Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 367: Shane Mauss

Episode Date: January 4, 2020

Shane Mauss, comedian and host of Here We Are, rejoins the DTFH! Duncan is coming to Denver and Brooklyn! Click here to see his upcoming tour dates.  This episode is brought to you by: Manscaped - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout to get 20% off and FREE shipping.

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Also, I'm gonna be at the Arlington Draft House and the Bell House in New York City. All the links to get tickets are at dougatrustle.com. Greetings to you, O beautiful citizens of planet Earth and welcome to the year of the rat. And if you're a superstitious person, you might be thinking, fuck that. Rats are disgusting, they're covered in disease,

they're little claws are usually festering with strange, as of yet, undiscovered bacteria. And if you get so unlucky is to have one of them claw your nips, then your nipples will decay and char, fester, fall off and spray yellowy blasts of pink, smattered, nip jam all over your bathroom mirror as you begin to scream, thinking, my God, why did I let one of those rats crawl in my chest?

Or maybe you're one of those people out there believes that where there is rats, lightning will soon strike. Or maybe you're one of those people out there who had one of your tiny little dogs carried away by rats down into the sewers where the dogs were sacrificed to the God of rats. I understand some of us have had rough run-ins with rats, but personally, from a distance,

rats hold a warm place in my heart. Not because I like rats, not because I wear black lipstick and put leather on and put white powder all over my face and jingle around and leather jingling gimp suits at weird parties throughout LA. I would never wear a gimp suit. The reason is because I love Ganesh, the Hindu deity.

And Ganesh, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Hindu pantheon, is the elephant-headed God, son of Shiva, very interesting, weird story about how that elephant had ended up on the human body. But Ganesh brings us good fortune. Another name for Ganesh is Ganapati. And Ganesh is considered the remover of obstacles. And many people, they take Ganesh as their deity

because they look upon Ganesh as sort of a deity that brings you opulence, wealth, a great family, and all the things that you deserve because you're a wonderful human and it's time for you to enjoy all the great gifts that the elephant-headed son of Shiva used to be. It had a little boy, a kid, a head, a human head that got lopped off by Shiva and replaced by an elephant

whose head was also lopped off, I guess, poor elephant. But regardless, this head transplant resulted in a really amazing, incredible deity. I mean, besides the fact that we've got everything cool about elephants in Ganesh, Ganesh rides a rat. All the Hindu deities have their mounts that they ride and Ganesh actually rides a rat.

That's his steed and he can shrink himself down or get really big, but so in this case, I love it because for people in India, and it's just about anywhere, whenever you see rats, it's bad. It means that they might have gotten into your grain. They certainly carry disease. Usually it's a bad omen if you see a bunch of rats. And so the reason that I love that symbol

of the remover of obstacle riding a thing that you never wanna see is it represents that repeating pattern that happens in a person's life where you realize that the very worst thing, the very worst omen, the thing you were most terrified of, the thing that appeared in your life and really made you shit, big, white, hot rat turds out your inflamed ass was actually the best thing

that ever happened to you. All the misfortune, all the terror, all the darkness, all the stuff where you thought, I don't think I'm gonna make it through this one. On the other side was a better version of you, a wiser version of you, a stronger version of you, a smarter version of you, a cooler version of you. And that's all because the bringer of good fortune,

the remover of obstacles, he sticks his head into your life as a rat with greasy little whiskers. And the rat itself that Ganesh rides used to be a demon. And that rat ended up getting in a cool, weird anime style battle with Ganesh. And of course we all know the rumor, it's an urban myth. I haven't checked it out on Snopes, but that elephants are afraid of rats.

So Ganesh went head to head with a thing that makes a lot of elephants in the cartoons go galloping away and ended up sitting on this rat. And the weight of Ganesh, this deity was the weight of the entire universe and this incredible, powerful run-in with Ganesh's big ass, I'm assuming, was so potent that it caused the demon to convert and become Ganesh's eternal servant.

And of course that represents you facing the thing you're most afraid of and that if you really pull it off and you really allow not just you, but the you that is the sum total of all sentient beings in the universe to be the power that moves you through whatever obstacle you face, not only will you crush that obstacle, but that obstacle will turn into your friend and dearest associate in something that you can actually use

as a vehicle to move you through the next obstacle and the next obstacle and the next obstacle. So the year of the rat, I think it's good luck. It's good fortune. And it says to me, look, even if things seem fucking scary right now, and even if things seem impossible and even if things seem absolutely unfixable and even if you've been snorting hot rails of fear

from Fox News and CNN, and you've gotten all contorted inside and you're like, fuck, am I gonna get drafted? Holy fucking shit. And even if stuff on the home front seems absolutely unwinnable and even if you find yourself freshly broken up with or about to break up with somebody and even if you find yourself about to get canned or you can't find a job or even if all these things

if you imagine for a second or the snout of Ganesha's magical, shape-shifting, polymorphine demon rat poking its head into your incarnation, then you can invite it in instead of trying to ignore it or sending all your negative energy into it, which just makes it bigger anyway. And then, and then maybe, just maybe, you'll end up with a brand new pet rat

that you can ride around your house. And I'm sure whoever you live with will love that because that pet rat is gonna be made of the thing that used to be your greatest fear. So welcome to the year of the rat. It's 2020 and we're gonna gallop into the future with a smile on our face and a rat under our butts. We've got a glorious podcast for you today.

Shane Moss is here with us and he's one of my favorite guests on the show. And this one, we go deep. We're gonna jump right into it, but first, some quick business. My penis looks like I shaved with a cheese grater. My balls, they look like a map of the moon's craters. I should not have used that, the razor from the jar.

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It's time for you to mainline the DTFH into your pulsating thrombic nerve right below your fifth taint. That means head over to patreon.com or slash DTFH and subscribe. Once you subscribe, not only will you be visited by a multi-breasted angel in your feverish wet dreams, you're also going to be given immediate access

to lots of extra DTFH content, hour long rambles, commercial free episodes and access to our Discord server. Just head over to patreon.com or slash DTFH and subscribe. Also, if you are in Denver, come and see me at the Denver Comedy Works. I'm going to be at the Denver Comedy Works, something like the 18th, whatever that weekend is.

Go to the Denver Comedy Works website, buy tickets. Those links are going to be at dunkatrustle.com. And of course we have a shop located at dunkatrustle.com so you could adorn your body with beautiful, magically imbued bits of glorious, swag, swag and sag. That's dunkatrustle.com, forward slash shop. All right guys, without further ado,

please welcome back to the Dunkatrustle Family Hour podcast, a comedian with an incredible podcast called Here We Are. He also has an amazing comedy show that he's touring right now called Stand Up Science. He is a brilliant human if aliens do finally try to contact this planet. He's going to be the first one they reach out to. Open your arms, spread your wings,

expand your thrombo folds and engulf today's guest with all the love that you have and the deepest part of your cavernous love reservoirs. Welcome to the DDFH, Shane Moss. It's the Dunkatrustle Family Hour podcast. Welcome, welcome on you, that you are with us. Shane and Nobby Doobie Blue,

welcome to you. Welcome, welcome on you. It's the Dunkatrustle Family Hour podcast. Brush your head. Yeah, I don't know. I think, is there a way of combining it of, I was just thinking yesterday about how, you know, I did all this factory work early on in my life,

probably did like five, six years of factory work and it was just a lot of like repetitive. What factory? Mind this, I worked at, the first factory job that I ever had, I worked in a crouton factory. Are you fucking shitting me? Where?

