#394 - “I Was There” Tech Elites Are Planning Breakaway Civilization | Douglas Rushkoff

[Music] Nice to meet you, Doug. Get to meet you. Yeah. You are into some fascinating stuff. You've written like 25 or so books. Yeah. And all kinds of wild stuff, the history of media, culture. You can probably do a better job than me. Why don't you sort of explain how you got into this? I started really originally, I started writing because I was interested in all sorts of states of consciousness. And I wrote this book that no one knows about. I wrote this book when I was like 24 or 25, called "Free Rides, Ways to Get High Without Drugs." And the idea was that they're not so afraid of the drugs themselves. The people making the laws, they're afraid of the states of consciousness that they provide, because then people can see alternative ways of understanding reality. So once you're high on anything, you come back and you go, why did I agree that this is money? Why do I agree that that is rent? Why do I agree that I work for him? There's like, what all your social agreements go away? So that was what it started. And I was a theater person and I got really sick of theater because it was like very expensive and predictable and all. And just when I was getting sick of theater, the internet thing was just starting to happen. So I started to write articles about what is e-mail, what is hypertext, what is virtual reality, before anybody believed that the stuff was real or going to happen. So I was in New York, I'd go out to San Francisco, go to the house where they published "Monda 2000" magazine or hang out with Terrence McKenna and learn about all the weird stuff. I started writing articles and then books about that. I wrote a book called "Siberia," which sort of took "Rave" and "psychedelics" and "hypertext" and all that sort of new stuff happening. And saying this is part of one thing, society's changing. So I was the guy on the beat of the original internet. I wrote a book called "Media Virus," sort of naming the viral media phenomenon. That put me on the map. Once you get a word, they kind of think. So I got that term and then started writing about how the internet went from this great creative collective playground to this kind of controlled big money surveillance manipulation apparatus. I wrote a bunch about that. And then I got interested in magic in the occult and weirdness kind of as ways of creating more wiggle room in consensus culture. I wrote a bunch of those, wrote a bunch of graphic novels, and went about Aleister Crowley, went about the Bible, went in a bunch of different directions. And then now do a podcast called "Team Human." Arguing the being human as a team sport, we can do this together. The only way out is through, but the only way through is together. And I wrote this book that kind of made a lot of, I don't know what, waves and claps, both, called "Survival of the Richest," escape fantasies of the tech billionaires that looked at why do these guys want to escape our reality and leave us all behind? How did you do the research for that? Did you go meet with like a bunch of tech? Yeah, that was weird. That happened accidentally. You know, I get hired to do talks and sometimes even by, I'm counter-cultural guy, but big corporations will hire me, almost as a proof that they dare, right? Or they're tapped into the culture. Yeah, exactly. Or they do it as some sort of intellectual dominatrix thing. You know, it's like, I tell them what they're doing wrong. And you're like, "Thank you, sir, me, at least I'm another." So it was one of those. I was got invited out to do a talk for, for it was some kind of hedge fund about the economy of the future and whatever. And they fly me out, like business class, the whole nine yards and limo through the desert to this resort. And it's a whole thing. And I'm waiting in the green room to go on. And usually, you know, when you're in the green room, the guy comes with a little clip on Mike and whatever to bring you out. Yeah. And instead of these five guys come into the green room, and they sit around this table and this is the talk. It's these five ultra-wealthy guys. And they want to know, I mean, originally it was like these sort of investment questions. They were like Bitcoin or Ethereum, you know, virtual reality or augmented reality. Like, "Dude, don't come to me for that." I would have said Betamax. I would have said CompieServe. I understand what's going to happen. But I'm not the guy to, I don't tell you what company to bet on. But then finally, they were like Alaska or New Zealand. They wanted to know where to put their bunkers in case of what they called the event. You know, the electromagnetic pulse or revolution, climate event or a pandemic that makes the world unlivable and forces them to go somewhere else. And that was, you know, I got, I tried to play with them at that point. They're just crazy, wealthy guys. You know, and I was like, "So, how are you going to protect your bunker from the rest of us?" And I was like, "Oh, we got Navy SEALs, you know, on speed dial. They're going to come out." And, you know, like, "Okay." And then how are you going to pay your Navy SEALs once your Bitcoin's not worth anything? Because the world's in. So they've like thought it out, like walking dead level scenario planning. But they haven't really looked at how do you stay alive and you can't. Not for very long like that. But so then that's what set me on the journey to figure out how did the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world convince themselves that they're utterly incapable of sustaining our world. That the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable collapse of civilization and try to survive in some kind of a futile bunker. Yeah, that's kind of, you know, this recent stuff with the Epstein files kind of illuminated a lot of them. There were so many emails with Epstein and people like Peter Teal. There was like 1000, I think over 2000 emails with Peter Teal. And other people like that. And you could kind of see if you started to like really spend the time to read it and digest it. How these people operate, you know. And it really got me thinking like, I mean, I was sitting down reading some of these emails at night. Like it was like I was binging Game of Thrones. Like it was just, I was so into it. And, you know, it got me really thinking about thinking differently about these people at like the top of the hierarchy of the top of the food chain in society. Like people like Teal and Elon and all those folks that like it's pretty clear. These guys aren't necessarily, they don't feel responsible for society. Or they don't necessarily feel like it's their duty to, you know, push forward the American Empire or whatever their public claims are. Right. Don't seem to be a reality. What the reality is is there's this inner sort of something going on within their psyche, like deep within them that is being projected out publicly and narratives are being spun. In the media. So we all have this like distilled sort of like reconstructed version of what their reality is. If that makes any sense. Yeah. Although sometimes they really do just say it outright. You know, Peter Teal was doing these lectures on satanism right on what he sees is the satanic force. And he sees mutual aid as the satanic force. You know, in his model of reality, a few humans will rise above a few humans will level up. You know, his book is called from zero to one, meaning that you go from zero to one that you need to become one order of magnitude above everybody else. And in business, it can kind of make sense. Like rather than having a website own Facebook that controls the websites. Right. Rather than having a store online, have Amazon, which is the aggregator of all the store. So you level up, but he sees that as kind of in his version of Christianity, you level a few humans will level up. And they need the resources and the stuff in order to do that. If you're busy spreading out the wealth and resources and giving it to people who are just going to die eventually anyway, you're wasting what could be going up. So that's why you note to him like a Greta Tumberg is the devil that anybody who's trying to spread it out when the object of the game, it's a pyramidal society. The object of the game is to gather the stuff and climb up it right and get to the, get to the top and transcend. And that's, I mean, to cut to the chase, that's the vision of the most extreme of these kind of transhumanist tech bros. But they see, they see human beings like larva, like maggots living on the earth, which is this piece of dung. You know, you've seen maggots in there and they're there. That's what we are. And a few of us are going to sprout wings and get off, right? Either up into the, the ether of the cloud or off the planet or into another dimension or through a quantum leap or something, a few of us will sprout wings and go. The rest of us, we're only important in so far as we serve as the labor and the future. fuel for the few who get the wings and go everywhere else. So now that they see it, and they do believe in climate change, probably more than you and me, they see that the thing is ending. The civilization is ending. The economy got too poorly distributed, right? The pyramid of the society, there's too many elites at the top. It's going to collapse. We all see it. They see it. So now the race is on, they've got to build their AI to figure out how to get to the next place. And temporarily they could stave off maybe 50 or 100 years by having a castle protected by droid armies in a police state. That's sort of what they're building currently, that is the plan. But that's not the long term, the long term plan is to get out, is to leave us behind. And it's like, the fact that he is the one in charge of, or he's the one behind everything in Silicon Valley, with like wrapping everything in Christianity, and all these articles that have been coming out about how now everyone in Silicon Valley is going to church, and he's trying to paint Christianity onto everything that's happening there, and he's hosting these anti-Christ talks, lectures that Duncan went to. And what he's doing, like his beliefs, his values, wanting to live forever and escape the planet, does that seem to be a very Christian ideal? No. Because the thing he doesn't realize, and the tech brothers in general don't realize, is their vision of transcendence is the opposite. What they want to do is preserve their ego and personality exactly like it is. You know, record it and stick it in an AI, or get enough, you know, child blood so they can maintain it, whatever. But the things they're doing are so earthly, they're so heavy, even all the heavy metals that you need for AI, that's what they invest in, is like rare earth, heavy, grounded, they're trying to, even life extension as they understand it, it's not life extension, it's not the blossoming of a life form, there's no, I mean, anybody who's taken a decent plant medicine understands it, what we're doing here, we're metabolizing, right, we're metabolizing and changing state, that's what mushrooms do, they turn poop into life, it's that chain. If you can't engage in that cycle, you're not really alive. So what are they preserving? It's back to the pharaohs. What are the pharaohs? What does any empire civilization do? You end up with a few super duper wealthy, powerful people who genuinely believe that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives can be sacrificed to preserve their sarcophagus, right, to keep them alive forever. Wow, I never thought about it like that. 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It's an up and down profession, you know, but, um, but getting a PhD taught me enough to really try to look at where did this thing come from. You know, I've always been really good at looking at something and saying like, that's weird, right? Like looking at a dollar bill and in that kind of stoned way and going, why does this paper have value? Like, huh? Right. What the academic does is say, let's find out, you know, who was it that, who was it that figured out how to make a piece of paper have value? How do they enforce it? Why do we believe it? What are its biases? What came before it? What kind of money was there before central currency, loaned out by a central bank and interest? And how did it work and what did it do? So that's the sort of thing I'll look back at, at, at those kinds of things. So, I mean, money is a great one, right? So in my work, what I look back at is I kind of go back to the late Middle Ages as my starting place, whether you can go all the way back to anything. You know, the late Middle Ages was like right after the crusades that they gone on all these Christian soldiers from Europe and out into Muslim lands and they, you know, fought and killed and whatever and then crusades kind of ended and it was a whole bad thing, but they had opened up all these trade routes to all these other parts of the world. So Europe got really cool and interesting. They brought back all these new technologies and, you know, windmills and watermills and new money systems and even the marketplace. We didn't have a market until then. We saw this thing called the Bazaar and it was like, oh, that's cool. People just bring their shit and sell it to each other and whatever. So we started in Europe, we, I mean, I don't know where my people were at that point. But, you know, they started doing these marketplaces and these were people who were formerly peasants, right? They would just bring their crops to the Lord and eat what they could. So now people are starting to bring things like one person selling shoes, someone else is selling chickens and then they started to use this kind of money that was like poker chips. It was basically money that got issued in the morning, but usually by the baker or someone who had some kind of commodity and it would expire at the end of the day. So the idea is, it was like poker chips that they had no value in themselves. So everybody just traded stuff, right? It was optimized for trading. There was no way to save up, right? So nobody would hoard money or try to hold it. It wasn't gold. It was worthless. So it was just used like IOUs so that we can each get the thing. I want shoes. You want chickens. He wants meat. So we could all get the things and then sort of settle books at the end of the day and it was done. Right? There was no money and people got rich. People actually got rich and because they couldn't and this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but this is actually it's a happy conspiracy. It's just