Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 337: Daniele Bolelli

Episode Date: May 18, 2019

**Daniele Bolelli**, historian, professor, fighter, and all-around saint joins the DTFH! This episode is brought to you by [BLUECHEW](https://www.bluechew.com/) (use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping).

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Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store, and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up, everywhere to go. JCPenney. You know, I was chatting with my dear, dear friend, Brendan Walsh, who's in Mensa, and we were talking a little bit

about our online habits at night. You know, there's a thing called Sleep Hygiene. If you haven't heard of it, it's the term related to how you should go to bed at night. And if you're a healthy person, most healthy people, what they do before they go to bed is they wrap their entire body in lavender bandages, leaving only their genitals exposed,

and then usually they have some kind of marsupial creature in the house who comes and lapsed slowly at their genitals until they have a mild orgasm, can't have too strong an orgasm, or you're gonna get excited and stay awake. You have a nice, mild sort of semi-shuttering orgasm, and then you fall asleep after the marsupial laps up your sprays.

But I don't do that. I go to, I put on sweatpants, usually in a T-shirt, and I lay in bed with my wife and I look at my phone, and she falls asleep before I do, usually. And then I go through a variety of news sources. I'm gonna start with Drudge Report. I head over to Reddit World News, then I head over to Reddit News.

Then I'll head over to Reddit WTF, and then sometimes I might take a quick little stop by popping, Reddit popping, and look at people popping zits and cysts, and then after that I'll go to rfort slash conspiracy and try to find a nugget of strangeness that my mind can feast on, and then I'll fall asleep and dream

about having sex with crocodiles. This is usually my pattern. It's the opposite of sleep hygiene, and I wouldn't recommend it for anyone, but during one of my explorations into Reddit conspiracy, I came upon a wonderful conspiracy theory, which is the idea that the thing that we understand as history is completely wrong,

and that a different history happened that has been hidden from us for various conspiratorial reasons. I don't believe this, by the way. I like it in the same way. I like Rosemary's Baby. Do I believe that somebody was the mother of the Antichrist? I don't know, but do I like watching Rosemary's Baby,

and if I watched Rosemary's Baby exactly 666 times? Yes, the answer is yes. You can enjoy a thing without believing in it at all, which is why I'm semi-bummed out about the current prohibition on access to conspiracy theories via the normal avenues. In the old days, you used to be able to go on YouTube, plug in flat earth,

and you would start just the most insane shit would start getting suggested to you by the AI, and you would go deeper and deeper and deeper until eventually you came to like a gang stalking video or something that was completely unintelligible, maybe like a zoom in on a foggy map with some guttural utterances happening, and that's what it used to be like,

but because the statistical probability is that if you put anything out there into the world and enough people look at it, some percentage of those people are going to be completely, completely out of their fucking minds, and of the ones that are gonna be out of their minds, there's some statistical probability

that one or two of them is gonna take whatever data they get and then do something with it, and we've seen the results of this, unfortunately, when a gunman shot at a pizza parlor. So, you know, how do we deal with the fact that we have so many different sorts of information out there and the statistical probability is that some people are gonna slurp that shit up

and it's gonna send them out into traffic jerking off onto fucking cars? I don't know, and luckily it's not my job because I don't run the internet, I'm not a politician, and I don't have to pretend like I know the answers, but I will say this, I am not gonna go into traffic and jerk off on cars unless it's for a very good reason and that good reason has come to me from YouTube.

But the main thing is I'm a connoisseur of conspiracy theories, I collect some people, they enjoy Greek mythology, some people love Norse mythology, some people love folklore, folktales, you know, there's, I don't, I got, my mind was melted with boredom once by I think a class I took where they talked about the jack tales of the Appalachian mountains. I have no offense to people who are into that shit,

it just isn't my thing. My thing is conspiracy theories and whenever I find a new one, I dive in and go as deep as I can and try to see how far it goes and who's attracted to it. And there's so many wonderful ones out there, if I was gonna recommend a few, the obviously the Mandela effect,

the idea that we're in an ever-schisming, cracking, fragmenting, multiverse and some of us are flipping into other multiverses is glorious and you can get lost in it for a long time. I went through a really wonderful hollow earth phase to the point where at like 3 a.m. I sent a text message to a, I think she was a Stanford professor, I'm not sure.

She never wrote back asking her, a geologist if the shit I'd been reading that maybe there's like hollow places and the earth was true. She didn't write, it was late at night, who could blame her? But my newest discovery, which we talk about on the podcast so I won't go too deeply into it is this idea of the hidden history

or the fact that there was a cataclysm that happened and it's been hidden from us intentionally by our keepers. Oh, it's a good one, really love it. Don't believe it at all, but I do love it. But I will say this, something today that emerged really has really freaked me out, as it should freak anyone out who's seen it, which is they duplicated my friend Rogan's voice

with some kind of AI and it's good. It did a good job, it does sound like him, like you can hear some kind of like distortion in it, just a tiny, tiny little bit of a distortion, but it sounds like him and it's so cool and so absolutely fucking nuts to examine the implications of what is down the road for us, which is that we all right now live in a time

where we feel like we have some autonomy over our self and over our personalities and whatever our particular way of being in the world is, everything that you do, the way you roller skate, if you're a roller skater, maybe you've figured out a way to do that backwards roller skate thing that fancy pants do at the roller rinks. Man, I will hate on those people all day fucking long, man.

Those people who are like so proud of their roller skating tactics and they roller skate backwards and do little spins and zips and flips and they've got like fucking roller skating outfits on and like their own personal kind of roller skates and like, I don't know, some kind of like special headwear and shit and I'll hate on them all day long and it's pure deep player hating.

Like I fucking am jealous is what I mean. I mean, I'm jealous like the worst kind of just little, little, little bitch because if I could do that, should I do it all day long? I'd wear headbands and rainbow shirts and fucking just zing around roller skating rinks, roller skating backwards and shaking my ass. If I'd done that, if I could have done that

when I was a kid, I don't know what would happen to me. I have my life would have gone in a completely different direction, but for a lot of people that's like their identity man, believe it or not, and it's the same with bowling golf, you know, you pick it, you name it, you're driving down the street and you look over, there's that guy in like a leather jacket

on his fucking motorcycle. Bah, bah, bah, he's so proud of the person in the Ferrari who's proud of their fucking car. Right now I'm proud of my fucking bike. It's got a Copenhagen wheel on it, it's an e-bike and I drive to a place I'm not allowed to talk about yet on that bike every day if it's not raining just about. And I'm proud of it in a gross way, not like a nice pride.

I'm like proud and embarrassingly egoic about it, like I get off on the fact that I can zing by cars that are stuck in traffic and I fantasize that they're jealous of me even though none of that is true and everyone's just trying to get home. It's just an embarrassment, it's embarrassing, that part of me, but it's like kind of a little bit of who I am, my modular synth, my podcast, my dogs,

my beard, all this stuff, my personality, it's like this is me. And so I don't know if you saw it, but this Rogan thing, they perfectly duplicated his voice. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with the superstitions of some indigenous people. And I'm not either except for like things that I've maybe seen in movies,

so it could be absolute bullshit. This might just be an urban myth, but supposedly there are some people out there don't want you to take their picture because they think it'll steal their soul. And I'm not gonna pat myself on the fucking back, all right? I'm not gonna pat myself on the back here, but ages ago, ages and ages and ages,

I don't think I'm Nostradamus, I'm just your basic, yappy stoner with some mild narcissism, okay? I don't think it's, so I'm not like, I don't mean to proclaim that I am a prophet sent here by the divine, but holy fucking shit. Quite some time ago, I did have a vision, my friends, my sweet, sweet, beautiful children come gather

and sit before my tucket while I teach thee and perfume your brow with my sweat. If you wanna touch my feet, you can. I had a vision that at some point, AI would duplicate us. In fact, it probably wasn't my vision, I'm sure I read it somewhere and then decided I had invented it in my own head.

