Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 414: Shane Mauss

Episode Date: December 12, 2020

Shane Mauss, one of our most requested guests of all-time, re-joins the DTFH! Listen to Shane's amazing podcast, Here We Are, and check out his documentary, Psychonautics, A Comic’s Exploration of Psychedelics. And you can find out even more about him on his site, ShaneMauss.com. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Shudder - Use promo code DUNCAN for a FREE 30 Day Trial. BLUECHEW - Use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping. ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package.

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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. In 1984, Man, I'm Steamroller released a Christmas album. This was a new genre,

cocaine, Christmas music. This song proves that Satan is real. If you want to please the devil, all you have to do is make an album of Christmas music. That sounds good when you're on cocaine. You know, I don't know if Man, I'm Steamroller's really satanic, but I think what was happening was

my mom was going through a divorce that Christmas, and, you know, I just associate. Hey, Gary, you mind fucking stopping throat singing while I try to record the intro to my fucking podcast, please? So sick of that shit. You're gonna ruin your vocal cords. I'm legitimately sorry, Duncan.

You see, I read that should I do throat singing, I'll stand a better chance against COVID and all other infections. No, that's wrong. You're an idiot. That's bullshit misinformation. Why don't you get your fucking head screwed on straight? Why don't you go fuck yourself, Duncan?

What? I'm so tired of your elitist, liberal attitude. It's not elitist to have common sense. I just don't understand how you think your aggressive, abusive behavior is going to make me change at all. It just makes me wanna do more throat singing. You want me to baby you?

Is that what you want? You want me to maybe put you in some diapers and make you my little baby instead of my sound guy? How dare you infantilize me, you liberal goon. I'm so tired of you pseudo philosophical bullshit, liberal elites having zero empathy and compassion for those of us who could use it most, the selfish dumb ones.

Look, Gary, I'm sorry. I don't think you're dumb. I just feel like you're being irrational. I'm kidding. We don't need your help at all. If the power goes out long enough, we'll put you against the wall. What?

Put a bullet in your head. Gary, what the fuck? And then we'll rewrite history. Did you just threaten to kill me? What? In the old days, we didn't live that long. We were national with selfish dumb asses, but thanks to your compassion,

there's much more of us than you. You're fucking fired. You can't fire me because I quit. Hope you enjoy that Soros money, no collusion, pandemic. I'm out of here. PS, I haven't been able to taste anything for the last three days. That's a scene from an upcoming musical

that I'm working on called Gary, which follows the rise to power of a sound guy that I fired for not telling me he had COVID and follows his rise to power and his eventual destruction of the entire planet by using nuclear weapons that he launches at himself. It's gonna be out on HBO Max in the spring. Friends, we got a great podcast for you.

Shane Moss is here. We're gonna jump right into it. But first this. This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by the beloved geniuses of Squarespace.com, who raised this planet out of the dark primordial ooze of archaic web design. You had to go into some dark, sultry part of your city

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use offer code dunkint and you'll get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. Hey, Bubs, do you want commercial free episodes of the DTFH? Do you wanna commune with some of the brightest minds on the planet today and become part of a secret, nonviolent, anarchic revolution designed to create

some blockchain style, mimetic, viral movement that compels and seduces billionaires to naturally give away 20% of their income to people who need it? Then head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and subscribe. You'll have access to a weekly group meditation. You'll have access to a book club,

which happens on Wednesdays and of course, our cherished and beloved Friday family gathering. Also, you will dive into a Discord server and make friends with people who will love you for the rest of your life. And if you try to get out, we won't let you. It's all at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Well, I need to apologize for this episode.

I don't know how I did it, but somehow I lost the way. Look, this is gonna be some boring technical stuff that maybe you're not interested in at all. But the way I record these episodes is that I use a reel-to-reel tape player to record my side of the audio to get that vintage warm tone. And then I send that reel-to-reel

to this wonderful place in Nashville, where for a mere $10,000, they process it, digitize it and send it back to me, which is why you get that amazing DTFH trademark sound. Unfortunately, the reel-to-reel ended up getting carried away by a fucking wolf that was in the UPS truck. Apparently the wolf was being taken to a reserve or something.

I don't know, but the whole fucking reel got dragged into the forest by this fucking wolf, which is why would it even want to grab a reel-to-reel? The UPS truck was filled with dog food, so I don't even understand. Regardless, it's my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast Zoom Audio and All, one of the most requested guests of all time on the DTFH.

He has got a killer podcast, which I demand you subscribe to. It's called Here We Are. Also, you gotta watch his amazing documentary, Psychonautics, a comics exploration of psychedelics. And before we all got slammed in the groins by this pandemic, he had an incredible show that he would do, some combination of science and stand-up.

He's a brilliant, eccentric, beautiful human being who I am proud to call my friend. You can find out everything you need to about him by going to ShaneMoss.com. That's M-A-U-S-S. But first, listen to him here. Everybody, welcome back to the DTFH, ShaneMoss. ["Welcome to the World of You"]

["Welcome to the World of You"] ["Welcome to the World of You"] ["Welcome to the World of You"] ["Welcome to the World of You"] It's been dope controlling everybody in fantasy of how fun it would be to be in a cult. This is why we love these documentaries, is because they're inevitably sexy at first, right?

Like Manson. Yeah. Everybody's fucking Vanguard. Everybody's fucking. You know, so there's like this, before it all falls apart, there's this weird sexy thing. And if a good documentary leads with that so that you get enticed by it,

and then they reveal like, oh, it was, no, it didn't just stop with orgies. Then it, you know, devolves into pill-addled assaults, you know, and then it falls apart. But yeah, the fantasy of the cult is obviously very, very enticing, I think, for many people. Well, they also, you know, so you see both the fantasy, and then there was a turn and the darkness.

But I want to see one that's just about like the administrative upkeep of a cult. Like the paperwork is insane. You're doing, like, you know, it's easy to sell all of the, like, to get on stage and give like these fanciful speeches and stuff, and like hit on the girls, and people come to you with their problems, and like giving advice to people,

like people love giving. It's surprising people go to people for advice, and then don't go like, you know, I bet this person just likes giving people. Like it's a very, it's a very human thing to do. Like, you know what you should do? You should believe in yourself more. I've never heard that before.

Thank you. But they don't talk about the logistics of figuring out, because now you're evading taxes, and like there's all this other stuff going on too. Yeah. Which I'm sure a lot of that, I'm sure a lot of those guys were just like, like me, not the best bookkeepers, you know,

and then after you get in a little deep, then you're like, you know what, we shouldn't be paying taxes anyway. I'm a sovereign student. You just forget to file for it. Yeah, you don't fucking file. You're like, that's the mark of the beast. I'm not gonna do that shit.

Like, oh yeah, it's like every, it's weird, isn't it? Like how every cult leader, coincidentally when they hear from God, or like finally gain access to the divine record that informs how they're supposed to function in the world and what message they should give to the world to change the world, that that message is always God saying something on the lines

like, you need to fuck. And you need to fuck as many people as you can. You need to have babies and fuck. That's what I want you to do. And drugs, not like other people do drugs. You're gonna do drugs differently because it's how I'll talk to you. I need you to fuck.

I need you to do drugs. And I need you to not, to not pay any fucking taxes. Don't pay taxes. Don't pay. That's it. I'll talk to you later. I gotta go talk to some other cult leaders. I'll be back.

But fuck drugs. Don't pay taxes. I'll be back with a Matt's suicide plan. I'm gonna, well, you know, it's so weird, right? They all end up in the same place except for the UFO cult, the documentary. I don't know how much that one had to do about fucking. That one had to do with castration.

I think they cut their own dicks off in that one. See, this is the difference between your, my, like I tend to skew more toward the, let's cut our dicks off. These are silly organs. Hey, it's a way to keep you guys out of your, it's a way to keep people are born as a dude out here. Oh man, that's for sure. We already, you know, this is what we talked about a few years ago

when we had this discussion of, yeah, yeah, this is, because I tend to view sex as much as I love it. It's the thing that I think for good reason makes me trust myself less than anything else in the world. I'm hyper aware to, as much as I know I deceive myself, I know I deceive myself way more than I even do. And that's the- Wouldn't you deceive yourself in sex?

Just in life, generally. Of just like overestimating my intelligence or knowledge of something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know how funny I am or whatever. It's just, there's just lots of, there's a lot of evolutionary mechanisms built to make us, to blind us from seeing those,

and we often aren't confronted. We also tend to find like little ways of hiding the truth from ourselves. Like you go to, like I'll go to some family gathering, right? And I have like a bunch of like, you know, I'll have like some mega uncle that's like, yeah, tends to be a little more sure of himself, a little more of a loud mouth or whatever. And I bite my tongue.

