You Are Being Brainwashed - Duncan Trussell
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Words per Minute
159.0315
Summary
Duncan McElroy is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster. He's also the author of The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. Duncan McElory joins Jemele to discuss the current political climate, and why we should all be compassionate with each other.
Transcript
00:00:08.880
Imagine if your mother, at the end of your life, wrote you a bill.
00:00:13.520
How much would a mother charge? What's the value of a mother?
00:00:16.640
Capitalism and motherhood don't seem to go very well together,
00:00:19.360
because how do you quantify unconditional love?
00:00:25.800
Why is Kamala Harris acting like our drunk f***ing stepmom?
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We need each other directly around us, the people here.
00:00:35.560
And I'm just saying they're not the ones coming to save you.
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It's your neighbors who you're going to when the power goes up.
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Duncan, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.
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I'm seeing people losing their mind over jokes, people getting angry.
00:01:04.760
You know, people seem to forget that every four years,
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It's really like a terrible kind of national menstrual cycle.
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I think, you know, obviously anyone who's in America,
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if he was living in America right now is being subjected to incredible amounts of propaganda.
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And I'm talking about like historic levels of propaganda.
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Because I think in considering why, that's what you're talking about.
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It's the United States of America, theoretically united.
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And yet, we are being just shotgun blasted in the amygdala
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with so much hyper-sophisticated, hardcore propaganda,
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cooked up by people who've spent their entire lives studying how to hack human consciousness.
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Studying exactly how to implant into people's minds seeds that grow into words,
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that feel like they're based on some kind of autonomous self.
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And which is why you sort of run into the invasion of the body snatchers
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experience online, where you realize people are not just saying the same idea,
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they're saying the same sentence over and over and over again.
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And it creates a real eerie sense when you look at it holistically,
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which is like, it doesn't seem very normal or human,
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that so many people are saying identical phrases over and over and over again.
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And then when you look into that, and you realize, oh, of course,
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this is teams of volunteers and paid people on both sides of the political spectrum,
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and not even on both sides of the political spectrum, but from other countries,
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who are actively firing these propaganda weapons into the psyche of Americans to try to warp their
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perception in a way that produces a result that doesn't benefit anyone in the way that the people
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think it's going to benefit when they vote. I mean, that's the really sad thing to me. I mean,
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I don't mean to make it very cynical or anything like that, but it appears that a vast amount of
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the money that we pay via taxes doesn't even go into the country. And so there is something really
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sinister about that. But I think it's good, like if you're out there and your friends have gone nuts
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and you've been getting ear beatings, I think this is where you kind of find a place to be
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compassionate with people because no one in the history of humanity that I'm aware of, there's
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never been a time where this much propaganda from so many different sources has been injected into
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the consciousness of people. Yeah. And it's interesting because you walk around and like,
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maybe it's me projecting, maybe it's me spending too much time on X or whatever it is. And I,
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but I just feel like there's an edge. There's an edge. You know why you think that? Because you're
00:04:23.800
You know what I mean? That's why. And no, there is an edge and it's an edge and there should be an
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edge. The edge is happening because there's a ghost story being told. We have two incredible
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storytellers. This is the, whoever's running these campaigns. They're good at telling stories. This is
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how you sell a product is you tell a story about it, you know, whatever the thing is. You ever seen
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The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Zizek? You ever seen that? No. Oh, it's so funny. It's good.
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But you know, he's like out in the desert or something with a Coca-Cola, but a can of Coke,
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and he drinks it. And he's just like, it's not very good if it's not cold. It's just this sweet
00:05:11.240
shit that if it's cold, it's okay. But look at a Coca-Cola commercial. They, they, the story they
00:05:17.160
tell about Coca-Cola, at least in this commercial is that you are going to have a peak experience.
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They're trying to pair this. I think it's the one he shows is like a rave or something. I mean,
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it is the greatest night of somebody's life and they're drinking Coke. You bring these two things
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together. And now instead of just having some syrupy brown shit that tastes good when it's cold,
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nice with whiskey, you've got like the key to liberation, freedom, your true self, actualization,
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getting laid. And so that's the story that you do when you're doing branding. And so you've got,
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when you hear about the money that pours into these campaigns on both sides and the donations,
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the money from corporations, the money coming in from unknown sources, all of that money goes to
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cooking up a story, a big story and little stories week to week. And those are ghost stories that we're
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being told right now. The story is one of peril, one of apocalypse, one, both sides are telling the
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same story. And the story is, this is the end of America. If this person gets elected, say goodbye to
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everything you've known. Well, by the time people are watching this,
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one of the two people has been elected. We don't yet know how the elections turned out as we're
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recording this. So the America is over. Yeah. The irony is people are like listening to this
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in nuclear waste. They were right. Well, they need entertainment, right? But I thought you made a
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really interesting point right at the beginning. And I've been thinking about this a lot, which is,
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you know, some people will be like, what do you mean the most propaganda ever? What about the
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Soviet? What about Nazi Germany? What about, but actually in terms of quantity, there has never been a
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time when somebody would have been consuming propaganda of one kind or another for like
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eight hours a day, which is what most people now do. Yes. In the thirties, yes, there was a lot of
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brainwashing going on, but that was the radio. Maybe a little bit of television starting to come
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through, right? Newspapers. Yeah. So what would a normal person do? They'd pick up a newspaper in the
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morning. They'd glance through a few headlines. They'd maybe have the radio on while they're making dinner
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or something. By the time TV comes along, you'd maybe watch an hour or two of TV before you go to
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bed, right? Nowadays, that whole, you're getting eight, 10 hours. And as you say, it has been very
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carefully, not just made and designed, but it's been selected by an algorithm that knows exactly what
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you like and more importantly, exactly what you hate. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the other
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reason it's completely different is because, um, though I do think throughout, since the invention
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of the printing press, people have read this or that that they called the news and thought,
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well, that is real. And if like in their own minds sort of simulated some version of the world based on
00:08:07.160
the data they got from 2D space versus like data you get from 3D space. Um, but I think the difference
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is that because like you said, someone in the 30s, I mean, when you were walking around in the 30s,
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40s, 50s, you would see people looking at their newspaper, but you wouldn't be like in a conversation
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with somebody and they pull the newspaper out. They weren't getting alerts from their newspaper.
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Oh shit, breaking news. Right. So you would, it was sort of modulated day to day. Every new issue,
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it sort of moved the story forward a little bit. Now we're getting, uh, stroboscopic news and it's
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insidious news. And that's another important factor that people really need to understand is that, um,
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maybe you're at a cafe, you're in France in the 30s and somebody comes and sits down with you
00:09:05.240
and starts talking about Germany, starts talking about whatever the news is of the day.
