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We're putting profit over humanity. How do we quantify motherhood? Imagine if your mother, at the end of your life, wrote you a bill. How much would a mother charge? What's the value of a mother? Capitalism and motherhood don't seem to go very well together because how do you quantify unconditional love? Why is Donald Trump acting like our dad? Why is Kamala Harris acting like our drunk stepmom?
We don't need them. We need each other directly around us, the people here. And I'm just saying they're not the ones coming to save you. It's your neighbors who you're going to when the power goes up. So Duncan, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. It's such an interesting time. I'm seeing people losing their mind over jokes, people getting angry, presidents commenting on it. And I'm thinking...
What is going on? Crazy. It's crazy. Yeah, it's wild. It's a wild moment. It's always like this every four years. You know, people seem to forget that every four years. The whole country kind of goes nuts. It's really like a terrible kind of national menstrual cycle. It's really brutal, though. I think, you know, obviously anyone who's in America, who's living in America right now is being...
subjected to incredible amounts of propaganda. And I'm talking about like historic levels of propaganda because I think in considering why, that's what you're talking about. Why? It's a good thing to wonder about. Why? It's the United States of America, theoretically, united. We're united. And yet, we are being just shotgun blasted in the amygdala.
with so much hyper-sophisticated, hardcore propaganda cooked up by people who've spent their entire lives studying how to hack human consciousness, studying exactly how to implant into people's minds seeds that grow into words that feel like they're based on some kind of autonomous self. And which is why you sort of run into the Invasion of the Body Snatchers experience online, where you realize people are not just saying the same idea.
they're saying the same sentence over and over and over again and it creates a real eerie sense when you look at it holistically which is like it doesn't seem very normal or human that so many people are saying identical phrases over and over and over again and then when you look into that and you realize oh of course this is teams of volunteers and paid people on both sides of the political spectrum and not even on both sides of the political spectrum but from other countries who are actively
firing these propaganda weapons into the psyche of Americans to try to warp their perception in a way that produces a result that doesn't benefit. anyone in the way that the people think it's going to benefit when they vote. I mean, that's the really sad thing to me. I don't mean to make it very cynical or anything like that, but it appears that... a vast amount of the money that we pay via taxes doesn't even go into the country. And so...
there is something really sinister about that. But I think it's good, like if you're out there and your friend's gone nuts and you've been getting ear beatings. I think this is where you kind of find a place to be compassionate with people because no one in the history of humanity... that I'm aware of. There's never been a time where this much propaganda from so many different sources has been injected into the consciousness of people. Yeah, and it's interesting because...
You walk around and maybe it's me projecting. Maybe it's me spending too much time on X or whatever it is. But I just feel like there's an edge. There's an edge. You know why you think that? Because you're a racist fucking Nazi. You know what I mean? That's why. And no, there is an edge. And it's an edge. And there should be an edge. The edge is happening because... There's a ghost story being told. We have two incredible storytellers. This is whoever's running these campaigns.
They're good at telling stories. This is how you sell a product. You tell a story about it, you know, whatever the thing is. You ever seen The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Zizek? You ever seen that? No. Oh, it's so funny. It's good. but you know he's like out in the desert or something with a coca-cola but a can of coke and he drinks it and he's just like It's not very good if it's not cold. It's just this sweet shit that if it's cold, it's okay. But look at a Coca-Cola commercial.
They they the story they tell about coca-cola at least in this commercial is that you are gonna have a peak experience They're trying to pair this. I think it's the one he shows is like a rave or something I mean it is the greatest night of somebody's life and they're drinking coke You bring these two things together and now instead of just having some syrupy brown shit that tastes good when it's cold, nice with whiskey.
You've got like the key to liberation, freedom, your true self, actualization, getting laid. And so that's the story that you do when you're doing branding. And so you've got, when you hear about the money that pours into these. campaigns on both sides and the donations the money from corporations the money coming in from unknown sources all of that money goes to
cooking up a story, a big story and little stories week to week. And those are ghost stories that we're being told right now. The story is one of peril, one of apocalypse. Both sides are telling the same story. And the story is, this is the end of America.
If this person gets elected, say goodbye to everything you've known. Well, by the time people are watching this, one of the two people has been elected. We don't yet know how the elections turned out as we're recording this. So the America is over. Yeah, the irony is people are like listening to this in nuclear waste Well, they need entertainment, right? Yes, but I thought you made a really interesting point right at the beginning and I've been thinking about this a lot which is
You know, some people will be like, what do you mean the most propaganda ever? What about the Soviet? What about Nazi Germany? But actually, in terms of quantity, there's never been a time when somebody would have been consuming... Propaganda of one kind or another for like eight hours a day, which is what most people now do. Yes in the 30s Yes, there was a lot of brainwashing going on but sure how was the radio? Maybe a little bit of television starting to come through, right? Newspapers. Yeah.
What would a normal person do? They'd pick up a newspaper in the morning. They'd glance through a few headlines. They'd maybe have the radio on while they're making dinner or something. By the time TV comes along, you'd maybe watch an hour or two of TV before you go to bed, right? Nowadays...
That whole, you're getting eight, 10 hours. And as you say, it has been very carefully, not just made and designed, but it's been selected by an algorithm that knows exactly what you like and more importantly, exactly what you hate. That's right. yeah yeah exactly and the other reason it's completely different is because um though i do think throughout since the invention of the printing press People have read.
