In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, the boys talk about the future of the internet and how it s going to change the way we live in the future. They talk about a new service that allows you to measure stuff at home with your own digital scale, and how you can get cancer from licking stamps. Also, they talk about how they re going to make purses online, and why you should be careful about who you order them from. Joe also talks about how he thinks the future is going to be better than the past, and what it s like to work for a company that makes purses and sells them online. The boys also talk about what they would like to see happen in the world of the future, and if they think it s possible that we re all going to end up in a post office or not. They also talk a little bit about how the future might be a little different than the present, and the pros and cons of using the internet as a way of life. This episode is brought to you by Stamps and Hover, and is sponsored by Shaffir's Legs. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell us what you think about it! We re listening to this episode and what you're listening to and sharing it with your friends and family! and posting it on Insta: and tagging us in the comments! Thanks to our sponsorships and shout outs! We ll see you next week for the podcast! - we re looking out for the next week with a new episode on the next episode of The Joe Rogans Experience Podcast! :) Thank you for all the love and support! Cheers, Joe, Joe and Joe! XOXO, Joe & Joe! xoxo - The Rogans Podcast, EJ & EJG. - P.R. (and Joe's Legless Podcast ( ) - The Crew at the JOB PODCAST, and EJOD Podcasts Podcast, and Joe's Legs Podcast, , and the JRE Podcast, AKA the JR-E, and JRE. . & JRE AND JRE! , , JRE, , & the JRB Podcast. & the Podcast, & podcast
00:01:23.000If you buy any of the kitty cat t-shirts that Brian Red Band sells, that's how he makes them.
00:01:28.000He sends them, rather, through stamps.com.
00:01:30.000If you have a small business and you're trying to go to the post office and Wait in line and get your shit weighed and put different labels on boxes.
00:03:27.000Hover is the domain company that I use, actually.
00:03:31.000And if you're like a techno idiot like myself, I do not know how to do anything correctly other than really easy, simple, intuitive shit like Facebook or Twitter or something like that.
00:03:42.000I don't know how to, you know, if I can register a website, like super easy, and it has things that you normally have to pay for, like who is domain name privacy, which is, that's key.
00:03:56.000That's key if you order Ari Shaffir's legs, and then, you know, you put that shit online, and you don't want people to know.
00:04:03.000You're just steady beating off to Ari Shaffir's legs.
00:06:48.000It's this like humanoid baby with no limbs, which feels like the beginning of like a creepy sci-fi movie that starts out with showing like the first AI, but it's limbless.
00:07:16.000Because it responds to you like a human, and it's cute.
00:07:19.000You immediately anthropomorphize it, and you start to respond to it like it's alive.
00:07:23.000And at some point, it'll be so good at responding that by all measures that we know about when it comes to knowing if you have a subjective experience or if you have a subjective...
00:07:31.000We'll just believe that they're conscious.
00:07:33.000And at that point, are they just going to be these...
00:07:35.000Living, thinking things that we keep limbless behind a rope so people can throw money and look at it.
00:07:42.000I mean, it just freaked me out, the presentation of it.
00:07:44.000I didn't think it was a compelling idea.
00:07:46.000I think one thing that people haven't thought of with robots yet is that they think that they're going to be confined to one form.
00:08:07.000In a way, it's kind of like time-lapsing reality because what are atoms if not self-assembling entities that link up With other atoms that become cells, and then those cells self-assemble into tissues and organisms.
00:08:20.000I mean, the whole story of the universe, the opposite of entropy is extropy, right?
00:08:26.000The things that move towards greater complexity and self-assemble.
00:08:29.000So when people talk about robots or nanotechnology, it's like an acceleration of it so that it becomes discernible to us.
00:09:48.000Kevin Kelly, the trippy co-founder of Wired, in his book What Technology Wants, he calls technology the technium.
00:09:55.000He says it's the seventh kingdom of life and that it also has wants and needs.
00:10:00.000And he says that if we were able to zoom out and remove ourselves from being the co-participants in creating technology, it would actually look like the technology itself is self-assembling and has a direction, like the time-lapsing of plants.
00:10:12.000And then when McKenna was tripping out and he starts talking about singularities, hello, hear the echo with Kurzweil and McKenna.
00:10:19.000McKenna's tripping on DMT and talking about singularities.
00:10:22.000He's talking about universes that engender novelty, universes that allow the sprouting of new possibility.
00:10:27.000It's the same thing that Kevin Kelly's writing about in his technology book.
00:10:30.000So you see like the respected technologists writing these books about what's happening.
00:10:35.000You know, even Eric Schmidt, The Age of Augmented Humanity and Google.
00:10:38.000Google represents the literalization of the psychedelic dream.
00:10:41.000You know, the literalization of the idea that we are expanding our minds with these technologies, whether they be chemical technologies or whether they be these external technologies.
00:10:49.000And what you're saying, this is why it's hilarious when you hear people start railing against, it's unnatural!
00:10:57.000Because what you're saying is like, no, actually there appears to be some form of transcendent, invisible architecture that all things grow upon in a similar way, whether it's Plants, technology, humans.
