The Joe Rogan Experience - July 02, 2024


Joe Rogan Experience #2172 - Sebastian Junger

Topics
parenting bipolar relationships warfare psychic distance Afghanistan suburb internal hemorrhage compensatory shock blood loss and shock near-death experience love quantum physics mystery quantum entangled photons discovery quantum physics mystery blockbusting zoos and tigers zoo wolves Ted Hughes poem inner morality and religious beliefs Genghis Khan genius killing genetic reward for aggression
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Sebastian Junger
Mentioned
Schrodinger Dostoevsky Trevor Burrus Well Genghis Khan Karl Marx Tsar Nicholas Wolf Watching John Joe Rogan Podcast Jack Weatherford Phil Dombrowski Ted Hughes Heisenberg Younger Barbara Kelvin Jamie Peter Betty Blah and 22 more
Joe Rogan Experience #2171 - Eric Weinstein & Terrence Howard Joe Rogan Experience #2173 - Jimmy Dore

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 17 minutes

Words per minute

168.12

Word count

23,091

Sentence count

2,365

Harmful content

Misogyny

19

sentences flagged

Toxicity

220

sentences flagged

Hate speech

31

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this week's episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins me to talk about the end of an era: the death of the flip phone. We also talk about playground safety and the dangers of playing on the playground in the fall. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The show was produced by Riley Bray. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. All rights reserved. Used by permission. If you or someone you know is having a hard time with something, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text "ELT" to 741741. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerSpeakers. We appreciate the support we've gotten from you, the listeners. Thank you so much to our sponsorships, we can't wait to hear from you! We'll see you next week with our ad-free version of the show! Subscribe, Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast, and tell us what you think of it! We're listening to it on Apple Podcasts! and we'll be giving you a shoutout! in the next episode of the pod, too! if you like it out there! Thanks for listening! Timestamps: 0:00 - 5: 1: 2:30 - What do you have a flip phone? 3:15 - How do you feel about it? 4:00 5:40 - What kind of phone do you'd rather have? 6:10 - what do you want? 7: What do your kids have an iPhone? 8:00 + 9:00 | What are you'd like to see me call me back? 11:30 9: What s your favorite thing? 12:30 | What's your favorite piece of advice? 13: Is it better? 14:00 -- what s your biggest piece of technology? 15:00 Is it a good day? 16:40 | What s it's better than a good one? 17:00 & 15:30 + + + 6:30 & 16:10 What do I think it's a good deal?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.
00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
00:00:13.000 As I was saying, you're one of the last of the Mohicans rocking that flip phone. 1.00
00:00:18.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:00:19.000 I'm proud of it.
00:00:19.000 Do you text people?
00:00:21.000 Yeah, yeah, I text.
00:00:22.000 Do you do the do-do-do-do-do where it takes a bunch of times?
00:00:24.000 Well, it's something called T9. It's predictive texting.
00:00:27.000 So, you know, it gives you a bunch of alternatives.
00:00:29.000 You just have to do it all on a keypad with your thumb rather than with an iPhone with you have the full alphabet.
00:00:35.000 But I bet that battery lasts like a week.
00:00:37.000 I don't even travel with a charger, man.
00:00:39.000 Really?
00:00:40.000 Yeah, I mean, unless I'm gone for a week.
00:00:42.000 But if I'm just gone for a couple of days and I don't have any long conversations planned, I don't even bother.
00:00:47.000 Wow.
00:00:48.000 Yeah.
00:00:49.000 All emailed, everything's handled at home.
00:00:51.000 All on the laptop, right?
00:00:53.000 Yeah, plus chicks do get mad. 1.00
00:00:54.000 They do?
00:00:55.000 No.
00:00:57.000 What kind of chicks are you hanging around with? 1.00
00:00:59.000 Savages.
00:01:00.000 At one point, I was at CNN waiting to go on, and these two young women kept looking at me.
00:01:06.000 This was like 10 years ago, so I plausibly could say to myself, well, maybe I still got it.
00:01:12.000 Who knew?
00:01:14.000 And then one of them noticed that I had noticed them looking at me and she goes, oh, excuse me, sir, we were just, we can't believe that you have a flip phone.
00:01:21.000 So I was like, well, that's the end of an era.
00:01:23.000 Ten years ago?
00:01:24.000 Yeah.
00:01:25.000 Wow.
00:01:25.000 Yeah.
00:01:26.000 Ten years ago, there was a few people out there that were hanging out.
00:01:29.000 My friend Ari still had a flip phone ten years ago.
00:01:32.000 Yeah, the only people I know now are you and David Tell.
00:01:36.000 So you're in good company.
00:01:37.000 Yeah, yeah, that's right.
00:01:39.000 It's cool.
00:01:39.000 I'm telling you, it's cool.
00:01:40.000 It's coming back.
00:01:41.000 It's the next big thing.
00:01:42.000 Well, I know a lot of people, you know, they switch to what's called, I think it's called a simple phone.
00:01:48.000 Is that what it's called, Jamie?
00:01:50.000 What is that thing called?
00:01:51.000 What's that?
00:01:52.000 No, the little tiny, the one that's...
00:01:55.000 It just gives you nothing but text messages.
00:01:59.000 I think you can get music on it, too.
00:02:01.000 I think it's called a simple phone.
00:02:04.000 Do you read on a tablet, like one of those Kindles?
00:02:09.000 I don't.
00:02:10.000 Well, the great thing about those is they have this white paper-looking interface, so it doesn't look like a screen.
00:02:17.000 It looks like paper.
00:02:18.000 Right.
00:02:18.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:02:19.000 That's what this little phone looks like.
00:02:22.000 That's what it is.
00:02:22.000 Light phone.
00:02:23.000 Yeah, that thing.
00:02:25.000 So it has basically the same thing as your phone, except you could text like a normal human.
00:02:31.000 And it'll play music and it has notes.
00:02:33.000 It gives you directions, right?
00:02:35.000 That's not bad. 0.87
00:02:35.000 I mean, what I don't want is to get sucked into the algorithms of social media and all that garbage. 0.87
00:02:41.000 You don't want to get into the algorithms, I'm in.
00:02:44.000 You don't want.
00:02:45.000 I have seen more people fall off buildings, get hit by cars, get shot, get stabbed.
00:02:50.000 And just not participate in their life, right?
00:02:53.000 Even if nothing bad happens, you're still...
00:02:55.000 I mean, listen, man, I have young children.
00:02:57.000 I have a seven-year-old girl and a four-year-old girl.
00:02:59.000 And we're at the playground, and I swear there are kids who fall, and I got to go...
00:03:03.000 Kids I don't know.
00:03:04.000 I got to go over and, like, dust them off and comfort them because the mom or dad doesn't even know because they're on their phone.
00:03:11.000 Yeah.
00:03:12.000 Right?
00:03:12.000 That's not parenting.
00:03:13.000 I mean, like, what do you have kids for?
00:03:14.000 Especially playgrounds, man.
00:03:16.000 Playgrounds are still a little sketchy.
00:03:18.000 You know, my daughter, when she was six, she broke her arm at school on a playground.
00:03:22.000 Really?
00:03:22.000 Actually, she was a little older than six.
00:03:25.000 She might have been eight.
00:03:26.000 But, yeah, it's... 0.99
00:03:27.000 Playgrounds are fucking scary, man. 0.98
00:03:29.000 You know, you're swinging around and you're playing and kids fall the wrong way and... 0.99
00:03:34.000 And we're on the Lower East Side in New York City, so it's sketchy in some other ways, too.
00:03:39.000 You've got to be awake, right?
00:03:41.000 You've got to be alert.
00:03:43.000 And not only that, but you had kids.
00:03:46.000 Just enjoy this while you can.
00:03:49.000 Right.
00:03:50.000 Is the TikTok video more interesting than the human that you made?
00:03:54.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:03:55.000 You guys made humans.
00:03:57.000 I mean, that still freaks me out to this day, even when they're mad at me.
00:04:00.000 I'm like, I just can't believe you made you.
00:04:04.000 I made you and now you're mad at me.
00:04:06.000 Like, how does that work?
00:04:08.000 I have all girls, so they're mad at you for stuff that doesn't even make sense.
00:04:11.000 Like, you're like, okay.
00:04:12.000 How old are they?
00:04:14.000 The youngest right now is 14. Oh, wow.
00:04:16.000 So I got seven and four.
00:04:17.000 So, right.
00:04:19.000 So that thing's coming.
00:04:20.000 Okay, got it.
00:04:20.000 Yeah.
00:04:21.000 I got a 14 and 16 and then a grown one.
00:04:23.000 I got a 27-year-old.
00:04:24.000 Because, you know, I've had girlfriends that were mad at me for things that I didn't think made sense.
00:04:29.000 And I was like, okay, well, that's all right. 0.98
00:04:31.000 That's because you're crazy and, you know, whatever. 0.93
00:04:33.000 But actually, like, that might be in my future. 0.97
00:04:36.000 Yeah, they're just different.
00:04:38.000 It's just women and girls are just different. 1.00
00:04:42.000 And me, you know, I think the universe did me a solid by giving me only daughters.
00:04:48.000 Yeah, me too.
00:04:49.000 Because you have a different perspective. 0.99
00:04:52.000 Like, if I had a son, I'd be like, I gotta keep this fucking savage out of jail. 1.00
00:04:58.000 I'm passing my genes. 1.00
00:05:01.000 That kid's got to go to the gym.
00:05:03.000 I mean, I got to get you into a jiu-jitsu gym early.
00:05:06.000 You got to start doing challenging things early.
00:05:09.000 And then also you have to deal with the fact that you have a successful father and that puts a lot of pressure on a kid because a lot of kids, they try to measure up to their parents or compete with their fathers in some sort of strange way.
00:05:21.000 So you have to mitigate that in advance and tell them that you're there for them.
00:05:24.000 You're on their side.
00:05:26.000 It's like...
00:05:27.000 There's a lot with kids, but with girls, they're so different. 1.00
00:05:31.000 I don't think I understood until I raised children.
00:05:36.000 I just didn't understand how different they are.
00:05:39.000 Yep.
00:05:39.000 Listen, I agree.
00:05:40.000 And I have two girls.
00:05:42.000 I'm thrilled.
00:05:44.000 I mean, it's the best thing that ever happened to me in my life, that and meeting my wife.
00:05:48.000 Like, just incredible.
00:05:49.000 And partly because they're girls and not boys.
00:05:51.000 I have nothing to learn from boys.
00:05:53.000 I already know what that's about.
00:05:54.000 I am one, right?
00:05:56.000 Yeah.
00:05:57.000 But girls is just, like, amazing. 1.00
00:05:59.000 And it wakes up some part of you that was dormant and you didn't know was there.
00:06:03.000 It's just, like, it's an amazing feeling.
00:06:05.000 Dave Chappelle said to me once, That not only did it change the amount of love I have, but it changed my capacity for love.
00:06:12.000 Absolutely.
00:06:13.000 Yeah.
00:06:13.000 Absolutely.
00:06:14.000 Yeah.
00:06:15.000 That's a great way to put it.
00:06:16.000 It's just a completely different experience.
00:06:19.000 And I have friends that are just avowed bachelors.
00:06:22.000 I'm never getting married.
00:06:23.000 I'm never having kids. 1.00
00:06:24.000 Fuck that. 1.00
00:06:24.000 And I'm like, I get it. 1.00
00:06:26.000 I know if you've had a bunch of bad relationships, you have a bunch of people that are annoying and there's constant drama and dilemmas and all these different things, but man, you're missing out on a different phase of life, a different experience of life that's just so humbling.
00:06:43.000 But you've got to meet the right person, right?
00:06:44.000 I mean, if you're not with the right person, I imagine being on top of that.
00:06:48.000 That's hard enough just on its own. 0.74
00:06:50.000 On top of that, parenting with the wrong person must be a freaking nightmare. 0.99
00:06:55.000 Yeah, you fucking go to dinner with the wrong person is a nightmare. 1.00
00:06:57.000 A nightmare. 1.00
00:06:59.000 Just dealing with nonsense.
00:07:02.000 Yeah.
00:07:03.000 Especially if you're not the type of person that handles nonsense so well.
00:07:07.000 Yeah.
00:07:08.000 Well, what I do, for a variety of family reasons, I flatline.
00:07:14.000 Like, if someone's coming at me with something that doesn't make sense and they're really upset...
00:07:18.000 I just go – I just sort of emotionally flatline.
00:07:21.000 I get super rational and just zero Kelvin like nothing, right?
00:07:26.000 Which is kind of a good place to be because it's not escalatory.
00:07:30.000 But I've come to find out that's also exceedingly provocative to do to someone who's upset.
00:07:36.000 Oh, so they try to like get a response out of you.
00:07:39.000 Yeah, and they think that your non-response means you don't care.
00:07:42.000 Ooh, that's a problem. 0.99
00:07:44.000 And then you're just so screwed. 0.99
00:07:45.000 That's also a problem with emotional manipulation. 0.98
00:07:48.000 You realize that this escalation of emotions is really just to incite a reaction.
00:07:53.000 It's not the real feelings.
00:07:55.000 That's right.
00:07:56.000 Which is why it's so exaggerated.
00:07:58.000 And I think I'm doing the relationship a favor I was like, somebody's got to stay sane in this room, right?
00:08:06.000 Or the cops are getting, you know, whatever.
00:08:08.000 So I'm like, all right, I'm going to flatline.
00:08:10.000 The only way to do this, because you're making me really angry right now, is to flatline and feel nothing.
00:08:14.000 I'm going to do us a favor by doing that.
00:08:16.000 I'll be super rational and calm and blah, blah, blah.
00:08:19.000 But I didn't realize, like, that's completely inflammatory also in a different way.
00:08:24.000 So there really isn't a good choice until that person figures out how to emotionally regulate. 0.98
00:08:29.000 Yeah, the good choice is get the fuck out of Dodge. 0.97
00:08:32.000 That's a good choice. 0.98
00:08:33.000 Stay rational and calm as you can until you can abandon that relationship. 0.97
00:08:37.000 Unless that person has a complete understanding of what went wrong and apologizes and realizes like, oh, I'm being fucking crazy.
00:08:48.000 I knew a guy who was, I won't name him, his older brother.
00:08:52.000 They're both sort of pretty well-known writers and his older brother was in a bad relationship of that sort.
00:08:58.000 And they were walking through, I think it was Paris.
00:09:00.000 They were visiting Paris and all their stuff was at the hotel.
00:09:03.000 This is before cell phones.
00:09:05.000 This is in like the early 90s, late 80s, something like that.
00:09:09.000 And they're walking through Paris and they stopped to look, she stopped to look at some clothing in a shop front, you know, the window, through the window.
00:09:18.000 And it took him some steps to realize that she had stopped and he had kept going.
00:09:22.000 And he looked at her and he looked down the street.
00:09:24.000 He was like, this is my chance.
00:09:26.000 And he just started sprinting.
00:09:28.000 Oh my god.
00:09:29.000 And he sprinted all the way to the hotel, paid the bill, left 500 bucks on the bed, threw his stuff in his suitcase.
00:09:37.000 Out of there, straight to the airport.
00:09:39.000 And that was the last time they ever saw each other.
00:09:42.000 Wow!
00:09:43.000 It was that bad?
00:09:44.000 It was that bad.
00:09:45.000 The pressure that he must have been feeling that allowed him to make that decision.
00:09:51.000 Like, he must have just been in hell. 1.00
00:09:53.000 I don't think he was just a dick. 0.99
00:09:54.000 He might have also been a dick, but I think one of the things that was going on, because I've been in relationships that were pretty tough, is that you can't even have the breakup conversation because it goes full nuclear. 0.98
00:10:03.000 So you don't know what to do. 0.97
00:10:06.000 You gotta flee.
00:10:09.000 I support him.
00:10:10.000 I support him.
00:10:11.000 I mean, if he's a rational guy, and he's never done that before, that seems like...
00:10:15.000 If that's his move, maybe it's you.
00:10:19.000 And then he met the right gal, and they had a family, and he's a great dad, and blah, blah, blah. 1.00
00:10:24.000 So it's not like he was just a congenital asshole, right? 1.00
00:10:27.000 But that was his move. 1.00
00:10:28.000 In a split second.
00:10:29.000 Wow.
00:10:30.000 Split second. 0.96
00:10:31.000 I'm out of here.
00:10:31.000 That's crazy.
00:10:33.000 No cell phones, of course.
00:10:34.000 So now you'd be getting speed dialed over and over and over again, right?
00:10:40.000 Wow.
00:10:40.000 So he never saw her again?
00:10:42.000 No.
00:10:42.000 Oh, my God.
00:10:44.000 Oh, my God.
00:10:45.000 That's wild.
00:10:46.000 Boy, that must have been a mess.
00:10:48.000 I love that moment where he looked back like, oh, she's in front of the store.
00:10:53.000 And he just ran.
00:10:54.000 I have a 20-yard head start.
00:10:57.000 That is so crazy.
00:10:59.000 That is such a...
00:11:01.000 I don't support it, but I get it.
00:11:04.000 I've never been in that bad of a situation, but I've known people that have.
00:11:10.000 Sometimes you just gotta do what you have to do to stay alive.
00:11:13.000 Yeah.
00:11:15.000 That's right.
00:11:15.000 Literally.
00:11:16.000 Because bad relationships and bad friendships and bad jobs and a lot of things, they'll rob you of your peace.
00:11:26.000 They create anxiety, which creates physical problems.
00:11:31.000 Your body's under stress.
00:11:32.000 Your cortisol levels get jacked up. 0.70
00:11:34.000 That fucks with your sleep, which fucks with your health.
00:11:38.000 You're literally robbing your life. 0.99
00:11:40.000 I have a couple of buddies who I love who are bipolar.
00:11:44.000 And I lost one of them.
00:11:46.000 He killed himself.
00:11:47.000 And it's tragic.
00:11:47.000 But the other guy is okay.
00:11:49.000 And they're bipolar.
00:11:51.000 And, you know, having a relationship with someone who's bipolar is almost impossible, no matter how much you love them.
00:11:56.000 Like, it really presents a complicated challenge.
00:11:59.000 And if you're having a romantic relationship with someone who's bipolar, which I've done, it's like a thousand times harder from like a buddy, right?
00:12:07.000 Right.
00:12:09.000 You know, I've had a couple of those.
00:12:11.000 And it is really, in some ways, the most painful experiences of my life.
00:12:17.000 So that was the, you know, sort of sprinting from the shop front window.
00:12:20.000 I didn't do quite that, but close.
00:12:23.000 Because if someone's bipolar, it's also volatile.
00:12:26.000 That's sometimes your only choice.
00:12:29.000 Yeah.
00:12:30.000 The bipolar thing is wild because if your mind works well, you think, well, tell that person to get it together.
00:12:37.000 Makes no sense.
00:12:38.000 Right.
00:12:38.000 You're not making sense on it.
00:12:39.000 It doesn't make sense.
00:12:41.000 But you don't understand. 1.00
00:12:42.000 It's like the chemicals in their brain are all fucked up. 1.00
00:12:46.000 Everything's all fucked up. 1.00
00:12:47.000 They can't. 1.00
00:12:48.000 It's almost impossible to get it together.
00:12:50.000 It's like you being on fire and someone saying, stay calm. 0.99
00:12:54.000 Like, how the fuck are you going to stay calm while you're on fire? 0.99
00:12:57.000 Exactly right. 0.99
00:12:58.000 With lithium.
00:13:00.000 Is that it?
00:13:01.000 Is that the move?
00:13:02.000 That's it.