Probably Ray Kurzweil said this, who fucking cares, who said it doesn't matter anymore, that's the point. Because copyright, property, intellectual property, the meat and potatoes of how the entertainment business works has always been based on the, that there were certain people who have very special takes on reality.

These were the writers or the announcers or whatever. And Jesus fucking Christ, you know, I'm like sort of rolling my eyes at the impending AI apocalypse. Oh yeah, well that sucks. I'm sorry the fucking Uber drivers are gonna be out of a job. I'm sorry the accounts are gonna be out of the job. I'm sorry the lawyers are gonna be out of a job.

I'm sorry that the factory workers are gonna be out of a job, but boy, there's always gonna be a need for podcasters, comedians, people with an interesting take and you know, quirky folk who figured out a way to get their stuff out there and be funny. And man, wow, it's a strange, swooning feeling to realize that even that's gonna go away.

They're just gonna duplicate us. That's what I'm saying. I don't know the terms of services I fucking signed. Do you know how many terms of services I've signed when I've signed up for various video games and online services? I don't know what shit I said yes to when I got my iPhone. I just scroll down and go, yeah, sure, whatever.

You wanna put a cookie in my fucking thing? Go ahead, put three cookies up there. That's how I like it. Three cookies in my browser, baby. Shove them in, fucking fist my browser with your cookies. Monitor, watch, gather my data, take my bio rhythms. I don't care. I wanna read the fucking story about the Loch Ness Monster

appearing in goddamn Mississippi. I'll give you whatever you want. But man, it's just wild to think that what they're gonna do and they might wait till we're dead, but what they're gonna do is resurrect us. Holy fucking shit. You know, like, let me explain. We all know the various stories about the end of the world,

you know, and especially like the Judeo-Christian story that Trumpet blows, the dead rise, there's a final day of judgment. And you know, if you're like a literalist and you've probably haven't spent much time thinking about, like, well, I hope that when the dead rise, their skin grows back and they're fucking, that whatever clothes they were wearing when then,

what happens if you died naked? Like, is there gonna be a lot of like naked, freshly resurrected, very confused people from the 1200s wandering around? What happens if you're like buried in a mountain or something? What about the people who fell into the dams when they were building the great dams?

Like all the dead bodies in the concrete, like, how do they get out? Or they just kind of like wake up but they can't open their eyes and they're stuck in concrete. Anyway, that was like, that's one of the crazy ideas about the end of the world. You know, the dead come back to life. But holy fucking shit.

What it really is, is they're just gonna bring us all back to life. That's what I said a long time ago. They're gonna take us, they're gonna take your online profile and they're gonna resurrect it and they're gonna put it on their service and you're gonna have to deal with the fact

that a duplicate of you is now existing in some kind of simulated ecosystem. And now we're gonna have to also deal with the fact that that simulated version of you and this fucking ecosystem, more than likely is gonna be better than you. And if you look at the Rogan AI replication that they did, they did that.

They like had him read tongue twisters. As a kind of like, look, it's already a little better than you. I mean, I don't know Rogan's proficiency at tongue twisters. He's probably great at them. Who knows? I'm not good at them. But it's not just that, you know?

It's not just gonna be your voice. It's gonna be your face and your voice. And it's gonna be mixed with an AI that has access to all the information in the world. So there is going to be an infinitely more intelligent, articulate, funnier, cooler thing that looks just like you online. And it gets even fucking weirder

because our online identities have become who we are. You, many of you know me, not because you've met me in person, but through this podcast. And this podcast, where does it exist? Where do I live when I'm not in my body? I'm just a series of ones and zeros on various servers somewhere.

My voice anytime you download and listen to it, it's just being duplicated, you know? And that's gonna happen to all of us. That's every single one of us. If you've got a Facebook account, if you've got any kind of digital thumbprint out there, you are going to be duplicated. You're gonna have to deal with the fact

that some virtual version of you is getting fucked by clowns in a fucking AI simulated universe. That can happen. That is gonna happen. We're gonna have deep, fake versions of us that our enemies have access to. And we are gonna have to inevitably get the email.

Fuck enemies, I'm friends with comedians. I know it's coming. I know it's coming. I know it's coming. What's coming is some kind of goddamn clown, some AI clown, some simulated virtual clown with bat wings and like, like he's with big fucking banshee boobs

and seven horse cocks and cocks on his feet. And then I just know, I know my friends, I know it's coming. I'm gonna have to look at an AI version of me with just banshees just pooping on it and coming. You know what I'm saying? It's like, you're gonna have to deal with just the fact that like,

there's gonna be various versions of you running rampant through the internet. You know, who knows what happens when they become autonomous. What are you gonna do when 1,000 versions of you suddenly start making their own Twitter accounts and they're funnier and cooler than you? We're gonna be surpassed by ourselves.

We're all gonna be wandering around the world turning, going online to ask ourselves to like do shit for us cause they're more articulate than us. That's just right around the corner friends. It's just look at the, look at the, look at the Rogan thing. There's gonna be more of those coming matter of time

more of these deep fakes coming. In fact, this isn't even me. This is an AI version of me. It's the exact same technology. This was just sent to Duncan and Duncan's putting it up on his podcast right now because he's too busy right now to do his own stuff. The last three or four opening rants that you've heard

is it hasn't even been Duncan. Duncan is working in a cannery right now in Alaska. He's up to his fucking neck in fish oil. Nighty sleeps on an old plank. He ran out of money a long time ago and he just gave us permission to duplicate his personality. So this is what we've got so far. It's still not funny, but maybe we'll figure it out.

You know, we're working on that part of it. The point is friends, enjoy this world that you're in right now where there's only one you. Enjoy it. Cause this is the last days if there won't be only being one you. I don't know what terms of services you signed when you signed up for fucking Facebook,

but my guess is that it is only a matter of time before you are gonna see some version of you, your mom, your dad, your grandfather, whoever's online. And they're gonna be selling Pepsi products. Or what's even worse, what's gonna happen is something's gonna pop up after one of your loved ones passes away. And it's gonna be like,

would you like to spend another hour with your grandmother? Then all you gotta do is watch this one minute phone commercial and then you could say hi to grandmother again. And it's gonna be almost just like you were with her. Except every once in a while, she's gonna say, this is your grandmother. I'm so glad you came to see me. Please, please, please make them stop.

Please just buy an accessory to your Verizon phone and they'll stop doing these terrible things to me. I miss you. I love you. Save me from this hell. Boy, do we have a glorious podcast for you today. Danielly Bilelly is here with us today. And it's the actual real Danielly Bilelly, not an AI version.

And that's pretty exciting. We're gonna jump right into this podcast, but first some quick business. This sanctified episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the sweet alchemists over at bluechew.com. That's blue, like that color blue. Also like the blues, but not plural. Bluechew brings you the first chewable

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every time you listen to me promote a product on this podcast, there's a way out. All you gotta do is go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH. You're gonna get instant access to commercial free episodes of the DTFH along with a plethora of other stuff, including rambling hour long rants and some music and access to our discord server. Some video podcasts pop up there from time to time

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on iTunes or wherever you like and subscribe at. Also, we have a shop with some beautiful, beautiful stuff in there, including crow's milk and stop drinking crow's milk bumper stickers, t-shirts, posters and other wonderful things. You can find that by going to dunkintrussell.com. Now without further ado, welcome back to the DTFH,

the host of the Drunken Dauest podcast, the host of History on Fire, the author of How to Create Your Own Religion, historian, professor, fighter, and all around saint, the great Danielli Belelli. Welcome to Soil, and welcome to... Mr. Belelli, welcome back to the DTFH.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I always said that it's weird. I was about to say that. Always a treat to see you. It's fun. I don't know any other historians. I don't know any other people who have such a deep grasp on global history.

And I wanted to start this podcast, and possibly make the entire theme of this podcast about something that I love, conspiracy theories. Oh yes, of course, yes. I have been, you know, I rotate conspiracy theories. My attitude with them is one of, these are like the emerging modern folk stories, mythology, maybe there's some like kernels of truth

in some of them, but usually there's so many different distortions based on not enough information or wrong information that they can possibly be true. The most obvious ones, flat earth. I don't know, hollow earth. Yeah, there's some pretty weird shit out there, but yes. Pretty weird shit. But I came upon my new favorite conspiracy theory.