00:11:09.000It just stretches on this invisible framework and reveals what's hidden and underneath all things, which seems to be this ever-perfecting, ever-complexifying, harmonious expression.
00:11:27.000He got pushed out of the church because he basically...
00:11:30.000He sort of divinized the idea of the singularity, and he was using the language of God, but he was talking about this move towards complexity and the phenomenon of man, and man was the point in which evolution became self-aware and started directing its own evolution.
00:11:41.000Doesn't that echo what we were talking about at the Futures Conference?
00:11:44.000So you see these echoes, you see these patterns that connect, you know?
00:11:47.000The whole idea of cyberdelics, cybernetics and computers, and then psychedelics and chemical technologies, and they collide in what's known as cyberdelic.
00:11:55.000That all started in the 60s and 70s in Silicon Valley, when the computer scientists were tripping on LSD and working on creative problems.
00:12:03.000Xerox PARC, Augmenting Human Intelligence.
00:12:05.000There's a book by John Markoff called What the Dormouse Says, which talks about where that came from.
00:12:10.000I mean, you have to think that these people were out of their minds when they were conceiving of a world in which these computers could be wirelessly sending our thoughts across time and space at the speed of light, and that we're all going to be connected and see our faces on these machines.
00:12:22.000I mean, you have to be, in a way, psychologically or metaphorically tripping to even think so far outside the box.
00:12:29.000That's why Da Vinci was so fascinating.
00:12:31.000A lot of the stuff that he came up with really didn't come to fruition in that form, but you could see that he was thinking of these concepts way ahead of everybody else.
00:12:42.000What a fascinating, fascinating guy that must have been.
00:13:29.000I do not know any of the history of Da Vinci.
00:13:31.000He didn't make any money at these things.
00:13:33.000I was reading an article today that said even though human beings evolved about 200,000 years ago, the first art, the first signs of religion or contemplative thinking didn't appear until the cave paintings that are 70,000 years old.
00:13:44.000So if we had the same brains for 200,000 years, but you didn't see the beginning of humanness or imagination until about 70,000 years ago, why did it take so long if we had the same brains?
00:13:53.000And the idea is that it's like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
00:13:56.000Those first 100,000 years, we didn't even have enough food.
00:13:58.000We didn't have, like, any kind of organized society.
00:14:01.000It was only when we could afford the leisure time It's like paying back a loan.
00:14:05.000You mostly pay interest at first and then one cent on the...
00:14:37.000Think about countries today, civilizations today that are living like that.
00:14:40.000Have you heard about these people in India?
00:14:42.000There's an island, an uncontacted island off of India.
00:14:45.000And recently, within the last few years, these fishermen...
00:14:48.000They inadvertently got drunk on their boat and drifted into the shore, and these people killed them.
00:14:52.000They killed them, and then the authorities were trying to figure out how to get to the bodies without getting shot at by these people without having to kill them, because there's not that many left.
00:14:59.000There's maybe like 40 or 50, and they have no contact with other human beings.
00:15:45.000And there's tales of cannibalism, but it's hard to substantiate.
00:15:49.000But it's not outside the realm of possibility.
00:15:51.000So you might be dealing with cannibals that we allow to kill people because they're so primitive that we don't want to fuck up what they've got.
00:16:02.000Because there is a sentimental instinct in humanity that wants to preserve everything.
00:16:08.000A hamburger place goes under, everyone cries.
00:16:11.000It's like an instinct that people want to do that.
00:16:13.000And a lot of people say that's part of our humanity, is keeping intact people.
00:16:19.000Cultures and religions and keeping intact all these ideas because you can see that with this thing that's emerging, this thing that's emerging is so far, is so much bigger than some old desert religion.
00:16:35.000And the bigger it gets and the more this thing emerges, the more its light begins to shine so brightly that all these silly little superstitious ideas begin to seem...
00:16:46.000Yeah, I mean, our consciousness is becoming so expanded that it's almost like, you know, we're able to, like, all of a sudden turn around and see ourselves.
00:16:53.000And I know that sounds almost like an impossible shape, but like the first time that we can actually do that and we can see ourselves sort of out of context, just like in 1969 when astronauts first took a picture of the Earth from the vantage point of space, I mean, it's literally like the human mind was folding in on itself, because how is it possible for a human brain that emerged from the Earth to then see the Earth,
00:17:51.000How do you accommodate to yourself, to the idea that everything you know, the vast expanse, the repository of experience of your entire life, Is a blink of a blink of a blink on a grain of a grain of a grain of a grain.
00:18:03.000Well, instead of turning it that way, I mean...
00:19:04.000The existential ideas can overwhelm the reality of the situation.
00:19:08.000And the reality of the situation is you would like to stay alive, and for the most part, it's fun.
00:19:12.000And if it's not fun, you've managed your life incorrectly.
00:19:16.000But you know what's interesting about what you just said is that you've Eloquently stated something that's actually very difficult for most people to experience.
00:19:24.000Most people either have to have, like, they have to be half asleep, which means ignore the overwhelming universe and just be barely present.
00:19:33.000And then other people are awake to this overwhelming universe.
00:19:37.000You know, Brian's right here and he can hear you.
00:20:35.000I remember reading it and I found it really depressing.
