Like, someone who makes JFK look like a complete fucking idiot.
Like, someone like that good.
And, I don't know, he's living somewhere, and maybe he's like, man, I think I could really help.
But, he's like, how am I gonna raise...
$500 million to run a presidential campaign.
I can't do that.
So he doesn't run.
He can't.
And if he did try to run, he couldn't get the money to get to the point where the other ones have gotten to because they're being supported by the corporations.
So really what we've done is like we've managed to filter out all the other people who could be awesome because they can't get the money.
It's so sad if you think about it.
It really is.
Remember this last election?
You're looking at the two choices.
Like, imagine the Olympics, you know, or any, like, any other competition.
Imagine if, like, you're watching the two finalists in some Olympic, I don't know, gymnastic challenge, I don't know, like, tumbling or ice skating.
And like they both are really bad at fucking ice skating.
You know what I mean?
And you gotta pick one.
It's a binary now.
But they're both in different ways.
They're like really bad at it.
But you gotta pick one.
That's what really sucks.
That to me is like the real embarrassment in our country right now.
It's like...
You're giving us a shitty binary every fucking time.
And if I say, I don't want to participate in the binary, people are like, no, don't you get it?
Our country's future is in your hands.
You're like, yeah, but I don't like either of them.
They both seem awful.
One I don't like, the other I don't like.
I would not leave my kids alone with either of them.
I don't want to fucking support it at all, but we have to because it's a binary.
Do you not love your country?
Do you not believe in democracy?
But really you're looking at it like surely there were better people than this.
Like surely this isn't like the greatest representation of leadership.
I'm sorry I'm ranting a little too much.
No, it's perfect.
Here's the thing.
Imagine this.
We could reverse all the conditioning everyone fucking has been injected with on one side or the other for the last 10 years, right?
Then we just present like, alright, here's this dude and this dude.
One is Trump, one is Biden.
Would you like either of these people to be president?
Who would be like, oh yeah, let's get the fucking megalomaniac or let's get the old man who can't really put a sentence together.
Those are definitely the best choices out of all the other awesome, charismatic, young people out there who you could pick.
It's really depressing, man.
It's really depressing and it's sad that we're all at each other's throats.
Fighting over these like you know what I mean a stupid binary like we're presented with a dumb binary.
It's I Don't know I keep saying fucking no, it's a really good point.
It's a really good point because That's what separates most people.
It's not really their values It's that you think the other person is on the other party and the other party is inherently bad Everybody's doing it It's mostly incorrect.
Most people agree on most things.
Most people are good people.
Most people, we can't concentrate on the ones that aren't the most.
And we can't align ourselves with the ones who aren't the most.
The people that are the most asshole-ish on the left, that freak you out, Are just like the people that are the most asshole-ish on the right that freak you out.
Like, my God, the way this man carries himself, the way this woman lives her life, the way they talk, the way they treat people, I want to be like that.
And if we are, as a group, aligned with only one of two choices, and so you're either on this side or you're on that side, and you always look at the people across the fence, fuck you, and they look at you, fucking losers.
Sad.
It's dumb.
It's dumb.
It's the best way to keep us divided.
It's fucking stupid.
Most people agree on most things.
And the things that we disagree on, we should be able to talk through.
The idea is just to continue to improve upon the systems that we already have.
They're not perfect, but they're better than nothing, and if we blow it all up, who the fuck is gonna take...
If we blow it all up, it's William Wallace up in this bitch.
Okay?
If you decide that this government no longer has power over the people, and then a bunch of people start assuming power and saying that they have power, you got a real fucking problem.
When I say change, I mean like a complete restructuring.
I don't mean like let's make it so the politics don't get bought out by money.
I mean a way where people have to be informed about the things that they have opinions on that are super critical.
So like there's a real responsibility for everyone that's involved in all these decision-making aspects of voting to know what the fuck the consequences are for real.
The problem is when it comes to certain things like climate change, right?
You say climate change, you don't agree with the consensus of climate change?
If you don't jump on board immediately, people want to bark at you and very few of them have done any research.
And I'm not saying that climate change is not real.
I'm just saying when something's like that, Where it's like, this is what it is, and the science is...
Talked about whether it's the ice ages come in or whether it's a there's always been some big fear-mongering thing about some climate disaster It's always happened You know, it's funny to me about that stuff is people take themselves out of the climate So it's like people talk about climate change as though the climate were something external right to the human whereas like there's an Interior climate like a subconscious climate A semi-conscious climate that is
the sum total of the interior lives of everyone on the planet.
And that gets left out because we can't quantify it.
And so whenever you're seeing a war happen, you are looking at like a sort of subjective internal yet collective societal hurricane happening and destroying stuff, but it's doing it via like the human system, the human biome.
And so to me, I think that there isn't a quick fix to this, but...
Carl Jung.
Carl Jung.
You know who Carl Jung is?
He's like Freud.
Okay.
Carl Jung, I'm sure a million people have already said this on your podcast.
His idea was that leaders are a projection of the collective unconscious.
So whatever the world leader is that you're looking at, you're actually looking at a physical representation of Of the internal subjective lives of the collective, right?
So when you see like a Biden, you're seeing the shadow of society.
When you're seeing a Trump, it's our shadow.
That's what you're looking at.
Like this is where connectivity, interdependence comes up.
It's like we're all connected.
Whoever the person is that ends up being the mouthpiece for all of us, we all have a tiny little thread of quantum energy injected into that thing and we're kind of looking at ourselves.
Part of ourselves we might not want to admit is there.
So the idea would be if You can find in your own little internal climate a way to cool it down.
Cool it down.
Stop heating up so much.
Get peace.
I remember a long time ago, man, you talked to me about this.
It stuck with me for the longest time because I was more turbulent back then.
But it's this idea of maintaining an even keel.
You know what I mean?
Find a way to be stable, consistently.
Every day in your own life and stability will appear naturally around you, right?
But if you are prone to reactivity, anger, freakouts, whatever it is, mania, whatever the thing is, then The people around you, they're always kind of worried like, what version of this dude am I getting today?
Am I going to get the happy version?
Am I going to get the freaked out version?
Am I going to get the angry version?
Am I going to get the cool version?
And if it's really extreme the way your behavior is warping and shifting, you could only expect chaos around you because people get nervous around instability, right?
So then if all of us We're reactive.