And I thought, my God, this is the thing to talk about with Danielli today, which is, okay, so, and I'm gonna confuse it for those of you who are more familiar with it, because I just got into it, but do you know about the Tartar Empire? Yeah. Tartaria.

Sure, sure. Let's go into it. Okay. You tell. So the idea is that there was some kind of cataclysm that happened not that long ago relative to like how old we think the earth is, maybe 500 years. And essentially the history that we think is history

is all wrong. It's been completely rewritten. We are living in a false history. The story that we think the way the United States came about, the way Europe came about, all of it, completely, absolutely wrong. The catacombs of Paris, they're not filled with bones because of some, the plague.

Is that's why they think they're filled with bones? They're filled with bones because of a terrible, terrible cataclysm that happened, and they had to fill the bones up. They had to bring all the dead bodies underneath Paris. So have you ever heard this conspiracy theory before, which is essentially history as we know it is a lie? History as we know it is a lie is a classic,

but you're giving me a new spin to it. So that's interesting. No, I was just reading last night one that was sounded vaguely going in that direction. Is it what, the Mandela effect? Yes. Is that kind of a, okay, good. So do explain, what's the connection there

between the two? So, well, okay. Basically, our understanding of history, if we're gonna bring in the Mandela effect, our understanding of history would be comparable to early humans understanding of the planet. So early human thinks that bases their understanding of the planet on what they can see.

And on the highest point that they can get to. So from getting on top of a very high mountain, you can look and see the expansive things, draw maps based on that, but you can't get into space and see it. Similarly, we're glued to time because we haven't figured out a way to elevate ourselves from the time space continuum yet.

And so our experience of time in history itself is based on the notion of one time stream that we're on. When the reality is that every single one of us is constantly moving through multi-realities, more moving through various time streams that are all mostly identical to the one that we're in. In the same way that if you were a person living, I don't know, in North America,

your ability to travel from North America to Hawaii, for example, and see a completely different ecosystem would be limited by your ability to get on a boat. Yes, yes, yes. In the same way, because we can't really move out of the temporal ecosystem that we're in, we think that time looks like this. We're in a post-industrial technological civilization,

constantly teetering on world war and stuff, but if you had some extra help via technology, some sort of magical ability, or the ability to control your dreams, et cetera, you could theoretically actually shift timelines all the way to a point where we're currently existing in kind of a Buddha field techno utopia. A Buddha field techno utopia.

Okay, I like that already. So do tell. Evidence, what do they base it on? I hate to be the guy who says that, but... Well, can we, for the sake of this, just push evidence off the table? Because if we start going to... We have to go to in this particular time field,

time stream, time space continuum. The evidence is that there is no other... This is it, baby. We're here. I mean, just forget it. Like we have no quantifiable measurements. Now you can look into quantum physics, you can look into like the reality that if you investigate

anything at a deep enough level, it vanishes to see there seems to be a permeability to reality itself. And then of course there's the people who say, the Berenstein Bears, I remember it as... Okay, so it's exactly what I was reading last night. Jesus Christ, that's weird and odd.

Yeah, that is, we live in the matrix, right? Never heard of ever before read it last night. And here you are telling me about it. Yeah, yeah. That's right, yeah. Weird. Well, it's not too weird because you brought it up. I was talking about multiple histories

and you brought the Mandela effect. Oh, yeah, no, I mean, weird in the sense that, well, what you're talking about is so intimately related to this that it's like there's a very... There is a connection there, yeah. Interesting, interesting, interesting. Okay, so do tell me more about this. No, you tell me, because I'm interested in you,

your understanding of history is so much greater than anyone I know who is in academics. Sure. Academia. So in your understanding of history, are there any iterations of this concept that the reality as we know it, history as we know it is not actual history,

but that in fact, we're living in some kind of confined reality tunnels shared by a certain group of people. We're on the outskirts of that. There are all these other realities that are happening simultaneously. If you get some historians really high on LSD, you may get there, you know, you could, that's worth a shot.

No, generally speaking, I mean, the most, and even that's considered a way out there, but the most that's kind of within the range of something vaguely similar, and I use the word vaguely intentionally because it's not even that similar. But like if you talk about like some gram ankle kind of idea about, you know,

our timeline of history is completely fucked up. It's, you know, his idea about younger trials, comet impact, there was way more advanced civilizations before this time that got wiped out. And so our scale of history is really limited and reduced. But even that's almost a square theory compared to what you're telling me, because that's still assuming a linear timeline,

a single reality, we just don't happen to know about something that happened long ago. What you are saying is there is no single reality. There's multiple timelines, multiple universes touching each other. That's a whole other, you know, that takes it 25 steps forward. And already, like, you know, you take gram,

which I like gram, by the way. I think gram has mixed very interesting points. He definitely raises some good questions. And even he's considered like way, like when I, you know, I had gram on, you had gram on on the podcast, I had gram on a couple of times on Trank and Taoist and I get like the hardcore guys were like, what are you meddling with this pseudo historian crap?

And I'm like, dude, the guy actually has good questions, you know, does that mean every single thing he's saying is correct? People really doesn't even believe that, but he's making good points, you know? He's like, so the standard view of history is so square, that gram is way out there. What you're telling me is like make a gram look

like the most square human in the universe, you know? So that's the scale. Okay, then help me understand this. Yeah. When you begin to study history, is the study of history mixed in with the study of time? No. So historians aren't even interested in time

as we understand it or physics or anything like that. No, I mean, and that's the problem with most disciplines. That's one of the things that I've always disliked about not even academia, but our way of approaching knowledge that it's based on specializing to the point where not only you have no connection between history and physics, let's say, or history and any other field, you know, any field with each other, they basically are foreigners.

But even within the same field, he's like, what? You're a historian. Well, what does that mean? You know, I'm a historian of 1727, Paris, that's what I'm a historian of. And you're like, holy, I can't remember. That's so cool, by the way. Well, I mean, it's cool and it's not.

It's cool because you end up knowing every single thing that happened down to what was going on on that straight corner between 5 p.m. and 5.15 on that day. But at the same time. How is that real? Is that it? That's hyperbole. Totally. It is.

Well, I think that we have established that about every other word that comes out of my mouth is hyperbole. So we are good with that. I didn't mean it. I'm sorry if that seemed like a neg. I don't want that to be true. I would like it to. And I think that's why I like to run with this stuff.

But no, I love hyperbole. No, I think what it is is knowledge is divided in this tiny subset that even the guy I was talking with a lady was a specialist in Japanese history, right? He's like, it's already limited, right? You take one country out of all of the world. I mentioned a huge thing that happened in the 1400s in Japan. And she was like, what?

And I'm like, well, it's kind of important. And she's like, oh, no, no, no, I saw it. I only studied Japan from like the 1850s forward. And I'm like, so you're not even a historian of Japan. You're a historian of like one century and a half of Japan. That's it. That's all. And that's my feeling with most of knowledge,

that the effort to cross boundaries is next to non-existence. OK. Definitely in academia, but even outside sometime. From your own personal subjective experience, where do you think history exists outside of the human mind and outside of whatever material it's recorded on? Well, I mean, and that's when you say whatever material is recorded on, that's the problem with the field itself.

That there's no great book or history that you open and tells you everything that happened exactly as it happened, right? You're only as good as the sources you have. And most of human history, we know nothing about, right? Maybe you find one tooth of a guy who lived 30,000 years ago and you go like, what an amazing discovery. It's one tooth of one guy. Come on, I know it's like.

So most of human history, we have no evidence. The ones that we do know about is usually one guy who wasn't really there, but 60 years later, right about it because his great uncle told him that his retired neighbor was there one day, but actually wasn't really his retired neighbor. He was actually the sister of his neighbor who told, you know, his hearsay. So there's monstrous, like when all you have is like three

paragraphs in a guy writing 60 years later on a third hand account, reliability is a little thing to say the least. So then the stuff that we do know more about, even when you do have an eyewitness who was there who said, I saw it, there's the question of reliability to that person. There's moral of the stories, a lot of history. There's a ton of guesswork involved. There's, you know, what we say as fact is maybe possibly likely.