00:13:02.000 Is there anything else that works for those folks?
00:13:04.000 It saved two people that I know of that I really loved, that I'm really close to.
00:13:08.000 One guy and a woman that I dated who I later found out she stabilized on lithium.
00:13:13.000 What is the downside of taking the lithium?
00:13:16.000 Oh, I don't know.
00:13:17.000 You're emotionally flat.
00:13:19.000 You put on weight.
00:13:20.000 You know, all kinds of stuff.
00:13:21.000 All kinds of stuff that's better than suicide.
00:13:23.000 That's true.
00:13:23.000 But, you know, it's not good.
00:13:25.000 And, you know, bipolar, you know, it destroys relationships.
00:13:30.000 I mean, it's like, it really, it's a very, very tough deal.
00:13:34.000 Yeah.
00:13:34.000 And often the result of trauma, right?
00:13:36.000 I mean, in both cases of these people that I care about, they were traumatized as children, you know.
00:13:40.000 And so it often produces that terrible behavior that then just fulfills itself your whole life.
00:13:45.000 It's absolutely tragic.
00:13:46.000 The crazy thing is they don't even know.
00:13:48.000 Like some people, it's not even trauma.
00:13:50.000 They just get it.
00:13:51.000 They just have it.
00:13:51.000 There's some neurochemical stuff, yeah.
00:13:53.000 But trauma is a known correlate to bipolar as an adult.
00:13:58.000 Yeah.
00:13:59.000 The crazy thing about mental illness is that it's just no one can really tell what's going on in your head, and it's up to you to talk to your psychiatrist or whatever and try to explain it.
00:14:10.000 And they have to try to, like, make a map of the territory.
00:14:14.000 But no one knows how you think about things other than you.
00:14:18.000 Right.
00:14:21.000 Right.
00:14:21.000 Right.
00:14:37.000 Right.
00:14:42.000 Right.
00:14:42.000 Right.
00:14:52.000 Well, there's just so many medications that get prescribed to people based on the person reporting a feeling that you can't, like, see in a test.
00:15:01.000 You know, like, if someone says, like, if you have, you know, some sort of a disease, they say, oh, we found that you're sick with, you know, syphilis, whatever it is, and we're going to give you this medicine, and we've got this figured out, we tested you, we know what it is.
00:15:16.000 With your mind, you know, like, if someone says they're depressed, like, okay.
00:15:21.000 What does that mean?
00:15:22.000 What does that mean?
00:15:22.000 There's no measurement.
00:15:24.000 There's nothing – so they have to say, OK, let's try a little of this or try a little of that and try to figure out what it is.
00:15:30.000 And there are some things that are legit bad, really, really tough things to have like Borderline and my buddy – I mean he was my closest friend.
00:15:42.000 He was my brother, right?
00:15:43.000 Yeah.
00:15:43.000 And he's the best man at my first wedding and we were in Bosnia together during the Civil War and just brothers, right?
00:15:52.000 And amazing, brilliant, funny, funny man.
00:15:57.000 But he was a lifelong depressive and part of his brilliance was rooted in, he says, in his depression.
00:16:06.000 Like it gave him a certain kind of mind and he was...
00:16:09.000 But he was finally diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.
00:16:14.000 And one of the problems with schizoaffective is that they reject the diagnosis.
00:16:19.000 They're saying, no, no, no.
00:16:21.000 Everyone has it wrong.
00:16:22.000 I'm fine.
00:16:24.000 And I have no problem.
00:16:25.000 And it's you guys that don't understand what I'm up against.
00:16:29.000 And so it's very hard to treat because like borderlines, they reject the idea.
00:16:34.000 Narcissism disorder is another one.
00:16:35.000 They reject the idea there's anything wrong with them.
00:16:37.000 So it's really, really hard to treat.
00:16:41.000 It's crazy when someone's weakness is actually like their strength in their career.
00:16:48.000 Yeah.
00:16:48.000 You know, which is a thing with some creative types.
00:16:52.000 Like, there's this guy Richard Jennings, like one of my all-time favorite comedians, and he killed himself.
00:16:57.000 And everyone who didn't know him was baffled.
00:17:02.000 They were like, that guy's at the top of his game.
00:17:04.000 That guy's everything we all want to be.
00:17:07.000 He was so good that I went to this club in New York, in upstate New York, or in Long Island, rather.
00:17:14.000 Eastside Comedy Club.
00:17:15.000 And this dude, Peter, who was the emcee, was depressed because he worked with Richard Jenny all weekend.
00:17:23.000 And he was like, he did a new hour every night.
00:17:27.000 He did a new hour, two hours Friday, two different hours, two different hours Saturday.
00:17:33.000 For most of us, we have one hour.
00:17:35.000 You're right. 0.83
00:17:36.000 Like, while we're on the road, we have one hour, we tone that thing down, we tighten it up, we fucking, we edit it, we get it to, it's like a rockin' one hour. 0.99
00:17:45.000 This motherfucker destroyed with four different hours. 0.99
00:17:48.000 On a weekend. 1.00
00:17:49.000 And Peter was like, I should quit comedy.
00:17:52.000 That's a real comedian. 1.00
00:17:54.000 I'm a fucking poser. 1.00
00:17:55.000 And that guy killed himself. 1.00
00:17:57.000 Yeah, well, John, my buddy, he wasn't a professional comedian, but he could have been.
00:18:03.000 I mean, he had that unbelievable brilliance and just devastating humor and just crazy.
00:18:10.000 I mean, he could just sort of sit there And just riff, right?
00:18:15.000 I mean, he just like, and he would go for an hour, and everyone would be like pissing themselves on the floor.
00:18:21.000 And he just on and on he went, right?
00:18:23.000 Just this brilliant riff that had never been heard before, would never be heard again.
00:18:28.000 And it just flowed through him.
00:18:30.000 But he was, you know, life, I mean, as a teenager, he said, you know, he said to his mom, he said, I know, eventually I'm going to kill myself.
00:18:38.000 He knew that as a Oh, my God.
00:18:40.000 Yeah.
00:18:41.000 And he held it off a long time.
00:18:42.000 He had a family, two little girls, and he was like...
00:18:47.000 He killed himself while his girls were young?
00:18:48.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:18:49.000 And, you know, of course, it's hard not to say, John, what the fuck? 0.99
00:18:55.000 Right? 0.99
00:18:55.000 Like, you're kidding. 0.99
00:18:58.000 But then I realized, no, no, no.
00:18:59.000 That just shows how much pain he was in.
00:19:02.000 Yeah, they just can't take it at all.
00:19:04.000 They can't take it.
00:19:05.000 And they're worried what they're going to do with that pain.
00:19:07.000 Are they a threat to their family?
00:19:09.000 Can they trust themselves?
00:19:11.000 I think they start to worry about that.
00:19:12.000 There's an amazing story, not that I know that this was where John was at, but it could have been.
00:19:18.000 There's an amazing story from the Iliad and the Odyssey of Ajax, Ajax, who threw himself on his sword, right?
00:19:27.000 And the...
00:19:30.000 The conventional understanding is that he was dishonored by Agamemnon in some way that I can't remember.
00:19:36.000 And he couldn't, after the trauma of combat and the siege of Troy, and he lost his best friend, et cetera, et cetera, he couldn't stand the dishonor.
00:19:43.000 He had PTSD, right, in sort of contemporary terms.
00:19:46.000 And he threw himself on his sword.
00:19:48.000 And I sort of looked into the story a little bit because it didn't quite, I was like, wow, that's a lot of honor, right?
00:19:53.000 I mean, that's like, he had a family, he had children, that's, why would you, so what it turned out Was that he was walking on a hillside and in his mind he thought he was attacked by the enemy.
00:20:08.000 And he drew his sword and he killed them all.
00:20:11.000 And then he realized he had killed a herd of sheep. 0.99
00:20:14.000 Whoa.
00:20:15.000 In his trauma he had mistaken sheep for the enemy.
00:20:19.000 And I have no proof for this.
00:20:22.000 I've never heard, you know, whatever.
00:20:23.000 Like I'll stand down if I'm wrong.
00:20:25.000 But it occurred to me.
00:20:27.000 That what he thought at that moment was, if I can kill a herd of sheep because I think they're Trojans, my family's not safe.
00:20:35.000 No one's safe.
00:20:36.000 No one's safe, right?
00:20:37.000 And I'm a warrior.
00:20:38.000 I'm a protector.
00:20:39.000 My job is to defend and protect.
00:20:41.000 And if I think a herd of sheep are enemy warriors, like, I am not safe for my loved ones to be around.
00:20:47.000 And he said to his half-brother, please take care of my family.
00:20:51.000 And then he went down to the beach, he buried the handle of his sword in the sand at an angle and then he ran and he threw himself on the sword and killed himself.
00:21:03.000 That's a rough way to go.
00:21:05.000 Yeah.
00:21:06.000 But if you're worried you're going to kill the things that are most precious to you, how can you not?
00:21:11.000 Also, when you're talking about childhood trauma, imagine childhood trauma in a time where people fought with swords.
00:21:18.000 Oh, my God.
00:21:19.000 What did you see?
00:21:20.000 Absolutely.
00:21:21.000 You know, what did you see when you were a baby?
00:21:23.000 Yeah.
00:21:24.000 What did you see your whole life?
00:21:25.000 People getting beheaded and gutted, you know, and then you're off at war.
00:21:29.000 Yeah, and when you come back from war, you know, you're not coming back from, like, landing rounds at 500 meters against an enemy position, right?
00:21:37.000 I mean, you're coming back with, you know, people's blood on your—I mean, covered in other men's blood, right?
00:21:41.000 And entrails and whatever else.
00:21:43.000 I mean, the Iliad is— It's like a medical textbook.
00:21:46.000 It's like then he sliced his abdomen open and his entrails fell out and he staggered away holding his entrails and then this and then that.
00:21:52.000 I mean it's completely bloody, right?
00:21:55.000 Visceral in the literal sense, a viscera, right?
00:21:57.000 Like completely bloody.
00:21:59.000 If that's what combat was like and I'm sure for the Native Americans here as well, like it must have been unbelievably traumatizing to the guys who did it.
00:22:08.000 Yeah.
00:22:09.000 I mean one-on-one combat with swords must be so insane.
00:22:15.000 Yeah.
00:22:16.000 And arrows flying and cannonballs.
00:22:20.000 Yeah.
00:22:21.000 Now, they were hunting cultures. 0.98
00:22:22.000 Like, for example, in North America, they were hunting cultures and they were used to, you know, gutting animals and the guts spilling out and, you know, beheading, you know, whatever.
00:22:30.000 Like, I mean, they were used to that, you know, with animals, with hunting, they were used to blood and guts, literally blood and guts.
00:22:38.000 So maybe the transition to...
00:22:41.000 Warfare is less of a distance to cross than it is for a kid who grew up in a suburb of Boston and then suddenly is in Afghanistan and it gets intimate and bloody. 0.91
00:22:53.000 The psychic distance that that person has to travel is quite far.
00:22:59.000 It may be not quite doable.
00:23:01.000 That's a good way to put it.
00:23:02.000 The psychic distance that one has to travel.
00:23:05.000 Right.
00:23:05.000 I think you get accustomed to what's normal, right?
00:23:10.000 But I think every human being that existed back then was probably in this heightened state of urgency and fear because they had experienced sword fights.
00:23:20.000 Right.
00:23:21.000 That's right.
00:23:21.000 That's right.
00:23:23.000 And also...
00:23:25.000 No distractions.
00:23:26.000 You're staring up at the stars every night, and you're waking up in the morning to sword fight again.
00:23:31.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:23:32.000 Jesus Christ.
00:23:33.000 That's right.
00:23:34.000 No Instagram.
00:23:34.000 Nothing.
00:23:35.000 Nothing.
00:23:36.000 Stories are being told by the fire.
00:23:38.000 Everyone's on a flip phone.
00:23:42.000 If you had a flip phone back then, man, you'd run everything.
00:23:44.000 Like, look, I want to call the general.
00:23:46.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:23:47.000 Right now.
00:23:47.000 From the trench?
00:23:48.000 Like, what?
00:23:49.000 From the trench?
00:23:51.000 Yeah, what do kids do? 1.00
00:23:52.000 I mean, these fucking kids are filming things now, which is really crazy. 0.99
00:23:56.000 The footage that you get out of Ukraine right now is so nuts. 1.00
00:23:59.000 Oh, my God.
00:24:00.000 Insane.
00:24:01.000 So nuts, because it's high resolution cell phone camera and GoPro video footage.
00:24:06.000 It's absolutely crazy.
00:24:08.000 Yeah.
00:24:08.000 Yeah.
00:24:09.000 You know, as a person who's been there, you know, like when you did Restrepo and, you know, you've been to wars, what is it like for you to see these new ones emerge? 0.96
00:24:21.000 And, I mean, I've always hoped that there's going to come a time in our culture, in my life, where we're not going to be involved in any of this shit anymore. 0.94
00:24:30.000 Trevor Burrus We the human race or the US? Trevor Burrus We the human race and particularly the US. Trevor Burrus Well, I mean here's the thing. 0.98
00:24:37.000 Like I have some sort of like peace-oriented friends, pacifist friends.
00:24:44.000 I mean there's a sort of two different flavors, right?
00:24:46.000 There's a sort of a conservative isolationism and a liberal pacifism.
00:24:50.000 And they wind up ironically in sort of the same place.
00:24:52.000 It's like war is bad.
00:24:53.000 We don't want any part of it.
00:24:55.000 You know, like the convergence is sort of interesting politically.
00:24:58.000 But the sort of left-wing people that I know are sort of Vietnam-era pacifists, right?
00:25:07.000 So in my mind, I'm like, listen, you know, if war is bad...
00:25:13.000 Avoiding it isn't the only—you know, there is a moral case to be made for, say, in Bosnia, which was stopped by a very brief NATO intervention.
00:25:21.000 And, you know, you could make a moral case for, you know, drop a few bombs, the war stops, and then human life is preserved.
00:25:27.000 Yeah, you can make that case.
00:25:28.000 But, you know, basically, I think for, say, for Ukraine, peacefulness works, and it's a wonderful thing to aspire to.
00:25:42.000 Sort of as long as no one invades you.
00:25:44.000 Right?
00:25:45.000 Right. 1.00
00:25:45.000 And if you knew that no one would invade you and you're warlike anyway, you're an asshole. 1.00
00:25:51.000 Right? 1.00
00:25:51.000 Right. 1.00
00:25:52.000 But what you have to do, any society, from a group of Like Comanche warriors in the hill country around Austin in 1840 or Ukraine or the US or Israel or any nation, 0.93
00:26:09.000 right?
00:26:09.000 You have to figure out how to be a peace-loving society that can also defend itself.
00:26:14.000 And that's really – and then if you're going to defend yourself – What is your obligation to defend your allies or your friends or even just on a strategic level, countries where if they fall, then eventually the dominoes wind up with...
00:26:31.000 And I don't know the answers to that, but that to me is like the strategic and moral question.
00:26:36.000 It's like, where is that line where you have to defend something because eventually you're going to end up defending yourselves?
00:26:44.000 Yeah.
00:26:44.000 It's just, when does the human race ever get out of this cycle?
00:26:48.000 It's just individuals as human beings are capable of coexisting in harmony.
00:26:54.000 But when we get into groups, there's always something.
00:26:58.000 It's unavoidable.
00:27:00.000 I mean, we've talked about this a bunch of times, but if you ever ask people, in your lifetime, do you think there'll be no war?
00:27:06.000 No one says yes.
00:27:07.000 Right.
00:27:07.000 Well, there's always the possibility of a bad actor that's like, you know what?
00:27:10.000 I want those oil fields.
00:27:12.000 I want those diamond mines.
00:27:13.000 I want whatever.
00:27:15.000 And we've been that guy too sometimes, right?
00:27:18.000 And you're a strong, jacked up guy who knows how to fight.
00:27:24.000 And if the world contained only peaceful men...
00:27:28.000 You wouldn't need to be.
00:27:29.000 You might want to be, but you wouldn't need to be, right?
00:27:32.000 But you're walking down the street, you know in your mind, I can defend my family and myself with my hands.
00:27:38.000 And I need to know that I can...
00:27:40.000 I'm just reading into your mind.
00:27:42.000 Obviously, I don't know how you think, but I'm guessing that somewhere in your mind, you're like, I can take care of business if my family's threatened, and there's a security in that.
00:27:51.000 And if you just knew for a fact that there were no predatory people out there, not one, You wouldn't need to be, right?
00:28:00.000 But that's not – we're social primates and that's not the world that we evolved in and it's never going to happen.
00:28:06.000 Yeah.
00:28:09.000 Yeah.
00:28:10.000 Unless something changes, something really big.
00:28:14.000 Right.
00:28:14.000 And it's not going to change overnight.
00:28:16.000 No.
00:28:16.000 Right.
00:28:16.000 I mean we have the DNA we have.
00:28:18.000 We have the cultural wiring that we have.
00:28:22.000 So you know all the democracies which tend towards sort of fairness and peacefulness because it's frankly good for business, right?
00:28:31.000 The war is not particularly good for the stock market.
00:28:33.000 Unless you are Raytheon.
00:28:36.000 Right.
00:28:37.000 For some businesses, absolutely.
00:28:40.000 But for the array of economic enterprise in the world, like war doesn't do the economies much good overall.
00:28:50.000 And so the question is like how do you – so democracies are – Invested in stability, in market stability.
00:29:02.000 They're invested in it because they disproportionately benefit from it, right?
00:29:06.000 Iraq under Hussein was not disproportionately benefiting from market stability because it was an oppressive... 0.98
00:29:11.000 It was a dictatorship, right? 0.81
00:29:12.000 And the economy sucked and there was a ton of corruption, right?
00:29:15.000 But democracies are quite...
00:29:16.000 They really do benefit from stability.
00:29:18.000 But all of those democracies are defended by really robust militaries, right?
00:29:24.000 And if they weren't, Right?
00:29:27.000 They would get overrun, like, in half a generation.
00:29:30.000 Right.
00:29:30.000 Well, that's what scares the shit out of me about today, because I think with AI and with weapons technology advancing in the same exponential rate as cell phone technology and computer technology is, we're getting to this really weird place where it's not just mutually assured destruction because of nuclear weapons.
00:29:52.000 It's whoever presses the button first wins.
00:29:56.000 And so you have this, like, if you can completely disable a nation's army almost instantaneously, Right.
00:30:04.000 And then take over their cities or bomb their cities like instantaneously.
00:30:07.000 It's just we're relying on good nature.
00:30:10.000 Right.
00:30:11.000 The understanding that this is a horrible thing to do to humanity to pull that trigger first.
00:30:17.000 Right.
00:30:17.000 Well, there's also this sort of what do you – what happens when the dog catches the tire, right?
00:30:24.000 Right.
00:30:27.000 I mean, what the Ukrainians—I mean, all the politics and whatever aside, just on a military level, what the Ukrainians were able to do, you know, quite outmatched by the Russians, what the Taliban were able to do with the U.S., the Mujahideen against the Russians,
