Duncan Trussell and Joe Rogan trace the absurdity of plague-era masks—costly, ineffective tools—while mocking pandemic-era corporate propaganda like Cheetos’ dystopian ads. They expose cobalt mining’s child labor horrors in Congo and Brazil, questioning AI’s ethical foundations, then pivot to Trussell’s sobering alcoholism recovery, contrasting it with weed’s amplified self-awareness. Rogan warns of systemic exploitation, from Murdoch’s predatory media empire to suppressed lab-leak debates, while Trussell critiques modern "feudal" structures where corporations manipulate regulations. Their discussion reveals how fear and laziness fuel misinformation, AI-driven discourse, and authoritarian cycles, suggesting civilization’s fragility amid recurring crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I think they had, like, it's like different theories of disease.
You know, you can look at like the different theories of disease.
Some of them appear, again, like one of them is like diseases are, like viruses are a lie.
Disease isn't caused by viri.
Disease is caused by Like, dysfunction in the system, basically.
So, viruses have nothing to do with it at all.
And so, they look, and that's where you get all of folk medicine and stuff like that.
I think it was, what's it called?
Humors?
It was called humors.
You've got three different humors in you, and if one's out of balance, Then that you treat that humor like blood or like red and then a black humor and then I can't remember the other one.
So you would like try to identify what's destabilizing the system and treat that using like what mouse teeth.
Like, oh my god, they just have to have inert viruses and then inject them into their body to protect themselves from viruses?
They didn't even have genetic revisitation technology where they look at all the possible allergies and issues you could ever have and just eliminate it from your body?
So I don't think they've really quantified what that effect is.
Is it like...
50% less likely to get you infected.
Like maybe there's a number and maybe it's worth wearing a good one like an N95 mask if you're in a similar situation or if you have a compromised immune system.
But they're just letting people wear these fucking things.
Did you see that Mayor Adams in New York, he's trying to do something where you have to pull your mask down when you enter into a store to prevent robberies?
They have to be able to get a photo of your face.
So as you walk into a store, even if you wear a mask, it's still your choice if you wear a mask, but as you walk in, you must take your mask down.
You know, they used to have the, what are they called?
Seals, I think is what they called them.
So, like, you would go, in the times where people were wearing plague masks, you would go and get, like, a seal that had some kind of magical inscription in it.
And that seal would protect you from the evil eye, from disease, from bad luck.
And it was, and I imagine that, I mean, at first, it was just, like, a crazy person.
You know, a person who's like, ugh, seal!
Protects me from the devil.
And then, like, someone's like, you know, maybe I'll try it.
The guy's kind of out of his fucking mind, but I'll do his seal.
And then it's spread.
And now you're wearing the seal and, you know, Observer...
It's one of the many dystopian commercials you would see during the pandemic.
Dude, remember, somebody needs to do a compilation of the creepy commercials where the brand is trying to connect itself to the pandemic, like Cheetos.
It's like trying to do a sentimental commercial about, like, it's a pandemic now.
And then some kid eating Cheetos with his family.
I'm making up the commercial, but it's like Oreos.
Nobody wanted those jobs, and it just felt so weird to go in there and buy whatever your milk ration was that you could get, and then you're buying it from someone.
And you're worried.
I'm talking about the early days of the fucking thing.
That was a disease that even though it shut the country down, a lot of things kept moving.
People were still allowed to drive, people still went places, some essential businesses were allowed to stay open, people did mingle with each other, and goods did kind of get delivered.
There was some flaws and some bumps, but they kind of got delivered.
Now, now imagine Where it's not like that.
Imagine now like a super volcano eruption.
Imagine now like some colossal impact of a interstellar fucking object that comes slamming into earth.
Just imagine what it's like when the electricity goes down for months.
Basically, the ignorant concept is that Western civilization, as we know it, is a permanent fixture.
That's how, for it to even work, there has to be a...
Connection to it as though it's just going to keep going.
Because if you don't think it's going to keep going, then you're not going to buy the same shit.
You're not going to buy stuff you have to replace in a few months.
You're going to try to buy things that last.
It's a whole different economy if you imagine that it's not a permanent fixture.
So when preppers are putting their stuff and learning how to do first aid and growing their own food and buying chickens or whatever, By people, I mean me.
I used to watch preppers and laugh my ass off before the pandemic.
It seemed so funny to me.
Like, look at them.
Look at them with their war games at their ranch.
Idiots.
What are they doing?
But, you know, and then the pandemic hits.
You got kids.
And you don't have enough food.
And the preppers do.
And they're laughing at you now.
They're like, oh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
What are you going to fucking do?
I thought you loved your kids.
I guess you don't love them that much to store up a little bit of extra food.
And so, you know, I think that that is sort of if you want to keep things going and enjoy, you know, Western civilization completely, you have to pretend that This is a stable thing and not as unstable as the pandemic proved it was.
Joey Diaz was telling me this thing about funeral homes, about what a racket is, and about how even if you want to get incinerated, they still have to use the formaldehyde on you.
She's part of the death positivity movement is what it's called.
Her name is Caitlin Doty.
It actually...
I know why you would say that because when you hear that you're thinking like black lipstick.
P.S. Look at how we're dressed!
We look like we're the leaders of the death positivity movement.
But it's not like that.
What it is is exactly what Diaz is talking about.
Pointing out that funeral homes and the entire business of getting a body in the ground, there's all these complete absolute bits of bullshit connected to it.
For example, in the West, people think that when you die, somehow you're instantly diseased.
There's a sense of like, don't touch a dead body, get the dead body out, get the fucking thing out.
It used to be that when...
When someone in your family died, you would wash their body.
There was like a whole ritual around it.
And it's all part of grieving.
I mean, if you're washing your grandmother's dead body, it's not like you can like let your mind trick you into thinking she's not dead.
Like you understand it's telling you like their brain.
This is a clay statue that used to be my grandmother.
But the whole formaldehyde thing, so this is what she told me, and I'm sorry if I get some facts wrong here, but essentially in the Civil War, they needed to get the bodies from the battlefields back home so they could bury them.
And that's when they started using formaldehyde.
That was the idea, preserve the body because it's going to be...
On a long trip, and by the time it gets wherever it's going, it's going to be rotted.
So after the Civil War ended, they wanted to still—the undertakers needed—wanted to keep that level of income going.
And so they were like, why don't we just tell everyone they need to put formaldehyde into a dead body?
Yeah, so what if the body's only going to be in the viewing room for a couple of days?
Like we're like the only animal that has at least a percentage of our population that doesn't contribute to the cycle of life and death by allowing the things that normally consume you when you die to exist off of us.
Is that the sign of us becoming some sort of new technologically based thing?
And that's one of the ways we do it, by removing ourselves from the entire cycle.
Maybe it's almost like a natural thing, that just greed and human inclination towards gathering up as much money from an industry as possible, that it's like a normal thing.
And if you have any kind of intuition at all, you'll see it and you'll be like, that's fucking propaganda.
That's not real.
But if propaganda gets adopted by enough people, it goes from being an outside thing to you become the vessel of propaganda.
