Dr. Chris Ryan and I stopped in Bisbee, AZ to visit a rattlesnake guy and talk to a guy who has been studying snakes for 50 years and has been bitten 15 times by them. I don t know why anyone would choose to live in a toxic place like that, but I guess it's a good thing it's not like it's like a normal place to live. I have no idea what it is, but it's definitely not a place you want to visit if you don't want to get bitten by a snake. And if you do, don't worry, you're not the only one who's been bitten by one. I don't know why you would want to live there either, but that's what happens when you're on the road and you stop to visit someone you care deeply about and they don't care about you. It's a weird place and it's probably not a good place to be, but you do what you gotta do, so why not go there and see what you can find out about it? It's not a bad place to stop and visit, and you'll probably have a lot of interesting experiences along the way. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you like what you hear, tweet me and let me know what you thought of it! Timestamps: 1:30 - I'm back in New Orleans 4:00 - I just got back from the road 6:00 7: What's your favorite part of the road? 8: Who do you think is the most toxic place in Arizona? 9:15 - What are you would like to see me visit? 11:40 - What is your favorite snake guy? 14:30 15:40 16:00- I'm going to go to Bisbee? 17:20 - What kind of snake guy you think I should be next? 18:30- What do you like to eat? 19:20 22:15 20:00 | How to eat a snake? 27:30 | How many bites I've been bitten? 26:40 | How do you feel about a snake bite? 29:00 / 30: How much venom? 31:30 // 30:00 + 33:00 // 34:30 / 36:10 36:40 // 35:30 + 36:00 ?
00:00:59.000There's not much of a reason to go to Bisbee.
00:01:02.000If you said Bisbee and you didn't visit Stanhope, if you went to Phoenix and didn't visit a guy that you knew there, it's like, I'm sorry man, I got really busy.
00:01:56.000And so I'm traveling, and I'm also meeting people along the way, some of which are planned, like if Stanhope had been around and was willing to hang, definitely would have hung with him.
00:02:06.000But others just come up, like right near Bisbee.
00:02:12.000See, people follow me on social media, and they're like, oh, I see you're in Texas.
00:02:15.000You should visit my buddy in Terlingua.
00:02:17.000And I did, and I'll tell you that story in a minute.
00:02:19.000But near Bisbee, this woman, Dorothy, I think her name was, wrote to me, and she's like, dude, you're in southern Arizona.
00:02:26.000You've got to drop in on my buddy, the rattlesnake guy.
00:02:31.000Who's been studying rattlesnakes for 50 years by himself.
00:02:36.000He's not looking for fame or anything, but I'll talk to him.
00:02:39.000I think he'd like you and you guys would enjoy each other's company.
00:02:43.000So I'm like, sure, I'll talk to the rattlesnake guys.
00:02:46.000So he came out to this campsite and we hung out for the morning.
00:03:59.000They're digesting the animal from within because they don't have enough enzymes within their own digestive tract to digest the whole thing from outside, right?
00:04:10.000So when they get the animal inside them, they're digesting it simultaneously from outside in and then from inside out.
00:05:16.000But what I'm saying is, but if something else was going after that snake, if something had killed, it's like a coyote had killed a snake, I really wouldn't be bothered by it.
00:06:58.000But anyway, I was wandering around the neighborhood in my Indian thing and I saw this rabbit and there was a bush with these hard little fruits on it and I grabbed one of these fruits and I threw it at the rabbit.
00:07:21.000So I walk over and I look at the rabbit and it's just laying there and then I hear this squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak under this pine tree and I go, and there's this nest of Little baby rabbits with their eyes still closed.
00:07:53.000So I took the babies home and the next door neighbor, my friend's mother, was a nurse.
00:07:59.000And I showed her and she had like a syringe without the needle and she showed me you have to mix, can't give them straight milk because the rabbit milk is thinner so you have to mix water with it and all this stuff and I was feeding them and then I went back actually a little while later,
00:08:15.000maybe, I don't know, the next day or something and the big rabbit was gone.
00:08:20.000Which then later in life, I thought maybe it wasn't dead.
00:08:23.000Maybe it was faking it to try to save the babies to distract me somehow.
00:08:51.000No, then we had to go visit my uncle in Ohio.
00:08:56.000And I left the rabbits with this girl and told her how to take care of them and all that.
00:09:01.000And the girl apparently forgot about mixing the water.
00:09:06.000And so by the time I got back after a three-day weekend, a couple of them had died, but she didn't want to tell me.
00:09:14.000And, you know, we were 10, 11. And actually it was all through the biology teacher and then it turned out by the time that she told them they were all dead.
00:10:36.000That instantaneous ability to just go after something, you don't meet them, you don't establish a friendship with them, you don't talk to them at all.
00:10:42.000That's why I'm saying it's a reflection.
00:10:43.000As a psychologist, I find it really interesting because it's, you know, you see these guys, every fucking day there's another story about an anti-gay pro.
00:10:54.000You know, minister who's been sucking little boys dicks every day.
00:11:14.000You know, and so this whole the trolling and stuff going on online is interesting because people don't realize that they're exposing themselves.
00:11:23.000Yeah, well, it's also a really shitty way of interacting with humans that some people participate in almost exclusively.
00:11:32.000Like, there's some people right now in our culture that They're communicating with people, but the people that they're communicating with, they're only communicating with people online.
00:11:42.000They're only doing it through Twitter or Facebook or however they do it.
00:11:46.000So their days are spent interacting just randomly with people tweeting at them and reading tweets or reading message board posts or posts.
00:11:58.000Posting things or reading Instagram You know passages all they're doing is interacting with people online and I just think there's a lot of kids developing that way because they're not even even when they're around each other they're spending more time Communicating with people through a device than they are doing it face to face because they're always distracted and And I feel like this is a very – it's not indicative of how we evolved.
00:12:35.000There's just this new weird form of expression that doesn't make you take into consideration the other people's feelings.
00:12:40.000It's like the only time we've ever had something like that.
00:12:42.000If you killed someone or you beat someone up and you looked at them and they looked at you and you knew that you hated them, at least that's an honest attack.
00:12:51.000But if you want something terrible to happen to someone and you don't even know them, he just heard him on a podcast, he was a guest and he annoyed you, so you want terrible things to happen to him.