In the cross, Wisconsin. Here's the thing, I had no idea that that's like a funny thing to have done until I started telling people and when I told people I worked in a crouton, but they're like, oh what? Like it just does something to people's minds, like I didn't realize croutons are made in a factory. I'm gonna be honest with you, man,

I know a lot about you. You cover yourself in Siri and Rue and MAO inhibitor and smoke DMT. You've been in mental hospitals, you're a brilliant comedian, you've traveled all over the fucking place, but this is the craziest shit you have told me in our long friendship that you worked at a crouton factory.

I worked just for a little while. Yeah, I worked third shift in a crouton factory with a bunch of degenerates. I used to drink every night. I took a third shift job because I was drinking too much and I wanted to like not be around my friends and not have the inclination to go out and party, but I ended up just drinking at work.

You're gonna get sober. The crouton factory mistake doesn't work. It's a myth. I know, I know. It's what it used to. People would say, if you wanna clean yourself up, go to the crouton factory, but then the darkness even creeped in there.

Well, that was the early people that did that, had the LSD experience with the crouton factory work and then once they phased that out. You're talking about the MK Ultra shit when the CIA was going to crouton factories and giving people small doses of acid. You're familiar then. You're familiar with the history.

Absolutely. Shane, let me just, cause you know, what better place to start? So you go in to apply for a job at a crouton factory. I was actually, I went to a temp place. And that was my first temp gig that they gave me. Gotcha. And so when you got to the crouton factory,

the first day, what's the first day of work there was like 10 degenerates all working there. Some of them were like actually quite likable. And then there was like scary people. I like, I got kind of like, they would have fun. You know, they would like to haze new people and stuff. So they put me by to work with some dude who is just this lunatic who like,

you're talking to him for about, you know, like maybe five minutes, you're working with the guy. He's shown you like how to load bread up on the thing that sends it up through these racks, that then pushes it through the oven. And like the things that you need to know, which really isn't that much. Is he a big dude?

He's like a bigger old, a big, huge beard, wild looking. And within five minutes of just like, within the tutorial of like, here's what you need to do. There's like a little, you know, Hitler actually had some pretty good ideas. Like just slipping that in. Just let's get to know each other. Oh my God.

I feel like you need to know this about loaves. You also need to know that people were a little hard on Hitler. Dude, that is the worst to get station next to a Nazi at a fucking crouton factory. I mean, you know what you're, if you, if you're working at a crouton factory, you should know what you're signing up for. Again, I was just a little naive back then.

I was a young man. I didn't know the old cliche about Nazis and the crouton factories. And so I wasn't, I wasn't prepared for it. Isn't that a Maya Angelou poem? Nazis in the Crouton Factory, working, working shift three. Nazis in the Crouton Factory coming after thee. Your, your retention for poetry is incredible.

Oh my God. I mean, it probably has been a while since you've read that poem and that was, that was flawless. 20 years since I read that poem. But yeah, I do have a photographic memory when it comes to poems about Nazis. I've never read a, I've never, I've never forgotten any poem about Nazis

that I've ever read. So it's just like, so I just like to think about it from this Nazis POV, which is like in his mind, you know, because to me, I think like, okay, so this maybe is like a little too far away from what we're talking about, but I think I can bring the two together, man. Like the other night I found this one,

I wish I could remember the name of the YouTube channel just because the guy who's making these videos is really doing a really good job of making fringe theory YouTube videos that are actually managing to stay almost like a documentary that isn't really saying he believes it or not, which I love just like, and so it's this wonderfully engrossing YouTube video,

which is an account from a variety of different mythologies and world religions regarding some shit that happened on the planet a long time ago, kind of the Graham Hancock stuff. Yeah, that in all these different world religions, there's an account of what it sounds like a comet, but you know, it's people who didn't know what comets were back then to saying shit like, you know,

a dragon in the ceiling of the sky flew by, great waterfalls fell from the rain fell from the rain fell down, but not like natural rain, like waterfalls in different spots, the rivers turned red. There's all these accounts of the rivers turning red and these mythologies. And, you know, he wasn't saying anything, he's just reading quotes from all these mythologies together

and put in your like, oh shit, it's like some awful thing happened, the rivers turning red, maybe he did talk in it. I think I'm building up a little bit too much. He might've talked a little bit, but the rivers turning red was what would happen if iron got in the water. So whatever this thing was,

but anyway, I'm reading this, watching it and wondering like, why is this making me so happy? Like, why does it feel so good? And then I started thinking like, oh my God, it's like something in us knows that modern society is weirdly so constrictive. And so, you know, like a, probably a monkey at the zoo,

if the monkeys could talk and there was a monkey who started telling the story of like, one day you know the zoo will burn. The monkey would kind of like it, even though there's food and all this shit, right? So similarly, I think the Cruton factory, Nazi, the reason people get into these spots in their mind is because you're working at a fucking Cruton factory.

Oh yeah, it's miserable. You're miserable and in your mind, the fantasy of Nazi Germany that these psychopaths have, which is one of like some like, to them, Hitler's Luke Skywalker. Snacking on Crutons all day, you know, loses a little bit of its luster after a couple decades.

Yeah. And now it's like, are we gonna come out with any new flavors of these Crutons? Or am I just gonna keep eating these garlic ones all of the time? Cause you know you need to snack on the Crutons. Was it garlic Crutons? Yeah, they had all sorts of different flavors.

Was there, can you name the factory? It's a no, but at the time, I think they did some stuff with hostess. I don't remember the name of it and I believe it's changed name. It's in the cross Wisconsin. I'm sure people could throw a quick Google search in and go maybe that and just look for an old guy

with a big old gray beard and a beard. As I think about it, you'd also like wear the beard net too, which is like, that's nice, I feel like. Like if you don't give a fuck so much that like within five minutes of meeting someone, you're like advocating for giving Hitler a second chance, but you're still like conscientious enough to like put the beard on your net

so that your beard hairs don't get into strangers Crutons. I mean, there's a lot, you know, we all contain multitudes and there's this is a very, you know, kind of dynamic, unpredictable character. Good news is the Cruton Nazi knows that there are white people in the supply chain. Right, right, right.

Otherwise we'd be fucked. Yeah, right. But the other thing is like, I don't think people understand just how, and maybe they do, but you know, we live in LA and you travel all over the place, I don't think people understand just how many Nazis are working at the various Cruton factories of the world.

It's Nazis, you know what I mean? I mean, it might even be a front. Crutons might just be a thing that Nazis made up as like a legitimate business for their Nazi propaganda. Another fucking thing. What do you think about that shit though? Like I've, you know, like one of the,

the, I don't remember who said it to me, they're like, where do you think the Nazis went Duncan? You think that like after the, after World War II ended, the Nazi just dissolved? Do you think they just went away? They were like, okay, we lost the war. We're out of here. So there's like one of the great conspiracy theories

is that the Nazis just started corporations. And so like Bear Aspirin and like a lot of the great corporations and I mean, great, big, successful corporations of the world, they have their roots. That's just name names. We got McDonald's. Not McDonald's. No, no, no.

That old podcast. Guys, remember, go to McDonald's, use an uppercut swastika, they get a 10% off your cheeseburger. Free small fry. But like, you know, that is a, I think that's where when we're getting fucking blasted these days with like.