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One thing that will not cross your mind is, is this a robot? And the other thing that's happening is
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because we've begun to equate our interactions online and with this being actual community. And also we've all
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made the normal human assumption that the people we're talking to are not large language models or
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not AIs or not robots. Uh, it's way more insidious because it's not only, I mean, sure there were,
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there's always been shells. There's always been people who during a protest will instigate and, and, and
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make the protest turn violent. That's a classic technique. But the idea that you can create,
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essentially golems, you can create essentially these artificial intelligences that tune into key
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phrases, go into a thread, derail the thread with an agenda, an intent to point the thread in a
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different direction that matches your corporate goal or state goal is brand new and incredibly insidious.
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And so it would be easy if you weren't attuned to what's happening in the world right now to have
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an idea of reality completely separate from what reality actually is. Because the moment you start
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thinking 2d space in your phone matches 3d space, then that means that the entire landscape of people's
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subjective universe could be completely warped, transformed, changed by data wizards, essentially,
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who are just intentionally manipulating people, uh, without telling them. And there's no regulation
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for that. There's no regulation. There's no, like, why would it be that, like, if I, if you like, you do an
00:11:07.320
ad on Instagram or something, you don't say it's an ad. I think it's illegal. Like, I don't think you can do
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that. It's illegal. You're in trouble. So why would it be that if you are a volunteer for a political
00:11:17.320
organization or for a state entity fulfilling some goal, some state political corporate agenda
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via, like, information that you don't have to have on there, you're getting paid by this group of
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people? It's not, that seems like something that should be regulated way before you start trying to
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regulate. I'm not saying regulate speech. I'm saying identify
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corporatists or statists who are spreading propaganda so that at least people can
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might have an agenda to it other than what the person is, like, stating.
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Right. And foreign bots, especially, or foreign organizations and other countries that are really trying to do a lot of that.
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I'm sure people have always been like this, but it just feels like there's a such a lemming effect.
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Like during the election we saw, you know, Tony Hinchcliffe opens with some jokes at a Trump rally.
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And it's front page news. You've got a comedian made some jokes.
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This is front page news in a country that's got massive economic problems. It's got an immigration
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border, all kinds of shit, healthcare. Like we can go down the list of actual real issues.
00:12:29.160
Well, I, you know, I think if you think of it more in terms of like a ball has landed in some nice,
00:12:35.240
soft, wet grass and a dog sees the ball, grabs the ball and runs with it.
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So when you consider that this, those jokes, like if, so like, if you're looking to sort of,
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it seems like the angle that they're, they're taking right now, the ghost story they're telling
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is that half of our country is fascist garbage. Half of the country doesn't care about the
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environment. Half of the country are compassionless
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beasts, monster. I mean, the president United States said they're garbage. So this is the picture
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you're wanting to paint, not just because you, you're looking, you're not looking for the garbage
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monster vote there. The garbage is already voted. What you're looking, what you're looking to do there
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is alienation. So the idea would be, do you really want to be garbage? Do you really want to be like
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part of a fascist, neo-fascist American movement? If you're on the fence,
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if you're on the fence, how could you even be on the fucking fence?
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Well, you are a fascist if you're on the fence.
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If you're on the fence, you're a fascist. And so what you're hoping to do there is like any outliers,
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anybody who's like somehow still undecided, you want to shame them into the correct vote, right?
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And so to do that, you want to paint half of the country as either sort of fascists,
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pre-fascists, uh, idiots, gullible fools taken in by a maniacal psychopath. And, um, and so then
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Tony does this joke, which if you've ever gone to any comedy show, if you've ever seen Tony roast
00:14:27.400
anybody, it's just like a basic roast joke, you know, non-complex, simple. And in Kill Tony, it would,
00:14:34.360
it would do good. And like, whatever, you know, if you know, Tony, as we do, one of the sweetest
00:14:40.840
people we've ever met, I'm sorry if that fucks up your thing, Tony, but he's so sweet.
00:14:48.200
No, he's not. Listen, we're going to save his reputation.
00:14:51.400
Yeah, he's a little demon, a little demon. He murders, he murders like small animals in the
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green room and laughs. He paints his face with their blood. But so, so.
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That's probably a protected characteristic by now, lack of religion of some sort.
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I think if you like zoom out a little bit, if you zoom out just a little bit and look at
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a few different aspects of what happened, one thing is like, this got the ball and the dog in this case
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is the DNC propaganda, the arm of the DNC that wanted, that this helps them confirm
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via some kind of, I don't remember, I don't know what the philosophical, and I always hate it when
00:15:36.360
people like, are like, that's an ad hominem attack, but what is it, a red herring or something?
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Like basically, you take four minutes of stand up from a roast comedian known for that,
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and then you apply that to the entire, half the country must be like that, and that's who they
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really are. Well, it's ridiculous. I mean, and it's also like very condescending to all sides of the
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argument. It's very condescending that you expect an irrational, logical adult to imagine that because
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a comedian who, on any show, you don't want to go first, but at a Trump political rally to follow
00:16:10.920
the fucking national anthem and try to do stand up, oh, this is like a fever dream. This is something
00:16:17.320
you wake up from screaming if you're a comedian, but regardless, to take that and then use that
00:16:23.240
as a way to paint entire groups of people, many of which are Latino people, as being
00:16:32.920
fascist or whatever, is just, I think, fairly irrational and incredibly sad and doesn't do
00:16:44.680
anything for the greater good, if you ask me. It just perpetuates a ghost story and it asks people
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to ignore their rational mind. And so that to me is the main thing. I think that if you really want
00:16:57.800
to cut to the core of why everyone's acting so weird right now, it's because both sides of
00:17:02.840
the fence seem very comfortable in inviting us to disregard our rational mind. And this is what
00:17:10.600
they do in any cult. In any cult, that part of you that is still, what do they call it? The small,
00:17:16.600
the still quiet voice, that part of you, they want to encourage you to stifle that.
00:17:23.320
And because that voice will say things that go, if you're on the right, it'll say things that might go
00:17:27.880
against what the right wants you to think or what you equate with team right. If you're on the left,
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that voice starts speaking up. You want to suppress it because it, you don't want to be a Nazi. You
00:17:41.560
want to be a good person. And on the right, you don't want to be a global elite pedophile.
00:17:48.840
Right. So, so on both sides, you're being invited to disregard what is the most important aspect of
00:17:58.040
being human and what makes you not an animal. And then you factor in, it's not just politically,
00:18:03.400
but people when they're in their family situations, when they're with friends, even with relationships,
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they're going, well, I can't say what I really think because I know that they will alienate
00:18:12.360
this person. And then my relationship's going to end. My family are going to hate me. We saw this time
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and time again with people essentially cutting off ties with family members because of Brexit,
00:18:24.600
the vaccine, Trump. And you're going, this is lunacy. The most important thing that you have
00:18:30.200
is connection, is your family, all your loved ones. That's right. And your community. And really,
00:18:37.000
like, you sort of, what ends up happening here is the classic set of conditions for
00:18:47.800
a cult. And the set of, so if like you're wanting to, or an abusive relationship.