00:14:08.000Yeah, but the thing in Spain is funny because if you come from Mexico, Uganda, wherever, and you immigrate to Spain and you get residency, you have to turn in your driver's license and they'll give you a Spanish license, right?
00:14:23.000The only country where they won't honor your license is the United States.
00:14:30.000That bullshit, night school for six weeks, take the ridiculous test that's designed to trick you and the translation into English is incomprehensible.
00:15:41.000You know, don't have a vehicle registered in your name.
00:15:44.000Not that I would ever do any of these things.
00:15:46.000Yeah, I was reading about expats and about people who just decide to just go and move over to Europe for a while.
00:15:55.000It's such an adventuresome thing to do, if you really think about it.
00:15:59.000As an American, because Americans are for sure locked into our way of thinking.
00:16:05.000I don't want to speak for the whole group, but when you think of the typical American, you think of someone who just, they like things the way they have them here.
00:18:58.000Or, I mean, how many number of people that come from other countries that speak Spanish, or speak English, rather, but they speak it with the accent of their place.
00:19:58.000And I was just learning Spanish then, and he got really pissed off at me when I said I was American, because he's like, we're all Americans, dude.
00:20:34.000I took Italian in college and Spanish in high school and I remembered none of it.
00:20:40.000I took three years of German in middle school, high school, because I initially signed up for Spanish, which would have been the smart move.
00:20:51.000But then over the summer, I was like eighth grade, I think.
00:20:54.000And over the summer, this girl named Judy Gumpf, who I just lusted after Judy Gumpf.
00:21:03.000Judy Gumpf was like the 15-year-old who was totally built and, you know, gorgeous and smart and going out with a 23-year-old dude with a Camaro.
00:21:16.000And here I am with my zits and braces, and I'm thinking I got a shot at Judy Gumpf.
00:21:44.000I'm all right in English, but when you start talking grammar in the accusative case, and in German there are three genders, and there's die, der, das, masculine, feminine, and neutral, and every noun has a gender, and it's Like a fucking nightmare.
00:22:01.000So it's neutral for objects, like das Boot?
00:22:17.000But anyway, Herr Flint was also the soccer coach.
00:22:22.000So we sort of had this unspoken agreement that if I was on the soccer team, He would pass me in German, even though I was lost constantly.
00:22:32.000I mean, I would have failed out for sure, but he would give me a C as long as I was on the soccer team.
00:22:37.000Not that I was any soccer star, it's just that he needed enough people on the team that they'd keep paying him or they'd shut it down.
00:22:45.000So my memory of German is basically humiliation from Judy Gumpf, because I never got anywhere, Humiliation in the class because I couldn't understand a fucking thing.
00:22:54.000And humiliation on the soccer field because not only did I suck at soccer, but he would scream at me in German.
00:26:30.000They would go everywhere and sit down with people that were by themselves.
00:26:33.000And if they thought you were lonely or an outcast, they would send in the hot one.
00:26:39.000She would come and sit next to you and invite you places.
00:26:42.000And then they'd pull you into the fold.
00:26:43.000And they were just recruiting people left and right to join.
00:26:46.000And then, like, I noticed as the class would go on, like, later in the semester, I noticed some of the people from the class were now in that little tight group.
00:30:41.000I love those old Mustangs split rear window.
00:30:44.000Some of those cars are just, you look at them and you're like, God damn, how did they do it so good then?
00:30:51.000And why, like you look at those old Mustangs or old Corvettes, like there are a few years where Corvettes just couldn't have been more beautiful.
00:31:58.000But as getting back to the cult thing, I think some of the mechanisms, the psychological mechanisms that make that possible apply to what's happening in podcasting these days.
00:32:11.000And the beautiful thing about podcasting is so far no one has taken advantage of it and started some compound somewhere and banged everybody's wife.
00:33:46.000It's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on.
00:33:49.000I have an intervention on behalf of Brett Weinstein.
00:33:53.000Yeah, are you going to get me married?
00:33:54.000You know, I told you in an email that I felt bad when your book came up on the show and I didn't know how to defend it.
00:34:01.000I didn't know what to do because I was in that weird moment where I was recommending it because I like it because I think it's a great book.
00:35:48.000There are hundreds of citations in that book.
00:35:50.000Now, if somebody says, as people have, like, you know, Chris Ryan, you know, deliberately misrepresented the science or doesn't understand the first thing about evolution or, you know, whatever it is.
00:36:04.000I just don't engage because that's emotional.
00:36:08.000It's like what we were saying earlier about comments online.
00:36:10.000I think people react to sex at dawn very emotionally.
00:36:15.000And so if they're reacting emotionally, there's no point in me engaging with them because they're expressing something that's going on in their lives that I don't know anything about and they're suffering in some way.
00:36:28.000I'm not talking about Brett Weinstein or anybody specifically.
00:36:33.000There's an emotional reason to have that kind of reaction.
00:36:36.000Whereas if somebody says, look, on page, you know, 72, you said that bonobos are the only ape that does this and actually gibbons do it as well.
00:37:19.000When it comes to monogamy and sexuality, people have a notion in their head and that notion almost always aligns with how they're living their life.
00:37:28.000Or how they wish they were living their lives.
00:38:01.000And then often you'll see some people are very eager to hear about it and talk about it, and other people are just steams coming out of their ears.
00:38:11.000I think a lot of people are in relationships that they're trying to make fit into what they believe is the right way to have a relationship.
00:39:39.000How come this guy can start a whole fucking cult in Australia and tell people he's Jesus and his girlfriend's Mary, and you guys can't get together and form yourself a nice gay church?
00:39:48.000I mean do they have them that I don't know about?
00:40:00.000When I was there, you know, when you just walk around the Vatican and just see the fucking vast amount of pilfered riches that are all just sucked out by an ideology.
00:40:53.000Is it a shock that that is probably one of the most stunning things that I've ever seen in my life?
00:41:01.000One of the most beautiful works of art, yet was created for this religion that most likely the people that were living in that day We're probably like worshiping these people that were running this thing like as if they were deities themselves.
00:43:13.000Look at the fucking carving and everything.
00:43:16.000And I'm telling you, it's one of those things like you were talking about how you have to see another culture in person in order to really appreciate it.
00:43:23.000I think that's the same with this thing.
00:43:26.000St. Peter's Basilica is one of those ones when you're there.
00:43:28.000Like, look how little those people are walking around down there.
