Daniel Pinchbeck is an author who has a great book called Breaking Open the Head and another one called 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl. He s also a big advocate of Burning Man and a big part of the hippie scene. In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, we talk about the end of the world, the power outages in Los Angeles, and the weird things people do to prepare for a natural disaster like the one that's going on now. Plus, he tells us about a weird dream he had about a gorilla and a werewolf having sex and why he thinks it s a good idea to get stoned before a big disaster like this happens. Also, he talks about a new drug called Choline and why you should try it if you re looking for a new way to improve your mental function. And he explains why he doesn t think it s actually that bad. Enjoy this episode, and don t forget to subscribe to the show and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! and a review on iTunes if you like the show! Thanks for listening, Joe! XOXO, Timestamps: 0:00 - The End of the World - Breaking Open The Head 6:30 - The Return Of Quetzalscoatl 8:40 - Burning Man 9:00 12:20 - What s going on in the world? 13:15 - How do you feel about Burning Man? 14:15 15:00- What do you like about the hippies? 16: What s your favorite thing about the most? 17: What are you looking forward to? 18:20 19:30 21: What is your favorite part of your favorite book? 19 - What's your favorite moment from the past day? 22:40 23:30- What s the worst thing you ve ever had to do in your life? 26:40- What would you like to see me do in the next episode? 27: How did you think of the most important thing that you ve done in the past week? 29:00: Is it a good enough? 30:00 + 27:00 | How do I feel about your favorite piece of food? 31:00 / 32:00 & 33:00 Is it possible to be a hippie in your head?
00:00:17.000We're gonna get crazy Taking a long ride Down some of my favorite schools of thought with this guy here Daniel Pinchback is author if you've never heard of him Taking a long ride down some of my favorite schools of thought with this guy here.
00:00:54.000I'm sorry you got stuck in traffic, but it's almost appropriate because you're sort of a little bit of a doom and gloom, end of civilization sort of a dude, and there's a giant power outage in L.A. that fucked traffic upside down.
00:01:04.000Well, yeah, now that I know that, I feel better about the situation.
00:04:06.000I spent a lot of time with this woman who runs the Women's Visionary Congress, and my friend John Perry Barlow, who wrote lyrics for The Grateful Dead and started Electronic Freedom Foundation.
00:04:16.000It's actually an amazing, you know, brain trust of human oddities and eccentric fossils.
00:04:22.000I believe that, but there's also a lot of douchebags and you've got to wade through them.
00:04:27.000And when you're, what you are is like this figurehead for this psychedelic movement in sort of a lot of ways.
00:04:37.000Honestly, I actually didn't have one douchebag experience.
00:04:40.000A lot of people did come up to me who had read my books or seen the film, and people were extremely respectful and actually kind of moving.
00:04:49.000So many people told me that the books had affected them or impacted their lives or whatever.
00:04:53.000I mean, every Dead show I've ever been to, or any Fish show I've ever been to, has never been douchebags.
00:04:57.000Even though you would think there would be a shitload of douchebags, everyone has this positive vibe to them.
00:05:01.000So everyone, even if there are douchebags, they still have this underlining, yeah, I'm happy and I want to give you love and positive energy.
00:05:08.000It seems like the whole scene and stuff like that.
00:05:39.000The guy from California, the guy from Massachusetts, rather, Mitt Romney, he's a Mormon.
00:05:46.000I mean, at a certain point in time, you gotta go, come on, man, really?
00:05:50.000You believe that Joseph Smith, this 14-year-old kid, found these golden tablets with the lost works of Jesus, and only you could read them because you had a magic rock.
00:06:54.000It's a fascinating yet terrifying documentary that Johnny Knoxville put together about this family in West Virginia that's completely crazy.
00:07:02.000All they do, like they're just constantly committing crimes and selling pills and going on rampages and getting arrested.
00:07:08.000It's just a fascinating family that's just not living by the rules that you or I live by.