I hope fact. And when you start digging down, you have to really separate what do we actually know about this, which is usually something that can be written in three paragraphs, and what we think that that means and what how we connect the dots, which were then you end up with a book. Okay, gotcha. So, you know, we obviously we know someone built the Eiffel

Tower. Yep. And we probably know who built the Eiffel Tower, and we probably know why they built the Eiffel Tower. And then from that person, we can kind of figure out who did build the Eiffel Tower. No, Mr. Eiffel.

Yeah, Frank Eiffel. But we so, but the, the, the sum total, like what's interesting to me is most of us are walking around with the idea of like, I understand the history of the world. Yep. I understand how we got where we're at right now. But when you look into it, you realize like, not only do you have a very foggy understanding of, for example, how California

came to be, who lived in California before California was California, what California was called before it was called California. Yep. You have a foggy memory of what the fuck you were doing in the third grade. Exactly. What you were doing in the fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh

grade, you don't know what you were doing June 15th, 1987. Right. And so then you, so, you know, as I say, as above so below, the human psyche is not equipped to remember things accurately. Of course. And from that, you could probably extrapolate, then if the sum total of all human psyches is what contains within it, our understanding of history, then our understanding of history is

completely distorted. Yeah, because it goes through a filter, right? There's no, in that sense, it's almost a philosophical question about the existence of objective reality out there versus what you know, that's inevitably filtered through your own subjectivity, which clearly raises question about how much of that is really objective and how much the filter is making up as you go.

Yeah. So this produces all of the wars and all of the catastrophes and all of the human conflict, because everyone's walking around with a distorted conceptualization of what happened, right? No one even fucking knows. There might be some epigenetic record inside of us, but the reality is it's all distorted.

So I'm an American, you're an Iranian. Over there, we've got the Syrian and the Russian, God forbid. And we have all these people wandering around. They have some in their mind, some sense of like, I'm an American. Yeah, I'm an Iranian, I'm a Russian. But really, those people, they don't know what that even fucking means, because it doesn't mean anything.

Well, even genetically, it doesn't really mean anything, because when you look at it, it's like, unless you live in some weird corner of the world that has been isolated, which there are not that many by now. Like, I remember when I first started getting into Italian history, because I was like, I read everything else, I might as well learn the history of where I'm from, right? And so like, at one point, I read about the one city where I'm

from, and they say, oh, like 2,500 years ago was founded by the Celts. And I'm like, oh, cool. So there's a Celtic origin. I turn the page and he's like, yeah, but 20 years later, these other tribes came in and killed them all. He's like, oh, okay, so not that guy, this guy, yeah, but 30 years later, and then you go over 2000 years and you realize

that everybody and their grandmother has gone through there. So what it means to be from there today is a mix of, I don't know, 300 different peoples would themselves are a mix of other things. So you just start realizing that this notion of like race, for example, only exists if you keep it in a really narrow historical range, you know, from 1300 to 1500, oh, I see

there's continuity. But once you open it up a little, even the idea of a race is kind of a joke, you know, because everybody's a mix of a million different things. So Nietzsche declares in a time when it meant something, God is dead. Motherfucker. Should we declare history is dead?

Should we declare that our devotion and worship of history, our fixation on history is in fact a fixation on a false God. Here is where I'm going to tell you, so here is what's interesting about this that to me, focusing on the evidence, what do we actually know about something like one thing that I do with podcast sometime is like, there are awesome stories that I want to tell. When I start looking at the evidence, the evidence is kind

of thing doesn't necessarily support the stories. So I usually split it in a double track is like, okay, this is what people say. And I want to believe it badly. Did it happen? You know, the evidence doesn't tell us that it did. This is what we actually know. And so you have a double layer, you have the mythology, which

is true on a different level than historical truth. And then you have what we actually know and what we actually know to me is interesting because yes, the sources are limited. Yes, there are problem with sources. Yes, we lack a lot of information that would want to have, but that doesn't mean that everything out there, every opinion about it is equally valid.

You know, some are based on actual facts that you can, despite all the pain and suffering of digging through a mountain of crap, you can actually dig to something that turns out to be semi solid versus others are just, you know, random, you're making shit up along the way, you know. So to me, that effort to separate what do we know as much as a human being can do anything? Let's put it that way.

Because when you know, when we say fact, even that's get complicated, depending on, but as much as a human being can know, we do know certain things for a fact versus all the other stuff where it's like, maybe possibly, I don't know about that or no, that looks goes into legend territory. I think there's something interesting there. And one doesn't necessarily have to kill the other because,

you know, just because you want to know the bear facts, well, the bear facts, obviously, there's a lot more that happened. So that doesn't mean that that's the beginning and the end of the story, but that's the solid part of the story. Right. The other parts make a lot happen that we don't know about. And that's fine. And a lot happened that we can speculate about, but that

doesn't, that's a separate thing from actual history. This seems like a non sequitur. It's not. Have you ever been in a fight with your girlfriend or wife? And she brings up a fight that happened like a year ago. Sure. To justify some, something that happened that she did just in the present, of course.

Right. And you realize that if, because you fucked up a year ago, that justifies her fucking up eternally, right? Or I don't know why I'm saying, I'm blaming this on a girl. I've done this lame ass tactic where you're like, well, you did that two weeks ago, three weeks ago, you were doing, and you realized like, if I am using this shit tactic, then essentially, I have caught us in a never ending, repeating loop.

Yep. And so there's that saying, he who forgets history is doomed to repeat it. Yes. But maybe the reality is he who remembers history is doomed to repeat it, that by the fixation on patterns that have emerged in the past, we're recreating them in the present. And that the best thing to do would be, and this, I love it because it's so blasphemous to so many, abandoned history.

Right. Forget it. It's over. Who cares? Here we are now. So what? Whatever it was, whatever it was. And now as I'm saying it, I was like, oh my God, this is a delightful

blasphemy. World War II, who gives a fuck? Right. Founding fathers, who gives a fuck? Never even happened, who cares? Yeah, yeah. And so then in saying these things, people are going to be like, What?

My fucking grandfather was at ease. And then, and then, and then, you know, we should, we gotta, we must worship and bow down to the millions and millions of dead people who have been transformed to dust and are in crypts right now, instead of having our own lives. Right. It's very similar to people who have a sick fetishistic attachment to their parents.

And even when their parents passed, they still try to like live according to what their parents thought they should live like. Or Norman Bates style. With yes, right. Do we as a species right now have a Norman Bates style relationship with history? I think I'm in good old Taoist fashion. I like to think of it as three stages.

There's the initial one where you don't know anything about history. You don't care and whatever. It doesn't matter. And then you realize, no, it does. There's a lot to so second stages when you realize no way everything that you live today has been shaped by historical forces. We are your education, the way your parents raise you has been shaped by so suddenly you're like, it's all about history.

It's all about remembering the past and when this and that. And then you go to stage three, which is yes, good that you went through that process, but you also got to live in the present. So dragging on history as if he was this dead weight as a corpse along the way is not helping anybody. That doesn't mean that you should stay at stage one where you just go like fuck it all. It doesn't matter.

It's not important. Is is like the classic Taoist parable about learning, right? You don't want to be ignorant, but when you are learned, you are weighed down by knowledge. Knowledge doesn't allow you to live in the present because you're so stuck with concepts that are heavy rocks in your head. Yes. So what do you do?

Do you never learn? No, you learn and then you just absorb what's useful from it and let go of the dead weight so that then learn it's not any more knowledge becomes wisdom. It's become the wisdom that allow you to actually be in the present, be alive today here and in this moment with a little extra depth, a little understanding of human nature and other things that in the specific case that we're using history can give you.

