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?
00:01:14.000And 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.
00:01:21.000So I was like, well, that's the end of an era.
00:05:03.000I mean, I got to get you into a jiu-jitsu gym early.
00:05:06.000You got to start doing challenging things early.
00:05:09.000And 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.
00:05:21.000So you have to mitigate that in advance and tell them that you're there for them.
00:06:26.000I 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.
00:06:43.000But you've got to meet the right person, right?
00:06:44.000I mean, if you're not with the right person, I imagine being on top of that.
00:09:05.000This is in like the early 90s, late 80s, something like that.
00:09:09.000And 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.
00:09:18.000And it took him some steps to realize that she had stopped and he had kept going.
00:09:22.000And he looked at her and he looked down the street.
00:09:54.000He 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.
00:11:51.000And, you know, having a relationship with someone who's bipolar is almost impossible, no matter how much you love them.
00:11:56.000Like, it really presents a complicated challenge.
00:11:59.000And 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?
00:13:59.000The 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.
00:14:10.000And they have to try to, like, make a map of the territory.
00:14:14.000But no one knows how you think about things other than you.
00:14:52.000Well, 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.
00:15:01.000You 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.
00:15:16.000With your mind, you know, like, if someone says they're depressed, like, okay.
00:15:24.000There'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.
00:15:30.000And 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.
00:17:36.000Like, 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.
00:17:45.000This motherfucker destroyed with four different hours.
00:18:30.000But 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.
00:19:30.000The conventional understanding is that he was dishonored by Agamemnon in some way that I can't remember.
00:19:36.000And 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.
00:19:43.000He had PTSD, right, in sort of contemporary terms.
00:19:48.000And 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?
00:19:53.000I 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.
00:20:08.000And he drew his sword and he killed them all.
00:20:11.000And then he realized he had killed a herd of sheep.
00:20:41.000And if I think a herd of sheep are enemy warriors, like, I am not safe for my loved ones to be around.
00:20:47.000And he said to his half-brother, please take care of my family.
00:20:51.000And 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.
00:21:25.000People getting beheaded and gutted, you know, and then you're off at war.
00:21:29.000Yeah, 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?
00:21:37.000I mean, you're coming back with, you know, people's blood on your—I mean, covered in other men's blood, right?
00:21:43.000I mean, the Iliad is— It's like a medical textbook.
00:21:46.000It'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.
00:21:59.000If 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.
00:22:22.000Like, 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.
00:22:30.000Like, I mean, they were used to that, you know, with animals, with hunting, they were used to blood and guts, literally blood and guts.
00:22:41.000Warfare 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.
00:22:53.000The psychic distance that that person has to travel is quite far.
00:23:05.000I think you get accustomed to what's normal, right?
00:23:10.000But 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.
00:24:09.000You 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?
00:24:21.000And, 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.
00:24:30.000Trevor 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.
00:24:37.000Like I have some sort of like peace-oriented friends, pacifist friends.
00:24:44.000I mean there's a sort of two different flavors, right?
00:24:46.000There's a sort of a conservative isolationism and a liberal pacifism.
00:24:50.000And they wind up ironically in sort of the same place.
00:24:55.000You know, like the convergence is sort of interesting politically.
00:24:58.000But the sort of left-wing people that I know are sort of Vietnam-era pacifists, right?
00:25:07.000So in my mind, I'm like, listen, you know, if war is bad...
00:25:13.000Avoiding 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.
00:25:21.000And, you know, you could make a moral case for, you know, drop a few bombs, the war stops, and then human life is preserved.
00:25:52.000But 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,
00:26:09.000You have to figure out how to be a peace-loving society that can also defend itself.
00:26:14.000And 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...
00:26:31.000And I don't know the answers to that, but that to me is like the strategic and moral question.
00:26:36.000It's like, where is that line where you have to defend something because eventually you're going to end up defending yourselves?
00:27:42.000Obviously, 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.
00:27:51.000And if you just knew for a fact that there were no predatory people out there, not one, You wouldn't need to be, right?
00:28:00.000But that's not – we're social primates and that's not the world that we evolved in and it's never going to happen.
00:29:30.000Well, 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.
00:29:52.000It's whoever presses the button first wins.
00:29:56.000And so you have this, like, if you can completely disable a nation's army almost instantaneously, Right.
00:30:04.000And then take over their cities or bomb their cities like instantaneously.
00:30:07.000It's just we're relying on good nature.