00:20:37.000Well, I guess my whole question is, okay, so in the face of an infinite universe, with our minds we can ponder something close to the infinite, yet the irony is that we're housed in these heart-pumping, breath-gasping, decaying bodies.
00:20:49.000You know, Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death.
00:21:49.000Yes, absolutely in our significance we are all the average person 100%.
00:21:52.000Yeah, when someone says that all men are created equal, not really, but yes.
00:21:56.000Not really in this experience, but yes.
00:21:59.000There's Einstein's, there's Stephen Hawking's, there's fucking Lou Ferrigno's.
00:22:02.000There's a lot of weird people in this world.
00:22:03.000But I think there's a responsibility as technology emerges and science begins to show us the truth of reality, these responsibilities begin to emerge that create ethical dilemmas for societies, which is when you have large swaths of the human population being controlled by tyrannical,
00:22:21.000fundamentalist, religious people, Who are basing everything they do on a phantasmal being that clearly doesn't exist and outdated rituals that are just rotting.
00:23:25.000We talked about ayahuasca and DMT, which, as Eric Davis says, baseline reality dissolves.
00:23:31.000There's a complete ego death and a new reality emerges.
00:23:34.000Or it just fucks with your visual cortex and you add it all with your ego and your psyche and your creativity.
00:23:40.000And you just, you have the ability to generate images inside the mind's eye with your creativity and you just create a fucking world of geometric patterns because that's how your eyeball works when it's over-flooded with too much DMT. That's how your visual cortex responds.
00:24:00.000This is what I always say when people say, how do you know whether or not a DMT trip is real?
00:24:05.000You're pretending that that really happened, you really did speak with intelligent beings from the planet.
00:24:09.000The reality is, whether or not you really did go to another dimension and speak with these super-intelligent beings who are made out of love, or whether it didn't happen at all, either way, you experience the same thing.
00:24:52.000But think of what happened at the end of the movie.
00:24:53.000She went, right, through the wormhole and went to this, saw these alien civilizations, had an experience that sounded like a religious experience, except it was, you know, a scientist.
00:26:52.000In other words, infinite resonance with set and setting.
00:26:54.000That's why when people talk about psychedelic experiences, they're like, make sure you're in a good headspace, make sure you're in a good set and setting.
00:26:59.000Because if you have infinite resonance with set and setting...
00:27:31.000Or you could be in a beautiful place that elicits feelings of calm and sereneness, and then you can feel like you're getting licked by God.
00:27:40.000Happy Shroomfest, by the way, everybody.
00:27:43.000That's going to be the real problem when people are able to decide what state of consciousness they experience at that moment, not even earning it by being so scared that you take mushrooms.
00:27:52.000Because every time I've taken mushrooms, I've been scared.
00:28:37.000But I feel like that's also one of the reasons why people aren't that happy.
00:28:41.000I feel like if you're not improving yourself and getting rid of your bullshit in life, it's very difficult to feel good.
00:28:49.000It's very difficult to be enjoying it if you have all these issues that you're not dealing with.
00:28:53.000Like about you as a person or you with your job or you...
00:28:57.000I hear more and more people talking about it when they say, like, and I know I've been bad at that and I'm actually trying to make a note to not be like that anymore.
00:29:27.000It's like sometimes you're there and you see it, but you can't beat yourself up when you go down.
00:29:32.000You have to have faith that you'll come back up again.
00:29:34.000But what you're saying is dead on, man, because if I'm feeling like shit, what you're saying is not some broad, big thing you've got to do.
00:29:40.000If I'm feeling like shit, nine times out of ten, it's just because I've got dishes in the sink, or I didn't go jogging, or I didn't, like, sweep my kitchen.
00:31:02.000I have a friend who was starting a company.
00:31:03.000He wants to create a watch that regulates emotion because people talk about the age of the quantified self where we're going to have all these devices that are going to be- A watch that what emotions?
00:31:19.000It'll measure your biofeedback rhythms and it'll give you feedback to tell you how you're feeling so that then you can change your behavior if that's what needs to be done.
00:31:29.000Feedback loop seems to be the best way to reprogram reflex responses.
00:31:33.000They're saying that the best way to stop people from doing speeding is not from actually pulling them over, but it's from those sensors that say your speed and tell you that as you pass them by.
00:31:42.000So receiving feedback is the best way to Change behavior.
00:31:46.000So in terms of moving towards experience design and the age of the quantified self, if you know you're eating something unhealthy, maybe you won't eat it.
00:31:53.000If you're constantly reminded about how you're feeling and what you're doing, you can really kind of improve yourself.
00:31:59.000Technologically enhanced mindfulness is what that is.
00:32:02.000Because it's like, how often are you wandering around in a state of absolute terror, pretending everything's fine, I'm totally fine, having a great day, but inside you're like, Oh, fuck, man.
00:32:13.000If I don't make enough money, I'm not going to make rent.
00:32:24.000One of the most important things that anybody could ever understand in this life is what happens and what it feels like when you're out of debt.
00:32:32.000Because how many of us, by the time we're 20, whatever the fuck we are, we have so much money that we can't pay off.
00:33:06.000And this is where we can actually connect that to the ideas that Rick Kurzweil is talking about.