00:08:27.000December 21st, 2012 is the big day and that's, you know, etched in stone and a lot of people's ideas about a lot of the shit that you write about and a lot of the shit that people think of about the coming of the next age.
00:08:40.000If it rolls around and nothing happens then what?
00:08:52.000On the other hand, it seems to me that it's super clear that we're in the middle of a transformation, that we can see now the global economy is buckling, the planetary ecology is also buckling, we've hit peak oil, A lot of the resources are in serious depletion.
00:09:11.000So yeah, we're faced with an endgame for the current global civilization that we're in.
00:09:18.000Is that peak oil thing been clearly established?
00:09:20.000Yeah, it's been very clearly established.
00:09:22.000So everyone agrees it's not a debated thing?
00:09:24.000Well, I mean, of course, there's some debate and there's some disinformation.
00:09:53.000Of course, but it's why we are in wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and why we're trying to hold down our access to the remaining resources.
00:10:03.000But yeah, so I never anticipated anything exactly what happened on December 21, 2012, although it certainly might.
00:10:11.000But I think that what we need to do and what I tried to do in my work up to this point is really try to take a big step back and look at our situation and factor in all sorts of stuff that the modern worldview is not really factoring in, which for me includes Shamanism, the DMT experience, psychic experience in general, the kind of psychic capacities that actually many people are aware of that happen all the time, whether it's synchronicity or telepathy.
00:10:55.000There's a lot of minutes in the day, man.
00:10:57.000It happens more and more the older I get to.
00:10:57.000How do you know when I'm calling you, man?
00:10:59.000There's a lot of goddamn minutes in the day.
00:11:00.000When was the last time I fucking called you?
00:11:01.000I mean, yeah, you were supposed to be on the podcast today and we had emailed each other about it, but we hadn't talked on the phone in a long-ass time.
00:11:10.000Well, I mean, you could say that it's weird and creepy, but then you kind of get past that point and you just kind of integrate it.
00:11:14.000And it's like, okay, somehow there's actually one consciousness that's kind of working through all of us.
00:11:20.000And as time moves on in this period, it seems like those synchronicities are speeding up and our psychic capacities are somehow intensifying.
00:11:30.000But I will say that one idea I'm working on for December 21st, 2012, is to utilize the date, because now there's so much popular focus on it, to create a kind of global event, which would be a kind of spectacle.
00:11:42.000I'm working with composers and a team from Cirque du Soleil, and they're kind of putting together a concept for a show that would kind of celebrate humanity's evolution to this present point.
00:11:55.000And then ending with a synchronized peace meditation, kind of global focus on unity, with the idea that you could take the energy that's pointed towards that day, and there's so much fear around it, and anxiety, and trepidation, and actually make it into the most awesome thing possible, where it's like, well, look where we've arrived at, and look at our opportunities now to make a shift and a jump into a new form of planetary civilization.
00:12:20.000Well, this is the clearest time in human history where the common person, any person really, has a direct influence over an incredible amount of people with viral information, with videos, and with anything that you write that really resonates with people.
00:12:33.000You can hit an amazing amount of people now.
00:12:35.000So a guy like you could get in touch with a bunch of other people who could do exactly the same thing, and a ripple effect can go on, and it can hit millions and millions easy.
00:12:44.000There's never been an opportunity to do anything like that.
00:12:46.000Yeah, I mean, we'd totally love to have you involved with our Unify Earth project.
00:12:56.000At the moment, we're actually in negotiation with the Mexican government to use Chichen Itza, which is considered by the Mayans to be the heart of the Mayan world.
00:13:04.000You know what would be the shit, dude?
00:14:05.000How much communication online steers it.
00:14:07.000Because it seems to me this is the only time where people have been able to sort of...
00:14:12.000Merge in this way globally on their own and do it on a regular basis.
00:14:16.000People are addicted to just going on Twitter, addicted to communicating with people on message boards and on Facebook.
00:14:23.000There's an interconnectivity that's never existed before.