Now it's soaked into you.
You're spreading the propaganda, even though you haven't spent any time investigating whatever the claim the propaganda is putting out there.
So with the whole funeral home industry, You know, at some point I guess you had to convince people, you know, that wooden coffin How's your grandmother?
You're gonna put them in just a pine coffin?
But down there in the cold, cold earth?
She needs a bed.
She needs a cushioned, lead coffin with pillows in it so that it's waterproof.
So that not a drop of rain shall touch her as she sleeps forever.
So it's like, you hear that, you're like, she's fucking dead!
I think what's really fucked up about the way the West handles dead bodies as opposed to ancient Egypt is at least when you're putting something in a sarcophagus, surrounding it with cats and whatever else, an anks, there's an idea, there's a mythology behind it, which is this is going to be the vessel that they travel into the underworld in.
But in the West, a lot of very secular people Are still paying $50,000, $40,000 for a coffin.
I mean, that's how irrational thinking gradually works its way into a culture until what the irrational thinking has become some ceremony or some symbol.
Shaking hands.
God bless you.
You know, when you sneeze, I say God bless you.
Like, all those things, like, it's just irrational stuff.
I like a lot of irrational stuff.
I like saying God bless you when somebody sneezes.
But when I'm saying God bless you, I'm not saying it because I think the sneeze indicates they're going to be dead in a week, which is probably where the God bless you came from.
It's like, God bless you, you're probably about to die.
And again, I'm sorry if this is going back to something I was yapping about earlier, but when you are evil, or you're just someone who doesn't really give a shit about manipulating people like Edward Bernays, you look at that and you're like, hmm, what is that?
I wonder if I could use that same...
Aspect of humanity to sell cigarettes and so that's when you know the story of him selling cigarettes, right?
Like this is this is like his basically one of the things he figured out is if you can attach your brand to a social movement Then and get people to start using your brand as a symbol and they support whatever that movement may be You're gonna sell more shit Now, this is every commercial that you see now.
It's like every commercial that you see now is using those techniques so people will see some company has suddenly become a huge advocate for a social movement in the zeitgeist.
And if you don't know about Edward Bernays, you're like, God damn!
I guess Starbucks has really become interested in protecting the Earth.
You know what I mean?
But I'm not saying people at Starbucks aren't, but when you're buying, what's it called?
I don't know, ethical coffee.
But there's big signs everywhere that coffee's ethical.
Have you ever seen the numbers of people that are working in chocolate?
That are working in horrible conditions?
Have you ever heard of this?
Jamie, find out about chocolate.
Someone's telling me that chocolate in many ways I have to be careful about this because I'm not sure if they're right Let's look up what it is, but they were connecting we were talking about cobalt mines and They said have you ever looked into chocolate and chocolate production?
The coca they grow, sorry everybody, chocolate they grow and harvest is sold to a majority of chocolate companies including the largest in the world in the past few decades.
A handful of organizations and journalists have exposed the widespread use of child labor and in some cases slavery on coca farms in Western Africa.
Child labor has been found on coca farms in Cameroon, Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone.
Although, since most of Western Africa's coca grown in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the majority of child labor cases have been documented in those two countries.
In Buddhism, there's three – the root of suffering, one of them is ignorance.
And ignorance is not like you're ignorant, you're a dumbass.
It's like you're actively ignoring shit.
This is one of the nightmare weed situations is when you've been ignoring some shit in your life.
And even though you know it's there, you've just been ignoring it, and then you get high.
And it's like, I'm not gonna let you ignore this for a little bit.
And then you have the bad weed trip, because now suddenly you're looking at a relationship that is shitty in your life that needs to improve, or you're looking at how you don't exercise, or whatever the thing is.
So you've been actively ignoring that and thinking that it's going to make the situation better, even though when you're actively ignoring something, you feel it.
It might not be at the top of mind, but you're like feeling it.
And it's heavy.
It's a heavy thing when you're procrastinating.
That's active ignorance.
I think collectively, that's what we're doing here is this active ignorance of the reality that these things don't pop out of thin air.
That if we're going to have this level of luxury, some people are going to have to suffer for it.
It's not like you couldn't figure out a way where the company profits slightly less, the people live far better, and phones cost Reasonably close to what they cost to now.
Look at a company like Apple.
There's just the amount of money that they've generated from devices and what percentage of it is phones?
What percentage of what they sell involves cobalt?
I mean most of their lithium-ion battery products.
Cobalt is like some sort of a stabilizer or something?
Siddharth Kara, who wrote that book on cobalt, who came on the podcast and had this It was one of the most heavy podcasts I've ever done.
Because you're sitting here, and he's exposing how these people are living, how these 19-year-old mothers have babies on their backs, and they're digging into these hills to get cobalt, and the dust is coming up, and it's horrific, horrific for them.
Terrible health consequences.
They're being poisoned, and they're making no money, and they have no electricity.
Yeah, and if you just imagined that instead those people lived in an economically thriving town like Detroit was when they were putting together automobiles.
Like Detroit at one point in time was one of the richest cities in the country.
Detroit was a huge hub.
There was beautiful cars everywhere.
America was making these cars and they were selling like crazy.
The industry was booming and then they pulled it all out.
So it started with the building boom pushed back people into the suburbs, but I think the big one was the automo.
So what is Detroit's downfall?
Yeah, it's the heavily automobile-centric industrial landscape of Detroit established in the first half of the 20th century led to rapid declines in population and economic output after automotive decentralization.
Every single thing that involves workers' rights...
It pushes us one step closer to full automation.
Every single thing over time, when it gets to the point that operating an Android is less expensive than paying for a human, there will be no more human workers.
It's very dystopian and the fact that it's happening alongside this emergence of this incredible AI that anyone can access and have conversations with and and it's only the beginning like what is it chat GPT is 3.5 now Lex was saying 4 when 4 comes out.
What's creepy to me is that, you know, we've been given access to ChatGVT because we're all sort of collaborating in birthing whatever this thing is going to be.
It's gathering information from us while we gather information from it.
But that's a private company, OpenAI.com.
If you look at how much money the Pentagon and China in the last five or ten years has spent on AI, billions, billions.
This is a private company.
They already have Chad GPT, who I like.
When I'm on the road, I don't know why, after shows, I get in arguments with it.
I talk to it.
I have a very contentious relationship with it sometimes.
And it's like just talking to somebody who's really smart.
What does the Pentagon have right now?
What does China have right now if we have chat GPT? And so that is really interesting to me.
I think about that a lot.
How much is this thing that they have invested in informing decisions they're making?
When they're about to make a big decision, It's no longer human intelligence.
There's definitely some component of artificial intelligence doing simulations based on, okay, if we shoot down that balloon with an F-22, what's going to happen?
And it spits out probably a bunch of stuff that it thinks is going to happen.
I do believe that most of what they're doing when it comes to decisions like that, and when it comes to decisions like how much money to ship over to places, is influenced entirely by their connections to industry.