This is kind of like, I think it's a pretty common thing. It's usually the person that knows the least, this Dunning Kruger thing has the most confidence, and then they're the most vocal. And then you also, there's the, I forget the name of the cognitive bias, where you tend to over perceive people's, people relating to you.

So like, oh, it's just common sense, or everyone knows that and everyone else is sitting around like, I don't think so, and smiling politely. But then afterwards, like, you know, on the ride home, I love doing the, like now I have the straw man of my uncle, like sitting in the passenger seat next to me. And I'm imagining the stupid points he's making. And I'm like slamming him with like,

oh, I'm making these amazing points. And I'm like, look at how right I must be. This, this idiot, I just imagined this person saying, I just inserted a bad point in his imagined self. For me to win a debate that I'm actually just having with myself. And then, and then I go, I guess I have it pretty figured out. Yeah, you do. I mean, that thing you're talking about to me, you know,

and you hear over all the time how advanced the human brain is, like how incredibly powerful it is. But that ability to do a scan of someone on the street or someone you barely know, then take that and turn it into an AI that lives inside of you, that animates this. It's incredible. And it does it instantaneously. It's so astounding.

And to the point where I will, if I'm pissed at somebody, I will, and I'm by myself, I'll mutter to myself while I'm, I'll be like, yeah, and yeah, I guess you fucking know everything. No, no, it's there. I'm literally, I'm doing the thing that is the, like, stereotypical number one. This is what you do if you're crazy. Talk to yourself.

And I'm angrily, you know, like, oh, really? Oh, okay. So, oh, you don't, well, maybe you're not the funniest person either, motherfucker. Do you ever think of, oh my, who am I talking to? It's just someone I invented. It's like, you know, but, but if our brains can do that, you know, the implication is so cool, which is like,

we are computers already are kind of doing that. But if our brains can do it instantaneously, the fun thing is going to be that, like, the next gen, next gen video games are going to be, you take a video of your uncle, you drop it into this video game, the video game deep fakes your uncle puts an AI behind it. And now you can sit in front of the video game and like set different levels on your uncle.

It's like, what do you want him to be like five times dumber or five times smarter? I mean, how many shitty points do you want him to make? Do you want us to handle the thing? And then just like, you know, or whatever, that's that to me is going to be the the the moment in history where the in the same way, like we've gone through this little bump in the road called

social media and we've like are reacting to it like animals and fight at each other's throats wait until the next thing where suddenly you could put all your enemies into a video game and they see real. Yeah, maybe they are. And then suddenly like your enemies are like begging for their lives as you day after day like torture them or kill them. You know what I mean?

And it's yeah, you can't do that. It's illegal. I know it's not them, but you know what I mean? Oh, I I'm sure I'm sure not every woman that I've fantasized about what what necessarily that would be her idea. Her idea of a good time. Some of the some of the imagined things that was actually one of the things like when I was so when I when I when I have manic

episodes, that's one of the really big themes is that is this idea that everything these these people that we are talking about creating whether it's a straw man or someone you're fantasizing about or just hey Duncan popped into my head. I'll give him a I'll send him a text. But that's that is to me some it's some sort of life that exists in my head. And when things start getting a little squirrely is this I like I

start really feeling a lot of empathy for these for these things in my head and I had I had some DMT experiences where I felt some of them were kind of gaining their own consciousness and realizing that they were just this like imagined thing in my mind and then there was other stuff outside of it and like one of them was kind of seemingly pretty like disheartened by that and and it just sent me it multiple times it sent me down this spiral of like every time I've ever even you're driving in a car

and you like almost drive off the road and you quick imagine like the car having driven off the road and exploding at the bottom of the cliff or whatever like that was a real person like in your head that you without even trying sent off of a cliff and had explode into this thing and you did that you've murdered so many people in your head you you've you've had you've you've had sex with a bunch of people that in real life probably wouldn't have much to do with you and that that's that's where that

thought pattern sometimes goes far enough for me where I just can't I'm now I'm trying to like control my thoughts so I don't have I wonder if some of the like purity of thought and stuff that came out of religion emerged from you know some of this mindfulness stuff and having empathy with yourself and and thinking about you know just I'm sure people took I'm sure in the past it seems people took the dreams maybe a little more literally than the general population does today and so they

still do what do you think they still man like the the but you were always weirdly in sync and I'm that's what I think that's the that's what one of the things is such a bummer about having manic episodes is that when you have act like part of part of the episode it's not like everything you're thinking during the episode is wrong and how many inventors and poets and writers throughout history have their best work has happened during those manic episodes like because your brain is on fire

it doesn't mean what you're thinking is necessarily off it's the mania your volumes are off I'm assuming you know when I what I'm assuming I've had like mild manic episodes by now I'm sure but but so this is what I was thinking regarding what you just said which is and it comes from a foggy memory of something I read when I was in college studying Carl Jung and he was talking about neuroses being a like because what you know we are conscious we have we're sentient and because of that

you could maybe think of your consciousness as like a this is a really dumb way to put it but like a bowl of water on your head or something right and so like that's the what's going on is just this field of self-awareness within which you all the stuff that you think is you is happening and a lot of people say all the stuff that you think is you is not that much different from what you're saying your uncle is really it's actually the same thing so there's people have a part of

themselves inevitably that they don't like so it's like essentially like the idea is like as you the simulation that your brain is doing clearly is not doing a scan of like your uncle's retina and then from that extrapolating some kind of personality type and then from that producing a replica of your uncle or whoever's living in your head but rather what's happening is the image of your uncle becomes like a mirror and then you're sort of painting all the things that you can't

quite accept about yourself onto that mirror and that's an erotic ideas like all the shit about that you're rejecting in your own life whatever it may be from you know trauma that's happened to things that you've done that you wish you hadn't done to moments where your personality doesn't fit in with this narrative that you've been telling yourself how you are all those things get pushed down into the subconscious but they're still in this ocean of sentience which is you and

so they actually do take on their own personalities they they become a fragment of you and just in a fractal kind of thing of you so this is the this is that moment where suddenly or something comes out of you and someone says that that's not the shame I know who is that what was that that's the thing down there grabbing for a second grabs the wheel and you know I'm saying and so your manic thought was actually really I thought of I should be compassionate to myself any

fragment of anything that's existing within me deserves compassion as much as I do but it's actually all me and then also the finish this rant because because we're living in a individuated kind of world right now there's a you and a me that's the level of reality required for all of society to function then that also would be enveloped within our own mind right so like you know what I mean so the uncle would exist in the mind and the way the uncle exists in the world the mind

just reflecting it but really it's the exact same the place where it jumps into the mystical is the idea that we are in the minds of God and that you're part of the imaginative process of the universe you are a kind of broken off fragment of this infinite ocean of sentience and you have been imbued with a personality and a thing that appears to be separate but is actually is just the consciousness of some infinite being and it goes all it goes all the way in and

maybe the uncle in your mind has his own this work it's really weird as the uncle living in your mind have things inside its mind that you're not aware of but they have somehow been built you know what I mean do you imagine the beings you imagine have their own imaginative beings you know how far in does it go yeah and much in the way that we are we are by well and end up as well like if so so say so say some of this projection stuff like like I find myself Doug Stanhope has a

good bit that embodies this but it's academics would call it the curse of knowledge one of the most pretentiously named cognitive biases which is which is once you once you know something like once like the moment you learn something you can no longer accurately identify with someone who doesn't know that thing so so like I learn a board game I like watch a YouTube video I read the thing and everything and I'm fussing over and I'm a little confused and what I figure it out and I

figure it out and I play a few games and now when I'm like going to show you how this board game works I'm explaining to you worse than the YouTube video and the instructions and everything that I got but I'm like Duncan why the hell can't you understand like what's wrong with you and and and I think Stanhope has something about like when like one hour after he learns something he is furious with anyone that doesn't know the thing that he just learned an hour ago but but but

but the imagine one imagine the the say say we're stuck in this universal consciousness and and we're like but you know one aspect of it where the imagined Shane inside of this universal consciousness like if we're projecting maybe that thing's projecting to and then I'm like looking at myself and like what's wrong with me and I'm like oh what's wrong with this God that it this is like this this straw man version of itself like this unfair version of well yeah that I mean that's that

so this is where the wag the dog dog stuff starts happening I love horror movies I really do I always have since I was a little kid used to buy Fangoria magazine and fantasize about saving enough money to order this weird mask that made it look like somebody put a meat cleaver in my head and I'd study Fangoria I'd study Friday the 13th and Marvel at the way that the genius FX artists would decapitate people in that movie it freaked my parents out but it's their fault my dad

used to give me eight dollars and let me rent as many movies as I wanted from this badass video store in College Station Texas down the street from the apartment that we would stay at need go to work and I just sit in the dark of that apartment and watch horror movies and I loved it only later did I realize that whoever ran that video store had incredible taste in horror movies and there was a time when I went through a frustrating period of realizing that beautifully curated collections