00:18:54.280
Abusive relationships are incredibly similar to cults actually, which is you want to isolate,
00:19:00.040
you want to gaslight, you want to essentially replace this person's subjective experience of
00:19:09.880
reality with a simulated experience of reality. You're telling them, I mean, this is the classic
00:19:16.360
Orwell, what is it? One plus one is three. One plus one. Two plus two is five. Two plus two is five.
00:19:21.480
That's actually, it's one plus one is three. He was wrong. But you, yeah, so that is what is going
00:19:30.040
on. And the last thing that you want, if you're trying to cast this subjective distortion spell
00:19:36.920
on somebody, the last thing that you want is for them to go to their friend and be like, hey, dude,
00:19:41.240
two plus two is five, actually. Because their friends are like, what the fuck are you talking about?
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Who told you that? Oh, this guru that I met told me two plus two is five. Well, he's an idiot. It's,
00:19:54.520
everyone knows two plus two is three. But you know what I'm saying?
00:20:00.280
So, of course you would want to make people turn their backs on their families, on their loved ones,
00:20:09.160
on anyone other than whatever the particular team is that you're a part of.
00:20:15.080
And you want them to do that not because you give a fuck about them. You want them to do that
00:20:19.320
because you can't successfully execute the propaganda campaign if they have anybody outside
00:20:24.280
of the Galapagos island of data that you're trying to create to produce these mutant status propagandized
00:20:35.640
people. And that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous and sad and scary. And, and, but also the other problem
00:20:43.320
is that there's so many people right now who are looking at the left and are looking at the right.
00:20:50.280
And they're saying, oh, what the fuck is wrong with these idiots? How do you get so brainwashed?
00:20:55.080
Are you out of your fucking mind? Don't you understand that you are supporting the military
00:21:00.040
industrial complex? Don't you understand you're going to get people killed? Don't you understand
00:21:04.360
they don't give a fuck about you? You get mad. But it's like, man, these people, and this is where
00:21:11.800
it gets so sad. These people legitimately want the world to be better. These are people who have
00:21:21.480
kindness, compassion in them. They have humanist ideals. Maybe some of it's utopian humanism,
00:21:27.480
maybe some of it's idiot compassion, but their compassion impulse, that basic human impulse to
00:21:34.360
help has been hijacked by the state and, and, and, and warped in this terrible way where the idea is we
00:21:43.160
only are compassionate to people within this zone. To be compassionate to that person is to collude
00:21:51.240
with a Nazi. Were you going to be compassionate with Hitler? Or, oh really? So you're going to be
00:21:57.880
compassionate with some trans pedo? That's who you're going to be compassionate to? I guess you're
00:22:03.000
fucking one of them. They deserve nothing more than rejection. You know what I mean? Both sides,
00:22:08.440
the language that gets used, all of it is warped distortions that have nothing to do with legitimate
00:22:15.320
direct encounters with human beings. And so in that, we are robbed of our ability
00:22:19.640
responsibility to have, um, to express compassion universally. And in that we have been essentially
00:22:28.920
taken over by, um, um, a demonic, I don't think it's literally demonic, but I would say like,
00:22:35.960
if like in a, in a fantasy book, if there was something that could get in your head and make you
00:22:41.880
think that not everyone deserves compassion, only the people who agree with you, then you're a fucking
00:22:47.000
demon possessed person. I was looking at the Tony joke situation and I was thinking,
00:22:55.560
do you think part of the reason we get so inflamed by a joke, because the people wouldn't do it if we
00:23:01.000
didn't react, is because it's such a small, simple thing. And the solution to a lot of people is very
00:23:09.960
easy. We cancel the comedian. It goes away. Whereas it's more, far more difficult to get
00:23:17.160
angry and enraged about an issue that is more complicated because it's not simple. It's more
00:23:23.880
nuanced. So therefore what we can all do is channel our rage, channel that demonic rage at a figure like
00:23:31.160
Tony, because it's simple. He made a racist joke, destroy him.
00:23:36.680
Tony. Okay. Yeah. I would say this, picture this. I'm going to invent a fantasy creature. Okay.
00:23:41.400
Picture this. There's a creature, the creature. I don't know. Just I'm, I'm in the Elden Ring.
00:23:45.960
I'm picturing it like an Elden Ring style creature. It's really creepy. A big dark robe with lots of
00:23:50.520
weird spindly arms that stick out of it. Right now, uh, what this creature does is the moment that people
00:23:58.760
realize that's a fucking monster. One of those spindly arms produces a brand new mass that it pokes out of
00:24:04.120
its robe and it brings the mask over here and people start attacking the fucking mask like a
00:24:09.880
matador style. Like, you know, the, the weird red thing that bulls apparently hate. So this, if I can
00:24:17.240
do this and make people just cut off my appendages that regrow instead of attacking me, the monster,
00:24:23.640
then I can avoid people attacking me. So I would say what you're looking at in all forms of this,
00:24:30.280
and I think it's really important to understand that it is simple. It isn't complex. The thing
00:24:38.520
wants to seem more complex than it, than it actually is. But I think you have to base everything on like
00:24:44.280
actual value. Like what has real value in the world? What has value in the world? And I think
00:24:50.200
like what has real value in the world and people will mock this and jeer at me or whatever. I would say
00:24:56.120
like an important good thing is to try to reduce the number of babies that get blown up. I don't
00:25:04.360
think you should argue with that. If people do argue with that, like if like we're sitting down,
00:25:08.200
like, okay, what do we work on first? Let's try not to blow up as many babies. And someone's like,
00:25:12.440
you know what? Actually, I think we need to, we need to start dealing more with like carbon emissions
00:25:17.480
than like directly stopping the explosion of innocent babies. That person's like got their priorities
00:25:23.560
mixed up. Like we got to deal with like the basic violence that goes along when, with, um, having,
00:25:31.640
um, a military industrial complex, uh, that is, uh, being funded by taxpayers to execute, um,
00:25:43.560
things overseas that, um, that I'm not sure directly benefit the people who are paying for the
00:25:51.640
fucking thing. To me, that's the main thing. And I don't care who is behind the wheel. I think we
00:25:56.680
have to first look at that. Like we have to stop this war situation. We have to stop blowing people
00:26:01.880
up. We have to stop killing people. All the other socialist stuff, capitalist stuff, libertarian stuff
00:26:07.240
aside, there's just a basic connection to humanity that feels like it's been lost a little bit in the
00:26:14.440
alleged complexity, which doesn't seem very complex to me. You know, the, the, the, the,
00:26:24.280
you know, you ever read Diogenes? No. So he had this idea of, um,
00:26:29.080
there's a lot of critiques against him. He was a cynic, uh, Diogenes, um,
00:26:34.840
I guess I'll lead with the bad shit he did. He would jerk off in publishing.
00:26:39.160
So he's a comedian. Diogenes would jerk off in publishing.