It can be any other example, right? But we're talking about history. So it is, is like, is not a fight between dumb ignorance versus heavy ultra intellectual knowledge is those are two stages along the way and you ultimately want to overcome both, but you kind of need to go through all of them in a way. So in that sense, to me, history is like look at something like to pick a specific example.

Ethnic minorities who got screwed over. Yes. Right. You get the standard white guy responses. Come on, get over it. That was 200 years ago or 500 years ago or 100 years ago. It's not today. So just shut the fuck up and get on with it today.

And it's a tricky thing because even when it's not phrased the way I did, which is sort of the asshole way of putting it, even when it's done in a nicer way, there is a point to that that is like, hey, you don't want to just hang on to a past forever in the sense that then your as you are putting your recreating it in the present, right? But at the same time, it's a little too easy for you, motherfucker, we haven't had that experience to come tell somebody

else, hey, you guys need to just get over it, you know, pull yourself by by your bootstrap and we all start from the same starting line. You know, it's like, to me, it's both at the same time is no, you want to know it, you want to understand it, you want to even call it for what it is. And it's important to actually shine the spotlight. Once we have done that.

Okay, not everything that's happening to you today is the result of what happened 100 years ago and I justify why you are poor and oppressed and I can't do shit with my life because what happened 100 is like, what happened 100 years ago is absolutely true and it did shape some forces that are still affecting you today, but you also have agency in the in the present. The problem with the discussion is that they tend to be very

one sided, they are either the it's all about the past and you are a victim of society or get over it, none of that is meaningful, none of that is real. It's an illusion just live today. Both of those things will be oversimplified a situation one by saying something true, but do mean yourself to never move on. And the other one by just denying reality. Well, I mean, to bring it into like a person's subjective daily

experience, because I yeah, because I got lucky enough to be the white dude on planet Earth right now. I have no fucking idea outside of my own ability to like empathize and think about it. I honestly, I just don't like my friend who teaches me meditation. I was in a fight with my wife when she was pregnant. And he's like, Duncan, if you experienced the hormones going

through her body, yeah, for five minutes, you would be committed based on how I know you, you would just go insane. That seemed like a fair statement. Yes. And I liked that because I was like, yeah, you're right. I have no idea what that and you find compassion there. But I want to talk about like a thing that haunts so many people. Your age, right?

So people walk around there like, well, I'm 45 years old. I'm 20 years old. I'm whatever age. And at every single age, people feel a different type of pressure based on where they're at. So if you're 15, the pressure you're feeling is I need to like do good and and figure out what I'm going to do and what college I'm going to go into.

And I was thinking got laid, but sure. Okay, that's you get laid, of course. And then figure out in the midst of that, a deal with your fucking raging boner, right? Then you get in your 20s, you're in college. Now you got to deal with the fact of like the weird presentation of potential careers all seem like just essentially like different nooses with which to hang your future on.

And then you get out of college and you have some job or you have to find a job or you decide to be an outcast wanderer or whatever. But still you have this thing feeling of some encroaching thing called your thirties. And then you get to your thirties like, wait, I'm in my fucking thirties. And then you get to your fours like, holy shit, what am I? So all of these anxieties are hanging on top of a sense of time. And each and and and none of them are really that useful in the sense

that you've set a clock. You're like, I got this long to do some dumb thing called my life. And the way I'm going to do the dumb thing called my life is not based on some intuition or instinct, but it's based on an approximation of what a good life is based on what I've been told a good life is by the movies, TV shows and things I've been taught. And it could be that all those are totally wrong. That in fact, the reality is you have no fucking idea what a good life is.

You just know how to parrot, imitate and mimic the other monkey descendants. Right. So this is a way that people torture themselves. I've met 28. I was talking to some guy. I think he just turned 30 and he was so sad. And he said to me, you know, I'm getting old. I'm like, what the fuck? Yeah, you're in your fucking thirties, man.

No, you're getting old. Yeah, fuck off. What are you talking? Right. What are you talking about? You you are out of your mind. You're you have you might as well have told me that a witch has a piece of your hair and is poking a fucking voodoo doll with it in a forest. And that's why you feel bad, right?

Except you're the fucking witch, right? Because you have hung your life on a time. So similarly, I can speak to the rancid white supremacists that I've seen on the internet who are deeply glued to the idea that white people are responsible for all the good things in the world. Sure. These idiots are so attached to that idea. And they've done nothing.

These are people who have maybe done like eight push-ups in the last three years. Right. Their great accomplishment in life was connecting their computer to the internet. Right. You know, they've done nothing. But we created that. Yeah, of course. You did shit.

That was a great. I was watching. I'm sure you have seen it. This great Stan Hoppe bit where about nationalism and he's like, you know, because we freed France during World War II and he's going on like, hey, Mike, you know, I remember getting wasted the last night and I remember where. But I don't really remember it as in the mud in France. That is it.

And so this adherence or fixation on the past historically. And the weird sentimentality people feel about it, I think is very similar to a kind of religious fundamentalism. And I think it is ultimately disastrous. Yeah. And I think I know. I think there's a reason why you connect religious fundamentalism to this. Because even though they sound like very different things, they are rolling around

the very same issue to me, which is identity. People badly want to belong to something. People badly want to have an identity outside of just their own individual identity, because it's hard to just have your own. You know, when you are by yourself, you have to figure everything out in life. Yeah, there are guidelines out there, but you have to choose between 10,000 things. It's fucking hard. It's scary.

And that's why despite what people say, people love dogma, you know, dogma is like a sweet mom who holds you in her arms saying, don't worry, baby. It's going to be okay. Just follow these rules. This is who you are. This is your identity. This is what your past is. Just go with this program and everything is going to work out.

And it's a super seductive concept for a lot of people, because otherwise the alternative is that you have to figure shit out for yourself. That's right. And that's our work. So whether it is the identity of being what, you know, what kind of religious fundamentalism do I want to jump in? Why? Because that's going to give me the answers to everything in life.

I don't need to create shit. I just need to follow a blueprint or what historical identity I want to embrace. I am whatever the fuck I am, right? And you decide people like me have this culture. We like these things. We suffer this thing, which make us more in this such fashion. And it's like, and again, you're buying a set of clothing, essentially, you're putting on this thing that you want because it's like, why is it so hard for

people to live without a pre-package identity? Because then you have to create it every fucking step of the way. Who's creating it? Well, if you don't have a pre-package one, then you have to do it. Who's the you creating the identity? Right. So you are in this flow of shit that's mixed, that's part of this one body that you have, and you are in this constant state of flux.

And in this process, you are trying to grasp at something to hold on to. It's momento. Remember that cool fucking movie and the guys written all over the walls, all this shit to remember? That's history. And humanity is this venge, many people are like this vengeful dude who's like looking at the walls and trying to summon up who the fuck did this to me? Right.

It's the situation is one of, um, on one side, it's completely tragic to me because here we all are essentially in these like, I guess, what meat dinner tubes floating down this beautiful lazy river called time. And some time back there, people pass some crazy shit. There was some wild shit back there. Meanwhile, here we are. No. And all these people are like, oh, but back then, and they remember when we

passed that fucking tree with a thing in it, his status and through fire. Of course. Now that's gone. Now we're in this. And so I think you're right. It hinges not only on the problem of having to establish your own identity, but do you think it also hinges on the problem that identity is identical to any other thing that exists in the material universe?

As Bob Thurman, the great Buddhist philosopher says, the closer you look at anything, the less it seems to be real. Sure. And so you start with history and you realize, wait, I don't know what I ate for lunch two weeks ago, right? And I'm supposed to not believe that some, some shit that some guy wrote down on a scroll after he heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who heard it from a lady who heard it from a guy who maybe dreamed it is real.

Right. And so then you're like, oh shit. So probably a lot of history is distorted. We do have landscapes in the sense of there is the thumbprint of something that happened in the material, in the, in the material world, but we're not quite sure if our, our logical explanation for those things is, is real. And then this starts getting going deeper and deeper and closer and closer to home until you're like, wait, I don't know.