I mean, they had the Nazi gold at the time, right? Maybe you get, maybe you start a business with that Nazi gold. You get into something legitimate. Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. I don't like thinking about that. That conspiracy theory to me,

the only reason like, I'm, But don't you still, I mean, doesn't it, doesn't it dissipate over time? Sorry, I cut you off. But doesn't it, I'm so glad you did. Doesn't it, doesn't it like you take your Nazi gold, you start, you start Sears and then like over time,

your kids are like, I'm kinda, I'm not into, don't the kids eventually be like, you know, grandpa's like, you know, he's got money. We gotta ask at nice to him, but we're not sure about the Nazi thing. I feel like over time it kind of simmers down a little bit. Who knows? I don't know.

Somebody just desecrated a synagogue here in LA. Yeah, that's true. It's like these motherfuckers, man, they're just, they're floating around out there. You know, they're just like, and they, they're like, and you know, it's like that, cause like the thing the crouton Nazi did to you,

he does to everybody. That's just his thing. He's a recruiter. He's a, he said Nazi recruits on it. I think it was like, it's also a way to get a rise out of people or like, you know, they had them like stuck by himself. Most everyone else is like working together

and like there's a thing and someone's like filling the bags and then another person's packing the bags in the boxes, another person's taping the box, another person's putting the box in the, and you're like all right next to each other. But the Nazi guy, you set him like far, far away in another room, not talking, and he must like it that way

because he doesn't like when he needs to like train the new kid or whatever. So it might've also been just like a defense, like get the hell away from me kind of a, kind of a situation too, but everyone else is very, you know, they were a surprisingly tolerant group of individuals for like whatever behavior that you could get into.

I used to be, I used to skip on my lunch breaks, I would go and like meet up with friends at a party, do a bunch of shots and come back. And depending on how drunk I was, that's how they would decide what job to give me. And so if I was like really drunk, they thought that was the funniest. And so what they would do is they'd get me up

on like a scissor lift or something like that. It'd be like my first time running a scissor lift and they'd be like, this will be hilarious. Shane's very drunk right now. We'll just throw him up on a scissor lift, give him an air hose and teach him how to clean off the tracks running across the ceiling for the bread. And so that's the kind of stuff I do.

I don't know why this is shocking to me. I've never, for one here, like just from, this is the Midwest. I think I speak for the listeners, maybe when I say, when we're eating our croutons, we're not thinking, where the fuck do these come from? I'm not thinking about that at all. I'm just, if I do have croutons,

which is a weird thing anyway, but if you did, sometimes when you're like really looking for a wild salad or you're at the... Yeah, you definitely got to warn people when guests are coming over like, how wild do you want, I do, I don't know if you fucks with croutons, but I do have some garlic croutons. Whoa, Duncan.

Hold on, I didn't know you were a Nazi. I was just coming over to smoke DMT, but I don't fuck with croutons on my salad. Croutons, you had to pile croutons on there, but you know, or if you're at a salad bar, and you're like, you know what, fuck it, I'm gonna scoop on these croutons. And then you know, they end up just becoming like mushy.

They're actually just better. What I learned from working in a crouton factory is just eat croutons. Just get a box of croutons and eat them like you'd eat a Trisket or something like that. That's the best way to eat a crouton. I'd munch on croutons every night. Do you?

And they, no, no, no, no, no, I did. When I worked in the factory, there'd be like the things going by and you'd always be, everyone would be scooping handfuls. Yeah, you got like dirty to generate hands, scooping handfuls of croutons. I mean, if you think that's the worst thing that's happening to your food.

No, I don't. Listen, I wouldn't be surprised if every single thing we eat gets launched through like one of those T-shirt guns into like some kind of like mutated chimpanzees ass and a vomit sip back out for no reason, like those fucking lemurs that eat the coffee beans. I imagine everything.

Oh, sorry. Please, what was that? Yeah, no, this just reminds me of, I'm just very excited about all of the, I was, I took a tour, I was in Dublin and there's a, I took a tour of the Guinness factory because there's a, there's a comic that would sometimes give tours there.

Yeah. And so I got like a little more like behind this. So I'm not sure that they would normally tell people this. Oh my God. But it used to be that like within the beer making process, rats would just be like ground up and get into the grain and everything all of the time.

And it was just like, you know, that's just what happens. And then eventually in like the early 1900s, they figured out what, you know, like they started having health code people and stuff come in and check things. And they'd be like, listen, you know, you got to have not 200 dead rats in your thing like every day.

And so they started putting things and getting the rats out of there. They put up new screens and stuff like that. And people started complaining about the Guinness. They'd be like, we, well, I don't know what you guys did to Guinness. You changed the ingredients. We liked the old Guinness better.

So they had to create an artificial rat blood. Are you fucking with me? No, you're lying. You're lying. I am not lying. This is a fucking lie. This is a true story. As far as this guy,

unless he was a comic and he was fucking with me, he worked for Guinness and he was telling, it was very convincing the way that he told it. Yeah. What? Yeah, dude. And like, not only are they launching our food through a t-shirt, cannon, baboon ass,

but we love it that way. Yeah. If they ever stopped, we would riot in the street. What happened to the food? Remember when the food, the taste changed? And it's when the one baboon that's at the front of the last stop of the supply chain died finally, just like one quivered,

like puked out some rits or whatever. They're like, we can't, we just can't do that to another baboon anymore. You know, we know more. No, they tried. We know more than we knew back then when we chained this baboon. 30 years ago, we didn't realize there was anything wrong

with shooting food through a t-shirt cannon into this baboon's ass that it would then puke up through its mouth. You'd wipe it off a little bit, cook it, eat it. And we didn't know that we didn't realize that baboon didn't like that. And we can't, you know, we can't do that anymore. But now people are, now you gotta figure out

an artificial way of making the baboon ass puke taste that kind of the food marinates in. That's a whole R&D department nightmare. You are making me wanna just start a farm and just grow my own fucking food and brew my own beer. But you know, this is, one of the things the Hare Krishna said, I've said on the podcast before,

is that they were like, don't go out to eat. And here's why. In the same way that you see a painting and you can feel the artist in the painting, that's the artist's energy that has gone into the painting and has locked in there in this visual form. The same thing happens with food. So, you know, if you're,

the person cooking for you is fucked up, a little bit of that energy gets in the food and you eat it. And but then now I'm thinking like, well, fuck it. Even if it's the Dalai Lama back there cooking your food with a big smile in his face, glowing with a radiant, benevolent aura from a lifetime of pure compassion practice, whoever, like the croutons he's putting in your salad,

there's a Nazi somewhere in there in the supply chain. So all of us in everything we eat, we are just scooping into our mouths some tiny, like tell me this, okay, and correct me if I'm wrong here. But like, tell me, cause I think you will understand this more and this is one of the woo-woo things I like to talk about, but then I'm always thinking in the back of my mind,

you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Can you tell me just a little bit about quantum entanglement, Shane? And no, I don't know enough about quantum entanglement. I will say that one of the, and it's been a while since I've brushed up on my physics. I don't have physicists on my podcast or anything. I have like life science, psychology and neuroscience people.

But one of the things that people, that I see people like really run away with is the, oh, what's the? Observer effect. Yeah, the observer effect where they're like, oh, so you can't actually observe anything without changing it. And really what's happened, you're using a light.

A light is bouncing off of an electron, I believe. And then it's changing the trajectory and so when that light bounces off and that's how you register it by going into the device or your eye, and then you saw where it was at that moment back in that time, but because the light changed the trajectory, you can't know where it was now.