00:14:27.000So an idea, the idea of a hive mind influenced by anyone is way different now than it's ever been in human history, as far as we know, right?
00:14:40.000Different people are kind of moving towards this idea that maybe humanity is on the verge of transitioning into being kind of like a superorganism, you know, that we're kind of like coming to awareness of ourselves as a singular being, in a sense, you know, and then we can, you know, begin to act more symbiotically rather than like parasitically or aggressively.
00:14:59.000There was a really fascinating article recently written on creativity and how people are always praising creativity and looking forward to getting new and creative ideas.
00:15:08.000But that other people's creativity actually makes people uncomfortable.
00:15:12.000It makes people uncomfortable and uneasy.
00:15:14.000And the idea that someone had come up with these ideas that they didn't.
00:15:20.000Like, the really powerful push towards fundamentalism, the really powerful push towards the 6,000-year-old earth kind of shit, you know, and follow the Bible kind of shit, is really the same thing as someone trying to confine creativity.
00:15:36.000They're trying to confine enlightenment.
00:15:38.000I guess my feeling is basically we live in a culture where people are being indoctrinated not to think.
00:15:47.000They're being indoctrinated by the media, the mainstream culture, by the education system to be ignorant, to not question, to not develop their independent capacity of thought.
00:15:58.000Okay, but are you saying this from the education system or are you saying this from the media?
00:16:25.000No, all these things are, from my perspective, they're basically kind of holding the mass consciousness, the planetary consciousness, at a certain low level or low frequency.
00:17:22.000And I think that, honestly, with the internet, you look at the society that's growing out of the internet, look at movements like Anonymous, look at things that have never happened before, these giant groups moving forward and taking down websites and taking down companies that they feel have acted unjustly.
00:17:43.000No one's ever been able to do something like that before.
00:17:48.000Yeah, well, I mean, so we have two things.
00:17:51.000A number of things are happening simultaneously, and that's another thing that's very interesting about our time, is that things are getting pretty complicated.
00:17:57.000Now, one problem with television in general is that it's designed to reduce everything into tiny little sound bites.
00:18:03.000You know, when Lincoln and Jefferson debated in the 1860s, the debates lasted eight hours, you know?
00:18:08.000When we have a debate on TV, each person gets, like...
00:18:11.00036 seconds for this response, 22 seconds.
00:18:13.000We're basically used to everything being spoon-fed and dumbed down to an absolute level of stupidity.
00:18:19.000And basically, the problem is that because our scenario on the planet is very complex at this point, we actually need to be able to articulate and analyze at a much deeper level.
00:18:31.000We have the one-directional mass media, which I really am convinced is basically a kind of lobotomy machine that anesthetizes people into an ultimate state of idiocy and consumerist passivity.
00:18:43.000And then we have the development of this new interactive media, which is having profound effects and will continue to have profound effects.
00:18:50.000And if you go look at the history of media, Every time there's a new form of media that's very powerful, it transforms the society, the political system, the government, changes everything.
00:19:02.000You could never have had an empire until you had a written code of laws that could be distributed to the borders and beyond.
00:19:08.000You could never have had a modern representational democracy, nation-state, unless you had the printing press, which distributed enough materials that everybody could participate in civic dialogues.
00:19:21.000Now with this interactive technology, potentially points towards a much deeper transition in our political and social paradigm.
00:19:28.000Potentially towards a way from centralized control hierarchy to more of a kind of distributed or direct democracy.
00:19:36.000and interconnectedness as human beings in general.
00:19:40.000No one's been this close to this many people just through online communication.
00:19:45.000No one has ever had that kind of an influence before by such a wide variety of people and ideas all coming at you.
00:19:51.000Sure, and look how incredibly new it is.
00:20:44.000That reminds me of a joke that Terence McKenna used to say, that some guy practiced a city of levitation for 40 years and figured out finally how to float.
00:20:54.000And he came up to the Buddha and he said, Master, I can walk across the water.
00:20:58.000And the Buddha said, but the ferry's only a nickel.