Like if suddenly a wave of reactivity swept through the whole planet and people started thinking it was normal to like pendulum between moods and to react to the moods and like, this is me or what the fuck or extremes, then you would expect the representation of all of us to be kind of fucked up.
And so the idea is if we could all kind of calm down a little bit, find some peace, find a way to like be actually calm, not repressed.
Like, you know, when you're freaking out on mushrooms and you try to pretend you're not or when you go to a party where they give weed.
I don't know if you ever been to an edible weed party.
I remember talking to this dude who was telling me about the cannabis community.
It was really interesting because I was beyond barbecued to the point where like words were coming out and I would hear the sounds That the words would make, and I would see the words coming out of the person's mouth.
But what I got was feelings.
I got like bars of feelings, like registered feelings above each word.
So as this guy was talking, I could tell what he was trying to do.
And he was trying to say that he loves and appreciates the cannabis community and he feels very close to them as a community and that they all have each other's backs.
I know if anything goes wrong with me, the cannabis community has my back.
And it was this thing that he was doing when he was communicating with me because I was so barbecued.
I got to realize that's what we're doing all the time.
We're doing all the time.
We're not always just trying to get our words out.
We're trying to like project a tone and figure out a way to get people to like us more.
Literally, everything you see is your mind because your sense organs are taking in phenomena and that's all getting translated via your brain into something we call reality.
So, literally, when you're seeing the color yellow, You're seeing your own mind.
That's the way your mind translates whatever the particular wavelength of yellow is into the thing that you call yellow.
It's literally your mind.
Everything you're seeing is your mind.
That's just the way it is.
But what happens is we start thinking it's not our mind.
There's a me and a you.
There's an outside me and an inside me.
Even though this is 100% not the case, there is probably something outside of you, but that's not what you're seeing.
You're seeing an incredible symphony of neurotransmitters that are all harmonizing in a way that produces your reality.
So when you see an enemy or a friend, when you see someone you love and someone you hate, all your mind.
The feeling of love, your mind.
The feeling of hate, your mind.
So...
When you get really fucking confused, not realizing this is on my mind, you start picking shit out.
This person, that person, this thing, that thing, and you would start attaching to it.
You start attaching to it to try to feel better, right?
So you're like, if I can make this person like me, I'm gonna feel better now.
I'm gonna feel good again or something's gonna make me feel better and This is what what you're talking about.
This is where you begin the never-ending cycle In Buddhism called samsara where it's just a never-ending attempt to rearrange your mind into some way that is going to give you a sense of like, okay Everything's fine now never-ending Never-ending!
Not only never-ending in this life, but literally zillions of incarnations.
You've been doing the same fucking thing over and over again in different ways.
And so the moment you realize this is my mind, this is all my mind, then all of a sudden that's when shit gets really interesting because now you might begin to change the way you start trying to get shit out of your mind, out of like, you know, Getting the thing you desire, pushing away.
You stop defending as much, too.
You're defending against your own fucking mind.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Like, so many people are super defensive all the time.
They're trying to keep themselves from being hurt, which is really smart, but...
What they're defending themselves from is words, perceived opinions, real like high-level social animal shit.
They're not defending themselves against bear attacks, lions, arrows.
They're defending themselves against like psychic impacts.
You know what I mean?
So it's not even a danger.
Like when someone says some shitty thing to you, And you get triggered and then you react to that shitty thing.
Like, experiment with not reacting.
See what happens if you don't get revenge when the person does the thing to you they always do that you get revenge for.
You just don't get revenge.
You just don't do the thing that you thought you had to do or they're gonna do it again!
So if you start getting calm, if you start getting a little space between you and your thoughts, just maybe, just maybe that your enemies won't seem quite like enemies anymore.
The people that you have been waking up in the middle of the night thinking about pouring acid in their mouth.
Maybe you'll realize it's like...
The example that I read...
And then I'll shut the fuck up.
I'm sorry, everybody.
The example that I read was...
It's like someone shoots an arrow at you.
And they miss.
It lands at your feet.
This is when someone says something shitty to you or you get upset about something someone's doing.
You don't see that person for weeks, maybe.
But the example is the arrow lands at your feet and you pick it up.
And you start stabbing yourself with the arrow going, why did they shoot me with this arrow?
I can't believe they did that!
Every time you bring them to your mind.
Every time you wake up thinking about them.
Every time you have that fake conversation when you see them and you're going to one-up them.
That's just you going, ah!
Yeah, why did they shoot me with this arrow?
You know, you're just massacring yourself with your own mind.
You don't have to do that.
You actually can stop.
You don't have to constantly be stabbing yourself.
But the thing is, like, There's too many variables.
I don't think we have a mind that's designed for the variables that exist in modern society.
There's too many variables because you're getting news from the entire world.
So you're getting everything catastrophic that happens amongst seven point whatever billion people.
That's too much data.
And you're interacting with people that are nowhere near you, primarily.
Most of your human interactions are coming via cyber world, which is fucking bizarre to accept.
And then on top of that, you're probably having to sit through traffic, and you're probably stacked on top of a bunch of people in an apartment building, and you're probably annoyed that there's so many fucking people around you all.
It's an unnatural state for most people.
Most people.
And it's all rapidly changing while we remain the same.
Premises that potentially 5g could be used as some kind of radar system that like it's so powerful that you could theoretically see people moving inside of buildings Using 5g somehow there might be a way to like look at the way the 5g is being like I don't know Doesn't that make sense though that like ultimately that's gonna happen and if we have phones and everybody carries a phone with them So you know where you're...
Unless you're one of those really rebellious ultra-marathon runners who puts his fucking phone in his desk drawer when he gets into work and just leaves it there all day.
Most people have their phone on them.
So there's proximity tracking, right?
You know where you are at all points in time.
And if you have some sort of a thing that's just like...
You know, the misinformation and malinformation board is requiring that we install these on all chips.
And all that is doing is utilizing 5G to get a sense of everything that's in the space.
It's like, but imagine if it was just on screens in your house, right?
Like if hanging in your house, there was, I don't know, just a light that if someone starts speaking misinformation, it starts glowing red or something.
And you're like, oh shit, that thing you just said, it's like the light's blinking, so it's bullshit.
It would be...
It would be fucking horrible.
It'd be scary, but somehow because it's like we still externalize the Social media as like an outside space even though it's in our house It's in our pockets right next to us all the time.
Yeah, it seems like alright, you know the whatever that is.
It's just on the outside It's not on the inside yet, but it's really it's it's it's kind of is you turn on the TV I don't care what you're fucking watching man.