00:26:45.800
And he had a great saying about that because obviously people complained. He said,
00:26:49.560
if only I could deal with my hunger by rubbing my belly, how great that would be. You know,
00:26:57.880
he was a funny guy, but he was also loved by Alexander the Great. And he was a great,
00:27:02.680
great philosopher who, uh, called himself a cosmopolite. He thought that it's important to
00:27:10.840
no longer identify with the state country of origin, but rather to recognize that you are a
00:27:15.160
citizen of planet earth, not in some hippie cheesy way, but literally we are on a planet that we all
00:27:21.400
share together. But also, uh, the, the Greek roots of that could also mean literally the galaxy.
00:27:27.800
So this, uh, fixation on the, uh, identity as being localized within the state or city or country
00:27:40.920
creates a distortion in what we actually are, which is we are born onto a planet with borders created
00:27:50.280
by people we'll never meet or dead. And within these borders, you have cultural sort of, um,
00:27:59.400
you have traditions within these borders and these traditions, that's what Diogenes was mocking.
00:28:04.360
He was like, he was saying, this is absolutely insane that we are fighting over these, uh,
00:28:12.120
traditions and ways of being that don't reflect nature, which was his big thing was to harmonize
00:28:18.440
with nature. And which is why Alexander the Great loved him. And there's so many awesome stories
00:28:24.760
about like the many disses he gave to power, like Alexander the Great encounters him on the street,
00:28:30.840
on the road. And these could be all myth, but supposedly Alexander the Great says to him,
00:28:37.720
I will give you anything you want, whatever you want, I will give you as a great emperor.
00:28:41.800
And he said, can you move a little to the left? You're blocking my son.
00:28:47.080
And you know, this was this big, fuck you to power. And, and, and, and that fuck you to power,
00:28:52.760
that fuck you to the peacocking pomposity of people who have established themselves as the shepherds of
00:29:01.240
humanity who wear their costumes and parade about with their proclamations regarding what we need,
00:29:09.240
that we depend on them. This paternalistic fucking relationship with humanity. That is what needs
00:29:17.640
to be rejected. And it is that paternalistic hierarchical relationship with hypnotic power
00:29:24.520
mongers that is causing all the problems. They're not our daddy. You'll never meet them. Why is Donald
00:29:32.040
Trump acting like our dad? Why is Kamala Harris acting like our drunk fucking step-mom? We don't
00:29:39.880
need them. That's the bottom line. We need each other directly around us, the people here. And
00:29:46.280
it's not fucking Kamala Harris wasn't the one setting up tables of fucking food in North Carolina
00:29:53.880
when all the shit got washed away. Donald Trump wasn't out there fucking hauling lumber.
00:29:59.480
You know what I mean? And I don't think we should expect either of them to do that. I'm just saying
00:30:03.720
they're not the ones coming to save you. It's your neighbors who you're going to when the power goes
00:30:08.440
out. And people have forgotten that. And, and people are turning to the state and some desperate,
00:30:14.360
pathetic hope that the state is going to rescue them from some perceived threat. They don't know their
00:30:21.000
fucking neighbors' names. Like, come on, man. Get your priorities straight.
00:30:25.720
But isn't the problem the fact that we've disempowered people, Duncan? We've disempowered
00:30:33.320
people. And now people feel that the only way that they can be safe is to give up what little
00:30:39.880
power and agency they have to the government who will come and protect them. And I mean,
00:30:45.160
COVID was the perfect example of this. People were so willing to give up autonomy,
00:30:49.800
to give up their power, to give up freedom. Yeah. If it meant that they could be given this thing
00:30:54.600
called safety, which actually didn't really exist anyway. Well, I think I love Carl Jung. And I think
00:31:00.840
if you look at these big social movements as the projection of the collective shadow,
00:31:05.720
COVID is fantastic because what was the instruction with COVID? Social distancing. COVID, if the goal is
00:31:14.200
to separate us from our neighbors and make us latch onto the state, like that poor monkey that like,
00:31:21.560
did you ever see that terrible experiment with a wire monkey? Oh, it's the most fucked up,
00:31:25.800
fucked up thing. I hate it so much. They take this little monkey away from its mama. They give it a wire
00:31:31.400
monkey. It's got like, they use like bicycle reflectors for its eyes, made it kind of look like a
00:31:37.640
monkey. This poor little monkey baby. It would rather cling to this fake ass wire monkey than food.
00:31:47.000
Cause they just thought that was his mommy. And so if, if like what we're looking at here is some kind of
00:31:58.040
movement to disconnect people from the actual like, like joy of being human, which is connecting with
00:32:07.560
others and then connect with the state, then COVID, it was a perfect way to do that. You, you had to
00:32:16.040
cover your face. You had to distance from people. You had to fucking hate people who didn't wear the
00:32:21.560
mask or hate people who did wear the fucking mask. It created these bizarre teams and the craziest team
00:32:27.160
outfits you've ever seen. And what did it do? It separated us. It's separate, separate, separate,
00:32:33.000
and any time you see an invitation to disconnect from this group or that, or separated from this
00:32:39.480
group or that, or most importantly to not forgive, then you should be very suspicious because that is
00:32:45.160
serving the purpose of creating a fragmented planetary civilization. And that can only lead to
00:32:52.120
aggression, violence, and suffering. And that is not political. That is not a political statement.
00:33:27.960
Do you think, do you, how realistic do you think it is for us to overcome that? Because,
00:33:36.840
you know, I don't know if you read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. He talks about, um, why human, uh,
00:33:43.880
homo sapiens became the dominant species of hominids on planet earth. And the reason is
00:33:50.360
that they outcompeted other types of humans effectively. And the reason was that they were able
00:33:56.280
to build tribes that went beyond a hundred, the dumb bar number, 150 people or so. And the reason
00:34:02.360
they were able to do this is that according to Harari is that they built these shared myths, nation,
00:34:11.320
country, money, all of these things that aren't real, as you say, we're just a bunch of, you know,
00:34:18.200
animals living on a planet, but we've drawn these arbitrary lines over which we frequently fight and
00:34:23.240
side. Right. On the one hand. So it's all arbitrary on the one hand. On the other hand,
00:34:28.920
it is how we evolved. Yeah. And so we are tribal creatures. Yeah. And I, I wonder whether
00:34:35.800
realistically we ever have a choice about whether we are tribal. My thinking today has been, and I'm
00:34:43.080
obviously open to, to change my opinion on it, has been that ultimately you can't overcome the tribal
00:34:48.840
nature of our evolutionary history. And so what you can do is find the right unit of tribalism.
00:34:55.800
Right. So when I look at America or our country in the UK, what I see is that we went from kind
00:35:03.640
of like, we're English, we hate the French, which was like, good. Right. That kind of work. Yeah.