history. People got wealthy and they got healthy like women at that time, late middle ages, England 11th, 12th century. They were taller than at any time until the 1980s until they caught up. That's how healthy people were. They worked like three days a week because what do you do if you're doing well, but you don't want to keep, we don't even have a reason to keep working because you have no way to store the money. So if you can't hoard money, what are you going to do? You're going to start optimizing your society for leisure, which is what they did. How much do I have to work in order to have everything I need? So the sign of wealth, the sign of doing well was, oh look, Joe only works two days a week. Right? Because his pig farm is doing so well. It doesn't have to work that much. What is that like? So people started to get wealthy and the aristocracy got really upset because they were the former lords. They hadn't worked in thousand years and now all of a sudden the peasants are becoming the middle class, the bourgeois that we hate. So what did they do? They had to stop the rise of the middle class and they came up with two ideas. One that we know about was the corporation or what they called the chartered monopoly. The idea of a chartered monopoly, what is the, we know what a monopoly is. Charter means it's the king mandated monopoly, the king charters a monopoly. So now it's like, instead, if you're my friend, I'll be like, okay, Danny, now you're not just a shoemaker. You are his majesty's royal chartered monopoly shoemaker. You're the official shoemaker. All the other shoemakers in town in the city in our country, they got to work for you. Just when employment was invented, there weren't employees before that. There were an employees. People worked, but they didn't have jobs at companies. It wasn't, it didn't work like, now, now instead, all the other shoemakers, instead of them making shoes and selling them, now they go work for you by the hour, right? So that's when, when hourly wages happen, that's when the clock went on the tower in the medieval village. They didn't have clocks up there before. They put them up really as a way of normalizing, showing time is our value. That's the highest thing now. Time is money. That's when that started. So what happened was people got really disconnected from the value they were creating. You were punching the clock. You were working. eight hours a day, you know, 40-hour a week, whatever it was instead of working for the value you created. And then what people like you figured out, what Danny, I'm not you in real life, but Danny, the guy who runs the company figured out, you don't even want qualified workers working for you. You want to go to the Home Depot parking lot, pick up a bunch of undocumented aliens, and bring them in, train them in 15 minutes, and pay them minimum wage. You don't want some super qualified shoemaker that's going to demand 40 bucks an hour. So that's when we got the assembly line. That's when we developed the industrial age so that you could train someone in 15 minutes to do one piece of the job, pass it on to the next person. And only you and your other boss people know the whole process of making it. So we got that, and we also got central currency. They've decided to make all those local currencies we were using, all those poker chips, all that stuff. That's all illegal. You can't use that anymore. Now what you have to do is borrow money from the central treasury at interest. So if anyone wants to buy shoes from you, you can't use your own money. We want to make, they're wealthy want to make money off that transaction. So the way they will is for me to have money, I've got a borrow money from the central treasury at interest, do my transactions, and then pay back more money than I borrowed. And that's a really weird idea. How do you pay back more than you borrowed? Where does the other money come from? The only way to get more is the economy has to grow. And that's why we talk about to this day. That's why we talk about GDP and economic growth and all that. It's not so I can have the shoes I need and people can have the stuff they need. The economy has to grow because the operating system of the economy, this central currency needs to be paid back with interest in order for it to work. That's the kind of money we use. So we live in an economy and a society, a civilization that has to grow in order to stay functional. That work really well for colonialism, getting a new world, getting new territories, getting new enslaved people. I'll keep going, going, going. Let me kind of run out like 1950s. We kind of ran out of room, right? The Palestine pushed back. India pushed back to no more. What do we do? What do we do? So let's create consumers out of Americans. We've got people to buy more stuff. We use advertising and get people to buy shit they don't need just to keep the economy going. And they'll get storage facilities to stick all the shit they don't need. And we'll get pollution. We'll make stuff disposable so they need to buy more so that the economy can grow. And we all accept that this growth is a great thing. Finally, the internet, that's going to be the best one of all because it's going to create infinite surface area. We're going to have the worldwide web is forever. It's an infinite marketplace. But what happened was it turned out people only have so many eyeball hours in a day, right? You only have so much time that you can spend so much attention. So that's part of why we're seeing the breakdown of the human mind is we're mining human attention. But but that's the thing that's really reached its its limit is our ability to keep growing the economy in a way that's not just well in a way that's not just hurting people. It's not just extracting value. So now it's really hard for almost anybody to make value except the people who are at the very top of that that growth pyramid. And those guys see this isn't going to work anymore that this last thousand two thousand years you know of of of a growth through extraction and growth in this sort of corporatized central currency way. It's a it's that one's over. So they're like what what happens after you know what happens kind of after this this particular capitalist extraction. And that's why you got folks like Nick Land in Europe saying oh it's going to be monarchy. That's what's going to come. You know it's no it's no longer a capitalist society. It's a monarchic society. And then things will work things could work like that. Some people see socialism and you know that's what this sort of the occupy people are all we're going to have a sharing economy and you know that one sounds better to me than a monarchy. And the tech bros are like it's going to be nothing at all right. That whole thing's going down that's you know forever chemicals are forever. I don't want to live there. We got to get off this place. We got this planet. Yeah. What do you think what do you think they think those tech bros like the people like Teal and you know all those people what what do they think that this AI stuff is going to lead to like the now that the AI is the chat GPT is updating itself and you know it's baked into everything the social media and like we can't figure out what's real or not real. Now Grock when you ask Grock if an image is real. Grock can't even tell you if it's real or not. Like do they I can't imagine there's any optimism within those people. Well there is some time you know the thing I love about these people I mean these these guys were kind of like the guys out hang out with stone in college and have these crazy thoughts you know what if we're living in an experiment just being you know a simulation run by a grad student or somewhere on another planet you know those are fun great conversations to have it's just not great to like run a government or an economy based on right the most crazy answers to them they're I mean different ones are thinking different things you know I mean Elon Musk used to he really thought he was getting off the planet and pretty recently was when he decided oh I'm not that's not gonna work we're gonna dial it back to the moon is what he said yeah yeah dial it back to the moon or even try to make it work you know as you can hear you know because you know I'm sure you've had somebody talk about that what do they call the Kessler syndrome maybe we're not saying that the satellites and space are crashing into each other and making smaller and smaller particles oh I haven't heard this oh this is a big one right so Musk knows about this all right it's in a side but it's kind of cool yeah at least in terms of getting off the planet so you know we have all these satellites and stuff up in space and occasionally they crash into each other because they're up there moving to 20,000 miles an hour or whatever and when they crash into each other they make smaller particles right and then those smaller particles are all going around crashing into other stuff like the remember the Chinese they were just gonna bring their astronauts down from the Chinese space station or something they couldn't do it they couldn't do it because the the craft that was supposed to pick them up got pierced by one of those projectiles oh no right but the more satellites that get hit by projectiles the more projectiles there are until it reaches this thing it's called Kessler syndrome where there's so many that it cascades and then it's just like just zillions and zillions of particles they could be yeah look they could be so it's like exponential it's exponential and they could be a millimeter or a centimeter big but still if your spacecraft gets hit by a centimeter it still shreds you right so the idea is then this whole layer of the of the of the orp this whole level of shrapnel is like exactly it's like Gettysburg right it's just like thousands of things and it's so bad though that then we can't get off it makes it impossible to get off planet wouldn't that be ironic because they trapped in there from that irony recently what Musk did he was just asked permission to start on a weather NASA or whatever runs this the thema who knows um to start using a different orbit because that orbit's just too crowded with crap to start launching his satellites to uh so they want to start doing it deeper into space no they can't they got to do it closer closer in because if your time you go deeper in space you kind of risk going through that shrapnel yeah what's the number isn't like 30,000 something satellites are up there right now or isn't 60 it's something crazy it's like it's like I think it's getting damn near 100,000 satellites and I would bet must guess a lot of it and I'm not saying anything against space travel or whatever right it's just like dudes work this out oh 15,000 twice 2026 there's approximately 14 to 15,000 active satellites on earth orbit yeah but there's 45,000 total human made objects what yeah because those are inactive satellites and to be trying to know with millions more smaller pieces of debris so millions it be it's like do you remember that movie who was it Julia Roberts was up there or Sandra Bullock or somebody was in space and gravity I never saw that one right and all these that's what screws them up there's this shrapnel those but anyway they're they're it's an interesting metaphor for the the reverse impact of so many of these things right the more it's like kind of like the more locks you put and and guarded whatever the more fences and and shielded doors you put on a city street the more crime they'll be on the street yeah because it's just like you're making it making it worse so yeah exactly and that's what they're doing they're so they're so afraid but yeah what I looked at you know was I looked at how capitalism which is really what we were describing before the corporations and central currency how it led to this sort of growth based economy where the only way to survive is to become really big right you've got to you live in a pyramid and you've got to get higher and higher up the pyramid psilocybin mushrooms are seeing major breakthroughs in scientific research right now but there's a whole nother mushroom that's just as effective and it doesn't make you trip it's called ominita miscaria I would have never tried ominita miscaria if it weren't for amentara at high doses it can feel sedating even a little dreamy but 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Going, what they did to my internet, we were just gonna rave and party and share. And it was a share where everything was free. It was beautiful. And then they wanted to capture our attention. And they took these technologies that we were using and turned them on us, right? So instead of giving people tech to realize their visions, they used tech on people to create our visions, right? They reversed the whole thing. It became what they called "capitology," right? Using tech on humans to predict and steer our behavior forward. And then you say eyes and algorithms, which are basically algorithms are almost like demons, right? I'm gonna train something to use everything it knows about. You get you to act against yourself, right? So there was that. But then I started to look and I thought, you know, it's not just money. It's also something about the tech and the science. Also is part of it. And I look back at like the origins of empirical science, you know, it was this guy Francis Bacon around the same period, late middle ages early Renaissance, right? That same period, Francis Bacon. And when he was selling the idea of empirical science, meaning evidence-based science to the court, he said that empirical science will let us take nature by the forelock, hold her down and submit her to our will. Right, so take nature by the hair, hold her down, and part, right, submit her to our will. That was, so the way early scientists looked at the world was like this scary, dark, feminine, nature, moon, fairies, earthworms, unpredictable stuff. We're gonna use science to make it all predictable, you know? So you take something, you kill it, you take it apart and understand what it is. It's not about life, it's about reduction, right? So anything that you can, anything you can weigh and measure exists, if you can't do even a metrics for it, may as well not be there, it's nothing, right? So it was, it wasn't just like anti-female, but I mean, women kind of represented that unruly, I mean, I understand, what is that? What is the thing? How is it thinking? What is it want, you know, and I need to be with it, but I'm afraid of it, I understand they were there, but that was the way they dealt with it was to control it. So then