I mean, it's like Okay It's fucked up that Everybody knows that most of our politicians in some way, shape, or form are making money from various- How much do you think they make?
If they told him, I mean, he was on a show once and they asked him about UFOs too, and he said something about he knows some things, but he can't talk about them.
Like now, if you believe UFOs are bullshit, you're in a minority now.
Because you're talking about the US government has been doing like hearings where they are saying, yeah, some of this stuff we don't know, but we've picked it up.
like the question is how many of them are drones how many of them are super sophisticated drones from other countries how many of them are drones that we have that are top secret just Just like the Blackbird and Stealth Bomber and all these different things they've worked on.
How many of those are top secret drones?
And then is there anything that's not?
Like that Tic Tac one that Commander David Fravor found off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
That's the craziest one.
Because there's multiple jets watched this thing.
They got it on radar.
They got visual.
They got a video of it taking off at an insane rate of speed.
They don't know what the fuck that thing was.
No visible heat signature.
Moving at speeds that are impossible to describe how fast it is.
I mean it's got to be more sophisticated than that now, right?
Yeah, now it's just like it's looking at ripples or something like it's not there's no space in between it's just instantaneously you could see whatever the fuck it is.
So whatever the fuck this thing was they tracked this and this thing moved in a way that is indescribable.
Look they can't they can't imagine some way using the methods that we know about propulsion systems and applying it to this craft and getting it to move the way it did.
We, we've said this, I've said this, I feel like we've said everything once on your podcast by now, but like, coral reef, some blind creature starts developing an optic nerve.
And all of a sudden, one day after billions of years or millions of years evolution, the eye opens.
You see the coral reef instead of just having to like sense movement in the fucking coral reef.
That's gonna be a crazy moment for the first thing to see that when all it's been feeling are these like weird shifts and movements.
So probably whatever this technology is and if you like go like Terence McKenna and look at technology as some kind of appendage of the planet, some new sensory apparatus that's appearing out of the collective, then probably we're just getting the ability to see what's really out there.
What's really out there is probably what people have been saying for thousands of years, people who spent lifetimes meditating in the forest and went through all this weird shit, and they started seeing it too.
What's out there is innumerable forms of life and intelligence that aren't locked into the classic idea of what life looks like, carbon-based life, or just starting to see the cause.
That's what they used to call them, the gods, angels, whatever.
That we've been colonized a long time ago, and they just go in and out of the ocean, do as they please, move in ways that we can't track, we don't understand, and it wasn't until really, really recently that they even be able to use radar to detect them.
So anyway, see if you find the King's Chamber, the stones for the King's Chamber were cut from a quarry 500 miles away.
Google that.
See if that's correct.
Because I think that was one of the big mysteries.
Like, how the fuck are they moving this stuff?
It's not even that it was like right next to it and they slowly rolled into the place.
They took it from 500 miles away.
Archaeologists uncovered the Scyria.
Yeah, look at that.
The pyramid stones were known to have been transported from over 500 miles away, but archaeologists did not agree on how the ancient Egyptians, I guess it probably says pulled that off, That's just the headline.
It's what's funny is like we, to try to understand stuff, we obviously, we try to use a precedent, like our own technology.
So we use the height of our technology and then try to think about how they did it.
But if we're talking about, I mean- It's possible that we only exist, well, we exist in more than one reality.
We're in time-space right now, but there's aspects of us that are outside of time-space.
There's aspects of us that we Call our soul or whatever.
It's some hyper-dimensional formation that like flowers with each incarnation like when a flower blooms, that's your life and then it dies and another flower blooms.
That's your next life and another flower blooms.
So, if that's what's going on and some civilization figured that out so that instead of being unconscious about the greater whatever the fuck it is, the hyper-dimensional tree that we're all like fruiting on, then God knows what you could do in that point. the hyper-dimensional tree that we're all like fruiting on, then You could just make the tree grow a pyramid maybe, you know, like in the same way it grew a you.
You know, you could just make it like, like bring stones from...
Who knows?
You know, we think we're so advanced.
Like, I'm sure that however cognizant a monkey is, like, when it's, like, using a tool or showing its friends how to use a tool or its kids how to, like, break open a nut or how to use the stick to get the ants out, I'm sure it's, like...
We are very advanced.
Like this is a very advanced thing it's doing.
It probably thinks it's like advanced if it could think that.
Similarly, we think we're so fucking advanced with our internet and all that stuff.
And then you live in this crazy world where you think everything's been figured out.
It's all been...
We're at the cutting edge.
We're at the cutting edge of...
Like, even though...
Throughout history, doctors have, in a lot of ways, been consistently wrong.
You know what I mean?
Like the whole bleeding and leeching and then before that, whatever the weird medieval-like ways people would treat disease, you know, like crazy, like take a rag, horse piss and wrap it around their head and then like put them above a fire for three days.
It'll cure their pox and everyone believes it.
They're like, oh yeah, that'll work.
But now we're all like, no, no, no.
Now we've figured out medical technology for sure.
Like, we 100% know everything about the way the human body works, which is why when you go into a doctor, you know, depending on who the doctor is, you mention some other possible therapy, they'll laugh you out of the room.
They're like, get the fuck out of here, that's quackery!
And sometimes they're right, but sometimes they're probably wrong.
I mean, my point is, it's just funny, because you have to live in a world where you are surrounded by people who think In one way of really leaning into the idea that we've all kind of worked out the thing.
We figured out humanity.
We figured out the planet.
We know what the climate is.
We know what medical science is and how the body works.
We understand germs, viruses, diseases, and history.
We fucking know how the pyramids were built.
Please stop saying the aliens did it.
It was people taking it from quarries.
We figured it out.
You don't need to look into that anymore because we figured it out when probably we really haven't figured out much of anything.
Probably what's really going on is so astounding that if you actually saw what it was, you might die.
You might just blip out of reality or cease to exist.
It's an alternative version of history and the alternative version is that there's actual evidence that the Earth was assaulted by comet impacts around 12,000 years ago.
And there's also actual evidence of construction that's almost impossible to do today, certainly in a lifetime.
Like to make the Great Pyramid of Giza, if you had one lifetime, do you really think they could move that many stones cut in place along with all the fucking extraction of the stones from the quarries and all the engineering involved and making sure that...
How much time was it gonna take to make something with 2,600,000 stones from a quarry 500 miles away?