This or that. They called the news and thought, well, that is real. And if like in their own mind sort of simulated some version of the world based on the data they got from 2D space versus like data you get from 3D space. But I think the difference is that because, like you said, someone in the 30s, I mean, when you were walking around in the 30s, 40s, 50s. You would see people looking at their newspaper.
But you wouldn't be like in a conversation with somebody and they pull the newspaper out. They weren't getting alerts from their newspaper. Oh shit, breaking news. So you would, it was sort of modulated day to day. Every new issue. It sort of moved the story forward a little bit. Now we're getting stroboscopic news, and it's insidious news. And that's another important factor that people really need to understand is that...
Maybe you're at a cafe. You're in France in the 30s. And somebody comes and sits down with you and starts talking about Germany. Starts talking about whatever the news is of the day. One thing that will not cross your mind is, is this a robot? And the other thing that's happening is because we've begun to equate our interactions online with this being actual community. And also we've all made the normal human assumption that the people we're talking to are not.
Large language models are not AI's are not robots It's way more insidious because it's not only I mean sure there were there's always been shells There's always been People who during a protest will instigate and make the protest turn violent. That's a classic technique. But the idea that you can create essentially. golems. You can create essentially these artificial intelligences that tune into key phrases, go into a thread.
derail the thread with an agenda and intent to point the thread in a different direction that matches your corporate goal or state goal is
brand new and incredibly insidious. And so it would be easy if you weren't attuned to what's happening in the world right now to... have an idea of reality completely separate from what reality actually is because the moment you start thinking 2d space in your phone matches 3d space then that means that the entire landscape of people's subjective universe could be completely warped.
transformed, changed by data wizards essentially who are just intentionally manipulating people without telling them. And there's no regulation for that. There's no regulation. There's no, like, why would it be that, like, if I, if you, like, you do an 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 that. It's illegal. You're in trouble.
So why would it be that if you are a volunteer for a political organization or for a state entity fulfilling some goal, some state political corporate agenda via like information?
that you don't have to have on there you're getting paid by this group of people it's not that seems like something that should be regulated way before you start trying to regulate i'm not saying regulate speech i'm saying identify corporatists or statists who are spreading propaganda so that at least people can understand that whatever they're hearing might have an agenda to it other than what the person is like.
stating right and foreign bots especially or foreign foreign organizations and other countries that are really trying to do a lot of that and you just see how much i'm sure people have always been like this but it just feels like There's such a lemming effect. Like during the election, we saw, you know, Tony Hinchcliffe opens with some jokes at a Trump rally. And it's front page news. A comedian made some jokes. Right.
This is front page news in a country that's got massive economic problems, it's got an immigration border, all kinds of shit, healthcare, like we can go down the list of actual real issues. comedian made some jokes at a rally. Well, you know, I think if you think of it more in terms of like a ball has landed in some nice, soft, wet grass and a dog sees the ball, grabs the ball and runs with it. So...
When you consider that this... those jokes like if so like if you're looking to sort of it seems like the angle that they're they're taking right now the ghost story they're telling is that half of our country is fascist garbage. Half of the country doesn't care about the environment. Half of the country are compassionless beasts, monster. I mean, the President of the United States said they're garbage.
So this is the picture you're wanting to paint. Not just because you... You're not looking for the garbage monster vote. The garbage is already voted. What you're looking to do there is alienation. So the idea would be, do you really want to be garbage? Do you really want to be like... Part of a fascist neo-fascist American movement if you're on the fence If you're on the fence, how could you even be on the fucking fence?
Well, you are a fascist if you're on the fence. If you're on the fence, you're a fascist. And so what you're hoping to do there is like any outliers, anybody who's like somehow still undecided, you want to shame them into the correct. And so to do that, you want to paint half of the country as either sort of fascists, pre-fascists, idiots, gullible fools taken in by a maniacal... psychopath and um
Then Tony does this joke, which if you've ever gone to any comedy show, if you've ever seen Tony roast anybody, it's just like a basic roast joke, you know, non-complex, simple. And in Kill Tony, it would do good. Whatever. If you know Tony, as we do, one of the sweetest people you've ever met. I'm sorry if that fucks up your thing, Tony, but he's so...
Nah, he's a cunt. No, he's not. Listen, we're gonna save his reputation. Yeah, he's a little demon, a little demon. He murders, he murders like small animals in the green room and laughs. paints his face with their blood but so so that's probably a protected characteristic by now lack of religion of some sort man the main thing is I think if you like
Zoom out a little bit. If you zoom out just a little bit and look at a few different aspects of what happened. One thing is like, this got the ball and the dog in this case is the DNC propaganda.
the arm of the DNC that wanted, that this helps them confirm via some kind of, I don't know what the philosophical, and I always hate it when people like... or like that's an ad hominem attack but what is it a red herring or something like basically you take four minutes of stand-up from a roast comedian known for that And then you apply that to the entire, half the country must be like that, and that's who they really are.
Well, it's ridiculous. I mean, and it's also like very condescending to all sides of the argument. It's very condescending that you expect an irrational, logical adult to imagine that because a comedian who on any show you don't... want to go first.
But at a Trump political rally to follow the fucking national anthem and try to do stand-up? Oh, this is like a fever dream. This is something you wake up from screaming if you're a comedian. But regardless, to take that and then you... that is a as a way to paint entire groups of people many of which are Latino people as being fascists or whatever is just I think fairly irrational and incredibly sad and doesn't do...