Remember what I had for lunch two weeks ago on this day? Did I, was I even there? Right. And then that starts getting closer and closer to your like, suddenly here you are now. And you realize like, oh fuck, but this thing that I think I am right now is based on all this other shit that's probably not real. So then you, you get into your own self and now you start dissolving.

And this is, I think maybe where you hit the fundamental conspiracy, which is that there isn't an identity. There isn't an individual self in our entire lives from the moment we're born to the moment we die. We're told that we are real. And because of that, we're all going fucking crazy. Right. That's Maya's game, right?

There's this idea. Yeah, it's exactly. And I think that's the issue right there. The notion that, you know, when you step it down to an almost Buddhist philosophical level, is there anything really that or even like the Hindu idea of like, is there even anything outside of you? Is there like, you know, a hardcore one branch of Hindus philosophy argue that every single nerd is part of the same being.

It's just this one entity, right? So that all the other things are an illusion or a play or a game that you play throughout existence, where this one thing that makes up the universe split into 10,000 things. And then the interplay with this give you history, give you life, give you things as we know it. But ultimately, they are all faces of the same God, right? Every single one.

You know, it's a, on one hand, is a cool concept that's based on something because, you know, yeah, you're right. When you, the harder you look at something, the less solid it seems. Yes. At the same time, we live in a universe where in order to function, you have to buy into the separation between subject and object. You know, the me and this table are no one and the same. Well, yeah, if we were, as I'm driving, that would be a problem, you know,

it's like, so in order to function here and now, you have to go by a subject, object duality and bill and act as if it was real, whether it is real or not. That's a whole completely separate discussion. You used to have to fucking go to church on Sunday or they set you on fire. Yeah. I mean, there's always an adherence to some illusionary thing that's being supported by people with guns. Ultimately, it's like, if you spend too much time in Western society, existing

in unit of consciousness, you're probably going to get arrested. You know what I mean? Like someone's going to come in like, be like, no, you don't understand. You have to, you didn't, you didn't pay your taxes. Yeah, exactly. You didn't pay your rent. It's like, yeah, you need to act like this shit's real. We're literally being forced by, by people standing with guns behind the

people standing with the forms to pretend this shit is real. Well, and I guess because the problem is that if you take the position that it is not real, then you, it's kind of hard to go on living in this dimension when you make that switch, when you, when you, and not only because, you know, there's some asshole out there was trying to impose a certain reality on you, but because if you start arguing, like I was talking with a dude who was a hardcore Zen Buddhist, right? And he was telling me this stuff about, you know, he was doing meditation,

this and that, and he was like, looking at money, like, ah, money's an illusion. It's a piece of paper. It's not real. There's nothing real to it. Did you ask him for his money? And for what we gots worse, because then his teacher was like, yes. And you think that your wife and daughter are any more real than that piece of paper is, and he wasn't too happy about that part, right?

Because he's like, on the money part, he could, you know, it's like, ah, whatever, fuck it, take the money. I don't care when it gets to something else. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, now we are taking it to another level that I'm not comfortable with, you know? Well, that's right. It is. Well, I mean, because it's uncomfortable.

It's like, you know, you wake up in a world where everything's distorted and you can't find a way to find an undistorted anything because every single thing is distorted, at least if you're picking up data from other people. And then, you know, you end up with science and you end up with some, you need some way of like figuring out like, well, what, and this is the beginning of any great philosophical system. And, you know, nihilism is, can be an accidental byproduct of the conceptualization that everything is not real.

Then you end up in, you can end up in a spiritual bypass. You abandon your responsibilities and just, I don't know. Just what do you do? You just fuck. I don't know what you bore people. Just like, ah, fuck off again. Is that guy again? With this nothing is real thing.

So, but, but, and that all I think is absolutely, abjectly. A misunderstanding. Yeah. What if we are the sort of fixation on the identity? The doll of who we think we are is an obstruction that's getting in the way of our ability to move through time in a way that people haven't quite moved through time yet. In other words, like by getting stuck on the identity, you know, we are held on

in the way that the Earth's mass pushes into the time space continuum and holds us fixed where we're at and keeps everything from flying off into space. The subjective mass, the ontological mass, the mass of our fixation, not only on our own identity, but on our historical understanding of the world and our fixation on our very distorted sense of truth has produced its own kind of subjective mass that is literally locking us into this particular timeline and that by gradually letting go of our addiction to the conceptualization of ourselves, we simultaneously experience radical shifts in the timeline that we're living on.

And so when you hear about enlightenment, it isn't a thing that happens to you as a person. It's a thing that happens to the entire time space continuum that you're living in when you achieve realization. Right. So the more you let go of your attachment to this yourself, suddenly people report, oh, fuck, I've started having synchronicities. Then people start saying, yeah, I like, I got this weird ability to like almost read people's thoughts and then people start saying crazy shit, which is like,

oh, no, I saw someone walk through a wall. Matrix shit. Yeah. And then you're like, I can't believe I just said matrix shit. I used to say, if anyone says this is like a matrix, I wish their balls would explode because it's so annoying. I only have one. So I got to be careful.

Yeah, be careful about no one. But this is what I mean is like by focusing on whatever your idea of your own personal history is in the history of the world is, this is the tether locking the hot air balloon of your identity to the particular part of the multiverse that you call reality. And the more you let go of that, the more you notice things seem to change, not just subjectively and not just interpersonally, but on the global scale. And I find it ridiculously fascinating the way you have come around to this

whole pro like from where we started to where you're at right now. Now, for the sake of everybody listening, not suddenly bemoaning the fact that good high quality LSD has sort of disappeared from the market and there's less than before, or at least that's the popular perception. Exactly. And suddenly they are scrambling for a good drug dealer to be able to keep up with the conversation. I think like one healthy step, baby step, you know, you, you think like, well,

we're seeing right now is we're shit and you're not buying any of that. That's fine. Um, baby step to test the water with just that doesn't hurt. You don't have to go any further, but it's not a bad idea. That notion of identity that not like take a look at in your own life, which of course is different from everybody. You know, my experience, Duncan's experience totally different, but anybody else listening, totally different.

What are the things that you think define you that make up your identity, your gender, your nationality, your skin color, your whatever the fuck, you know, list them down like what are the things that you feel are shaping who you are as a human being and don't let me know. Everybody's got a filter. Of course, the gender is a filter. As you said a few minutes ago, if you have a certain hormones going through your body is a very different experience than if you don't, right?

So filter, we get it. How much do you actually invest in that identity? How much being a male from a certain country, shape who you see yourself as being, you know? And what I would invite people to play with is try to kind of lower the volume on that voice a little bit, you know, it's like, for example, I always find it funny when people are, and granted, this is also, this is where the objective and subjective meet, right?

If I hear somebody telling me, which I've heard a lot because so many of the people I've known are not big fans of white guys, right? So if I hear somebody telling me, fuck white guys, they did this and that are horrible, fuck white people. I don't think it personal because I'm not white people. You know, it's like, yeah, I happen to have light color skin. The fuck do I care? I know exactly what you're talking about.

I wasn't me. I had nothing to do with it. So I'm not even taking it like you're talking to me. Now, of course, it's, it depends on how other people around the perceive it. You know, you can be, have whatever ethnicity you got, have whatever gender, whatever age, whatever, whatever thing by which people perceive you through and try to put you in a certain box and you don't identify with the things, but everybody else around does identify you with that.

Well, suddenly now you do have something in common with the other guy who also has light skin or also is from the same country or age, not because you really have something in common, but because everybody else treat you like you do. Okay. So it's like, okay, we do have, we do have one thing in common. We get treated the same by these guys over here. Yes. But my point is like, other than that, do we really have anything in common?

Do we, you know, we do on a human level, but does that it's kind of like, that's why to me, the whole discussion for us to take a specific example, something like nationalism, which is a big part of many people's identity, right? Where they are from, their nation, their thing, never made any fucking sense to me, like not even a little bit, because to me is like, people aren't too proud of all the things that like Leonardo da Vinci or this shit that came out of Italy. I'm like, it wasn't me, man.