00:21:07.000Not only that, the idea that you are independent from nature and that you don't need some help in any way.
00:21:15.000I mean, you're constantly getting help from nutrients and vitamins and protein and all these different things that you absorb through nature.
00:21:20.000But then when it comes to this that you think may or may not do something to your mind, I can get there naturally.
00:21:26.000To get back to the Google search, I think that the fact that we now have so much knowledge and information at our disposal is an extraordinary thing.
00:21:36.000But then the question is still, how do we manage that?
00:21:39.000And what type of society can we pull ourselves into?
00:21:45.000Because at the moment, what we have is not going to last very much longer.
00:21:48.000I like what you said, pull ourselves into, because it's going to have to be that, because you're going to have to pull away from the system that we have now, especially the financial system.
00:21:58.000We've learned from when Ron Paul wanted the audits of the bailouts and people found out how many trillions of dollars had been sent into this whole idea of bailouts and where these tax dollars went.
00:22:09.000I think a lot of people became really disillusioned and disenfranchised and had no connection to it.
00:22:55.000And we interviewed this guy, Bernard Lyotard, who was an economist.
00:22:58.000He was one of the architects of the euro.
00:22:59.000He wrote a great book called The Future of Money.
00:23:02.000And in that book, he, you know, and in our film, we discussed how the financial system is broken.
00:23:06.000It really doesn't matter at this point who you put in control because it's still just like a car with no brakes, but that actually we're going to have to reinvent instruments for exchanging value that actually have fundamentally different value systems connected to them.
00:23:23.000So, for instance, he proposes a currency, which he calls the Terra, that has a negative interest charge.
00:23:28.000So it's a new trading currency, a global trading currency, that's indexed not to just a virtual abstraction like our money currently is, but actually it's indexed to a basket of real-world goods and resources that decline in value over time, because most things do.
00:23:43.000So the longer you held on to a Terra, the less it would be worth.
00:23:47.000So instead of a gold standard, it would be based on a bunch of different valuable things?
00:23:52.000A bundle of resources that would include fuel and wheat and processed foods and unprocessed goods and so on.
00:24:00.000And as a summation of all of that, it would actually decline in value.
00:24:04.000It would have what's called a demirage charge.
00:24:06.000So when people got a bunch of these taros through some business deal, rather than seeking to hoard them or hold on to them, that wouldn't work.
00:24:13.000So they would be best used by putting them back into circulation, by sharing them or whatever.
00:24:19.000So that's Leotard's concept, one of many concepts.
00:24:23.000We're actually publishing a book through my company Evolver called Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein.
00:24:28.000It's actually already out on the internet and you can get copies.
00:24:32.000But he actually puts together a whole paradigm looking at the inevitability of the financial system breaking down and really seeing that rather than just having one monopoly of a value exchanging instrument like money that's controlled by private banking interests, You could really create a whole ecology of different ways of exchanging value that would be used for different purposes.
00:24:53.000Do you think that the government would ever allow something like that to actually take place?
00:24:57.000I mean, it almost seems like trying to create a government inside a government.
00:25:10.000Well, I think that's definitely going to be on the horizon because people are not going to be able to use this currency.
00:25:15.000Yeah, it was a small town, and they had their own currency in this town.
00:25:18.000And there was a debate about its legality.
00:25:21.000And in fact, if you look at the bankruptcy of the government and the effects of peak oil and all this other stuff going on, the capacity of the federal government to intervene and to meddle may actually become radically reduced in the next years.
00:25:36.000Because there's just not going to be the money available for that kind of endless effort.
00:26:55.000How important is psychedelics in this equation?
00:26:58.000Because the best tool, in my opinion, to sort of calm down those instincts, those competitive, super hyper-aggressive instincts, is psychedelics, and it's...
00:27:19.000So I think that psychedelics have tremendous value.
00:27:22.000People always say that I'm an advocate of psychedelics, and I suppose it's true to a certain extent, but I also feel that it's an individual decision.