Anything for the greater good if you ask me it just perpetuates a ghost story and it asks people to ignore their rational mind and so that to me is the main thing I think that If you really want to cut to the core of why everyone's acting so weird right now, it's because both sides of the fence...
seem very comfortable in inviting us to disregard our rational mind. And this is what they do in any cult. In any cult, that part of you that is still, what do they call it, the small, the still quiet voice, that part of you. they want to encourage you to stifle that and because that voice will say things that go if you're on the right it'll say things that might go against what the right wants you to think or what you equate with team right
If you're on the left, that voice starts speaking up. You want to suppress it because you don't want to be a Nazi. You want to be a good person. And on the right, you don't want to be a global elite. Pedophile. Right? So on both sides, you're being invited to disregard what is the most important aspect of being human and what makes you not an animal. And then...
You factor in, it's not just politically, but people, when they're in their family situations, when they're with friends, even with relationships, they're going, well, I can't say what I really think because I know that they will alienate this person. And then my relationship's going to end.
My family are going to hate me. We saw this time and time again with people essentially cutting off ties with family members because of Brexit, the vaccine, Trump. And you're going, this is lunacy. The most important thing that you have. is connection is your family all your loved ones that's right and and your community and and and really like you sort of what ends up happening here is the classic set of conditions for
A cult. So if you're wanting to... Or an abusive relationship. Both abusive relationships are incredibly similar to cults, actually. Which is, you want to isolate. You want to...
You want to essentially replace this person's subjective experience of reality with a simulated... experience of reality you're telling them i mean this is the classic orwell what is it one plus one is three one plus two plus two is five two plus two is five that's actually it's one plus one is three yeah he was wrong uh but you Yeah, so, so, so...
That is what is going on. And the last thing that you want, if you're trying to cast this subjective distortion spell on somebody, the last thing that you want is for them to go to their friend and be like, hey dude. Two plus two is five, actually. Because their friends are like, what the fuck are you talking about? Who told you that? Oh, this guru that I met told me two plus two is five. Well, he's an idiot. It's...
Everyone knows 2 plus 2 is 3. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. So, of course you would want to make people... uh turn their backs on their families on their loved ones on anyone other than whatever the particular team is that you're a part of. And you want them to do that not because you give a fuck about them. You want them to do that because you can't successfully execute the propaganda campaign if they have anybody outside of the Galapagos.
island of data that you're trying to create to produce these mutant, statist, propagandized people. And that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous and sad and scary. But also, the other problem is that there's so many people right now who are looking at the left or looking at the right. And they're saying oh what the fuck is wrong with these idiots? How do you get so brainwashed? Are you out of your fucking mind? Don't you understand?
that you are supporting the military industrial complex? Don't you understand you're gonna get people killed? Don't you understand they don't give a fuck about you? You get mad. But it's like, man. These people, and this is where it gets so sad, these people legitimately want the world to be better. These are people who have kindness, compassion in them.
They have humanist ideals. Maybe some of it's utopian humanism. Maybe some of it's idiot compassion. But their compassion impulse, that basic human impulse to help, has been hijacked by the state. and warped in this terrible way where the idea is we only are compassionate to people within this zone. To be compassionate to that person is to collude. with a Nazi? Were you going to be compassionate with Hitler?
Or, oh really? So you're gonna be compassionate with some trans pedo? That's who you're gonna be compassionate to? I guess you're fucking one of them. They deserve nothing more than rejection. You know what I mean? Both sides, the language that gets used, all of it is warped distortions that have nothing to do with legitimate direct encounters with human beings. And so in that, we are robbed of our ability.
to express compassion universally. And in that, we have been essentially taken over by demonic i don't think it's literally demonic but i would say like if like in a fantasy book if there was something that could get in your head and make you think that not everyone deserves compassion only the people who agree with you then you're a demon possessed person i was looking at the tony joke situation
And I was thinking, do you think part of the reason we get so inflamed by a joke, because the people wouldn't do it if we didn't react, is because it's such a small, simple thing. And the solution... To a lot of people, it's very easy. We cancel the comedian, it goes away. Whereas it's far more difficult to get... angry and enraged about an issue that is more complicated because it's not simple. It's more nuanced. So therefore what we can all do is channel our rage, channel that demonic rage.
at a figure like Tony because it's simple. He made a racist joke. Destroy him. Okay, yeah. I would say this. Picture this. I'm going to invent a fantasy creature, okay? Picture this. There's a creature. The creature, I don't know, I'm into Elden Ring, I'm picturing it like an Elden Ring style creature. It's really creepy, a big dark robe with lots of weird spindly arms that stick out of it, right? Now, what this creature does...
is the moment that people realize that's a fucking monster. One of those spindly arms produces a brand new mask that it pokes out of its robe and it brings the mask over here and people start attacking the fucking mask like a matador. style, like, you know, the weird red thing that bulls apparently hate. So this, if I can do this and make people just cut off my appendages that regrow instead of attacking me, the monster.
then I can avoid people attacking me. So I would say what you're looking at in all forms of this, and I think it's really important to understand that. It is simple. It isn't complex. The thing wants to seem more complex than it actually is. But I think you have to base everything on actual value. What has real value in the world? What has value in the world?