00:46:09.000He was telling me some really interesting things like when a human being puts its face in the water, all sorts of physiological changes start happening.
00:46:17.000Your metabolism immediately slows way down.
00:46:21.000Your oxygen consumption cuts way back just automatically.
00:46:25.000We've got a lot of seemingly evolutionary adaptations to living in the water.
00:46:59.000There was a period in human evolution where our ancestors lived in tidal areas.
00:47:06.000So they spent most of their time in the water that was about body temperature so it was comfortable and it was shallow enough that they weren't worried about sharks coming in and deep enough that leopards and other predators from the land couldn't get at them so it was safe in that respect.
00:47:23.000Also, you have great sight lines, so you can see if something's coming from a long way off.
00:47:28.000And there's lots of food there, lots of mollusks and fish, and you can net.
00:47:32.000And so it sort of made sense that they would be there.
00:47:35.000And so we have these physiological adaptations for aquatic living.
00:47:40.000Like, for example, human infants are the only apes, certainly, I don't know, primate, probably the only primates that know to hold their breath underwater.
00:47:52.000So like that great Nirvana album cover of the baby.
00:47:56.000So you take a baby and drop it in water and it holds its breath.
00:49:06.000Even the nostrils, like, you know, nostrils come straight out of the face, and the idea of our nostrils facing down is related to this aquatic thing.
00:49:15.000The oil glands that we have on our heads and faces and shoulders that, you know, cause acne and stuff in teenagers.
00:49:24.000You know, that's for protection from the sun, apparently.
00:49:28.000So there are lots of adaptations that seem to fit into this interpretation.
00:49:32.000But, you know, lots of sort of mainstream evolutionary theorists would say, well, wait a minute, you know, there are other adaptations we don't have.
00:49:40.000And that we would have if that had been the case.
00:49:46.000Part of it was also the theory that the human brain, in order for us to be born vaginally, the brain could only be so big before the kid was born, right?
00:49:57.000Yeah, I mean, that's the explanation for why humans are born helpless.
00:50:25.000And the idea would that be every dude's dick would just become a super dick, and every woman would be, you know, it was a joke about flying squirrel pussy people.
00:50:34.000They would just jump dudes with big dicks in shopping carts.
00:50:36.000We'd chase these girls to the edge of cliffs.
00:50:38.000The women would leap off with their...
00:51:39.000They get together and they see each other and recognize each other instantly.
00:51:42.000There's an intelligence there, but what we judge intelligence oftentimes depends on whether or not it can communicate with you, whether or not it changes its environment, builds a structure.
00:51:53.000To me, this is one of the deepest questions...
00:56:16.000So this question of intelligence is really interesting and I think very important because, you know, we talk about intelligence as if we know what it is, but we don't.
00:56:25.000It expresses itself in so many different ways.
00:56:55.000There are racial differences in intelligence, IQ specifically with Asians being the highest and then whites and then blacks, and that that's just the way it is, and social adjustments aren't going to change that because it's largely genetic.
00:57:35.000But I think it's also true that Part of the argument is that social programs are a waste of money because they're not going to affect it because it's genetic.
00:57:58.000You don't even know if it works because what have you done?
00:58:01.000Go to an inner city school and pretend you're a 10 year old kid trying to get by in this life and you're literally seeing gang members and craziness and people flashing cash and people dropping out because they're pregnant when they're 13th and you're trying to tell me there's not some sort of a massive environmental factor.
00:58:19.000If you were a white kid going to a school like that, I only went to a bad school for one year of my life.
00:58:27.000I'm no OG, but I really did go to one bad school, Mary Curley Middle School in Jamaica Plain.
00:58:37.000And in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, now it's become gentrified, sort of.
00:58:42.000It's kind of like East LA or Silver Lake area.
00:58:46.000A lot of hipsters have moved in and nice places, but...
00:59:58.000When you grow up, even in the womb, if your mother's around horrible situations and people screaming and fighting, that cortisol and adrenaline and all those hormones are flowing through that baby, preparing that baby for a violent world.
01:00:11.000Well, I'm sure you know about the epigenetics that show that that can pass several generations.
01:00:17.000Your grandfather was in a famine, you're more likely to be obese.
01:04:40.000I remember showing you one time, a long time ago, I was here doing a podcast and my phone, a message came in and I looked and it was this really hot woman in Australia who liked to send me naked pictures of herself.
01:04:51.000And I showed it to you and you're like, that's a trap.
01:06:06.000I said, I read this article a couple years ago.
01:06:09.000This dude, you probably read this article yourself.
01:06:11.000This dude was in Africa with the Hadza people, the hunter-gatherers, and he took some Hadza shit and he mixed it up and blasted it up his ass to see if he could get a hunter-gatherer's microbiome because it's a much more complex microbiome, right?
01:08:18.000But he was saying it was just a terrible ordeal.
01:08:21.000But there was also an article that I read about certain countries where they didn't have an endogenous psychedelic or didn't have a local psychedelic.
01:08:32.000So these people would take ordeal poisons.
01:08:35.000So they would take poisons that would get them like literally to the brink of death, and then they would come out of it like a near-death experience.
01:08:43.000And that this near-death experience provided some sort of a shamanistic, you know, some sort of a breakthrough experience where you could move on to the next level.
01:08:53.000Like you'd experience something that was like, like we were talking about before the podcast, like when you lived in Portland, and then coming here in LA when it's sunny out, you're like, ah...
01:10:50.000Now, by itself, you listen to this right now and you go, oh, this is just like some weird, slow music.
01:10:58.000But when you're in the dimension of dimethyltryptamine and the world has become infinite fractals that are moving and changing and morphing, when you hear this song, the hallucinations or whatever they are that you're experiencing,
01:11:14.000the visualizations, they dance to the song 100% in sync.
01:11:25.000It keeps people from having bad trips sometimes because they can cling to the music and the structure in the music, whereas their own paranoia and fear and inability to let go gets hit with that psychedelic juice.
01:12:53.000Yeah, the sandcastles are beautiful, but one of the beautiful things about this is we know how temporary they are.
01:12:57.000When you see a sandcastle, it's not just like, oh, this guy made an amazing sculpture.
01:13:01.000It's like, oh, no, this person made something that they know is not going to last, and they put a massive amount of work into it, but part of the beauty of it is that it's not going to last.