00:30:43.000 all of this, like, what the Ukrainians were able to do against the Russians is quite extraordinary.
00:30:48.000 The Russians really should have taken Ukraine in a few weeks, right? 0.99
00:30:51.000 And had they— That was what everyone predicted.
00:30:55.000 I didn't think that was going to happen, but that was what everyone predicted.
00:30:57.000 It didn't happen.
00:30:59.000 And the motivation to defend your home is always far greater than the motivation to invade someone else's home.
00:31:06.000 Just for the 19-year-old male, like, and motivation is, as you know, I'm sure from MMA, is, like, super important in outcome, right?
00:31:17.000 So – but had the Russians done it, had they taken – had they just blitzkrieged all the way through Ukraine, seized it, then they would – what they would have had is the huge, huge and costly problem of maintaining order. 0.67
00:31:40.000 We're good to go.
00:31:51.000 You know, electromagnetic pulse that took out everything in the—I mean, I'm just bullshitting here—took out everything that the U.S. military relies on to communicate and to function.
00:32:01.000 You just zapped it out of existence and invade it, right?
00:32:04.000 The Russians took, you know, east of the Mississippi. 0.88
00:32:07.000 The Chinese took west of the Mississippi or whatever it might be.
00:32:12.000 Then you've got to run this place.
00:32:13.000 And that's when you really have a tactical problem township by township, mountain by mountain.
00:32:19.000 And then your electromagnetic pulse actually doesn't serve you that well.
00:32:23.000 And, you know, the Afghans, I mean, the Taliban didn't defeat us. 0.99
00:32:26.000 They just outlasted us until we got tired of being there and didn't want to pay the bill.
00:32:31.000 Yeah.
00:32:35.000 So, when I got reached out to about you was that you had gotten through a near-death experience.
00:32:43.000 And I really didn't want to read into it at all.
00:32:46.000 I just wanted to ask you about it.
00:32:47.000 Sure.
00:32:48.000 So, something happened.
00:32:50.000 You had an aneurysm that burst inside internally?
00:32:54.000 Yeah.
00:32:54.000 Is that what it is?
00:32:55.000 Yeah, so, I mean, the short, you know, the medical description is I had an undiagnosed aneurysm, which is a ballooning of an artery at a weak spot.
00:33:05.000 Like, so, I mean, arteries can dilate to get more blood flow, but an aneurysm is like one specific spot that for one reason or another is weak and it starts to sort of give way and it'll bubble outwards.
00:33:19.000 And as that bubble grows bigger, and this takes decades, it's a very slow process, right?
00:33:24.000 Basically, I have a ligament in the wrong place.
00:33:26.000 And that set in motion a sort of vascular problem that resulted in an aneurysm.
00:33:32.000 And they don't hurt.
00:33:33.000 There's no way to diagnose them.
00:33:35.000 I mean, unless you scan someone's abdomen.
00:33:36.000 I've always been super healthy.
00:33:38.000 And so throughout my life, I just never had any reason for an abdominal scan, right?
00:33:42.000 I'm a fit, healthy male, right?
00:33:44.000 A fit, healthy person.
00:33:45.000 And so I just never needed that look inside me.
00:33:50.000 So no one saw the aneurysm growing, right?
00:33:52.000 And so at some point, the artery wall gets stretched so far that it will rupture.
00:34:02.000 It'll just burst.
00:34:04.000 And now you have an arterial bleed.
00:34:07.000 So you know what that, you know, if someone shoots you in the femoral or stabs you in the abdomen and you have an arterial bleed, you know, your life is measured in minutes or whatever or hours.
00:34:17.000 And if someone does you the favor of stabbing you in the abdomen...
00:34:22.000 And severing your pancreatic artery, which is the artery that ruptured on me. 0.99
00:34:28.000 Now, it's a little artery, this thickness of a number two pencil.
00:34:31.000 It's not a big deal.
00:34:32.000 But it's arterial blood, right? 1.00
00:34:34.000 I mean, don't stop that shit. 1.00
00:34:36.000 You're going to die, right? 1.00
00:34:37.000 So if someone just, like, stabbed you in the abdomen, You rush to the hospital.
00:34:42.000 It's no problem.
00:34:43.000 If you're still alive, they'll transfuse you. 0.99
00:34:45.000 The doctors know exactly where to sort of put their finger to plug the leak.
00:34:48.000 It's no problem.
00:34:49.000 The problem with an internal hemorrhage, an abdominal hemorrhage, is the doctors have no idea where it is.
00:34:55.000 And your abdomen is basically a big bowl of spaghetti, right?
00:34:59.000 And it's filling up with blood.
00:35:02.000 And they have to find where it's leaking.
00:35:04.000 Yeah, because the blood...
00:35:05.000 You know, if you're stabbed, the blood's going out of your body onto the kitchen floor.
00:35:09.000 With an internal hemorrhage, it all stays in your abdomen.
00:35:13.000 So it happened.
00:35:16.000 It was during COVID, and we were in a remote area, an old house that we own at the end of a dead-end dirt road in Massachusetts.
00:35:24.000 And it's so remote that there's no cell phone service.
00:35:27.000 The phone lines are old, and they short out when it rains.
00:35:30.000 And my wife and I had a little bit of babysitting.
00:35:34.000 We had, at the time, a three-year-old and a six-month-old.
00:35:36.000 We had a little bit of babysitting From the teenage girls that lived down the road that we knew the family. 0.82
00:35:42.000 And so they came over to give us a few hours.
00:35:45.000 And my wife and I went out to this cabin that's even deeper in the woods.
00:35:48.000 And, you know, paradise, basically, right?
00:35:51.000 And so we're out there.
00:35:53.000 And in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of pain in my abdomen.
00:35:57.000 Like, ooh, what was that?
00:35:59.000 Right?
00:36:00.000 Like, not kidney stone pain, but worse than indigestion.
00:36:03.000 Right?
00:36:04.000 And so I sort of twisted and turned to see if I could work it out, you know, and then nothing helped.
00:36:08.000 And then I finally stood up.
00:36:10.000 I said, maybe I can walk it out.
00:36:12.000 And as soon as I stood up, the floor just reeled away from me.
00:36:16.000 And I almost fell over.
00:36:18.000 What was happening is my blood pressure was just, like, tanking.
00:36:22.000 Because I was losing all my blood into my abdomen.
00:36:24.000 And my body hadn't compensated yet.
00:36:26.000 So I was just, like...
00:36:30.000 Like, my head was reeling, right?
00:36:33.000 So I sat back down and I said something I never thought I'd ever have reason to say to my wife.
00:36:38.000 I said, um...
00:36:40.000 Something's wrong.
00:36:41.000 I'm going to need help.
00:36:43.000 And you don't want to ever have to say those words, right?
00:36:46.000 And you're fit.
00:36:48.000 I'm fit.
00:36:48.000 It never crossed my mind that I would ever have to say that unless someone shoots me or something, right?
00:36:55.000 But not in my life.
00:36:56.000 I stopped war reporting.
00:36:57.000 I gave all that gambling with your life.
00:37:01.000 I gave it all up.
00:37:01.000 I had a family.
00:37:02.000 We're in this beautiful spot.
00:37:03.000 Like, are you kidding?
00:37:04.000 It can come after you here too, right?
00:37:07.000 Who knew, right?
00:37:08.000 So she dragged me through the woods.
00:37:13.000 You know, I have my arm around her shoulder.
00:37:16.000 I'm sort of like a stumbling drunk, right?
00:37:18.000 And she started dragging me through the woods.
00:37:20.000 And she gets me to the car and puts me in the passenger seat of the car.
00:37:25.000 And, you know, we're a one-hour transport to the hospital.
00:37:29.000 Right.
00:37:30.000 Right.
00:37:31.000 And I'm bleeding.
00:37:32.000 I'm losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes.
00:37:34.000 You know, my wife didn't know this and thank God I didn't either.
00:37:37.000 But I was literally a human hourglass.
00:37:40.000 Right.
00:37:41.000 And she ran.
00:37:42.000 She put me in the passenger seat of the car and I'm lying there.
00:37:45.000 Now I'm starting to go blind.
00:37:46.000 Right.
00:37:47.000 Which is one of the things that happens when you lose too much blood is you go blind.
00:37:50.000 Right.
00:37:51.000 She ran into the house.
00:37:52.000 The sort of electric white just took over the world. 0.84
00:37:55.000 And that's all I could see.
00:37:56.000 Electric white.
00:37:57.000 If you bleed out, that's the last thing you'll see.
00:37:59.000 And then darkness, which is what I finally got to, was the darkness.
00:38:05.000 So she ran into the house, told the girls, the teenage girls.
00:38:08.000 One of them ran out.
00:38:09.000 The phone line didn't work.
00:38:10.000 But the girl, one of them, was able to get one bar of signal. 0.99
00:38:13.000 Like in one spot on the driveway, like one bar.
00:38:16.000 And she called the ambulance.
00:38:17.000 And the ambulance guys came.
00:38:19.000 And you go into something called compensatory shock if you're bleeding out.
00:38:24.000 And the body senses, in its miraculous way, it senses that, you know, there's a five-alarm fire going on here and we gotta tighten our game, right?
00:38:35.000 So it literally shuts down vascular, like, blood flow to parts of the body you don't need, like your legs and your arms, your skin.
00:38:44.000 And it sort of hoards the blood in your chest Your abdomen, your chest, and your brain, around your heart, right?
00:38:51.000 You know, those things go, you're dead.
00:38:53.000 So it collects the blood around there and keeps it there through muscular tension, right?
00:38:58.000 You don't know you're doing this.
00:38:59.000 But what happens is your blood pressure goes back up, and suddenly you're sort of back in the world.
00:39:04.000 And I was no longer going in and out of consciousness.
00:39:07.000 Suddenly I could see again.
00:39:08.000 The ambulance guys get there and they're like, how are you doing?
00:39:11.000 I'm like, well, you know, belly pain, but I don't want to be a complainer here.
00:39:14.000 I'm feeling a little better.
00:39:16.000 You know, maybe blah, blah, blah.
00:39:17.000 My wife, and this is why, there's a famous statistic, married men live longer. 1.00
00:39:20.000 My wife is like, you know what? 0.95
00:39:22.000 Because they were going to leave me.
00:39:24.000 They were like, oh, it's a hot day.
00:39:25.000 Drink some water.
00:39:26.000 You probably just dehydrate. 1.00
00:39:27.000 Oh, shit. 1.00
00:39:28.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:39:29.000 My wife is like, no. 0.90
00:39:31.000 He's going to the hospital.
00:39:32.000 I watched him.
00:39:33.000 He was in and out of consciousness.
00:39:35.000 He couldn't stand up.
00:39:37.000 He was going blind.
00:39:39.000 Like, what's it take?
00:39:40.000 Yeah.
00:39:40.000 Guys, what's it take to get a guy to the emergency room?
00:39:43.000 So anyway, they took me.
00:39:45.000 My body stayed in compensatory shock for that hour that it took.
00:39:52.000 But I was losing blood, losing blood, losing blood, and then I got to the hospital.
00:39:58.000 And my body couldn't hold compensatory shock anymore.
00:40:01.000 And I went straight into end stage hemorrhagic shock, which is you're dead in 10 or 15 minutes, right? 0.99
00:40:08.000 And I went off a fucking cliff right as we got to the hospital. 0.98
00:40:13.000 And they estimate my blood pressure was 60 over 40, which is like rock bottom. 0.99
00:40:18.000 They estimate I lost like two-thirds of my blood.
00:40:22.000 If you lose more than two-thirds, even if they transfuse you and top you off with, you know, full complement of blood, they pump it into you.
00:40:30.000 If you lose that much blood, there's complications that happen with coagulants and all kinds of things like that that will kill you.
00:40:39.000 So people can die of blood loss with a full complement of blood that they've gotten from transfusions.
00:40:48.000 Just because this chemical process gets initiated and they can't reverse it.
00:40:52.000 And that starts to happen when you've lost two-thirds of your blood, which is right where I was at.
00:40:58.000 Ten minutes later, I'd have been dead.
00:41:00.000 And so they rushed me into the trauma bay and the doctors knew immediately what was going on.
00:41:09.000 And one doctor had this sort of large gauge needle and he started and she asked my permission.
00:41:19.000 I had no idea I was dying, right?
00:41:20.000 And he asked my permission to stick it through my neck into my jugular, which didn't look like a lot of fun.
00:41:25.000 And I was like, really?
00:41:26.000 Is this totally necessary?
00:41:28.000 Like, do we really need to do this?
00:41:30.000 It was like, why?
00:41:31.000 In case there's an emergency?
00:41:32.000 And he was like, no, this is the emergency.
00:41:33.000 Like, I had no idea.
00:41:35.000 Right?
00:41:36.000 I'm 10 minutes from dead.
00:41:38.000 I have no idea I'm dying.
00:41:39.000 Zero.
00:41:40.000 Right?
00:41:41.000 Thank God.
00:41:41.000 Because I would have been terrified.
00:41:42.000 And I would have been thinking about my family.
00:41:44.000 And I would, you know, I mean, you know, like, you don't want that.
00:41:48.000 Right?
00:41:49.000 And...
00:41:50.000 So he said, this is the emergency.
00:41:52.000 Well, if you say so, go ahead.
00:41:54.000 Have at it, right?
00:41:55.000 So while he's working on prepping my neck, And it actually didn't hurt at all, right?
00:42:02.000 So if you ever have to have this done, don't worry about it.
00:42:04.000 But while I'm lying there and he's sort of working on my neck, it felt like it took longer than it probably actually did.
00:42:14.000 But while I'm there, all of a sudden, and I have to stop and say, I'm an atheist.
00:42:19.000 I'm a lifelong atheist.
00:42:21.000 I'm a rationalist.
00:42:22.000 I'm not spiritual.
00:42:24.000 I'm not a mystic.
00:42:25.000 I'm not woo-woo.
00:42:27.000 Like...
00:42:28.000 I'm nothing, right?
00:42:29.000 And my dad was an atheist and a physicist.
00:42:31.000 I have to say all this because of what's coming.
00:42:34.000 And I'm still an atheist, by the way.
00:42:36.000 So all of a sudden, I sensed below me and to my left this black pit opened up, this black abyss, like this infinite black void.
00:42:49.000 And I was getting pulled into it.
00:42:53.000 And it's not like darkness had taken over the world.
00:42:56.000 The world was here.
00:42:56.000 I could see the doctors.
00:42:57.000 I was talking to them, right?
00:42:59.000 Here I am.
00:43:00.000 But the darkness was contained in this hole that was underneath me, and I was getting pulled into it, right?
00:43:08.000 I didn't know I was dying, but I had this, like, this instinct of, like, a wounded animal.
00:43:12.000 Like, if I go into the pit, the infinitely dark pit, I'm not coming out, right?
00:43:17.000 Like, I just sensed, like, don't go in there, because you're not coming back, right?
00:43:22.000 Right?
00:43:22.000 And I started to panic because I felt myself getting drawn in, right?
00:43:27.000 And then my father, my dead father, appeared above me and to my left.
00:43:34.000 Now, there's a whole body of inquiry of NDEs, near-death experiences, and I didn't know anything about this stuff, right?
00:43:42.000 I didn't know anything about it.
00:43:43.000 It didn't interest me.
00:43:44.000 I'm not culturally prepped for anything like that.
00:43:47.000 I'm not Christian. 0.83
00:43:48.000 I didn't see angels.
00:43:49.000 I'm a zero in that regard, right?
00:43:52.000 There's my dead father above me, right?
00:43:55.000 He'd been dead eight years.
00:43:56.000 I love him.
00:43:57.000 But I was not happy to see him, right?
00:44:01.000 I was shocked.
00:44:03.000 I was like, Dad?
00:44:05.000 What are you doing here?
00:44:06.000 And there he was, and he communicated to me.
00:44:10.000 And so what I saw...
00:44:12.000 See isn't quite the right verb, but I don't know if there doesn't exist the right verb.
00:44:16.000 I sensed slash saw him and it was his essence, his energy, his presence, right?
00:44:24.000 It's not like I see you, right?
00:44:25.000 It's like, oh, there he is, right?
00:44:26.000 It wasn't with that clarity.
00:44:28.000 In some ways, it was with a deeper clarity because it was his essence, right?
00:44:31.000 And there he was.
00:44:32.000 His presence was right there.
00:44:35.000 And above me and to my left, it was like quite specific.
00:44:39.000 And he communicated to me, again, not with words, but with some manner that I understood that I can't quite explain what it was.
00:44:46.000 But basically, the idea was, you don't have to fight it.
00:44:50.000 You can come with me.
00:44:51.000 I'll take care of you.
00:44:52.000 It's okay.
00:44:53.000 It's okay.
00:44:54.000 Don't be scared.
00:44:55.000 Right?
00:44:55.000 I'll take care of you.
00:44:58.000 I was horrified.
00:45:00.000 I was appalled.
00:45:02.000 I was offended. 0.99
00:45:03.000 I was like, you're dead.
00:45:05.000 Why would I want to go with you? 1.00
00:45:06.000 You're dead. 0.92
00:45:07.000 You're the opposite of what I am. 0.99
00:45:09.000 Why would I possibly want to go with you and be dead with you?
00:45:13.000 Because I'm alive with my family right now.
00:45:16.000 I'm not going anywhere with you.
00:45:18.000 Get out of here.
00:45:19.000 And I said to the doctor, you have to hurry.
00:45:23.000 I'm going right now.
00:45:25.000 I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I was sort of outbound.
00:45:29.000 And once that happened, there's no inbounds.
00:45:33.000 But I sensed that.
00:45:34.000 I said, you've got to hurry.
00:45:35.000 You're losing me right now.
00:45:39.000 So what'd they do?
00:45:41.000 Well, they transfused me.
00:45:43.000 They stabilized me with three units of blood.
00:45:45.000 Eventually, I needed 10 units, which is a full complement of blood.
00:45:48.000 And so let me just pause for a moment and say, please donate blood.
00:45:52.000 Like everybody who's listening, I'm alive.
00:45:55.000 My daughters have a father because 10 people who I'll never know...
00:46:18.000 It's pretty quick, yeah.
00:46:25.000 Yeah.
00:46:26.000 Yeah, I mean, to get up to 100%, I think it's a little longer, but whatever.
00:46:30.000 It doesn't matter, right?
00:46:31.000 It's like, we're talking about human life here.
00:46:33.000 And if you want to be part of something greater than yourself, it's blah, blah, blah.
00:46:36.000 All these things that we all kind of want.
00:46:38.000 Like, how do I participate?
00:46:40.000 You know, like, nobody needs me.
00:46:42.000 I'm not part of anything.
00:46:43.000 I feel lonely.
00:46:44.000 Give blood, man.
00:46:45.000 Then you'll be part of something amazing, right?
00:46:47.000 And you might...
00:46:48.000 So I give blood regularly.
00:46:49.000 So at any rate, there's my pitch.
00:46:51.000 But...
00:46:53.000 So they stuffed some blood in me through my jugular.
00:46:57.000 I stabilized.
00:46:58.000 And they brought me to the interventional – the cath lab, the interventional radiology suite.
00:47:04.000 And what interventional radiology is, it's a freaking miracle, right?
00:47:07.000 Like 20 years ago, I had been dead, right?
00:47:10.000 I mean even – the advances are so fast and so miraculous.
00:47:14.000 So what they do is they put you on something called a fluoroscope, which is basically sees into you with x-rays, but it's x-ray video, right?
00:47:25.000 So they can see in real time what's going on in your body, and then they pop a hole into your femoral from your right groin, And they insert a catheter into it, which is a flexible rubber tube or wire.