I think what has real value in the world, and people will mock this and jeer at me or whatever, I would say an important good thing is to try to reduce the number of... babies that get blown up i don't think you should argue with that if people do argue with that like if like we're sitting down like okay what do we work on first let's try not to blow up as many babies and someone's like you know what actually i think we need to we need to start dealing more with like
emissions then like directly stopping the explosion of innocent babies that person's like got their priorities mixed up like we got to deal with like the basic violence that goes along when with um having A military industrial complex that is being funded by taxpayers to execute. things overseas that that I'm not sure directly benefit the people who are paying for the fucking thing to me that's the main thing and I don't care
Who is behind the wheel? I think we have to first look at that. We have to stop this war situation. We have to stop blowing people up. We have to stop killing people. All the other socialist stuff, capitalist stuff, libertarian stuff aside, they're just a basic... connection to humanity that feels like it's been lost a little bit in the alleged complexity, which doesn't seem very complex to me.
You know, you ever read Diogenes? No. So he had this idea of, there's a lot of critiques against him. He was a cynic. Diogenes... I guess I'll lead with the bad shit he did. He would jerk off in publishing. So he's a comedian. Diogenes would jerk off in publishing. And he had a great saying about that because obviously people complain. He said, if only I could deal with my hunger by rubbing my belly.
how great that would be you know he was a funny guy but he was also loved by alexander the great and he was a great great philosopher who uh called himself a cosmopolite he thought the It's important to no longer identify with the state country of origin, but rather to recognize that you are a citizen of planet Earth, not in some hippie cheesy way, but literally.
We are on a planet that we all share together. But also the Greek roots of that could also mean literally the galaxy. So this fixation on the... Identity as being localized within the state or city or country creates a distortion in what we actually are which is we are born onto a planet with borders created by people we'll never meet or dead and within these borders you have cultural sort of
You have traditions within these borders. And these traditions, that's what Diogenes was mocking. He was like, he was saying this is... absolutely insane that we are fighting over these traditions and ways of being that don't reflect nature, which was his. big thing was to harmonize with nature and which is why alexander the great loved him and there's so many awesome stories about like
the many disses he gave to power, like Alexander the Great encounters him on the road. These could be all myth, but supposedly Alexander the Great says to him, I will give you anything you want. Whatever you want, I will give you. This is a great emperor. And he said, can you move a little to the left? You're blocking my son. And, you know, this was his big fuck you to power. Yeah. And that fuck you to power, that...
Fuck you to the peacocking pomposity of people who have established themselves as the shepherds of humanity who wear their costumes and parade about. with their proclamations regarding what we need, that we depend on them. This paternalistic fucking relationship with humanity. That is what needs to be rejected. And it is that paternalistic, hierarchical relationship with hypnotic power mongers that is causing all the problems. They're not our daddy.
You'll never meet them. Why is Donald Trump acting like our dad? Why is Kamala Harris acting like our drunk fucking stepmom? We don't need them. That's the bottom line. We need each other directly around us, the people here. And it's not fucking Kamala Harris. wasn't the one setting up tables of fucking food in North Carolina when all the shit got washed away. Donald Trump wasn't out there fucking hauling lumber.
You know what I mean? And I don't think we should expect either of them to do that. I'm just saying they're not the ones coming to save you. It's your neighbors who you're going to when the power goes out. And people have forgotten that. And people are turning to the state and some... desperate, pathetic hope that the state is going to rescue them from some perceived threat. They don't know their fucking neighbors' names. Like, come on, man. Get your priorities straight. But...
Isn't the problem the fact that we've disempowered people, Duncan? We've disempowered people and now people feel that the only way that they can be safe is to give up what little power and agency they have. to the government who will come and protect them. And, I mean, COVID was the perfect example of this. People were so willing to give up autonomy, to give up their power, to give up freedom, if it meant that they could be given this thing called safety, which...
actually didn't really exist anyway. Well, I think I love Carl Jung, and I think if you look at these big social movements as the projection of the collective shadow, COVID's fantastic, because what was the instruction with COVID? Social... distancing. COVID, if the goal is to separate us from our neighbors and make us latch onto the state like that poor monkey that like...
Did you ever see that terrible experiment with a wire monkey? Oh, it's the most fucked up fucked up thing. I hate it so much They take this little monkey away from its mama. They give it a wire monkey. It's got like They used like bicycle reflectors for its eyes, made it kind of look like a monkey. This poor little monkey baby, it would rather cling to this fake ass wire monkey than food.
Because they just thought that was his mommy. And so if like what we're looking at here is some kind of movement to disconnect people. from the actual joy of being human, which is connecting with others, and then connect with the state, then COVID, it was a perfect way to do that.
You had to cover your face. You had to distance from people. You had to fucking hate people who didn't wear the mask or hate people who did wear the fucking mask. It created these bizarre teams and the craziest team outfits you've ever seen. What did it do? It separated us. It separates, separates, separates, separates. And any time you see an invitation to disconnect from this group or that, or separated from this group or that, or most importantly, to not forgive.
then you should be very suspicious because that is serving the purpose of creating a fragmented planetary civilization, and that can only lead to aggression, violence, and suffering. And that is not political. That is not a political statement. Sure. Give me one minute to tell you about Senalytics and why they're being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. As a middle-aged man... Middle-aged man? Who wrote this script?
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for an extra 15% off your purchase. Thanks Aqualia for sponsoring today's episode. Do you think... How realistic do you think it is for us to overcome that? Because, you know, I don't know if you read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. He talks about why human homo sapiens... became the dominant species of hominids on planet earth and the reason is that they out-competed other types of humans effectively and the reason was that they were able to build tribes that went beyond
100 the dumb bar number 150 people or so yeah, and the reason they were able to do this is that According to Harare is that they built these shared myths Mm-hmm nation country yeah money all of these things that aren't real as you say we're just a bunch of you know animals living on a planet but we've drawn these arbitrary lines over which we frequently fight and so yeah right on the one hand
So it's all arbitrary on the one hand. On the other hand, it is how we evolved. Yeah. And so we are tribal creatures. Yeah. And I wonder whether realistically... we ever have a choice about whether we are tribal. My thinking to date has been, and I'm obviously open to change my opinion on it, has been that... Ultimately, you can't overcome the tribal nature of our evolutionary history. And so what you can do is find the right unit of tribalism, right?