01:14:00.000I just thought, I don't want to do this.
01:14:01.000Yeah, because at this point, you'd have free range to do whatever you wanted.
01:14:05.000Yeah, it's I just think that any time you willingly take on some new project managers, their opinion might very well be valid, but I'm not looking for it.
01:14:19.000I want whatever I write to be out of my head, and whether it's good or bad, depending upon how much focus and attention I put into it.
01:14:29.000So if I think it's clunky, I'll try to redo it.
01:14:31.000But I'm not interested in, like, artistically or creatively going down a direction where somebody else is picking the subject matter or somebody else is suggesting.
01:14:56.000I'm finishing this book I've been working on for a few years now, and I don't know that I'll ever publish another book with major publishers.
01:15:05.000Well, you've had great success with your podcast as well, but the beautiful thing about your podcast is it allows you to put out an idea almost instantaneously.
01:15:12.000I mean, you get together with this rattlesnake guy, you guys have a couple-hour conversation, you upload that shit, and that's it.
01:15:17.000It's wonderful, and it brings really interesting people into my life, and my circle of friends now is largely composed of either guests or listeners of the podcast.
01:17:02.000I mean, really, there's a lot of amazing conversations that I've had with people on this podcast that I would love to see written down where I could read it, go over it, and not hear my own fucking voice.
01:17:11.000And also, people have it in the bathroom.
01:17:29.000See, I don't have spaces in my life where I'm doing something that would allow me to listen to voices talking that wouldn't interfere with what I'm doing.
01:18:27.000Yeah, man, if I stopped and thought about it, because before I started doing the podcast, I would listen to recordings of lectures that Terrence McKenna would give or Timothy Leary.
01:18:52.000And then I think about all the conversations that I've been able to have with guys like John Anthony West, with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson and Michael Shermer and you and Duncan and Ari.
01:19:02.000I mean, so many people have had these crazy conversations with them that, to me, they've been...
01:19:07.000I mean, it's shaped the way I look at everything.
01:19:12.000So I feel like I'm constantly getting educated, you know?
01:19:15.000Yeah, you set up your life as, like, you know, I'm not talking about myself, but you've had guests who are some of the smartest people in the world who come to you to sit here and chat with you.
01:19:29.000I mean, you have set up an amazing little...
01:20:21.000I just got another set of headphones to give to my guests because ostensibly the main reason is I'm using handheld now because my whole thing's mobile, right?
01:22:27.000I just grabbed my phone and started talking into it, and I threw it up.
01:22:30.000And people like it because one thing they know, this is one of the things that's appealing about podcasts in general, is that it's not produced.
01:23:43.000I feel so privileged and largely thanks to you and Duncan, honestly.
01:23:48.000When I started the podcast and you guys did that shrimp parade thing and that really built up my audience and to the point now where it's self-sustaining and it's my main gig.
01:24:20.000And so I kind of feel like, all right, so the cost of that, you know, every opportunity or every, you know, privilege comes with a responsibility.
01:24:28.000The responsibility is like, I got to talk about shit that other people don't talk about.
01:25:26.000I just I don't want to be a part of that.
01:25:28.000I just there's no I think that's smart.
01:25:30.000I don't think it's intelligent and I also don't this is my real honest feelings I do not think that fame is I don't think that people should aspire to it I think it should be something that happens if people like your work and then it's cool.
01:25:46.000It's fine But I think there's way too much emphasis put on just trying to get attention.
01:25:54.000And it's being rewarded and supported in this weird way.
01:25:58.000There's nothing wrong with getting attention, but it should make sense.
01:26:54.000You have to be very careful with who you communicate with.
01:26:58.000Because one of the weirdest things you'll see from famous people is all of a sudden they get this very strange thing where they feel like people are supposed to do things for them.
01:27:08.000And they're not supposed to pay for things.
01:30:36.000I was in Asia for a couple of years and I visited my best buddy in Paris and we're throwing a football around, I remember, in some back street in Paris, which freaked out the Parisians, of course.
01:30:46.000And my buddy's like the opposite of me.
01:31:42.000And in Buddhism there is a path of The drunken guru, right?
01:31:48.000There is a path of sex and altered states of consciousness and sort of, you know, William Blake said, the palace of wisdom lies at the end of the road of excess.
01:33:17.000Every comic that starts out, if they're being honest, like Fitzsimmons and I have talked about this a hundred times because we'd never thought of a career.
01:33:25.000Fitzsimmons has won at least two Emmys for writing.
01:35:43.000I have a friend that looks like his parents never picked him up for the first year of his life to just let him lay down on a flat marble pillow.
01:35:50.000His head is flat like a fucking pizza, this poor bastard.
01:36:44.000They just put boards on the side of their heads and stretched their heads up.
01:36:47.000They think they might have even been trying to emulate one of, like, originally the idea was bounced about that someone in the royal family in Egypt had deformities.
01:37:00.000And that was one of the things that said about King Tut.
01:37:04.000Like, King Tut was not a healthy person.
01:37:07.000Like, that he may very well have been the product of incest.
01:37:15.000Yeah, I know about the incest in the Egyptians.
01:37:17.000Yeah, and that some of the, like, heads, when you see people with, like, elongated heads and hieroglyphs and images, they might have actually done that to try to replicate someone who had something fucked up with To normalize it.
01:37:31.000Which might have been like a royal who had been...
01:38:18.000Like, if you were on a spaceship, say if you're watching Star Trek, and that dude walks by, like, well, for sure, that dude must be playing someone from another planet.
01:42:33.000I think all roads lead to humility, ultimately.
01:42:36.000It just leads to a greater perspective.
01:42:38.000I mean, if you live in a small town, and I'm not knocking Ohio, Jamie, but if you live in a small town in Ohio, that's what you're used to.
01:42:45.000And you kind of, like, develop your pattern of what you expect to see in the world based on what's around you in a very close, immediate area.
01:42:52.000But if you're in the fucking rainforest of Bolivia, And you're hanging out with these tribal folks who are going to go hunt a monkey.
01:43:00.000And you're with them on a monkey hunt.
01:45:12.000There's something that you get from escaping civilization that you...
01:45:20.000You don't know you're missing it until you're out there.
01:45:23.000When you're out there, and I'm sure you've experienced this on your travels, there's a certain detachment from the masses, just to be out of the hive and the influence of all the people around you.