00:33:10.000He's saying that healthcare is about to undergo the same transformation that information technology went through.
00:33:14.000So that means that the whole idea of how people cure themselves or fix diseases, this is all going to become like something that's a part of our smartphone and part of our day-to-day life.
00:33:21.000So it's going to change That broken system of healthcare.
00:33:24.000And education through the internet, free education, people around the world coming online, joining the global conversation, getting free education.
00:33:30.000There's a Harvard professor who's offering all his classes online.
00:34:15.000By the way, I love that term because I think one of the big fucking problems is the need that people have to claim responsibility.
00:34:22.000for innovation and this is this is one of the horrors of our age is that that thing which makes people get rich is what motivates people people aren't motivated like when people are trying to cure cancer you like to believe that the reason they're trying to cure cancer is out of some kind of altruistic desire until you see them going to the Supreme Court to try to patent genes because they want to profit off of their research yeah that's pretty weird right it seems like the part that the idea should be that the I know,
00:34:50.000but that's why Pfizer is giving the researchers the money to research, is so that eventually they'll be able to show a return on that investment.
00:35:03.000That's the real problem is that you can make money and create things, but you have to have a psychedelic mindset in order for society to move forward like emotionally.
00:35:22.000And the reason why it's not is because when you have a corporation, you get that diffusion of responsibility thing going on, which is the opposite of what's psychedelic.
00:35:34.000It's where the individual has no responsibility for the mass of individuals, whereas the psychedelic experience is connected to all individuals.
00:35:41.000The mass of individuals is connected entirely.
00:36:03.000When you do mushrooms and you realize that there is a fucking planet one quarter of the size of ours and it's literally floating above our heads.
00:38:18.000And then, you know, whatever's connected to her.
00:38:21.000Those people are going to find it for you.
00:38:23.000Yeah, I think that's how you do it in today's day and age.
00:38:26.000And that's the beauty of us being able to introduce people like Bert Kreischer or anybody else that we brought onto our podcast that all of a sudden other people can go, oh, that guy's really funny.
00:38:37.000Like, oh, and he's friends with this guy.
00:38:49.000It's been a year later, and I still get people saying I'd like to come back and hang out with you guys and have a mind job, which has been amazing.
00:38:54.000Well, it's a two-way street, though, because the whole reason why the podcast is interesting is because people like you are interested in coming on.
00:39:01.000If you only had just me talking after a while, I'd be repeating stories like a motherfucker.
00:39:05.000I'd just be spouting nonsense at this point.
00:39:07.000But you know what's interesting about what you're saying?
00:39:10.000There's a book that talks about the importance of an information diet, you know, because we live in a world now where there is like an infinite amount of content out there, more than 10,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every hour, some crazy number like that.
00:39:22.000The most difficult thing, I think, becomes deciding who are going to be your information diet filters.
00:39:29.000Like in this case, the death squad, the peer networks that you are connected to, the people you follow on Twitter.
00:39:36.000A lot of people trust NBC. By the way, if you only watch traditional media, you realize how limited it is.
00:39:42.000Brian Redband's leaving us, everybody, so he's got to go do an Icehouse show.
00:42:33.000Well, I think the sex technology will probably be the pioneer.
00:42:37.000I mean, just like with The porn industry pioneered DVDs.
00:42:40.000When DVDs were first a thing, who do you think was doing the most advanced, multi-angle, interactive DVD experiences was the porn industry.
00:42:47.000As soon as they said phones wasn't going to go with that old style of video, all of porn was like, cool, we'll update.
00:43:06.000Well, but no, but some people say, you know, the Kama Sutra talks about we've been wanting to merge with our lovers at the beginning of time.
00:43:48.000Or even worse, what if you get into her mind, like if you can access your girlfriend's needs and desires, and you go, I want to know what you want, and you get into her mind.
00:44:48.000He says that the brain's extraordinary capacities for creativity, for discourse, for Everything we do, even build airplanes and iPhones, is ultimately our glorified version of the peacock feather.
00:47:16.000And there's a guy called Hans Rosling who has these amazing videos on the internet that show every nation in the world by every measurable indicator of quality of life has been right over the last hundred years.
00:47:24.000No, but it just shows that contrary to what the media in which it bleeds, it leads, feeds us because we have these overactive, fear-based amygdala that only pay attention to what's wrong, We fail to see everything that's going right.
00:47:36.000You know what's the most confusing shit?
00:47:38.000Really hot newscasters telling you horrible things.
00:48:15.000But I would imagine Bill O'Reilly, because he's always on his show, it's always these Beautiful, yet dominating, hot girls that surround him.
00:48:24.000He likes to be around these types of girls.
00:48:55.000Oh, that Dawkins interview when Dawkins, the smile on Dawkins' face is the smile of the Lord of the Rings necromancer as he's crushing just like a little imp or something.
00:51:46.000And the idea that there's anything wrong with saying that ancient ideologies that involve killing people if they don't believe are fucking bad.
00:51:56.000I mean, doesn't it say that somewhere?
00:51:58.000Well, you can't be tolerant of intolerance.
00:52:01.000I mean, that's the problem with moral relativism and with this fear of, like, passing any kind of judgment because it's a different religion.