00:30:27.000I 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,
00:30:43.000all of this, like, what the Ukrainians were able to do against the Russians is quite extraordinary.
00:30:48.000The Russians really should have taken Ukraine in a few weeks, right?
00:30:51.000And had they— That was what everyone predicted.
00:30:55.000I didn't think that was going to happen, but that was what everyone predicted.
00:30:59.000And the motivation to defend your home is always far greater than the motivation to invade someone else's home.
00:31:06.000Just 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?
00:31:17.000So – 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.
00:31:51.000You 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.
00:32:01.000You just zapped it out of existence and invade it, right?
00:32:04.000The Russians took, you know, east of the Mississippi.
00:32:07.000The Chinese took west of the Mississippi or whatever it might be.
00:32:55.000Yeah, 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.
00:33:05.000Like, 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.
00:33:19.000And as that bubble grows bigger, and this takes decades, it's a very slow process, right?
00:33:24.000Basically, I have a ligament in the wrong place.
00:33:26.000And that set in motion a sort of vascular problem that resulted in an aneurysm.
00:34:07.000So 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.
00:34:17.000And if someone does you the favor of stabbing you in the abdomen...
00:34:22.000And severing your pancreatic artery, which is the artery that ruptured on me.
00:34:28.000Now, it's a little artery, this thickness of a number two pencil.
00:38:19.000And you go into something called compensatory shock if you're bleeding out.
00:38:24.000And 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?
00:38:35.000So 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.
00:38:44.000And it sort of hoards the blood in your chest Your abdomen, your chest, and your brain, around your heart, right?
00:38:51.000You know, those things go, you're dead.
00:38:53.000So it collects the blood around there and keeps it there through muscular tension, right?
00:39:45.000My body stayed in compensatory shock for that hour that it took.
00:39:52.000But I was losing blood, losing blood, losing blood, and then I got to the hospital.
00:39:58.000And my body couldn't hold compensatory shock anymore.
00:40:01.000And I went straight into end stage hemorrhagic shock, which is you're dead in 10 or 15 minutes, right?
00:40:08.000And I went off a fucking cliff right as we got to the hospital.
00:40:13.000And they estimate my blood pressure was 60 over 40, which is like rock bottom.
00:40:18.000They estimate I lost like two-thirds of my blood.
00:40:22.000If 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.
00:40:30.000If you lose that much blood, there's complications that happen with coagulants and all kinds of things like that that will kill you.
00:40:39.000So people can die of blood loss with a full complement of blood that they've gotten from transfusions.
00:40:48.000Just because this chemical process gets initiated and they can't reverse it.
00:40:52.000And that starts to happen when you've lost two-thirds of your blood, which is right where I was at.
00:40:58.000Ten minutes later, I'd have been dead.
00:41:00.000And so they rushed me into the trauma bay and the doctors knew immediately what was going on.
00:41:09.000And one doctor had this sort of large gauge needle and he started and she asked my permission.
00:46:58.000And they brought me to the interventional – the cath lab, the interventional radiology suite.
00:47:04.000And what interventional radiology is, it's a freaking miracle, right?
00:47:07.000Like 20 years ago, I had been dead, right?
00:47:10.000I mean even – the advances are so fast and so miraculous.
00:47:14.000So 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?
00:47:25.000So 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.
00:47:37.000And 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.
00:47:53.000And 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.
00:48:42.000The catheter threw these twists and turns, right?
00:48:46.000And they couldn't get it to the site of the bleed, which they knew where it was, right?
00:48:51.000And they couldn't get the catheter there.
00:48:53.000The 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.
00:49:09.000And 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.
00:49:16.000And 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?
00:49:24.000So as soon as you open up the abdomen, you can imagine what happens.
00:49:28.000I 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.
00:49:37.000And as you can probably guess, it doesn't go well very often, right?
00:49:41.000So 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.
00:49:51.000They don't tell you or her that, but that's what they're doing.
00:49:54.000And that's what they would have done with my wife who got to the hospital.
00:49:58.000The ER doctor was like, you better come now.
00:50:00.000And 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.
00:55:03.000And so what I can't do is make an executive.
00:55:05.000When 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?
00:56:20.000But for me, there is no evidence that there is a God.
00:56:26.000I 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.
00:56:41.000Had 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?
00:57:19.000So I'm happy to stand corrected if someone offers up some proof, but thus far it hasn't happened.
00:57:25.000And when people say, you know what, the proof of God is that the universe exists.
00:57:29.000Who created the universe, motherfucker?