I have to imagine it's gonna take a long fucking time.
So we know for sure that someone a long fucking time ago had that kind of engineering and genius.
And then we also know that human beings, even in America, Just a couple hundred years ago were living like Stone Age folks.
I think, if you think about how quickly people went from that, like the riding horses and shooting things off a horseback, which was like...
You know, obviously the Mongols, that's how they did war.
So that's the 1200s, right?
So that's not that long.
That's 800 years ago.
If you think about the pyramids being 5,000 years ago, from 800 years ago to now, from 800 years ago to horseback, drinking horse milk with blood mixed in, because that's how you're going to stay alive when you're on this long campaign.
It'd make people calm down a little bit, wouldn't it?
Like, if you could go back and look at tweets from 700 BC and, like, realize how insignificant you are in that vast scope of time, that would be really good for us, man.
I think that's part of the problem, is that those big gaps in what we know about civilization have created this, like, Really terrible, I don't know what you would call it, like some kind of like societal narcissism or some kind of like crazy idea that like, no, no, no, your life, like this life that you're in right now, this 70 year span in the midst of this ocean of time, no, no, no, no.
For sure it's the most important life.
Definitely.
Like, out of the stacks of bones.
Like, bones.
Definitely, you could make like a bridge of bones that would probably, what, go all the way to Mars?
Like, if you took all the people who've lived on the world and had their bones, I bet you could do a bridge of bones.
Well, I don't know the most, but they're super fucking important.
And I think we think of them frivolously.
The problem was like things like video games because video games can be insidiously addictive because in many ways they're more stimulating than real life.
Like you and I have both had like major problems with video games.
I have managed though to only play video games for like seven hours a day now.
I'm just kidding.
You got control of it?
I've gotten it down to like maybe like an hour and a half maybe.
But also lately I've just sort of got like it doesn't interest me as much.
This is a weird thing I'm noticing is like Do you ever like, when you break an addiction to video games or whatever, you don't miss the video game or whatever you're addicted to, but you miss the addiction itself?
You know what I'm talking to where you're like, I kind of liked being addicted.
This is where I kick her out of the idea That upon death, it may just be that, man.
It might just be that.
Like, the whole fucking thing.
People watch us like we watch, like, video games.
They're like, look!
Look at the way he died!
Can you fucking believe it?
Did you see how he went?
He fell out of a building, splattered all over the ground.
That was nuts!
Look!
He's getting back up!
Going back in the game!
It's like...
I think that could really be what's going on, man.
This shit just keeps getting in this, whatever this little bubble we're in, it always gets more advanced, it always gets more hypnotic, it always gets more spectacular.
Jamie, would you mind going on, I think it's DeForum on Twitter, and then scroll down, and somewhere he's posted, really, like, at the very top of his tweets, it says, like, AI virtual reality.
I mean, and also that you're going to be wearing augmented reality goggles or glasses that are doing the same thing to your environment in real time.
So, like, you're, you know, this stable diffusion ship, man, you can give it a, like, an MP4, just a video clip, and it'll take every frame and then...
Generate like a new image based on the image.
It's not deep faking.
You could like, you know, I took a video of Johnny Pemberton and like, it's like Johnny Pemberton rapping in studio, shirtless, gold chains.
And you know, he's wearing a shirt, but it took that video and over each clip, no shirt, gold chains, made a music studio around him that kind of undulates in and out.
So it's like, This, to me, man, this is gonna change everything.
It's like, once it's wearable, and you can just decide, you know, today, can you put me in a primordial forest?
So, like, wherever I go, everything's just, like, trees and dinosaurs and stuff.
And that's the reality that you see.
That's what you're gonna see.
It's gonna take, in real time, all the shit around you, and then put over it whatever the fuck you want.
You're going to be able to wear it on your face.
And that's when...
That's the apocalypse.
I mean, that's like where we're all living in different realities.
You'll be hanging out anywhere in a mall and everyone in the mall is going to be experiencing a different version of the fucking mall.
Some people are going to be in a castle.
Some people are going to be walking through a pyramid or, you know, in some kind of like space station.
That's where we're headed.
I mean, that's proof of it, man.
I mean, that's...
Right now, that seems slow in the sense you have to watch it fill itself in.
The people running these simulations and these AR, are they gonna be entranced with it too?
The people that are creating these, or are we just gonna give it up to AI? Like, are we going to give up to power to AI? Or are people going to be curating these experiences for people?
I think it'll be like, you know, like, when I've been doing this text-to-art shit, you actually—it takes time to figure out the right prompts to get it to make the thing you want it to make.
Like Mid-Journey, which is this incredible text-to-art AI. Part of the fun is you sit there trying to think of what is it that we want this thing to make.
And it's fun.
You can kind of do it.
One night I was like...
With, like, Justin Roiland, a bunch of these other artists, we were all trying to do different versions of, like, Bill Cosby eating beautiful sausages and, like, just trying to type in different versions of it on mid-journey to, like, make it, like, to dial in whatever the fuck.
Bill Cosby on a rollercoaster made of human baby meat.
Oh my god.
You know, shit like that just to see what you can make, but you really do have to figure out the prompts.
So I think initially it's definitely going to be curated by people who know how to generate the prompts and make it make whatever the fuck it is.
But gradually it's going to get better and better at understanding what it is you're wanting.
And then at that point it'll probably be Like, you know, you'll be more in control of what you're seeing on your screen at first, and then in VR, and then in AR, I would say.
And then, who knows?
Who knows, man?
I mean, I'm sure there's, like, gonna be popular, like, in the way there's popular Instagram videos, right?
But wouldn't the curated shit become like the NBC, CBS, ABC version and then there's gonna be a blockchain version of AI where everybody agrees to have no centralized power and it just all gets created and curated and adjusted by the people that work inside the system.
That might be, this concept behind this and the idea behind that, that might be the cure.
If this is the way that humanity interacts and exchange information from here on out, imagine if that becomes the norm.
That could be the norm.
And if that's the norm, that might be our way out of this.
If there's a way where you can get out of centralized power and the way is that it's almost impossible to avoid, just like it's impossible to not have a cell phone now.
You know, it's impossible.
I mean, you can do it.
People have done it.
Some people wear flip phones.
You can be a renegade, but most people don't.
What if it becomes like that with this?
And what if it becomes like that with decentralized AI? And if we all agree that this is the best way, and there's no manipulation, there's no coercion for you to opt in to a corporate controlled AI. You're like, why would I do that?