00:52:23.000Bill Maher gets labeled as an Islamophobe, which I find fascinating because progressives, for some reason, it's almost like they're bullied, so they want to make friends with the bully.
00:52:35.000So there's this weird progressive thing where you don't criticize Islam, and if you do, you become an Islamophobe.
00:52:41.000Or if someone is criticizing other religions, that's the first thing they say.
00:53:14.000Whether it's UFOs or Bigfoot or Chupacabras or Islam or Joseph Smith or Jesus Christophobe.
00:53:21.000You're not a Christophobe because you're against them raping little boys.
00:53:24.000If you believe anything that you haven't seen yourself or watched on TV, you're an idiot.
00:53:28.000Well, this is a thing, Joe, this is a thing you were talking about earlier when it comes to the DMT experience or the psychedelic experience.
00:53:35.000And the question is, does it matter if this is real or not?
00:53:38.000And I think it matters more than anything if it's real.
00:53:42.000We must understand reality from subjective reality.
00:53:47.000If we can, we should try to understand it.
00:54:50.000In the same way, if the DMT or the psychedelic experience is taking us into a state that is non-subjective, that is external, is actually introducing us to entities or intelligences that somehow exist outside of our own being, it's incredibly important to begin to communicate with them in a real way.
00:55:40.000The imagination is responsible for every fucking thing that a human has ever made.
00:55:44.000Clothes, this microphone that I'm talking to, this computer that I'm on, clothes that I'm wearing, the car that drove me here, it's all manifested out of the imagination.
00:55:52.000So the imagination is fucking real as shit.
00:55:55.000And before you created those things, when you just imagined them, you were conjuring up something that didn't exist.
00:56:02.000And the fact that we then brought it into existence proves, well, it at least existed as a potentiality.
00:56:06.000It was allowed by the laws of physics.
00:56:08.000So then it makes you wonder, what are you tapping into when you're having that kind of vision?
00:56:13.000That disembodied, you know, reconceptualization of reality.
00:56:16.000When you live in a world where there is no airplanes and you think that you could build a machine that will fly over the ocean and get you to this other place.
00:56:24.000Like, to imagine that, to even fantasize about it, if we can utter it, it means that it's possible.
00:58:05.000Joe, in all seriousness, man, because you're one of the busiest people I know, How do you find time to watch Battlestar, Galacta, and Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones?
00:58:16.000Well, right now, I don't have hardly any time.
00:59:31.000It's what TV tends to do to creativity.
00:59:33.000If you read the comics, the comics are some of the most bleak, horrific things that you've ever seen, where it's like every few pages is a gut punch, where you're like, what the fuck?
00:59:44.000It's not like this emotional kind of sappy thing.
01:00:07.000Well, you think because there's an established business model and we have to keep some kind of stability in the system and we don't want to stuff this up to make you question too much?
01:00:37.000I had comics on my iPad once on a plane, and you mercilessly made fun of me for the entire flight about the fact that I had comics on my iPad.
01:01:28.000That was with DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
01:01:31.000It's about a married couple, and it flashes back and forth between the banality of day-to-day life, like what happens after you get what you want, versus the hopes and dreams of when they first met.
01:01:41.000God, it made me feel bad about existence for a while.
01:01:46.000It made you collide against Against frustrated ambitions and a life of having to settle and settle and settle and settle and to become a stale facsimile of what you want to work.
01:01:59.000It makes you go find your dreams after that.
01:03:56.000It's like a urinal, but instead of peeing, you just vomit out as much as you can of the booze and the food, and you go back to drinking and eating.
01:04:04.000Yeah, the Romans supposedly did it with feathers.
01:07:37.000I was born into the darkest of ignorance, but my spiritual master opened my eyes with a torch of knowledge, which I love that a lot.
01:07:45.000But it's like basically the idea is like...
01:07:49.000When you come into contact with truth, which is what any of the sutras are, by the way, I love the Bhagavad Gita, but I just started reading the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which are fucking great, man!
01:07:59.000They blow the Bhagavad Gita out of the water, as far as I'm concerned.
01:08:01.000You don't find them pretentious at all?
01:08:36.000And I think that people worry about it and other people.
01:08:39.000But what's crazy about this stuff is that once you get into it for weird reasons, but once you get into it, then it starts deconstructing you.
01:08:48.000It starts breaking you apart because it's going to this very micro level of the way that we tend to work subjectively, which is what...
01:08:55.000But that subjective experience is the only thing that ultimately matters in terms of your interior world, right?
01:09:03.000I think it was Werner Herzog, the documentary filmmaker, that was talking about the difference between ecstatic truth and factual truth.
01:09:09.000And he said, you know, if facts were the most interesting thing in the world, then the phone book would be the world's most interesting book.
01:09:15.000But obviously there's this other experience that we still call truth.
01:09:18.000Maybe it's italicized or whatever it is, but it's that ecstatic truth.
01:11:31.000See, I love that term, man, because enlightenment is the ultimate shift, which is where you do the diectic shift from yourself to the whole.
01:12:27.000And they say that, you know, movie-watching and dreaming are strangely familiar existing...