01:45:35.000As weird as it seems, There's energy that we're all exchanging in these giant hives together and some people live off of it like those New York City people like my friend Jeff lives in New York City.
01:45:46.000He's always gonna live in New York City.
01:46:57.000If you were on the third floor and the worst enemy was below you just standing there smoking a cigarette, would you drop that bag on them or would you have mercy?
01:48:29.000You take this SteriPen, you run it around in the water for a certain amount of time, and it kills everything bad in the water, and it doesn't taste any different.
01:48:40.000There's a bunch, like SteriPen's a good one, but these gravity filters are amazing.
01:48:44.000They have pumps, they have another one, you can take some water and you pump it, you pump it, and it goes through the filter into your water bottle and you can drink it.
01:48:51.000You can clean up like 99.99% of all the bullshit with just a good filter, and you don't have to drop chemicals in there.
01:49:00.000Some people bring iodine tablets and stuff like that.
01:49:04.000You don't need to, but please don't drink at a creek, folks.
01:49:07.000Shit could be dead just a hundred yards up.
01:49:12.000Just recently I read a thing online saying that it's almost never necessary to filter your water when you're camping.
01:49:20.000And I've always filtered my water camping, but it was this thing where they took all these samples from creeks and apparently they're self-correcting mechanisms in nature.
01:51:32.000Anyway, so Andrew was right in the mix and he sort of was central in Leary getting in trouble because Andrew wrote an article in the Harvard Crimson criticizing Leary for indiscriminately giving psilocybin to students and that's what triggered a lot of the tumult after that.
01:51:56.000Went on to Harvard Med School, residency at Mass General in Boston, like top, top flight, you know, academic stuff.
01:52:05.000But instead, he got his MD, but then he went and worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the main government research center.
01:52:37.000You know, people have tested marijuana and they say, oh, it's bad for your brain because what they do is they get people high who've never been high and then they give them a bunch of math questions and they have trouble.
01:52:49.000I don't want to do math when I'm high.
01:52:51.000So let's test people on things they like doing when they're high, like color perception or pattern recognition or ability to recognize tonal changes in music, things like that.
01:53:03.000And he found that their perceptions were actually heightened.
01:53:08.000It's just bad for certain things and not others.
01:53:11.000So then he did, I think it was about driving.
01:53:16.000We said, okay, they find that marijuana impairs driving ability, but that's again because they're using naive people who've never been high before.
01:53:24.000And they don't have a chance to practice driving while high.
01:53:27.000So he got people, let them practice, let them get used to being high.
01:53:32.000Then he tested their driving ability versus what it had been before or when they're not stoned and average scores and all that.
01:53:39.000And again, he found that when people had a chance to practice, they drove fine.
01:57:01.000It's Asian people that apparently have...
01:57:05.000What I was told is that it's not even necessarily just about the idea that it gets your dick hard, but there is value in the fact that it's a forbidden thing that's very difficult to acquire.
02:00:24.000Anyway, it was a full moon, and Ana and I decided we were going to take some acid.
02:00:31.000And watch the moon rise and the sunset up from the top of Temple 4. It's called the Jaguar Temple.
02:00:39.000And so we went up with this other couple and there's this ledge up there and it's up above tree line.
02:00:45.000You know, you're way above the tree line.
02:00:46.000You can hear the monkeys and like see out over this flat jungle, the paten I think it's called.
02:00:54.000And so we're up there and The sun's sinking and the moon is rising and the moon comes up.
02:01:02.000It's beautiful and there's this big bank of storm clouds and the full moon is like between the horizon and the storm clouds, but then it starts to go up behind these clouds and you can see it's gonna get dark as fuck, right?
02:01:15.000So this other couple are like, yeah, we're gonna go back to the campsite.
02:01:19.000They didn't know we were tripping, right?
02:01:20.000And we timed it so we were peaking like now, you know?
02:01:25.000So they're going to go back to the campsite, but we were like, yeah, we're going to just hang here, right?
02:01:31.000So I went over to hold the flashlight for them as they went down this ladder.
02:01:35.000It was like maybe a 30-foot ladder, pipe ladder drilled into...
02:01:38.000The temple's made out of limestone blocks.
02:03:29.000Because the moon's going behind these clouds.
02:03:32.000And there's these two dudes way over on the other side of the ledge.
02:03:37.000And we go over to them, and they're Italian, and they don't speak English, but Ana spoke Spanish, so she was talking to them in Spanish and Italian, and you sort of understand, you know?
02:03:49.000They're both Latin, similar languages.
02:03:51.000And those guys were like, yeah, I don't know.
02:03:53.000And we were like, well, watch out, because they're all around.
02:05:49.000And so one of the Italian dudes is like, look, you guys go.
02:05:53.000I'll stay with her and make sure she's all right.
02:05:56.000And so I go down with this other Italian dude.
02:05:59.000We go down the ladder and we get down to the floor and we start walking around the jungle and it's fucking dead.
02:06:04.000It's totally dark now because the moon's totally obscured.
02:06:08.000And the jungle, you know how when you're tripping, your pupils are super dilated so you can see light and stuff that normally you might miss?
02:06:15.000The jungle in Guatemala is full of glowing worms and shit flying by that's all green and blue.
02:07:30.000And then it occurs to me that I'm saying my last words to a guy whose face I've never seen, because we didn't shine the light in his face when we were talking to him.
02:09:12.000Like, the world doesn't owe me shit, man.
02:09:15.000I mean, I'd been in Alaska two summers at that point.
02:09:19.000I worked in New York in Manhattan for two years at that point with a guy who offered me a million dollars if I would stay, and I said no, and I left.
02:09:43.000The million bucks was, he said, when you're 30, you'll have a net worth of a million dollars, and if you don't, I'll write you a check for whatever you're missing, and we'll notarize it.
02:09:55.000And this guy's worth $30 million or something.
02:09:58.000So he just wanted you to work for him?
02:09:59.000He wanted me to stay, and I wanted to go.
02:10:01.000I wanted to see the world, and This guy hired me to help him manage his family's property in Midtown Manhattan.
02:10:10.000And the main reason he hired me is because I didn't give a shit about money.
02:10:48.000And we bang on the door, and this horrible fluorescent light comes on, and this Guatemalan dude who obviously had been drunk and asleep is like, what?