I don't want to do that.
Why would I only watch the Big Bang Theory when I want to watch Game of Thrones?
And people get sucked into these ones and those ones be manipulative.
But I think ultimately...
Just like what the internet is doing for the exchange of information.
It's kind of like putting it in the hands of people that really never would have gotten into that position if they were involved in the corporate system.
I mean, the stuff is most certainly being like, at least, you know, that stuff is open source.
When you are working with it, it's like, man, I'm telling you, it's like going into a wizard's library or something.
You're having to like, Pull out these weird tomes called collabs, these weird things on GitHub.
Like shit, I don't know.
It's so fucking arcane.
And like, you know, like going on YouTube channels like Prophet of the Singularity to like the name of the YouTube channels, Prophet of the Singularity, to get tutorials on how to make this shit work.
And it's all just people sharing information.
That's what I love about it.
Just people like, okay, I figured out how to do this, and then I figured out how to do that.
All going on in the background, just like what you were saying earlier.
While we're all at each other's fucking throats, the midterm elections are coming, and the fate of democracy lies in your vote.
In the background, these, I don't know who they are, wizard, transhumanist, AI people are just tapping code.
Okay, we're gonna make that a smarter.
We're gonna make it a little smarter.
I think he made it smarter here.
Let's make it smarter there.
Can we make it understand language better?
Yeah, we can.
Let's see if we can make it translate really bad audio into perfectly clear speech.
Okay, we can do that.
Let's just keep doing it.
All that's going on in the background.
And where it gets interesting is like they're sharing their information.
Here you go.
We figured it out.
Here you go.
And then some other wizard gets it and they're like, okay, I can make that better.
And then it gets a little better and a little better.
And then the AI starts making it better on its own.
It's like, all right, maybe I'll analyze this, the things my master's created.
And then let's see if I can make myself better.
That's that's how you get to McKenna's Singularity.
It's open-source collaboration between these geniuses and they don't honestly I don't think they give a fuck who it is working on it like anybody can like participate It's really cool man.
It's really badass.
I feel so excited to have stumbled upon it because That's amazing.
So this is what it says here in this article on...
What is it?
Nutritional weight and wellness and it's bringing up nutrition episode board-certified epithemologist Featured fascinating discussions on the important nutrition connections to age-related macular degeneration That's what we have You may be surprised to learn that AMD is a leading cause of irreversible vision loss and blindness in the developed world and In AMD,
inflammation and reduced blood oxygen flow causes damage to the photoreceptors, rods, and cones, and the blood vessels of the macula of the retina.
So vegetable oils and trans fats include soybean, canola, corn, and cottonseed oils, as well as hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils undergo extensive heat and chemical processing.
By the end of that process, they're oxidized, damaged, and cause inflammation to all the tissues in our bodies, including our eyes.
To add insult to injury, these types of fats also make their way into most man-made and high-sugar foods, such as cakes, pastries, fried foods, salad dressings, dips, margarines, coffee creamers, cooking.
That makes these foods a double whammy of inflammation for our eyes.
Yeah, well, this is Lugavere, right?
I'm saying it right.
Max Lugavere and I talked about that on the podcast recently where he's discussing the nutritional benefits of olive oil, how good olive oil is for you.
And you want to believe that there aren't people like that.
Literal warlocks, like literal evil wizards making bad potions and dispensing them to the people, poisoning them, and then trying to tell them that it's medicine.
And I know it's become a right versus left issue, but this speaks to what we were talking about before.
Jimmy Kimmel had a monologue where he was talking about right-wing people being scared of fentanyl coming in from the border in the form of candy during Halloween.
Is it a concern that people are going to come across the border and give kids poisoned candy?
I don't think that's the concern, but to make light of this idea that the fentanyl issue is not a giant, terrifying issue that's killing somewhere like 100,000 people are dying of this drug every day.
Is there some dispute about that it's the number one killer of kids 18 to 45?
So many people listen to your fucking podcast, there's probably someone making fentanyl right now listening to this shit like, come on, it's not that bad!
A study by an advocacy group says that fentanyl is the leading cause of death for people ages 18 to 45 compared with other major causes of death such as automobile accidents, cancer, and suicide.
Heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19 outrank opioid overdoses as leading causes of death among all American adults.
I wonder, though, and I'm not discrediting the fact that people died from COVID, but we do know that a lot of people who died from COVID were already dying, and they listed them as COVID deaths, including people with cancer.
If you're taking opioids and your immune system is fucking destroyed and you're on your way out the door and you catch COVID, you're probably not going to make it.
It's probably amazing, but there's also the problem that they give it to you when you get hurt.
It's so it's hard to get off of I know a bunch of people that have gotten injured and then they got on Something and then whatever that painkiller was they had a really hard time getting off dude I flirted with that shit for a second and then something changed in my brain I used to like it.
I remember I took that old NyQuil in the 90s and I was sick one day and I took it and I was sitting in my bed watching TV and I couldn't have felt more loved.
You go there thinking you're going to get, like, something...
They're going to give you something to make you better.
And they're like, your liver's gone.
Like, it's already eaten your liver up or something.
I don't know if this is just, like, some horror story I heard.
But I heard that's how it works, is once...
You're going to be alive a little bit...
You're gonna survive a little bit longer than after your liver is like kind of liquefied or something and then so it's a terrible OD. It's a terrible OD. Fuck that.
Acetaminophen eats you up.
That's why Vicodin's so bad because it's acetaminophen mixed with the opioid and it goes really well with...
And so I end up getting home and, you know, I'm done with it.
Like, I feel like one flew over the fucking cuckoo's nest.
I'm like, I don't want to take this shit anymore.
It's horrible.
I feel gross.
It's like awful.
So I stopped taking it.
And you're not supposed to do that when you're addicted to Xanax.
So I stopped taking it.
I'm standing in line at a pharmacy, not to get more Xanax, to get cold.
No.
I don't know why it matters.
Advil or something.
So I'm standing in line and all of a sudden I get this weird fucking headache.
It feels like electricity is like, I don't know how to explain it.
Like my hand twitched or something and I'm like, ugh.
I just started feeling bad.
Went home.
Got into bed.
Worst headache of my fucking life.
I was closing my eyes.
I was seeing like bad trip images and stuff.
I couldn't sleep.
And I'm thinking, you know, man, if you go take Xanax, Right now, I guarantee this headache's gonna go away, because this is some kind of withdrawal, for sure.