00:35:08.520
Yeah. Yeah. Right. To, oh, I am a, you know, African American. I'm a, this American, I'm Latino,
00:35:15.880
I'm this, I'm that or whatever. And suddenly, instead of being a United States of America,
00:35:22.200
we've now become, you know, in the UK and here, the divided states within itself. So rather than
00:35:29.240
focusing on external threats, which by the way, we may wish that they weren't there and all man was one
00:35:35.080
and all of that, but they are there. Sure. Like the Chinese aren't sitting around taking
00:35:38.200
psychedelics and going, you know, how do we chill out? I wouldn't be surprised if they were taking
00:35:42.360
psychedelics. Maybe not for that reason. I mean, I think the idea that you give psychedelics
00:35:45.320
to a fascist and suddenly they're like peaceful is madness. I, I, that whole like,
00:35:50.360
give Kim Jong-un some mushrooms and everything that we find, shut that up. He's going to launch
00:35:55.560
the nukes right away. I've got mushrooms. They don't tell me to love everybody. And if I had access
00:36:00.040
to a nuclear arsenal, I got paranoid enough, I might fire a couple of ICBMs.
00:36:05.800
So that's what I'm saying. Right. So we do have people who want to take things away to fight,
00:36:12.120
to challenge, et cetera. So is it that we should be heading towards some kind of, I would argue,
00:36:19.880
utopian vision where everyone is like all one and whatever, or is it just that we've
00:36:25.560
become tribalized along the wrong lines? That's cool.
00:36:30.600
Cool. You know, man, I, I, I would refer you to like Buckminster Fuller. Have you ever read,
00:36:38.440
what's it called? Something like Manual for Spaceship Earth. It's really cool. But so he,
00:36:45.160
I don't know what he would say about that book you were citing, but he talked about sort of the
00:36:56.680
evolution of human beings from living on land and becoming a seafaring civilization. He talked about
00:37:02.360
how like, you know, you're born into whatever part of the world. There's no satellites, airplanes,
00:37:07.000
trains. You've got maybe horses, but your, your world is going to be the circumference of that,
00:37:13.320
which could be explored by foot or by horse. Once you get to the ocean, that's it, baby. It's done.
00:37:18.920
It's like the wall in the video game that you can't walk past. And suddenly we figure out a way to
00:37:23.880
navigate the oceans. And he called those people, the first, the great pirates. So the, the, the people
00:37:34.120
who began, the explorers of renown were also pirates. And this is where we got into territorial
00:37:44.200
expansion. Now what's happening is the circumference of the subjective world that people were living in
00:37:49.800
was beginning to slowly grow. It was growing now past the area that you had been living in to the
00:37:57.400
ocean and getting bigger than that. Eventually we realized the earth is round. It's not flat.
00:38:04.120
We're on a round fucking thing. So that every time those kinds of things happen, global consciousness
00:38:10.760
shifts. And he points out the moment we got a picture of earth from space. Now there's no way to
00:38:16.520
deny it, to argue with it. We are living on the same thing. It's a planetary civilization that we are
00:38:22.520
currently living on, a very divided planetary civilization. But if you were to look at the,
00:38:28.120
if you were to look down on planet earth and just spin the globe, if you could do that, I mean,
00:38:32.840
if you could actually do that, it would destroy the planet, I guess. But if you did that and you're
00:38:37.160
looking at Dubai, New York, Moscow, Israel, and just looking at it, not understanding anything about the
00:38:43.800
the cultures there or the laws there or the leaders there, it all kind of looks like the
00:38:51.000
same ant's nest, right? It kind of looks like the same thing. You might be astounded to find out
00:38:55.640
that people who are getting in their car and driving in the pulsation of traffic that happens
00:39:00.840
every morning and night according to where the planet is rotating in accordance to the sun.
00:39:05.880
You might be astounded to think that each one of those people thought they were doing something
00:39:09.880
different. You look down and see what's going on. You would see a clearly like a clock,
00:39:15.800
the inner workings of a fucking clock, this pulsing of life that is just completely based
00:39:21.800
on the solar cycle. And you would be astounded to imagine that people on one side of the planet
00:39:27.880
at any given moment might launch nuclear missiles at people on the other side of the planet because
00:39:31.960
they were so very different from them. That would be astounding. Now, from Buckminster Fuller's
00:39:39.080
perspective, because it was the early explorers or pirates who were the conquerors and who
00:39:49.240
created the areas that we call countries. And obviously, they weren't all sailors.
00:39:55.640
Many of them were like, I don't think Genghis Khan ever got in a fucking boat, did he? I don't know,
00:40:00.040
maybe. But the point being, the conquering mentality. It's what became our laws. It became the legal
00:40:11.880
system. In America, the first, quote, democracy was pirate ships. They were democratic. They were
00:40:19.080
diverse. They were. They didn't give a fuck. And they would vote. And so what ended up happening is
00:40:28.840
like maritime law, basically pirate code became encoded within a lot of the systems, the legal
00:40:36.520
systems of these countries. And so Buckminster Fuller was saying, we are now living on a planet.
00:40:43.320
We know it is a planet. We know it's one thing. But the way we are executing
00:40:51.080
life on this planet is with pirate code based on a complete lack of understanding of the system that
00:40:58.360
they were actually on. And this is why we are having so many problems right now is because we don't know
00:41:05.480
how to adapt to the reality of living on a planet. And I'm not talking about hierarchical,
00:41:10.600
top-down, one-world government antichrist systems where the new world order controls the mind of
00:41:16.520
the people and there is no more freedom. I'm talking about it at all. I'm not talking about that.
00:41:21.560
I'm talking about a fundamental connection with reality, which is you live on a planet that has
00:41:29.720
been here for what? What is it? Five, 3.8 billion years? Something like that. A very old planet.
00:41:35.400
You live on a very old planet that has a set of laws according to these imaginary boundaries drawn
00:41:42.600
by conquerors that vary from place to place, but essentially result in the same damn thing.
00:41:47.160
A lot of skyscrapers, cities, cars going around, 40-hour work weeks, some various forms of slavery,
00:41:54.200
human bondage, justification of hyper-violence based on these boundaries. And it might be that the reason
00:42:01.480
that's happening is because of a distortion in our ability to comprehend what is actually going down.
00:42:07.240
And you're not going to have to state, is not going to tell you that. You're not going to,
00:42:12.440
no president is going to come out and be like, hey guys, we're all on one planet. And I agree with you,
00:42:18.120
because we're all on one planet, it doesn't fucking mean it's like saying, well, we all live in one
00:42:22.600
house. There's a dude with a hatchet over there. So we should just love that guy who might come swinging
00:42:27.560
at us at any given moment. I'm not saying that the move is some irrational embrace of people
00:42:35.400
who are an existential threat. That's called idiot compassion. But I think the first step would be to
00:42:41.160
shake off any propaganda that's given you a sense that you aren't a planetary citizen, that your
00:42:48.360
birthright isn't being an earthling. Throw that off. Don't be afraid. It's kind of scary to do. You feel
00:42:54.120
dirty just to say, I'm not an American. I am an American. I love this country. I really do.