00:27:27.000They're not for everybody, and obviously they're still illegal and frowned upon in our society.
00:27:31.000But the fact is that one of the values of psychedelics is they kind of decondition you from your present state of consciousness and your social ideology and belief system.
00:27:43.000I remember the first time I took mushrooms, one of the first experiences I had was going to a deli and buying something with money and just finding it totally ludicrous that our culture invested so much belief in these wrinkly, brown, ugly pieces of paper.
00:27:57.000You know, and that everybody was kind of so disconnected from their present experience and focused on the sports or the stock ticker or all this crap, for my opinion.
00:28:06.000You know, so I think that peeling away back to a kind of, you know, phenomenological, as they say, level of just presence of being, that's a very powerful thing.
00:28:26.000So the psychedelics can break that investment we've made in all these things that we think are real that are just abstractions and concepts.
00:28:35.000Can you enjoy a good movie and still be a person who believes that we're evolving as a consciousness and that we are in an adolescent state of evolution and somehow or another we're in a transitionary period and we're all coming...
00:29:32.000Personally, what I like are kind of...
00:29:35.000When I get excited now about popular narratives, it's more because I see in them the seeds of part of this transformation that's underway.
00:29:44.000Now, for instance, if you look at like a lot of the most archetypally huge stories that our culture keeps telling us, which includes the mutant, you know, the X-Men, Harry Potter, you know, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings to a certain extent, but Star Wars, let's say, Avatar.
00:29:59.000The story that's repeated over and over again is there's like this hero's journey.
00:30:02.000And as part of that hero's journey, there has to be a learning to use our psychic faculties.
00:30:08.000You know, so, so, you know, the Matrix.
00:30:11.000He's trying to tell us we're all superheroes, dude.
00:30:14.000Yeah, so if you look at mutants, they're going to this academy, they have to learn how to master these paranormal gifts.
00:30:20.000You know, Harry Potter, you have to learn to cast your spells.
00:30:24.000You know, I actually, the more that I've thought about it, and the more my own experiences have kind of echoed, you know, some of these things, I think that these stories are so powerful because they represent a kind of yearning that people have for a kind of initiatory training and extrasensory perception.
00:30:39.000And that is something that our society...
00:30:42.000You know, has rigorously denied us, you know?
00:30:44.000And I think if you look at, like, what happens to you when you're, like, an adolescent, like, let's say you're 15, 20 years old, you know, you have this beginning, and when you're a young teenager, you have this tremendous sense of expectation.
00:30:55.000You're, like, waiting for some transformative thing to happen to you.
00:31:00.000And so instead, you accept a lot of basically crappy, degraded substitutes, like dulling entertainment, like, you know, watching athletes do this and that or whatever, Rather than having gone through something that you always just know is missing, but then the culture kind of hides it from you.
00:31:17.000And I think that that thing that's missing from our culture is this direct initiatory process.
00:31:23.000How is the culture hiding it from you, though?
00:31:25.000I think the culture, the water sort of seeks its own level on a lot of these things, and a lot of people just get lazy and don't look for it.
00:31:32.000And this culture that's opening up right now, The experiences now are being detailed and talked about that people could never understand before.
00:31:41.000The connection that people have together through the internet now, there's never been anything like this before.
00:32:09.000I want to start fucking putting cigarettes in here.
00:32:10.000I fuck with you because I love you because you're one of my best friends, but I get it.
00:32:13.000Actually, it was through ayahuasca that I stopped.
00:32:15.000Actually, it was through ayahuasca that I started also, to be honest, because there's a whole relationship between ayahuasca shamanism and the Amazon and tobacco.
00:34:02.000My personal, you know, experience growing up was like, you know, I thought there would be this amazing thing that would happen.
00:34:09.000You've got to do something to have those things, man.
00:34:12.000You've got to, you know, I've always said that there should be some sort of a right of manhood.
00:34:17.000It doesn't have to be even a manhood thing attached to something manly or aggressive.