02:11:34.000Alecran is a big green thing, but they're both with the tail and the, you know.
02:11:41.000And so we had been using the word scorpion, because in English that's all there is, but scorpion, escorpion, in that part of Guatemala, is lethal.
02:12:18.000It's very controversial because the Atkins diet is a lot of protein stuff.
02:12:23.000I heard that the guy died of a heart attack and that they weren't being completely honest.
02:12:31.000Apparently even Snopes says it's not clear.
02:12:36.000The guy I feel like he was the head of like it's so weird when this happens the Atkins diet guy when he died he weighed 258 pounds so he was overweight and he was 72 years old and The story was he slipped on ice in front of his house and hit his head But he also had a history of heart disease.
02:12:56.000I did not know that and he had had heart attacks and Is that why he got into the research that led to the diet?
02:13:47.000And saying that it's really terrible and that all the fat and all the stuff, all the protein you eat, you really shouldn't eat that much.
02:13:54.000But it's very similar to what a lot of people are eating now.
02:13:57.000When they're eating paleo and they're eating low carb.
02:14:00.000Apparently the real problem, and I read this today, about high fat diets is if you're going to eat a high fat diet, it must be a low carb diet as well.
02:14:14.000That is really bad for you because your body is going to use all the carbohydrates for fuel and all the fat that you eat is just going to be stored.
02:14:21.000And apparently that combination, especially with saturated fats, is very bad.
02:14:26.000So you want to be ketogenic or close to it?
02:15:18.000Well, just to tie this together, the guy, after he explains this to me, he gives me a couple pills, probably aspirin or something, and he dips some water out of a bucket and says, take these pills, you'll be fine.
02:15:33.000I knew you don't drink water out of a bucket in the tropics, but this guy just told me I wasn't going to die, so I'll do whatever the fuck he says.
02:15:40.000I drank the water and a week later I had hepatitis.
02:17:06.000Yeah, low fiber, just not eating healthy.
02:17:09.000If you're eating a lot of sugar in particular, you got candida running around your gut and the unhealthy bacteria reacts better to that and just your body starts craving it.
02:17:20.000That's one of the weirder things about when you do eat a low carb diet is your body really doesn't crave carbohydrates anymore.
02:17:49.000Jesus, these things that get into the brain and determine behavior and from the gut as well can determine – I mean, not – even something as simple – you know, this is a simple example of like wanting – We're good to go.
02:18:47.000I remember mentioning him to you once on this podcast and Jamie brought up his photo and you looked at his photo and you said, there's a guy who does not give a fuck.
02:18:57.000Yeah, if you look at him, his crazy fucking hair.
02:18:59.000Yeah, it looks like he's homeless or something.
02:20:09.000Well, no one's asking you to do anything.
02:20:11.000There's no rules, but it's an opportunity For like-minded discussion that's rarely present in cubicle life.
02:20:23.000What do you think about, I mean, podcasting, in the intro to this podcast book we were talking about earlier, I said that I think that podcasting is on a par with the invention of the printing press in terms of the potential for radical social change.
02:20:42.000Because there's no, like you said before, there's no filter.
02:20:46.000There's nothing between you and your audience.
02:20:52.000I mean, when the printing press came about, what that meant was...
02:20:58.000You didn't need to have a team of scribes to copy out this thing that you've written, right?
02:21:04.000So you can be just a regular guy and pay a thousand bucks or whatever the equivalent of that was in medieval Europe and have all these pamphlets printed.
02:21:12.000So you could be Martin Luther and change the world if you have a good idea and it takes hold.
02:21:19.000Podcasting seems similar to that in the sense that anybody who can afford a few mics and a laptop Can get their message out.
02:21:45.000I think you're probably on to something.
02:21:47.000I think the internet in general and the ability for people to just create their own content, that's the real...
02:21:52.000The gatekeepers to the masses have always been these production companies, content providers, networks, all these people, the hallowed halls, and those people all got fat on it in a weird way because the gatekeepers are the ones that hoarded all the money.
02:22:08.000And they gave some of the money to the actors and some of the money to the writers, and everybody got wealthy.
02:22:53.000I mean, the only one in the room, you know, we have Jamie helping out, and then it goes to the server, and then it's uploaded to the RSS feed, and then it goes to iTunes, and it goes to wherever the fuck you're getting your podcast from, and that's it.
02:23:08.000There's no steps, there's no network, there's no notes, there's no production.
02:23:12.000I mean, if you did your podcast, and your podcast was on some radio network somewhere, you'd have to go to meetings, weekly meetings with the studio, you'd have some fucking program director, some Dick, fuck, asshole, wants to tell you what not to talk about anymore.
02:25:56.000Well, it depends what she signed, you know?
02:25:58.000But, I mean, she's already, like Stephen King, people like her, they can cut a totally different deal.
02:26:04.000But the standard contract is what I had, which is, you know, 8% on hard copy, it's 8% for 5,000 copies, then 10%, 5,000, then 12% after that in hard copy.
02:26:36.000It's a lot of books if you look at it that way.
02:26:38.000That's how you have to look at it because that's what it really is.
02:26:41.000But in terms of money, it's not that much money, especially if you stretch it out over the years it took to write it and all the promotion and all that.
02:26:51.000It's not a way to make a lot of money, writing books.
02:28:32.000It's at the point now where it's like, wait a minute, if I got a platform, I got access to media, I'm hiring my own editor, why am I giving you creative control and 92% of the fucking revenue?
02:32:01.000Maybe he'll take you out for a beer afterwards and you'll be friends.
02:32:04.000This is the subject of Ari Shafir's podcast this week with Aubrey Marcus and they're talking about open relationships and they get super honest.
02:32:15.000I think that we live in cultural patterns.
02:32:19.000And that what we see around us, we replicate.
02:32:22.000I think there's a lot of evidence for that.
02:32:24.000If you just pay attention, forget about studies, just look at how different people are in other parts of the world.
02:32:29.000People that are putting plates in their lips and rings through their noses.
02:32:32.000The way people tattoo themselves, the way people express themselves in dance.
02:32:37.000Like, human beings vary so wildly in what we accept and what we don't accept.
02:32:43.000I was going to bring up Japan earlier.
02:32:44.000It's one of the more fascinating travel experiences I've had was going to Japan because when you go to Tokyo, you realize this is a completely different way of living.