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gore terror an adventure thank you shutter you the when out the first time you hear that terrible weird statistic or maybe you know this better than I do because I heard it on an NPR interview but it was really like I remember hearing it and it's been like oh no that's so fucked up but apparently you become aware of yourself making a decision milliseconds after the decision is already been made so there's yeah what is that

you've you've heard of this I mean that's kind of just consciousness that's the way that academics would think about consciousness is more of the story that you tell yourself of the explanation after the fact of of like like for for example there's there's there's these sloths that have this this like like strange pooping pattern that's like it's really it was a mystery for a really long time pooping they climb yeah they climb all the way down the tree where they're like highly

susceptible to predation like 60% of sloths die on the ground so sloths have evolved to basically not move they're just like they they just eat a bunch of stuff that like nothing else can really eat it's not it's not it's pretty low in nutritional value and not great for most things and they and and so so they just have like a really fancy digestive so you just want to think they're just like a gut yeah like hanging on a tree and and and so they and they don't move that's like

part of their camouflage as well and they but they climb all the way down a tree it's like the most energy that they spend and they do it once a week they're moving more they're they're making like basically this is the riskiest thing that they do is shit and why don't they just do it from the limb it makes I I oh that's a good question I'm not sure I would think that maybe they would but that's that's yeah I don't know but they so they don't know why this is how they thought is

this like some sort of mating thing which didn't really make sense and that is this like a marking territory and what they figured out was there is these there's these moths that are particular to sloths their sloth moths and they they live on they thought they thought it was just something that didn't hurt the sloths evolutionarily so they just like where these hangers on and and lived on this algae that's on their back that also camouflages them and stuff and then they found out

that these these moths lay their eggs in the sloth done so if they didn't go all the way down and and then the moths reattached themselves so then they realized there must be some sort of utility to these moths and and then oh it looks like this algae has nutritional value and then they so then they go in and find out sure enough they have they are sneaking a few bites of this algae from time to time it's a part of their diet and and so there's this whole symbiotic

relationship which means that at some point the sloths that just tended to have a preference for this weird bathroom activity of like going all the way down the tree to do it like like some people take their pants all the way off just like some peculiar thing that for whatever reason like no sloth knew conferred this benefit and and then and and now they're attached to this system and if they stopped doing it they they wouldn't grow this algae and everything else but from

but the sloth is unaware if you were able to ask the sloth why it does this it would be like well why what do you mean it's because that's how sloths it would be rude not to oh go away I think from a tree more like what I like to think of them as a really fast talk and that's the only thing that I know man the sloth this I like thinking about this just because that implies that sometime there were you would walk under a tree and just sloth shit would like probably rain down

there was a time when people had to worry about sloth shit but you know that was a thing you use but it also implies it like some point there was a sloth it's like I'm going down there and shit and it's free shit man and those like so but yeah this so and and the point is about consciousness is that there's no way that sloths can have access to what is actually driving right behavior sloths don't know all of that stuff there but they would I'm sure quite readily make

up an explanation that they that they would be very confident in and and be very hard to be convinced out and that's much of what the trick of consciousness does is is you go so so they so they'll they'll have people to test this they'll have people go like like they'll they'll send them they'll show them like two pictures of people that are like rated around the same level of attractiveness right and then and then they say hey which of these which of these people

do you find to be the most attractive and then they pick one and then they the scientist pulls both of the both of the pictures back and then and then puts the wrong picture the one that they didn't pick in front of them and goes why did you pick this picture and very few people catch that that wasn't the person that they picked and then they start looking and being like well I like their cheekbones and I really like the way that their hair is and they and and they

come up with these explanations for why they made this decision after the fact and much of this is like when we're talking about straw men and everything else I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of like reasons to have like biases carrots and sticks of like having a fantasy or like catastrophizing something to you know make you avoid a pathogen or or or or or terrorists or whatever and that's why I get that and so the consciousness tends to be

like a real dramatizer as well you know so there's not a lot of nuance going on there and this is this is actually this is one of the things when we talked like we had a conversation about suicidal thoughts like two years ago or something and it was I don't know if you'll remember but the the conversation was that there's a few things that really confused me from an evolutionary like utility point of view and one is like like anxiety for example is like a

really easy one to wrap your head around at least like the general one oh one of it is like you're avoiding a threat you know plain and simple and sure sure it's not accurate and everything else but but at least that makes sense things like depression there's a lot of theories out there that I find kind of less convincing and same and and and the less clear and and don't embody all of all that is depression and same with so with suicidal thoughts there's a lot of

interesting theories out there like perhaps it's part of like a social bartering where where if you start with drawing from a from a group in a hunter gatherer society like you you kind of force the the tribe to like step up and be more attentive to like whatever you need so you're not like dragging everyone down all the time or or you know if you if you did actually act and kill yourself so I found all that kind of like not totally convincing and we talked about it um I talked

about how how uh how strange it is that you'll do something like the cartoon version of saying a dumb thing is going like dope and like hitting yourself in the head and like what in the world could be the utility of hitting yourself in the head but it's in one it's like first off it's the prefrontal cortex which does a lot of your impulse control so it is funny that like this this quick like more primitive ish reptilian instinct like aims for that guy the executive

function tries to take out the boss so it can like teach you a lesson or something like that right and and and we had this conversation and you had a lot of we had a great conversation listeners should listen back to it but I still remained kind of like unconvinced by any idea that I had heard by any idea that I had come up with that you like any scientist that come up and it got me thinking about because as comedians um I I don't know how mindful I imagine you're probably do this

more than I do how mindful you are of like the idea factory like when you have a good idea uh like where was I like what was what was going on like how do you engineer the right environment like oh I tend to have a lot of great ideas in the shower but do I want to waste all that water blah blah blah and oh when I drive a lot I have all these great ideas I better make use of my voice recorder I remember to do that and so within that I started thinking about wait just to clarify

you're talking about that thing that happens to some people or just out of the blue a thought emerges it's like I'll just kill myself I'm just gonna kill myself like I should just kill myself that weird thing it happens with more frequency of people on different medications it happens with people who are depressed but it also just happens to people we're just out of the blue your mind just vomits up let's annihilate what about annihilate ourselves and that's what you're talking

about just to be clear but keep going yeah I mean I no no I had so many of those like my last two weeks I've been I've been pretty pumped about I've been pretty optimistic about a lot of COVID news and so I've been in like a better mood and and before that I was just like I was doing okay and feeling better but I was still just like like I don't even feel bad right now but I'm just thinking I have all of these images of killing myself yeah constantly like I don't want to kill myself like

what in the world are these ideas popping in and and so I thought of this I go back to this thought experiment that I kind of thought about after this is stemmed from our conversation it kind of gave birth to this of like thinking about what is the birth of ideas and so it's it'll happen right now like you and I are deciding like how much to talk or when you should interject or you know you're talking I'm thinking things vice versa but I find it best to think of like say you're

sitting around a table of like five of your friends and you're all kind of all things being equal this is like everyone has as much say at the table as anyone else so like we'll forget about the messiness of hierarchical things or social and so people are sitting around talking about say sports or whatever what what is and you're sitting there and you're thinking of different things that you might say right and then you go to say one and then people hear you say that one

thought and as far as anyone can tell and what the intuitive interpretation or what the intuitive thought about that would be is they would be like oh Shane just had a thought you know even if they thought about it this far he just said something he said what was on his mind what they don't see or think about that much or have access to unless you really intellectualize it and be like I wonder what else was on Shane's mind but the idea is that I had like five different ideas I

said one of them and what was that criteria for expressing that one idea was it the right timing was it that the thing was funny was it that it was relevant to the conversation like maybe I have a really interesting sloth fact that we're talking about football right now it'd be a little weird to just talk about sloth out of nowhere and and so there's all of this criteria and I think that there's a similar relationship between consciousness and the subconscious mind so for every

time that you're having one of those fantastic shower thoughts or whatever there was another 10 just below the surface that were maybe just as good maybe even better that you're never going to experience never have access to I mean this comes up when like you do mushrooms or something like man I had all of these amazing shower thoughts in a four hour trip how did that happen well you're probably just getting a little more access to those same thoughts that were floating around anyway so then