01:12:34.000Familiar experiences, similar experiences, but apparently it has to do with your self-awareness, the lateral prefrontal cortex.
01:12:40.000The same thing that turns off when people are in flow states, when rappers are freestyling.
01:12:44.000The self-editing, the self-consciousness disappears.
01:12:47.000And we love transcending our self-consciousness because it's the moment in which we see that there's an infinite amount of subjective experiences that we can have.
01:12:54.000We can be Indiana Jones, we can be anybody we want.
01:12:58.000We're not bound by our individuated state, which as amazing as it is, it's still limited.
01:13:03.000Is that lateral prefrontal cortex that you're talking about, is that the neocortex?
01:13:14.000But this is, the reason I saw this is because it was talking about it in the article about movies and you blurring, blending into the films, but also another article was talking about flow states and when they did fMRI scans on freestyle wrappers versus memorize, and it was like the same thing.
01:13:27.000But this is a terrifying thing for people.
01:13:28.000The flow state that you're talking about, if you have identified yourself...
01:13:33.000With a level of suffering or with a level of control or with a level of always being the thing driving the car, then this flow state you're talking about is a form of death.
01:15:33.000It wasn't like The Matrix, which is sort of more of a visceral thing, but still they're both pointing to the same idea, which is that whatever your experience of reality is may in fact just be a dream state or some kind of hallucination or an aspect of a simulation that you've become absorbed into.
01:15:51.000It's interesting you mention that because I actually brought something to read to you guys about The Matrix.
01:15:58.000And it's exactly about this conversation we're having.
01:16:00.000It's almost like I thought at some point we're going to start talking about blending into movies and breaking the ego and that whole thing.
01:22:07.000Oh yeah, Peter Diamandis is behind it, dude.
01:22:09.000They just launched a million dollar Kickstarter project to create a space telescope for public use, because you know they're launching a whole fleet of tiny space telescopes that To scan for near-Earth asteroids that we can then land on and leverage for resources.
01:23:40.000Those are totally different kind of animals, those people that are figuring that out.
01:23:43.000But I don't think they are, because the fact that we can have this conversation means we can acknowledge some kind of understanding of what we're talking about.
01:23:53.000Comparison to the dude who figured out what a quark-gluon plasma particle would weigh and then made it.
01:23:59.000Made something that if you get a sugar cube of it, it'll fall straight through the center of the earth because it'll weigh like 400 billion pounds or something fucking crazy.
01:24:07.000So you think it's just a different kind of animal?
01:24:08.000You think it's just a different kind of brain?
01:24:09.000You think like if we went and sat with him for a couple weeks, he could explain it to us?
01:24:15.000I think people are remarkably adaptable and people go down certain paths, I think, in life.
01:24:20.000And if you meet a guy who's been a ballet dancer since he was four years old and now he's 25 and doing these twirls in the air and shit, you would look at that guy moving.
01:24:29.000I don't know why I chose ballet dancer.
01:24:31.000But you would look at that guy moving and going like, that guy is so far down the path I could never possibly catch up to him.
01:24:38.000But I think human beings have a capacity for continuing down a path in a very far way to the point where they're almost unrecognizable from when they first started.
01:24:49.000An insane specialization, like a malleability, like an ability to transform.
01:24:53.000I know that from martial arts especially.
01:24:54.000It's amazing how you can see that about, let's say, a ballet artist dancing and stuff.
01:25:06.000Isn't it funny that they don't really know what we're doing?
01:25:08.000It's like they think that we're just telling jokes, and we absolutely are, but it's all about where to put them, how to say them, how to structure them.
01:26:21.000We say he's so magnetic when he's on stage.
01:26:24.000I mean, we use those metaphors to explain something for which we have no instrumentation or way to quantify or measure, yet we employ those capacities.
01:27:32.000She says the capture and management of attention is a vital component, a state of immersion, a state of absorption is a vital component in any kind of interpersonal transformation or education or influence of any capacity or growth.
01:27:46.000In other words, you need to be completely sucked into whatever it is that's going to really transform you and get inside of you.
01:27:52.000So it all has to do with the capture and management of attention.
01:27:55.000And what are psychedelics if not Attention technologies.
01:28:22.000Focusing attention is the key to everything.
01:28:24.000If we had the power to decide at any given moment to focus our attention on the best possible thing that we could focus our attention on, our life would be like a living, breathing sculpture.
01:28:32.000It would be like a dream constantly rendering.
01:28:34.000Or it would just be you jerking off in new socks.
01:28:52.000In a world of social media, of infinite media, infinite channels, who succeeds but the one who is most physically able to capture and manage attention?
01:29:01.000And that's where you see the phenomenon of something like this.
01:29:04.000I'm always talking about like, it's been a year and people are still saying, Come back and have this conversation.
01:29:09.000I mean, that just means that you've tapped into a nerve that millions are feeling.
01:29:13.000And when you consider that 10,000 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every hour, that you still have millions of people that come and join this conversation, shows the power of that.
01:29:24.000It's like, you know, shining a little bit brighter than the other 10,000 hours.
01:29:29.000But it's a funny thing when the attention doesn't tune in.
01:29:32.000Like, when you see Obama in Germany recently, did you see that shit?