00:47:37.000 And because of the way the heads of these catheters are designed, they have little shepherd's crooks and little curves and all this stuff, and they can navigate through your venous system, through the twists and turns, and they can get that thing almost anywhere in your body.
00:47:53.000 And then once they're there, they can pop a coil and plug a leak or they can inflate and put in a stent or whatever.
00:47:59.000 They can do miraculous things.
00:48:01.000 They can inject radioactive dye and then they see where it goes and they turn on the fluoroscope and then they can see...
00:48:09.000 The dye is leaking into the abdomen from here. 0.99
00:48:11.000 Here's where the leak is.
00:48:12.000 It's amazing what they can do, right?
00:48:15.000 And so they popped the entry into my femoral and then threaded a catheter.
00:48:24.000 Threaded a catheter up through my venous system.
00:48:27.000 And because of this ligament that's in the wrong place, the arteries in my abdomen are very distorted, right?
00:48:36.000 And they're tortuous.
00:48:38.000 They're called tortuous.
00:48:40.000 And they couldn't get...
00:48:42.000 The catheter threw these twists and turns, right?
00:48:46.000 And they couldn't get it to the site of the bleed, which they knew where it was, right?
00:48:51.000 And they couldn't get the catheter there.
00:48:53.000 The alternative, if you can't fix it with a catheter, is you pull your gear out and you send the guy to the OR and you do this crazy, like, race against time.
00:49:07.000 You cut them open.
00:49:09.000 And then one of the reasons the blood loss slows down is that there's so much blood in your abdomen that there's back pressure.
00:49:16.000 And it keeps, it slows down the blood loss from your artery because now it's trying to flow into a full container and it doesn't leak as fast, right?
00:49:24.000 So as soon as you open up the abdomen, you can imagine what happens.
00:49:28.000 I mean, you guys are blood and, you know, you got to like push the organs aside and it's this desperate search for the bleed before you bleed out.
00:49:37.000 And as you can probably guess, it doesn't go well very often, right?
00:49:41.000 So it's not quite a death sentence, but if you go into the OR with an abdominal bleed, You know, they bring your wife in to say goodbye to you basically before you do that.
00:49:51.000 They don't tell you or her that, but that's what they're doing.
00:49:54.000 And that's what they would have done with my wife who got to the hospital. 0.96
00:49:58.000 The ER doctor was like, you better come now.
00:50:00.000 And so at one point, I'm in agonizing pain because I've got all this free-floating blood against my kidneys and my liver and my spleen and just agonizing.
00:50:11.000 It's like kidney stones, right?
00:50:12.000 I'm in agony and they can't sedate me because my vitals are too low, right?
00:50:16.000 So I'm conscious through all this and I'm watching the doctors.
00:50:20.000 And at one point, I watched one of the doctors just sort of shake his head and shrug and was basically like, well, we tried.
00:50:29.000 This isn't working.
00:50:30.000 And the other doctor nodded and he was like, yeah, we tried.
00:50:34.000 And it was the first moment where I realized, oh my god, I didn't realize.
00:50:42.000 We're playing for keeps right now.
00:50:44.000 This might not turn out well.
00:50:46.000 I might not be going home.
00:50:47.000 I couldn't believe what I'd seen.
00:50:50.000 And then the first doctor, who's this brilliant interventional radiologist named Dr. Phil Dombrowski.
00:50:56.000 He saved my life.
00:51:00.000 You have in your mind a special relationship with someone or anyone who has saved your life.
00:51:05.000 It's a very particular relationship and I've never been in that position before.
00:51:09.000 And so Dombrowski said, we can try one last thing.
00:51:17.000 Let's try going through his left wrist.
00:51:19.000 And so because of your vasculature, like the left wrist allows a different point of attack.
00:51:26.000 You come down from above instead of coming up from below, and you don't have to go through all those twists and turns.
00:51:32.000 And he had to...
00:51:35.000 Get through a problematic spot in my celiac artery that was impeded by the ligament that's in the wrong place.
00:51:41.000 Well, it was a lot of problems, right?
00:51:43.000 And you had to be like a super high-level IR guy to even think of this, much less do it.
00:51:48.000 Like I was told a very, very few interventional radiologists would even think of doing this, right?
00:51:53.000 But he was a genius, right?
00:51:57.000 The other doctor said, I like the way you think.
00:51:59.000 And I watched them put a catheter into my left wrist.
00:52:04.000 I no longer have a pulse in that wrist because it messes up the artery.
00:52:07.000 And they did it.
00:52:11.000 They got the thing to the place.
00:52:13.000 They got the catheter to the bleed.
00:52:16.000 They popped a coil in there.
00:52:18.000 It blocked the artery, blocked the leak.
00:52:22.000 And then they sent me to the ICU. They knocked me out, sent me to the ICU. I remember seeing my wife very briefly afterwards.
00:52:30.000 I held her hand and that sent me off.
00:52:34.000 And I woke up in the ICU the next morning.
00:52:36.000 And so the blood in your abdomen, do they drain it?
00:52:38.000 Does your body absorb it?
00:52:40.000 No, no.
00:52:41.000 I guess maybe they do sometimes.
00:52:42.000 No, your body absorbs it.
00:52:44.000 Wow.
00:52:45.000 Yep.
00:52:45.000 Six pints of blood.
00:52:47.000 You know, I could feel it in me.
00:52:49.000 I mean, it didn't feel good, right?
00:52:50.000 And you're sort of discolored.
00:52:52.000 I mean, it's awful.
00:52:53.000 Not a good look.
00:52:54.000 Right.
00:52:56.000 Now, you keep saying you're an atheist.
00:53:03.000 Right.
00:53:03.000 What exactly?
00:53:05.000 Everybody sort of defines that differently.
00:53:07.000 I feel like a lot of atheists are actually agnostic more than they're atheists because an atheist is someone who just doesn't believe.
00:53:14.000 I don't believe.
00:53:15.000 What do you think the experience with your father was?
00:53:19.000 His presence?
00:53:21.000 Well, that's the billion dollar question, right?
00:53:26.000 I'm an atheist in part because I respect the The highest intentions of religion too much to take them lightly.
00:53:40.000 Now, there's plenty of religious expression which is not at a very high level, which I find even offensive and destructive.
00:53:49.000 But at its best, like journalism, like psychology, like everything, at its best.
00:53:55.000 It's a very noble...
00:53:58.000 A thing that helps people live with more dignity and less fear and blah, blah, blah, right?
00:54:05.000 I get it.
00:54:06.000 So I take that stuff really literally.
00:54:08.000 And so for me, believing in God is an active thing, right?
00:54:14.000 And really, it's not like that you found God.
00:54:17.000 It's God found you.
00:54:18.000 Like, oh my God, suddenly God was in my life, right?
00:54:22.000 And it's like when you fall in love.
00:54:26.000 You can't choose to fall in love, right?
00:54:30.000 It's an overwhelming feeling that you can't resist.
00:54:34.000 And if it's not, you're not really in love, bro.
00:54:36.000 You might have married Betty, but you're not in love with Betty, right?
00:54:39.000 But when you have that experience of overwhelming love, like, oh my God, I'm in love with that person.
00:54:45.000 I got to be with them.
00:54:46.000 My life is with them.
00:54:47.000 Like, that's love finding you.
00:54:50.000 You didn't...
00:54:51.000 I mean, you facture it, and you didn't make an executive decision.
00:54:55.000 Well, I'm in love with Betty now, and we're getting married.
00:54:57.000 I mean, people used to do that, and it just isn't love.
00:55:00.000 It's a contract.
00:55:00.000 It's a decision.
00:55:01.000 It's an arrangement.
00:55:02.000 No problem, right?
00:55:03.000 And so what I can't do is make an executive.
00:55:05.000 When people say, you've got to find God, you've got to find Jesus, listen, man, even if I wanted to, which I don't, but even if I wanted to, it doesn't work that way, right?
00:55:12.000 I can't just decide to love God.
00:55:14.000 That's not a feeling that you can summon and dictate to yourself.
00:55:19.000 So I'm an atheist because I don't, I don't make God a sort of part of my daily practice.
00:55:25.000 It's not part of my life.
00:55:26.000 It just isn't, right?
00:55:27.000 And I can't just choose to make it be.
00:55:30.000 I could fake it, and I could go to church every Sunday. 0.69
00:55:33.000 But I respect religion in its best form too much to friggin' fake it, right?
00:55:39.000 And I'm not an agnostic because, you know, if I saw... 0.94
00:55:46.000 In my mind, agnostic is like a hung jury, right? 1.00
00:55:48.000 It's like, you know what?
00:55:49.000 I don't know.
00:55:50.000 There could be a God.
00:55:51.000 There might not be a God.
00:55:52.000 I don't have an opinion on it, right?
00:55:54.000 A hung jury.
00:55:55.000 He might be innocent.
00:55:55.000 He might be guilty.
00:55:57.000 You know, we can't...
00:55:58.000 Your Honor, we can't decide either way.
00:56:00.000 And we can make an argument for both.
00:56:02.000 So it's a hung jury.
00:56:05.000 Like, we can't.
00:56:05.000 We don't know, right?
00:56:07.000 In the legal system, that means he's innocent.
00:56:09.000 If you can't come to a decision of guilt, then he's innocent, right?
00:56:11.000 But so in the sort of agnostic sense, like...
00:56:15.000 There's evidence for, evidence against.
00:56:17.000 I can't decide, so I'm an agnostic.
00:56:20.000 But for me, there is no evidence that there is a God.
00:56:26.000 I mean, there's belief, right, which is a beautiful thing, but I've never in my life actually seen something happen where I was like, oh my God, there went God.
00:56:34.000 I just saw Him. 0.99
00:56:35.000 Holy shit. 0.99
00:56:36.000 Like, are you kidding? 1.00
00:56:37.000 Like, there He is.
00:56:39.000 Like, now I believe there's a God.
00:56:41.000 Had I, while I was dying, had God come to me, whatever that would even look like, right, whatever that is, had God come to me, afterwards I'd be like, you know what?
00:56:51.000 I don't know.
00:56:52.000 Maybe there is a God, right? 1.00
00:56:54.000 Because I saw some strange shit. 0.99
00:56:56.000 And that's the only explanation I can think of is that there actually is a divine power in the world. 0.99
00:57:01.000 I encountered it.
00:57:02.000 It changed my life.
00:57:04.000 Like, even if I'm not religious, I'm at least agnostic.
00:57:08.000 But I've never – it's never happened to me, right?
00:57:11.000 So I'm not an agnostic because I just – I have no reason to think there is a God.
00:57:17.000 It never happens, right?
00:57:18.000 I'm an atheist, right?
00:57:19.000 So I'm happy to stand corrected if someone offers up some proof, but thus far it hasn't happened.
00:57:25.000 And when people say, you know what, the proof of God is that the universe exists. 0.99
00:57:29.000 Who created the universe, motherfucker? 0.99
00:57:31.000 Like, who do you think it has to be God, right? 0.99
00:57:33.000 And I'm like, well, not really, like, because if complex systems need a creator and that's your proof of God, clearly God is a complex system that's at least as complex as the universe created.
00:57:45.000 So who created God?
00:57:46.000 Like, that will not get you—that doesn't prove anything, right?
00:57:49.000 So that's the—so the theology aside, like— What did I make of my father appearing above me?
00:58:06.000 The next morning, to get in there, I have to sort of say what happened to me, right?
00:58:10.000 And if I may.
00:58:12.000 The next morning, I woke up in the ICU to the nurse saying, good morning, Mr. Younger.
00:58:21.000 Congratulations.
00:58:22.000 You made it.
00:58:23.000 Like, it's a miracle.
00:58:25.000 We almost lost you last night.
00:58:28.000 And no one can quite believe you're alive.
00:58:32.000 You know, welcome back to the world, basically.
00:58:36.000 I cannot tell you how shocking it is to get news like that if you had no idea you were dying.
00:58:45.000 I mean, I knew something was going on with me.
00:58:47.000 Belly pain. 0.95
00:58:48.000 Maybe I'm going to wake up to shitty news about a tumor, you know, cancer. 0.98
00:58:51.000 You know, whatever.
00:58:52.000 I mean, I was aware that this might not be a fun day tomorrow.
00:58:55.000 I had no idea I was dying in that moment, right?
00:58:58.000 So it's absolutely shocking.
00:59:00.000 And particularly if you have children, right?
00:59:03.000 And my little girl.
00:59:04.000 I mean, I immediately thought about my little girls.
00:59:07.000 And then I remembered my father.
00:59:09.000 I'm like, oh, my God.
00:59:10.000 I saw my father last night.
00:59:12.000 And the pit, right, all came back to me.
00:59:16.000 And I didn't know what to do with it.
00:59:19.000 I was like, Jesus, like, are you kidding?
00:59:22.000 What was that?
00:59:27.000 So I'm left there with my thoughts.
00:59:28.000 I'm throwing up blood. 0.92
00:59:29.000 I'm a freaking mess, right?
00:59:31.000 And then the nurse comes back later and says, how are you doing?
00:59:35.000 Like, not that great, frankly.
00:59:38.000 Like, thanks to you.
00:59:39.000 What you told me is terrifying.
00:59:41.000 Like, what?
00:59:43.000 I can't stop thinking about it.
00:59:45.000 And I almost died.
00:59:46.000 And she said, try this.
00:59:48.000 She had an awesome Boston accent.
00:59:50.000 She was like one of these – she was sort of a middle-aged lady, like heart of gold, straight shooter, tough as nails, buried three husbands, whatever. 1.00
01:00:00.000 She was one of those ICU nurses, right?
01:00:03.000 I liked her enormously.
01:00:04.000 And she was like, try this.
01:00:06.000 Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.
01:00:11.000 She walked out. 0.98
01:00:12.000 Like a hell of a thing to say to an atheist, right? 1.00
01:00:14.000 So for me, all those wonderful words like blessing and sacred, they have beautiful secular meanings as well.
01:00:23.000 So I feel entitled to interpret them in my own way.
01:00:26.000 And for me, Something sacred is anything that allows – as I was saying before, any work, any task, any knowledge, anything that allows people to live with more dignity, with less fear, more connection, more love, that just helps the human condition a little bit.
01:00:43.000 Like that's sacred knowledge, right?
01:00:45.000 You know, it could be a minister, right?
01:00:47.000 It could be a shrink.
01:00:48.000 It could be a journalist, right?
01:00:50.000 You could be doing sacred work for people.
01:00:53.000 I'm sure you are.
01:00:54.000 And so, you know, the things that you say are helping people navigate their painful lives.
01:00:58.000 Yeah, bro, absolutely.
01:00:59.000 We're all capable of sacred work, right?
01:01:01.000 That's what it means to me.
01:01:03.000 So when she said that, I'm like, okay.
01:01:06.000 I've been going to front lines my whole life and coming back with knowledge that, you know, in my most grandiose moments, right, I thought might help humanity.
01:01:15.000 Like, what's going on in—no, I wasn't in Ukraine, but right now.
01:01:18.000 Like, what's going on in Ukraine?
01:01:19.000 What knowledge can we come back with that will help the world and the United States make better decisions about how to preserve human dignity and human life?
01:01:27.000 Like, whatever that means, right?
01:01:29.000 So that's—at its best, it's sort of a sacred task, like many others are.
01:01:34.000 And— And now I'm not going to front lines anymore.
01:01:38.000 I went to the ultimate front line.
01:01:39.000 I went to my own mortality.
01:01:41.000 The front line we're all headed to.
01:01:44.000 And that most of us are scared of.
01:01:47.000 And I was allowed to look over the edge.
01:01:50.000 And then I came back.
01:01:51.000 I was allowed to come back.
01:01:54.000 Did I come back with sacred knowledge?
01:01:56.000 In other words, with knowledge that would be helpful to me and to other people, lead their lives.
01:02:01.000 And with less fear, more dignity, etc.
01:02:04.000 And that was the challenge.
01:02:07.000 And I set about doing it.
01:02:08.000 At that moment, I just lay there.
01:02:10.000 I was like, alright, what did I learn?
01:02:12.000 What did I learn?
01:02:13.000 And the big question that I had to answer for myself was, What the hell did I see with my father?
01:02:21.000 Like, what was that?
01:02:22.000 And does that mean that there's something, quote, more?
01:02:28.000 Right?
01:02:29.000 Is there something after we die that we can sort of like look forward to and count on? 0.99
01:02:35.000 Or is it just the dying brain hallucinating some shit because we're so frigging scared and the synapses are shorting out and it's going haywire and that's what you get. 0.98
01:02:47.000 You see some weird stuff, right? 0.99
01:02:49.000 Like, which is it?
01:02:50.000 And so I started researching NDEs, near-death experiences, and there's a whole body of literature, a whole body of knowledge, and frankly a whole cottage industry, somewhat shameless cottage industry around that, you know, proof of heaven, blah, blah, blah.
01:03:03.000 But, you know, the flakiness aside, there's some legit, you know, it's very, very common.
01:03:07.000 And the NDEs that people have had, thousands of cases of them from all over the world, different societies, different cultures, even different ages.
01:03:17.000 There are historical accounts of this.
01:03:19.000 And the interesting thing about them If you give a room full of people LSD, they'll have a wide variety of hallucinations.
01:03:25.000 And we know how that works, right?
01:03:27.000 We know what happens in the brain when you take LSD. No big mystery there.
01:03:31.000 And they'll hallucinate a whole bunch of crazy stuff, right?
01:03:33.000 With NDEs, what's sort of strange is that the experiences are – there are an infinite number of them, right?
01:03:39.000 It's not like some people see ham sandwiches and other people see kangaroos, right?
01:03:42.000 It's like they fall into some – like three or four basic buckets, right?
01:03:47.000 And that's across culture.
01:03:49.000 Throughout history, which sort of argues for a sort of seminal human experience rather than just a sort of function of brain chemistry and essentially drugs, right?
01:04:05.000 Endogenous drugs being released in your brain in your final moments.
01:04:09.000 And so there are a lot of people, very well credentialed, smart people, who are like, listen, these accounts amount to evidence of an afterlife.
01:04:18.000 Right?
01:04:19.000 Sorry.
01:04:20.000 Like, there's so many of them.
01:04:21.000 They're so consistent. 1.00
01:04:22.000 How do you explain this shit? 1.00
01:04:23.000 Like, come on. 1.00
01:04:24.000 Right?
01:04:24.000 And then there's other people, well-credentialed, equally smart, et cetera, et cetera.
01:04:28.000 Like, nonsense.
01:04:28.000 I'm a neuroscientist.
01:04:30.000 I'm a neurochemist.
01:04:30.000 You know, like, we can explain all this through, you know, you put fighter pilots in a human centrifuge, spin them to 5Gs, they will see a tunnel of light.
01:04:39.000 They will see God.
01:04:41.000 They will experience their entire life in one moment.
01:04:43.000 Blah, blah, blah.
01:04:44.000 You know, epileptics, same thing.
01:04:46.000 Brain seizures, like...
01:04:48.000 We can reproduce all of this in the lab.
01:04:51.000 Like, this isn't evidence of anything, right?
01:04:53.000 But isn't the problem with that that you're actually killing a person when you're spinning them into centrifuge?
01:04:57.000 No, no, no.
01:04:57.000 They do this with fighter pilots.