02:32:55.000They have a completely different way of interacting on the streets.
02:32:58.000They have a completely different way that they have decorated their buildings.
02:33:11.000Because it's associated with organizing.
02:33:11.000Yes, so I had to go back and just there's a lot of that like where you realize like this is a totally different way of living but if I live there I would live like these people.
02:33:22.000So the momentum of these patterns in these cultures gets established and then it takes something radical to lift them and to free people from these patterns and once they're free from these patterns then they have a real opportunity to objectively assess the way they behave and And whether or not this is the way they want to behave or the way they want to live or whether or not you just expect it to because of this unthinking culture,
02:33:48.000I think that's what podcasts are doing.
02:33:50.000The big thing With podcasts is that it's creating more narratives and it's creating more discussions about interesting subjects and more questions and discussions about why we live our life a certain way.
02:34:07.000And if you live a regular life with regular people, what are the odds that you get a chance to sit down with a guy like you for three hours?
02:34:16.000Or a guy like, you know, fill in the blank.
02:34:18.000All the fascinating people that you or I have talked to in our podcasts.
02:34:23.000And then these conversations get right into someone's head while they have their earbuds on, while they're at work, typing some nonsense bullshit into some fucking form that they have to fill out because that's what they do for a living.
02:34:38.000No generation before the podcast generation had that option.
02:34:42.000You had Howard Stern, you had, and it was always funny, you had, you know, Art Bell was always weird, and then you had, like, all the right-wing wacko dudes on AM talk radio, the Michael Savages, and, you know, the fucking Rush Limbaugh's, and you had all those people,
02:34:59.000but you didn't have- Yeah, you didn't have a guy who just talks about whatever he wants to talk about.
02:35:04.000You had to be like, well, Chris, before we give you this radio broadcast show, what kind of a show are you going to do?
02:35:13.000Like, no, I'm going to talk about sex and tribes and about how I think monogamy is just a cultural construct and really the way we evolved.
02:35:21.000Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you fucking hippie!
02:35:28.000Like before, if you came to someone and said, hey, I'm going to write this book and it's going to sell about 400,000 copies and it's basically saying monogamy is bullshit, what do you think?
02:36:10.000When we were talking earlier about race, and about race being a determining factor for IQ, like, you don't really ever know.
02:36:19.000You might know from studies, but you don't know until those people who have the high IQ have to live the lives of the people that have the low IQ. And they have to have the same environment that they grow up in, the same fears, and the same influences, negative and positive.
02:37:27.000Or a hunter-gatherer, these people in the Amazon we're talking about who can identify 500 different kinds of plants at a glance and, you know, know the behavior of animals and all this stuff.
02:37:39.000But you give them an IQ test and they're like under 100 for sure.
02:37:42.000Well, I've had conversations with people that are brilliant, super brilliant people, and scientists, and they'll try to explain to me mixed martial arts in some fucked up cockamamie way and I have to stop them.
02:38:21.000I mean, it's fun to be able to flip people around like that.
02:38:23.000And it would be a great thing to know if you lived in feudal Japan and you lost your sword and someone was coming at you and you had one chance at glory.
02:38:32.000What I love about Aikido is how it translates into psychological and emotional stuff.
02:38:37.000So what we were saying earlier about how I don't engage with people who are emotionally triggered by sex at dawn.
02:39:08.000But it's just my point is that people who are brilliant and are geniuses in one aspect of life simply don't have enough time to accumulate the same amount of data about everything.
02:39:30.000The difference is between how you apply that information.
02:39:33.000If you're a really smart person and you don't do shit with it, you're a moron.
02:39:37.000You might be a really genius person, but if your life is falling apart and it's all because of your shitty decisions and you've never tried to improve upon your thought process and you just blame the whole world instead of yourself, you're a moron.
02:39:48.000Even if you're really good at taking IQ tests.
02:39:53.000Personally, I don't think that I'm particularly intelligent.
02:39:58.000I think that what I can do that a lot of people don't do is...
02:40:03.000Think outside the box and connect dots that other people aren't connecting, which is precisely because I didn't go to the right schools and I didn't, you know, in my 20s, I went and fucked around the world for 20 years.
02:40:17.000Also, you don't have, like, tenure that you're working for or anything weird that's going to keep you in line.
02:40:22.000I can just fuck around and figure it out.
02:40:25.000There's a lot of people that get stuck in that.
02:40:27.000Even intellectuals, they get stuck in that trap of having to toe the line You know, in terms of like, I mean, good luck trying to find a conservative professor, right?
02:40:37.000I mean, what is like 4% identify as conservatives in mainstream universities and colleges?
02:40:58.000It's so confusing because the older I get, the more I realize that the language...
02:41:03.000It's like one of those Venn diagrams where there's language and there's reality and there's some overlap, but there's a lot that doesn't correspond.
02:41:42.000And yet we look at that and say, oh, well, that's gay, but they don't see it as gay.
02:41:47.000So again, as you were saying, we replicate the behavior we see around us.
02:41:51.000Do they have adult homosexuality or do they only have sex with kids?
02:41:57.000I think it's only, at least the only kind that's been reported by anthropologists, because again, there's a filtering there, is younger boys with older boys.
02:42:09.000So it's the younger boys are given blowjobs to the older boys because that's the way to get stronger and more masculine.
02:42:17.000Well, what a scam somebody pulled off of that place.
02:42:20.000One dude probably a long time ago was like, listen to me!
02:42:25.000We've got a new way of doing things around here.
02:42:47.000It's pretty crazy, though, again, like what we were saying earlier, that you can have these pockets of culture that they're radically different than other places, but the people just adapt and conform to what's around them.
02:42:59.000And I think that's the case with human beings everywhere.
02:43:02.000I don't think it's just the people that live in New Guinea, and it's not just the people that live in the Congo or live in Woodland Hills.
02:43:11.000And it's also interesting to look at how the culture reflects the environment, right?
02:43:16.000And Marvin Harris wrote about this, cultural materialism, how a culture responds to an environment sort of like how, you know, cacti live in the desert.
02:44:08.000He applied this prism to it and showed that also in the South Pacific, there were some islands that the people were cannibalistic and other islands where they weren't.
02:44:17.000And so he looks at all these and what he figured out was that in the places where people are cannibalistic, there are no domesticated animals that eat different food than humans.