When I look at America or our country in the UK, what I see is that we went from kind of like, we're English, we hate the French, which was like, good. Right. That kind of work. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Oh, I am a, you know, African-American, I'm a this American, I'm Latino, I'm this, I'm that, whatever. And suddenly, instead of being a United States of America, we've now become... you know in the uk and here the divided states within itself so rather than focusing on external threats
Which, by the way, we may wish that they weren't there and all man was one and all of that, but they are there. Like the Chinese aren't sitting around taking psychedelics and going, you know, how do we chill out? I wouldn't be surprised if they were taking psychedelics. I mean, I think the idea that you give psychedelic... to a fascist and suddenly they're like peaceful as madness.
That whole, like, give Kim Jong-un some mushrooms and everything that we find, that's fucked up. He's going to launch the nukes right away. I've been on mushrooms. They don't tell me to love everybody. And if I had access to a nuclear arsenal, I got paranoid enough. I might fire a couple of ICBMs. So that's what I'm saying, right? So we do have people who want to take things away, to fight, to challenge, etc. So is it that...
we should be heading towards some kind of, I would argue, utopian vision where everyone is like all one and whatever? Or is it just that we've become tribalized along the wrong lines? That's cool. You know, man, I would refer you to like Buckminster Fuller. Have you ever read, what's it called? Something like Manual for Spaceship Earth. It's really cool, but...
So he, I don't know what he would say about that book you were citing, but he talked about sort of the evolution of human beings from... living on land and becoming a seafaring civilization he talked about how like you know you're born into whatever part of the world there's no satellites airplanes trains you've got maybe horses but your your world is going to be the circumference of that which
be explored by foot or by horse. Once you get to the ocean, that's it, baby. It's done. It's like the wall in the video game that you can't walk past. And suddenly we figure out a way to navigate the oceans. He called those people the first the great pirates so the the the people who began the explorers of renown were also pirates and This is where
we got into territorial expansion. Now what's happening is the circumference of the subjective world that people were living in was beginning to slowly grow. It was growing now past the... area that you had been living in to the ocean and getting bigger than that. Eventually we realize the earth is round. It's not flat.
We're on a round fucking thing. So every time those kinds of things happen, global consciousness shifts. And he points out the moment we got a picture of Earth from space, now there's no way to deny it, to argue with it. We are living... on the same thing it's a planetary civilization that we are currently living on a very divided planetary civilization but if you were to look at the if you were to look down on planet earth and just spin the globe if you could do that
I mean, if you could actually do that, it would destroy the planet, I guess. But if you did that, and you're looking at Dubai, New York, Moscow, Israel, and just looking at it, not understanding anything about the... the cultures there or the laws there, the leaders there, it all kind of looks like the same ant's nest, right? It kind of looks like the same thing. You might be astounded to find out that people who are getting in their car and driving in the pulsation.
of traffic that happens every morning and night according to where the planet is rotating in accordance to the sun. You might be astounded to think that each one of those people thought they were doing something different. You look down and see what's going on. You would see a clear like a clock you know with the inner workings of a fucking clock this pulsing of life that is just completely based on the solar cycle and you would be astounded to imagine that people on one side of the planet
at any given moment might launch nuclear missiles at people on the other side of the planet because they were so very different from them. That would be astounding. Now, from Buckminster Fuller's perspective, because it was the... early explorers or pirates who were the conquerors and who created the areas that we call countries.
And obviously they weren't all sailors. Many of them were like, I don't think Genghis Khan ever got in a fucking boat, did he? I don't know, maybe. But the point being, the conquering mentality... And it's what became our laws. It became the legal system. In America, you know, the first, quote, democracy was pirate ships. They were democratic. They were diverse.
They were. They didn't give a fuck. And they would vote. And so what ended up happening is like maritime law, basically pirate code became encoded within a lot of the... um systems the legal systems of these countries and so buck mr fuller was saying we are now living on a planet we know it is a planet we know it's one thing But the way we are executing life on this planet is with pirate code based on...
a complete lack of understanding of the system that they were actually on. And this is why we are having so many problems right now is because we don't know how to adapt to the reality of living on a planet. And I'm not talking about hierarchical.
top-down, one-world government antichrist systems where the new world order controls the mind of the people and there is no more freedom. I'm talking about that at all. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about... of fundamental connection with reality, which is you live on a planet that has been here for what? what is it, 5, 3.8 billion years? Something like that. A very old planet. You live on a very old planet that has...
a set of laws according to these imaginary boundaries drawn by conquerors that vary from place to place, but essentially result in the same damn thing. A lot of skyscrapers, cities, cars going around, 40-hour work weeks. some various forms of slavery, human bondage, justification of hyper-violence based on these boundaries. And it might be...
that the reason that's happening is because of a distortion in our ability to comprehend what is actually going down. And you're not going to have to state. is not going to tell you that. No president is going to come out and be like, hey, guys, we're all on one planet. And I agree with you, because we're all on one planet.