I mean, yeah, that's sweet. But what the fuck do I have to do with it? You know, it's like, I'm born in the same nation. That's what makes me special. Yeah, that doesn't mean shit to me. Similarly, I don't take all the crap that happened in Italy as being who I am. You know what I mean? I don't, and even that identity is funny because that only exists when you are

comparing yourself to the outsiders, to the guys across the border. But when people start looking inside, it gets a whole different story, right? It's like, well, we are great and proud Italian, except for you guys from the south, because you guys kind of suck. I mean, when I speak Italian, it's more like the north. That's the real Italian. But even that, you know, 50 miles away, there's the town Bergamo. They speak funny, they eat weird food.

I guess they are Italian, but that's not really what I mean. You know, it's like the city, Milan, not the outskirts of town, though, because that's why trash. I'm talking more about the central. So it becomes your neighborhood minus the people who share a wall with pump up the music at 2 a.m. And you hate their guts, your family minus your brother who's an S, you know, that identity suddenly shrinks to a level where it boils down to the individual.

Yeah. And the bigger that identity gets, the thinner it gets. Like what you actually do share is minimal. So what is it? What do we all share? I think that's what interests me. If we are going to go past the individual level, then go all the way. Go to a human level.

Go to what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live in this body? What what are the things that I can and fuck, I can even take it further. Even, you know, we got them maybe with a mammal, with another mammal, with a dog. You can I can have empathy for the dog. He can fucking understand where I'm coming from. Some of the time I understand where I know what I know what you need, man. Is that particular type of food that you want?

And, you know, so to me, that interests me more than anything else is every single person is a mix of 10,000. The influences, which as you rightly say, they are constantly changing. It's not even a stable thing in itself. So if your identity is an ocean, is this constantly changing body of water that's changing every second and everybody else says to great, figure out a way out to roll in the present moment to flow and using as much empathy as humanly possible, where you can find ways to relate to somebody who, of

course, has a different body than you as a different age, as a different experience, as a different or if he wants to be happy, exactly. She wants to be happy. Exactly. We all want to be happy. Yep. That's what we share. Yeah. And the dogs do too. And the birdies do too. Yeah. We all want to be happy when you're in traffic driving home.

What, what, what, what do you have in common with everybody? They all want to go home. Yep. Every single one, one, just like you. They want to go see their babies, their wife. They want to go watch Netflix. They want to be home and that's what's happening. The difference, the problem is because we are still living in the era of believing that ourselves are real is they think they want to go home

more than you want to go home. Of course. Everyone's like, when the self-driving cars come, traffic will be much better because they'll be able to drive and like, they'll all synchronize. Yeah. We don't need that. The moment we all realize when you're looking over at the pissed off dude who's glaring at you, you know why he's glaring at you?

Because he's got this beautiful baby at home and he's been at work all day and it's bath time. Yep. And he knows he's got, he's got to get home in 30 minutes to give the baby the bath or the baby has to go to bed. Yep. And he's fucking wants to see this adorable little baby or someone wants to go home because they're in love with someone

and they just met him and they're late for the day or all these beautiful reasons and the problem is they all think that reason is more important than your reason. Of course. And this is why we're in hell. And this is also why simultaneously we're in heaven because all you got to do is flip the switch the other way. So how do you I get it? And I like it philosophically.

How do you live in a very kind of thanks and close word in which, you know, if a tiger decide that the deer has just as much of a right to life as I do and look at the beautiful deer roaming around, I shouldn't eat it and tiger stars then or what you see where I'm going. Yeah, we have to take the. Idea of the expansive. Global utopia. And we have to start with ourselves.

I can't fix the tiger deer relationship yet. But as you about it, you are doing a wonderful job wiping them all out. So there would be any relationship right. Yes. I mean, the other way to fix it would be to come up with some kind of like bio organic, like robotic deer that have tofu flesh that the lions can still enjoy eating and chasing them while the other deer sequestered to some other. I don't know, man, but that's for DARPA to figure out. Yeah, like the first step is, I think, has to be a subjective shift of circuitry.

And to me, I think of Terrence McKenna, when he has one of his very great, probably unscientific yet beautiful explanations of why when you smoke DMT, you enter into an alternate dimension is that it actually reverses the spin of. I can't remember how he puts it, but on some quantum level, it's literally it's causing the circuitry in your consciousness to reverse. And in that reversal of the circuitry, the veil is temporarily lifted and you see reality as it actually is, right, which is populated with, you know, various entities of such tremendous beauty that it it as he puts

it could you could die from astonishment. Now, similarly, I think that it would begin with a subjective exploration of intentionality and all people so that we could determine where the evil is. And what I found in that in my own sort of exploration of that is that every single person that I have met thus far in my life has been tortured by their selfishness. And in that pain, they're acting in ways that is intolerable to people around them, which is compounding their suffering.

That's it. No evil, no nefarious anything, more just like the way an animal with his or her paw and a trap reacts when someone comes and takes the trap off. Yeah. No one would say that animal is being a dick. Sure. When it's trying to bite you. Yeah. You wouldn't go to the animal and say, listen, why are you being such an asshole? I'm just trying to get your trap off. Right. Yeah. You know, it's similarly, I think this is what we're witnessing is that every single one of us has gotten our soul trapped in our identities.

And that is producing for many, many people a great deal of suffering because the difference between in this weird analogy is the animal knows the trap is hurting it and will not slag off to get out of that fucking trap. A human will fight to keep the trap safe. A human will put lipstick on the track. A human will like buy the trap rings and Rolexes and beautiful watches. Their human will look at other people's traps and be like, what a fucking loser in his ugly trap. This is the problem, I think. So the idea would be first explore that idea. Is your identity really

bringing you pleasure? Is there joy in your desires? Is there something you're really getting out of this never ending exertion to try to get people to know what you're like? And for me, I found that there is not much there. I'm with you. I think identity in many cases is a crutch that when you feel that you can't handle life. That's when you cling the hardest to and you know, look at who are the people who cling the hardest to a rigid identity. That's why to me it was interesting when you use the word fundamentalism because often is is not just oh, this

is my it's like a clinging heart disease. The absolute truth on their question and kind of thing because it's like, otherwise they feel lost. Otherwise they feel ridder than swimming in a beautiful ocean. They're drowning there and they need something to hang on to because they feel like it's too much. That's right. I can't handle it. So I even get that I understand why people do it. I get it. Why people are addicted to rigid identities. Ideally, either you learn or somebody teach you to actually swim. So you don't need to cling to

this goddamn rigid identity that hard. But I understand that until you're getting your hang of how to be in the water, it's scary. And I understand why somebody would do it. For sure. I mean, there's it's mainly because things that are in pain. They're not generally rational. You know, you I know myself when like, I get angry enough, my rationality goes right out the fucking window. Absolutely. And that anger is just suffering and suffering makes you act crazy. So yeah, to me, it's like history, I think for a lot of people is this type

of like, imaginary bear trap that seems to have imprisoned in the way that the individual identity and our attachment to our personal history seems to be causing us to be stuck. Because if you're in a bear trap, you're not going very far. I think that in the same way history is this bear trap that seems to have encapsulated the sum total of all of us in is causing a great deal of suffering. But who the fuck knows? Anyway, Mr. Bilelli, I know that you've got to go. It's we are now at 1205.

I have a few minutes if you want, or we can wrap up. However, if you feel that we're in a good place, we can wrap up or I can stick around a few more up to you. I think that I want to. Can you talk about the phone conversation you this is I just want to wrap up on this. Tell me about the phone conversation. Okay, just a little quick history. Yes. This is when you know you have cool fucking friends. Yes. Right before we start the podcast. Daniel is on the phone with some

mysterious person planning a fight in Japan. Yes, for his girlfriend. Yes, correct. That's yeah, it's an interesting universe is what's going on with Savannah. What is that? Can you talk about it? Yeah, sure. She fights for one championship, which is in Asia is the biggest MMA organization and is definitely even global is pretty up there. I mean, there's UFC of course, but there's one is huge. And it's it's kind of called one is an interesting take on things because is is

perfect for her personality too, because you know, a lot of UFC a lot of like MMA in the West tends to be very, you know, just bleed kind of stuff. The ultra macho trash talking type of shit. That's what sells fights. Yeah, that's why trash talking is such a big part of the game. Sure. One is trying to push a more sort of traditional martial arts respectful mellow kind of thing. And it fits our personality way better because she's not a trash talker. She's very polite and sweet and stuff.