It doesn't mean that you moved it with your mind or anything. It's not like you manifested that. It'd be like if you were closing your eyes and there was like a ball on this table and I was like, I wanna use my hand to know how far this ball is. And then when I touch it, the ball rolls away

and now I know exactly where that ball was at that moment and now I don't know because it rolled away. It doesn't mean like I moved the ball with my mind or I manifested a thing or that nothing is real and we can't predict anything. I think people are really taking that notion of we don't know anything and maybe making a little bit too much out of it

because it seems like throughout human history, people go like, whenever you don't know something, you go like, therefore magic. And we've made some progress in being like, actually along the way, when we do figure out how something works, it seems like it's less magic and it would actually be weirder

if things didn't work that way, like things like the Fibonacci sequence or something like that. It'd be weird if leaves on flowers didn't work in a Fibonacci sequence way because then the petals on the flower wouldn't get the exact right amount of light per each petal and there's just things

that seem like very magical on the surface but it's just like very, like once we know how it works, it's like, oh, in hindsight, that's like fairly simple math. And so quantum entanglement, I don't even wanna touch that one because I just don't know.

All of the quantum physics that I've read, I don't understand from my understanding of it, quantum physicists that actually do quantum physics work don't seem to understand how it works themselves, admittedly, and I mean, one of my favorite things is about scientists is they always, I mean, probably every single episode that I interview a scientist at least once or twice,

they'll say, I don't know. And so few people say, I don't know in their everyday life. Most people, we could walk outside right now and we could go up to a stranger and be like, what's the meaning of life? And they'll be like, well, pull up a chair, I'll tell you exactly what it is.

And I think that's just like the trick of consciousness that we are constantly being kind of reassured in kind of a self-grandizing way that we kind of know what's going on all of the time. And the two main causes of stress are lack of predictability and lack of control. Those are the two main stressors. So like one is, have I ever told you about those people?

I don't think so, Shane. So if you take a rat and you put it in a cage and you have like two sides of the cage and one of them's electrified and the other isn't. Wait, is this something the guy at the Guinness factory told you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry.

No, no problem. So you have like the game is, is like a light turns on and then if the rat moves to the other side, it will avoid the shock and it will learn this pattern very, very quickly. And then, but then you take one of these things out of there. So now you take the light out of there. So there's no warning and there's a shock,

but it still knows if it runs to the other side, then it's safe from the thing. And then, or you do the other thing, you give it the light, but you don't give it another side to run to. And so there's no control over the situation, but there is predictability. And there's a high level of stress there, but the rat can still brace itself.

So that's, they're about equal levels of stress. But if you take both away, no light and nothing it can do about it. So no predictability, no control. And you just shock this thing at random intervals. What it eventually does is it learns that the world is full of random shocks that there's nothing you can do about.

And then when you go and put it back in a condition where any other normal rat would easily learn, oh, the light comes on and move over here, it can't learn it. It's now learned helplessness. It's like given up on life. And that's really easy for any of us to do. So there's all of these probably evolved

self-defense mechanisms to overly perceive predictability and overly perceive control in our lives because it would be fucking horrifying if we didn't. And so sometimes, and I know we like, you and I are, I mean, this is why we're so a perfect pair together because you're a little more mystical than I am and a little more into like manifesting things than I am.

I've also had enough psychedelic experiences to be like everything that I'm saying right now is probably a bunch of bullshit because I've had those experiences where it feels like those things. I don't think it's bullshit. I think that what you're talking about on one level of reality is exactly right.

And that's the level of reality that we have the most data for. So probably if you're gonna place bets on the way things are, that's where you'd wanna roll the dice, right? This does tie in to the, I think the misunderstanding many people have regarding the observer effect and so the,

and sort of just the framing of reality itself, and which is like, if a thing's in a superposition, it's moving so fucking fast. This is how I understand it. It's the cloud of energy around an atom, the electrons are moving so fast. They're basically everywhere at once around that fucking thing.

So in their moving so fast that pretty much wherever you look, you're gonna find it's gonna be there. It's there, it's gonna be there because it's moving so fast. It's like, this is my understanding of it. And you're framing it and you're, the act of observing it is like,

you've taken a little snapshot of it and so it becomes a thing for a second and then goes back into its quantum soup. And so the misunderstanding seems to be people think that it's our attention that is making the form happen versus like the snapshot that is showing a place where it was at for a second. It was also at every other place simultaneously.

And so this sort of concept gets moved into like the new thought mystical movement, which is like, well, yeah, what you're saying is exactly right. We don't wanna feel stressed out. We wanna know what's coming next. If we know what's coming next, we can relax for a second

because we feel like we're safe. Like right now, for example, if you knew, like let's say we've been locked in this fucking house by lunatics who are like, listen, we want you to- For the listeners, that's actually what has happened. Duncan has locked me in here. Yeah, during an experiment. I'm a scientist, I don't know what's gonna happen.

But I do know this. And if anyone could please call for help. We've got, it's not really a doggy door. It's a shame if you'll notice over there, that's actually a lion door. And what's gonna happen is at a random time, a lion is gonna come galloping out of that door and it's gonna attack us.

Now, the moment you know that, the podcast is gonna be a different podcast. It's gonna go all the time. You're just gonna be staring at that fucking door, crying. You know? And this is the, so the human mind, the human humans, we wanna know what's coming down the line.

Is, you know, when I was like doing my cancer treatments, you know, you get those fucking tests, you gotta wait to find out if you're gonna die. You know, and you gotta wait. And that does not, that is not a pleasant time when you're just sitting there like, fuck, I don't know what's gonna happen. Now, the reality is whether or not you have this or that,

whether you're sick or healthy, whether you're old or young, you really don't know what's gonna happen. That's the reality. You just can't know what's gonna happen. But you can kind of make bets on what's gonna happen based on what's happened before. So this is where it gets interesting,

is that if you're somebody who has had a string of bad luck, you have been the rat in the experiment and you've just had random shit happen to you. You wanna number one know, why does this shit keep happening to me? So you're gonna look around, look into yourself, and maybe you're gonna be like, fuck, I shouldn't have thrown that gypsy kid in the volcano

when I was drunk on my last trip to Hawaii because his fucking grandmother- No, that can't be it. It must have been something else. Or whatever, you'll try to come up with a reason for it. And then, so you'll just kind of feel like, oh, I must be cursed. Oh, it's me, or oh, the world is out to get me,

or oh, the world's not designed for me, or oh, this or that or this or that. But in that crystallization of like in your attempt to get some ability to relax, just at least you understand it's cause you're cursed. The gypsy kid, you threw it into the fucking caldera. Now, at least now you know I'm cursed. You can relax a little bit into being cursed,

but the idea is actually the moment you let yourself lean in to the security of insanity, which is you don't know what's gonna happen, that leaning in begins to form, at the very least a behavior pattern, that could very easily be creating the events in your life that you associate with being cursed. Oh, absolutely.

So that's the, now that, see, that's the non-mystical part. It's like if you're super defensive, if you're super scared, if you're angry, mostly if you're in a lot of fucking pain, you don't even realize you're snarling. My volumes are off. You know, I was talking to one of my spiritual friends

in the car, Ragu, I've had on the podcast, and he, and we're driving, and he's like, why are you yelling at me? And I'm like, oh my God, I was yelling at you. I didn't even realize I was yelling. Right now you can say, why are you yelling at me, Duncan? My volumes go up too high. You know what I mean?

I don't like your volume. Thank you. Don't you ever change your volume? He wasn't asking me to change you. I like it, because he was pointing out like, look at where you're, because I was unconscious of the thing that was happening. You're expressive.

Yeah, but I was also mad at the time. We were talking about something I was pissed off about. And so anyway, that's the first part. But even before that, and I'll shut up after this, even before that, the precursor to the consideration of what's coming next, the behavior pattern, the way you're emoting, your body language, even your pheromones, it's happening in some kind of

super harmonized release of neurotransmitters. And so the precursor to that is actually some kind of energetic state. And also like you're saying neurons that wire together, fire together, you've essentially formed a kind of, for lack of a better word, what do you call the thing you make spaghetti in? What's that called?