you look at how that scientific mind, that's not even scientific. I would call it "scientistic mindset." It was a scientist, it was sort of reductive, materialist science as religion, rather than science as the exploration it really is, you know, not scientific model, scientific reductionism. Then that came through to the tech bros, anything you can't quantize is not real, anything that can't be digitally-- - Wade. - Wade, right? - Exactly, and if you don't know what it is, then it's just noise. So all that DNA, all that's junk DNA, don't worry, but don't take my junk DNA. What's, you know, it's my monkey DNA, or whatever, it's not junk, it's gonna just wait. I might, it's there, I might need it. It's my history, it's my, it's all the species I was. I don't wanna lose, I don't wanna lose that. You know, it's like anything that's not on the quantized line is expendable. Everything is kind of auto-tuned into their reality. You know, and it's like, I get it, you wanna auto-tune Ariana Grande or something, she'll be a better product, hitting the C perfectly, go at it, go for it. But like James Brown, right, who's like reaching up to the note and lives in that in-between space, if you auto-tune James Brown, you're literally removing the soul. - Right. - The soul, to these guys and to the digital realm is noise. And it's not. The soul, it's that, all that in-between stuff, what's stuff you talk about on here? The in-between, the liminal, the, the reason why we talk about even the stuff we don't believe in, is because it puts your head in that weird in-between space, just the exercise of hearing somebody talk about aliens, you decide later you don't believe in, wrapping your head around it for an hour or two, it makes you realize there's more going on here than meets the eye, right? There is a shamanic sensibility, right? There's, but that's the scary female power nature. - Right. - Stuff that gets quantized out, right? So those are sort of the two histories I look at, the history of capitalism and money, right? Which only wants to value things that it can put a dollar value on and that will expand the market for the bankers. And then a scientific view of reality that the only things that matter, the things that have metrics and all the other stuff doesn't. And that's how you end up with this kind of sociopathic marriage, going, which is like, it's funny. I mean, you want a real conspiracy story that I lived, all right? So I was at, I was at, I was my late 20s at my first like important scientist party. I'd written my first book or two. And I'm there and I see Richard Dawkins, right? The selfish gene guy came up with the term meme, you know, Nobel, whatever, scientists dude, Cambridge, the whole thing. And he's there and he's talking about memes and stuff. And he starts saying that human beings are just like computers for memes. That a meme runs a human like a program runs a computer. And that ultimately he had this very reductive view that there's nothing going on here. We're in a completely materialist world and we're going to live selfishly because our memes and genes tell us to live selfishly. And you know who was there was Naomi Wolfe. Remember Naomi Wolfe? She was a big feminist writer and then she ended up becoming kind of a Maga Kennedy. - Really? - Yeah. - She's not, the name's not ringing about. - Yeah, we will. - Yeah. - Oh, okay, yeah. - She'd been on like a band and show a lot. She was anti-vax and I mean, she went from being a kind of a lefty intellectual feminist to. - She had a gray hair. - Yeah, she kind of horseshoed to the other side of it. But at the time she was more, what would the word be? More intellectually dependable to the regular classes. More a New York Times approved intellectual at that point. If lefty, she hadn't kind of gone off road yet. And she was arguing and I thought she were arguing with Dawkins thing, but isn't there a soul? There's something, there's spirit. And all these dudes, it was like Dawkins and some of the other scientists of that ilk, these God delusion type scientists. Like Laffanatter and kind of Teasinger. And I've tried to defend her 'cause I was for a bunch of reasons. But I wanted her to like me, I guess. And so I'm defending her and arguing that the universe doesn't work like they're saying. These other things, and I was bringing a vick and steen and systems of meaning. And finally, they dismissed me and Dawkins said, "Oh, you're a moralist." Like, I didn't even know what a moralist is. That's dismissed, "Oh, you're a moralist." Is it like, that means Christian or something or a moralist? That I believe we live in a universe that does have some sense of right and wrong, that there is a conscience, that there is an ethical something that humans can do. And 10 years later, I see Dawkins and some of the other scientists from that party and a picture on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express, right? Now, they weren't going to the eye and they were going to the TED conference, but I find out that Epstein had funded my literary agent and all the scientists' conferences and stuff. And I was thinking, you know, so I'm the moralist and they're the ones who are on Epstein's plane. So what really is going on here is that the marriage of these things is Epstein funded and he did. He funded these particularly scientific kind of anti-spiritual scientists as a way of kind of justifying the exploitation of all these other people. If people don't have souls, if people aren't even really real, they're not even conscious, they're just kind of machine animals, then it's okay to have a harem of 14-year-old girls. What are they, they're not real, right? Nature, we're going to hold her down by the forelock and submit her to our will because she's just stuck, there's no nothing. And that was when I saw the sort of the sociopathic tendency of the kind of tech-brow scientist to look at everything as programmable matter rather than an other, right? There's another person there that's not a thing to exploit. That's a human. It really dovetail perfectly with the billionaire sociopathic view of the rest of humanity. And that's how they get to this weird version of transhumanism where the super elite can leave everyone behind in order to pursue. I've always wondered though, what is that something that's baked into us from the jump? Or is that something that just happens when you attain that level of financial wealth and power? Is that something that bubbles up out of the human psyche naturally? Because this stuff goes back to like early Greece. Maybe this stuff goes back. What is the Greek emperor, Tiberius, who famously had like, was like testing and killing children all day long on his island. And there's tons of stories of this stuff going back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. And is this just some like freak genetic abnormality in some people that also happens to coincide with becoming a billionaire at the top of society? Or is that what happens when you attain all of that power? I wonder. There's some of both, right? So it is true. And I talk about these actually in that book. There are studies that show like basically you take a billionaire and put them in an MRI machine, show them a picture of like a starving baby. The parts of the, you're a migraine that would light up and empathy don't for them. So as you, as you get wealthier, your empathy decreases. And it's not that people with low empathy end up doing well, although that might be true too. It's that as you get wealthy, you help less. Welfare people help less in the street. You just do. You have less. Yeah. You do separate. It's part of the way you justify. You have to justify after the fact that you've gotten there. I think it depends on how you got wealthy too. I know super wealthy people who are not like that at all. Some, yeah. Some, but they must have good, good upbringing or strong anchor. The other thing you bring up, which is interesting, is some percent, you know, one out of a hundred, five out of a hundred of humans are going to have a sociopathic tendency. It's just the way we are. You know, one to say five out of a hundred, even ten out are going to have that. So then the question is, is the landscape in which your society is operating? Is it a landscape that rewards the sociopath or or prevents the sociopath from gaining power? Right. So if you look at some of the some, not all, some of the Native American or indigenous cultures, they have a lot of safeguards to prevent a sociopathic, usually male, but not always, but so usually sociopathic male from taking over. So they'll have a, they'll say, we're going to have a male chief at all times, but we're going to have ten females who are allowed to veto and change the chief whenever they want. So it's a weird balance. You get the wisdom of the women and the, you know, macho, whatever, bruhaha of the guy, but he's kept in check by this panel of women who can get, okay, you're out. And then they even had mechanisms. If we really don't like the dictator we're with, they were, they were migratory societies. They believe, we'll go 50 of us. We're going. This guy's fucking maniac. Right. So you, you can build societies around that. Those are called horizontal civilizations, or you build pyramidal civilizations and they, they're throughout history, pyramidal civilizations, you have to climb to the top in order to gain power and they're optimized for accumulation and control and taking. That's what you do. And then there's horizontal civilizations like the late middle ages time we were talking about. Horizontal civilizations are, are, are optimized for leisure, you know, but we take our productivity and we give it back to everybody in the form of more time. And that one to me seems like the more natural human state what are we here for? We're here to fuck and play and create. That's not just stuff you let workers do so they work more. That's the reason we're here. You work in order to have time to fucking play. Right. And now it's becoming your, your compiling onto all that stuff, all the digital and all the separation of humans where people only communicate within via screens and text and dating apps and all that stuff. And like now I was laughing my ass off when you and Duncan were talking about this, but also injecting themselves with bow talks so you can't see their emotions anymore. So not only are they hiding their facial expressions, they're also behind the screen. Right. And like the separation has become, is becoming exponential on top of all of that stuff. So right, that is interesting. So we're zooming already and we're unable to really establish rapport in zoom. I can't see if your pupils are getting bigger or smaller as I speak. Hundreds of thousands of years of painstakingly evolved mechanisms for establishing rapport are thwarted there. And then you're right, then we go into the real world and do other things to prevent rapport. It's like we're on this runaway apocalyptic train that I don't see. There's an end. It seems to be coming soon. It doesn't see. I mean, maybe, maybe. Oh, it's collapsing. I seem to be optimistic. I like to be optimistic about this too, because like I always look at all the stuff that was happening or in the 60s when Kennedy got shot and all this other crazy stuff that was outing like imagine if we had phones and Instagram back then, you know, imagine how many conspiracies there would be everywhere and how people would be running wild. So yeah, you know, people are getting sick of it though. I mean, they are. They are. They're more aware of how unhealthy it is. I know. And I feel like kids, not just I know there's everyone's want to be an article about oh, here's a group of kids. It's throw away their phones and they're only reading books, you know, but they're a tiny group. On the other hand, I was in I was in target the other day and right in front of the target, they had, I think it was like Taylor Swift's last record or something, but it was in vinyl. And I saw this girl buying it and I asked her, she's like a Gen Zier. And I said, oh, that's cool. You're getting, I said, what kind of turntable do you have? She goes, well, I don't have a turntable. I just want to wreck. So it was both heartbreaking and sweet at the same time, but that she wants the artifact. They want the thing. Even if she's listening to it on Spotify, she wants wants the thing. And I feel like we kind of reached a place where, you know, I know all the stats say the kids are having less sex. All that. Eventually, I think, I think it's going to come back around. Really? Yeah. And how does that happen? Through sheer nausea and boredom and sadness. It's like things like sex and meditation and movement and ecstatic. Have you gone to it? Extatic dance? Done one of those. No. It's like an ecstatic. Remember rave? Were you around for rave? You know, thousands of people go, I never, I never, I went to maybe one book. Yeah. So raves was 1000 kids, 100 beats per minute, taking ecstasy. Yes. The ecstatic dance night is like 300 people, maybe not on ecstasy, but like dancing altogether, not like with partners, but just like in this thing. And you really do a few hours in. You end up in a beautiful altered state with people. And it's like, you don't have to do drugs. You don't. It's like, you know, the scene in the second Matrix movie, you know, where they're all dancing. They show the people who are in Zion. Basically, Zion is like this kind of Zion. Zion is like a burning man. Kind of rave thing. It really, you reconnect. Pretty friggin fast. You know, people go to one of those or one good mushroom ceremony. You know, they did just like, Oh, okay, I want to, I want to live like that. Yes. Yes. I was explaining this, I was explaining this to somebody where there was a, I went to a, a Metallica concert last year in Tampa. And it was my first time I were going to, I'm a Metallica concert. And when I was there, it was like 60,000 people packed into this. It was the, the Buccaneer Stadium, which is a huge outdoor stadium. And what they do is they put this circular stage in the middle of the football field, right? And they put all the people basically gather around the, they're in the stadiums, too. But it's all on the floor, like in the middle of where the football field would be. And it's like this donut-shaped stage. And there's people in the middle, they call this snake pit, too. And there's like these giant towers, the LED towers that show graphics. There's like, there's smoke. There's giant beach balls. And the sound is like vibrating through everyone. And it's like, it's hard to describe this like palpable, palpable energy that's there. That