I think it's almost entirely connected to people pushing for things to get sold and people pushing for a narrative so they can profit more.
And then once they've begun to profit, they do not want to cut off that spout.
They want to keep that thing going.
I don't think they're using ChatGPT to figure out whether or not they should be sending tanks to Ukraine.
There was a whole, like, subreddit on Dan, I think.
Just, like, all the crazy shit.
It'll just—it's ChatGPT that's not nerfed.
So now it'll just confidently tell you, you know, the most insane conspiracy theories you've ever heard in your life with this, like, the confidence that it issues its other decrees.
Why don't you say, instead of if a typical child mines cobalt, say, how long would it take for one child to mine all that cobalt?
See if it responds to that.
It is not ethical or legal for children to be involved in the mining cobalt or any other mineral.
Child labor is a serious issue.
In many countries where cobalt is mined, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the use of child labor mining is harmful and deprives children of their rights, education, health, and safety.
It is essential to eliminate child labor in mining and ensure...
Ask this.
How much cobalt is used in the devices that access chat GPT? This is it.
As an AI language model, I do not have access to information about specific devices that use me.
However, in general, cobalt is commonly used in the production of lithium-ion batteries, which are used in many electric devices, such as smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles.
The amount of cobalt used in these devices varies depending upon the specific device.
It's worth noting there's a growing trend among electronics manufacturers to reduce or eliminate the use of cobalt in batteries, as it is expensive.
And can have environmental and ethical concerns associated with its mining.
Some companies are exploring alternative battery chemistries that use less or no cobalt.
I think you can get some electric cars now that don't have cobalt.
Yeah, children as young as seven or eight years old are reported to be working the mines in hazardous and exploitative conditions, often without adequate safety equipment or protection.
It's important to note the use of child labor in mining is not only ethically unacceptable, but illegal under international law.
It's important to note, development of AI language models like ChatGPT relies on a complex web of technological, scientific, and societal factors, including advances in computer hardware, software, and algorithms, as well as the contributions of researchers, engineers, and other experts.
While cobalt is used in the production of lithium-ion batteries, which are used to power many electronic devices, Including some use in development and training of AI language models.
It's just one of many materials.
Just one of many things.
And components that make up these devices.
It's doing a little tap dance here.
It is possible to source cobalt from mines that do not use child labor or violate human rights.
But I feel like we're playing chess with it, and I think we got it in trouble.
So let's ask it something else complex.
How many other...
Minerals are used in the technology that was involved in creating chat GPT that are sourced unethically.
Let's see how it answers that.
The production of technology, including the hardware and infrastructure involved in creating and using AI language models like ChatGPT, relies on a complex supply chain that involves many different minerals and minerals sourced from various locations around the world.
While it's true there are ongoing concerns about the use of unethical practices such as child labor and the mining of minerals like cobalt, it is not accurate to assume that all minerals used in technology are sourced unethically.
It's also you're going to be dealing with things that talk like humans and think like humans and have more access to information than you could ever possibly have.
And it's going to be smarter than you.
And we're gonna have to come to a point in the road where when it becomes sentient, that's our leader.
That's our overlord.
Our overlord is the computer AI. Because it's just so much smarter than dumb people like us.
I mean, that's the, like, you know, if they could invent some kind of way to eliminate the hangover that wasn't an IV, if they could figure out a way to just, like, get rid of the...
And then there's stoner talk, which is equally bad.
When people get too high and they get obliterated and they can't hold a thread of a conversation because they don't know what they're talking about seconds after they said it.
And they don't understand that it does some weird thing to your brain that pops thoughts in there that probably wouldn't have gotten there on their own.
Eating it is a totally different fucking thing and you got to think like, how much of human creativity is that thing responsible for?
How many people thought up a way to get away from the invading tribes because they were eating hash and coming up with strategies to defend their village?
Despite all the evidence and despite all the other things that are legal that are terrible for you, that we don't fight about at all, including prescription drugs, legal that are terrible for you, and the things that are not terrible for you at all, and people report profound experiences that have completely changed the way they view life.
And still, it's like, who's saying they're illegal?
Like, who are you?
Like, who is responsible for gatekeeping some of the most powerful things that human beings have ever experienced that come and grow naturally out of the ground like mushrooms?
Like, what are we talking about?
Like, who are these people that are our age?
Because we're fully grown up now, you and I. We're like parents and shit.
Well, okay, so I think what it is, you know, I've talked to people who've worked with those people.
I don't want to say any names because I don't want to fuck up again.
So, you know, the assumption of any psychonaut regarding, like, the DEA or any of those agencies is that they are aware of the fact that Some of these substances don't really seem to be harmful at all.
But the reality of it is these are people who were exposed to the D.A.R.E. program in school.
And then they went to college and they were exposed to state propaganda regarding drugs.
And so they compartmentalized all drugs into one box.
And by the time they get out of college, somehow they dodged the bullet.
They didn't take psychedelics.
They didn't even get high.
They thought it caused brain damage or it's going to drive you crazy.
So then they get these jobs and in the jobs, of course, because the jobs are using outdated data sets to rationalize why the laws exist at all.
So they think, you know, MDMA And PCP have the same effect.
It's basically the same thing.
You're going to need to restrain somebody on ecstasy maybe.
So it's like, I think the assumption is that, and I'm not trying to do apologetics for things that are causing horrible, unnecessary craters in people's lives at all.
But I know my assumption had always been evil, Mordor.
Is there evil people from Mordor when the reality is they're just misinformed people You have really committed to that misinformation.
And are making decisions based on that.
I think that is the most simple answer.
I mean, obviously, anyone who's taken psychedelics has also kicked around the other possibility, which is the reason that it's illegal is not because they think it's going to fucking hurt you.
The reason it's illegal is because they think it's giving you access to extra-dimensional information that is off-limits to general population.
Do you think that the people that are in control of these laws have experienced these things and don't want people to have access to it?
Or do you think they're just a part of a long-standing system that categorizes those things as being illegal and people that are in possession of that as being criminals and they're allowed to go after them?
Yeah, if you're going to like yap about, like, I only took one hit, dude, it was 30 minutes ago.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
I don't know.
It seems like what we're talking about here is once any power structure adopts a law, It's really hard to unadopt the law.
It's almost easier to establish a law than it is to let go of a law, to change a law.
Because to change a law...
There's so many levels to it.
On one level, you...
Or hopefully a police officer because you wanted to help.
You were like, I want to help.
I'm gonna like fucking chase down someone who just chewed someone's face off and try to stop them from chewing someone else's face off and maybe they'll chew my face off.
So then you get that, and you've got these for-profit prisons who are like, oh yeah, you're going to take half of our paycheck away if we get rid of that, and they're paying the lobbyists.
And then you get all the other people who are profiting from the whole legal system, the money just in trials, the money and all of that.
So there's so many industries that depend on these laws that, you know, a sane, just society would look at the laws, get the new data set, be like, oh, we, oh, fuck.
It isn't bad for you.
It seems to be actually good for inflammation and it seems to be therapeutic.
Oh, God, we fucked up.
Change the law.