01:04:59.000 Right, but you know if you keep doing that, you'll die.
01:05:01.000 Oh, absolutely.
01:05:02.000 And your body knows that, too.
01:05:03.000 So you are in a near-death experience.
01:05:06.000 You're near death.
01:05:07.000 Well, you're near death because blood's not getting to your breast. 0.50
01:05:09.000 And your body knows that.
01:05:10.000 I mean, you are opening that door.
01:05:12.000 Whether you're opening that door in a safe manner, you're still opening that door.
01:05:16.000 Absolutely.
01:05:17.000 Yeah, you're right.
01:05:17.000 You're right.
01:05:18.000 But the argument for—you're absolutely right, and I never thought of it that way.
01:05:21.000 But the argument by the scientists, the rationalists, is, look, we can reproduce all of this in the lab.
01:05:26.000 Yeah, but it's a dumb argument because what you're doing in reproducing it is bringing someone close to death. 0.86
01:05:31.000 Right, right. 0.58
01:05:32.000 Well, another thing they can do is stimulate the brain during brain surgery, and they do that to make sure that they're not scooping out tumor, not, you know, your piano lessons or whatever, right?
01:05:42.000 And one of the things they can do is they stimulate certain parts of the brain.
01:05:46.000 They can give people a sensation that they're floating.
01:05:50.000 Or that they, oh my god, my grandfather.
01:05:53.000 You know, whatever. 0.99
01:05:54.000 They can do weird shit with their brain with, you know, basically a toothpick and a bone saw, right? 0.99
01:06:01.000 And so, at any rate, just suffice it to say, there's the sort of slightly mystical argument of this is proof of an afterlife, and then there's this sort of rationalist argument. 0.99
01:06:11.000 No, no, no.
01:06:11.000 We understand the physiology of all this.
01:06:14.000 And so, there was a guy in, I think it was Estonia, an older guy who fell and hit his head, had a hematoma, They put electrodes on his scalp to see what the brain activity was because he was having seizures.
01:06:27.000 Other stuff happened to him that the family said, you know, he doesn't have a chance of recuperating.
01:06:32.000 He basically pulled the plug, let him die.
01:06:34.000 He had the electrodes on his brain, monitoring brain activity before the decision to pull the plug.
01:06:43.000 So they did something that would otherwise not be ethical.
01:06:46.000 If someone's going to die, you're like, hey, let's hook him up to see what his brain does.
01:06:49.000 That's not ethical, right?
01:06:50.000 This guy already had that stuff in place as part of the life-saving measures.
01:06:53.000 So they were able to see what happened At the moment of death, right?
01:06:59.000 So what happened in the human brain, in his brain, Was that there was a flood of, I think it was gamma in his brain that is associated with long-term memory.
01:07:14.000 A flood of gamma in his brain, right?
01:07:18.000 And that was, and one other frequency, I can't remember.
01:07:21.000 At any rate, there was this, the brain did, basically did what brains do when they're remembering very, very old stuff, right?
01:07:32.000 And that they even found that in rats that they ethically are able to kill, like hook them up, kill them, what happens in the brain, right?
01:07:39.000 And so the most ancient sort of memory source centers of the brain are activated at the moment of death while there's a sort of lingering, dying consciousness.
01:07:50.000 So boom, all of a sudden, you're five and you're talking to your grandfather.
01:07:54.000 You know, whatever it is, we don't know what the specific Things that that man saw, but we know that his brain was activated in ways that suggest memory retrieval, right?
01:08:05.000 So the rationalist is like, okay, the brain dies, all of a sudden you'd see your, you know, you have these old memories, right?
01:08:11.000 So, now, for me, as I read, so I got home...
01:08:19.000 It's a rather convoluted story, but hopefully it's interesting.
01:08:22.000 So I got home.
01:08:22.000 I was a week in the hospital.
01:08:25.000 It surprised everybody.
01:08:26.000 But the reason I survived at all was that I'm a fit, athletic person.
01:08:31.000 And so I gave the doctor something to work with.
01:08:34.000 It also meant that I recovered quite quickly.
01:08:36.000 So instead of three weeks in the ICU, I was five days.
01:08:39.000 And then, boom, I'm out of there, right?
01:08:40.000 And so I came home.
01:08:43.000 And, you know, it's not the kind of party you would expect, right?
01:08:46.000 Like, I came home and I was like, woohoo, I'm alive, I made it, blah, blah, blah.
01:08:49.000 It's like, oh my god, I almost died on a totally ordinary day and it could happen again.
01:08:57.000 This also could be the day that I die.
01:09:00.000 Right?
01:09:00.000 Maybe I have another aneurysm.
01:09:02.000 Like, we don't know.
01:09:03.000 And I completely freaked myself out.
01:09:05.000 It was a classic post-trauma, like, anxiety, panic reaction.
01:09:08.000 Like, it was all very classic.
01:09:10.000 It was way worse than combat.
01:09:12.000 Way worse, right?
01:09:14.000 But one of the problems I started to have the sense that I wasn't really there and that maybe I had died, which sounds freaky, but apparently it's quite common in people that almost die that they're seized with this fear that they're actually a ghost and they didn't make it.
01:09:30.000 I know it sounds insane.
01:09:33.000 But I can just tell you, I sincerely had that worry.
01:09:38.000 It was the ultimate panic disorder, right?
01:09:40.000 That you're dead.
01:09:42.000 Is there anything bigger to panic about?
01:09:44.000 That you're actually dead?
01:09:46.000 And the reason I had that, and this gets to another rather mysterious, slightly woo-woo part of this whole story, is that two days prior, I had no idea, obviously, that I had something that was going to kill me in my abdomen.
01:10:02.000 I had no conscious idea.
01:10:04.000 But two days prior, at dawn, my family and I, we still co-sleep.
01:10:09.000 And so we sleep in a group on a pad on the floor.
01:10:13.000 And we sleep as a family, the four of us.
01:10:15.000 And so at dawn on the previous night, so 36 hours prior to almost dying, I was woken by this horrific nightmare, the worst nightmare I've ever had and I've ever heard of.
01:10:29.000 And the nightmare was this.
01:10:31.000 That I was hovering above my family and they were crying in grief.
01:10:38.000 And I was waving to them.
01:10:40.000 They were crying in grief that I died.
01:10:42.000 And I was waving to them.
01:10:44.000 I was like, I'm over here.
01:10:44.000 I'm right here.
01:10:45.000 I was shouting.
01:10:46.000 I was waving my arms.
01:10:47.000 And they couldn't hear me.
01:10:49.000 They couldn't see me.
01:10:51.000 And I didn't know why.
01:10:53.000 And then I was made to understand in the same way that my father communicated with me.
01:10:57.000 It was just a sort of transmission of knowledge, right?
01:11:00.000 I was made to understand that they couldn't hear me because I'm dead.
01:11:07.000 I'm a spirit.
01:11:09.000 I'm not there.
01:11:10.000 And I'm above them.
01:11:13.000 And I'll be going now.
01:11:14.000 I'm out.
01:11:15.000 Mr. Younger, you're outbound.
01:11:17.000 And you're not coming back.
01:11:18.000 It's too late.
01:11:19.000 You can't go back.
01:11:20.000 It's over.
01:11:21.000 And I was so anguished that it woke me up, and I woke up next to my—it happened to be next to my oldest daughter, and I just, like, clutched her like a stuffy.
01:11:30.000 Like, I was like, oh, my God, thank God, because it really felt like I was dead.
01:11:34.000 Thank God that was just a dream.
01:11:36.000 I'm actually here.
01:11:37.000 I'm alive, right?
01:11:39.000 So then, you know, 36 hours later, ooh, what's that pain in my abdomen?
01:11:43.000 Off to the hospital, almost, almost die.
01:11:47.000 Doctors have later told me, not the doctors who saved me, but other doctors who were honest with me, like, it's a miracle you're alive, right?
01:11:56.000 Like, it isn't just, oh, good, well done.
01:11:58.000 It's a freaking miracle.
01:12:00.000 Like, 10 slices of Swiss cheese, 10 holes in the lineup, and you threaded the needle through those holes, right? 0.61
01:12:06.000 Like, so I got back home.
01:12:10.000 And I was super emotional.
01:12:13.000 Every time I heard a siren, I'd start crying.
01:12:15.000 I mean, I was just a freaking mess, right?
01:12:18.000 And then I thought, oh my god, I died in my sleep.
01:12:26.000 That dream?
01:12:28.000 Because I started to read about NDEs, and one of the most common is that you're hovering above your family.
01:12:32.000 Right?
01:12:32.000 Another is that you see a dead relative, right?
01:12:36.000 And I knew none of this, right?
01:12:38.000 So, oh my god, that wasn't a dream.
01:12:41.000 That was my experience of actually dying, right?
01:12:45.000 The kind of experience that many people who almost died and were resuscitated report having had.
01:12:52.000 I was hovering above my family and I died.
01:12:56.000 And I died in my sleep.
01:12:57.000 My wife woke up next to her dead husband.
01:13:00.000 It's over.
01:13:01.000 I just don't know because I'm in the middle of a dying hallucination.
01:13:06.000 I'm a ghost.
01:13:07.000 I'm not here.
01:13:07.000 I think my daughter's talking to me.
01:13:10.000 I think she's on my lap.
01:13:11.000 I'm not, bro, you're not here, man.
01:13:12.000 You're like, just face it, right?
01:13:15.000 And, you know, you can't disprove it, right?
01:13:18.000 And if you're crazy enough, it actually feels like it might be what's happening.
01:13:21.000 And I was plenty crazy enough for this, right? 0.82
01:13:25.000 I'm not a naturally neurotic person, but it turned me into one for a while, right?
01:13:29.000 And at one point I went to my wife, like, honey, just tell me I'm really here, that I survived.
01:13:33.000 We're here.
01:13:34.000 We're good.
01:13:35.000 Like, just tell me.
01:13:36.000 She said, of course you're here.
01:13:37.000 You survived, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
01:13:39.000 But in my mind, I'm like, that's exactly what a hallucination would tell you, right?
01:13:45.000 I was inching towards madness, right?
01:13:49.000 And so finally, long story just to sort of finally answer your question.
01:13:58.000 Where I landed...
01:14:01.000 So I'm reading the NDE stuff and the scaredy cat in me is like, oh, wow, that's pretty convincing.
01:14:08.000 Maybe there is an afterlife.
01:14:10.000 Maybe we don't have to be worried.
01:14:11.000 Like, wow, how pleasant.
01:14:13.000 How pleasant to think that there's something to go on to.
01:14:17.000 Nothing to be scared of.
01:14:19.000 And then I read afterwards...
01:14:23.000 The sort of, like, you know, party poopers, right? 0.69
01:14:26.000 Just sort of, like, the rationalists come in, like, nonsense.
01:14:28.000 We can explain all this.
01:14:29.000 It's all neurochemistry.
01:14:31.000 Like, there's no freaking afterlife.
01:14:33.000 Like, come on.
01:14:34.000 So, and because of...
01:14:37.000 Partly because of the father I grew up with, like, who really valued rationalism.
01:14:43.000 Like, I was like, oh, well.
01:14:44.000 You know, nice try.
01:14:45.000 Like, you know, close but no cigar.
01:14:48.000 Oh, well.
01:14:48.000 I guess when we're dead, we're dead.
01:14:50.000 And so then...
01:14:53.000 The one thing that didn't quite make sense was that there's this incredible consistency in people, like an enormous percentage of the time, and I can't remember off the top of my head, but quite a large percentage of the time, the dying, people who have NDEs and are resuscitated and report their memories like I was.
01:15:13.000 I was able to.
01:15:15.000 They are received by the dead, right?
01:15:18.000 The dead come to receive them.
01:15:19.000 Sometimes it's your father.
01:15:21.000 Sometimes it's a friend who died decades earlier.
01:15:24.000 Sometimes it's someone that you might not even like very much.
01:15:28.000 But the dead come to receive the dying in the way that my father did.
01:15:32.000 You know, in my mind, I'm like, I don't know, you know, like...
01:15:35.000 I get it.
01:15:36.000 You give everyone LSD, and they all have hallucinations, and the dying brain produces hallucinations, but it's sort of odd.
01:15:41.000 Like, okay, you stir up the memory banks of the brain when you die with the gamma and all that stuff.
01:15:47.000 So, all right, so suddenly I'm five years old, and we're playing by the swimming pool, and now suddenly I'm camping with my buddy at 12. Yeah, there's a whole array of memories.
01:15:56.000 That's different than dad showing up.
01:15:58.000 Like dad showing up saying, come with me into the afterlife.
01:16:01.000 That's not exactly memory recall, right?
01:16:03.000 That's something else, right?
01:16:06.000 And then I started talking to hospice nurses.
01:16:09.000 And it's a super common experience.
01:16:14.000 Older people, people dying of cancer in their last days and hours, what are they doing?
01:16:20.000 They're having conversations with people in the room that no one else can see.
01:16:25.000 They're having conversations with the dead who are clearly there to take them.
01:16:29.000 It's okay.
01:16:29.000 Come with me.
01:16:30.000 It happened to my mother.
01:16:32.000 She suddenly scowled in her last hour.
01:16:35.000 She scowled and looked up at the coroner and said, what's he doing here?
01:16:41.000 And she had a terrible relationship with her brother who had died in his 50s, you know, like decades earlier, right?
01:16:47.000 And I just guessed.
01:16:48.000 I was like, Mom, that's Uncle George.
01:16:50.000 And he's come a very long way to see you.
01:16:54.000 And you have to be nice to him.
01:16:56.000 And she frowned and she said, we'll see about that.
01:17:02.000 It continues into the afterlife, right?
01:17:04.000 It's not over when you die, right?
01:17:06.000 It goes on, right?
01:17:07.000 There's a sequel to this, right?
01:17:10.000 So these visits are not necessarily a sort of benevolent, like, oh, the dying, you know, sort of need some kind of comfort, and they manufacture a vision of a loved one to make them feel better.
01:17:21.000 It's not quite that either.
01:17:23.000 And then there's super poignant stories, right?
01:17:26.000 I talked to a hospice nurse who was taking care of an older gentleman who was dying painlessly, you know, no morphine at all, so of clear mind, right?
01:17:36.000 You know, in his 80s or 70s or 80s.
01:17:39.000 And in his last, you know, 12 hours or so, he suddenly, the nurse that I talked to said that the man looked and he was like, Barbara, oh my God, you know, it's so good to see you.
01:17:55.000 Like, oh, thank God you're here.
01:17:58.000 You know, like, so the nurse who's been through this a million times says, okay, he's in his last hours now.
01:18:04.000 This is the endgame, right?
01:18:06.000 Thank God, because he's dying and it's, you know, like, needs to resolve.
01:18:11.000 And so...
01:18:13.000 She went into the kitchen where the wife was and said, I think we're in the last stages.
01:18:19.000 He's seeing someone in the room.
01:18:24.000 He seems very, very happy to see her.
01:18:26.000 It's someone named Barbara.
01:18:29.000 Does that name mean anything to you?
01:18:33.000 So the wife says, yes, that was his one true love.
01:18:39.000 So, of course, the nurse is like, oh, my God, I stepped in it, right?
01:18:43.000 And then she goes, that was our 19-year-old.
01:18:48.000 Oh, wow.
01:18:50.000 Right?
01:18:50.000 I mean, how do you tell that story and not start crying, right?
01:18:52.000 I mean, it's like...
01:18:53.000 So that kind of story...
01:18:57.000 It's super, super common.
01:18:59.000 So in my mind, right, I'm like, okay, I buy the centrifuge, I buy the, you know, like endogenous DMT and the blah, blah, the gamma.
01:19:09.000 I get it.
01:19:10.000 I get it.
01:19:11.000 What I don't understand is the consistency of the visions.
01:19:15.000 Of the dead coming to – like my father did.
01:19:18.000 I mean you – I get that we hallucinate in times of extreme stress but not that – I don't get the content being consistent across cultures, across ages, manners of death, like on and on,
01:19:34.000 like – Really?
01:19:36.000 Like, how do you—like, so to me that doesn't prove there's a, quote, afterlife, but it raises a legitimate question, like, what is it we're talking about here?
01:19:45.000 And so where I land—and I promise I won't, like, drag us into a long conversation about quantum physics—but, you know, basically the rational— The argument that's both rational and open-minded, and my mind has been enormously opened by this experience,
01:20:02.000 not to God, but to maybe we just don't understand the nature of existence completely, right?
01:20:07.000 It's been open to that.
01:20:08.000 So the rational and open-minded explanation for some of this stuff.
01:20:13.000 I think?
01:20:37.000 I think?
01:20:54.000 We just don't quite understand what death is, what reality is, what consciousness is.
01:21:01.000 So my father was a physicist, and just weirdly, my great aunt had a long, passionate affair with Schrodinger, the physicist who Schrodinger's cat, right?
01:21:14.000 And one of the mysteries of quantum physics, and I'm sure you've come into this in your studies and your research and your conversations, you know, one of the profound mysteries of quantum physics that was sort of broken wide open about 100 years ago by people like Schrodinger and Heisenberg That when you observe a subatomic particle,
01:21:35.000 it acts differently than if you don't observe it.
01:21:37.000 So you create basically the act of conscious observation.
01:21:43.000 If I look at that ashtray, the ashtray does exactly what it does if I don't look at it.
01:21:49.000 In the macroscopic world, conscious observation doesn't change anything.
01:21:55.000 In the subatomic world, it changes everything, right?
01:21:59.000 So a subatomic particle, an electron, is in all positions as a statistical probability.
01:22:08.000 It's in all positions until you observe it and then it's in one position, right?
01:22:13.000 If you fire a photon at two slits in a metal plate, With some photographic film on the other side to mark where the photon hits.
01:22:23.000 If you fire the photon at a plate with two slits, it's the famous double slit experiment.
01:22:28.000 Fire the photon at two slits and actively monitor it with a photon detector while it's moving.
01:22:37.000 It will go through one slit and hit the strike plate on the far side with a signature of like passage through one slit, right?
01:22:47.000 If you fire a photon through two slits and don't monitor it, it simultaneously goes through both slits and leaves a signature on the other side of having done so, right?
01:23:01.000 In other words, and this is one of the deepest mysteries of existence, right?
01:23:06.000 At the quantum level, Our act of observation creates the reality that we are observing and that if we don't observe it, it's another reality, right?
01:23:20.000 So given that deep and unresolvable mystery, is it possible?
01:23:27.000 In this sort of like the electrons in all places at once until we watch it and then it's in one place in that sort of basic sense of a profound mystery at the quantum level.
01:23:35.000 Is it possible that there's an equivalent mystery around biological death, the existence of consciousness, which people still don't understand?
01:23:45.000 Right?
01:23:46.000 They can't even define what it is exactly, right?
01:23:50.000 Is there a mystery around that that we not only don't understand, can't understand?