And I'm like, if I fucking go take Xanax, that's how you get addicted to Xanax.
And this is why people can't quit, because they could die.
Also, I think you've got to look at civilization, society, modern society, and think about...
Why are people taking these opioids?
You know what I mean?
It's not like everyone who gets addicted to fucking pills is some kind of miscreant junkie.
In fact, most of them are really good people.
They just, they kind of feel like whatever this shit is, reality, life, Minus the drugs is sort of a raw deal.
You know what I mean?
They're kind of like why?
Why?
Why do I need to be sober in like according to your definition of sober?
You know a lot of people they're like here's what sober is and they're not even fucking sober.
They're on coffee.
They smoke cigarettes.
They're on pharmaceutical medications.
But yeah, I think a lot like probably a lot of people who are on pills As awful as they are, and man, I'll tell you, man, I'm very close to someone who's related to someone who has an opioid addict.
The way it fucks up the family unit is so crazy, you can only compare it to demon possession.
It's like this used to be your brother.
This used to be your son.
It's a thing now that if it can, it's gonna steal your wallet.
It's gonna break into your house.
It's gonna like wreck your car.
But it looks like the person that you love.
But it keeps lying and robbing and doing awful shit.
Dude, it fucks up families.
Not just like direct families, it goes out and ripples.
So when you see 70,000 people died of opioid overdoses, that's just the people who died.
You're not seeing all the people who are close to death or the walking dead and the way that's impacting families and there's shame attached to it so people don't talk about it.
People don't know what to do.
The state isn't sophisticated enough to step in and deal with it.
Man, it's so fucking depressing.
It's so horrible.
It really is.
It's a fucking plague.
I mean, I know so many people who've been like just...
It's scary that people are willing to do stuff like that for profit and then once it happens and once you get that profit, you want to keep that profit rolling in so you keep selling it.
And you keep finding ways to prescribe it for people.
The thing is, if heroin was legal, like real, regular heroin, and people could snort it, and you get pure heroin, would all that stuff even exist anymore?
You know, I think one of the coolest things the mob has done lately...
It's gotten people to go the mob back in the day.
You know what I mean?
They're so smart because they're like, oh yeah, they got a PR person out there like, yeah, back in the day, the mob was doing all kinds of crazy stuff.
You know the thing is, again, I don't mean to be cynical.
I'm an old man now.
I'm older now.
I have gotten to the point where I recognize that The government isn't evil.
It's trying to do something, and that thing it's trying to do is really fucking hard.
It's trying to create a democracy, a place where you could raise your kids, not have kids, whatever, but live a relatively free life, be healthy, happy.
It's trying to do that.
That's the machine is trying to do that, and it's failing a lot.
It's trying, but...
It's gotten infiltrated.
So within it, there's chunks of really nefarious bad shit.
But it's like, at some point, you look at the wars between governments and mob, mafia, organized crime, and it's like, really, what's the...
If you take any classic drug dealer, any mid-level drug dealer, Make them like 500 times more powerful and they become a pharmaceutical company, right?
Like at some point you go from like selling illegal drugs to just starting a company, making fentanyl, and then legally selling synthetic heroin and being protected by the police.
While you sell the drugs.
That's the only difference, right?
The idea is you get organized crime.
The organized crime, if it gets to a certain level, it gets on the radar, and then it gets shut down.
But if it manages to jump through that level, then usually it just gets into politics, right?
And then it just becomes part of the government, right?
That's the ultimate place you want to be.
You want to go from Succumbing to laws, to controlling the laws.
That's like victory, right?
When you get to make the laws.
So, I don't know, it seems like, I don't know, I always think it's funny when you're hearing about them bugging their hubcaps and stuff, and it's just like, shit, man, it seems like it's just another mob war.
You know, they're not calling themselves the mob, they're calling themselves the government.
But it's still kind of a mob, it's just one very, very powerful mob fighting.
The desire to be the head of the tribe is instilled in all of us.
We were in these little tribal groups for most of the time that we were humans.
For thousands of years we lived like that.
Until they figured out transportation, until they figured out how to ride animals, until they figured out how to branch out, until they figured out boats.
No, but it's instilled in the DNA you're a logical person.
But I would imagine if you weren't, and if it was also instilled upon you as a small child that that's the best job in the world, and you can't sing and you can't dance, and you're not good at writing books, you can be the fucking president.
Do you fit the right criteria?
Are you trustworthy?
Can you speak in a way?
You don't even have to be extraordinary in your accomplishments.
As an intellectual, as an artist, as anything.
All you have to do is be this person that talks.
A lot of them are lawyers, right?
And they learn how to talk in a certain way, and they're convincing enough, and they've got enough people to cover up their dirty secrets, that they can get into a position of extreme power.
And the only way out of that is people realizing how dumb that is and people not wanting to do it anymore and you get a smaller and smaller group of people that are running and a less and less interesting and charismatic group of people that are running because nobody wants that fucking eye of Sauron on you.
Nobody wants that microscope and your fucking your life and all of your details of it and you want to be the president of what?
The problem is there's always going to be militaries.
There's always going to be people that are in charge of the militaries.
If you're in charge of the biggest military and you have the biggest might, You know, you have a real significant advantage over everybody else that's talking shit and trying to do things.
And maybe you're interfering in these countries.
Maybe you're fucking finagling behind the scenes and, you know, sowing the seeds of resentment and hate around the world because of your policies.
But yeah, when you look at the bigger picture, the many, many mistakes...
That have happened.
You know, it is curious to me, though, like, we do live in a time now where it seems like there, like, if you just, it seems like there's almost like a prohibition.
People don't want you to say, like, maybe we shouldn't go to war.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you start saying that, you get aligned with one side or the other.
So whether you believe it or not, whether it's been refuted or not, I thought mostly it has.
But at the end of the day, they really were successful in connecting Trump to Russia.
There's a feeling you get when you feel about Russia.
You're an anti-Trump guy, and then Russia invades Ukraine.
Okay, this is a horrible act of war.
Clearly, there's one party that has escalated this to the point of violence, and it's the worst thing that could ever happen in the world, when a neighboring country invades a neighboring country.
Fucking Jesus Christ, the world has to sit back and watch this.
The best analysis of it I saw was on Russian state TV, where some of the people on Russian state TV are starting to say, wait a minute.
And this guy was like, look, Ukraine is...