Doesn't fucking mean. It's like saying, well, we all live in one house. There's a dude with a hatchet over there. So we should just love that guy who might come swinging at us at any given moment. Saying the move is some irrational. embrace of people who are an existential threat. That's called idiot compassion. But I think the first step would be to shake off any propaganda that's given you a sense that you aren't a planetary citizen, that you aren't.
that your birthright isn't being an earthling. Throw that off. Don't be afraid. It's kind of scary to do. You feel dirty just to say, I'm not an American. I am an American. I love this country. I really do. But also... All of us, we are planetary. We live on a planet. And then, this is a sort of universal, all one perspective. Now that's called...
eternalism when it gets out of balance. If you get too caught up in that wooshy-washy, woo-woo-y bullshit, then what are you going to do when the taxman comes? He doesn't give a fuck that you think you're a planetary citizen. You can go fuck yourself. I'm taking your house, your car. I don't give a fuck. This is ridiculous. It's eternalism when it gets imbalanced. Also, on the other side, you have when it gets imbalanced is nihilism. All we are is...
Just like our country, our state, this planet, we're just matter. We're like the universe malfunctioned and atoms coalesced together in some horrific amalgam that produced the... awful disease of consciousness with an immortal body. What can be more torture than that? Now that's nihilism. So I think the goal is to find a way to connect these two things together in a real...
moment to moment way. Instead of trying to fix the problems of the planet, I'm gonna wake everybody up, we all have to realize we're planetary citizens. I'm gonna bring world peace. I think it's like my friend Jack Hornfield says, tend to the part of the garden you can touch. You know, go micro, go small. What around you needs help right now? It's all that matters.
That's it. You aren't going to bring peace to the Middle East. You are not going to solve the Ukrainian-Russian crisis. You are not going to stop us from blowing each other up. That's never going to happen. And by you, I mean the individual. But collectively, ground level, micro acts of compassion would theoretically change everything.
And it would happen very quickly, in fact. You know, it's a really profound point you make because I remember when I was teaching, there'd be, in every school, there'd be one or two teachers. who would transform kids' lives. Like a kid would come in to their class and a year later you'd come out and they'd seem like a fundamentally different human being. They'd come in hating maths or hating English. I can't do this.
And you'd see the child transform. So if you think that one person can do that for, what, 30 kids? Yeah. Over a career? Yeah. I mean, that's thousands of people. that's right so if one person can do that then and they've made that commitment then maybe we can't do it to that many people but we can certainly do it to double digit triple figure triple digit people numbers of people oh
And this is where you get into the disempowered thing you're talking about. This is the, I mean, if you exist within the system, which is the, you are inside an infinite system. And within you is another insane system when you consider like the... perfect harmonization of this your cells your biological internal universe and then you consider the atomic universe in the subatomic universe and there you are like on the outside of the bubble in another bubble it's
profound to be part of this thing at all i mean and so that i think the first step is recognition of what you actually are within the system that you're actually within as much as you're capable will re-empower you right away Because you begin to see, holy shit, man. I like, think how long it takes erosion to like make a, to change a landscape. Give me a fucking shovel.
I can do a thousand years of erosion in a minute, no problem. And that's being human. We can do that. It's incredible. Not just what we could do to be a landscaping, but when you... Look at the historic precedent for people who have absolutely completely transformed the cultural technological landscape that we're living in. You realize these ideas emerge in the minds of people like Nicola. Tesla, Karl Marx, you name it.
For better, for worse, these ideas come into a human mind and get articulated in some form or fashion that produces ripples that we are experiencing to this very day. People long dead. and you are one of them you are running the same nervous system you are running the same oh you're not maybe not the same os you're running you got the same basic system
So you should feel empowered because you're sitting in the same kind of body Genghis Khan was sitting in, Mahatma Gandhi was sitting in, Martin Luther King was sitting in, you go on and on and on. Buddha, Muhammad, all of them had a body. Maybe they had different...
operating systems who knows but that's you you the individual you the person he doesn't mean go megalomaniacal about it but for god's sake in a world where we all are walking around like deflated balloons we're walking around feeling all guilt and bad and scared and I can't do anything to help anything. If I'm gonna help something, I gotta help the whole fucking planet. It's like no one ever talks about Buddha's great-grandmother. You never hear that.
You never hear about Buddha's great-great-grandmother. You never hear about the person who like, I don't know, like invited Buddha's great-grandmother to some kind of lunch where she met Buddha's great-great-grandfather. And they bang that night. You know what I mean? You never hear about that. But now we have the Buddha. You only hear about the fucking Buddha. And it's like, if you were interacting within the system...
You are participating in a system that inevitably produces people like Jesus, the Buddha. This system produces that. And that is not woo-woo. That is, you can look in history and see. And you are participating in that system. Meaning that, theoretically, you could be one tiny drop of sand. You could be one tiny drop of sand on the scales that shifted to producing the next Buddha. They happen here. They show up and shit changes for the better. Sometimes for the worse.
but you know that is very exciting to me that's a really cool thing and that transcends politics that transcends some transient temporary propaganda machine. And people, I hope that more people recognize that and that you don't have to be the one. Do you really want to be Jesus? Like, look at how he ended up.
All these motherfuckers want to be Jesus. I wouldn't want that. I wouldn't be nailed to a cross, stabbed with a spear. I don't want to get assassinated like Gandhi. You don't want to be that. But if you could, I wouldn't mind being part of what produces a thing that brings... the alleviation of suffering or a mind that is like able to articulate some way of living that unifies our planet in a nonviolent way. That would be cool.