You push pasta through it. Oh yeah, the, the spaghetti eyes. Yeah, yeah, the spaghetti eyes, sir. Your brain has become- Oh, it wasn't called that, it's ridiculous. Your brain has become, I think a pasta press. I don't know what it is, but your brain has become a spaghetti eyes for reality.

This word starts getting mystical. Is that essentially, because your neurons have formed in this way, you're like a 3D printer that's printing out a set of behavior patterns and energetic patterns that's forming a universe around you. Absolutely. That's good or bad.

Yeah, I mean, I, so one, in terms of self-fulfilling prophecies that happened, this is like, this is a very easily testable thing. There's, there's one of my favorite studies is they took, they took female Asians and gave them math tests. And they gave them, they gave them just a standard test with no, nothing to fill out ahead of time.

And they had that group of people. And then, so that was the control. And then the two experimental groups is they had one group that they asked them for their race ahead of time to remind them to prime them like, oh, I'm Asian. And then they had another group where they primed them to be like, well, it's your gender. So it reminded them that they were female.

And the people that were reminded that they were female did worse on the math test and the control. The people that were reminded that they were Asian on the math test did better than those in the control. That's crazy. And, and, you know, so there's all of these self-fulfilling because culture had taught them this and that about what to expect from a gender or a race of people.

And this happens all of the time with all sorts of minority groups and everything. And then there's also in, in addition to that, there are things that, you know, have, I mean, meditation was very woo-woo 20 years from now. And now it's like, you know, there's hardly, you know, there's all sorts of academic literature and research and guys like Richard Davidson and neuroscientists

who's like writing books with the Dalai Lama and stuff. And I think some of his stuff goes a little overboard, but still he's really got to legitimize things. There's, I just got done, I just had an episode, I was in the Fort Worth Zoo interviewing some people and doing some behind the scenes zoo stuff. And there's one of the vets there does animal acupuncture. And this is a bunch of stuff that would have sounded

and still does sound like a whole bunch of baloney to a lot of people. This isn't someone like, you know, dressed up in a bunch of new age. You know, this is a serious veterinarian that and what would have normally been called like meridians or whatever that you were doing. You know, these are just parts of the nervous system

that they're interfering with in a lot of times. And this is one of my favorite points that I think about a lot when I'm talking with people. When I have conversations like this where it might be like easy to be like, I'm the science-y one, you're the mystical one. I'll be the mystical one. And I don't even think that that's,

you know, I think it's a little bit of a false narrative. And I remember we were talking at Peter McGraw's party, the last time I saw you that rooftop party, we were talking about this very idea of I was telling you about how in the 1800s there was this conductor who had synesthesia and he didn't know what synesthesia was. He just, he saw music as color

and didn't realize that no one else could see that. To him, it was just like normal life and would get frustrated other people. And so he would, but it made him like this incredible conductor, but he would have to be like, yes, I need more violet out of the horn section. And they'd be like, what the fuck?

And so they press like a different button on the saxophone or trumpet or whatever. And then he'd be like, no, that's red. I said violet. And then they like try a different button nervously and be like, oh, that's almost, and then they try like another thing. And then finally he'd be like, yes, yes, more violet.

That's the violet, more violet. And then the trumpet section would eventually learn that like, be flat. You know, when he says violet, you play B flat. And so they were just using different words to articulate the exact same thing. And they were both, you know,

the conductor was this world paint brilliant conductor. And there's nothing crazy about what he was perception. It was reality. It was just his way of perceiving it. And same with the trumpet was not crazy for not being able to perceive and see music and like tuning in and interpreting it in a different way. And I think that's a lot of like what's going on

is we're all kind of tuning in on around the same kind of ideas and just are, and sometimes bickering over like the language in which we're articulate, not that you and I, but you know, amongst culturally, I think a lot of times we, sometimes we are often on the same page and just using different words to say the same thing.

I think that you're like a, you know, you are an explorer, a philosopher, you're not afraid to like go very far out into places that a lot of people just don't have any interest in swimming in those waters. A lot of people don't wanna dive into the DMT realm and look at it from a quote scientific sort of POV thinking about what the neurotransmitters

in the mind might be doing during this. Some people just wanna like have a normal life, but also some people, they might be experiencing something that's really far out, but because it's not supposed to happen and because they are leaning into the, whoever the particular people in their lives are that they think are the experts, they ignore the phenomena and it atrophies or it goes away.

Some people might be, you know, this composer is lucky he had guts because he wasn't afraid to be like, no, fucking violent. Cause he, you know, if he had gone the wrong way, people would have been like, you're, that's crazy. And he would have just had to learn B flat and maybe he would have like the synesthesia stuff. He would have just ignored or cut off or who knows, whatever.

And this is like in some societies, there's people who are epileptics who talk to spirits and they become shamans. And there's over here, they become schizophrenics. And so the vision between the two can become so incredibly extreme that it isn't just a B flat violet thing. It's more of like a, you know,

if we lean too much into authority. Right. If we, cause I think science and Buddhism have something that is inarguably in common in most forms of Buddhism, which is both ask you to test it yourself. Both are saying, you know, you, you need to like do the experiment if you don't believe it.

You need to test the hypothesis. You need to like listen to yourself and trust that your own experience enough to at least allow that that experience is happening in the universe. Cause some people don't even want to do that. My friend, Connor Habib, he is into Rudolph Steiner. And this guy, he, one of the things he said to me is like,

think of the human, how complex human emotion is. Think of the way we feel, how nuanced feeling is versus how limited the words we have for our feelings are. In general, we get happy, we get sad, we get depressed, we get excited. How many times have you heard someone go, I'm excited about that. Right.

It's like, what do you mean? What does that mean, excited? What do you mean by you're excited? You know, ask like, what does that feel like being excited? And they haven't even thought about it. Yeah, yeah. They don't even know. They're just like, oh, there's a feeling

in my body of something. Yeah. But if you, anytime you're quote excited, if you really look at it, you might notice it's like a tapestry of different things interacting in this beautiful way that you call being excited, but that's not quite the right word for it.

And anyway, I think that it's like, if we get too caught up in the leaning into the authorities, we lose our, we can lose your soul. Yeah. I mean, even within academia, there's a lot of academics would say like, these are academia is going wrong because it's creating a culture that is too safe.

No one's, there's no like mad scientists anymore because people that are a little off and are a little maybe like the type of people that are like maybe a little autistic. So they say inappropriate things or something like that because they don't realize it. Or just the idea of like, hey, this is someone who shows up on time each day

and finishes their homework on time each day. Yeah. Like the valor Victorians, there is no like, think of any story of any scientist, any leader, you know, spiritual leader, anything that's like moved society forward in any way. None of them were valor Victorians. Like valor Victorians just are good at doing it.

Is it valid Victorian or dictatorian? Is it valid dictatorian? I don't fucking know. I have no idea. I have no idea. It's bigger dick. I trust your use of words better than mine. Let's say whatever, whatever, who gives a good shit.

Valid Victorian. And it's one of those things where, I love when you hear a word wrong, you know, the first time and then you just repeat it that way all through life until someone finally is like, I think you might be wrong there. Oh God, I do that all the time. People send me tweets all the time.