once you have that then I then I thought well it might be the case it so if there's a selection process then there's kind of this evolved process then there's a selection pressure and how do you get attention I like how do you get that attention at the table say something really interesting or yell or whatever and your subconscious is probably doing something else where there's a number of ideas in each one is bidding for your attention so how do you get consciousness's attention well

consciousness really attaches to like the scary things on the news or some that's or novelty or something really beautiful or or or creative and and so and and think about like and I'm I'm nearing kind of finishing an abbreviated version of this thought it's really cool so so one so and studies they show like if you want to go to the grocery store and you want to like easily remember your list without writing down the ten items just create a story create like a dramatized version of

the like you know just imagine that you're Duncan Tressel like doing an ad read in the beginning like you're going to Mordor and like all of the to get like these ingredients you know like you will really remember those ingredients a lot more when you're when you're heightening these these things and like kids you see kids playing lava and and intuitively you go well that's kind of a silly little thing for kids to do I guess they're just playing around but think about what

you're actually doing is the mind is projecting a simulation of a heightened you know it's benign but there's heightened imagined consequences and and and through that you're able to better fine tune your your motor skills and so your your muscle memory is maybe being impacted by now you're dedicating a little more conscious effort to the to the accuracy of landing on this pillow or whatever so the floor is lava now now addressing like suicidal stuff now imagine imagine like you're

in you're in line at a grocery store and you're furious with somebody and that for no reason you know someone's taking like a little long to pick out their subway sub or whatever and and and and you're irritated with them and you have this like bizarre embarrassing flash of like man I just kind of want to knock that person in the back of the head like whoa where did that come from Shane that's an inappropriate reaction to to that where did that come from but if instead

if you were thinking I you know I like playing board games say we were playing like Pictionary or something and I had one picture one image to to convince you I just I just drew out of the bowl the word anger and I need to quick draw this I wouldn't draw some nuanced version of like this picture was like of a guy who was like a little peeved I would draw a picture of like someone with their fist clenched in their faces red and scrunched and you know this exemplar this like

this like full embodiment of of the exaggerated version of what we what there's no chance that they would think it's anything else you the maximum you could you would draw yeah and and it's clear because it's exaggerated to much like comics are like this they're doing this thing now what's next to this more crazy thing you know we we tend to exaggerate to make these points and get these points across and our subconscious is doing this all the time and so this is what

this is what kind of helped me a lot and thinking about my suicidal thoughts is thinking now apply that to suicidal thoughts if you're thinking if you're having this image what is that an exaggerate imagine that every single image that you have is just an exaggerated like dictionary version of a much more nuanced thing then what is it saying so then it could be it could be very well your subconscious picking up on hey Shane if you keep going on this path where you're like

not taking care of yourself or or or perhaps perhaps the career path you're on just something unexpected just happened and you can't do live comedy or something like that and and and there's like how how do you just if you only have one picture and you're trying to quick get someone's attack like how do you say like stop don't go down that path it could look a lot like hey you're jumping off a cliff like this is much in the way we go oh oh you're killing me right now we say

things like this although I could have just murdered them people say this about their children all the time they don't mean it they're joking but it's but it's picking up on a more nuanced yeah I see you're saying this is like a way for some something deep in your subconscious to sort of throw up a warning flag get your attention try to make you notice something in your environment that maybe is not like great for stability harmony and it's and you know yeah I think that's

a really interest and you're saying this is like this is the way we could explain suicidal ideations from an evolutionary perspective that it's there is some kind of way that thinking about ending your life can actually give you a greater favorability in survival which sounds like a paradox almost which is why but you have to ask why do these things exist in this if you know if we if anything existing in a some had some benefit this is when people talk about the why would there be

sociopaths and you know the theory is what we you know maybe that's you need a sociopath or two to you know if you if you're living in some tribal ancient situation you need somebody who doesn't really feel the way we feel yeah someone's gonna cut the got to cut the cows throat we don't get we're not gonna eat it and I think that's a cute cow you need the guys like I don't it's just a cow I don't know what it is I just I don't know you want me to cut its throat the cow or your mom

though the cow okay yeah I'll do the cow no problem do your mom no okay that's cool right should I do your mom cows okay but you but you write so like there was point me toward a throat I'll split it you don't want to like I'm I'm not out there to slip throats I'm just indifferent to see what I'm told you know me if I do that I can't feel I don't know that I don't know I love blue chew and I use them so should you blue chew blue chew this episode is sponsored by blue chew let's talk about

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want to reiterate I will eat blue chew in front of aliens but you know from an able this is my advantage if it helps and then you and then we get them in this in society and there because they don't have someone being like hey you know this is the whole entirety of Dexter is based on the fantasy you could maybe channel a sociopath into helping society so suicidal ideations you would it's cool to look at it from that perspective you know my feeling with it and is yeah and

this might just be because of the work I'm doing with David who teaches me meditation is uh and it might be a temporary a lot of like in the type of Buddhism I'm studying I think there's like it's like training so it's mind training so there's parts that you do for a little and then you just forget about it that lead to another part but the idea is like the thoughts in general where young you western psychology as scribes all of this meaning to the thoughts

like you know like yeah that if you're in the same way we ascribe meaning to dreams if you're thinking it must mean this which must mean that which must mean that this the is it is more of like now it's it's it's a chock-a-mole Rinpoche compares it to baby diarrhea he calls it so it's like this is just diarrhea that it's and being too caught up in what your thoughts are like blasting out at you is is kind of compared to having a horrible bowel movement and

then spending the rest of the day being like whoa did I eat peppers I don't remember eating peppers but what is it why is it shaped like that what does that mean when it's when ideas like no it's it's literally nothing and yeah the but what's it's an it seems to be some kind of nothingness that has within it the desire for us to think it's important that's where it gets you know yeah so for me with my my own and I think there's a difference between being suicidal and having

suicidal ideation oh yeah you know and I think that like people listening because we now especially like we're really tuned in that are thinking make sure Shane's okay you're fine as fine as I've ever been like I mean I've been I've been I've been you know I would say that this I would say that this doesn't show up on the list of darkest times in you seem great but I'm just saying that because I know that's going to be a thing people are thinking but yeah also because people are

hearing that you have to deal with mania and which is one of the dangers of it is that people you have manic manic depression mania sometimes I have a higher chance of committing suicide I think the reason being that and not just suicide but here's the problem the moment I I start believing my thoughts everything gets fucked up in my own life forget the suicide yeah the moment my like when I was getting you know when I testicular cancer and this is we may have talked

about this before but this is where I really started working with my thoughts in the sense that I would be waiting for a result to come back and my thoughts or the thought I was most aware of the thought that was getting my attention would be hey you know that scans not when it comes back it's going to be bad news you know that right that's just a thought but I would hear it and then I would think well maybe I'm a little psychic or I'm intuiting something in my body that I already

know that something is way off and so when this scan comes back I what's the point of you've been doing it because I know but then I would think okay let's put a pen in this oh part of my brain that's prognosticating bad scans bad futures bad whatever and when I get the result if it's not bad then fuck you I'm relegating you to the cavern of all the other thoughts that told me things that were wrong if you're right I'll look into it and so then scan comes back everything's great

congrats everything's fine then you're like oh my god I'm not intuitive like I thought I was I don't have the ability to do fucking cat scan on myself with my mind I can't look into my atoms and see things like the new ages might say I in fact have no idea what's going on with a lot of my body at any given moment which is why I'm able to stay alive because if I deal with any of the processes I would be dead meat it has to function outside of my conscious mind you know what I'm saying

so so then yeah this is the exercises beginning to take these suicidal ideations and maybe just think or whatever it is and just look at them and be like yeah no not that's nothing it's no more any more than like when I'm in the and I do have these thoughts you see a baby this way this is the one that popped up in my head for a little bit I would be in a cafe and I would see a baby and I'd want to throw cold water in it like there just be a thought a fantasy of like what happened to

you just wake up baby just that moment like harm nothing about it that nothing in the thinking or the fantasy is pleasant at all there's nothing good that from the beginning to the end it's just you you're throwing water in a baby's face and you're going to get arrested you're probably your ass kicked you're definitely going to upset a baby it's going to be a thing that you know what I mean like but there's nothing good there but because that thought is so powerful just like what you're

saying it becomes your fucking uncle you know what I'm saying it becomes the obnoxious loud piece of shit that grabs all the attention but it's no it's no different than it's just like a but all the other thoughts that are streaming by like maybe I should try an almond croissant or I wonder what would happen if I you know get another coffee while I'll be able to sleep or like God you know Matlock whatever happened to that guy you know those thoughts all get left in the background for your loudest