What I really like about you, Duncan, and I see it in your stand-up, is that you're very pro-human. You're very... You talk about... you know the wonder of having kids yeah and it seems to me and part of what i realize in myself is i i contend if i'm not mentally balanced or stable at that particular time. He hasn't taken his meds. I'm fucking bashing back with some whiskey, mate. But luckily I have for this interview. But I guess...
One of the things that I find really sad is as a culture, we become anti-child, anti-human. And that to me is a civilization. where something is going disastrously wrong. You're so right. You're so right. It is really dismaying. You know... I got lucky enough to be on a show with Bill Burr. And we were backstage with Rogan shooting the shit. And it had come on the news that they'd figured out something like child blood.
Transfusions could actually maybe reverse the aging process. We're just talking about that. And Bill Burk goes, tough time to be a kid. But I do feel like it's a tough time to be a kid. And the reason I think is because we're putting like profit over. Like over humanity, like making a profit seems to be the goal. And so what ends up happening there is. This bizarre hierarchy appears within which the mother is reduced to like a kind of antiquated form, a sort of a...
Appendix of the system that you would stay home and raise your kids. You should get into the corporate world You got to get out there Make some fucking money, dual earning household. Let's get fucking rich. We'll take our kids, put them in fucking daycare. You can go in the cubicle. You can go in the bathroom and like pump your breast milk and then the baby can have breast milk. To me, that is a real devaluing of something. And it's really fucked up because how do we quantify motherhood?
in other words like you know like imagine if your mother At the end of your life, like, wrote you a bill. At the end of your life, like, how much would a mother charge? What's the value of a mother? Like, we know what minimum wage is, but they also grew in their womb. Capitalism and motherhood don't seem to go very well together because how do you quantify unconditional love and destroying your pussy for a fucking thing that's going to call you a...
because you don't let him go smoke weed at a fucking slumber party. It's like there's no way to like quantify. I don't know the economic metric for this. And so what ends up happening again is propaganda. that like that the idea being like I want to I want to get people working Not working because having a kid and being a mom that's doesn't count as work That's something different
Almost like a vacation. And the implication when there is some shaming of mothers because they want to be stay-at-home moms is the implication is, look, being a mom is a part-time fucking job. You know what I mean? It's a dilution of what is in anyone who's been around a fucking mom, three kids. It's just like being the center of a vortex of life. It's a constant need, constant, you have to be there. And then you add to that that.
You were invited to leave your kids at daycares and shit. You know what I mean? It's like everyone like bashes communism. They talk about they want to take the kids away. Let the state raise the kids. And that's true, I think. I think they actually did want to do that. They did.
Do that I was raised in a communist society where that happened with me they would take oh, I know I would go to Nursery I'd like before I was one There you go, right and the nursery you're getting state propaganda, right the nursery you're getting communist propaganda I think one, I don't think they...
I don't think they bothered at that. There wasn't any saluting of the flag. They weren't trying hard enough. No, no. There was no Hammond signal there. You know, one-year-olds love communism. Yeah, they do. No, they fucking don't. Kids hate communism. My kids don't want to share shit. I love...
Give my kids to be fucking communist. That'd be incredible. I gotta buy two, everything for these boys. It'd be incredible if they could share. I should give them Karl Marx. But so this in the- Two-year-olds are fucking hard to indoctrinate, aren't they? Dude, I am- not been able to. It's impossible. And it is really difficult. Elrond Hubbard's a wonderful person. I think we can do it. You drop your kids off at daycare. Now, this is different from communism.
Because they go to daycare and they're not getting some communist indoctrination. I don't know what they're getting, like Blippi or something. But if we look, again, if you look at it, if you zoom out enough, it's the same goddamn thing for an economic system. You're leaving your children with somebody else. And so to me, yeah, this is a really sad thing. And it's a really sad thing when...
The fashionable attitude right now is... antinatalism is like all over the fucking place it seems to be some kind of like it's running rampant at least in the blogosphere which I don't think is real necessarily but There's a general sense that to have a child is to hate the earth, that to have a child is to either wish... For the child to experience just a hellscape style playing it or the carbon emissions from that kid's...
Fucking macaroni and cheese farts is gonna be the last nail in the coffin for the ice caps I Know it's crazy man, but also there's so much you talk about propaganda if you think about your point about motherhood um there's so much propaganda in that area where like my wife spent a period of time just being at home with our son and there's very few people who will be like That's a great thing to have done.
A lot of people are like, oh, oh, you're a stay-at-home mother. Oh, is that it? And that's crazy. But also we know from all the polling that most women would like the opportunity to be with their kids if they can. Of course. Of course. But at the same time, especially if a man like you or me comes along and goes, well, maybe we should, you know, think about how we arrange society too.
make that available and goes what you want to chain women back to the radiator where they've been all their evolution and and so there's a kind of proper propaganda war over women's minds that's going on and a lot of women have
Internalize that propaganda and they are the ones that are the front of anyone who says guys guys Maybe this isn't working out, right? Yeah. Well, I mean I think that Any kind of social experiment Has like real risks any kind of utopian vision of the world or something like that has incredible risks and You know I've heard this. I don't know if it's true. I'll probably mispronounce it. I've heard that the actual word for Hinduism is Sanat and Dharm, which means the eternal way. And so...
You sort of just look at the world. You look at like, what does it mean to live in balance with the world? What does that look like? I mean, we're talking like for thousands of years. What does that look like? What would be the best way? And certainly... for the majority of human history, at least as far as I'm aware, and if I am wrong about this, I hope people will tell me.