It's like, you know, you're completely mispronouncing that word that you say over and over. Or sometimes they're like, that word doesn't mean what you think it does. So whatever, who cares? But you know, the point is, is that, I mean, one thing that I do like about science is that scientists often acknowledge that like,

hey, nothing we're doing here is perfect. And we don't know. And the more we investigate things, the more we realize how little we know, which is the opposite. And a lot of what makes like you and I similar in terms of this conversation about like receptivity is also a personality trait that might be like,

you know, we're a little, you know, personality researcher would say that you and I are both very high in openness, meaning like we have a high threshold for novelty, ambiguity, the unknown, we're a lot more, we don't get stressed out by the, like we need that to survive the idea of working in a factory and doing monotonous work that is actually a safe kind of feeling

for some people in factories and almost meditative in a way. That's not the majority of what's going on, but there's some people and there are people that when you're like, hey, you just got to go out and investigate, you know, there's a lot of people that are just never going to do that because there's this one interesting, I was just taking a person,

I've had a bunch of personality researchers on my show, but I just took this personality research course recently and it like really, really dove into the topic more and it absolutely blew my mind is through great courses, people are interested. But anyway, it was one of the things that stuck with me was it's related to the openness and related to this conversation

is there's people with a high need for closure and people with a low need for closure. So you learn something, you and I have a very low need for closure. Like we can just keep things open for a very long time, we don't need to know the exact answer right now. Other people just need to have, it just brings them too much anxiety when they don't know.

And so their brain comes to a conclusion faster. It's often not as accurate of a conclusion, but what's interesting is they also are more sure of themselves because they have to be for that closure and because they have less information that they're drawing from because they're closed off to new information, they're the more information that you have,

the foggier things, the foggier certainties going to kind of get for you. So there are just a lot of people that through arguably no fault of their own are just have a arguably we've evolved to have people that would be like, hey, we're gonna set up shop here and we're gonna keep everyone safe

and we're gonna get down the way of life in this area and then you needed people like you and I that were like, we're going over the hill and they were like, the dragon hill? Where all the dragons live, you're going over there and they're like, yeah, fuck yeah, we're sick of this. It's boring, I can't do this every day. I gotta see what's over dragon hill.

They're like, it's fucking dragons, we all heard about it. And they're like, we don't believe that. We gotta take a look for ourselves. And they're like, well, all right, you find anything, we'll name the fucking town after you. But you know, a lot of those people, a lot of people like you and I died in the past. You were dragons.

There's a reason why there was those people and there was that safety. And there was, I think they call them like a dove and hawk strategy, the cautious and the aggressive kind of strategy. Well, you know, also any great thing that you're fucking enjoying, whatever it may be, and then we'll cut any great thing, particularly air travel.

Yeah. How many people didn't quite make it to become the right brothers? Oh yeah. I've seen some videos. I think there's a video of this French guy jumping off the Eiffel Tower and he died. Yeah.

Cause he thought he could, he thought he'd come up with a wingsuit or something. And the experimental, the people who test aircraft, the people who fucking, like that woman that just died cause she got, she wanted to like break a land speed record and the car crash, she died. And it's too bad. It's tragic because those are the people

we really like need the most sometimes that are absolutely willing to like take the extra, especially nowadays, because this is arguably, if you forget about things that we don't really have the evolved capacity to understand and sense naturally like things like global warming or nuclear war, if you take out those things and just focus on the things that we've evolved to comprehend,

like say, in and out group bias, murder, crime, theft, that sort of stuff. This is the safest time to be alive in all of human history. And I think, have I ever talked to you about this, the possibly kind of being a, having a psychological allergic reaction to our modern society.

So there's this, there's a cycle. Wait, let me cut to a commercial and then let's jump in to the plague of safety. The plague of safety. We're back. There probably wasn't a commercial there. Yeah. Safety plague.

So in this world of safety, people are not digging it. So, I don't want to sound like the old guy of just like, kids are too coddled these days and this and that because there's a lot of different domains in life and there are pros and cons to creating a safer way for our children and whatnot. But there's the idea of the reason why we get allergies potentially is because we evolved in an area

that was chuck full of bacteria and parasites. There was nothing you could ever, and then you have, you evolve these psychological propensities to clean up after yourself more and debate more often and to clean up your area more and there was never anything you could possibly do to get rid of all these parasites and bacteria in your area. And then all of a sudden, for the very first time,

in all of human and animal and life history, there's like Lysol and we were able to sterilize and completely wipe out almost all bacteria and parasites, at least by comparison. So, say there's like one-tenth the number of parasites and bacteria that there was through all of human history, through what our immune system has been evolved to cope with through, so this is seemingly intuitively good news,

but there's a threat detection aspect of our immune system that has evolved to detect, say, I'm just making up a number, say 10 parasites or bacteria, whatever potential threats to the immune system every single day and then it would do its thing and take care of those threats and investigate them and then all of a sudden, for the first time ever in this DNA structure, it's only picking up on one threat a day

and so there's kind of like this supervising mechanism going, why are we only detecting one-tenth the number of threats we should? Maybe it's the sensor itself that is off, it's not sensitive enough and so it's increasing the sensitivity of the threat detection until eventually it's like, Dander, maybe that's a threat and then it sends out and Dander's not,

it's not a threat to your immune system, but the immune system response to it is an autoimmune response and so it's the threat response in and of itself that is a threat to you, that's what an allergy is and there's even extreme ideas of like how you can, you know, there's people that have had, this is why when someone is like, hey, I'm allergic to this thing, so I'll just eliminate it

and then it turns out they start becoming allergic to like three other things and they're like, oh, now there's three other things that I need to eliminate and it just compounds and the idea is that there might be something like that going on with psychological threats as well. Cancel culture. Yeah, and so there's, I mean, if you look,

you know, you have a kid now, I've just had a bunch of, I was just hanging out with a couple of my best friends hanging out with their kid and they're like, yeah, it's too bad that we can't, remember when we were kids and our parents just let us like run around in the neighborhood and play and it's too bad, the world's too dangerous now and you can't do that anymore, it's like,

no, actually this is the safest, this is the lowest rates of kidnapping, of child murder or anything like that in all of human history and this has been, this is the single worst time to be a kidnapper in all of human history, that's not to say that it's safe, maybe our parents were fucking up by letting us out that much but if ever there was a time

to let your kid run around in the neighborhood, statistically this would be the time but it doesn't feel like that, it feels like just the opposite to that and maybe it's this psychological allergy over-perceiving and hijacking our consciousness and over-perceiving our thoughts and tell where, because there's not an actual threat,

we're just imagining ones that don't exist. Okay, let me add to that, so I've got this ring doorbell that we never fucking charged the battery so it's just the biggest waste of money because it's like something are going down and charging it and whatever but once you sign up for ring and people are like, don't do ring because you're being monitored or I don't care about that,

I don't give a fuck about that but one annoying thing is you sign up for ring, you get put on the ring network, right? And anyone in your area that experiences any kind of thing, a package, thief, whatever, like you get an alert so your phone will be like, and I know I could turn the alerts off, to be honest, I think it's kind of funny

but I'll get the most ridiculous ring alerts, the one most recently was someone stole detergent off my porch and you get the video of someone like wearing a headlamp, scooting around, grabbing tide which by the way turns out to be something people trade for crack, it's a different story altogether but it really is like a black market currency weirdly. Yeah, yeah, look it up, it's very odd

but anyway like, but you know, you start getting these alerts and because you've, before getting the ring doorbell, I didn't have any idea when a crime happened in the neighborhood, suddenly because your sensor has become more accurate, has become more focused, you're getting all this new information about the shit going on in the neighborhood and then you make the huge cognitive error

and thinking fuck, this place is suddenly, it's a dangerous place, it's always been that dangerous, you just didn't have the data to understand just how dangerous it is and like, and I know you mean, I know stealing detergent isn't that big a deal and I do agree that we're in the age of safety so to speak but you know, and this isn't the idea

that this is like literally causing people to not just become oversensitive but also to kind of atrophy too, right? Isn't that the idea? Yeah, yeah, I mean, so many things there. One is that we also have this, one of the most studied evolved biases is the negativity bias, the rustling in the brush

or whatever is probably just the wind in our evolutionary past but if it's an actual line you wanna be aware of that, is that line coming out anytime soon? I don't know. And so maybe you see some berries, they might be, chances are 90% chance they're editable but 10% chance they're not, you're dead

and so like, do you really wanna touch that thing? For one of the, and so there's this negativity bias and so part of the thing is, is ring is never giving you an alert of like, hey look, no one did, look at all these people that passed by your neighbor Sam's house today without stealing anything, look at this, just regular old people walking around through life.