00:43:00.280
But also, all of us, we are planetary. We live on a planet. And then this is a sort of universal,
00:43:09.400
all one perspective. Now that's called eternalism when it gets out of balance. If you get too caught
00:43:15.080
up in that wooshy-washy, woo-woo-y bullshit, then what are you going to do when the tax man comes?
00:43:20.360
He doesn't give a fuck that you think you're a planetary citizen. You can go fuck yourself. I'm
00:43:24.520
taking your house, your car. I don't give a fuck. This is ridiculous. It's eternalism when it gets
00:43:29.800
in balance. Also, on the other side you have, when it gets in balance is nihilism. All we are is just
00:43:38.360
like our country, our state, this planet. We're just matter. We're like the universe malfunctioned and
00:43:44.600
atoms coalesced together in some horrific amalgam that produced the awful disease of consciousness
00:43:52.200
with an immortal body. What can be more torture than that? Now that's nihilism. So I think the goal is to
00:43:58.360
find a way to connect these two things together in a real moment-to-moment way. Instead of trying to fix
00:44:07.480
the problems of the planet, I'm going to wake everybody up. We all have to realize we're
00:44:11.160
planetary citizens. I'm going to bring world peace. I think it's like my friend Jack Kornfield says,
00:44:16.840
tend to the part of the garden you can touch. You know, go micro, go small. What around you
00:44:25.240
needs help right now? It's all that matters. That's it. You aren't going to bring peace to the
00:44:31.800
Middle East. You are not going to be, you're not going to solve the Ukrainian-Russian crisis. You
00:44:37.480
are not going to stop us from blowing each other up. That's never going to happen. And by you, I mean
00:44:43.240
the individual. But collectively, ground level, micro acts of compassion would theoretically change
00:44:55.080
everything. And it would happen very, very quickly, in fact.
00:44:58.280
You know, it's a really profound point you make because I remember when I was teaching,
00:45:05.160
there'd be, in every school there'd be one or two teachers who would transform kids' lives. Like
00:45:12.920
a kid would come in to their class and a year later you'd come out and they'd seem like a fundamentally
00:45:19.080
different human being. They'd come in hating maths or hating English, I can't do this. And you'd see
00:45:24.520
the child transform. So if you think that one person can do that for, what, 30 kids?
00:45:31.400
Over a career? I mean, that's thousands of people.
00:45:36.840
So if one person can do that, and they've made that commitment, then maybe we can't do it to that
00:45:43.000
many people. But we can certainly do it to double-digit, triple-digit people, numbers of people.
00:45:48.600
Oh, and this is where you get into the disempowered thing you're talking about. This is the, I mean,
00:45:54.200
if you exist within the system, which is the, you are inside of an infinite system,
00:46:01.320
and within you is another insane system when you consider like the perfect harmonization of
00:46:07.480
your cells, your biological internal universe. And then you consider the atomic universe and the
00:46:12.760
subatomic universe, and there you are like on the outside of the bubble in another bubble. It's
00:46:18.120
profound to be part of this thing at all. And so I think the first step is recognition
00:46:24.040
of what you actually are within. The system that you're actually within, as much as you're capable,
00:46:29.320
will re-empower you right away. Because you begin to see, holy shit, man, I like,
00:46:34.280
think how long it takes erosion to like make a, to change a landscape.
00:46:39.480
Give me a fucking shovel. I can, I can do a thousand years of erosion in a minute, no problem.
00:46:45.720
And that's being human. We can do that. It's incredible. Not just what we could do to like,
00:46:51.240
to like go via landscaping. But when you look at the historic precedent for people who've absolutely,
00:46:58.200
completely transformed the cultural technological landscape that we're living in, you realize
00:47:03.880
these ideas emerge in the minds of people like Nikola Tesla, Karl Marx, you name it. For better,
00:47:10.840
for worse, these ideas come into a human mind and get articulated in some form or fashion
00:47:16.760
that produces ripples that we are experiencing to this very day. People long dead. And you are one of
00:47:23.000
them. You are running the same nervous system. You are running the same, oh, you're not, maybe not the
00:47:27.640
same OS. You're running, you got the same basic system. So you should feel empowered because you're
00:47:35.480
sitting in the same kind of body. Genghis Khan was sitting in, Mahatma Gandhi was sitting in,
00:47:40.120
Martin Luther King was sitting in, you go on and on and on. Buddha, Muhammad, all of them out of body.
00:47:45.800
Maybe they had different operating systems. Who knows? But that's you, you, the individual,
00:47:50.600
you, the person. It doesn't mean go megalomaniacal about it, but for God's sake,
00:47:54.760
in a world where we all are walking around like deflated balloons, we're walking around feeling
00:48:00.200
all guilty and bad and scared. And I can't do anything to help anything. I gotta, if I'm gonna
00:48:04.840
help something, I gotta help the whole fucking planet. It's like, no one ever talks about Buddha's
00:48:09.560
great-grandmother. You never hear that. You never hear about Buddha's great-great-grandmother. You
00:48:15.080
never hear about the person who like, I don't know, like invited Buddha's great-grandmother to
00:48:21.320
some kind of lunch where she met Buddha's great-great-grandfather and they bang that night.
00:48:27.640
You know what I mean? You never hear about that. But now we have the Buddha. You only hear about
00:48:32.120
the fucking Buddha. And it's like, if you are interacting within the system, you are participating
00:48:39.240
in a system that inevitably produces people like Jesus, the Buddha. Like it, this system produces that.
00:48:49.080
And that is not woo-woo. That is, you can look in history and see. And you are participating in that
00:48:53.880
system. Meaning that theoretically, you could be one tiny drop of sand. You could be one tiny drop
00:49:01.560
of sand on the scales that shifted to producing the next Buddha. They happen here. They show up and
00:49:09.800
shit changes for the better. Sometimes for the worse. But you know, that is very exciting to me.
00:49:16.600
That's a really cool thing. And that transcends politics. That transcends some transient, temporary
00:49:22.840
propaganda machine. And people, I hope that more people recognize that. And that you don't have
00:49:30.040
to be the one. Do you really want to be Jesus? Like, look at how he ended up. All these
00:49:36.200
motherfuckers want to be Jesus. I wouldn't want that. I wouldn't be nailed to a cross, stabbed with a spear.
00:49:42.600
I don't want to get assassinated like Gandhi. You don't want to be that. But if you could,
00:49:47.480
I wouldn't mind being part of what produces a thing that brings the alleviation of suffering or
00:49:52.600
a mind that is like able to articulate some way of living that unifies our planet in a non-violent
00:49:58.920
way. That would be cool. What I really like about you, Duncan, and I see it in your stand-up,
00:50:03.880
is that you're very pro-human. You're very, you talk about, you know, the wonder of having kids.