most garish shittiest thought I get what you're saying it's really cool yeah yeah yeah and and and then it's also you know there there might be you know something like cancer sitting there and evaluating the statistical reasoning and and every that's just not something that we're great at and images work but this is why you see it like so I'm speaking of like curse of knowledge stuff I was always I always took to numbers and math really I was terrible student and every other thing but math

just naturally like numbers were the only thing that ever made sense to me like this is real okay here's a bit of sanity that I can like hold on to and feel it and and so I can look at stats a little bit more and kind of get you know just get it where it's like not not perfectly or anything but the average person to say like hey there's this you know COVID or something or heart disease or anything yeah this is killed 300,000 people like at a certain point that number is so big it doesn't even mean anything so then

you have to like make this image of like you see these things that they're like preposterous or like well okay so imagine each of those people were were a baseball and you wanted a house big enough to fit 300,000 baseballs you would need an eight bedroom house with the three car car and people are like whoa this is a problem like that's a huge house full of baseballs like how come no one told me that there was a huge house full of baseballs worth of COVID death going on. You need a speaker for the

scientists because these scientists they don't know how to do that right like that's a thing that's why everyone's so freaked out right now is because Fauji's awesome but he is not the best at like explaining like and I think people like that have to it's hard for them to go back to before they went to grad school or before they took their first statistics class or before they had the first grade teacher who told them science is never certain of really anything at all it's just burned into them so

much that for them they're like no wearing masks and you shouldn't and then suddenly be like oh let's wear masks they in between that they needed to say like you know we get new data sets things change we don't mind saying new things that seem completely opposite from what we said because they're assuming everybody went to graduate school everybody knows that science isn't some certain thing everybody knows that we change based on incoming data everyone knows that meanwhile people are like

what the fuck he did told us one thing he's a lion that's a lion wizard right like that's the problem and they need people like you your podcast and people like Bill and I and all the people who you can like do what you just did which by the way is fucked up because I didn't have a way to grasp that that's that's like that's really a lot of dead baseballs man I have no idea if that was I didn't go in and measure that

but that's just an example of kind of the ridiculous imagery that we need to show to like you want to you want to know how powerful this computer is here's if you took the pictures that your memory card could all you could stack those photos to the moon like why did you even do that that means nothing you just made the situation more confusing to me I just needed to know how many fucking terabytes my hard drive is and and but uh but yeah there there is

that is a tricky thing of like you know I know from from you know people that have sent you know uh papers early on about the um that the headline would of the of the poorly titled paper would make it seem like like they were like oh mass mass don't work and then if you actually read the paper what they're saying is well uh the considerations that we have to make

is if one are people going to adapt to using mass and if if they do will they not distance and not do all of the other things that that we want them to do are they gonna wear them wrong are they gonna wear the wrong kind of them what are the number of ways people will people will people accept this will it like will it scare the shit out of everyone if if everyone's wearing masks around and there's all of these within the messaging these

these number of other considerations that were being made at the time and also so there there's like great news that happens all the time like at the time they didn't know what exactly was causing the spread if the reason why we are all spraying down our groceries and mail and everything else at the time was because they didn't know how much surface transmission was was an issue now they know like you can you could drink COVID and unless you

unless you choked and it got into your windpipe you would you would be fine and that's awesome I used to flavor a lot of my food with COVID so that's good news look how healthy you are so yeah but but the academics have they they do just the same number of biases and stuff but I think it's I think it's helpful to at least be aware of them and then there's a peer review process where then

you you have to turn it into like a thousand if you think like comics are shitty at like a comedy contest to like that wasn't funny I'm funny or not like every academic is trying to prove every other academic and themselves wrong they're like quite readily happy to happy to do that and and there is here's here's something that you're going to like when you're talking about ideas being nothing there's there's this idea that

you know thoughts being all the six thoughts not ideas necessarily yeah yeah yeah right I so there was people are getting like real excited about like evolutionary biology and blah blah blah and psychology in the early days and then they eventually realized sometimes what you're looking at what they called it was a spandrel it's one of my favorite words a spandrel is actually it comes from architecture

you know the corner of a door frame that will be like really dressed up and fancy looking yeah or like in an arch the corner will have this dressed up so that's what a spandrel is in sometimes things in evolution and I would say ideas are like this where what it is is there's like these two it's the intersection of these two things that have utility so you need the vertical and the horizontal thing coming together

that has a lot of utility and now that you have this corner which is just the inevitable outcome of these two things that do have a lot of utility and then you like just dress it up a little bit that's the thing that's sticking out to you and you're making more meaning out of it than what it is this is like someone has like a divot in their chin and you go like well what was the evolutionary pressure that made that take off and it's very likely that it's just a byproduct of

like this is the way a jaw needs to be shaped to be forward looking and it's the intersection of all of these other things that have utility and a dimple isn't either a deal breaker or sexy enough to take off or be weeded out by evolution so you have like this spandrel and ideas I would say are like this all of the so it might even be that some of the sorry thoughts that

you disregard have utility but then they also they might be kind of the intersection of ideas that have utility and they might you mean like that's really cool like they could be like whenever you're having a profusion of a specific type of thought you mean they could be swirling around they could be like a ripple around something bigger a thing that is worth exploring or looking into

rather than just disparate don't like throwing water in a baby's face whatever but let's is that thing is that thought one of like a constellation of thoughts and if so what's the black hole in the center of that constellation maybe there's something there they could be used or useful or to help you understand something and I mean just on the surface think about that if you're going if there's something in your subconscious

evaluating do I like going to restaurants do I like going to this restaurant you know what I don't like when someone has like a crying baby when I'm having my night out with the wife it's just like this very exaggerated but you know what's really impressive about what you did was like you're done with the testicular cancer thing the idea of like that was science the meta-analysis that you did

afterwards of like okay I'm positing a theory and I'm making it falsifiable that's the number one this would be really easy for people to do like I've had friends that like early on super smart friends that like COVID's overblown it's not so and but was still good enough to be like I will bet you know that it won't kill this number of people and then when it crosses this threshold I'm going to start taking it more seriously

and then he's like I was wrong I have to admit that I was wrong and we can we can then be able to break ourselves free of a lot of like if you take the 5G thing there's just there's this connection of correlation which is two things happen at the same time that are big news 5G is big news 4G was big news 3G was big news we love a new G it's going to make the headlines give me I can't wait till 6G think

how it's going to be just as frustrating I promise you but we'll be excited about it nonetheless and so it's you know it's going to be in the zeitgeist and then this so that's this novel and then this other catastrophe happens at the same time and the brain just like makes some kind of goofy connections and then and then you you have this theory but this is something that see anyone can do science really easily you can just go you know what I'm going to look up

every area with a 5G tower I'm going to find similar areas and I'm just going to look at the data and see if there's higher rates of COVID in areas that have 5G towers and especially if there's like a spread of like a radius like the closer you are to COVID the more COVID there is there and and you might you might be right and then and then if there's no difference then you're wrong you might you might even find there's

less COVID in the 5G towers and guess what you just saved the world you're the here you're the person that just figured out that 5G towers per stop COVID but if it's not then you disregard that because there's there's you know there because now you have things where the stakes are higher with like something like a novel vaccine where like people are people are absolutely correct

and you want to research and like you know your average person is going to have the mixed the downside of having to wait for a vaccine is that there's going to be tens of millions of people that will have had the vaccine before before you and I you know there's something like 40 million healthcare workers that got to get it first and I don't can get a chance to

to do it they and then and then they go to you know then they need to get it to guy with Netflix show and then after that guy that once had a mediocre Netflix great speciality I actually hated that special but anyway I'm just making a joke of like for the average person you won't really you can just like wait and find it's good to it's good like the yellow

fever vaccine is I just heard about I just did a podcast with this woman Nina Pfefferman and I tend to just because I've you know this is my own bias of reactance where you get attacked by people and then you dig in and so because all of a sudden you know I've had a podcast for a science podcast for six years no one in all of that time has written me and been like I don't think this beetle researcher knows what the fuck they are

that beetle researcher is in league with the devil but you know the stakes are high and people are just like being introduced to some scientific thinking for the first time ever and there's a lot of like motivated reasoning and wish thinking going on and stuff like that you know heart breaking I just had two like aunts that I talked with recently that were like

did the right thing of like well we better not do Thanksgiving this year and they're like I take COVID way more seriously they're toward the side of denial but enough of them have now had it but they skipped they were like hopefully by Christmas we'll be able to what story are you telling yourself where this is somehow going to be better by Christmas like this if you were like