00:57:31.000Like, who do you think it has to be God, right?
00:57:33.000And 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.
00:59:50.000She 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.
01:00:00.000She was one of those ICU nurses, right?
01:00:12.000Like a hell of a thing to say to an atheist, right?
01:00:14.000So for me, all those wonderful words like blessing and sacred, they have beautiful secular meanings as well.
01:00:23.000So I feel entitled to interpret them in my own way.
01:00:26.000And 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.
01:01:03.000So when she said that, I'm like, okay.
01:01:06.000I'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.
01:01:15.000Like, what's going on in—no, I wasn't in Ukraine, but right now.
01:01:19.000What 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?
01:02:29.000Is there something after we die that we can sort of like look forward to and count on?
01:02:35.000Or 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.
01:02:50.000And 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.
01:03:03.000But, you know, the flakiness aside, there's some legit, you know, it's very, very common.
01:03:07.000And the NDEs that people have had, thousands of cases of them from all over the world, different societies, different cultures, even different ages.
01:03:17.000There are historical accounts of this.
01:03:19.000And the interesting thing about them If you give a room full of people LSD, they'll have a wide variety of hallucinations.
01:03:49.000Throughout 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?
01:04:05.000Endogenous drugs being released in your brain in your final moments.
01:04:09.000And so there are a lot of people, very well credentialed, smart people, who are like, listen, these accounts amount to evidence of an afterlife.
01:04:30.000You 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.
01:05:32.000Well, 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?
01:05:42.000And one of the things they can do is they stimulate certain parts of the brain.
01:05:46.000They can give people a sensation that they're floating.
01:05:50.000Or that they, oh my god, my grandfather.
01:05:54.000They can do weird shit with their brain with, you know, basically a toothpick and a bone saw, right?
01:06:01.000And 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.
01:06:11.000We understand the physiology of all this.
01:06:14.000And 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.
01:06:27.000Other stuff happened to him that the family said, you know, he doesn't have a chance of recuperating.
01:06:32.000He basically pulled the plug, let him die.
01:06:34.000He had the electrodes on his brain, monitoring brain activity before the decision to pull the plug.
01:06:43.000So they did something that would otherwise not be ethical.
01:06:46.000If someone's going to die, you're like, hey, let's hook him up to see what his brain does.
01:06:50.000This guy already had that stuff in place as part of the life-saving measures.
01:06:53.000So they were able to see what happened At the moment of death, right?
01:06:59.000So 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.
01:07:18.000And that was, and one other frequency, I can't remember.
01:07:21.000At any rate, there was this, the brain did, basically did what brains do when they're remembering very, very old stuff, right?
01:07:32.000And 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?
01:07:39.000And 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.
01:07:50.000So boom, all of a sudden, you're five and you're talking to your grandfather.
01:07:54.000You 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?
01:08:05.000So the rationalist is like, okay, the brain dies, all of a sudden you'd see your, you know, you have these old memories, right?
01:08:11.000So, now, for me, as I read, so I got home...
01:08:19.000It's a rather convoluted story, but hopefully it's interesting.
01:09:14.000But 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.
01:09:46.000And 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.
01:10:04.000But two days prior, at dawn, my family and I, we still co-sleep.
01:10:09.000And so we sleep in a group on a pad on the floor.
01:10:13.000And we sleep as a family, the four of us.
01:10:15.000And 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.
01:11:21.000And 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.
01:11:30.000Like, I was like, oh, my God, thank God, because it really felt like I was dead.
01:11:39.000So then, you know, 36 hours later, ooh, what's that pain in my abdomen?
01:11:43.000Off to the hospital, almost, almost die.
01:11:47.000Doctors 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?
01:11:56.000Like, it isn't just, oh, good, well done.
01:14:53.000The 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.
01:15:36.000You give everyone LSD, and they all have hallucinations, and the dying brain produces hallucinations, but it's sort of odd.
01:15:41.000Like, okay, you stir up the memory banks of the brain when you die with the gamma and all that stuff.
01:15:47.000So, 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.
01:17:10.000So 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.
01:17:23.000And then there's super poignant stories, right?
01:17:26.000I 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?
01:17:39.000And 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.
01:19:11.000What I don't understand is the consistency of the visions.
01:19:15.000Of the dead coming to – like my father did.
01:19:18.000I 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,
01:19:36.000Like, 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?
01:19:45.000And 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,
01:20:02.000not to God, but to maybe we just don't understand the nature of existence completely, right?