00:34:22.000I mean, to finding your character, finding your limitations, doing something extraordinary.
00:34:27.000Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Some of the thinkers that I wrote about in my books talked about how cultures need to have some type of initiatory ritual.
00:34:35.000And if they don't have it consciously constructed, it'll end up being unconsciously destructive.
00:34:41.000It'll happen through war or through destruction of the environment or something.
00:34:46.000So one theory that I have about the quote-unquote 2012 or this transition that we're in is that it's almost on an unconscious level.
00:34:54.000Humanity has not been able to change its behavior, right?
00:34:56.000So it's like it's on an unconscious level.
00:34:58.000We're kind of willing ourselves into a state of catastrophe to bring about an initiation and thereby a transformation of consciousness.
00:35:45.000You could see TV. It's just us living our life, and then around a certain age, we grow up to a certain point where we're like, yeah, it's fucking spinning out of control.
00:35:55.000Back in the 40s, it's probably like Charlie Chaplin thought it was spinning out of control.
00:35:58.000That is possible, but it also could be that human beings, even though we love to think of ourselves as being separate from all the other things in this world, we are a natural thing.
00:36:08.000And even though we have plastic fucking cars and glass lenses for our fucking cell phones...
00:36:15.000We are still a natural thing, and we are subject to the natural cycles of this earth, of this superorganism, of the universe itself.
00:36:23.000And even when we see crazy weather patterns and wild crazy shit, there could easily also be crazy cultural patterns.
00:36:30.000And that culture, even though we can create it and we do have control of it, it may be very well a natural movement.
00:36:37.000As natural as your evolution from baby to adulthood.
00:36:57.000Both of these computers, I tried to go to your website today and just search my name obviously first, but then Joe Rogan's name, and both of them kept on crashing my browser.
00:37:13.000Remember those trackballs in the center of it?
00:37:15.000Anyway, we've published a few pieces by a German scientist, the guy Dieter Braus, who wrote a book called Revolution 2012, and he's one of a bunch of people who are arguing that a lot of what's happening has to do with changes that are taking place throughout the whole solar system that have to do with the sun changing, that actually the electromagnetic environment of the Earth is shifting.
00:37:33.000What is supposed to be the galactic alignment on December 21st, 2012?
00:37:37.000Because I've heard Neil Tyson, who I very much respect, poo-poo it.
00:37:46.000He's a scholar, a very well-respected, I believe he's an astrophysicist or something along those lines, but super, super brilliant guy.
00:37:54.000He pooh-poohed that there was any alignment whatsoever.
00:37:56.000He said it's a constant thing, that same alignment happens all the time.
00:38:00.000He's like, you know, the fact that everyone's making it out that December 21st, 2012 was the first time that this happens in 25,000 years, he's like, that's nonsense.
00:38:08.000And he's, I believe, he knows more than I do.
00:38:11.000Well, he probably knows more than you do.
00:38:13.000So, I mean, I can just give you my little interpretation.
00:38:16.000I mean, my understanding is that it's simply an optical alignment, which means there's no particular reason that we would know of that would be such a tremendous transformative thing, where the winter solstice sun rises within the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way.
00:38:31.000So, in a sense, it's an eclipse of the center of the Milky Way by the sun.
00:38:36.000On the winter solstice, on that particular date.
00:38:38.000So that date had a lot of significance for them.
00:38:41.000It was like the key moment in the year.
00:38:43.000And they considered the Sun to be the first father, and they saw the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way as the cosmic mother, or they also called it apparently a black hole.
00:38:52.000Which is interesting, because only in the last 15 years that our astronomers discover there is a huge black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
00:38:58.000Well, they know that there's actually a supermassive black hole in the center of every single galaxy.
00:39:02.000And that that supermassive black hole is one half of one percent of the mass of every galaxy.
00:39:07.000So if you have a giant galaxy, it's a much bigger black hole.
00:39:10.000And they even have, there's the first photograph they've ever taken of a black hole eating a black hole.