I don't remember the words he used.
Well, I don't speak Russian.
They were translating it.
But he's essentially saying, look...
You're not...
You're not...
He was saying, these are the people, these are Russians.
They survived this or that.
I can't remember the exact thing they're talking about.
The siege of...
I don't remember what it's called.
I'm sorry, man.
I'm terrible at history.
But he's like, these are Russians.
They survived all this.
You're not going to starve them out.
You're not going to freeze them out.
They're not backing down.
You don't have their minds.
You're not going to get them to surrender.
So where's the out?
The idea was quick invasion.
They're gonna surrender right away and then He's gonna like take a chunk of Ukraine and then everything Everything like ends but it sucks because still yet whatever but it's like it's not working so even There's no way to, like, say, like, all right, well, let's concede this, the Donbass or whatever to Russia, because Ukraine's like, fuck that.
We're taking Crimea back.
Like, we're taking all of it back because they're starting to win.
And they're winning because the largest military on Earth has been giving them God knows what.
We only, God knows what.
Like, what kind of data they're getting from, like, satellites we don't even know are up there.
As grotesque as it might be to sit down and try to negotiate with people who thought it was a good idea to just fucking invade another country and kill a bunch of people, it's preferable to nuclear holocaust.
Like, you know, that whole thing, there was a period, I don't know if you did that, but for a while you start watching documentaries on Putin, and you catch that weird aspect of them, you're like...
There's something kind of cool about him, right?
There was, like, this weird cool thing.
That's gone!
We all think he's a fucking, like, tyrannical asshole.
Fuck him.
We get it.
Nobody likes him.
He's horrible.
He killed countless kids and his own soldiers.
He's fucking awful.
But, like, we need a solution to this that doesn't end in a nuclear holocaust.
Like, or something worse.
Like, those motherfuckers have smallpox, too.
They don't just have nuclear weapons.
Like, they've got all kinds of shit over there that...
You know, lots of stuff, just like we do.
So, goddamn, man.
I mean, I feel like such a stupid hippie, because it's like, I don't know anything.
I'm sure if I was a Ukrainian and my children had been blown up, I would be like, yeah, let the fucking nuclear bomb come, because I don't have anything else to live for.
I don't give a fuck.
Let's destroy them.
Let's kill them.
That's what war is.
You get no froth!
And even saying, like, God, I wish they could talk.
Who am I to fucking say?
I live in fucking Austin.
You know, I ride one of those pedicabs around sometimes for music festivals.
Fucking horrible, but it's like, how do you, how do you, how do you get like, logic or like, Human reasoning to appear in the most illogical, unreasonable thing, which is fucking war.
How do you summon the spirit of rationality in a place where people, just for living, had their children's playground blown up?
People were at a playground and fucking Russia shot missiles into it.
How do you fucking make that work after that?
You don't!
You don't.
And then it's like, okay, well, we're going to stop giving them weapons because we don't want there to be a nuclear holocaust.
So it's like, really?
You don't want to push back against this massive empire that just decided to encroach upon another country?
You think they're going to stop?
Are they going to stop?
I don't know the solution, man.
What's the fucking solution?
You know, it's like we need our presidents to have that thing that the chest dude had up his ass.
I mean I doubt it like it it all goes back to that.
It's like alright.
Well get off I'm talking to myself here.
This is by the way.
I've here's my shit.
Here's my Spirit Shitty spiritual advice is what I discover.
I'm telling you man.
It's changed my life Anytime Instead of the old days when I'd blither and blather and ear beat people with some spiritual fucking advice for their lives.
Anytime I'm about to do that, I don't.
And I apply it to myself.
So it's like if I'm about to like suggest to someone that maybe exercise is gonna make them feel better.
I exercise.
Or if I'm like, you know what, maybe you should meditate.
That's when I meditate.
Instead of saying it, I just start applying it to myself.
But instead of recognizing, oh shit, I've got a difficult personality and I'm hurting people a lot, they're like, that's who I am!
I'm that person who does the crazy thing all the time!
That's just me!
It's like, don't be that person.
Recognize like you can't you should stop hurting people right like it's not and and I I speak as someone who like a lot would rationalize really bad Traits is like, you know, man, that's what I'm like.
And it's like, no, it doesn't have that.
I don't need to be that way.
I don't need to be like a shit talker, a gossip.
I don't need to be someone who's like always mad at some certain person.
I definitely don't need to be a person who like is passive aggressive or punishes people with anger.
That could be Available to everybody, but it's being withheld from you by people who haven't experienced it It makes no fucking sense The people that are trying to keep you from doing mushrooms for sure aren't doing mushrooms Because if they were they would realize that the thing to do would be to spread these to everybody and to give people the chance to recognize That maybe they're under the the hypnotism the maybe they're under the spell a certain frequency That's not the only way to live You can live in a different frequency.
You can establish a different frequency amongst the people you love.
You can establish a different frequency with yourself.
It's possible.
And to deny that from people just because you're afraid of it or because of propaganda, it's very anti-science.
Because there's a lot of science that points to it.
Helping people with all sorts of things.
End of life crises.
That's a giant one with people that have taken psilocybin.
It's allowed them to really relax and think about existence and look at it in a completely different way.
And I don't think that's available through just someone sitting next to you and asking you questions and having a counseling session.
I'm sure that's great.
I'm sure that that counseling of end of life is great.
Dude, I bet five grams of mushrooms is more intense than death.
Like, whatever that experience is probably makes...
Like, when you're dying, when you're actually dying, you're like, fuck, man, this is, like, so much nicer than that time I took five grams of mushrooms.
What happens is you get all constricted, you know, like when you're a kid and you tie a rubber band around your finger.
You've done that, except it's not your finger, it's some appendage connecting you to infinity.
And you've figured out a way via like your beliefs and habits to tie a tourniquet around that.
And it sucks.
Remember, it was cool when you were in school.
You'd watch your finger turn purple and you'd be like, whoa, look at that.
That's crazy.
Look how it's going blue.
It's like when you see a significant asshole.
That's really what you're looking at.
You're just looking at someone who's really tight in the fucking tourniquet between them and Infinity to the point where they're just like filling up with their own ego and like the shit of this world.
They get really puffed and mean and cruel and defensive and scared.
Because why wouldn't you be scared?
You think you're a balloon.
What's more vulnerable than a fucking balloon?
You know, your balloon looks like your body, but really it's just a balloon.