just vibrates every fiber of your being. And it's like, you don't have to be on drugs at all. But it's intoxicating. Like just the sounds, the lights, the energy, the smoke, the, just the ambiance in general. It got me thinking. I'm like, this must have been like the Elluzinian mysteries were. Right. Except, you know, it's interesting. So you can do that. And in some of the ways we're describing, it's through a kind of a sensory overload that creates a reset. It's a little bit like, you know, they've been doing it since the Roman games, the Nuremberg rallies, a sports game, or a terrific concert. So it's too size. The interesting thing, what I've been trying to play with is how do you get there through stillness. So you can be bombarded by it, but you can also fall into it. In some ways, like a drum circle of people, there's still stuff in there. But it's sort of what David Lynch was describing. He wrote this book on meditation because he was a big meditator on how you go into that state, or I know it's tricky for kids now because they're trained on porn. But there's ways of having sex. They're trained on porn. What do you want to mean? But you know what I mean? It's like, yeah, no, I know. I know. It's crazy. It's what sex is. But if, I mean, I invite, I invite young, sexually active people to enter and be still. You know what I mean? Be still and see what that's like. It's like, there's another, you know what I mean? There's a kind of an intimacy, a connection, an opening to everything. If you can be, you know, passively active and actively passive. If you be in and yang at the same time, really fall into the moment. That's the hard thing. That's especially in our society. That's what I've been pushing for now is how do I be in the now and truly in the moment that I'm in? You know, not let even my most well intentioned social justice efforts distract me from exactly where I am in the moment. I mean, here I am having great water and coffee with you in this gorgeous studio. And I know there's people starving somewhere else and, you know, some kid getting their hand blown off by the IED or something in the second, like, yeah, but, but it's still okay to be, to revel in. Here we are connecting about this weird shit, you know. Right. Right. It's both. It's both. And if you're truly fall into that moment, then you reconnect with all of that stuff again. You know, and that's the kind of weird ass spiritual thing I've been working on lately is how do you kind of metabolize what's going on here? How do you kind of make like a mushroom? How do you be, you know, the how do you through your very existence? How do you metabolize what's going on in all of its horror and grief, rather than try to make enough money to rise above it, to insulate oneself, like, like, to break out of the system. Right. New seasons means fresh starts. And with I restores Memorial Day Savings event from April 28th through May 26th, it's the perfect time to upgrade your hair and skin routine. I restore has been leading the way for red light therapy for over two decades. And this is the last month for their bundles discount on two of the customer favorites, the I restore elite and the Illuminus skin mask. The I restore elite is clinically proven to help regrow your hair with 300 lasers and 200 LEDs that send light therapy directly to your scalp. And the I restore Illumina is a dermatologist recommended face mask with double the power than most competitors. It targets fine lines, breakouts, stimulates collagen and boosts blood flow. 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And like, I can't comprehend how other than what you just said, which I think is great, trying to reconnect with yourself and meditate how to break that system. I feel like it's going to take something just like overwhelmingly catastrophic to do that. You would think, well, we want the Goldilocks event is what they call it, right? Something that's bad enough to wake us up and not so bad that it kills us all. You know, we kind of hope that COVID would be that or maybe, you know, the Trump prison camps or something would be that, you know, what is it that does that? But, you know, for me, the easy way to play with it is, like, meet your neighbors, you know, go, go ultra local. If, if we conclude like the wealthiest people in the world, that this pyramid's coming down, right? It's, there's going to be a crash of one sort or another, whether it's, you know, climate crash or economic crash or both or all of them, you know, the, the, the ocean current we saw, that big ocean wave is, is dying down the, the North Atlantic, whatever that thing is. So anyone's going to have that one in like the magnetosphere or whatever. Yeah. There's like, the anomaly. Yeah. There's bad. No, there's, like, the ocean is changing. The climate change thing is happening. There's going to be mass migrations from the coasts. Even the Koch brothers are, are investing in it. You know, the people that are saying there's no climate change are investing in what's going to happen. They, everyone knows. So there's going to be that thing. And then it's like, we can work to try to prevent it. Sure. But I think that more important thing is how do we soften the landing as much as possible? You know, and the way to soften the landing of an economic or a food supply or an energy crisis is to have very resilient local networks. The more you know your neighbors, it's not like to be a prepper, but to be, how can our village, how can our town, whatever area be more sustainable? Where do we get our food? Where do the old people live? Who needs help? How do they get their water? The more that we do for each other, rather than buying it on Amazon, then the more prepared we'll be when Amazon is not delivering. The more, I'm not saying you can do it all overnight, but we can build more resilient communities. And it starts to really as simple as as meet your neighbor. We don't, we don't really know them. You know, it's when my, I, I, I told the story when my daughter graduating high school, we had this picture. We got the, you know, the frame picture. I want to stick it in the wall. We got plaster walls. I don't want to put a nail in a plaster wall. So I got a drill to put a set in there. I don't have a drill. So what's my first impulse like any American? Go to Home Depot, get a minimum viable product, rechargeable drill. Use it one, stick it in the garage, maybe never use it again or take it out and it won't recharge and throw it out. Right? So I sent kids into, in the Congo, into the mines to get the rare earth metals for the rechargeable drill. You know, all the carbon that was made to make it and then I throw it out and it's going to go on a waste dump in Brazil where some other kids are going to pick out it to pull out the renewable part and sell it to Apple so they can call themselves a green company, right? Or I could walk down the street and, you know, knock on the door and say, Bob, can I borrow your drill? Yeah. You know, why is that so hard? Why? And because, because, you know, why it's so hard? Because Bob's going to come out and he's going to say, Doug, you're a nerd. You don't know how to drill. I'm going to come over there and I'm going to drill the hole for you. He's going to come over. He's going to drill the hole and set it and whatever and plug it in the wall. Like it's supposed to be, you know, some, rechargeable crap. He's going to do the whole thing. Then that weekend, I'm going to have the barbecue party for my daughter and Bob's going to be over there working Broughton door, whatever he's doing in his garage. Smelling goes, what's going on? Doug's having a graduation party for his daughter. I drilled the whole fucking picture. What's that? Right? So I invite Bob. Okay. Bob come to the house and now Bob's going to come with his wife and the mother-in-law and the mother-in-law sees we have a piano and says, Oh, you know, we should come over and sing songs for Christmas. And now we're supposed to be friends with those people. Now the neighbors see that Bob is at my barbecue party. I wanted to know why didn't I invite them so that I invite them. So now I got the whole block and my daughter's graduation party having barbecue in my backyard like a block party. And that's the bad thing. Right? That's how screwed up we are. That's the bad. That's the good thing. That's the good thing because then we start talking, well, how did you beat? Why did you knock on Bob's? Oh, I needed to drill. He said, you know, we've got every family in this block has its own lawnmower. But if we had two lawnmowers for the whole block and we shared them and now we don't have to buy as much stuff, we don't have to work as much, we don't have to pollute as much. And I told this story at a conference of those kind of tech bro banker people and someone got up at the end and said, Well, yeah, it's all nice and good. But what about the lawnmower company? People are buying less lawnmowers and their stock is going to go down. It's going to hurt the economy. And what about the old lady who's depending on the dividends from her stock and the lawnmower company for her retirement. Now you've just taken food out of her mouth. To which I say, I don't want to live in a society where the welfare of that old woman is depending on how many lawnmowers we buy. We should be taking care of her. She's part of our neighbor. What kind of society is it that you have to earn enough money in your working years to support yourself entirely by yourself through the rest of your life? To the non-society. It's an every man for himself. competitive economy. Yes. And, you know, the social media stuff is hugely responsible for that too because it goes back and forth because you have these people that are just competing to attain more wealth so they can have, or have bigger Instagram followings or bigger Twitter followings or whatever. So they're incentivized not only to just like run that rat race, but they're also doing this whole other thing on social media trying to like prop up this fake existence to impress more people and it's spending, they're spending more time on that. And it seems like that that is also spiraling into more and more of this control grid system where all those companies are also like intertwined with the government somehow. It's like controlling what can be said, what can't be said. And I know, did you see Zuckerberg that they released these messages that he was agreeing with, he told Trump that they weren't going to, that they were censoring negative Facebook posts on Doge. Oh, no, when does come out last week. Really? No, I didn't see this. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, they did it for Biden too with, you know, and not saying bad things about vaccines. No, it's like, okay. So it's like, they didn't change their behavior. They just changed their allegiance. Right. Right. And that's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid of like when it comes to the integration of the tech, the big tech stuff and all of these platforms like Google and Facebook and YouTube and all that stuff, how they can just turn a dial and try to manipulate culture and manipulate community and manipulate this sort of like extra layer, this extra like this consciousness that lives above us that we're kind of all tapped into. Yeah. I mean, and the big name in that, no one really talks about, everyone talks about teal and muskets, Larry Ellison. Right. Well, Larry, I mean, what, he's buying these companies that are like, no, he really gives a shit about, right? Like CBS and yeah, but he's got a bigger surveillance infrastructure than a volunteer. Oracle was named after CIA project. The whole thing has been surveillance and control. He's the one, he's, he's on the board of peace, you know, in the Middle East. He's got the contract with the IDF to be doing their data and analysis. Right. It's really defensive on all their intelligence. He's got highest security clearance. His company has in the US government. He's got all of our employment data because all the companies, big companies use people soft as their employee management system. He's got our medical data. He just got our medical data and he's building the DNA database. He wants a DNA database of everyone America, everyone in the world. He's got more and what he wants to do with it is on the one hand, be able to do to cure cancer, predict all diseases. On the other hand, he wants to help predict crime. Oh my God, predict crime and it depends how you define crime. So what we're looking at is AI being used. Yes, and the way you're saying it to control what the population thinks. Yeah. But also to monitor and enforce our those who don't behave as we want. I mean, the easy thing, I can't imagine they're not already doing it is you use AI and predictive analysis to see you just look into the blogosphere. Look at the, at the, at the podcast sphere, whose media and talking is most likely to sow discontent in the population. And let's just throw a couple of tax audits at them, right? You don't need the warehouse. You don't have got to make a martyr, right? Talking on the, if they cart you away, you know, they cart Danny Jones away, that's not good, right? All of a sudden, what happened? It creates a Charlie Kirk kind of movement around that. You'll become cues, dry sand effect for that. Yeah. Right. But if you tax audits, it'll just take you off the playing field for a while. If it really, you know what I mean? It's like, but they don't even need to do the tax audits. All they need to do is turn a little dial on your reach. I know. So like with the shadow banning, they just turn you off in the algorithm. So no one sees you anymore. This, this has happened. This has happened to lots of people I know. Right. It's crazy. So it's not just like they're censoring or they're, they're burning the books or whatever. Now they're doing it secretly. So not only are they burning the books, but they're doing it and making it invisible. So nobody even knows it's happening. I know it is weird, though. It's like, if certain posts, it's like, why didn't this one reach 200,000 people? This one's really cool. And it reached 2,000 people. What happened there? Right. And they'll have reasons, you know, other reasons. They'll say, Oh, because you know, that one was 7.3 seconds longer than they optimized something or other. Yeah. But we can't see behind the curtain. So we don't know what's really happening. Yeah. But they just have these loose rules that are on all these platforms. These, they sort of like vague and big, you with sort of guidelines that you have to abide by. Right. But they're not really like you're