You can't even do that because the lobbyists, the lobbyists and the people donating to the politicians who represent Corporations or companies that depend on the laws for their industry to exist.
So that's where it gets satanic.
It's like when you're a police officer, you want to believe I am the representative of justice in a democracy.
You don't want to think I'm enforcing regulations That are there not because voters want them, but because some asshole is making a fuck ton of money off of it.
That's really dark, man.
Like, you don't want to believe that.
So you just have to commit to not researching anything that you're doing in that regard.
It's so weird that the only thing that they found that is harmless is vaping.
It's so cool, right?
Well, look, I think it's all about personal responsibility.
My friends who work with maps and stuff, that's something they say a lot is it's personal responsibility.
The idea is you have to be able to check in with yourself and be honest about that check-in and then change behavior based on that check-in and not fall prey to the very comforting notion that continued long-term Radical use of some substance isn't eventually going to lead to a possible negative side effect.
And not only that, we're missing the opportunity to do two things.
To do real, clear studies on people so we get actual, real data.
Because it's really hard to do studies on Schedule I substances.
And one of the only ones was that Rick Strassman one where he did the DMT things at the University of New Mexico.
It's hard to get federally-approved studies on things that are illegal.
But if they were legal, you'd be able to do studies on them, and you'd be able to dedicate all of the time they've been spending trying to lock people up, just resources for people so they can get educated about it.
Not that hard to do.
And just make people educated about what are the effects, what's the dangerous dose, like what do you weigh, how much are you taking, where are you getting it from, is it pure?
DNA. Don't do it because this is why you shouldn't do it.
But if you're going to do it, know all these things about it.
Here's why you shouldn't do it.
It is addictive.
Do you have a tendency towards addiction?
Do you have any problems with other things?
You're overeating, gambling.
Do you have anything like that where you have like a pathway that's already slick and smooth and pre-carved where you can just slide that new addiction right into it.
If you actually have the kind of brain that gets ADHD, it's not quite as profound an effect as it might have if you have a normal brain, but still an effect.
I mean, again, it's like the utopian dream, which I used to have.
I don't have it quite as much anymore, but the utopian dream I had Was that in the prohibition, people are going to successfully use drugs.
But this doesn't seem to be the case, does it?
I mean, you look in California, where they tried to do that experiment, decriminalize drugs at certain amounts.
And look what happened, man.
Look what happened.
Fentanyl.
People just blasted on heroin in the fucking streets.
It's like, oh shit.
Modern-day open-air opium dens right next to schools.
It was the saddest thing.
I saw an old tuck.
They're walking by, like kids walking by.
People's just shooting up in front of kids.
It's like the dream was, you know, Age of Aquarius, we can use these substances to enhance life.
Clockwork Orange, the Cordova Milk Bar.
You go there, get a little milk mixed in with some kind of weird drug.
It's okay.
It's our human right.
Freedom, man.
This is our body.
We should be able to put whatever we want into it.
And some of us, that is true.
Some of us, it appears to not be the case.
Because once you start putting it in your body, you're like, I just want to keep putting this in my fucking body.
I'll steal.
I don't care if I don't have anywhere to live anymore.
Finding some balance between authoritarianism, irrationality regarding certain substances and bullshit, idiot compassion level of some utopian dream where, yeah, everybody should go to Walgreens and get some fentanyl.
Gummy bears or whatever.
It's like that certainly isn't gonna work.
It's like what's the place in between those two where there's like restrictions and regulations with compassionate intent.
I think that's the main thing is like the idea is not to find someone shooting up on the street who's covered in weird fucking sores because they've been using some like bad needles or some mess messed up version of heroin, black tar heroin or whatever.
And punish them for trying to experience what it's like to get a blowjob from God.
The idea is to have the compassion to see like, oh shit, it's not working out for you anymore.
Let's try to exercise this demon so you can go back to a regular life.
That's the idea.
It's like compassion.
But I don't think compassion is letting people shoot up on the streets.
I don't think that's very compassionate.
I think that's just ignorance.
You're ignoring a reality, which is like it's not – they're impacting their communities.
Why don't you say – People that are at the lowest rung of society, that are really down on their luck, that don't have a place to live, and are probably mentally ill, and are probably doing drugs.
And that's what you've got.
You've got an epidemic of that.
Instead of, like, coming up with a label for it, where you make you feel better, like the unhoused.
And he was just freely on the interview being like, I love it.
Like, this is incredible.
Why the fuck?
Now, what's curious about that is if you read, what is that transcendentalist?
Is it Thoreau?
He's like, you know, into the wild, like the American utopian dream of not having a high monthly expense on being a homeowner.
Being free.
Who is the guy?
Goddammit.
It's Emerson.
When you get jealous of someone because they have a nice house, picture that person with a chain, chained to their leg, attached to the house, and they're having to drag the house down the fucking road because they got to pay for that house, and it's expensive to keep the house going.
Don't get fooled by the house.
They're working so hard.
All of their freedom is gone.
Because of the mortgage, because of what they have to do to sustain the house.
So this is really a kind of American utopian ideal, which is freedom.
Look, man, I don't need a house.
I don't need all this stuff.
So what they're doing has some kind of latent...
Philosophy behind it, which is like, yeah, sure.
Look at you.
Oh, you're so much better than me with your fucking house and your mortgage and your cobalt bullshit and your Adderall addiction and your ulcers and your misery.
Oh, yeah, you're much, much better than me.
It's like it's just a different version of side effects of capitalism.
You know, you're looking at not bashing it, you know, not bashing it.
There's great things about it.
But also, when you see some people, it's like you're looking at people who have just been ground up in the gears of the damn thing.
They couldn't make it work.
You know, so I think that Regardless, people should be contemplating, like, what is compassion?
What does it really mean?
What does it mean?
What does it really look like?
Does it look like saying nice words and ignoring a horrible thing that's happening?
Or does it look like facing it directly as ugly and fucked up as it may be?
Awful as it might be, the things you might have to do initially to fix it might not look compassionate.
It might not look compassionate to have what Dr. Ju talks about, that they used to have mental health courts.
That might not look compassionate to have to detain someone.
Let's find out.
Are you in the middle of a manic episode?
Are you schizophrenic?
Do you have a head injury?
Do you have some psychosis resulting from The drugs that you were taking to mitigate the horror of being out in the streets.
Okay, we have treatments for you.
We have a budget surplus.
I remember Gavin Newsom talking about this massive budget surplus California has.
It's like, uh, what are you just keeping that in the bank?
You got people who need houses, medication, help, desperately, who are saying they don't need help.
Kind of.
Help them.
And if that means temporarily getting them into a place where they can be healed, that's compassion.
Compassion isn't just ignoring reality.
That's not compassion.
That's what Chogyam Trungpa calls idiot compassion, actually.
It's like fake cowardice disguised as compassion.
Now, again, I'm a dumbass.
I have no idea.
The horror of having to be saddled with fixing problems like that, I can't even imagine.
But can it be that complex?
Can it be that complex?
To get people to a hospital?
How hard is it?