It's like a balloon that's definitely gonna run out of air eventually, but luckily you're more than the balloon.
But if you think you're just the fucking balloon, you're gonna freak the fuck out.
Like anyway, there's might be a way to psychedelics, meditation, whatever the fuck it is to sort of realize, oh no.
I'm much more than this little thing that is currently parading around with my name.
Much more than that.
And then you really calm down.
That's when you're really gonna calm down.
Because it's not quite the same anymore.
And then just that little bit of calming down, it's gonna make other people around you calm down.
I'm telling you, man, the conversation doesn't have to be around politics.
It should be eventually around politics, because that's what shapes laws and everything like that, but it needs to start with this fundamental truth, which is humans can suffer less.
You, as an individual, don't have to suffer as much as you're suffering.
There's ways for you to reduce your suffering in a real way that don't involve fentanyl, Doesn't involve opioids, doesn't involve the nitrous hit of power or winning at gambling.
There's an actual way that you can like...
Well, you know, one of the words for enlightenment and Buddhism translates to extinguish.
Blow out the candle.
So it's like permanently blow out the candle of your suffering.
There's a way to do it!
You can actually do it in this life.
That's exciting to me because it's not just a LARP. It's not LARPing.
Like all the mystics of the world and whatever religion they're in, they're not LARPing.
They're not playing a role-playing game.
They're actually, like many people, have figured out a way not to suffer as much.
Become increasingly stable is the wildest thing to watch like I watch you go through like a weird I don't know what but I just watch you go through all these fit not that when we met you're already pretty like Calm and cool, but not quite as calm and cool as you are now like you started like it was weird watching it happen like you found a way I still get upset sometimes unfortunately me too I always feel bad after I got upset But but I'm way more calm and way more rational about who I am now that I that I used to be and Yeah.
It's great.
And it radiates out.
That's the thing.
It's like, you know, it radiates out.
That's the main thing.
It's contagious.
It's like it's the one anti-virus that we actually have.
But I think for everybody, it's like, and you too, like we all do work on ourselves, right?
So as you're getting older and experiences you have that are negative, you learn from them and positive, you enforce those and you just, you learn to get better at being you, you know?
Last week, President Joe Biden announced the largest act of clemency in a generation, a mass pardon for people convicted of federal marijuana possession.
Any long trip that you take, how many fucking U-Hauls going by, have people locked up in them?
Probably like statistically one or two.
Probably like you've been at a rest stop next to a fucking U-Haul that was filled with drugged people waiting to get taken to some God knows where lab.
I mean, don't they say human trafficking is like one of the number one industries, right?
Look, man, I mean, oh God, it's just, we, especially people like us, look, I've said it before on this podcast, I'm quoting Jack Kornfield here, tend to the part of the garden you can touch.
As far as the other stuff goes, it's like, if you can help, If you're a human trafficker right now listening to this, driving your fucking U-Haul across the country filled with freight that you're gonna make, stop!
Pull over!
Let him out!
Just stop!
Obviously no one's gonna do that, but most people it's like, you're not having to deal with that.
You're really just having to deal with the fact that when you wake up in a bad mood, you think it makes sense for the rest of the day to be a dick to other people.
Just because you feel like you're in a bad mood.
You don't have to do that!
It sounds so dumb, so dumb, so obvious, but really that is kind of the...
I heard the Dalai Lama say it.
Do...
This is what he said.
If you can help, help.
If you can't help, don't hurt.
That's the EMC squared of it all.
It's like, that's it.
That's what it all boils down to.
Look, maybe you're not in a position right now where you can help anybody, but for sure you don't have to say the shitty thing you're about to say to somebody because you're mad.
That you could stop.
Like, you could stop that.
And that's a big deal, man.
Like, if you're someone who's been, like, saying mean things to people your whole life, woo!
You know, they say, and I read this thing, in a yogi's life, for a yogi, the greatest moment is when they were going to react with anger, and they didn't.
Manage to like rein in that fucking thing just once is a big deal, but you know if you keep doing it That's when you start multi traveling through the multiverse because everything around you gets completely different quick You know just that one little thing I speak is like a someone who's had real anger shit and like as do I yeah, yeah It's a it's a thing, you know that I constantly struggle with You get upset about things and you have to keep them under control.
You know, it's it's hard when someone cuts you off in traffic to just let it go and not say fuck you Yeah, it's like he can't even hear you and you're still like fuck you man That was such a douche move.
Yeah, but you're not gonna change him.
No like that That's who he is at this moment and he's cutting people off on the highway And you just got to adjust and adapt and don't get into one of those fucking things or people break check each other and get in front of each other It's so scary man You ever see people doing that on the highway and you're like, oh my god, what are you doing?
It's a strange thing, the management of the mind as you move through life and also the management of all the other shit around you.
What you consume, how much you freak out about Ukraine, how much you freak out about dirty bombs, how much you freak out about fentanyl, how much you freak out about everything, how much you freak out about every fucking social issue that ever comes up, whether it's the environment or...
You know, pronouns.
Who the fuck knows?
There's just a constant stream of shit that we're not used to, just like we're not used to driving fast on the highway.
It is a powerful thing and being able to have more control over it is a great feeling because it makes you feel like you can do a lot of different stuff on top of that.
If you can, like, as I've matured and gotten better at managing my own brain, I've also become much more productive.
Because I don't have as much bullshit to weigh me down, you know?
And I think that if you're running through life making the same mistakes over and over again, whenever I'm doing that, that's when I'm the most unproductive.
You're like someone who's like a cleanup crew for your own fucking destruction.
You're always following your past around, past decisions around, cleaning up broken glass and old fucking bits of concrete from the last crater you put in your life.
And that's, you know, again, we go back to the human mind doesn't come with a operator manual.
It's one of the most complex things that anybody could ever use.
And it doesn't come with directions.
And you learn from the people that are around you.
And it's hard to unlearn shit that's stupid.
But I think as chaotic as this time is, it's the most promising because it's the most interesting in terms of the way ideas get assaulted and reworked and thought up and debated.
And even though there's suppression of information, there's definitely suppression of free speech in certain platforms, there's still more exchange of thoughts In a tumultuous way where people just want it to end.
And you could be, like, truly, it's like, you know what, the one thing that I don't think anyone's going to get mad at you for, on any side of the political spectrum, is if you stop hurting people.
Like, truly, that is, like, that's it.
It's just a little less aggression.
You can even still hurt people, just hurt them less.