01:30:29.000Well, especially because I'm thinking, well, if this allows them to stop somebody from blowing themselves up in the subway, then cool, you know?
01:30:35.000What a pickle you're in if you know that if I have this much width, breadth, when it comes to monitoring, then I can stop people from getting blown up.
01:30:48.000I can stop a kid from getting turned into fucking Right.
01:30:52.000So now you're basically saying, well, what do we do here?
01:30:55.000Are we going to just – do we just say, okay, well, I guess the cost of people's privacy is that from time to time children get evaporated?
01:31:02.000Or do you say, no, we've got to grow up to the fact that – We're an interconnected system.
01:32:25.000Do you think that when a person implodes like that, if we're talking about what happened to that person on a human scale, we might say, okay, well, maybe...
01:32:32.000You know, years of disaffection and radicalization and propaganda and mediation from the wrong influences and his focused attention on the wrong place.
01:32:58.000Just like we want to make advances in medicine to detect cancer cells before they metastasize, can we find human beings before they metastasize into that?
01:33:28.000It teaches you about right and wrong and what's legal and what's not legal.
01:33:31.000If you're part of the pop culture, you're programmed into a kind of mainstream consensus trance that basically says, we're moderately free as long as you don't physically hurt me and I don't physically hurt you.
01:33:42.000You don't do certain things, but we have these kind of frameworks to impose some kind of an order so that the system can have some kind of function.
01:34:13.000No, but if they already want to fuck with you, they can look at your stuff and say, oh, he owns too large a lobster, which is a federal offense.
01:34:42.000And that's what this guy is saying is absolutely possible.
01:34:45.000This guy is saying that the people that work at the organization, like him, they keep referring to him as a high school dropout, which is hilarious.
01:35:19.000What nation has it been where it's like, oh yes, that was that one government that knew, that studied all the correspondents of all its citizens, and it didn't go wrong at all.
01:35:38.000But here's the counter-argument to that.
01:35:40.000Do you think that if given the proper instruments, the citizenry could police themselves?
01:35:44.000Could we have a society that becomes like Airbnb, where everybody can rent their own place and everybody else judges everybody else?
01:35:52.000You don't need someone now to tell you about a good dentist.
01:35:54.000You can just look online and you're connected to all the citizens who have told you by four and a half stars, right?
01:35:59.000I was asking my brother, I was like, how do you know somebody from Airbnb is not going to be some serial killer who's going to cut me into pieces?
01:36:04.000He's like, well, because you can look at the 50 other people that stayed at his house, and they rate his cleanliness, and they rate his...
01:36:09.000So you can go anywhere in the world and have this...
01:36:11.000Same way hookers work now on aeros.com?
01:36:30.000It's not utopia, but these decentralized peer networks that self-regulate each other with no top-down management, but just lateral, is leaning towards a kind of, like, space in which we can...
01:36:41.000We have Congress because we didn't have the ability to send someone...
01:37:33.000This is where I think this fervent form of naive futurist comes into being, and not just futurists, spiritualists and a lot of other people think, oh, you know, these, as you're saying, these, what do you call it, peerless networks?
01:37:45.000Yeah, these decentralized peer networks.
01:37:48.000And by the way, when I say you, I mean me too, because I do have this hope that somehow this thing is just like an escalation towards bliss and it's all going to work itself out.
01:37:56.000But again, if you look back at history, you will see that even if a thing has become archaic and antiquated, it doesn't mean that the people running that thing are going to give it up.
01:38:05.000No, no, they don't want to give it up.
01:38:40.000But I think that these technologies will meet resistance from the establishment, but I don't think that it requires violence for transformation to occur.
01:38:47.000I mean, we're seeing it through social media.
01:39:58.000I think the dream, the naive dream of the futurists is, it's like you look in the animal kingdom.
01:40:05.000You look in, not just the animal kingdom, but you look at any massive change that has ever happened is always surrounded by a release of energy.
01:40:14.000When things rapidly change, there's a release of energy, and energy releases are always violent.
01:42:12.000But I think that if I'm going to be on some part of that spectrum, I definitely want to be on the part of the spectrum where the definition of shirt is like a shoelace or something.
01:42:24.000But in that way, all I'm saying is I don't understand the solution to fundamentalists of any religion controlling massive populations or, in the case of North Korea, people controlling massive – I don't see how – Some android Jesus.
01:42:42.000I don't see how Kurzweil's manifestation of full brain emulation and the subsequent empathic connection that happens with people.
01:42:50.000I don't understand how that makes a person who's wielded control over a chunk of land using a false god.
01:42:57.000I don't understand how that's going to make them be like, you know what?
01:43:56.000So Steven Pinker called Better Angels of Our Nature.
01:43:58.000He wrote a book called Better Angels of Our Nature.
01:44:00.000He has a TED Talk called The Myth of Violence.
01:44:02.000And he actually went up there and explained that the chances of a man dying at the hands of another man today are the lowest than they've ever been in all of human history.
01:45:04.000I mean, even the Catholic Church, I mean, you go back to the 1500s, they were drinking, they had like mistresses, the popes had mistresses.