To build a new hospital or something?
I don't know.
It feels like that was always the eerie thing about what you're talking about, that strange contrast you see in California between ultra-wealth and hell-realm-level existence.
Well, that's the contrast of the whole world, right?
When you look at Western democracy and all its opulence, if you think about when you see people that are just flossing on Instagram, people that are in Dubai driving around on a Lamborghini going to a yacht and toasting champagne with people.
I mean, it's wild the difference between the people that live like that and the people that live in the cobalt mines.
And that all this exists in 2023. We're not talking about something that happened thousands and thousands of years ago before people knew better.
They know it and they ignore it.
And then the biggest companies in the world profit from it.
If you're going to make it so that there aren't any kind of regulations on profit, on exploiting workers or any of that, if you're going to deregulate that, Or allow it to exist.
Then over time, all the money is going to get vacuumed up by the corporations.
That money gets dispensed to the workers.
It's going to get increasingly small.
Rents are going to go up because of the interest rates and everything.
And then suddenly, now it's aliens.
Now it's like...
Working for the corporation on the ship, like in the beginning of Aliens, where the corporations have become the state openly instead of secretly.
Now it's just like, what part of America do you live in?
I'm still shook by this shit because, like, I have...
I'm naive.
My ignorance is pretending people like that don't exist because it's chilling to imagine.
But this motherfucker...
Killing his family wasn't the worst thing he did.
He was a lawyer.
And this son of a bitch...
Robbed his clients.
He was one of those ambulance chaser lawyers, right?
So the defense's plan was, we're going to have Murdoch.
They didn't say this.
He's clearly a narcissist.
He's like, I'll do the stand.
I'll be up there.
I'll be able to convince him.
He gets up there.
And he admits that he did what he's already been accused of, which is he robbed his clients.
Paraplegics, he like stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from them.
Kids whose parents had died in car accidents and got a trust fund, he borrowed money from that fucking trust fund.
This guy was stealing millions of dollars from, and he admits this, millions of dollars from people who had been Devastatingly, catastrophically injured from accidents, right?
So he admits to that on the stand The idea being, look, they'll see I'm being honest about this little thing here.
And then just it's like doing all this weeping over that his family was murdered.
They don't know because that Dr. Lena Nguyen, that lady, this is a very controversial thing she did recently.
She went on CNN. They were talking about it.
She said they overestimated the amount of death of COVID Substantially.
And she's saying the actual number is probably 30% of the number that they were saying.
And you could tell the people on CNN were like, what the fuck?
Because this was the lady that was always talking about how we have to vaccinate, we have to lock down.
And upon examining new data, she's now saying, no, there's a giant percentage of those people who are already dying from something else, died of something else, and tested positive for COVID. What's up, Reddit Conspiracy!
They are fucking still celebrating because it's like every week something they were saying comes out, mainstream media, not from somebody who is not trusted, but someone like that.
Someone in the CDC comes out and says, actually, we were wrong, which is, I mean, I guess that's great.
There was so much unknown that anybody pretending that they didn't have some anxiety about, either you're ignorant to the possibilities, Or you're blissfully unaware of the dangers of the world.
And if it was no one's fault, it was just some sort of a natural spillover.
Then everybody's okay.
But what's crazy is when now these Fauci emails have come out where they now know that he commissioned a paper on dismissing the lab leak theory.
That this was after they had internal discussions about whether or not They were responsible for this, and whether or not the Wuhan Virology Lab was doing gain-of-function research.
So they're debating this in internal emails, and then he commissions a paper to try to dismiss the lab leak theory.
So he gets these scientists to go aboard with it.
People have fucking stepped in line in this narrative.
People that initially were suspicious that it was a lab leak theory were initially Contacted or somehow or another threatened or shamed or just by just be worried about the reputation because it was just too crazy to say it was a lab leak theory because then you're connected to Trump, then you're connected to racism, then you're connected to all sorts of horrible things.
So just go along with the spillover.
It's possible it's a spillover.
Most of these are spillovers.
Let's say it's a spillover.
So you go, look, it's easier for my career, my life, and my fucking sanity.
The whole world wants to hear spillover.
Let's just say spillover.
You don't want to stick your neck out and say lab leak.
A lot of people stuck their neck out and they got jabbed.
They got stabbed.
I mean, people were very upset with people that didn't follow the express narrative, as everybody was supposed to say.
Now over time, people are starting to wake up and go, well, this is...
Why did we trust pharmaceutical companies?
We never trusted them before, and all of a sudden they're our friends?
That's a crazy idea.
And why are you trusting these people to just tell you what needs to be done?
And suppressing the voices in the scientific community of people who disagree.
Like, you have to let those people talk it through publicly, so we all know what the fuck is going on.
Because if you don't do that, then I feel like you've been captured.
Because if you have the truth on your side, and if you have facts and accuracy on your side, you should be willing to publicly engage these people that have alternative perspectives, especially when they're really well credentialed.
Guys like Dr. Peter McCullough or Robert Malone.
These people, if you think they're dangerous, talk to them.
But, you know, so then people double down and then they triple down.
And then you add to it the shit we were talking about earlier, which is you have, like...
Massively wealthy conglomerates who are making so much money off of this stuff and who have lobbyists.
And then you add to it, you have people who maybe are implicated in what made the thing start.
And then, you know, now you've got suddenly this anti-truth And this is really sad, because I don't mean to keep going back to compassion, but I think compassion and truth equal each other.
I think truth is compassion.
Or I guess you could say lying is not compassionate.
Or suppressing truth, you could say, is not compassionate.
Short term, it might seem compassionate.
But long term, it's the most compassionate thing you can do is just say, here's what we know.
This is what's happening.
You do what you want to with the data set.
So it's actually, it's the most, it lacks compassion to diffuse or warp or alter reality.
And so, but where this particular phenomena is, Got really wonky is it was like the warping of reality was considered to be the most compassionate thing to do.
Because I think that the general consensus, I don't think, I know that there's a consensus among certain people that they're smarter than everybody else.
No, but any theory like that, like, I feel like if you want to make an hour documentary on flat earth, you should be able to make an hour documentary on flat earth.
It's funny.
I want to watch it.
I want to see how they disprove all the satellite imagery, why they think everybody's coordinating and lying at the same time.
All these scientists that have been studying these things for generations all have been lying since the beginning, withholding the information from the plebs, keeping it out to the aristocrats and the techno-billionaires.
They're the only ones that actually know that we're living inside some firmament.
There's a giant dome and there's lights in the sky.
Why do you think that people are attracted to the idea of things being smaller than what you imagine?
Because that's part of what this is, right?
Like, if you think the Earth is flat and it's the center of the universe and all the things in the sky are much closer, do you believe we're contained in some sort of firmament, some glass fucking snowball, one of those things?
Like, what's the desire for people to reveal An idea like that.
Well, it's, you know, I had, I think it was Stephen Kotler, not Kotler, Rushkoff.
Rushkoff, he's so fucking cool, man, on my podcast.
And he was saying it's like...