00:50:10.440
Yeah. And it seems to me, and part of what I realize in myself is I contend if I'm not
00:50:16.120
mentally balanced or stable at that particular time. He hasn't taken his meds.
00:50:20.200
Yeah. If I'm fucking bashing back with some whiskey, mate.
00:50:24.200
Yes. But luckily I have for this interview. But I guess we, and one of the things that I find
00:50:33.960
really sad is as a culture, we become anti-child, anti-human. And that to me is a civilization
00:50:46.040
You're so right. You're so right. It is really dismaying. You know,
00:50:56.120
I got lucky enough to be on a show with Bill Burr, and we were backstage with Rogan shooting the
00:51:02.200
shit. And this, it had come on the news that they'd figured out like something like child blood
00:51:10.120
transfusions could actually maybe reverse the aging process. We're just talking about that.
00:51:27.320
But I do feel like it's a tough time to be a kid. And the reason I think is because we're putting
00:51:35.240
like profit over humanity, like making a profit seems to be the goal. And so what ends up happening
00:51:47.160
there is this bizarre hierarchy appears within which the mother is reduced to like a kind of
00:52:02.840
antiquated form, a sort of appendix of the system that you would stay home and
00:52:07.400
raise your kids. You should get into the corporate world. You got to get out there,
00:52:11.720
make some money, dual earning household. Let's get rich. We'll take our kids, put them in daycare.
00:52:19.240
You can go in the cubicle, you can go in the bathroom and like pump your breast milk. And then
00:52:24.440
the baby can have breast milk. You know, to me, that is a real like devaluing of something. And
00:52:35.960
it's really fucked up because how do we quantify motherhood? In other words, like, you know, like,
00:52:41.800
imagine if your mother at the end of your life, like wrote you a bill at the end of your life,
00:52:47.960
like how much would a mother charge? What's the value of a mother? Like we know what minimum wage is,
00:52:52.600
but they also grew in their womb. Capitalism and motherhood don't seem to go very well together
00:52:57.720
because how do you quantify unconditional love and destroying your pussy for a fucking thing that's
00:53:02.920
going to call you a bitch because you don't let them go smoke weed at a fucking slumber party.
00:53:08.040
It's like, there's no way to like quantify. I don't know the economic metric for this. And so what
00:53:15.960
ends up happening again is propaganda. Like the idea being like, I want to, um,
00:53:28.040
I want to get people working, not working because having a kid and being a mom, that's doesn't count
00:53:35.640
as work. That's something different, almost like a vacation. And the implication, uh, when they,
00:53:43.800
they, there is some shaming of mothers because they want to be stay at home moms is the implication
00:53:50.440
is look, being a mom's a part-time fucking job. You know what I mean? It's a dilution of what is in
00:53:56.120
anyone who's been around a fucking mom, three kids, just like being the center of a vortex of life.
00:54:02.920
It's a constant need constant. You have to be there. And then you add to that, that
00:54:09.960
you were invited to leave your kids at daycares and shit. You know what I mean? It's like
00:54:15.480
everyone like bashes communism. They talk about, they want to take the kids away,
00:54:19.160
let the state raise the kids. And that's true. I think, I think they actually did want to do that.
00:54:23.640
They did do that. I was raised in a communist society where that happened with me.
00:54:27.400
They would take, oh, I know I would go to a nursery at like before I was one.
00:54:34.840
And the nursery, you're getting state propaganda, right? The nursery, you're getting communist propaganda.
00:54:39.320
I think at one, I don't think they, I don't think they bothered at that. There wasn't any saluting
00:54:49.800
No, they fucking don't. Kids hate communism. My kids don't want to share shit.
00:54:55.000
I love for my kids to be fucking communist. That'd be incredible. I got to buy two,
00:54:59.320
everything for these boys. It'd be incredible if they could share. I should give them Karl Marx.
00:55:07.000
Two year olds are fucking hard to indoctrinate, aren't they?
00:55:11.800
And it is really difficult. Elrond Hubbard's a wonderful person. I think we can do it.
00:55:15.720
The, you drop your kids off at daycare. Now, this is different from communism,
00:55:24.120
because they go to daycare and they're not getting some communist indoctrination. I don't
00:55:28.440
know what they're getting, like Blippi or something. But if we look, again, if you look at it,
00:55:33.640
if you zoom out enough, it's the same goddamn thing. For an economic system, you're leaving
00:55:39.320
your children with somebody else. And so to me, yeah, this is a really sad thing. And it's a really
00:55:50.600
sad thing when the fashionable attitude right now is, uh, uh, antinatalism is like all over the
00:56:03.960
fucking place. It seems to be some kind of like, um, it's running rampant, at least in the blogosphere,
00:56:09.560
which I don't think is real necessarily. But there's a general sense that to have a child is
00:56:15.560
to hate the earth, that to have a child is to either wish for the child to experience a, uh,
00:56:23.000
uh, just a hellscape style planet or the, the carbon emissions from that kid's
00:56:30.600
fucking macaroni and cheese farts is going to be the last nail in the coffin for the ice caps.
00:56:37.720
I know it's crazy, man. But also there's so much, you talk about propaganda. If you think about
00:56:42.600
your point about motherhood, um, there's so much propaganda in that area where
00:56:50.360
like my wife spent a period of time just being at home with our son. And there's very few people who
00:56:58.200
will be like, that's a great thing to have done. A lot of people are like, oh, oh, you're a stay home
00:57:03.640
mother. Oh, oh, is that it? And, and that's crazy. But also we know from all the polling that most women
00:57:09.880
would like the opportunity to be with their kids if they can. Of course. Of course. But at the same
00:57:16.600
time, especially if you're, if a man like you or me comes along and goes, well, maybe we should,
00:57:21.560
you know, think about how we arrange society to make that available and goes, what you want to chain
00:57:26.520
women back to the radiator where they've been all their evolution. And, and so it, there's a kind of
00:57:31.960
proper propaganda war over women's minds that's going on. And a lot of women have internalized that
00:57:39.080
propaganda. Sure. And they are the ones that are at the front of anyone who says, guys, guys,
00:57:43.240
maybe this isn't working out. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, uh, the, the, any kind of social
00:57:51.080
experiment has like real risks, any kind of utopian vision of the world or something like that has
00:57:57.640
incredible risks. And, um, you know, I've heard this, I don't know if it's true, I'll probably
00:58:04.200
mispronounce it. I've heard that the actual word for Hinduism is Sanat and Dharm, which means the
00:58:08.680
eternal way. And so you sort of just look at the world. You look at like, what, what does it mean
00:58:14.280
to live in balance with the world? What does that look like? I mean, we're talking like for thousands
00:58:18.040
of years, what does that look like? What would be the best way? And certainly for the majority of
00:58:24.520
human history, at least as far as I'm aware, and if I am wrong about this, I hope people will tell me
00:58:28.920
there isn't a lot about dropping your kids off at a fucking daycare.