01:20:54.000We just don't quite understand what death is, what reality is, what consciousness is.
01:21:01.000So 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?
01:21:14.000And 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,
01:21:35.000it acts differently than if you don't observe it.
01:21:37.000So you create basically the act of conscious observation.
01:21:43.000If I look at that ashtray, the ashtray does exactly what it does if I don't look at it.
01:21:49.000In the macroscopic world, conscious observation doesn't change anything.
01:21:55.000In the subatomic world, it changes everything, right?
01:21:59.000So a subatomic particle, an electron, is in all positions as a statistical probability.
01:22:08.000It's in all positions until you observe it and then it's in one position, right?
01:22:13.000If 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.
01:22:23.000If you fire the photon at a plate with two slits, it's the famous double slit experiment.
01:22:28.000Fire the photon at two slits and actively monitor it with a photon detector while it's moving.
01:22:37.000It will go through one slit and hit the strike plate on the far side with a signature of like passage through one slit, right?
01:22:47.000If 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?
01:23:01.000In other words, and this is one of the deepest mysteries of existence, right?
01:23:06.000At 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?
01:23:20.000So given that deep and unresolvable mystery, is it possible?
01:23:27.000In 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.
01:23:35.000Is it possible that there's an equivalent mystery around biological death, the existence of consciousness, which people still don't understand?
01:24:08.000He's one of the sort of pioneers of biocentrism.
01:24:10.000And 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,
01:24:27.000that there's a subatomic particle associated with consciousness, just like the Higgs boson is associated with gravity.
01:24:35.000Like gravity exists because of the Higgs boson.
01:24:38.000It's a subatomic particle that we can measure, right?
01:24:41.000And Maybe consciousness, in the same way, is part of the physical existence of the universe.
01:24:49.000Without gravity, there is no universe.
01:25:28.000On some quantum level that no one has any freaking idea.
01:25:32.000As I say in my book, we might understand reality about as well as a dog understands a TV screen.
01:25:38.000Like with absolutely no concept of the machinery, the mechanisms, the processes that produce the flickering images that are in front of us.
01:25:46.000We 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.
01:26:01.000Yeah, 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.
01:26:18.000The leaps and bounds that we have made since using leeches to treat diseases is off the charts, right?
01:27:04.000So maybe someone knew this thousands and thousands of years ago.
01:27:10.000The 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.
01:27:24.000That just seems too insane and too amazing.
01:28:00.000We are at the edge of a vast forest and we're peering in and we're arrogant.
01:28:06.000And we're arrogant because the people that know know more than everybody else.
01:28:10.000The 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.
01:28:18.000So they have an arrogance of this understanding, this rational sort of reductionist perspective of what reality is.
01:28:28.000Trevor 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.
01:28:40.000They could not explain this stuff when it happened.
01:28:43.000It actually unsettled those guys, Schrodinger and Einstein and Heisenberg and all.
01:30:24.000But I think we're also cursed with these fucking primate brains.
01:30:28.000You 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.
01:30:42.000And we are the dog looking at the television screen.
01:31:14.000We are interconnected in ways that are far greater than Our understanding of human social interactions.
01:31:23.000There's something going on with us and that we experience that with love.
01:31:27.000We experience that with the love of, you know, your wife or your husband or the love of your child or your family members.
01:31:33.000We experience this connection that's like this, it's very different.
01:31:38.000It connects us like as souls and that's what I think I'm getting to.
01:31:42.000There'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,
01:32:06.000at least, like if there's chaos in my family life, you know, there's always God.
01:35:16.000And 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,
01:35:51.000I remember this feeling of like understanding came across me like oh Like the thing is inside of you.
01:35:59.000Whatever 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.
01:36:11.000I started thinking like, oh, this isn't bullshit.
01:36:13.000And 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.
01:36:32.000Of 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.
01:39:44.000Feel like all these cultures have this idea for a reason, right?
01:39:49.000I 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.
01:39:57.000We'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?
01:40:09.000What 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.
01:40:25.000There's a bond that we have because it's the moment in these great times of love where we recognize that we're one.
01:40:41.000This 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.
01:40:52.000That thing confuses you that that's what life is.
01:42:22.000And 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.
01:43:39.000So it sort of changed me in that sense.
01:43:42.000After 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.
01:43:54.000I mean, what a sadistic thing to do to a young person or anybody, right?
01:43:57.000So 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.
01:44:29.000And after eight months, they finally released them.
01:44:31.000And 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?
01:45:50.000We 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?