It's not newsworthy, it's not notable and so you're never going to see the news like 10,000 people in this small town drove to work today completely uneventfully and that's just never going to happen and it'd be so incredibly boring. Well, cause we can't get high off of it. It's like, that's another thing is like the,

I'm reading this great book by this guy, I think his name's Dr. Joe Espinoza, it's a woo woo book, he's up front with it in the very beginning, he's like, my friends in the scientific community are down on some of the things I'm saying, but I realized like, if I don't report what I'm finding out, because people aren't going to like it,

it's like this book isn't for them. You know, and he's, it's a really interesting, he does cite real studies in it, but essentially like the idea that he's putting out there is that humans in general are just addicted to stress. We, you get fucking high when you're freaked out, man. We, and that's now that like what you're saying, this has been removed from our environment mostly.

So now we're having to figure out ways to do this masturbatory stress mechanism. We have to- Where's the threat? It's gotta be out there. And we've become essentially like compulsive stress masturbators is a society, like people are, you, you know, when you're like,

then when you find yourself, I don't know, like when I find myself laying in bed, worrying over something, and essentially what I'm doing is jerking off my amygdala's dick, just trying to get some of that sweet cortisol to spray into my brain because that gets you high. It's a kind of speed almost.

And people are really, really addicted to that according to this guy. Most people are very addicted to stress. Most people have either had parents who were like the rats in your experiment who were just completely freaked out by life to the point where they transmitted this, and which would be an interesting thing to find out

in that study, what are the rats kids like? Freaked out too, but there's an answer to that? Well, I had a person on that studies stress contagion and what you do is you have a mother bring her baby into this study and you know, you separated them, someone's watching the baby and everything's fine. And you have a control where the mother goes away for like 15 minutes, you know, comes back,

holds the baby and you get cortisol, stress measurements from both the mother and the baby. And then you have a stressor condition, which all you have to do is have someone give a speech for 10 minutes. You tell them to give a speech about a topic for 10 minutes. And if you really want to stress them out, you have two Confederates, you have like two plants.

So they're just giving a speech to two people and the two people are just like arms crossed, like shaking their heads, just like not into your speech. And this is just a very reliable way to like stress people out in that kind of a benign way. You do have to make sure and debrief people after these studies and let them know what was up. That's, they didn't always do that.

And that's how the Unabomber came into the, he was in a study where they intentionally made people lose their self esteem and never got debriefed afterwards. Whoops. Whoops. And so anyhow, you stress out the mother, you take her cortisol measurements

and then you have her go and interact with her baby. And the baby's cortisol goes up as well and they don't know what the mechanism is. Exactly, they don't know if there's some sort of body language. They think it's probably olfactory, hormone smelling something is wrong. And that's what's triggering it.

But yeah, stress is contagious. I mean, we're social animals, laughter is contagious, good moods are contagious, everything's. Okay, so there you go, right there. That is exactly what this guy's talking about. I think what he says, the way we think he says, I guess, is that he's just saying, well, everything's light, everything's a frequency, everything's a frequency.

So those pheromones, they're theorizing it's pheromones, that's just, that's a form of energy. It's a data field that is around every single person, including you and me, everyone has got this set of data of which most, a lot of it, we can see. How does a person look? Do they seem disheveled? Have they combed their hair?

Do they seem dirty or their eyes dilated? Are they sweating? Are they trembling? This is just basic shit where you can do this instantaneous analysis and be like, fuck, are you all right, man? But then there's more, you know. All these subconscious, I mean, it would be bizarre

if we didn't evolve all sorts of instincts and subconscious, we're about the most social species on earth, if we didn't have some sort of sensory mechanism that we were kind of not terribly, not completely privy to. It would be weird if we, and what's really interesting is like, you know, you have these things that you don't consciously, you're not consciously aware of what is, no one knows what cortisol smells like.

You don't know like, oh, this is a real cortisol smelly room, but it's going, it's being receptive. And then you're now stressed for a reason you don't understand, but our consciousness likes to tell us a story, going back to the consciousness being like, hey, I know what's happening right now. Then you go like, I'm stressed because my, because of, you know, some group of people taking my job

or something like that. Like someone just walked in, they were stressed out, you know you're stressed and you think it's because of your boss or something, and it's just an olfactory, you're just sniffing a little bit of cortisol without realizing. It's not cortisol, it's a crouton factory. Here's the thing, so if you start reverse engineering,

just the concept of stress contagion, and it really does bring us back to the misunderstanding of the observer effect, what this guy is saying is, so the idea is because you think you know what's coming, based on what's happened, you essentially have encoded in your DNA your past, and this is produced as a constant anxiety state. So essentially like your DNA is acting

like some horrific genetic prism, which has captured the sum total of all your experience and is now giving your body a constant like feeling of anxiety or stress or whatever it may be. And because that's happening, when you get around people, people are acting fucking weird around you, because they are picking up on, fuck, do you know something I don't know,

is the lion about to come out of the trap door? And so people are probably avoiding your ass, because they don't wanna be around someone who potentially has got a lion chasing them down. I'm twitchy because no one will talk to me, no one will talk to you because you're twitchy. That, exactly. And so, and I think he, probably where he,

I don't know, because I haven't finished this, it's a great book, it's the newest book by him if you're interested, I think it's Dr. Joe Espinoza, but the next level of the thing is okay, how far does the stress contagion go? We definitely know it's gonna affect the human biosphere, and we sure as fuck know it's gonna affect animals. I mean, this is my least favorite thing.

I don't know what happened, but in the old days when I used to get super stoned, I would get really paranoid, man. I don't do that anymore, thank God. But like, but you know, when you're around your friends, you go over to your friends. Smoke weed? No, get paranoid.

Ha ha ha. You get around your friends dog, and when a dog gets stress contagion, they'll growl at your ass. Because then, if you're already paranoid, you'll start thinking, does that dog see something in me that I can't see? Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, no, the dog's picking up on the fact that the dog smells your fucking nasty ass cortisol sweat, and it's growling because it thinks you wanna hurt their master or them or whatever. And so now we know, okay, it's affecting the animal biome too. So okay, if it's affecting humans and animals, how far does it fucking go?

PS, if you're like, if your species and other species are getting freaked out by you, that's enough to produce a pretty turbulent life. But his thing, I think, gets to the point, it's like, well, yeah, but even on top of that, every decision you're making is based on this, sort of never ending field of stress.