So it's like flash is like, you kidding me? I get to fly out to Asia and fight in Asia. I got a free trip out of it. What? Yeah, I like that a lot better than being flown into Kansas City, no fans to Kansas City. But you know what I mean, you know, so she's excited. She she had her first and she had a couple of fights in US sort of entry level stuff. Then she had her first fight for one back in December. That was a man I was this is how people are wired differently. So it's 2 30 in the morning in

US when it's happening. And you know, I'm watching it live on TV. And I'm on the couch and I'm fucking hyperventilating. Right? I'm just not the fight hasn't even started. They're just the walk out. And I'm just going like and I watch her and she has this big smile like looks like a kid in Disneyland, right? She's just happy and relaxed and just high five in everybody. And after what she told me, you know, as funny as like what I did my walk out my heart rate didn't go

up one beat. And I'm like, how the fuck is that even possible? Like humanly? How is that even like, just the thoughts my heart starts beating about twice as mine is like, exactly. What are you talking about? And you know, people are oddly wired, like she can do that. No problem. You put a mic in front of her and ask her to talk about her feelings. And she starts sweating bullets. I can do that in my sleep, right? It's like, but yeah, no, it's exciting because she did really well so far. I

mean, all her fights ended in less than two minutes so far. She's kind of a beast because you know, most female MMA is very technical. Especially when it comes to punching power usually not quite up there compared to men. It's very rare to see sort of the one punch KO in female MMA. For whatever weird thing she punches hard, like she can turn your lights off with one punch. So it's a trippy and then you meet, you know, you hang out with her and she's like the most so spoken mellow person in the

universe. So it's the most peaceful, sweet person. Be careful out there. Don't be tricked, friends. There are a lot of people who have lightning in their fists that are the sweetest people out there. You would never guess it. Very quickly, you made a huge shift to a new podcast network. Yeah. You want to talk about it real quick? Sure. Let's do that. But it's so I did the problem is I have two podcasts, Drunken Taoist and History on Fire. Drunken Taoist is a chatty, happy podcast. I

don't really need to prepare. I can just put the mic on, call somebody I like, like Mr. Duncan Trussell. We start jamming. It's great. It's awesome. If people donate, it's sweet. If it works financially, it's sweet. But if it's not, it's not taking crazy energy from me. So it's cool. Right. History on Fire is a monstrous time investment because just to be able to tell a story where you really know your story well, you have to read multiple books, do the research, do so behind

every episode, you know, a two hour episode will have probably anywhere between 100 to 200 hours of work behind it. So that's not the thing that I can do as a kind of fun hobby where in my free time because there is no free time left if I have to do that. It's like writing a book. It's like writing a book every month. And then doing an audio. Exactly. And that is like next month, you do it again and that again. And then so realistically got to a point where it's like, okay, I either need to cut down

significantly on the number of episodes I released. And you know, I still treat teaching as my prime profession. And this is a hobby that I do in my spare time so I can only do a two, three, four episodes a year. Or if I want to keep up the pace that I've kept so far, which is 15 episodes a year, I can, you know, the three model of podcasting wasn't quite doing it for something that required a time investment, you know, if everybody will listen once a year donated $5, I'd be swimming

in gold, I would have no problem. Right. But the reality is that, you know, there's so most people who listen to podcasts do not exactly support, you know, maybe I don't know what your experience is. Mine has been maybe 1% at most something like that. I mean, there's a statistic out there for what that is. Yeah, it's really fucking low. So the problem is, as much as the free model is pretty in theory for something that required that much energy like is there on fire just couldn't

do it anymore. So I got an offer from Luminary were kind of creating this, you know, they have their app for the free stuff, but then they do premium content. Yeah. And so they have like 30 or 40 podcasts that, you know, what I ask for mine is I still want to put at least two episodes a year for free out there. So I'm not just saying, fuck you guys, I disappear, I'll give you what I can give you if I, if I don't need to rely on money. But then for the other stuff is just exclusive to

Luminary. Wait, it's you, it's Conan O'Brien, isn't it? Yeah, they've got like Russell Brand, Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah. So it's like, you know, I when I heard about it, I had a reaction that was kind of probably like what you're getting online for some people, which is like, but then when I thought about it a little bit, I realized this is a great experiment. And if it like, what is it? It's $9 a month or so? I think $8 a month. If it if like, you know, I don't know why

everybody uses the fucking coffee metric for this shit. But if for two lattes a month, you like have access to like some kind of like, you know, amazing content, that's the main thing. I know if your show, I don't know what these other people are going to do. Of course, I know your show is incredible. Thank you. And it's worth $8 a month by itself. But I think people need to lighten up a little bit on this because it's like, come on, this is no different from the shift from commercial

television to Kate to like Hulu or Netflix or whatever. It's like, you know, like, give him a break. You're fucking busting your ass to research history. And it's like, it's either that or you know, commercials, but And even that and that's I think is the problem that people bitch about these. And I understand they're like, that's not out of the culture of podcasting. I get it. When I have commercials, you're bitching because I have too many

ads. When I ask, okay, can you support them? Add three on Patreon? Oh, Patreon is an evil corporation squashing free speech. I'm never gonna use Patreon. Okay, about PayPal. I don't want to deal with it. It's like, come and just what the fuck do you want me to do? You know, it's like, also, it's not even them. It's like nine people. That's the main thing. It's like, if you go and look at like the people who are bitching about Game of Thrones or the people are bitching about

like this amazing video game I've been playing called End of Days or, you know, the zombie game, I can't fucking great game. Right. Days gone. That's what it's called. Okay. It's great. I love it. I'm now playing it every night. I have a sentimental attachment to my cheesy character. Right. I was so excited about I went look at the reviews. It's like people are nit picking, of course, this beautiful thing that if you travel

back to the 70s and showed it to somebody, it will probably put them in a mental asylum. Right. They would they wouldn't be able to handle it there. They would have a fucking meltdown. So we have to ignore those people, because they're just unhappy. And and I think most other people are happy, just have access to your brain. So congratulations on that shift preliminary. And I thank you. Many will subscribe to listen to your wonderful podcast, History on Fire.

Yeah, it's a trippy thing. I mean, what you're saying is you're 100% right, you need to focus on creating shit, not what because everybody's gonna have an opinion and not everybody's gonna like you and I get it. I realize that one of my weaknesses is for whatever reason, I maybe it's a narcissistic thing. I don't know. I, I feel horrible if I have the feeling that I'm letting somebody down. Me too. So if somebody's telling me, oh, I was listening, I loved it. And now, fuck you,

you betrayed me because I feel like, no, let's talk about it. And you know, of course, it doesn't work that way. You know, it's not the but it really, it shouldn't bug me. It does bug me. Yeah. And I'm just like, fuck man. Yeah, we have to let go of that. Yeah, it's the bear trap. It is one of the many spikes on the weird bear trap that has us change the time space continuum and is keeping us out of the DMT universe where they already have fucking spaceships. God bless

you, Danieli. Thank you so much. Until next time, my friend. Thank you for coming out here. That was fun. That's cool, man. I make the worst jokes now for listening to the DTFH and much thanks to Danieli Bolleli for appearing on this episode today. If you like the DTFH, won't you subscribe to us on Patreon and like and subscribe on iTunes. I feel so old. I'm not sure what that means. Can you even like on iTunes? Oh, leave us

a nice rating and leave yourself a nice rating. You're doing fine. Jeez, we're barely here for a second. Trust me, it goes by in a blink of an eye. If you're walking around and smiling every few months, you're doing great. Even if you're not walking around and smiling every few months, you're doing great. You're doing great because you exist. Until next time. Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC

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