01:45:59.000So this intense little capsule of reality.
01:46:02.000Like, what did he see in those moments?
01:48:00.000Leaps 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?
01:48:14.000Or is it just like this kaleidoscope of psychedelic images?
01:53:23.000And I can't make myself believe God exists.
01:53:27.000Contrary, 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.
01:53:39.000But I would never ever say, oh, there is no God.
01:53:52.000I don't run my life according to a belief in God.
01:53:57.000Jordan 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.
01:54:05.000I'm paraphrasing, but that's essentially what he's saying.
01:54:09.000Well, 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.
01:54:16.000Some people might, and some people need laws to not rob banks.
01:54:20.000I 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.
01:54:33.000Well, so then what I would say is because as soon as you say God, it presents some logical problems.
01:54:39.000I would say live your life as if you believe in a universal unity, a colossal unity of all things.
01:54:54.000And 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.
01:55:06.000And 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?
01:56:21.000And for that matter, why me and not a nine-year-old with cancer?
01:56:26.000So 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.
01:56:36.000And if that's the way he runs things, I don't want anything to do with him because that's cruel, right?
01:56:41.000And so that's my quibble with the word God.
01:56:46.000But universal unity, you know, I'm good, right?
01:56:50.000If it's good for Schrodinger, it's good for me, you know, whatever.
01:57:33.000And 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.
01:57:44.000And, 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.
01:57:55.000If you really think that's what humans are, then sort of religion makes sense.
01:58:00.000So 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.
01:58:14.000I refrain from doing those things because I don't want to be someone who does those things.
01:58:18.000I have my own inner morality about what it means to be a good person, to not be a freaking psychopath.
01:58:27.000I mean, I don't want to go to jail either, but you don't need the laws.
01:58:31.000You don't need the courts to make me act well in that sense.
01:58:35.000So if you need God in order to not rob banks and kill people and rape people, bro, you got a freaking problem.
01:58:54.000I 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.
01:59:07.000And 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.
01:59:12.000And you think you're smarter than them?
01:59:15.000I think it's people trying to get a map of what this is all about.
01:59:19.000And I think it's been that way forever.
01:59:22.000I 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.
01:59:42.000I'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.
02:00:57.000These 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.
02:01:10.000And we get angry if someone questions our certainty because our certainty defines our ability to exist in this experience.
02:01:41.000As simple as why would God take a child and give a...
02:01:44.000I mean, I think the whole thing is an uber-complex interaction of emotions and experiences that we're all going through simultaneously.
02:01:54.000And I have a feeling that part of the thing that moves us forward, unfortunately, Is negativity and the positivity battling against that negativity.
02:02:06.000It strengthens the positivity because of the resistance.
02:02:09.000I think like the evil of the world is almost like an important factor in the whole equation of our existence.
02:02:19.000Yeah, 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.
02:02:39.000Like, 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,
02:03:00.000if we could prove that, it would strip the value out of these precious decades that we are allotted.
02:03:06.000One of the reasons that life is so precious is because it's so finite.
02:03:11.000So if you could prove there was an afterlife, don't worry about it.
02:03:15.000Your wife dumped you and blah, blah, blah.
02:03:20.000But don't worry about it because soon the afterlife is going to start and then you're good forever.
02:03:34.000On 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,
02:03:49.000but 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.
02:04:00.000If 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?
02:04:10.000So where we're at right now, there's the perfect level of ambiguity.
02:04:16.000That there's not such a proof of afterlife that, you know, why bother leading our lives?
02:04:22.000But there's also not such a doubt about it that it's psychologically devastating.
02:04:29.000We'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.
02:04:39.000So 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.
02:04:49.000And 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.
02:06:50.000He 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.
02:09:19.000I 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.
02:11:12.000That was because of his aggression, right?
02:11:15.000So you have to understand that in evolutionary terms, aggression is richly rewarded.
02:11:20.000So 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?
02:11:33.000But just don't tell me that aggression is counterproductive, right?
02:13:00.000No, because we're better off in a group, even a group in a desperate situation.
02:13:04.000But 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.
02:13:15.000They'll form a coalition to attack, but not to defend, right?
02:13:20.000So 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.
02:13:33.000And then they take over the territory, all the food resources of that territory, and the females.
02:13:41.000And 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.
02:14:15.000We 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?
02:15:00.000It's certainly much better to live today, at least it is here, than it would be during the time of Dostoevsky.
02:15:07.000If 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.
02:15:17.000Things get better over time, but it's a slow, slow process.