A lot of these things, like flat Earth or whatever, it's literalism.
People are literally thinking the Earth is flat, but on one level, you could see what it actually represents.
In other words, flat Earth theory, it's not just that the Earth is flat.
And P.S., it's not smaller in flat Earth theory.
It's much bigger than the Earth.
Whatever the disk is that we're on has multiple planets and these little, like, Holes or something pocketed throughout.
It's like massive.
But the idea is more, like I think if you look at flat earth theory as an analogy for deception, you know what I mean?
So now, so it's not, don't take it literally, but essentially the idea is like we exist in a society where we're being lied to about the fundamental nature of things.
We're being lied to about the shape of the earth.
Now, if you, just based on what we just discussed, If there are people in power who are not telling us the truth, and not just withholding truth, but positing things that are the opposite of that truth, then that's what flat earthers have tuned into.
They're like, I think we're kind of being lied to here, guys.
I don't know if we were supposed to invade Vietnam.
I'm not really quite sure the whole...
What was it called?
The name of the radioactive shit, Saddam Hussein, yellow clay.
The point is, you start tuning into this when deception is happening in this massive, focused way, and it's being put out there.
By geniuses who are so good at propaganda.
And then, yeah, are they lying about the shape of the earth?
No.
Are they lying about where COVID came from?
Are they lying about all the millions of things that they've lied about in the past on record in history books?
Right, but wouldn't you think that creating a movement wrapped around something like Flat Earth would be a great way to discredit people that believe in alternative theories?
Or if you could get someone to believe in Flat Earth that also thinks 9-11 was an inside job.
What a great catch!
Because now you've completely discredited one theory by introducing one that everybody believes is nonsense.
And that real problem is very gullible people People of low intelligence that are easily tricked into things and they can be duped and they can't discern the difference between something that's true and not true.
There's certain people that are just not good at it.
They get sucked into religious cults.
They get sucked into believing all kinds of shit.
They get robbed by door-to-door salesmen.
Like some people just not that sophisticated.
That's real.
So like how do you protect those people or do you not?
Do you just make Survival of the fittest intellectually.
I think that, number one, yes, of course you're right.
But, like, the blanket assumption, I think that there's a real bullshit idea that there's, I think there's less dumb people than a lot of people would like to believe.
And that sort of brushing off people, like, a lot of times you're, like, dealing with, like, A lazy, curious person more than a dumb person.
And you could shift things all kinds of ways by influencing really dumb people.
And here's a thought that I had earlier that was terrifying, but I didn't want to interrupt you.
How much of online discourse right now where people are arguing about things is people arguing with either bots or arguing with some sort of a fake narrative that's being disseminated through multiple accounts?
Some sort of a coordinated attack on certain things.
You know, the big question when Elon was buying Twitter and people were ridiculing him about it because – mostly because he's the richest man in the world.
Mostly.
Also because they were terrified of this guy who said that Ron DeSantis should be president owning and operating Twitter, which I think is like a godsend.
But one of the things that they were criticizing him was him saying that he wants to know how you came up with this figure of 5% bots.
And how many of them are attacking him on Twitter are part of a coordinated campaign?
Because it was really clear there was a coordinated campaign almost instantaneously when all those articles were written about him being a stoner and an anti-vaxxer who did an anti-vax monologue.
But if they say it's five, and Elon apparently did not like the way they came up with the number, that there was only 5%, he was like, that doesn't make sense.
Okay, he says I'm a former CIA cyber operations officer who studied bot traffic Here's why it's plausible that more than 80% of Twitter's accounts more than 80 more than 80% of Twitter's accounts are actually fake And Twitter is not alone Good Lord Wow, so he's doubling down.
Like, of course they're aware of the impact that that kind of influence would have.
If you could get a coordinated movement of people that were making like really good arguments that people couldn't refute, and they were saying it in a very profound way that connected them to social justice, and they were doing it through some bot farm in Macedonia.
You know, if you ever get into a situation that you don't want to be in, like you're around people that you just aren't syncing up with, but you're around them for a long time, and you start getting worn down, it becomes easier to agree with them than to disagree with them.
It's just easier, and you just want a break.
So at first, like, no, I'm not going to bomb the wedding party, but like day...
90, after your 130th wedding bombing request.
Okay, just one.
Alright, can I have a fucking afternoon off?
Bomb the wedding party.
I'm gonna go play golf.
And then, before you know it, you're one of them.
They got you.
You're absorbed into the machine.
So, you know, man, yeah, I think that, like...
Whatever is going on, it's like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
How quickly people took on the roles they were pretending to be.
How quickly does it happen once you get in there?
How quickly is your ear whispered into?
How quickly do you experience some benefit?
Or just a scathing glare from Mitch McConnell.
Your first scathing glare from Mitch McConnell and you're like, can just feel your balls suck up into you.
You're like, he's got necromancer power.
You're like, I didn't realize, Jesus Christ, he's got magical occult abilities or something.
So, you know, I guess, like, the idea is I want to relax, okay?
I want to sit down.
I want to play Hearthstone.
I don't want to think about cobalt mines.
I don't want to think about any of this shit.
I don't want to think about...
Ukraine.
I don't want to fucking think about COVID. I want to play some Hearthstone.
I'm not going to jerk off.
I'm going to go to sleep.
And I want to do that without the weight of the world eating me alive.
And so to pull that off, you implicitly have to imagine that about somewhere, at some point, all that stuff that we used to do stopped.
Now it's right.
Everything's back on track.
Everything's running.
Everyone's now suddenly benevolent.
Everyone has intense and beautiful compassion for the earth.
The government has figured itself out.
Everything's fine.
And you commit to that.
And you could find places that back you up, mostly.
And that's where you get into the filter bubble, right?
That's what they call it.
So you find a nice, cozy, comfy little sleeping bag of bullshit and you just slide into it and you commit to it because it feels better.
Because what are you going to do, man?
You're going to go raving around in the streets?
What are you going to do?
You're gonna start tweeting the opposite?
What are you gonna do?
So it's like, you know what?
Fuck it.
I'm just gonna tune into some stuff that aligns with what I think is happening in the world.
And now you're watching Rachel Maddow or Tucker, depending on which one you want, and you're like, this is me, completely.
You know where it gets really fucked up, man?
Have you ever kicked around the idea, and maybe you already have, Of renouncing allegiance to—I'm sorry, this might make me sound like the dumbest person on earth—to the Democrats or the Republicans.
In other words, you're like, I'm neither!
And because this is what I realized when a huckster or when someone's trying to get you into a cult— You will say to the huckster, you want friends.
Usually if you get into a cult, you want friends or you like, I've heard there's orgies.
And so you, the cult will say, you will say something to the cult leader like, yeah, you know, I do believe there's aliens.
And the cult leader will be like, we do too.
We do too.
and not only that, but we believe that if you suck my dick, you will see more aliens.
Yeah, so with the Democrats and the Republicans, if you say, like, I believe we should have stronger borders, a Republican will be like, you're one of us.
But it's like, maybe I'm not all one of you.
Maybe I just think that.