01:23:55.000 And one of the theories, super, and I'll end with this, but it's a super out there theory.
01:24:00.000 It's called biocentrism.
01:24:02.000 There's a guy named Adam Lanza that you might be interested in talking to.
01:24:05.000 He's a brilliant guy.
01:24:08.000 He's one of the sort of pioneers of biocentrism.
01:24:10.000 And basically what he's saying is that, look, if consciousness determines reality at the quantum level and the universe ultimately is a quantum reality, It's possible that consciousness is part of,
01:24:27.000 that there's a subatomic particle associated with consciousness, just like the Higgs boson is associated with gravity.
01:24:35.000 Like gravity exists because of the Higgs boson.
01:24:38.000 It's a subatomic particle that we can measure, right?
01:24:41.000 And Maybe consciousness, in the same way, is part of the physical existence of the universe.
01:24:49.000 Without gravity, there is no universe.
01:24:51.000 There's no nothing, right?
01:24:53.000 It's essential to existence.
01:24:55.000 And maybe consciousness is essential to the existence of the universe in the singular form that it takes.
01:25:05.000 And it landed in this singular form with the arrival of consciousness.
01:25:10.000 Maybe it's all one and the same thing.
01:25:12.000 And that actually coincides quite nicely with Schrodinger.
01:25:17.000 Who was of the opinion that there was a universal consciousness.
01:25:21.000 There was a kind of colossus of consciousness that we are all a tiny part of.
01:25:26.000 And when we die, we return to it.
01:25:28.000 Right?
01:25:28.000 On some quantum level that no one has any freaking idea.
01:25:32.000 As I say in my book, we might understand reality about as well as a dog understands a TV screen.
01:25:38.000 Like with absolutely no concept of the machinery, the mechanisms, the processes that produce the flickering images that are in front of us.
01:25:46.000 We might, like the dog doesn't have that understanding of what it's looking at, we might not have an understanding of the cosmos that creates the system that creates the reality that we are seeing and that we think is existence.
01:26:01.000 Yeah, I'm entitled to believe that we're entirely too arrogant in our understanding of what we know and that we have a very limited amount of information even though it's incredibly complex for our understanding.
01:26:18.000 The leaps and bounds that we have made since using leeches to treat diseases is off the charts, right?
01:26:23.000 And you're a living testament to it.
01:26:25.000 But I think it is a very, very shallow understanding of an infinite thing that's happening all the time.
01:26:34.000 Have you ever seen, they just recently made images of quantum entangled photons?
01:26:42.000 No.
01:26:42.000 I mean, I know about quantum entanglement.
01:26:44.000 Another great mystery.
01:26:45.000 I haven't seen the images.
01:26:45.000 Spooky action in the distance.
01:26:47.000 Take a look at what this looks like.
01:26:49.000 Quantum entangled photons look like a yin-yang.
01:26:52.000 Like, exactly.
01:26:53.000 Oh, awesome.
01:26:54.000 Exactly.
01:26:54.000 That's it.
01:26:55.000 That's a quantum entangled photon.
01:26:57.000 Oh, my God.
01:26:57.000 Are you kidding?
01:26:58.000 Oh, my God.
01:26:58.000 Oh, my God.
01:26:59.000 So each one contains at its center a bit of the other.
01:27:04.000 Exactly.
01:27:04.000 So maybe someone knew this thousands and thousands of years ago.
01:27:10.000 The idea that the Chinese or whoever created that initial symbol, the idea that they just stumbled accidentally upon an actual image of quantum entangled photons, very unlikely.
01:27:24.000 That just seems too insane and too amazing.
01:27:27.000 That's fascinating.
01:27:28.000 Fascinating, right?
01:27:29.000 And to find that out.
01:27:30.000 When was that discovered, Jamie?
01:27:31.000 Was that very recently?
01:27:33.000 I saw it in some science.
01:27:35.000 I think it was like last year.
01:27:36.000 Okay.
01:27:37.000 Yeah, entanglement has been around for decades.
01:27:39.000 Right.
01:27:39.000 But those images are just – that's stunning.
01:27:42.000 Stunning.
01:27:42.000 That's amazing.
01:27:43.000 Yeah.
01:27:44.000 So I think this whole thing that, oh, we know what's going on in the brain.
01:27:50.000 Oh, we know the human neurochemicals that get – oh, we know we can stimulate the brain.
01:27:55.000 Oh, we know we can stick you in a centrifuge. 1.00
01:27:57.000 You don't know shit. 1.00
01:27:58.000 Right. 1.00
01:28:00.000 We are at the edge of a vast forest and we're peering in and we're arrogant.
01:28:06.000 And we're arrogant because the people that know know more than everybody else.
01:28:10.000 The people that do have an understanding of human neurochemistry and do have an understanding of how the body works know far more than I do, know far more than most people do.
01:28:18.000 So they have an arrogance of this understanding, this rational sort of reductionist perspective of what reality is.
01:28:26.000 But I think it's nonsense.
01:28:28.000 Trevor Burrus Well, listen, the physicists that give them their due, they are the branch of science which is actually fully aware of the drop-off where the mystery begins.
01:28:40.000 They could not explain this stuff when it happened.
01:28:43.000 It actually unsettled those guys, Schrodinger and Einstein and Heisenberg and all.
01:28:49.000 It really quite unsettled them, right?
01:28:51.000 They were like...
01:28:52.000 Whoa, what are we unfolding here?
01:28:54.000 And are we sure we want to unfold this?
01:28:56.000 Uncover this?
01:28:57.000 And once Sir Arthur Eddington said this wonderful thing.
01:29:00.000 He was asked about these sort of central mysteries of quantum physics and the universe.
01:29:04.000 And he said...
01:29:08.000 Something that we don't know is doing, we know not what.
01:29:13.000 That's a good way to put it.
01:29:14.000 Yeah, there's some humility right there, right?
01:29:16.000 And at its core, quantum physics, there's a mystery.
01:29:23.000 At the core of quantum physics, equivalent to the mystery at the core of religion.
01:29:27.000 At the end of the day, religion is an act of faith, right?
01:29:31.000 And you can't answer these questions, right, rationally.
01:29:35.000 And at the end of the day, the physicists themselves will say, look, we just don't know.
01:29:40.000 These test results make no sense in the macroscopic, rational world that we live in every day.
01:29:50.000 The macroscopic and the subatomic world, they're completely opposite to each other.
01:29:56.000 The laws of physics are completely different at the macroscopic level and the subatomic level.
01:30:04.000 Yeah.
01:30:04.000 And, you know, just the fact that if you look at atoms themselves, it's mostly empty space.
01:30:10.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:30:11.000 Like, what the fuck is going on? 0.99
01:30:12.000 That's right. 0.99
01:30:13.000 All of this, we have a cursory understanding of something that's infinitely complex.
01:30:19.000 We have an understanding of it, and far greater every year.
01:30:22.000 And they keep exploring. 1.00
01:30:24.000 But I think we're also cursed with these fucking primate brains. 0.99
01:30:28.000 You know, these primate brains that we have already talked about today are filled with flaws and, you know, childhood trauma and bipolar and depression and schizophrenia and all these different issues with the primate brain. 1.00
01:30:42.000 And we are the dog looking at the television screen.
01:30:46.000 We are.
01:30:47.000 And I think I've talked to a lot of these doctors that have this reductionist perspective.
01:30:54.000 Very few of them have had psychedelic experiences.
01:30:57.000 I think the brain is capable of opening up a door.
01:31:01.000 And I think that door opens when you die.
01:31:04.000 Door is a bad word.
01:31:07.000 It's not the right word.
01:31:08.000 But it's all I have.
01:31:09.000 It's an opening.
01:31:10.000 It's a gateway.
01:31:11.000 There's something going on inside of us.
01:31:13.000 There's something going on.
01:31:14.000 We are interconnected in ways that are far greater than Our understanding of human social interactions.
01:31:23.000 There's something going on with us and that we experience that with love.
01:31:27.000 We experience that with the love of, you know, your wife or your husband or the love of your child or your family members.
01:31:33.000 We experience this connection that's like this, it's very different.
01:31:38.000 It connects us like as souls and that's what I think I'm getting to.
01:31:42.000 There's I think the soul is real and I really didn't have that that thought really I was pretty pretty atheist I grew up I was went to Catholic school when I was very young for first grade and had a really bad experience there and it just was like religions bullshit my parents were breaking up when I was young and And I got really into religion because I felt like religion,
01:32:06.000 at least, like if there's chaos in my family life, you know, there's always God.
01:32:10.000 Like, God's gonna make sense.
01:32:12.000 Then I went to Catholic school.
01:32:13.000 I was like, okay, okay, God has nothing to do with this. 1.00
01:32:15.000 Like, this is fucking ridiculous. 1.00
01:32:17.000 Then my grandfather died. 1.00
01:32:19.000 I was very close to my grandfather.
01:32:20.000 I loved him very, very much.
01:32:22.000 I stayed with him when I moved to New York.
01:32:28.000 I was like 23 years old.
01:32:34.000 I didn't have a place to stay.
01:32:35.000 I didn't have any money.
01:32:36.000 I just got signed by this manager, and I was going to go to New York to do stand-up comedy.
01:32:40.000 I was going to chase my dream, so I was living with my grandfather.
01:32:45.000 My grandmother had an aneurysm, and they gave my grandmother 72 hours, and she lived for 12 years.
01:32:52.000 At least 12 years.
01:32:54.000 It might have been a little longer.
01:32:56.000 And she was bedridden, and I was staying with him and her.
01:33:01.000 And my grandfather had been dealing with his wife dying for all these years.
01:33:06.000 And she would, like, moan in pain.
01:33:09.000 You'd hear, like, make these sounds.
01:33:13.000 And I knew they were—he was old, and she was old.
01:33:18.000 They were dying.
01:33:19.000 And I knew she was going to die probably quicker than him.
01:33:24.000 And it was this transition in my life from me going forth on this great adventure to seeing this man that I loved.
01:33:41.000 And just darkness.
01:33:43.000 It was like his wife... 0.96
01:33:46.000 My grandmother was bedridden.
01:33:48.000 It was agony.
01:33:49.000 It was depression.
01:33:50.000 They lived in a very bad neighborhood.
01:33:52.000 They lived in North 9th Street in Newark, New Jersey.
01:33:57.000 When they moved there in the 1940s, it was an all-Italian neighborhood.
01:34:03.000 And then they started doing this thing called blockbusting.
01:34:06.000 And what blockbusting is, is real estate agents would come in and they would say, Black people are moving into your neighborhood.
01:34:12.000 You have to sell now.
01:34:13.000 If you don't sell now, you're going to lose the value of your home.
01:34:15.000 And it's the way they fired up the real estate market and they crushed communities this way.
01:34:20.000 Jesus.
01:34:21.000 And my grandfather was like, I like black people.
01:34:26.000 I'm not going anywhere.
01:34:27.000 And he never moved.
01:34:28.000 And he stayed there.
01:34:29.000 It changed from a black neighborhood to a primarily Hispanic neighborhood.
01:34:35.000 And when I was with him, when I stayed with him, just before, just before or after I got there, I can't really remember.
01:34:42.000 It was 30 years ago.
01:34:45.000 The kid next door was selling crack and police broke down the door.
01:34:50.000 He had an Audi.
01:34:51.000 I remember he had an Audi in the driveway. 1.00
01:34:52.000 I remember looking and I was like, this kid had a fucking Audi. 0.98
01:34:55.000 It was a nice car, you know, in 1990. It was just bad. 0.99
01:35:03.000 It was very depressing.
01:35:05.000 It was a depressing, depressing space.
01:35:08.000 The neighborhood was depressing.
01:35:09.000 His life was ending.
01:35:12.000 It was very, very sad.
01:35:16.000 And when I went to his funeral, when he was in the casket, I looked at him, and I'm sure you've been to a funeral before, and I know you've seen dead people before, but there's something about seeing a dead body where you're like, oh,
01:35:31.000 he's not there.
01:35:32.000 Yeah.
01:35:33.000 It's unmistakable.
01:35:35.000 He's not there.
01:35:36.000 It's not as simple as, you know, he stopped moving.
01:35:42.000 Right.
01:35:43.000 No, he's not there.
01:35:44.000 Yeah.
01:35:44.000 He wasn't there anymore.
01:35:46.000 Yeah.
01:35:47.000 And I remember...
01:35:51.000 I remember this feeling of like understanding came across me like oh Like the thing is inside of you.
01:35:59.000 Whatever that is is real It's not just as simple as you're alive, right and I at that moment I At that moment, seeing my grandfather in his casket, I started considering a soul.
01:36:11.000 I started thinking like, oh, this isn't bullshit.
01:36:13.000 And then I started thinking like how arrogant it is to assume that you know that all these people for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years have talked about souls. 0.94
01:36:23.000 It's a universal idea.
01:36:26.000 It's not common to one specific culture.
01:36:29.000 It's not isolated.
01:36:30.000 It's a universal concept.
01:36:32.000 Of there being something inside of you and I think it's an I think it's something that we intuitively understand that we know we We are aware of it.
01:36:40.000 We know it's real.
01:36:41.000 Yeah, we just can't put it on a scale We can't put a ruler on it and measure it.
01:36:47.000 We can't but there's it's a thing and I think that thing is It's intertwined with consciousness.
01:36:56.000 That's what I think.
01:36:57.000 This is just my own feeling I think your soul is Interacts with consciousness and consciousness is a force.
01:37:05.000 And I think we're all experiencing consciousness.
01:37:08.000 We're just doing it in this weird way.
01:37:10.000 We're doing it With different biological entities, different life experiences, different people and stimuli.
01:37:19.000 You're around different neighborhoods, different parts of the world.
01:37:22.000 But it's the same thing.
01:37:23.000 And the way I've described it is like, I think that you are me. 0.98
01:37:28.000 I know it sounds like it's like hippie nonsense horseshit. 0.93
01:37:31.000 But I think if you live my life, you would be me. 0.98
01:37:33.000 And if I lived your life, I would be you.
01:37:35.000 And I think we are all people.
01:37:36.000 I think all people are the same.
01:37:38.000 We are just living through different genetics, different biological experiences, different biological filters, different life experiences.
01:37:45.000 I think we're all the same.
01:37:47.000 I really do.
01:37:47.000 And I think that what your soul is, is your connection to consciousness.
01:37:53.000 I think your thing, the thing that you intersect with.
01:37:59.000 And I think whatever we are, there's like a place that that thing goes.
01:38:06.000 And I have a feeling that that's what these near-death experiences are, that's what a lot of psychedelic experiences are.
01:38:12.000 I think it's a looking into the other side.
01:38:16.000 I don't think all these cultures have had this same idea by accident.
01:38:22.000 Yeah, structurally, like at their core, they're all incredibly similar, and there's the realm of the dead, right?
01:38:28.000 And so I think there's also a very limited – there's a perspective of what God is, and there's a perspective of the universe itself.
01:38:37.000 Like, oh, who made the universe if God didn't make the universe?
01:38:40.000 Or who made God?
01:38:42.000 I think we are limited by our own biological perspective, which requires a birth and a death.
01:38:51.000 A beginning and an end.
01:38:52.000 And that it has to come from somewhere.
01:38:55.000 And I don't necessarily think that's real.
01:38:57.000 And I have a feeling that this concept of a God is even greater.
01:39:07.000 What it entails is even greater than an entity.
01:39:11.000 I think it's all things.
01:39:13.000 I think what God really is, is the universe.
01:39:16.000 I think it is all things.
01:39:19.000 Right.
01:39:19.000 Well, that's...
01:39:20.000 Biocentrism is sort of along those lines.
01:39:23.000 Yeah.
01:39:23.000 It's all one huge thing.
01:39:24.000 Yeah, I've come to this thought, like, in steps over time, where it makes more and more sense.
01:39:34.000 I'm not trying to comfort myself.
01:39:36.000 I'm not looking for some sort of rational...
01:39:40.000 That's not what I'm doing.
01:39:42.000 I'm just...
01:39:44.000 Feel like all these cultures have this idea for a reason, right? 0.98
01:39:49.000 I don't I don't think it's I think We're tuning into it in these little blips and we're bringing back evidence from the other side.
01:39:57.000 We're bringing back stories and anecdotes and feelings that you get Intuition, you know things that happen at certain times in your life where you just like okay, what is that?
01:40:09.000 What is that you're I think We all know also that if you have love in your life and you love your friends and you have good times, there's an elevated feeling that comes with that that's bigger than just fun.
01:40:25.000 There's a bond that we have because it's the moment in these great times of love where we recognize that we're one.
01:40:35.000 That's right.
01:40:36.000 You lose the shackles of your individuality.
01:40:38.000 You lose your ego.
01:40:39.000 You lose your biological limitations. 1.00
01:40:41.000 This chimp body and chimp mind that wants to keep you alive, that wants to make sure you spread your genes and control resources and do all the stupid things that humans do. 1.00
01:40:52.000 That thing confuses you that that's what life is. 1.00
01:40:55.000 Right, right.
01:40:58.000 There's a cemetery, a veteran's cemetery in the woods near in the town where my mom used to live.
01:41:03.000 My mom passed away, obviously.
01:41:04.000 And I'd go running there, and it's a beautiful little spot.
01:41:07.000 So I hid in the way, and there's a gravestone of a World War II vet who died later in life, right?
01:41:13.000 He lived a natural life and died in his 80s.
01:41:15.000 And it's a very simple gravestone.
01:41:17.000 I can't remember his name.
01:41:18.000 I wrote it down.
01:41:20.000 And all it says is, All that survives of us is love.
01:41:25.000 That's so beautiful.
01:41:26.000 Yeah.
01:41:27.000 Right?
01:41:27.000 And I think that's right.
01:41:29.000 And you don't need to be religious to think that way.
01:41:32.000 You don't have to.
01:41:32.000 You can be whatever.
01:41:33.000 It's just like such a profound truth.
01:41:35.000 Like that's all that survives.
01:41:36.000 Yeah.
01:41:37.000 And I think a lot of religions are simply people's It's an effort to try to consolidate all these thoughts and feelings into a doctrine.
01:41:47.000 Into something that you can tell people that you have the answer.
01:41:51.000 And whenever someone tells you they have the answer, well that's impossible.
01:41:55.000 That's impossible, so you don't have the answer.
01:41:57.000 But there might be wisdom in these ancient teachings that I think is real.
01:42:01.000 And I think that's really what fascinates me about religion.
01:42:05.000 It's ancient man's Attempts to understand and define this whole thing with this monkey mind that we have.
01:42:14.000 Right.
01:42:15.000 Right.