So the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the things you buy, literally everything surrounding you is like you're a, it's your shell. In the court, like what Terrence McKinnon called the technological coral reef of modern society, you're this like crustacean thing living in it, and you're growing a shell, which is the sum, all the shit you own, and all the people you know,

and all that is is a reflection of this genetic data set which got captured in the prism of your DNA when you were a kid, and now you're spaghettifying that shit out into the world, and this is producing your reality. So his premise is, if you can get to a place where you are living in the unknown, where you give up your past, you literally give it up,

it's you let go of everything you think is happening and everything you know in that state, this is where you're gonna roll your eyes at me, you enter into a kind of superposition, a quantum soup, a kind of like you become the electron that's everywhere at once, and in that place, which is why when people would go deep in meditation, they go into theta, right?

Their brain starts, it's like it's receiving all this like crazy data, and it's because they're, and this is not in the book, I'm guessing, that their expectation is no longer shielding them or acting like the magnetic field around the earth that keeps out the solar rays, your expectations are doing the exact fucking same thing for the entire universe, and then you start getting

like volts of inspiration, mystical experiences, and then your life begins to change. What do you think of that shit? Yeah, I mean, I think that most of it is absolutely what I would agree with in terms of, in terms of say just what I would just call simple confirmation bias of, so now you have this psychological allergy,

you're perceiving that there are more threats than your consciously, like your gut is telling you that the world is scarier than what your eyes are seeing, so you're like, I know it must be really scary out there, so then you find something on the news, and then they're right there for you. Here you go, here's something scary, and they use these statistical anomalies to go like,

hey, there was a shark attack in Australia, and you can be halfway around the world and be like, well, I better not ever get in the ocean in Florida or something because there was a shark attack in Australia, and see, I knew it, I knew it was scary out there, you get that validation, and then so what you wanna do if it's scary, then you want to go into a security mindset, you wanna hunker down, this is another thing

that I've maybe talked about is the embodied cognition where they have, where we kind of our internal world, we project on some of our morality, and so if you take someone's immune system and you threaten it by making like a stink bomb in a room, and you give people social tests, like what do you think about gay marriage, what do you think about affirmative action,

people vote more against affirmative action and gay marriage if you've just threatened their immune system using triggering disgust, it's because the immune system goes, there's a threat in our environment, we better hunker down, just figure out the threat that already exists, and not go into any new environments, not have any new interactions with new people

that are potentially carrying new bacteria and more parasites, and so then it alters your perception to trigger, to heighten your out group biases, and so... Wait, so just to take that further, let's say, like I don't know, they're voting on the impeachment today, have you ever heard of liquid ass?

Oh yeah, I think I... I think we talked about it. So this is terrible stink bomb, it's lots of YouTube videos, just they're hilarious, but so theoretically, if there was like an impending vote, and someone dumps liquid ass all over the floor, it's more likely that people are going to vote... Conservatively.

Conservatively. Yeah, yeah. So you can manipulate juries with this, you can... Yeah, I mean, you could even say pick up a... What? So you could find like a group of people that you would know have like a really bad immune system, so you would know that they were like

going to vote conservatives. So say like a nursing home, and then you could go and you could pick up a busload of zombies, and then you could parade these smelly dying zombies through a line of people that now have to see this and smell these smells on a subconscious level, and anyone on the fence would predictively,

potentially lean toward a more conservative mindset and be primed to go into a more conservative mindset, and then you can even predict that areas that have a higher bacterium parasitic load would lean more conservative, and that's what you find the closer you are to the equator, the more bacterium parasites there are in the environment, and that means that they're more spicy food

those people are going to eat because it's antimicrobial, and then it also means that they're going to be more psychologically conservative. So if you go to India or the South or anywhere they're going to be, you go to like somewhere like Mississippi, for example, where it's like really hot and humid, you could predict pretty reliably

that people are going to be, their immune systems are constantly being threatened. Fuck, that's crazy, man. And then you're confirming that with your eyes, so these are all these subconscious things that you're not consciously aware of in any way, and then you're turning on the news and you're finding the information

that is the scariest information that matches you're already perceived, what you already believe life to be, you're looking to confirm that, and then once you've done that, now you're going to hunker down, you're going to like not leave the house, not travel, because you've been primed

to overly perceive outgroup threats, you're going to say maybe get focused a lot on self-defense, that sort of thing, and then because you're not leaving the house and taking a walk down the street and having to pass some strangers that aren't actually hurting you, maybe having to like get rejected by a guy

or a girl or something like that, because you're hunkering down, and you're not, no, now it's the immune system still going like, no, there's nothing, we're still not seeing a threat, no one's like tried to fight us or anything, there has to be threats out there, and it's this feedback loop,

so the more you're hunkering down, the more afraid that you actually are, and you're not, and not just on a basic level, confidence, unless there's people of self-confidence, so that's usually a facade, but real confidence is through having experience and taking chances and learning through trial and error, and that's how you gain mastery over things,

so if you're hunkering down and not going outside and not having social experiences, then you don't have the confidence to go into the outer world, so now outside and social interactions are a threat to you, you're going to avoid them. Social anxiety disorder, all that shit, that's what that is.

Yeah, and then on top of that, our brains are basically these predictive computers that are pattern recognition efficiency machines, so as part of the reason why kids are so creative and adults kind of sometimes lose that, unless they're going out and having new experiences, getting new hobbies, traveling a lot, that sort of thing, is that if you're just working

in a factory and you're just moving croutons from point A to point B every single day, then your brain's going to get really efficient, and the rest is going to atrophy, all the stuff that you don't need for interpreting art or something like that, because you don't have anyone to talk to, yeah, you're definitely going to become a Nazi over time.

There you go, Shane. God bless you, man. I love you, you just blew my mind. I have so much to think about now. I'm never going to eat another fucking crouton again, because I hate Hitler, and that's what I got from you today, thank you. I'm not going to support that fucked up industry.

Now I get it. You know, in a little no fact, Hitler used to work in a fucking crouton factory. Okay, so please tell people where they can find you. I, man, I'm stammering just thinking about what you just told me. Sure, so Shane Moss, mauss.com, has all the things that I do.

My podcast here, we are interview different scientists about life science, how the brain works, that sort of thing, each and every week. And then the main thing that I tour with full time is I'm in about three cities a week doing standup science, which I have two scientists giving science talks on a second comedian, so it's half comedy sets, half science talks, that's my main thing

that I tour around with, and because of the success of that this year, I just started a psychedelic version of standup science called Head Talks that I just did a trial run of, and it went better than anything that I've ever done, so launching a full tour next year, getting different artists and different researchers and everything and having them present about their work

and having it be a Q&A and a meet and greet afterwards so people were even in cities that don't have psychedelic groups, I'm setting up groups for them so people can just sign up in, say, Wichita and then pick a couple, whoever wants to administrate the thing, here you go, now you have a psychedelic group, get together more often. And I just did a tour with this lovely anthropologist,

Sophia Rocklin, who you should definitely have on, she wrote a book, When Plants Dream, all about ayahuasca, she lives in Peru most of the time, but I'll put you in touch when she gets Q&A sometime, she's done ayahuasca three or 400 times and is a brilliant, articulate anthropologist, and I'm getting a bunch of awesome people like that in every city that I go to, so that's what I got going on,

guys. You're the best, Shane. Thank you so much, I love this conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for listening, everybody. If you enjoy the DTFH, won't you subscribe to us on iTunes

or whatever you use to listen to podcasts? All the links you need to find Shane and Shane's incredible podcast or stand-up show will be at dunkatrustle.com. Please use our offer code for Manscaped. You don't need to razor up your downstairs regions. Denver, if you're out there, come see me at the Denver Comedy Works. I love y'all and I'll see you next week.

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