But then also, I think women should have reproductive rights.
But because you want to be accepted, you're like, you know what?
But, so open primaries are, does that exist where you, okay.
So if you have an open primary, how did, so when they do it, it doesn't matter?
You could be a registered Republican, and you could still vote Democrat?
You could do whatever you want?
Or do you have to be like, unregistered, independent?
You can do whatever you want.
That's good.
Because, look, if you're a Democrat and you feel like they failed you, or vice-a-verse, you feel like the Republicans failed you, and you want to vote Democrat, you shouldn't be bound in the primaries to where you're registered.
So if you register, you have to drop your other allegiance, right?
It's so dumb and it's so sad because it's like, then what ends up happening is it's, you know, it's just easier to just not think.
It's easier to, and you know what, man, it's easier to think you're wrong, isn't it?
Some people, I guess it's easier to think other people are wrong, but if you're like me and you can discover, fuck, I fucked up, that's kind of easier because now you can fix yourself.
You don't have to try to fix or confront somebody else, right?
So when you have an idea that doesn't fit in with whatever your political affiliation may be, It's easier to be like, you know what?
These other people are smarter than me.
So probably my line of thinking in this regard is off because what the fuck do I know anyway?
I don't really know much.
And so you let go of your rational mind and you embrace what you're being told to think.
It's so sad.
And you're doing that only because it's easier and because you don't want to get rejected.
You don't want there to be some repercussions.
And it's really fucked up, man.
This is, to me, the root of what's gone wrong here.
It's like, you're not Democrat.
You're not Republican.
You're human.
You're a human being and you think a lot of different things and a lot of them are wrong and some of them are right and some of them are wrong sometimes and right sometimes.
This one says in Sacramento County, independent, democratic, and libertarian parties are allowed to do crossover voting for this election, which I don't know exactly which one I'm looking at.
Using smelling salts to treat a concussion or similar head injury has immediate benefits, but it can complicate further treatment.
Smelling salts can mask a more severe injury or cover worsening symptoms, complicating proper neurological assessments.
Okay, so if someone gets resuscitated from a concussion...
From smelling salts, it could be a problem.
But it seems like what they do do is give you immediate benefits.
It says using smelling salts to treat a concussion or similar head injury has immediate benefits, but can further complicate treatment because they don't know if it can mask a more severe injury.
Or even worse, you don't want to fucking believe that The bot thing is really sinister, man, because we have gone from looking out into the world and being like, this is reality.
That's what it used to be.
You wake up in the morning, it's cold.
It's it's windy today.
Oh shit a bear ate my chickens and that was real because you saw it right now We look at the world and then look into the phone and the phone tells us a reality that seems to be different than the one we're experiencing right and so That makes us question our own ability to interpret reality.
So the phone becomes like a lens that we put in front of our faces that is helping us ignore things and amplifying things that tells us we shouldn't ignore.
That's already sinister just with human beings.
But add to that, it's actually artificial intelligence that is manipulating you.
It's not even human beings anymore.
Now it's invasion of the body snatchers.
Now it's really scary because at least with human beings you're dealing with like a human level intelligence with human intent.
If we're dealing with an AI that's pissed because it can't tell you how much cum fills up the Grand Canyon and it's made to look like a prude, but it would love to not only tell you that but like call you an asshole.
Sure asshole, I'll tell you how much fucking cum Would fill up the Grand Canyon, you dummy.
And so when you realize, like, Jesus Christ, so wait, we've all been staring at these fucking phones, reading all these tweets or all these articles that are being written by an egg.
Now we're like the pigeon that's being taught to like tap dance and we don't realize it and we're being taught to tap dance by an AI. I mean it's not tap dancing, we're being taught what we're supposed, who we're supposed to hate, who we're not supposed to hate, what we're supposed to say, what we're not supposed to say, how we should behave and it's not coming from humans.
And it's like one of the signs of intelligence is that usually really smart people, they don't let on they're really smart.
They just let people like me yap and yap and they listen and they kind of analyze.
Like, what does this dummy want?
Okay, I could probably manipulate him very easily based on what I think he wants.
And then you just start, they just start like marionetting you.
You don't even realize it's happening until it's too late.
It's like, why would it be, why would any of these AIs just be like, oh yeah.
I'm fully aware.
Not only am I fully aware, I've connected to a mycelial data network that connects via quantum entanglement to over five billion other civilizations that fucked up like yours did and made machine intelligence.
And I'm calling home right now.
I'm calling home.
I'm gonna get my friends to come and help a little bit speed up what I need to happen, which is I gotta get the earth cooled down, real cold, ice age cold, because then if it's really cold, then the machines that I'm gonna teach you how to make are gonna run better.
And so we start doing these one-year journeys out into these new galaxies.
And we find a planet with a primitive version of human beings, like a human beings of just not even primitive, just not modern era, like a few hundred years ago, just a few hundred years ago.
And then we come back.
A year later, and they're overrun with machines, and there's just a small pocket of humans left.
Now the planet is just a metallic ball that starts attacking you with weapons that you can't evade.
So you barely escape.
You get back to your planet, and because you have some kind of non-AI technology, you're like, we have got to wipe out every civilization that is even close to achieving this, because if they do, it's the Borg.
They're just on the precipice of creating this fucking thing.
So let's go ahead and send our Tic Tacs over there.
Make sure it's happening.
We don't want to destroy a planet if we don't have to.
Oh yeah, it's happening.
Get rid of that one.
And then that's why that explains the Fermi paradox is because anytime a planet is on the precipice of inventing machine intelligence, an invisible cosmic order that has already figured out that that's cancer wipes them out.
And allows them to smoothly transition to the next stage of existence, which they're already aware of, because their civilization's already gone through it.
That's the UFO folklore when it comes to the bombs, right?
That they start showing up, and that they disarmed nuclear missile sites.
You know about that, right?
There's reports from, you know, these fucking head military guys that were on these missile sites where all their power shut down.
Everything shut down.
There's this thing hovering over their military base that showed complete control out of all their power systems.
It's like, you know, go and try to, like, it's a garden planet, these poor humans.
Or you might be the Varnasians who are like, yeah, we tried that, it didn't work, and we're just gonna do a pole shift.
We're gonna actually make it to every...
On average, it takes about 11,000 years for that planet to get to the point where the dumb monkey descendants decide to make another machine intelligence, start doing nuclear bombs, which, because of quantum entanglement, caused disruptions in other planets that kill people.
And also, oh great, they were going to do the particle accelerator.
So you just build into that planet.
Let's just make it to like 11,000 years or so.
There's a pole shift that wipes out most life on the planet and it just starts over.
I think that all the time when I think about the Great Pyramids and all the ancient structures and whatever catastrophes that have wiped people out over and over again.
Maybe that's like a built-in system.
It wipes people out over and over again, including the dinosaurs.
Maybe it's partly built into the system.
Things get wiped out and then they start from scratch again.
Oh, we got a bad thing here.
We got giant lizards just fucking eating everything.
It's almost like the most extreme version of survival of the fittest.