forcing them. There's no court. I know. And we think that we're winning or losing the war based on sort of what? It's not an ant. It's a, it's a, it's a Oracle. It's a fucking nano tier. It's a Palantir B. I think it would under my shirt. I'm okay. It could go penetrate you. Steve won't let me kill an ant. Really? No. Because he's a Buddhist. Yeah. He's a, he's a happy. Oh my God. No, but the funny thing is we think it's like we're competing like against each other in terms of our content. It's on my chest. Oh, is he? He's gone. You're hurting him. I know. I just, I just smashed him into my chest. It's all right. You're absorbing him. Exactly. Yeah. He's getting absorbed into my bloodstream right now. It's part of your, now you're metabolism. There were certain balls here in a second. I was, I was thinking about this moment. We used to have this show when I was a kid called Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. It was like animal documentary footage in like Africa. And there was, I remember I was a little kid. I saw this and stayed with me until I figured it out. Like last year, like 40 years later, of the, you know, the gazelle is running and the cheat is running after it. The cheetah jumps on the gazelle and the gazelle kind of struggles for a while. And then you see the gazelle stop and its eyes kind of glaze over. And I always thought about that moment. What's the gazelle thinking? And why does it give up? You know, why does it stop? And, and then I realized there's this moment that the gazelle realizes, I am now cheetah food. I'm cheetah food. That's what I am. I am now more cheetah than I am gazelle. And it, it, not that it's blissful, but a little bit like those vampire movies, you know, when the, the person getting bit finally goes, ah, you know, that there's this moment of, of, it's scary to say it. I'm sure this is what like massacres are sadist or something or all. And there's a moment of, of bliss in the surrender. So it's like, I'm so good, but because of that, the ant on you, that when the ant, finally, if it's, it's like absorbed, the ant becomes Danny. The ant is part of you. You know, it's, I mean, it's, I, you know, it's an anti-pita justification for eating animals or something. But, yeah. But there is that we are metabolizing each other with everything. It's, it's life is. Yeah. Things going to other things like that. It's the way it, it's the way it is. And I feel like the, the tech bro mentality we're talking about, they're at the one hand, they're resisting that. They don't want to be part of that. They don't want to be in the swirl. And on the other hand, they're using it as an excuse to be fucking sadist. Right? It's okay for all these thousands of kids in the Congo to be going into minds at gunpoint as slaves to build the chips for my AI that I'm going to use to solve the world's problems and make a trillion dollars and get off the planet. Mm-hmm. Totally. Yeah. That's, that's a crazy thing. I think that when the, when the going back to what you're saying about the animals, which is kind of not to your point, but I think it's interesting. I think that when that happens, when the animal starts eating them, I think they start probably tripping. I think it's for like a DMT trip. Like something gets released in their brain. Yeah. Like a, like a, like a breakable glass capsule in the brain or something that goes, and then all of a sudden you're just like shuddled into like another dimension. Right. But that dimension in other words that you're tripping, I like that you say you're tripping. It's not like it's morphine. It's not like you just shut down your nervous system. Right. That you trip. So you return to, you get to see the way things are. In other words, so when you're in this dimension here trying to like, okay, we got to have some, you got to keep this life form alive. You got to do this stuff in order to promote your DNA. And it's like, okay, you're dying. Here's how things are. Nothing matters anymore. You're one. You're one with everything. It's all good. It's all part of the world. Welcome home. Welcome home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because, and it's like the DMT thing, like when, like DMT feels like death, it feels like you're actually dying. So, right. Right. Like you're disconnected from everything in the material world and all of a sudden, whatever is in there, whatever consciousness is, seems to be shuddling through like a different dimension, a different, a different universe. Right. And like everything that's around us is its own organism, but not a material organism. It's like something that you can't really touch. It's not tangible. It's a heart. It's part of it to put it into words. Yeah. I think that, I think that could be it because I don't know what my, I've been thinking about that lately because my algorithm has been feeding me all these videos of people being eaten by sharks. Lately, yeah. For some reason, my Twitter algorithm I'm in my Instagram algorithm and feeding me all this crazy stuff of people getting eaten by animals, eating by animals. - Wow. - Very weird. - Yeah, so much death on the internet lately. - Yeah, I've been off social media and it's a little hypocritical because I create, now I create content for social media. I used to just do my podcast. Just as an audio podcast, you can download it. Everything was organic, you know, no Gary Vanertruck, microcontent, anything. And now what I'm doing, because I got a sponsor for it, I'm just trying, and I moved it to video on YouTube too, 'cause all the kids watch it on YouTube. They'll even start watching it and the, you know, the behavior is they open another tab and then they listen to it in the background. - Yes. - But if you gotta be on the YouTube, 'cause we want to sit and just watch the video for that long, but they wanna hear it. But I make microcontent on Instagram or YouTube, reels and all, but I'm not making microcontent to get them to come to the podcast. I feel like I'm making the podcast in order to be able to create microcontent to reach other people. I'm thinking of it in terms of cultural transformation. How do I get, you know, the sort of, you know, pockets of smartness? How do I create, you know, sparks of intelligence out there? You know, so the podcast is kind of funding the social. It's not the social as feeder content, 'cause they don't go from, they don't know from me and they don't click on a, watch a good TikTok and go, "Oh, I'm gonna listen to the two hour version of that." - Right, right, right. - You know, those are totally different people, I think, though, that do the TikTok. - But I like reaching that. - Sure, yeah, totally. - Did you recently stop using social media as like a entertainment-- - It's a 2013. - 2013? - It was when Facebook started the policy of where they could use your posts as advertising. - Yeah. - It was one of the things that they tried, and I was just like, "Oh, fuck this shit, I'm sick of it." - Wow, that was the last time I know. - And I played on Twitter when Evan Williams started Twitter, the very early Twitter. I was on there, 140 character thing, using it to send links to things and it was interesting. And I played around on there, but I got sick of it before. Once the algorithm was tweaked to sensationalism, it was just like, "I felt, maybe I'm overly sensitive, "but I didn't feel good physically after I'd been on it." You know, when it's like email is hard enough. - Yeah. - I wanted less screen time, I wanted to do yoga and stuff. - I needed to talk, so I needed to take a break from it to see how you feel. I've heard people, friends, talk to me about, like taking like month breaks from it, from the scrolling stuff, and like they literally feel like a physiological difference. They feel healthier. They don't feel as bogged down. - No, I'll tell you, I did. I've been bogged down anyway just 'cause of the way I live my life. I'm doing too much work, too many jobs and all that, but I took my first vacation like 25 years. All right, the last time I went on vacation was 1999. - What? - When the, yeah, when the, remember the planes were supposed to fall out of the sky 'cause the Y2K bug and all that didn't know. So, and I just, 'cause I'm a writer, thinker, artist person, and in some ways I don't have a job so I don't need a vacation. But I didn't really, I went to Costa Rica. I did this crazy thing. You gotta get someone from this called Ista. Have you ever heard of this? - No. - The International School of Temple Arts. It's kind of like sexual shamanism. Oh my God, it's intense. But just being off that and doing sort of meditation and weird practices for a week in Costa Rica, eating that totally natural food. And I come back and it's like, I realize every ping from one of these devices, whenever email, it's all, it's fake. There's this, there's this reality that we're in, right? That you touch it when you're tripping or having sex or you meditate or you're in an art. It's like, it's a shamanic thing. You can feel when someone shitties coming around the corner. You can feel, you know what I mean? You can, there's, there's, I believe, retro causality coming from the, you can feel events from the future, rippling back in time. You can feel, this is real. This is the way that real things, that's why you see birds fly before the storm and the shit. It's not all physics, a lot of it's this thing, this thing that we're in, this thing. And that's how our brains evolved. Yeah, and our hearts and our gut biomes and our busy, our, our, our, our, our, our nethers. And these devices and these things and these systems are, it's almost as if they've been designed to distract us and occlude that, right? It's back nature by the forelock, right? To hold her down. It's, so we, we submit to the will of the system. But when you rediscover it's like, I've refounded again. It's like, I don't want to let it go. I don't want to, it's like, it's too, it's luscious, you know? Yeah, no, I, like, to what you're saying, like that, there's something baked into us that has probably evolved for millions of years that is tapped us into nature and made us, because, because we've become sort of, unlike any other species on earth, that sort of like lives in this symbiosis with nature, right? We're sort of like, we have become the one species that doesn't really fit, right? Like we don't, we don't really add anything back to, we don't give back, right, to nature at all. Like every, every other animal in the rainforest does. But we sort of like exist outside of that. Right, we're out, right, me give it, like most or all other animals are kind of part of some symbiotic circularly down the phytoplankton, you know? Right, and it's circular and we live in this linear thing. Right, exactly. You know, which has, has externalities and waste, or at least the illusion of one, and progress to some future. We have like forever chemicals. Right, yeah, exactly. Might, might not make forever chemicals. Right, yeah. So what is that, that one way thing that we're on? And when you go into like the woods and stuff, and I've had multiple people explain this to me, like when you go into the woods, whether it be, you know, like the red woods or the Amazon rainforest, and you're completely disconnected from the grid, and you're in this like, almost like another universe when you're in the woods, right? You, you, you are almost tapped into another realm. It's like these, these buried senses start bubbling up to the surface. We're now like the sound of the branches and the birds and the footsteps and the insects. All that stuff is sort of like another language that we used to be able to understand, and now it's kind of like bubbling back up. But you can without tripping, if you're, you put your hand on a tree, you know? There's something there. That's, it's a living thing with a kind of, I don't know what they're called, consciousness, but a presence, yeah, it's there, you know? - Uh-huh. - And it's like, once you kind of get that, it's like, boy, what about befriending this place? I mean, I understand why we didn't. Big things would come and eat us. You know, it was scary. I remember watching, you know, Kubrick's Space Odyssey 2001, those little caveman creatures. There's this one scene where they're like sitting on this cliff, at night, and they're shivering and you hear this, like, hmm, like some saber-toothed tiger out in the, somewhere walking around and they're just sitting up. You know, how many hundreds of thousands of years did we as a species just sit and go, "Oh, mm-hmm." You know, that's going to breed an Elon Musk, right? That's what's-- - Right, yeah, that's kind of inevitable, right? - Yeah. Yeah, that's bizarre. - But we didn't, you know, but we did have, we did have these sort of indigenous societies and not just and other ones that did develop in other ways. There are, you know, there's that great book, Donna's Civilization that writes about all these different civilizations that happen. And we think it's just this one line from, you know, sort of, you know, Israel and Greece to Europe to us. And it's like, "Ah, there's a ton of others that have risen and fallen throughout history." Some of them, you know, like-- - They probably don't know about. - Yeah, a lot of them-- - Before written language, you know? - Right. - For recorded history. I had this psychologist on a couple, maybe a couple months ago, who was, explained to me her take on like written language, how she was explaining how like the story of Adam and Eve in the garden eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge was like a deviation from inherent knowledge to trusting the written work. And she was explaining how the written work, you know, we get everything that we've got, going back to recorded history has been, we rely largely on writing and text and stuff like that. Obviously we use things like archeology and other stuff to corroborate all that. But like the written word is inherently deceptive. - Yeah. - Because it enables you to lie. And it gets you away from intuition. - Yeah, this is why I became a media theorist. That's in theory my job, right? Is looking at that, you can look at the whole Bible, the whole thing as an ethical manual for a society that was transitioning from an oral society to a written society. It's the whole thing, that's called the Axial Age, was when we started writing things down. Once we wrote things down, we got two things, we got history, 'cause now you could write down your history, what happened? And we got contracts into the future. Right now you could you could bind someone in the future the way you couldn't before. Now you've got that there. So