01:42:16.000 Sometimes people ask me, so how did this change you?
01:42:19.000 You know, did you find God?
01:42:20.000 You know, no, I didn't.
01:42:21.000 But, you know, it did change me.
01:42:22.000 And one of the ways it changed me in is that I realized, even if you're in good health, even if you're not in a war zone, blah, blah, blah, that we don't know, none of us know that this is not our last day.
01:42:35.000 Right.
01:42:36.000 None of us know.
01:42:37.000 I mean, probably not.
01:42:39.000 Hopefully not.
01:42:39.000 But we don't know for sure.
01:42:41.000 June 16, 2020 was an utterly ordinary day when I woke up that morning.
01:42:45.000 I had no idea I was really slated to die in 12 hours.
01:42:49.000 No clue.
01:42:50.000 And so if you somehow knew that you were going to die in 12 hours, somehow knew that, Who would you want to be that day?
01:42:59.000 I'm guessing you wouldn't be scrolling through Instagram.
01:43:02.000 I'm guessing you wouldn't be wasting your time hating on people that pissed you off.
01:43:07.000 I'm guessing you'd be just holding your loved ones close and just being amazed at how beautiful a tree is or I don't know what.
01:43:16.000 It's almost a religious vision of what existence is.
01:43:19.000 I think it would inspire that.
01:43:23.000 My question is, like, you don't know that today isn't your last day, so who do you want to be today?
01:43:28.000 Right?
01:43:29.000 Because you never know.
01:43:30.000 So who do you want to be in the world?
01:43:32.000 And hopefully, day after day, you're that person, and then you don't have to die at the end.
01:43:37.000 Like, what a beautiful way to live.
01:43:39.000 So it sort of changed me in that sense.
01:43:42.000 After I finished the book, I read a story about Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer, who suffered a mock execution When he was in his 20s.
01:43:54.000 I mean, what a sadistic thing to do to a young person or anybody, right?
01:43:57.000 So he was a radical, you know, like he and his sort of like radical friends would sit around talking about outrageous stuff like liberating the serfs and crazy ideas like that.
01:44:09.000 And this is in the 1840s.
01:44:11.000 And so Tsar Nicholas I, you know, didn't take that kind of thing kindly.
01:44:15.000 And the police arrested them all, like six of them.
01:44:19.000 Threw them in jail.
01:44:20.000 It wasn't a particularly serious crime, right?
01:44:22.000 But threw them in jail.
01:44:24.000 It's czarist Russia, right? 0.78
01:44:26.000 It's an oppressor state, right?
01:44:29.000 And after eight months, they finally released them.
01:44:31.000 And these young men assumed that they were going to be, like, put in a wagon and driven to the courthouse and discharged and returned to their families after eight horrible months, right?
01:44:39.000 Like, okay.
01:44:40.000 They're put in a wagon.
01:44:42.000 And they're driven to a city square, right?
01:44:45.000 They only had minutes to adjust to this.
01:44:48.000 Instead of being released, they were tied to posts, and a firing squad was lined up in front of them.
01:44:55.000 And the order was given to the soldiers, charge your rifles, ready, aim.
01:45:07.000 And at that moment, a rider galloped into the square and said the Tsar forgives them.
01:45:16.000 So the question, my question would be like, what does the world look like?
01:45:20.000 Like, how hallucinatory is it?
01:45:23.000 If you know that you're going to be dead in seconds, what does the world literally look like to you, to that perspective?
01:45:29.000 Because we're all Dostoevsky.
01:45:32.000 Right?
01:45:33.000 I mean, the command of fire isn't maybe in five seconds.
01:45:36.000 It might be in 50 years.
01:45:38.000 But we're all waiting for the—right?
01:45:41.000 We're all getting the command eventually.
01:45:42.000 So what does the world look like to someone where all of that—that whole lifetime is compressed into a few seconds?
01:45:48.000 What's the world look like?
01:45:50.000 We should understand that vision of the world and incorporate it to some degree into our experience of our hopefully 50, 80, 90 years of life, right?
01:45:59.000 So this intense little capsule of reality.
01:46:02.000 Like, what did he see in those moments?
01:46:06.000 Because he wrote about it.
01:46:07.000 Like, this is valuable information.
01:46:08.000 Like, what's the world look like?
01:46:10.000 What's it really look like when you're about to be torn from it, right?
01:46:15.000 And so he said he was standing there and he saw sunlight glinting off the steeple of a church.
01:46:22.000 And he had this amazing thought, which goes to your point, right?
01:46:27.000 This amazing thought.
01:46:28.000 He said, in moments, I'm going to join the sunlight.
01:46:31.000 I'm going to be part of all things.
01:46:34.000 We're all part of all things.
01:46:36.000 And in minutes, that's what I'll be.
01:46:40.000 And then he said, in his mind, he thought, if I should, by some miracle, survive this.
01:46:47.000 I'm going to live my life turning every moment into an infinity.
01:46:52.000 Wow.
01:46:53.000 Mind-blowing, right?
01:46:55.000 So two of the six men in that group, it broke them.
01:46:59.000 They were insane for the rest of their lives.
01:47:03.000 Dostoevsky, he survived it psychologically and it deepened him enormously.
01:47:07.000 And he wrote through other characters, he wrote about that experience.
01:47:11.000 Yeah, if you have knowledge of your death, I used to do this bit about...
01:47:17.000 There was a tiger attack in San Francisco.
01:47:22.000 I guess it was the early 2000s or something like that.
01:47:26.000 These kids were throwing pine cones at a tiger in an enclosure in the zoo.
01:47:34.000 And they didn't know that the tiger...
01:47:37.000 When they built the zoo, they made the fence 14 feet high.
01:47:42.000 They thought that was enough.
01:47:43.000 Oh, no.
01:47:44.000 It's not enough.
01:47:44.000 I know what's coming.
01:47:46.000 The joke was if you have a monster in a box in the middle of the city, maybe you should put a fucking roof on the box. 0.99
01:47:52.000 How expensive is it to put a cage on the top? 0.99
01:47:55.000 Well, these kids are throwing things at the tiger.
01:47:58.000 The tiger leaps. 1.00
01:48:00.000 Holy shit. 0.99
01:48:00.000 Leaps up, gets a hold of the top of the fence, and the thought was like, if you're that kid and you see those paws hit that fence and you see that thing like flying through the air coming right at you, do you even see it? 0.99
01:48:14.000 Or is it just like this kaleidoscope of psychedelic images?
01:48:19.000 Right.
01:48:20.000 You know it's over.
01:48:21.000 You're looking at the most beautiful death that's currently available. 0.94
01:48:26.000 It's the most beautiful animal that can kill you. 0.82
01:48:29.000 A tiger.
01:48:30.000 I mean, they're gorgeous.
01:48:32.000 And they're also terrifying at the same time.
01:48:35.000 And it's running at you like a psychedelic experience.
01:48:40.000 They died.
01:48:41.000 Yeah, one guy lived, I think.
01:48:43.000 I think one guy lived.
01:48:45.000 I think, unfortunately, the kid is throwing the pine cones lived.
01:48:48.000 I don't remember.
01:48:49.000 I don't really remember the whole story.
01:48:50.000 One died, two survived.
01:48:52.000 Yeah, okay, two survived.
01:48:53.000 And they had to kill the tiger.
01:48:55.000 Of course.
01:48:56.000 They always have to kill the tiger because they went tiger.
01:48:58.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:48:59.000 I mean, look, I fucking hate zoos. 1.00
01:49:02.000 I mean, I used to take my kids to them because my kids loved them, but they're fucking prisons. 1.00
01:49:07.000 They're prisons for animals that didn't do anything wrong. 0.99
01:49:09.000 And last time we went, we were in, I think it was in Denver.
01:49:15.000 And we were turning towards this primate section where they have all these monkeys in these cages.
01:49:21.000 And this monkey's wailing, just screaming in agony, just like a crazy person locked up in a cage. 1.00
01:49:33.000 I'm like, that poor motherfucker. 1.00
01:49:35.000 Like, what are they doing to him? 1.00
01:49:37.000 Just so people could stare at it and go, oh, there it is.
01:49:40.000 Oh, there it is.
01:49:42.000 Yeah, it's awful.
01:49:43.000 Tigers are nature's balancing system.
01:49:47.000 You can't have too many deer, so you have to have tigers.
01:49:52.000 Axis deer are the kind of deer that live around tigers.
01:49:55.000 I don't know if you've ever seen an Axis deer.
01:49:56.000 They're beautiful.
01:49:57.000 They have white spots all over their body, and they move like bullets.
01:50:01.000 You've never seen an animal move that fast. 0.99
01:50:04.000 Axis deer, they just fucking go because they're just always looking out for tigers. 0.99
01:50:09.000 So this animal is primed by nature to be chasing things and killing things. 0.99
01:50:16.000 That is literally its biological reward system.
01:50:19.000 That's what it's here for. 1.00
01:50:20.000 That's why it's 600 pounds of fucking tissue and talons. 0.99
01:50:26.000 And what do we do? 1.00
01:50:27.000 We give it cold meat.
01:50:29.000 They push out on a platter and it just eats the meat.
01:50:32.000 It doesn't get to kill anything. 0.93
01:50:34.000 And then things stare at it and look at it in the eyes, which is fucking insane that you ever look a tiger in the eye. 0.98
01:50:42.000 In the wild, you would be fucking frozen in fear. 0.87
01:50:46.000 And this thing has to endure other puny little things throwing stuff at it over this fence. 0.99
01:50:56.000 In this universal karmic moment, it realizes that it can get them.
01:51:02.000 There's an amazing poem by Ted Hughes called Wolf Watching.
01:51:08.000 Wolves are, of course, equivalent to tigers, right?
01:51:10.000 The canine equivalent to tigers.
01:51:12.000 And he goes to the zoo and looks at the wolf.
01:51:15.000 And the poem, Wolf Watching, it's worth looking up.
01:51:18.000 It's just one of the most extraordinary poems about exactly what you're talking about.
01:51:23.000 And the look in the wolf's eye and what he knows you're doing to him.
01:51:27.000 Yeah.
01:51:28.000 And he's superior to you.
01:51:29.000 And he knows...
01:51:30.000 It's an unbelievable poem.
01:51:32.000 Ted Hughes, Wolf Watching.
01:51:34.000 You gotta...
01:51:34.000 I mean, seriously, like, look it up.
01:51:41.000 Yeah.
01:51:41.000 Yeah, we're bizarre.
01:51:43.000 We're bizarre with this whole fucking zoo thing. 0.99
01:51:46.000 The zoo thing's very weird. 0.99
01:51:48.000 It's like, on one hand, it helps preserve diminishing populations of some animals.
01:51:54.000 Right.
01:51:55.000 You know, and they do do that. 0.99
01:51:56.000 But on the other hand, like, why do you have a polar bear in a fucking swimming pool in the middle? 0.99
01:52:02.000 Right. 0.99
01:52:02.000 What are you doing? 0.99
01:52:04.000 Yeah.
01:52:06.000 They go crazy.
01:52:07.000 They just go in circles.
01:52:08.000 Yeah, of course.
01:52:08.000 You ever see bears in an enclosure where they just wander around in circles?
01:52:11.000 Look, people go crazy, too.
01:52:12.000 A solitary confinement?
01:52:13.000 Uh-huh, uh-huh.
01:52:13.000 I mean, people can't take it more—you know, like, it drives—it breaks their brain.
01:52:18.000 Yeah.
01:52:19.000 Yeah.
01:52:20.000 Yeah.
01:52:24.000 You keep saying, like, the word, like, I'm an atheist, do I believe in God.
01:52:30.000 Why even have a belief?
01:52:35.000 I mean, I don't.
01:52:36.000 I don't have any belief.
01:52:37.000 You don't have anything anymore.
01:52:38.000 But you still consider yourself an atheist?
01:52:40.000 An atheist is someone who doesn't believe in a god. 0.77
01:52:43.000 Right.
01:52:44.000 I don't have that belief.
01:52:46.000 So you don't believe or not believe?
01:52:51.000 I mean, not believing isn't an active...
01:52:53.000 Right.
01:52:54.000 I mean...
01:52:55.000 Well, you don't know, right?
01:52:56.000 This is why the atheism thing usually kind of drives me nuts with people.
01:53:01.000 Like, when people say, there is no god, I'm like...
01:53:04.000 Well, that's not atheism, right?
01:53:05.000 Atheism is that I don't believe in God.
01:53:07.000 It's not claiming to be able to prove there isn't God.
01:53:10.000 Right.
01:53:10.000 There's a little more arrogance to there is no God rather than I don't believe in a God.
01:53:15.000 And you can't make yourself believe in something.
01:53:17.000 Right.
01:53:17.000 Right?
01:53:18.000 So if you want to tell me that gravity doesn't exist, I can't make myself believe that.
01:53:23.000 Right?
01:53:23.000 And I can't make myself believe God exists.
01:53:27.000 Contrary, you know, despite the complete lack of evidence that he does, or she does, whatever, like, I can't force that belief in myself, even if I wanted to.
01:53:39.000 But I would never ever say, oh, there is no God.
01:53:42.000 I would never assert that, right?
01:53:44.000 And I wouldn't even say I'm agnostic.
01:53:47.000 Like, I don't know one way or the other.
01:53:49.000 I wouldn't even say that.
01:53:50.000 I would say, I don't believe in God.
01:53:52.000 I don't run my life according to a belief in God.
01:53:57.000 Jordan Peterson says, whether or not you believe in God, if you live your life as if God is real, you'll live a better life.
01:54:05.000 I'm paraphrasing, but that's essentially what he's saying.
01:54:09.000 Well, he's exhorting people towards moral behavior, which is totally fine, but you don't need God to be—look— You don't need God.
01:54:16.000 Some people might, and some people need laws to not rob banks.
01:54:20.000 I think the concept of it, that we're all connected in some way that's greater than just this life experience, is what—that's the foundation of this understanding of it.
01:54:33.000 Well, so then what I would say is because as soon as you say God, it presents some logical problems.
01:54:39.000 I would say live your life as if you believe in a universal unity, a colossal unity of all things.
01:54:49.000 I think the word God is the problem.
01:54:51.000 It's just been kind of co-opted. 0.99
01:54:54.000 And it gets co-opted by visuals of like a person, you know, a patriarchal leader who's in the sky with a fucking book of all the shit you did wrong. 1.00
01:55:05.000 Right. 0.99
01:55:05.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:55:06.000 Right.
01:55:06.000 And that's a silly – I mean I was – so a guy raised his hand at one talk and he was quite incensed and that I was – still said I was an atheist, right?
01:55:16.000 Yeah. 0.80
01:55:17.000 And he said, you know, you were—he came right at me, right?
01:55:20.000 And, you know, atheists don't—I mean, I don't care if someone's a believer. 0.97
01:55:24.000 Like, why would I care in what you believe?
01:55:26.000 But often believers are quite upset that you're an atheist, which is this bizarre quirk of the psychology that I don't understand.
01:55:34.000 But at any rate, he raised his hand and he said, you know, you're only alive because of God's grace.
01:55:40.000 And you have to be thankful.
01:55:43.000 You have to find Jesus, and you have to be thankful to God for saving you because it was only His grace that saved you.
01:55:50.000 And I said, you know what?
01:55:53.000 I flatlined, right?
01:55:54.000 I did like what I do with upset people.
01:55:56.000 Like, I didn't get emotional.
01:55:57.000 I went to zero.
01:55:58.000 You know, zero Kelvin.
01:55:58.000 I said, you know what?
01:56:00.000 My problem with that is why me?
01:56:04.000 Like, why me and not Tim?
01:56:06.000 Tim Hetherington was my buddy out at Restrepo, the guy I made the movie Restrepo with, who was killed in combat in Libya.
01:56:12.000 He died like I did.
01:56:13.000 He bled out, except he bled out not from an aneurysm, but from a shrapnel wound in his groin, right?
01:56:18.000 So why me and not Tim, right?
01:56:21.000 And for that matter, why me and not a nine-year-old with cancer?
01:56:26.000 So what you're saying is, unless you can answer that question, which I don't think you can, what you're saying is that there's actually a kind of random lottery for God's grace.
01:56:36.000 And if that's the way he runs things, I don't want anything to do with him because that's cruel, right?
01:56:41.000 And so that's my quibble with the word God.
01:56:46.000 But universal unity, you know, I'm good, right?
01:56:50.000 If it's good for Schrodinger, it's good for me, you know, whatever.
01:56:53.000 And so, you know, I would...
01:56:59.000 I don't know.
01:57:00.000 The violence of the emotions around all this is puzzling to me.
01:57:05.000 I don't understand why people get so heated about what someone else believes.
01:57:09.000 Well, people get heated about everything.
01:57:13.000 I've had conversations with people that are just Democrats.
01:57:17.000 To the end.
01:57:19.000 That's my team.
01:57:20.000 I'm with the Raiders.
01:57:21.000 And that's just how it is with everything.
01:57:23.000 And people are that way with religion.
01:57:25.000 They're that way with the state they live in, the football team they support.
01:57:28.000 They're that way with everything.
01:57:30.000 That's just humans. 1.00
01:57:31.000 It's just some primate shit. 0.99
01:57:33.000 And I think the real discussion is in how do you feel, why do you feel the way you feel, and what do you think, and what do you know that has sort of educated these thoughts. 0.99
01:57:44.000 And, you know, if you believe that human beings are inherently bad and that only a fear of hell and, frankly, not a love of God, a fear of God will make you act well.
01:57:55.000 If you really think that's what humans are, then sort of religion makes sense.
01:58:00.000 So for me, for example, and I'm assuming for you and most people that I think we probably know, like, I don't murder people and rob banks and things like that because I'm afraid of going to jail.
01:58:14.000 I refrain from doing those things because I don't want to be someone who does those things. 0.89
01:58:18.000 I have my own inner morality about what it means to be a good person, to not be a freaking psychopath.
01:58:27.000 I mean, I don't want to go to jail either, but you don't need the laws.
01:58:31.000 You don't need the courts to make me act well in that sense. 0.99
01:58:35.000 So if you need God in order to not rob banks and kill people and rape people, bro, you got a freaking problem. 0.99
01:58:43.000 Right. 0.99
01:58:43.000 Right? 0.99
01:58:43.000 You're still a problem even if you don't do those things because you're scared of God. 0.99
01:58:47.000 You're still not a person that I trust.
01:58:50.000 Yeah.
01:58:51.000 No, I share that perspective.
01:58:54.000 I think what this whole thing is for a lot of people, and one of the problems with religion and true believers is Boy, folks, there's a lot of different versions of that story.
01:59:07.000 And you've got to make sure you're betting on the right one because there's a billion people that don't think you are.
01:59:12.000 And you think you're smarter than them?
01:59:15.000 I think it's people trying to get a map of what this is all about.
01:59:19.000 And I think it's been that way forever.
01:59:22.000 I think people have always tried to figure it out and they have little bits and pieces and we're putting it together and Unfortunately, we also like to Look at these things as if they're like this doctrine is 100% factual I've seen Muslims do it. 1.00
01:59:41.000 I've seen Christians do it. 0.98
01:59:42.000 I've seen Jews do it people have this This belief that their way is the way, it's the only way, everyone else is the other, which seems contrary to the Word of God, the real thought, the concept of this interconnected thing that we're experiencing. 0.99