Shane we're gonna hold a gun to your head or your parents or whatever and you guys you gotta go to one of the two gatherings you gotta go to everything else is the same number of people there and everything but you either gotta go to the Thanksgiving or the Christmas gathering you go to the Thanksgiving one because the Christmas one will be worse because of the Thanksgiving one like this should be you know this is to me or I'm like it's so obvious and I gotta stop myself but it's heart breaking

is what it is and like you know look at the rock and hallmark channel and people are watching Christmas marathons all year round just waiting for the people's whole identity is attached to this it's heart breaking and it's really easy to find to look for like attached to the ideas and evidence that you want to find that get you to like what you wish to be there's all sorts of things I

wish to be true that are not you want to find a way to be your responsible because it's easier it's easier to be your responsible COVID's fucking deadly and also annoying and you know it's all the plagues it will go down as the most annoying I don't know I think so because like think of smallpox think of bubonic plague think of Spanish flu think of the onset of the disease you know when someone's got the fucking Spanish

flu right it's there's no question about the asymptomatic that's the asymptomatic stuff this if that wasn't part of the equation across the board people be like wear a fucking mask I don't want to make break out and bloody fucking boil but because of the asymptomatic aspect of it and because people not understood like the problem is when we're trying to find a way and I don't blame people I do it myself but when we're trying to find a way to

lean into just some way to not feel completely terrified of getting like a viral pneumonia you know where we look at things like well let's look at the morbidity of the thing right and so look at the morbidity and you think ah well there's not much for me to worry about there I don't have diabetes I don't have diabetes things but what you're forgetting and what this is what Aaron my wife pointed out is like we're talking about world populations

that little tiny little half a percentage point that's five that's three houses full of baseballs we're talking about a lot of fucking baseballs that little percentage point there I mentioned when he thought everything was just going to be can't touch me for the rest of his life full of baseballs like whoa that is pretty stupid man we're talking about an asymptomatic thing that's going to kill a lot of people

and people are like well it's like a flu it's like no it's not like the fucking flu like you know like when you have the flu you know you have the flu there's people who can go for the entire covid cycle without a single cough there's people who have had covid have been super spreaders and have no idea that they did it they don't even know they had it they're at home right now like I having no idea that there's countless people wheezing because they happened to cross pass with them at the wrong time so this is

why it's so such a mind fucking I why I totally understand everybody who is like no fuck this it's not real if it is real it's not as bad as they say if it's bad as they say I don't give a fuck because like I'm going to I have to live a normal I get I understand why and I mean this we talked about this last time but if you start examining a virus and it's not just as not just examining it from the perspective of its symptoms

but from the way it manipulates or exploits a culture you know what I mean like those moths somehow they got a fucking try to get a sloth to do anything try to get a sloth to do it they got a sloth to go down and treat it shit imagine imagine your entire existence is dependent on getting the thing that evolved for being the slowest

mammal on that it's it's niche it's it's actually greatest strength is how long it can go with moving as little as possible and you got to get this thing to move the most it ever does in its life in a way that's like so ridiculous and it risk it's life doing so in the it's not even like hey go and go across these limbs ten times further than you it's not just going further it's going into the jars of a jaguar

that's what you gotta do yeah and you don't speak sloth you're a fucking moth don't see the world of the sloth so if you look at like Covid from the perspective of that's the moth on the back of humanity right now you can and you realize that oh my god it's like manipulated us and it's asymptomatic qualities to not just ignore basic precautions but to go the other direction and start trying to

and to do things like Sturgis to proudly have concerts where people get together and there's a cultural prohibition on wearing a mask like you like if you look it from an evolutionary perspective what it's managed to do for the species it like because note like with the flu the difference between the flu and Covid everyone agrees there's a fucking flu all of us have had it and we don't want it nobody wants the flu I don't want the fucking flu you don't want the flu it sucks it hurts your bones ache but like Covid it's

managed to get a huge percentage of us to be like it's not real it's what is what I mean when you look at the history of plagues this is massive success from the viral universe like this is if there's they give out awards in whatever dimension these fucking things Nobel Peace Prize man like yeah it's amazing I mean this is

how this is how you know it's scary too because virologists talk the same way about Covid like wow how's it do it this isn't even just a respiratory virus this is a body but whoa it's getting in people's brains it's that person that you're talking about that didn't even know they were spreading they might have scarring on their heart now they they are more susceptible to in young people there's young people that never even knew that they have Covid that have scarring on their heart

already that and scientists don't even they they haven't even seen that with anything ever so they don't even know they're like what's that mean is that even back does someone just get scarring on their heart and then everything's fine they're young enough and it heals or does it mean they're gonna die 20 years earlier we have no idea we've never seen scarring on the heart of a young person caused by a virus there's memory issues that people are having the

long term stuff is so so the long term stuff the more that comes out the more horrifying it is like all of the time everything else is like looking way way better the vaccine are insanely promising other than you know they used a new they used a new process well that has a lot let's talk about that now this I was delighted when someone on my twitter profile decided to

use some dumb thread that I started to talk about how something in the Covid back the Pfizer I believe the Pfizer Covid vaccine is called Lucifer have you heard of this so it's a phosphine let me find it let me see where I find this here I mean my brother is a

does a lot of computer programmer and project manager at FedEx and does all these shipping things and you put data in an algorithm that you've built and then see if it pumps out like the answers that you want and does the job that you want it to do afterwards and if it does then you need to like reverse engineer what the hell that computer system that's like doing things that you can't even imagine is doing and part of the ways

that they have to like figure out what it's doing is they're like okay imagine this aspect of the program is Neo and this program is Morpheus and this is and this is again you know this is another way in which our brains attached to forming like these images and these kind of metaphors to encapsulate ideas so it wouldn't surprise me if they named something like the Lucifer

no it's if Luciferase is what it's called and it's a so it's and I don't even know if it's in the vaccine I can't really find it now but it is a it's a generic term for the class of oxidative enzymes that produce bioluminescence and is usually distinguished from a photo protein so one of the things that's floating out there right now sadly is that and it really could be I don't know there could be something called Luciferase in the one of the vaccines and so because

that which Lucifer means morning star and so it would make it's a it's a sensible name for a light emitting something right so but if but the problem is like and this is again it goes back to the Fauci thing it goes back to science only understanding things on this level ignoring the social level because when someone's whipping up the vaccine and like okay we're going to use Luciferase and this or that no one's thinking like don't do that if you fucking hear there's something called Lucifer in this shit they're not going to take it

like don't call it that rename it call it a call it like a mouse light or something call you know call it like a rain rain box anything but don't call it Satan man because people are already freaked out about it but you know what I mean so yeah so and then what happens is because the thing that is legit like with other funny thing is when people like say shit like that they are also saying well you know the

sea pansy that evil creature is filled with Luciferase you know what I mean they're like there's just a name humans invented for a thing that already existed way before anyone came up with the idea for Satan but people because it's name that people like oh they're wanting to inject the devil into you and people believe that and then because people believe that the only thing that happens is a bunch of people die that's it because like and so this to me

if if we're looking at like I think the future of battling pandemics one of the things people are going to learn from covid is you have to have an understanding of non scientific consciousness and not an understanding that's like judgmental you know like that's the condescension when you something tells me you've been following me on twitter yes I've been absorbing your twitter and I love it

but also like when I feel the anger you feel too no man I feel it too and I'm guilty of it is the problem I'm guilty sometimes I feel so condescending and I feel so legit you know the classic like how fucking hard is it you know this is we've heard it so many times how fucking hard is it to put a stupid mass that costs five cents over your face when you're around people like for me it's like I it's I don't care

it's I mean the other insulting thing I interrupted you but the other insulting aspect of that is like oh they're like they're just trying to see if they can get us to do like whatever they say well now you're presuming that I'm not smart enough to stop wearing the mask like once I like once COVID is is gone and like and but that whole thing you think like oh they're

trying to get just that's just the way to see if they can get us to submit it's like you a historic motherfucker what about Vietnam what do you think that was you want to they know they can make you submit how many of us did they make how many of us were just like oh I guess I'll go to the jungle fight communism if you tell me I have to over and over again they the state has sent humanity into so many varieties of horror that

to think that there's any question in the mind of people who we want to assign the role of leadership or deep state or whatever about making humans submit is madness you pay taxes you wake up in the morning and go to work according to an industrial revolution schedule before all this happened there's so many things people don't question at all if you look at it from the perspective of being manipulated it's like you are fully fucking manipulated

like so stop thinking the whole mask thing is a test they know they can make the herd go any direction they want the herd to go if you want to start assigning a malevolent intelligence to some small cobble of people they're not scratching their chin about whether or not they can make people do shit they sold pet rocks man you know what I mean some of them are rich out of some people rocks with sticky eyes on it they you know what I mean like that like this is I think a rational thing people