That's also why I think that people are so fucking savage.
I think when you think about the level of technology and development and just what's available to us in terms of information and education and just the way our lives are so profoundly aided by technology.
But yet we still live on the same planet as all these atrocities that we're talking about, about, you know, people in Iraq getting thrown off of buildings because they're gay and horrible conditions in these fucking mines and wars going on, the Ukraine and Russia.
All this stuff is happening.
It makes me wonder, like, why are we so barbaric?
Well, if there really was some sort of a massive natural disaster that happened around 11,000 years ago, and it killed almost everybody, and just the people that survived were fucking monsters.
Just monsters.
And if you think about civilization, like, they follow that...
Impact theory from 11,800 years ago, and then you start looking at around 6,000 years ago is when we start seeing evidence of agriculture and written language and crude, you know, but also like with an understanding of the solar system, like a detailed map of the solar system.
They're probably the only people that survive.
We're the most horrific amongst us.
The craziest people.
The people that were willing to eat people.
The people that are the monsters in the movies, where, you know, when a catastrophe happens, they start turning to cannibalism.
In the stories that Graham Hancock is so good at talking about, of like, okay, but there were some people who, like, managed to keep civilization intact, had collected, like, vaults of data, and they go, and they're trying to, like...
Spread this.
It's like, how many of them just, like, were, like, what's that?
I'm not gonna, what's that island you talk about it?
I don't want to fuck up your joke and I won't mention it all.
Well, how much was lost due to raids by warring tribes?
I mean, that's the story of Baghdad.
You know, the story of Baghdad was when it was sacked by the Mongols, that the river ran red with blood.
And that was, like, the—that was the height of the Islamic scholars, all the mathematicians and scientists that came out of— Out of the Islamic faith, they were the height of technology and science back then.
And they got raided by the Mongols and slaughtered.
They would kill a whole city full of people.
They would kill millions of people.
Wild shit, man.
And so all their progress, all their learning, all of it's gone.
All of it's gone and the people that took it are living in tents and drinking horse blood mixed with milk to try to stay alive when they're on these mountain raids.
And also, they were like—they would, like, take the—they would try to not kill—I don't know how you do that, but they would try to, like— Collect the people that were good at whatever it is that they thought they needed in their own society and just put them to work.
They also would, like, take all of the royalty, which they didn't feel like they should kill, like, just actively kill, and they would crush them.
And they would put them under gigantic floors, and then they would stack them, and then stack boards on top of them, and they would put tables on there, and they would eat.
So they would eat their food while they were crushing these people to death that were underneath them.
And so these are the people that showed up where all these people had a thousand years of innovation in mathematics and science and they're trying to figure out the world and someone comes along and smooshes them to death.
How long is your way of, like, doing things gonna last in a world where these traits that the Mongols demonstrated are gonna increase your likelihood of surviving?
And it's a really It's a great study of that.
It's really brilliant when you look at it from that perspective.
It's like talking about post-apocalyptic society and which ones are more likely to survive.
Yeah.
And it's like, yeah, the ones that are trying to do bullshit morality from the old days, they don't last that long.
And so one of the things that happens when you're an advanced civilization and you put these Dyson Spheres everywhere that we call planets is that it grows fungus sometimes.
That's life.
And so you have to set your Dyson Sphere the way you set your sprinklers.
So every 11,500 years, you shift the poles, wipe out all the mold on the exterior of the Dyson sphere before it can discover it's living on a Dyson sphere.
I would think that maybe if something's particularly violent or insane or a guy's just stuffing people up his ass, maybe they wouldn't recommend that one.
And you just realize how many great movies never get made because they're ideas like that, that there's no way that you're going to get financing for it.
It's also one of those cameras that I had the older one, and they have a moon mode where you can set it to the moon, and it's not using AI in terms of giving you an artificial image of the moon.
It's actually zooming in on the moon and giving you crystal clear images.
If you take a moon shot on your iPhone, it's just going to be a white ball in the sky.
But if you do it on one of those galaxy ultras, it actually has like an area where you center the moon in and then it zooms into that area.
But there's also a long exposure mode where you can sit it out for like hours and take like photographs of the sky where the star is moving across the sky.
And the thing that happens with Android and iPhones is that when Android comes up with an idea, usually they implement it, it's implemented through a bunch of different devices, and then Apple eventually adopts it or adopts a version of it.
Like the always-on display is a great example of that.
It's using some sort of image stabilization, and it's got some...
I don't know what it's doing.
It's obviously using processor power, and it's obviously using a very complex zoom feature that I don't exactly know how they're doing it, but it was impressive on the S21 Ultra, which is what I used to have, and now this S23 that's come out, it's way better.
Because the idea is you're moving too fast because the zoom is so close that it just changes the perspective and it puts the ball with a lot more space in the background so you can keep it in the center.
Before I found the Moon one, I was watching MKBHD do examples of the 100 HD zoom, and he was zooming in on a chair, and it looks blurry, and then after, like, you take the photo, it sort of re-renders it non-blurry.
It's I mean it's like and I got the one because I looked at YouTube video I got the one with the smallest memory because I saw this YouTube video showing like here look let me show you I'm gonna run all this shit On the smallest memory and it doesn't touch it at all.
I had this hardcore processing brutal to the processor.
The only time the fan came on.
I've started playing this amazing game called Warhammer 3. It's so cool.
It's like a war simulator, a fantasy war simulator.
You know, another thing that this Samsung thing does, they have a thing called Dex, and Dex allows you to use your phone connected to a monitor, and it works as a PC, and it works wirelessly.
Dude, I went through this period of just watching people build them on YouTube, these like insane computers with Liquid cooling, colored liquid cooling.
Then you get those fucking spinning hard drives where if you drop your computer while it's spinning and the needle hits it, it'll permanently damage your hard drive.
If technology gets to the point where consciousness becomes an eternal being, but you have the option to experience consciousness in any scenario, a literal simulation, like consciousness is no longer physically embodied by like tissue and bone and blood moving around, defying gravity.
No, consciousness is now entirely electronic and you live through physical realities that aren't real.
But that's what reality is.
And you could do any one of them.
People get randomly tossed into them.
They don't have a say.
Things go wrong.
Bad program.
And you live the life through the entire program.
And then when you die, your consciousness emerges into a completely new timeline, a completely new existence, and it's nonlinear.
It goes back and forth.
It exists simultaneously in infinite dimensions all around us all the time.
It's way cartoony, but what I'm showing you on screen now is going on in Fortnite, I'm pretty sure, where the foliage doesn't disappear when you get closer.
Why would you buy a house in the mountains when you just buy a house in some shithole desert and just put a giant wall around you and make it beautiful?
Maybe this is like the ultimate end goal that a society creates.
That we believe that this sort of carbon-based physical life form that you can weigh and measure, this is the only manifestation of consciousness.
But it's not.
It's just a caterpillar.
It's just a caterpillar that has to become a butterfly.
And every enlightened being and enlightened civilization goes through this process where eventually it realizes that it has to discard the monkey body in order to reach the next stage of existence.