02:00:01.000 I think it's all way weirder.
02:00:04.000 I think everyone's scared to die, but no one's scared to sleep.
02:00:10.000 Because you know you're going to come back.
02:00:11.000 But you do it every night.
02:00:13.000 Every night you go to some crazy place.
02:00:16.000 You shut off and you return and you assume because you have memory.
02:00:24.000 And because you have an understanding of the environment and you have a task that you have to do, oh, gotta be at work by nine.
02:00:29.000 You have all this stuff in your head.
02:00:31.000 You're assuming, just assuming that as you woke up today, that this is your life at 56 years old, continuing along the same path.
02:00:42.000 But it might not be.
02:00:43.000 It's just guessing.
02:00:45.000 We're just, we are, we're, we're a...
02:00:48.000 Our eyes closed and we're feeling through the darkness.
02:00:52.000 And we don't know.
02:00:54.000 And we give ourselves...
02:00:57.000 These rules and we give ourselves these stories, we give ourselves these religious practices to put structure into this thing and to put certainty into this thing that is absolutely uncertain.
02:01:10.000 And we get angry if someone questions our certainty because our certainty defines our ability to exist in this experience.
02:01:20.000 In a way that keeps us sane.
02:01:23.000 Like, God has a will.
02:01:24.000 God has a plan.
02:01:25.000 This is all...
02:01:26.000 I think it's way weirder.
02:01:29.000 I think it's way weirder.
02:01:30.000 And I think that's what you experience when your dad came to you.
02:01:33.000 And that's what you experience when you look down at the pit.
02:01:36.000 I think the whole thing is way weirder.
02:01:38.000 I don't think it's this...
02:01:41.000 As simple as why would God take a child and give a...
02:01:44.000 I mean, I think the whole thing is an uber-complex interaction of emotions and experiences that we're all going through simultaneously.
02:01:54.000 And I have a feeling that part of the thing that moves us forward, unfortunately, Is negativity and the positivity battling against that negativity.
02:02:06.000 It strengthens the positivity because of the resistance.
02:02:09.000 I think like the evil of the world is almost like an important factor in the whole equation of our existence.
02:02:19.000 Yeah, and I think humans have always struggled with it, and they've come up with theories that sort of, like, help them get by, and some of them even support human dignity, some don't, and here we are with the great, you know, still surrounded by the great mystery.
02:02:34.000 The great mystery.
02:02:35.000 And you know what?
02:02:36.000 Like, let's hear it for the great mystery.
02:02:38.000 Yeah.
02:02:39.000 Like, if you think about it, this thought came to me the other day, like, we're in a kind of sweet spot, so if you sort of knew for sure If the scientists could prove, if the nerds could prove that there was an afterlife, and what you got to do was just more of the same except it's a lot more pleasant for eternity,
02:03:00.000 if we could prove that, it would strip the value out of these precious decades that we are allotted.
02:03:06.000 One of the reasons that life is so precious is because it's so finite.
02:03:11.000 So if you could prove there was an afterlife, don't worry about it.
02:03:15.000 Your wife dumped you and blah, blah, blah.
02:03:20.000 But don't worry about it because soon the afterlife is going to start and then you're good forever.
02:03:24.000 So just don't sweat it. 0.98
02:03:25.000 In fact, why don't you just kill yourself right now and just get on to it because that's when the good part starts. 1.00
02:03:31.000 It would ruin what life is. 1.00
02:03:32.000 It would just strip it of value.
02:03:34.000 On the other hand, like the two other guys in Dostoevsky's group of friends, if we could prove, like literally prove scientifically that there is no afterlife, and you can't prove a negative,
02:03:49.000 but somehow if we could prove there was no afterlife whatsoever, we're biological beings, when we die, that's it, we rot, we return to the soil, that's it, done.
02:04:00.000 If we could prove that, that might be so psychologically devastating that it would be actually quite hard to lead a meaningful life because in your mind you're thinking, well, what's the friggin' point?
02:04:10.000 So where we're at right now, there's the perfect level of ambiguity.
02:04:16.000 That there's not such a proof of afterlife that, you know, why bother leading our lives?
02:04:22.000 But there's also not such a doubt about it that it's psychologically devastating.
02:04:29.000 We're in this sweet spot which allows us to sort of invest maximum meaning in the least amount of psychological distress in these decades that were allotted.
02:04:39.000 So in a weird way, where we're at right now is to sort of tune perfectly to the human brain for giving the maximum amount of meaning to this time that we have here on Earth.
02:04:49.000 And if you go in the extreme of either direction, of absolute certainty that there is an afterlife or is no afterlife, if you go to that extreme, it actually just robs us of what we do know for sure that we have, which is this life right now.
02:05:04.000 Right.
02:05:05.000 And that's part of the magic of it, right?
02:05:08.000 The magic of it is the uncertainty, the temporary nature of it, the finite nature of existence, all of it.
02:05:16.000 Yeah.
02:05:16.000 And the reason, you know, Karl Marx hated religion is because basically the peasant class had been told, listen, don't worry about it.
02:05:24.000 Your lot sucks. 0.99
02:05:26.000 Right? 1.00
02:05:26.000 The serfs. 1.00
02:05:26.000 Like, your lot sucks. 1.00
02:05:27.000 You're oppressed. 1.00
02:05:28.000 You're poor.
02:05:28.000 Blah, blah, blah.
02:05:29.000 But don't worry about it because there's an afterlife.
02:05:32.000 And Marx was like, there'll never be revolution as long as people think that once they die, everything gets nice.
02:05:37.000 Right.
02:05:38.000 Right?
02:05:38.000 Right.
02:05:39.000 And so that's why Marx hated religion.
02:05:42.000 And it's a totally legitimate point.
02:05:45.000 Yeah.
02:05:46.000 It's a legitimate point, but you think, you know, even that is like...
02:05:51.000 There's too much we don't know.
02:05:53.000 And it's too hard to not know things.
02:05:56.000 So we pretend.
02:05:58.000 Right.
02:05:58.000 And the version of religion that he was rebelling against is like, look, the meek shall inherit the earth.
02:06:02.000 Right.
02:06:03.000 Right?
02:06:03.000 You're crushed under the boot heel of Tsar's – the Tsar's boot heel here in life.
02:06:09.000 But, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth. 1.00
02:06:10.000 So just wait a little while and then it's all going to come to you.
02:06:13.000 Like that's why – you know, Marx wasn't objecting to a sort of like transcendent not knowing, a transcendent mystery.
02:06:20.000 He was objecting to a completely calculated and manipulative like – Social program that kept people oppressed.
02:06:31.000 Which is oftentimes what religion becomes, particularly when people have groups of people that they control.
02:06:36.000 Genghis Khan famously let people practice any religion they wanted.
02:06:40.000 People are like, oh, he's so open-minded.
02:06:42.000 No, that's not what it was.
02:06:44.000 He wanted order.
02:06:45.000 And he's like, yeah, believe that.
02:06:47.000 Go believe that.
02:06:48.000 Yeah, that's right.
02:06:49.000 That's right.
02:06:50.000 He also apparently just screwed his way across Asia because I think it's 11% of the population in the areas that he conquered are directly descended from him, his DNA. Yeah.
02:07:01.000 11%.
02:07:01.000 He killed 10% of the population of the planet.
02:07:04.000 And replace them with...
02:07:05.000 Well, he did.
02:07:07.000 In his lifetime, because of his actions, somewhere between 50 and 70 million people died.
02:07:13.000 It's so many that you can see when they do core samples of the earth, a difference in the carbon footprint of human beings.
02:07:21.000 Wow.
02:07:22.000 Yeah.
02:07:22.000 The areas that they devastated reforested to the point where there's a difference in the level of carbon.
02:07:30.000 Wow, that's amazing.
02:07:32.000 Yeah.
02:07:32.000 That's how many people they killed.
02:07:34.000 There's a famous story.
02:07:35.000 Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is this amazing podcast.
02:07:39.000 And he has this series called The Wrath of the Khan.
02:07:43.000 In one of the stories, they talk about the Charisman Shah who goes to visit Jin, China.
02:07:50.000 And they think what they see in the distance is a snow-covered peak.
02:07:55.000 And as they get closer, they realize that it's a mountain of bones.
02:08:00.000 They had killed over a million people in the city and piled them up on top of each other.
02:08:06.000 And they had to abandon their...
02:08:08.000 They were pulling wagons.
02:08:10.000 They had to abandon the roads because the roads were so mucked up with decaying humans that the roads had become muddy.
02:08:19.000 You couldn't traverse them.
02:08:20.000 Because so many people had rotted and decayed in the roads that it became mud.
02:08:26.000 That's insane.
02:08:28.000 But he was really open-minded when he came to religion.
02:08:29.000 Yeah.
02:08:30.000 And he opened up Trade to the East.
02:08:32.000 He had a lot of wives.
02:08:34.000 Yeah.
02:08:34.000 Well, I don't think they were wives.
02:08:36.000 They weren't wives. 1.00
02:08:37.000 Yeah, he did a lot of raping. 0.99
02:08:38.000 A lot of murdering and horrible, torturous murdering. 0.99
02:08:42.000 And the stories, it's just what we know.
02:08:46.000 Just about the way they hid his burial site.
02:08:51.000 Do you know that story? 1.00
02:08:52.000 They fucking killed everybody. 1.00
02:08:55.000 Everybody who went and buried him, everybody who killed the people who buried them, they killed them. 1.00
02:09:00.000 They killed thousands of people just to protect the location of his grave and to this day nobody knows where it is.
02:09:07.000 That's right.
02:09:08.000 Wild.
02:09:10.000 Yeah.
02:09:10.000 There's an amazing book by, is it Jack Weatherford, I think his name is, about Genghis Khan, like the classic book.
02:09:16.000 It's an amazing book, worth reading, Jack Weatherford.
02:09:18.000 Yeah. 0.92
02:09:19.000 I mean, what a, it just, what a fucking bizarre moment in history where this one genius is like really the best at killing people and taking over countries. 0.98
02:09:33.000 And he does it at a scale. 0.98
02:09:35.000 And then it goes away, which is a real lesson for America. 0.98
02:09:38.000 Because the Mongols ran everything for a long fucking time, for hundreds of years, and then they didn't. 1.00
02:09:47.000 Because of infighting. 0.99
02:09:48.000 Yeah.
02:09:49.000 Infighting.
02:09:49.000 They weren't defeated from the outside.
02:09:51.000 It was infighting.
02:09:52.000 Well, also, Genghis Khan was dead.
02:09:54.000 And the genius behind the whole operation, you know, he had a particular...
02:10:00.000 He had a tactical war mind that was just different than everybody else's.
02:10:05.000 He was a genius.
02:10:06.000 Absolutely. 0.99
02:10:06.000 He was just a genius applied to killing people. 0.99
02:10:09.000 And that was gone once his children took over and how it always works. 0.95
02:10:15.000 Yeah, that's right.
02:10:17.000 But that's us, folks.
02:10:19.000 When I talk to left-wing people about aggression and how it's...
02:10:29.000 I was maladaptive with the anthropological term.
02:10:32.000 It produces bad outcomes, right?
02:10:35.000 And I'm like, look, arguably the most aggressive man on the planet in history was Genghis Khan.
02:10:42.000 And he left the largest genetic footprint on the human genome, on the human race.
02:10:49.000 Of any individual ever, right?
02:10:52.000 So aggression at that level, in Darwinian terms, right, is absolutely rewarded.
02:11:00.000 The shy guy that was writing poetry had one kid, right?
02:11:04.000 Genghis Khan, 11% of the population of the area that he conquered is descended directly from him.
02:11:11.000 He's their daddy.
02:11:12.000 That was because of his aggression, right?
02:11:15.000 So you have to understand that in evolutionary terms, aggression is richly rewarded.
02:11:20.000 So the trick for human culture is to blunt that with some cultural values that bring people back into a place of peace and dignity and cooperation and blah, blah, blah, right?
02:11:33.000 But just don't tell me that aggression is counterproductive, right?
02:11:36.000 That's complete nonsense.
02:11:39.000 Well, it's just, it's a utopian perspective.
02:11:43.000 You know, aggression's bad.
02:11:45.000 Toxic male energy's bad. 1.00
02:11:47.000 Yeah, until someone's invading your fucking country. 1.00
02:11:49.000 And yeah, those are toxic males. 1.00
02:11:51.000 Yeah, I get it.
02:11:52.000 But guess what?
02:11:53.000 You need some on your side, too.
02:11:54.000 And that's the only way we survive.
02:11:56.000 It's the only way we made it to 2024. I mean, listen, chimpanzees do the same thing.
02:12:01.000 Males will invade a rival territory and kill off individual males by ganging up on them. 0.99
02:12:07.000 This isn't a fair fight, right? 0.98
02:12:08.000 This is 10 to 1. Beat the rival males to death from the rival troop. 0.97
02:12:15.000 Beat them to death. 0.99
02:12:16.000 And when they're shrieking in terror, their buddies in the rival troop don't rush to their aid like humans would. 0.93
02:12:25.000 They run away.
02:12:26.000 That's the difference between chimpanzees and humans.
02:12:31.000 What's called the male coalition exists in chimpanzee society, but they don't run to the aid of their brothers when the chips are down.
02:12:41.000 They save themselves individually.
02:12:43.000 Humans don't do that.
02:12:44.000 We will rush to help.
02:12:45.000 We will rush to help a brother who's in danger, as it were.
02:12:49.000 Even at risk to our own lives, it's one of the few unique traits that humans have that other mammals don't.
02:12:57.000 Which is probably how we made it.
02:12:59.000 Yeah, exactly.
02:13:00.000 No, because we're better off in a group, even a group in a desperate situation.
02:13:04.000 But chimpanzees, the rival troop that's getting beaten to death one by one, eventually they're wiped out because they don't form a coalition to defend, only to attack.
02:13:15.000 They'll form a coalition to attack, but not to defend, right?
02:13:20.000 So what happens is the more aggressive troop of chimpanzees Wipes out the males of the rival troop one by one because the rivals won't form a coalition to defend.
02:13:33.000 And then they take over the territory, all the food resources of that territory, and the females. 0.99
02:13:41.000 And now the aggressive troop of chimpanzees is now bigger and stronger, and those genes will be passed on at a higher rate than the genes of the poor bastards who got beaten to death one by one. 0.99
02:13:53.000 Right. 0.97
02:13:54.000 That's how Darwinism works and that's why aggression exists in the world.
02:13:58.000 There's a genetic reward for it.
02:14:00.000 And that's why we're here.
02:14:02.000 And that's why we're here.
02:14:03.000 And this is all God's plan.
02:14:06.000 That's right.
02:14:06.000 It's all God's plan.
02:14:07.000 And human culture came up with this extraordinary thing.
02:14:11.000 It's like, you know what, guys?
02:14:12.000 We're all one thing.
02:14:13.000 We're this tribe.
02:14:14.000 We're that tribe. 0.99
02:14:15.000 We have to fight to the last man to defend each other and defend our families, blah, blah, blah, because otherwise we're not going to make it because the fucking Vikings are coming over the ridge, right? 0.99
02:14:23.000 So who's with me? 0.98
02:14:25.000 You know, Braveheart.
02:14:26.000 You know, whatever.
02:14:27.000 I mean, there's endless stories about that kind of heroism.
02:14:29.000 Like, we're all together.
02:14:30.000 We'll die together if we have to, but we are all together, right?
02:14:33.000 And that's a uniquely human trait.
02:14:36.000 Yeah, it certainly is.
02:14:38.000 And the problem is when you have a utopian perspective and you want everyone...
02:14:45.000 Like, I'm not dangerous.
02:14:47.000 I want the world to not be dangerous.
02:14:49.000 The problem is the world is dangerous and it's genetically dangerous.
02:14:52.000 It's like it's always been dangerous.
02:14:54.000 It's just this is what it is.
02:14:55.000 And I think we're in this...
02:14:58.000 It's an enormous process.
02:15:00.000 It's certainly much better to live today, at least it is here, than it would be during the time of Dostoevsky.
02:15:07.000 If you live back then, you have less information, it's more dangerous, people have more control of people, they're crueler, it's more common.
02:15:17.000 Things get better over time, but it's a slow, slow process.
02:15:22.000 Yeah, that's right.
02:15:24.000 And we're in the middle of it.
02:15:25.000 That's right. 1.00
02:15:25.000 And, you know, we look back and we say, oh, those fools. 1.00
02:15:30.000 But in the future, they're going to look back at us and say the same goddamn thing. 1.00
02:15:33.000 The same way we look at Genghis Khan, they're going to look at us like, what the fuck did they do in Ukraine? 1.00
02:15:38.000 What the fuck did Israel do in Gaza? 1.00
02:15:40.000 What the fuck is going on in Sudan? 1.00
02:15:42.000 What the fuck is going on in wherever? 1.00
02:15:45.000 Fill in the blank. 0.99
02:15:46.000 Anywhere in the world.
02:15:47.000 Yeah, that's right.
02:15:48.000 And, you know, there is some hope that sort of global alliances blunt some of this stuff.
02:15:53.000 Like, so there is some – there is a sort of cultural evolution from the sort of like – The ancestral origins of the species.
02:16:06.000 And so alliances do often stabilize things, which is great.
02:16:13.000 I mean, that's a good thing.
02:16:14.000 But again, alliances can also precipitate conflict, so whatever.
02:16:18.000 Yeah.
02:16:19.000 Yeah, it's a complex mixture of things happening.
02:16:23.000 And I think, again, not to get too like woo-woo spiritual, but I think that's a part of our journey.
02:16:30.000 A part of our journey is navigating the good and evil.
02:16:34.000 Right.
02:16:35.000 That's right.
02:16:35.000 These are real forces.
02:16:36.000 That's right.
02:16:37.000 Yeah. 0.86
02:16:39.000 I will be killed, publicly executed, like Dostoevsky almost was, by my publisher if I don't say the name of my book. 0.56
02:16:47.000 I know you don't want that to happen. 0.88
02:16:49.000 Let's say it now.
02:16:49.000 I definitely don't want you to get killed, especially after what you've been through.
02:16:52.000 In my time of dying, how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife.
02:16:57.000 All right, man.
02:16:58.000 Well, listen, brother, it's always great to see you.
02:17:00.000 I'm glad you're alive.
02:17:02.000 Thank you.
02:17:02.000 I really enjoy these conversations we've had.
02:17:05.000 Me too, man.
02:17:05.000 Me too.
02:17:06.000 They're really wonderful.
02:17:07.000 Thanks for having me on and having such a great long talk about all this stuff.
02:17:11.000 My pleasure.
02:17:11.000 Did you read the audiobook?
02:17:13.000 I did.
02:17:13.000 Yes.
02:17:14.000 Good.
02:17:14.000 Beautiful.
02:17:15.000 So you've got to listen to it on the treadmill.
02:17:16.000 Yes, I will do that.
02:17:17.000 Thank you very much, man.
02:17:18.000 Thanks for being here.
02:17:19.000 I appreciate you.
02:17:20.000 My pleasure.
02:17:20.000 All right.
02:17:21.000 Bye, everybody.