01:45:45.000In the same way that it used to be, if a person had a great idea and wanted to transmit it, he'd have to get a printing press, and he'd have to, like, you know, to get the idea around it.
01:46:08.000You can't just do it if you want to build a nuke.
01:46:10.000But as matter as 3D printers begin to become more and more advanced, and they start working at the atomic level, then in the same way that we have accessibility to instantaneous communication, People are going to have accessibility to instantaneous creation of all kinds of fucked up weapons.
01:46:27.000That's when we're going to need an account of all the people in our community.
01:46:30.000That's when we're going to need an account of them in a loving way.
01:47:02.000You know, I mean, that's possible too.
01:47:04.000I think it's our job collectively as a human species to concentrate on the least fortunate amongst us.
01:47:11.000I think it's the thing that everyone takes for granted, everyone ignores, and every single guy who runs for president doesn't bring it up.
01:47:20.000They never say, look, our society is only as strong as its weakest link.
01:47:25.000We've got a bunch of people that are being ignored, and they're an awesome resource.
01:47:28.000If we educated them and helped them and moved them forward in some way, who knows what kind of great benefit you could get out of this community of people.
01:48:24.000It's almost like a part of being a human to recognize all the flaws around us to make it glaringly obvious that we're aware of having to focus more attention on them and hopefully slow down the progress of the evil.
01:48:35.000Us being scared and neurotic and almost negative has been biologically selected for to warn us against potential consequences.
01:48:43.000The early caveman who was chilling out looking at the sky got The one that was like scared of impending doom survived so there's no coincidence that we have evolved that but until we start like Playing with our own genomes, like we can't change our basic dispositions,
01:48:59.000which is to pay attention to whatever we think is dangerous.
01:49:02.000But I think it does have, you know, knowledge is power.
01:49:40.000But it's funny, Ari, what you're saying goes against your hate of the surveillance state.
01:49:45.000Because you could see how in an accelerating technology where people can blow each other up with increasing competency, you can see the necessity for perhaps an observation.
01:50:12.000The trend towards everybody having access to everything at all times.
01:50:17.000I think we're going to have a real problem with money because money right now used to be based on gold and now we've got this ones and zeros thing that we're rocking that doesn't really make any sense at all.
01:50:27.000I think that Bitcoin's not going to last but I think the thing that comes right after Bitcoin is going to be the one.
01:50:31.000Oh, have you guys heard about this shit?
01:50:33.000Bitcoin's going to be the front story.
01:50:36.000We live in a really strange time because as access to information gets more and more transparent, more and more free, where we all have access to everything...
01:50:46.000Well, then what exactly is financial resources?
01:52:04.000Well, we can have it in virtual reality.
01:52:06.000We'll have virtual games where we can be the heroes in our own universe.
01:52:09.000The flaw in your argument, and the terrifying flaw in your argument, is the assumption that people do things for a reason.
01:52:15.000You're saying people do things because they don't have enough or they do things because of this or that.
01:52:18.000Some of the most horrible things are done for no reason at all.
01:52:22.000They're done because the biocomputer that somebody's running clicked the wrong way and they decided it'd be fun to hear the sound of a teenage boy's neck snap when they're painted like a clown.
01:52:43.000There's the urge to kill it, but the interesting thing, and I think this, I heard, I think McKenna said this, there's this relay, there's a race happening right now.
01:52:51.000Because it's not as though these two things can't exist at the same time.
01:52:54.000It's like, we were talking about this, and I've been thinking about it a bunch since, how, you know, in phones, of course, there are conflict minerals.
01:53:01.000What's the name of that shit in phones?
01:53:22.000And to think that somehow technology is going to make things all light is to say that we will actually rewire the universe, when in fact it seems like what's happening is an acceleration on both sides of the scale.
01:53:35.000And as that acceleration happens, there will be an equivalent amount of this orgasmic, utopian, Teilhard de Chardon omega point with the other side of the thing, which is the absolute obliteration of all humanity through nuclear weapons or bioweapons.
01:53:51.000Now, here's the hopeful thing is what Martin Luther King said, which is the universe bends in the direction of justice.
01:53:57.000And there is this hope that there's a refraction in this lens where things are going towards the direction of creation instead of...
01:54:05.000Yeah, well, Steven Johnson says it's not utopia, but it's leaning that way.
01:54:09.000So, you know, you could argue the things are better.
01:54:13.000If technology amplifies the good in us, it amplifies the bad in us, but maybe it amplifies the good a little bit more than it amplifies the bad, so that eventually it might subvert completely.
01:54:58.000So in our desire to believe that these things are going to help us transcend our limitations, you know, technology is actually delivering a little bit more than the previous stuff.
01:57:23.000You're a real legit comic, R.H.F.E.R. It's an honor watching you grow from being a dude who is just sort of getting on stage the first time to being a legit headliner.
01:58:00.000It airs Monday nights at 9. We're doing season 2 now in the fall, but currently we're still airing it.
01:58:05.000Next Monday is the final episode, actually, the 12th episode.
01:58:08.000So please check out Brain Games on National Geographic.
01:58:10.000And I also launched a new YouTube channel called YouTube.com slash Shots of Awe, where I'm releasing new videos of my crazy espresso psychedelic videos every week.