are thinking regarding these fucking masks man but I get it I understand why and subconsciously they're scary too you know and it's a new thing and this is like how we tend to respond to uncertainty I think that you're absolutely right that they need to do more on like the messaging front in the future I do you think it's too late now I'm sorry to cut you off but do you think because my feeling is now the messaging has been so distorted

so choppy so condescending many times completely wrong many times you know coming from like the new thing when I totally get it is like these stupid shits like Gavin Newsom are like announcing all of these shutdown regulations getting on camera breaking the hypocrisy to me like if we would like you know the left loves throwing around and I

understand why the left loves throwing around like we need to like you don't just let people off the hook man some people like we some of the things that have been happening need to be like dealt with in a court right similarly yeah I one of the things that I hope happens in the future is that it is considered like if a leader is seen not following pandemic regulations then at the very least it's like instantly fine instantly gone

if not like having some kind of like actual criminal charges brought up against them because Newsom from doing that from fucking Pelosi doing that from all these people doing that they killed people because what happened is that was the last straw for a lot of people who saw that and they're like you know what thank you if you're not afraid of it I'm not afraid of it not thinking you know like no they're just people they fucked up just like all of us fucked up no that was the last straw they killed people that's the problem it's like

if you're gonna tell us we have to be a certain way we have to be that way times 10 you know and so this is to me like in the future you know we're gonna learn but now what do you think man you think it's too late do you think there's a way to make people so that their folks start practicing you know or start living in a way that stops the spread yeah I think that one

I mean so history pandemics shows that this is like this has always happened with all of them they've been like during tuberculosis I just heard this I talked to people should check out my guest Nina Fefferman who is my favorite she's spent a career theoretically mathematically modeling pandemics and it's now an applied mathematician basically for the first time but she's also an evolutionary biologist and stuff too but she was talking about

how one there's a lot of these things take time so it used to be the case that everyone just used to like spit on the street like quite regularly where now like maybe you do it if you're like on a run or like you know a few times a year you hawk a luge or you see like a teenager or like a rough around the edges cowboy or something like that but it used to just be like everyone all of the time like thought nothing of spitting in the street and then tuberculosis they like figured out that like

hey maybe we shouldn't do that and people were reluctant to get tests and we're scared of science and stuff back then too so they'd have to be like hey win a spin in a Model T if you if you promise to not spit in the street for four weeks and get a tuberculosis test will give you a spin in a Model T and people were peddling snake oil and supplements and exercise and diet fads and everything back through all of that as well and part of this is like

I think has a greater understanding of a lot of people look at what people people know about confirmation bias now like that's I don't think a lot of people know what confirmation bias was five years ago or or something like even like Dunning Kruger is starting to get out there a little bit of people over estimating their people that know the least tend to have the most

confidence in the in their knowledge in things that's much that's the illusion of it has to do with the illusion of explanatory depth that we talked about on the show before where where you ask someone like how does the car work and be like oh you push the gas pedal you do that and then you go like yeah but how does that work and like well then I guess there's like a fuel infusion yeah but how does that work and people are like oh I guess I actually don't know at all and so so you think you know cars and then you start like taking

a mechanics class and then you go oh shit I don't know anything about cars and then you become a mechanic and then your expertise goes up but your level of confidence is the same when you knew nothing about cars and when you were an expert you just had no confidence when you were actually learning about it people are going to start figuring things like that out and what's the oh my gosh what's the what's the holding holding too conflicting ideas in in your mind that's

all of the popular you know justifying two different ideas yeah cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance is like you hear people saying that all of the time now that's something that you didn't so we're getting a little smarter but what I'm saying is like now yeah like right now yes hopefully the problem is is that you know again like I don't mean to keep bashing politicians but it's like the problem is you had like the

president the vice president deciding they weren't going to wear a mask the president being like you know I'm not good like I'm not going to say anything that hasn't already been said but it's like in his mind the the thing to do was not to be like holy shit everybody I got this thing I was kind of wrong it's very contagious his idea was to be like it barely did anything so to me like from the perspective of

epidemiologists you know it's like looking at now like how many people have died not not I mean if on paper because the majority of folks are enough people decided not to wear a mask to be safe but the reason they decided not to wear masks is because they had a really good reason to not believe it did anything and that was because the messaging in the beginning was choppy and weird antithetical to itself nobody was

there there was no central like messaging there was no and so everything became the schizoid like thing where just what you're saying if you want to find online something that's going to tell you it's not real if it is real it's not as bad as they're saying or that you're going to be okay if you get it you can find it and so to me this is like where you know we look at a new like not only like you have to find a way now to re-message

to people like who are fatigued from hearing about fucking COVID my apologies to all of you we're pretty sick of it too listening but but re-mess... Oh man anyone that's using their platform to get the word out this winter will be the most you know horrifying thing that we've ever had to go through in our in our lifetime and I don't know if that's the right way to message it or whatever but the fact is is that we're going to whatever what other death rates you think are scary

right now we're going to easily be doubling that like in short order the problem is man it's like that that which is true and I'm asking you because I don't have any idea what what what the way you like I'm thinking like now we have we're having to look up for systemic error in part I think part of that is because Trump took like

dismantled the entire branch of the government that was going to like handle this shit and then because Trump and the Republicans politicized it because they knew that if this pandemic gets out of control then probably that he's not going to get re-elected it's going to make him look horrible though all the economy stuff's going to go right out the fucking window instead of like dealing with that in a smart way that decided they would send out a message that it wasn't that big a deal

guys we still have to live come on now the new thing in the right wing which is so insidious and all these fucking right wing people who are doing it man like you know history will tell but the new thing in the right wing is doing which is equally if not worse than what the left is doing the left is telling people to act a certain way and not behaving that way the right is doing this weird thing which is like come on winner of sorrow or whatever shut up it's not that bad you all just want to live in despair

it's going to be a great winner stand a clock it's still going to be great and it's a stupid and it's stupid because we're not there yet and so we're looking at like every single fucking like leader or thought leader out there is saying the wrong thing or saying the right thing and then getting video of them doing the wrong thing you know what I mean back to me we have to look at a way now to shift course

I'll tell you it seems like we're damned if we're doing damned if we don't in a lot of ways like if you look at so I'll say to the Republicans credit like they are practicing what they were talking about hypocrisy like these motherfuckers are getting COVID left and right what was it I forget if it was some my favorite tweet in all of this was after that garden thing when it was like clear that like all these people at Trump's big like

party that he threw or whatever got got COVID she was like this woman goes isn't it suspicious that no Democrats have gotten no Democrat politicians have gotten COVID but the list of Republican ones goes on and on like that's amazing but like Giuliani just got like that's living his truth like if he that dude wasn't

sneaking off and wearing a mask he really didn't believe it and then in terms of the hypocrisy this is like another thing of like hopefully in the messaging we can tease apart like yeah let's get rid of Newsom let's keep the masks and get rid of Newsom keep the masks get rid of the people that are not following along the thing that aren't setting the example aren't living by the things that they're saying I've taken the thing as to as I've you know I've taken

calculated risks I'm sure you've taken calculated risks I bet if someone had been recording my every single move through this pandemic people would have been like damn Shane did not take a lot of calculated risks like we have every time he was around someone he was walking backwards from people in like 10 feet away as people are like not getting the point and walking closer anyway but it's not that I haven't like gone on hikes with people without a mask that are also people that I trust

and everything else and so I think that in terms of what do we do there's gonna be things like so I just went and donated blood a week ago and I was like what a fool that I didn't do that because I got I'm going to get an antibody body test in case I've already had COVID and then and perhaps like have some immunity to it right now but then I got to do something good I realized that only 3% of people donate

blood and another thing that I thought of is I thought how much of a person's reluctance to to getting a vaccine is just that it's a sharp needle again from my way of looking at it like our conscious explanations for doing things are these fanciful you know stories that we tell ourselves after the fact and justifications after the fact I wanted to make sure that when I'm evaluating whether I'm going to get a vaccine

or not which I will and there's going to be a lot to pick from there's 3 that look great right now and another 40 on the way 100% chance and but make sure that you know you probably feel a little foolish if like all of the things that you made like oh they're going to poison us and sterilize all of us and blah blah blah was really just like subconsciously you were a little scared of needles which is the same probably the same reason

why heroin isn't a more popular drug than it is and pills are scary I haven't gotten a flu vaccine many years some years I got it some years I didn't that's never happening again and I'm going to get it from now on I needed to be more mindful of it but I think that some of these some of these practices will take a little bit of time and I think that people also don't even remember what it's like to not have Donald Trump as president