you end up with this sort, that's what sort of invented this linear notion of time that we didn't have. Before writing, you just went by the seasons. It's next winter, plant the crops. Once you could write it down, this happened and that happened and this happened. And then what happens is God promises Abraham, oh, when your future generations, if you do this for me, you know, don't kill your kid, but cut his little penis, do something, whatever. Then, then, then I will reward you in the future. You know, and there'll be a Masonic aid, Messianic aid, it'll be all this stuff. So we ended up in the society that that values its past as its origin story. We own this land. This is our thing. We deserve this. And we have our inevitable, our Messiah is going to come and save the day and do all that. So we get the linear story and we lose, we lose that. And we're combining it with thermonuclear weapons. Well, it's an end game. The alpha to the omega, you know, where, where before that, before writing, our spiritual, our spiritualities, they didn't have future point. They didn't have, there was no goal. Right. It was, it was a way of being. Yeah. And then, you know, also before all that, there was a plethora of religions and, you know, the secret societies and religious cults and the stuff and people worshipped multiple gods. And there was no one exclusive God until like this whole biblical cannon came about and like the council of Nicaea to include this book and this was the doctrine. And we had to follow this. And that was kind of like what shuttled society into what it is now. And like all the other gods, you're a pagan. If you do any of that stuff and burn down the temple of elusus, no more drugs. That's bad. And yeah. In some ways, the pagan gods long term did better in that deal. You know, I was watching, I guess it was during COVID. I started to get obsessed with all those Viking shows. You watch any of those Viking shows. They're really good. You know, they Netflix and now they do these long, you know, four seasons, sagas of Vikings. But they have like Odin is their God Odin and Thor and all this. And the Viking gods didn't stay alive in church, but they stayed alive in like popular culture and comics and movies. So they were allowed to sort of almost live better lives. They could morph and get refined by sort of successive, you know, TV shows and comics and popular culture things. So in some ways, they got to live in a way that, you know, the kind of the Jesus or Muhammad gods were sort of locked down, you know, in their first or second century form and not allowed to sort of iterate with culture. So I kind of like, you know, I'm into like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore and those guys who are sort of imbuing popular culture and comics and novels with these spiritual sensibilities because they've sort of in some ways there, even though they're pop culture or low culture. In some ways, they've gotten more evolved because they've been allowed to, allowed to simmer and change. Yeah. Yeah, that's really, that's really interesting. But yeah, what, what do you make of like the fact that there's this merging going on of like on one hand, you have this super advanced, unbelievably high-tech group of people that run the world who are embracing ancient texts and sort of using like this ancient writing as like an excuse to do whatever they can to control the world. It's weird. I think about it a lot and then I look at each one of them seems to be doing it for a different reason and with a different philosophy. You know, like Musk is getting over a childhood trying to spread as seed as far as possible. Teal is gay and wants to be transformed in awakened, Oracle and Larry Ellison are kind of like Rupert Murdoch, Power Family, you know, Trump and his people are just sort of, you know, kind of low life, you know, organized crime criminals, you know, using government to get lots of money, you know, and it's like, and they're all these different, and then there's some genuine kind of Christian believers who want to get Israel and bring on the Messianic age. Then there's like the chameleons like JD Vance or like everything to everyone, depending on who's gonna give them the money or whatever. So it's like, it's really hard. It looks like kind of strange bedfellows or an amalgamation of people who have very different reasons for supporting this kind of, this kind of regime. I mean, Justin, I'm not saying there's people opportunity. The left had a very different amalgamation of people. I mean, what makes these, the left and right not really work, is that the people in them don't really have common interests for the most part. They don't have common cause. But it is weird. The, um, that there are people in the White House now who go to prayer services like in the White House, in Congress, where they say the Jews killed Jesus or let's do the, we're going to bomb Iran so that the Messiah sees the fire and comes down to earth when you've actually got some people who will say it just to get approval. And then there's people who actively believe it. And if we're working on those, I'm fine for people to have faith, but you don't, this is why they're so mad at the Pope. And the Pope is saying it's good to have faith in all that, but like, don't blow people up for your faith. That's, you know, there's this sort of papal doctrine on when you do war and when you don't. And that, that, that the international laws around, around war are based on these, this Catholic doctrine. And Catholic doctrine basically says you don't like go to war on somebody unless they're doing something really bad to someone else. Like, unless they're actively bullying somebody, you don't attack. And even if you do, you can, but then you don't use, don't say you're doing it for religious reasons, right? Yeah. So now they really, they really, they're mad, they're mad at the Pope, the war ones. Yeah, because the Pope was, the Pope was talking shit about, or talking, not wasn't talking shit, but basically he was like going against everything that our government's doing right now. And that's bad because we're trying to paint, they're trying to paint everything as like this big Christian thing. Right. And trying to promote this war based on, there was a crazy story that came out where like, the, the generals were trying to, they were talking to the, they're subordinates and telling them that, like, Trump was like, the commanded by Christ to do this. Yeah. That was the guy who broke, that's my friend, Jonathan Larsen. He's got this great. Oh really? He's, yeah, called the fucking news. Oh, yeah. He's so cool. Oh, yeah. I saw that. Yeah. The fucking news is one who broke it, TFN. And it's great. They got this logo instead of like the Facebook on thumbs up. It's, it's in Facebook style. It's, it's a thing. It's perfect. It's perfect. But, uh, yeah, they, they were, um, yeah, troops were complaining because their generals and their commanders were telling them, you know, we're fighting, you know, we're fighting to bring back Christ. Christ will come back. Yeah, you're not supposed to do that. But I guess you're not supposed to do that. Well, at least we say that. But now there's people who believe we should. You know, and I get it, they think it's a Christian nation and that, that America can be, America and Trump are instruments of, uh, kind of a triumphalist vision of Christ. Not, this is like nothing. What Christ said or did. I mean, it's not, it's not Bible Christ like it all. Right. But it's a, there is a religion that's when built around Christ. It's a, uh, you know, legitimate religion. It's got churches and stuff where the idea is, um, to, you know, we do it, we can to bring about the, the apocalypse. Mm-hmm. You know, so that, though, then, you know, so we got to get the Jews, got to own Israel or greater Israel, which is like a bunch of other countries. And then once that happens and there's the red heifer and, you know, all those things happen. Exactly. Then boom. Right. And there's just some, you know, Jewish cults that believe that and some Christian cults, but that's the, the, the Washington DC. That's the prayer breakfast group. That's a prayer breakfast cult. Yeah. That's their vision of how, of how it goes. Therefore, you need sort of American triumphalism. I don't know what's crazier. The fact that that's true or the fact that everybody in society has access to that information and that knowledge. And they're not freaking out about it. Right. Exactly. That, that whole thing combined with all the Epstein things, because everyone's got their own thing. So it's like, even if I, oh, I'm going to be all man about, I'm going to be all about that. And then it's like, oh, look, Trump just signed that, so I've been legal. It's like, Joe Rogan, it's like, Joe Rogan, I don't like Trump, I don't like Trump. And it's like, oh, well, I think I'll show up for that one. You know, and it's like, everyone's so highly throw you a bone. But the thing is we shouldn't be living in a society where our dictator has so much power that they throw you a bone for you to then, I think Trump's probably getting so desperate because he's losing so much popular support from the people that lobbied for him so much during that. No. I know. I know that Marjorie Taylor green. I think he probably, I don't know, I have no inside knowledge, but if I was to guess, I would guess that he saw an opportunity to do something that he knew Joe would like. And he's like, Hey, man, I'll do this for you. I'll get the FDA approval. Will you, will you come to the White House and be in front of the camera with me? I bet you he asked to do this. Yeah. And like put Joe on a hot seat and then yeah, and it helps with all the, because the RFK thing helps drop way more than it helps Joe. Oh, yeah. And the RFK stuff was sort of going shit wall, you know, that, that I don't even know the whole story. But you know, RFK lost all this popularity and changed his mind about this and the vaccine thing and the measles. So the whole sort of RFK, you know, health nut new age, you know, to get that contingent wasn't working. You legalize mushrooms, man, you get, you know, you kind of win a whole lot of that, that sort of failed FDA people. Right. Right. It is a, it is a, it's a small victory. Right. That's like it's like celebrating the gut biome or something, you know, it's, oh my God. Oh, I got, can I pee and go back? Yes. Absolutely. Because that's the main thing I did. I got a pull up bar and I went from, I could do one pull up now. I'm like, it's six. That's great. Yeah. And then, and then just try to like increase, increase the amount you do and then start increasing the weight. Right. And you don't have to do a lot of them. Just do 10, do 10 reps of a weight that's like, you can barely do comfortably without hurting yourself. Yeah. And yeah, keep doing that. There's lots of, there's lots of supplements you can take creatines a great one. Yeah. I got that. Creatines a good thing. A good daily thing that you can use. And machines are all right. Someone said, don't give machines. They only do free weights. Oh no. Machines are fine. Because I feel like I'm so much less likely to get injured. Machines are totally fine. Yeah. Yeah. You don't, that person's crazy. I prefer machines, honestly. But yeah, lots of, the more you can do outside, is the better, is, is way better. Oh really? Cause the oxygen? Not, no. Cause the light. Yeah. It's better to do stuff outside. It's better like for me, like if I wake up early and I get out and like the, when the sun's still rising and to do some, just like, like some activity out there, like in the morning, like, and also like, you don't have to think of it like this big task. You just like, if you just keep some weights around your house, you can, like, you can microdose it. Right. You know, like before work or whatever, just for five minutes, lift some weights, do some push-ups, stuff like that, just like throughout, like work it into your day. You don't have to, you don't have to go crazy. Yeah. And eventually you'll start to see some progress and you'll get more and more in tune with it. And it'll work. No, cause it's good. I got like nice little stringy, like Bruce Lee muscles, which is kind of, I'm in the way, they came from nowhere. They really came from nowhere, like two weeks in. I was like, oh, that's great. I know. A lot of people, a lot of people, um, cause I had no fat. So I didn't have to work off fat to get muscle. I was just, boom. Right. So it came from, it was easy, it's easier to grow it than I guess then. Get teens a great way to do it, um, but you get your blood work often, or have you gotten your blood work? I mean, I, sure. Yeah. You can test your hormone levels and there's things you can do to like optimize your testosterone level. Right. And if you can get your testosterone level optimized, it'll really help with muscle growth and not just that, but like, like, um, mental clarity, all kinds of things. Sleep gets better, recovery gets better, more energy, yeah, all kinds of stuff. It's like a, it's amazing. Yeah, I'll do it for real, cause I look out online, okay, tribulus, get this, get that, you know, there's all these names of, shit, but yeah, I'm going random if I should have a professional, you know, yeah, yeah, there's a ton, there's a ton of stuff you can do to optimize. But for like the weights, for like the, um, the weightlifting stuff, you don't have to go crazy. You're not a big, you're not a daily gym kind of guy then. Yeah. I, I, I, I am a daily exercise guy. I do a lot of cardio stuff and I do, like when I, I have a gym in the other room here, and I do heavy weights, I have like a sled that I push, I have lots of weights like kettle bells and stuff like that. But I do it, I don't do it every day. I do it maybe two days a week, but I just go, I go really hard when I do do it. Right. So I'll just do as much weight as I possibly can until I'm just like exhausted, but because you got babies, right? Yeah. I got three. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot. I know. That's a lot. And there's like no amount of money that changes that either, you know, I mean, I guess it could if you're an asshole, but you know, the change is the amount of work it is having to get. You know, no, no, I try to spend as much time as I possibly can with them. You know, I don't want to be an absent, absent father. And then like, you know, like the other thing is, you know, you don't want to give them too much. You don't want to make them feel like they have like an easy way. Yeah. You don't want to make them feel like they're going to have an easy way through life or that they have any money or that they have any sort of like backup. Yeah. Kind of want to make them feel like it's, it's like that, it's like that fourth turning thing, you know, where it's like the hard times you heard this saying, it's like, uh, we should record. Are we rolling? Yeah, we're still. All right. It's the, it's that, that fourth turning phrase where it's like hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, you know what I mean? And like I grew up, would not any, I didn't grew up no money, but I grew up around a lot of kids. A lot of my friends were very wealthy, you know, and there was like a big difference between us. And you can see, you know, people that buy in large, I would say most people they grow up with a lot of money with really rich parents. They don't always seem to be like the most interesting, adaptable people that people had. It was always like people had money and no class or a class and no money is right. I used to think we were rich because I lived in the suburbs, you know, and we had two cars. We didn't, you know, we got our clothes from Sears Robot catalog, but you know, it seemed fine. Then I got into Princeton and went there and was like, oh, that's what rich is, you know? There's people who like had like country, like, like, like the girl there. Her last name was Rhodes, like Rhodes Scholar, like Rhodes Asia, you know, like Timmy Forbes, it's like Forbes. It was like, those were the people that I was like, oh my God. And they would, they would, they would go to New York every weekend and have these, you know, park avenue things or, oh, we're having a party. Oh, this weekend, we're on Martha's Vineyard. We'll send the plane around, you know? Like, geez. Yeah. I kind of got blasted into that world when I was really young, too, because one of my first jobs ever was working for this car magazine called the DuPont Registry. And it was, I was surrounded by the DuPonts, you know, and all these people who were flying around in Jets and driving in Ferraris and stuff like this, and I was like, whoa, I got to like spend some time at their parties and hanging out at their houses and like, you know, rubbing shoulders with their kids. And I was like, God, this is a whole different world. It was like crazy that I was like even in the same room as these people. Yeah. I quickly realized when I got invited to one of those events, I only got to like two or three things. I was the entertainment, you know? Or tell your, you should tell your Epstein story. You would do a party, didn't you go to a party? Yeah. Well, it was sort of the same, the same people. I mean, what I was talking about before, the whole that Dawkins crowd. Yeah. I went. It was, this was really funny. I, um, so after I went to that, I didn't, you know, hang out with those people much anymore. I kind of disgraced myself. I think, and my agent by challenging the great Richard Dawkins on his atheism and being a weird-ass spiritual psychedelic kid. Didn't you, but I was listening to you and Duncan talk about it. You brought a lesbian to an Epstein party, and that was a big, that was a no-no. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Well, it was, it wasn't, I didn't know it was an Epstein party. I mean, Epstein wasn't famous yet. This was the late '90s, but it turned out to be an Epstein party, but no, it was a party of, um, supposed to be these, the scientists and tech bros. It was called like millionaire dinner or something, millionaire dinner club. Um, so it had a bunch of the, the people who were running the big tech companies. At that time, and, um, and then the famous scientist. And this guy, this, this literary agent invited me to go to it and, um, I was like, oh, this is like my chance to really meet the, the movers and shakers and all. And he said, um, but you can have a plus one. He said, but make it a really good plus one because this is, make it, make it count. And I figured, so I, I thought, like, who's the smartest person I know, right? So there was this woman, um, in Brooklyn who ran this literary web scene, early web days, but she really smart. The kind of person who can finish your thought before you've even had it, you know, one of those. And okay, I'll bring her. So and she said, sure, I'll go. So I bring, I go there and the host of the thing, as soon as he sees her, he takes, he grabs me on the brain. I still feel it. He grabs, pulls me aside and he goes, how dare you waste your plus one on it, on a ugly lesbian. Actually, he said ugly, dike, I think. And how did he know that she was lesbian? Was it obvious? I guess. I don't know. Or maybe he knew her better than I know her, whatever looked up her wiki, I had no idea. I didn't know. I was like, it's just, that's how dark I looked up in my space. Yeah. I just, I didn't think she was ugly, you know, and I didn't know she was a lesbian. It's still don't necessarily, but you're supposed to bring a young. - Hot, big breasted. - I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, you were supposed to, I invited you, 'cause I was East Village 20 something, I invited you, so you'd raise the quotient of the party. And he goes, look, and at the tables, it's all sort of middle-aged guys with these very, in some cases, two young girls that look like they could be seniors at Dalton, right? And only like 10, 20 years later, I realized, oh, those dinners were paid for by Epstein. These were Epstein-funded dinners. I mean, they were essentially dinners for scientists to become part of culture and all that, and to meet potential funders. I mean, there was a lot of, it was the tech science, funder world. And they were together, you could still go to conferences and find all those people together. But it was like, oh, but I remember once that I had such, I'm an innocent. I had such a sick feeling in my stomach about what is this? And this is, am I, should I be more cool? Should I have known? Should I be going out with someone hot? Should I, and it's like, this was, I was kind of immersed in suddenly in the sort of wealthy toxic male Epstein value system. And, you know, ended up just staying away. You know, I just stayed away from them for years. It's so funny. Like you have to bring this accessory, this human accessory. Right. But you, but you realize how people fall into that. I mean, I should have been more impressionable, 28-year-old or whatever, but I was already kind of setting my ethical ways. But if you're a scientist, and you're not getting laid, and whatever, now you're in this thing, and there's millionaires and other scientists, and it creates a sort of a, a, a, a permission. Yes, exactly. Around doing icky stuff. It's like, oh, really? Look, there's no Mchomsky over there, right? You know, and he's as lefty as it gets. And he's kind of saying, oh, he's a friend of the things. Stephen Hawking's over there getting a lap dance. I'm good. So it's like, I guess this is really, and I know the arguments they'll make. It's like, like, since ancient Greece, you know, scientists, and then they do it, and it's, and these young women are getting something out of it, they're there. They're giving consent. They're going to get professional things. They're meeting you. You know, how much better is it for them to be with you and sent here against their will? Right. They're going to want to be with some 17-year-old who's going to come in 20 seconds. It's like, no, they're going to be taken in and cared for, and you appreciate them, and you create a, you can create a story around, around that kind of abuse. Totally. Yeah, that. You know, and there, but for the grace of God, go we, right? Because anyone could be frustrated and tempted into that. Mm-hmm. 100%. Yeah. No, I had, actually, we had a guy on here a couple weeks ago who was telling us a story about how Jeffrey Epstein wanted to meet with him, and they ended up doing a Skype call. And he's like, basically, like, looked him up. This was before all, I think this was before his first arrest, and in the early 2000s. And he was like, oh, yeah, this guy's funding all of the smartest people I know. Why wouldn't I do a 20-minute Zoom call with him? So we do a 20-minute Skype call with the guy. And he said, Jeffrey Epstein was just sitting on the Skype call asking him to tell him stories about spoon bending and telepathy for like 20 or 30 minutes. Right. Like, he was fascinated with this. That's interesting. You're a normal ESP type stuff. Yeah. So I mean, that combined with all this other occult stuff that he was into, and then Gilaen was into with like, we were talking about before, I don't know if we were recording, but we were talking about the Temple of Poseidon earlier. And her obsession with like, the lost city of Atlantis and all this stuff, and then you combine that with the eugenics stuff that he was interested in and like, well, right. If you can connect it to something really old, then it doesn't feel like you're such a psychopathic aberration, right? Right. Right. Right. It's sort of a continuity of it. The other thing I was thinking when talking about these sort of Epstein interactions and stuff, what got me out of that alive, right? The reason I didn't fall into it was because I, it's my spidey sense. You know, our spidey sense is what goes, uh, something's off here, right? That's why we've got to stay connected to this, whatever this natural shamanic, whatever this realm we're talking about. The more invested you are or, or distracted you are by all the social media metrics, if those are your gauges of good and bad, of right and wrong, then you lose that got spidey, ethical thing, you know, and that's, and of course, I mean, it's like, it's just like saying, oh, if you're completely a capitalist and nothing else, you're going to end up doing immoral things. Of course you are because you're not going to feel the externalities of your actions. You're not going to feel the people you're killing or whatever. So it's that. I really feel like the way to survive and thrive in this unfolding landscape that's getting weirder and weirder and darker is to stay in touch with that, you know, that the part that we're trying to crush, the sweet, innocent, vulnerable, fleshy, psychedelic, thoughtful thing. You know, that's the strength. Yes. Yes, exactly. Have you ever heard of Adam Curtis? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, his film, Hyponormalization, that's what this whole moment reminds me of. Yeah. You should get him on. I want to get him on my podcast. We've talked to him before, but he doesn't, he's not interested in doing podcasts. I know. I don't know. He's making five hours of movies every year. It's incredible. It's incredible. The stuff that he does. And like the whole, the whole Hyponormalization thing seems to be more relevant today than ever because like the way the media is where it's like you have access to all the deepest, darkest secrets. It's like of the people that run the world now, but everyone knows they can't do anything about it. You know, it's like all we can do, you have two levels of it. You have like people like us who talk about it for a living, who like we can talk about it and do everything we can to like boil our, our little pot of water in this ocean. Right. And then you have like people who have real jobs, who have to go to work and to take care of whatever they have to take care of and they don't really have the time and the bandwidth to pay attention to all this stuff, but they're kind of peripherally aware of it. They know it exists. And they know that like, oh my god, like this whole system is kind of not real. So I'm just going to keep pretending my way through, like if I, if I accept the fact that it's all a sham, how can I reconcile that with like getting up and going to work every day and being a part of this whole system? Right. You know, it's tricky. It's like we're pretending. Yeah. But then the object of the game is to start to dedicate as much of your time and energy toward the alternative ways of being, you know, whether it's just being nice to people in the street or not being on the phone or answering less email or changing jobs, doing favors. You know, it, you know, we can't single handedly create a new social economic order that doesn't reward sociopaths. Right. That can't happen overnight, but we can engage in behaviors and ways of moving through our lives that engender a more compassionate, local, friendly, human approach. That's what, you know, my pocket team human is like to say, being humans a team sport, let's act like that. What would that, what would that look like? Yeah. 100%. Behavioral. You know, it's behavioral. It's like, it starts really easy. It's like the first thing, you know, I would tell people is, um, and it works for the question to remember the Sabbath, maybe start that way, take one day a week and unplug from these systems. Yeah. Don't even look at a screen one day from Friday night to Saturday night. Don't look at a screen, meet people, touch people, have sex, play games one day. And that's enough to recalibrate your system. When you go back on Saturday night and sundown to the device, it's like, oh, this is, yeah. This is doing something. Yeah. It's like an alternate reality. Yeah. It's an alternate reality. It's the simulation. People always keep saying, oh, we're living in a simulation, or we are, no, no, we made a simulation. Right. You know, we weren't living in a simulation. We own them. Yeah. 100%. And also inside that simulation, you have multiple simulations because like the way the algorithms are, there's pockets. Right. There's like little like pocket echo chamber, echo chambers that people live in where they don't cross over. The other day, we had this dude on the podcast who he's like an academic attack dog. He's like an attack dog for academic consensus. And so like normally online, all of like the alternative stuff, like the alternative history, all of the, anything that doesn't go, anything that goes against like scientific consensus or norms, right? Sometimes to get the most attention online, like exposing corruption, talking to like stuff that Graham Hancock talks about, like ancient civilizations, the possibility, like when you use your imagination, and you try to say, you know, what if they were wrong? What if the, what if the textbooks in the schools aren't actually. what's, what the truth is. What if there's more to this story, right? And this guy is like the one that goes online and like publicly humiliates and belittles that group of people. And I was like, I'm like, what if we just like went completely against the grain and had this guy on the podcast, the guy that everyone, the guy that everyone who listens to my show, despise, would despise. And hate this guy, I'm like, let's, let's give it a shake. See how it goes. And I thought it might like open up a portal, but it did it. It was just like a brick wall. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, we got into some, we were talking about everything from like the pharmaceutical industry to, to ancient civilizations and Graham Hancock and stuff like that. And this guy was like, I was asking him, like, is there anything, is there anything that you looked at originally that you thought was a hundred percent of bona fide fact that you were able to come around on and change your mind on with other evidence? Like are there any of these crazy fringe things that you hated at first that you were able to change your mind on? He goes, no, never. And he's like, I don't think it'll ever happen either. Like he thought, he thinks he's absolutely right. So like, it really illuminated to me that this whole sort of like podcast ecosystem is his own separate universe from a whole nother part of reality. And I don't know if it's a fact that the people like him, the people that are in academia, the scientists that work in labs all day every day that don't pay attention to the media. Like are they, like are they so disconnected? Are they in a completely separate universe and reality from what this podcasting world is? Like if you were into, introduce them into this or inject this world into their veins, would it be like a total disconnect? Would there be, would it be like, what is this? This is completely not real. This is completely disconnected from my reality of what I see every day working in the lab with my hands on science and looking at atoms and all this stuff. I mean, and there's some of those guys have podcasts, right? Some of them do. Yeah, cool sciencey people and astronomers talking about other universes. Yeah. And this guys take is all those people are grifters. Like anyone who does real science who goes on a podcast is most likely a grifter because the fact that they're going in front of a microphone means they have some sort of a financial game that goes on a microphone or whatever. Carl Sagan and I don't think so. I think some are like public educators. Yeah. And it's thrilling, especially with kids to tell them about what's going on in the, I mean, I understand what they mean. I mean, the guy had like no imagination whatsoever. Right. And the fact that he can't change his mind about anything is not, he's not a real scientist then. You know, what the podcast universe can do, the thing I think is most valuable for is kind of exercising the what if muscle and people's brains? What if this, what if that? Like I was, I was telling you just before, before we started that I was listening to a bunch of your shows, you know, before coming on and like people talking about space and the aliens and stuff and like some of it, I'm like, I don't believe that. But the experience of what if thing, the experience of imagining it kind of creates more space in the brain. And the way, the way, I don't know if you're older, do you remember Art Bell? Were you around for him? Oh, of course, yeah. So you do an Art Bell thing with people, which I like, which is even if they're going off and it's like, well, these, these, these people are then more enslaved for the gold and just be able to do that kind of thing. And, but you, you stay with them not, not necessarily positive reinforcing, whatever, but okay, and then what? And then why would that? And so you, you follow them logically through their thing and try out, you try it on at least, you know what I mean? Which is though, that's what Art used to do. And he's like, is he believing it or not? He's like, you can never really tell. Yeah. And I like, I like, I like for you to stay in that space between 'cause it's like, yeah, I've always just been fascinated by this rift between like academia and like the entertainment podcast thing sort of world, you know, like the Art Bell world versus like the strict academic science because there's been this emergence of people that have been popping out of like the traditional consensus by the book sort of like PhD world who have like sort of sort of have been like coming out and like there's this like, there's this phenomena where they clash online and, and it's become a team sport. It should be, if we on the PhD side, which I am now, don't embrace our wonder, then people will hate us. They say, oh, you're stuck in your ivory tower, you're not able to have any ideas, you're just there to protect the establishment view of this and that, that's what it's for. Yeah, and I see the value in both. I think they should be, they should both exist simultaneous and there should be, they should be intertwined, but I've like, I've just heard so many stories of people in academia being like, for example, you know, one guy who was like publishing, publishing his dissertation and like went in front of the dissertation committee, he did a dissertation on drugs used in ancient Rome and the committee on his dissertation said, you have to take out every reference to recreational drug in ancient Rome before we give you your PhD. And he goes, why, and the head of the committee says, because the Romans wouldn't have done such a thing. And he's like, well, that's some weird form of censorship. So he did it, got his PhD and then he went out and made a book about it. Right, that is weird, you know, it's like, but I know that's not, that's not. What the committee should be doing is saying, you haven't demonstrated, you haven't demonstrated that it was recreational. In other words, you're making an assumption that they were doing recreational drugs. We don't have any evidence of that. So you can't say it, but it doesn't sound like that's what they were doing. - No, he had overwhelming evidence of they were doing it. - Yeah, one thing I do a Roman dissertation committees is I try to flip it and I explain to the person defending their dissertation. You're not defending your dissertation. We professors are defending the canon against your dissertation. When you write a dissertation, the underlying drive is to say, the canon is incomplete. I have new information that you need to include in the canon and we are defending. We're here to say, no, no, no, we don't want something new. We don't, because if you're writing a dissertation, you're basically saying that the establishment is either wrong or they're ignorant of something that they need to know. So who's defending what? You know, and if you flip it to that, it makes them feel that they're not nervous anymore. You know, it flips the thing. - Right, yeah. And I think that one of the cool things about, you know, one of the cool things about some of these like fringe ideas or fringe, you know, scientific theories or whatever it might be, UFOs or anything like that, is that that stuff can kind of be, which has happened for me, what draws you into something else. Like that can be like the hook that gets you interested in something that sort of draws you in. Like, uh-huh, this sounds a little bit crazy. Maybe they're wrong about something and you, at first you may think it's all real and then you kind of like learn something else. Like, oh shit, maybe it's not real. Now I'm kind of incentivized to like really drill down and find the truth about this and them. Before you know it, you become an expert in whatever it is. - Yeah. And the stuff was, I mean, the stuff we accept now that was seen as crazy when I was a kid, gut biome. Never believed in that. They didn't even believe when I was a kid, I would eat milk and I would get sick. They didn't even believe in lactose intolerance when I was a kid. That's in 70s. It was like not a thing. - Yeah. - It's like, it's science, you know, it's real. Gut biome is real. There's real bacteria in there that determine your mood and your health and all these things. - It's the second brain. - It is. And your immune system and these are all friggin' real. And, you know, amazing Randy, whatever it is, he says he's gonna give a million bucks to anyone who proves something supernatural. He's this magician who, but he'll never give it. Because there's a ton of stuff that's weird. And when someone from the academy, that's the worst for them. When someone from the academy challenges the laws of science, like Rupert Sheldrake. I don't know if you know him. - Oh yeah. - He came up with more for Genesis and all great. - Morphic Resonance. - Morphic Resonance. - Yeah, yeah. He did a TED talk and it's the only TED talk that I've ever got censored. And in a TED talk, he said that he believes that the laws, what if the laws of science themselves evolve? - Yes. - The physics change. - Right. - Because everything else does. What if they do too? Or if they're in a bigger system. And they just freak the fuck out and they just raced it off the thing. You're not allowed to do that. - That's so crazy. Why would you do that? 'Cause it undermines all the whatever. But it's like, that was the best. It's like, 'cause then it's like a meta-scientific. There's a scientific model. The scientific model's living in a reality that's changing. So how does it model? It's like, beautiful. And whether it's true or not, It's just a big bitch. beautiful what if. It's not as crazy as, you know, it's not a big foot what if. Right. It's a, it's a, it's a pretty straightforward one. Right. Well, there's, I mean, there's absolutely shit out there that is around us all the time that you can't measure or weigh in a lab, you know, and that there's, there's a real thing happening out there, a real multiple phenomena that don't fit into the scientific method. You can't, you can't, they don't measure up to scientific method mustard and you can't, you can't quantify it. Right. Well, they, maybe they do at some point if we had other languages and ways of understanding thing, you know, with some alternate universe, like retro causality is the one that I'm really into lately. Micharo, it talks a lot of, have you had him on? He's a great occult historian. So retro, retro causality, he didn't prove it, but I first heard about it through him is the idea that, that events in the future affect the present and the present affects the past. So what they've done to these experiments where a whole bunch of people take a test and they don't show the, how they, well, they did or whatever. And then people who study for the test after the test do better on the test than people who didn't. People who study for the test after the test do better. Why is that? Because as retro causal, retro causal learning. Right. So events in the future affect the past. You know, and it's interesting, you know, that crazy, and Nick Land, the guy who all the, he believes that capitalism is a strange attractor in the future, that it's, that the, what, what, what's drawing us toward it, which is why things are happening the way they are. The capitalism is what is like a, a strange attractor to capitalism is a, a future state that is rippling back and, and drawing us toward it into, into its future. That it's an inevitable future that's already there. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the idea, that time loop idea, right? Yeah. And they're pre-cognition. Look, they're, I have your shirts over stores that have dreams, that predict the future and stuff like that. It's the future is broadcasting back to us. And there's another physics theory. I forgot who it is now that, that, that it's apparently, it kind of makes sense that when the big bang happened, the time moved forward and backward at the same time, it didn't just move forward, so we're, we're, right. So loop, we're coming back around. Time loop was, was that guy? I interviewed him on my podcast. Wargo? Yeah. Yeah. Wargo. Yeah. He's great. I know. And he's a real scientist, right? He's a real deal. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting because it's a real, it's been documented throughout history of people like recording their dreams and like actually proving that these events happened after they had the dreams about them. Yeah. And then there's that, I mean, it doesn't show a heck of a lot, but the Princeton random number generator, number generator, it's weird when something's going to happen. There was a book, there was a, there was an entire book written about the Titanic sinking before the Titanic actually sunk. And it was like the, it was called, the, the name of the ship was called the Titan, I think, right? I remember we looked this up, back to Titan, Poseidon. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, man. It's bonkers. Well, thanks for doing this, dude. This has been really fun. Yeah. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. I'm really excited that you can get a whole cathedral this way. I'm doing a podcast. I want a cathedral too. Yeah. It's, uh, it's definitely fun. It didn't, it took us, uh, it took us a while to figure out the design, but once we figured it out, we got, we knocked it out pretty quick. I'm not sure what kind of cathedral it is, but people can use their imagination. Yeah, but not that pointy. So it could still, it's got a slight, you know, slight Islam shaping. Uh-huh. So it's good. And a contemporary, uh, I don't know, it almost got a slight, a slight reminiscent of the, the carpet in, in Kubrick's, uh, the shining shining. We wanted to put that carpet in here, but we, we found some people who made it and it was just too expensive. Oh, really? They just went nuts. Yeah. Yeah. It was like overseas. They like hand make that carpet, that shining carpet. Yeah. Oh my god. It's crazy. That would have been cool. All right. Next time, I'll put it in my cathedral. Yes. Yeah. Do it. Yeah. I just got to get, I got to get advertisers. Figure that out. That's how it gets paid for. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, right. Thanks. Well, tell people where they can find your podcast again. Uh, team human, your books and all that. Yeah. Team humans, the podcast you can find it everywhere. You know, YouTube and all those places. I'm Douglas Rushcoff got Rushcoff.com. The, the book you'll like is called Survival of the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Well, you want to book that. It'll just make you happy. Get team human. And that's a nice, uh, that's a nice book. Keep it in the bathroom. There's like a hundred little sections. You read one per sitting. It's a good unit dose kind of micro dose book. Perfect. Yeah. Awesome. We'll link it all below. Thanks for your time. It's been fun. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Can I everybody?