00:58:36.280
You know what I mean? There isn't a lot out there. And so, but I say, let's invite, I think that again,
00:58:43.400
like the, you, you, when you really start thinking about this stuff as what I think you two are,
00:58:50.360
and I think most people are as someone who wants less suffering in the world, you want to come up
00:58:56.760
with the solution, some way to fix this. And I don't think, I think if we're looking for that,
00:59:03.480
that solution has to be encouraging people to connect with reality outside of the propaganda sphere
00:59:10.920
and not be afraid to do that. In Buddhism, wisdom and compassion are the same thing. Like
00:59:17.560
like the understanding of emptiness or the understanding of the actual reality that we're
00:59:25.480
living in spontaneously gives birth to compassion. Now, maybe I'm a naive fucking idiot, but I really
00:59:32.840
do think that's true. And I think that's exciting because what that means, that can't be really
00:59:38.840
controlled by propaganda. You don't need books for it. You don't need books. You don't need
00:59:46.120
anything other than what you've got, what you're walking around in. And a little bit of courage to
00:59:52.520
just for a second, put all the propaganda up on a shelf and look around and ask yourself,
00:59:57.640
what is this? What is really happening? Not symbolically in my mind, what I've been,
01:00:05.640
not my set of, what are they called? Emoticons, emojis, not my set of symbols that have been
01:00:12.200
implanted in my mind to act as a filter between me and reality. But what is really happening here?
01:00:18.600
I think the more you start connecting with what's really happening,
01:00:22.440
then you don't even need a long-term plan. Moment to moment, you find yourself making decisions
01:00:35.640
Duncan, it's been great having you on. We barely scratched the surface, to be honest.
01:00:39.240
Thank you for having me. So let's do this again, man.
01:00:40.600
You guys have such esteemed guests. I was nervous being on here.
01:00:44.040
Yeah, you should have been. I was. I was an idiot.
01:00:53.160
No, man, it was awesome to chat. Like I said, I think we only got a little bit into it, but we'll
01:00:58.680
continue. So it was great to meet you. Before we ask you questions from our supporters on Substack,
01:01:05.240
the last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that
01:01:09.720
you think we should be? Before Duncan answers the final question, at the end of the interview,
01:01:16.680
make sure to click the link in the description. It will take you to our Substack where you'll be able
01:01:22.520
to see this. Do you think everyone needs to have a psychedelic experience before they die? She says,
01:01:27.800
I have FOMO about it. Fear of missing out. 95% of comedians smoke marijuana. The other 5%
01:01:36.920
aren't funny. Oh my God. I'm so glad they asked this question. This is so good. Finally,
01:01:43.560
we can address this. Quantum computers. That's all anyone should be fucking talking about right now.
01:01:50.840
If you really want to find, and I don't mean to go sinister all of a sudden, but if you really want
01:01:56.920
a line in the sand where you can find a place, not book of revelations, but where the apocalypse is
01:02:03.080
going to happen, look into quantum computing and look into the reality in like five to eight years.
01:02:08.440
Oh, another thing. Oh, it's not AI, it's quantum computing. Oh boy. AI, fuck AI. And monkey pox.
01:02:17.080
Yeah. This makes monkey pox seem like chicken pox. We're talking about the of encryption as we know,
01:02:25.560
we're talking, we have five years. We have five to seven years. So imagine this in five years,
01:02:36.120
all car locks are not going to work anymore. Anyone who wants to get in a car and drive it
01:02:41.400
around can, they're just not going to work anymore in five to seven years. This is,
01:02:44.680
so we have to replace all car locks. We'll go back to mechanical, surely. What?
01:02:49.000
We'll go back to mechanical locks then. Well, yeah, but the problem is how the
01:02:52.200
fuck do we do that with encrypted data that has been, um, sniffed up and vacuumed up already and
01:02:58.360
exists in servers. Encrypted data that would take 7,000 years for a supercomputer to decrypt will take
01:03:04.680
a minute for a quantum computer to do that. Meaning any data back in the, I don't know, 90s,
01:03:10.600
when people were sending encrypted emails and making encrypted phone calls, I don't think
01:03:14.840
they were thinking there's going to be quantum computers that somehow are able to use super
01:03:21.320
positioning to solve problems at the quantum level. Quantum computers where they, it has to be
01:03:27.480
the coldest thing in the universe just to fucking function. It looks like something out of
01:03:31.400
an HP Lovecraft story. If you look at the damn things, no one thought that was coming. There,
01:03:36.120
I think are terabytes of encrypted data just sitting in servers with people waiting for
01:03:42.280
quantum computers to catch up so they can decrypt it. Meaning all state secrets,
01:03:46.360
anything that's been siphoned up, any encrypted data that anyone has that is just sitting somewhere
01:03:51.640
in a hard drive. We're five to seven years away from whoever the fuck has access to these computers,
01:03:56.520
decrypting them. And all the secrets, all the secrets people will know. And so when you realize
01:04:04.200
there's literally a, there's an hourglass right now, there's a ticking clock. We're on the other side
01:04:13.160
of it. Anything you think is out there and you're like, well, you know, it's encrypted with this
01:04:20.760
incredible technology that I barely understand. You better hope.
01:04:24.680
The incognito mode is not going to cut it. What?
01:04:27.720
The incognito mode on the browser is not going to cut it.
01:04:31.480
No. Incognito mode is a wonderful, gives you a wonderful sense of security when you're jerking
01:04:40.520
off to German foot fetish porn. Yeah. So I would say quantum computing is a really interesting thing
01:04:46.840
to think about. And also think about that it could be that timeline is wrong. And what happens if
01:04:52.200
someone does achieve one of these quantum decryption computers, why would they tell anybody?
01:04:58.040
And if you would, if you look out at global events, I would say, take a look at, if you're seeing
01:05:03.560
anything happening that seems like magic, that it just seems like some state knows where someone is
01:05:09.640
at any given moment, that doesn't make any sense. You might ask yourself, do they have a
01:05:13.000
fucking quantum computer? And you know, I have no data on this at all. Obviously I'm a rambling
01:05:20.040
woo-woo comedian, but man, I'm scratching my chin wondering, does Israel have a fucking quantum
01:05:26.360
computer? You look back, they just opened up like a big quantum computing center out there. And then
01:05:31.400
all of a sudden they've got pagers blowing up in people's pockets. They know where everybody is
01:05:36.280
any given moment. Shit, man. It's worth looking into. It's worth thinking about. Like that's going to
01:05:41.880
change everything. So yeah, I think we should be talking more about quantum computers.
01:05:45.480
Well, you've just been disinvited mate. You depressed me.
01:05:51.000
Head on over to Substack where we ask Duncan your questions.
01:05:57.480
Before Duncan answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to click the link
01:06:04.840
in the description. It'll take you to our Substack where you'll be able to see this.
01:06:09.560
It seems there are a few people out there who promote use of psychedelics
01:06:15.480
without considering the very real potential consequences. Why is this?