02:44:30.000So, for example, you can't raise dogs for meat because dogs eat what we eat.
02:47:00.000And a lot of times when the black bears are near people, the reason is because people have encroached on their areas and then they started getting into eating garbage.
02:47:37.000And I was 16 hours a day, seven days a week, just like full on fucking busting it out because the fish are coming in and they got the lines running, you know.
02:47:47.000And at night, I would go back and sleep in my tent on this bluff where we were all camped out and So like, you know, after six weeks, everything smelled like salmon.
02:48:15.000We hitchhiked up to Denali and we were walking back this dirt road and this ranger came along in his truck and he stopped and he was this cool guy.
02:48:25.000He's like, hey, you guys been working?
02:49:26.000Orcas are the animal that I always point to that if they didn't exist and there was a legend of them, it would be way more fascinating than Bigfoot.
02:49:34.000If somebody told you that there's some mammal that lives in the ocean and they communicate with each other through a complex series of sounds that we to this day can't understand and that there's several tons.
02:54:21.000Especially, it's very impressive to me when you see flexibility progress in old people.
02:54:27.000And you realize, like, most of what we take for, we decide, like, oh, this is how far your body should move when you're 60, or this is how your body should move when you're 70. It's based on the average person who doesn't do a It's a goddamn thing with their body.
02:54:40.000You don't go hiking, you don't eat right.
02:54:42.000Again, it's based on what you see around you.
02:54:44.000In Spain, everybody goes for a walk after dinner.
02:54:47.000You can be 90 years old, they're out there walking after dinner.
02:57:15.000And I was like, yeah, but like, that's where I would ride, you know, way the fuck up there.
02:57:19.000And he's like, yeah, let me talk to some people.
02:57:21.000Well, my buddy John Dudley uses those for deer hunting.
02:57:25.000Because when you walk on the ground, well, not just that, when you walk on the ground, you leave scent.
02:57:31.000So instead of doing that, he rides a bike.
02:57:34.000So when you ride a bike, deer's nose is so much stronger and more powerful than ours that if the wind is at your back and the deer's in front of you, you're fucked.
02:57:45.000But if you play the wind correctly, one of the best ways to avoid leaving scent if a deer passes by after you've been there is to ride a bike.
02:57:53.000But you don't want to ride a bike and exert yourself because then you'll be sweaty and you have to sit in a tree stand.
03:01:08.000I mean, I think they're really interesting animals, and they're one of the few animals in the wild that will, if you live in a certain area for long enough, they will almost become domesticated.
03:01:19.000They'll get close to you and hang out with you, and you can feed them, and they'll walk with you and hang out with you real close by.
03:02:07.000Weigh the fuck out, but once they get accustomed to you, they're very intelligent, and they realize, like, this guy's not going to hurt me.
03:02:14.000Then they become like your little buddy, and if you give them food...
03:02:17.000I mean, this is essentially how animals got domesticated, right?
03:02:22.000They just hung around with us long enough that they were outside the edge of the campfire, and we gave them food to keep them from, you know, attacking us or whatever.
03:05:32.000It's a healthy balance, but it's only apparently a healthy balance according to biologists.
03:05:37.000It's not according to vegans or hunters, but according to biologists, it's only healthy if the bear population is kept to a certain number.
03:05:44.000If it gets too crazy, then they run out of food, and then there's a lot of cannibalism already, but then it gets even worse, and then they start encroaching on cities and towns, and it gets...
03:06:04.000They're like, well, if you don't kill an animal, this animal's overbalanced, this animal's going to be underpopulated now, because they're going to go after them, and they're going to kill a disproportionate number of them.
03:07:08.000He was explaining that the boars fuck up the coral reefs because they dig up all the dirt and then it runs off in the rain and it contaminates the bays.
03:07:19.000Yeah, so it's a really big thing in Hawaii that they have to really go after the boars as much as possible.
03:07:25.000There's a project right now in Maui where they're going to fence in an area, and the area that they're fenced in, they have to, it's like 5,000 acres, I think it is, where they have to eradicate the deer that are in this one particular area.
03:07:40.000Because they're trying to reclaim the forest land and a lot of these deer, all of the deer, most of the large mammals in Hawaii are non-native.
03:07:55.000There's not going to be a forest because the little things grow and they just eat them.
03:07:58.000They eat them right when they're coming up, and there's so many of them.
03:08:01.000So they also have a problem with people needing food.
03:08:05.000So what they're doing is they have this project where they're going out and they're hunting these animals, killing them, and then giving the food to people for free.
03:08:11.000So they've set it up like this so they have a real sustainable food source for all these poor people, which is the best meat in the world.
03:09:15.000It was bison diplomacy, bison ecology, that's the name of it.
03:09:19.000But it's basically saying that what happened was when the Europeans came to America and the Europeans spread disease, it decimated the Native American population by as much as 90%.
03:09:33.000Bison ecology and bison diplomacy, the southern plains from 1800 to 1850. So what his take is that the overpopulation of bison was a direct result of these Native American people being decimated.
03:10:04.000And he points to early settlers that described in great detail all of the various game animals that they came across, but nary a mention of the bison.
03:10:12.000And certainly not a mention of like these gigantic million strong herds of bison roaming the plains.
03:10:19.000And you think that's a direct result of all their predators, the Native Americans, who had gotten really good at hunting them and even, you know, even surplus hunting them where they drive them off cliffs and just take what they could that was at the bottom.
03:11:50.000They had meat hunting, what they called market hunting, where they'd take guys who came back from the war, and they were looking for a job, but one of the best jobs they can get.
03:13:34.000Like, not only that, but this weird movement to the West and, like, a landing.
03:13:41.000Landing on this weird continent that was filled with these people that lived in a completely different way I mean what are the odds that you're gonna get to a place you think of where Europe was in the 1700s the 1400s You know when the first started arriving and think of the sophistication with the boats and the written language all the different things and then they show up go across the ocean and land to a place that has zero cities and No,
03:15:42.000Kiva is like a Hopi dwelling that's semi-submerged.
03:15:47.000Each of our three luxury teepees has a comfy king-sized bed, fold-out couch, plenty of seating, rugs throughout, sink, undercounter fridge, Keurig, coffee maker, microwave, oh, you can make microwave popcorn, outdoor fire pit.
03:16:04.000I think outdoor is one word there, isn't it?