There isn't a lot about dropping your kids off at a fucking daycare. You know what I mean? There isn't a lot out there. And so, but I say, let's invite, I think again, like. When you really start thinking about this stuff, as what I think you two are, and I think most people are, is someone who wants less suffering in the world. You want to come up with the solution.
some way to fix this. And I don't think, I think if we're looking for that, that solution has to be encouraging people to connect with reality outside of the propaganda sphere and not be afraid to do that. In Buddhism, wisdom and compassion are the same thing. Like the understanding of emptiness or the understanding of the actual reality that we're living in.
spontaneously gives birth to compassion. Now, maybe I'm a naive fucking idiot, but I really do think that's true. And I think that's exciting because what that means, that can't be really controlled by propaganda. You don't need books for it. You don't need books. You don't need anything other than what you've got, what you're walking around in. And a little bit of courage to just for a second put all the propaganda up on a shelf.
and look around and ask yourself, what is this? What is really happening? Not symbolically in my mind, what I've been, not my set of... What are they called? Emoticons, emojis. Not my set of symbols that have been implanted in my mind to act as a filter between me and reality. But what is really happening here?
I think the more you start connecting with what's really happening, then you don't even need a long-term plan. Moment to moment, you find yourself making decisions that create a more novel. and fulfilling life. Duncan, it's been great having you on. We barely scratched the surface, to be honest. Thank you for having me. So let's do this again, man. You guys have such esteemed guests. I was nervous being on here, and I think... Yeah, you should have been. I was!
Look at how badly you fucked up. That's how you know you're a comedian. No, man, it was awesome to chat. Like I said, I think we only got... a little bit into it, but we'll continue. So it was great to meet you. Before we ask you questions from our supporters on Substack, the last question we always ask is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be?
Before Duncan answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to click the link in the description. It'll take you to our substack where you'll be able to see this. Do you think everyone needs to have a psychedelic experience before they die? She says, I have FOMO about it. Fear of missing out. 95% of comedians smoke marijuana. The other 5% aren't funny. Oh my god, I'm so glad they asked this question. You are. This is so good. Okay. Finally we can address this.
Quantum computers! That's all anyone should be fucking talking about right now. If you really want to find, and I don't mean to go sinister all of a sudden, but if you really want a line in the sand... where you can find a place not book of revelations but where the apocalypse is going to happen look into quantum computing and look into the reality in like five to eight years oh another thing
It's not AI, it's quantum computing. AI! Fuck! AI! And monkey pox. This makes monkey pox seem like chicken pox. We're talking about... of encryption as we know. We're talking we have five years. We have five to seven years. So imagine this. In five years, all car locks. Not gonna work anymore. Anyone who wants to get in a car and drive it around can they're just not gonna work anymore in five to seven years This is we have to replace all Carla. I'll go back to mechanical surely
What? We'll go back to mechanical locks then. Well, yeah, but the problem is how the fuck do we do that with encrypted data that has been sniffed up and vacuumed up already and exists in servers? Encrypted data that would take 7,000 years for a supercomputer.
to decrypt will take a minute for a quantum computer to do that. Meaning any data back in the, I don't know, 90s, when people were sending encrypted emails and making encrypted phone calls, I don't think they were thinking there's going to be... quantum computers that somehow are able to use super positioning to solve problems at the quantum level quantum computers where they it has to be the coldest thing in the universe just to fucking function it looks like
They got an HP Lovecraft story if you look at the damn things. No one thought that was coming. There, I think, are terabytes of encrypted data just sitting in servers with people waiting for quantum computers to catch up so they can decrypt it. Allstate secrets, anything that's been siphoned up, any encrypted data that anyone has that is just sitting somewhere in a hard drive. We're five to seven years away from whoever the fuck has access to these computers decrypting them.
All the secrets. All the secrets people will know. And so when you realize there's literally a, there's an hourglass right now. There's a ticking clock. We're on the other side of it. Anything you think is out there and you're like, well, you know, it's encrypted with this incredible technology that I barely understand. You better hope. The incognito mode is not going to cut it. What? Incognito mode on the browser is not going to cut it. No! Incognito mode don't.
is a wonderful, gives you a wonderful sense of security when you're jerking off to German foot fetish porn. Yeah. So I would say quantum computing is a really interesting thing to think about and also think about that it could be that timeline is wrong. And what happens if someone does achieve one of these quantum decryption computers? Why would they tell anybody? And if you look out at global events, I would say take a look at if you're seeing anything happening that...
seems like magic, that it just seems like some state knows where someone is at any given moment. That doesn't make any sense. You might ask yourself, do they have a fucking quantum computer? And, you know, I have no data on this. at all obviously i'm a rambling woo-woo comedian But man, I'm scratching my chin wondering, does Israel have a fucking quantum computer? You look back, they just opened up like a big quantum computing center out there. And then all of a sudden they've got...
pagers blowing up in people's pockets. They know where everybody is any given moment. Shit, man, it's worth looking into. It's worth thinking about. Like, that's going to change everything. So, yeah, I think we should be talking more about quantum computers. Well, you've just been disinvited, mate. All right. Head on over. to Substack where we ask Duncan your questions. Before Duncan answers the final question at the end of the interview make sure
To click the link in the description, it will take you to our sub stack where you'll be able to see this. It seems there are a few people out there who promote use of psychedelics. without considering the very real potential consequences. Why is this?