I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican he was a very different person than anyone that we've had before that was a selling point you know that he was different I don't think people will remember what it's like to have any other president Bush or anyone else would have been like here's the CDC guy here's what he's having to say you know it's like the one thing this I think is illuminated

is that we desperately need a centralized locus of data that is being articulated with an understanding that there are different ways that people in the world look at the world like what you're saying earlier on it's like sometimes you think that people are relating to you and they're not at all and this is like my favorite kind of commercial is when you watch a corporation

like that hilarious commercial where one of the Kardashians brings a Pepsi to a cop and they spent all this money on it I don't know if you saw it but it was like the most made fun of commercial they spent millions on it I can't remember which but they were trying to do some kind of funny look the fascist state and the people were going to be through coke it was fucked and it didn't work but you look at it and you're like

oh wow that's like a praying mantis that's like a weird alien looking at people and completely misunderstanding them but landing in the uncanny valley it's whatever you think we are is just not what we are and it fucks the whole brand up that's what we're looking at right now with covid there seems to be a kind of disconnect

in the way that politicians who are supposed to be representing the people think the people actually are and in that disconnect it spawned a perfect a perfect petri dish for every horrible thing that you would that could happen during a pandemic it is made number one if somebody sees you without a mask or whatever nobody is going to be like you fucking hypocrite it must not

be real they're just going to be like that was dumb you probably should have worn a mask or you know what I mean but when you see the people telling using law on folks not doing it at that point you've got to scratch your chin and be like if fucking Gavin Newsom thinks this is so bad that he's shutting down the whole state if he thinks the disease is so horrible why is he doing the exact opposite of what he's telling us to do

this is a very scientific thing to ask yourself you're supposed to see that and be like wait a minute wait so what are the possibilities here number one Newsom is an idiot and he had a moment of stupidity and somehow completely lost track of the fact that he's being filmed all the time and

he's definitely going to land on camera doing that that to me feels like a rational thing it's like oh no that guy is just a hypocrite he's an idiot the virus is still real the second one is what you want that's what we would all want that's the one your mind is going to want because it makes things less scary which is COVID is not real it's control it's they're doing it because they're locking down California to drive the small businesses out so the corporations over Newsom knows this he's not scared of it at all

and because he's not scared of it it's not real and because it's not real you better fucking believe I'm not gonna fucking wear a mask like all you cucks out there who think this shit is real I'm going to Sturges right and then so that's it that's what's happening and I'm going to go to Sturges and wear the least number of masks we've ever worn at Sturges literally the only population that quite regularly puts a

face covering they've gone to court so they don't get discriminated against wearing a face covering in the past not this year and so all I'm saying is it's like now because you have an infinite number of people who are imposing laws being shown to not follow their own laws and you are doing that out of what I would say is more kind of hubris

related to their position in society that's created a delusion in them that they are somehow invulnerable or something I don't think it's because they don't think it's real but because you have a number of these people doing that it's not just that it's killing people now who are like yeah it's not real look at the left look at those fucking elite deep state manipulators I'm not going to be part of that I don't want to be part of that and also just a basic human thing which is like

no one wants to listen to a hypocrite the reason you got installed as a leader is because you represent the best of us and not because so anyway what I'm getting at here is that now here comes the vaccine and these very people who have been illuminated as being like hypocritical are expecting enough people out there to take this and we're talking about people who really do believe they want to give us the mark of the beast

that they really do want to like make it so that we can't travel without a chip inside of us right and so all I'm saying is you know when you look in the upper echelon honestly I forgive every single one of them for being dipshits because god if like I'm going to get mad at someone for being a hypocrite I'm lucky I'm not I'm lucky that right now I'm not instantly being struck with lightning from above you know I'm but I get it I don't care I'm sorry I called you an idiot

noosem or whatever I don't like you necessarily I wish someone else was there I'd feel guilty but then you kill a lot of people but I don't know maybe you are an asshole who am I talking to when I can't use someone's in my body I guess what my point is what I'm getting at here is we've got to figure out a way now to get a messaging out there to people who didn't go to graduate school and who are just as smart as people who did go to graduate school but have a genuinely legitimate mistrust of the powers

to use the B right now that's what I'm saying some genius has got to come up with a way to get these people to stick themselves with this stuff and I have no idea how to do that yeah I mean so a couple fun things one just before we like it's easy I find myself getting swept up in the details of just like how could Trump or something like that do this but it does help me to

see the way that so I just had my episode that came out today different time for your listeners but I had a couple anthropologists on who study one of them studies like leadership and stuff in tribal communities the other one studies like witchcraft and various where the emergence of their myths and the way in which they're used and so there's these I think they're called the Chuni people somewhere in like Africa some

small tribe of people right they get a virus and they have like this water borne virus that they'll get and then what happens is they say oh the water monster slipped in at night and gave you this virus so right there that's like kind of interesting because your subconscious picked up on something picked up on the correlation like okay the water it's got something to do with the water

and then it and then it's created this exaggerated story to like really affine and like drive the point home or whatever just a best guess but then what they do is they call the local medicine person or shaman and what that person does is they come there and they like do some sort of you know ritual to get it out of there or whatever but the thing is it's presumed that those people that got the virus

what they were doing wrong and so they like have to have some sort of penance was that they weren't being altruistic enough they must have been withholding they must have been stingy and that's why they got this virus so there's this victim blaming that happens there's this idea of this just world hypothesis if you just do all of the things right because the world is just and because you're smarter or better or whatever you won't have to worry about getting this virus when someone does get it

they must have been doing something wrong this victim blaming happens with sexual so she must have been wearing the wrong thing you know we do this and it protects psychologically from thinking can happen to you or your loved ones and then and so then you use that to then justify your whatever your like political position or amplify these moral things like altruism or whatever in the environment so I think that I think one

being aware that look happened throughout history maybe showing people like the ads of the various things that were being pedaled through history and and the various stories that people told themselves through history which are not only amusing but educational and and it's also like hey this isn't me attacking you this is me saying this is a cognitive bias that we all have scientists

have this misunderstanding we're all this is an insanely complex world we all do this there's conservatives conservatives that are higher educated are more likely to disregard evidence for climate change because they have enough training to be able to poke better holes in some of the data and narratives they have the training to like find better information bias type research so this is like

so it's not just like we can change the conversation from being like smart to dumb or like bad to to good person and and just be like this is the human condition that we're a part of and and then addressing each one of the you know it's the painstaking task of addressing each of the issues that comes up which plenty of Democrats and hippies and everything else from like the people that I

fucking love hippie you know like I don't see eye to eye on it like I look at someone like you or Pete Holmes or Rameen Nasir who like think very differently in terms of like you know Pete's into more religious and you're like you'll tend to be into like a hollow thing and Rameen's like and like there couldn't be three people I respect the intelligence of more on planet earth and I am

intimidated by talking to them you know and I saw you had Rameen recently or you were on oh my god he's he always cracks me up but anyway so there I think that there are these ways of like cause here's what I don't think will work even though marketing says that it will of like the reaching across the table and you go okay I don't agree with this

hey Duncan what's your favorite ice cream flavor oh well I like that ice cream too now let's talk about covid and then you know you find this middle ground and then you find the thing that you agree on hey I like being happy and healthy and want everyone's family to be happy and healthy don't you and people go I sure do and then okay we have this agreed upon that shit just doesn't work in my mind because we all have a different idea of what happy and healthy

means I do think that objective reality will like is exceptionally powerful and wins like whether you wish Christmas for Christmas the Christmas miracle of covid rates like being cut in half or being down or whatever that's just going to this is what I talked about at the at the end of the last time that you had me on was like

the harder time the more we keep on telling ourselves these wishful timelines the more objective reality is just going to crush our hope over and over and over again so I think what we can maybe start agreeing on is like what is objective reality not everyone's going to be in agreement but there will be some something that looks like a consensus in my mind and then and then from there

addressing what are the things what are the arguments that pop up which people say like well aren't these things just natural don't viruses just just happen you know and this is just something we live with and I would say well thank you for my opportunity to share this thing that I love blabbing about because that's a misunderstanding this is a very modern problem because what's happened is we have these population booms where we have lots of

people in in cities now so there's disease being spread faster than it ever would amongst humans and then we're putting all of our food in wet markets in industrial farming and every you know this isn't the first and it won't be the last or where there's like mad cow disease that we all remember and this stuff's going to keep on happening when you pack a billion chickens into one area there's going to be some sickness in the food that then us packed into things that are too tight so now

we're eating more diseased stuff in a more diseased environment and then we're also as we as we lose habitat we are we are pressuring I know this isn't this is getting um a little far out there but but as as we as we lose habitat species like deer and stuff in the area have to be around more other critters that they wouldn't normally be around and they're getting they're getting more disease spread

so this is like I'm sure that I'm sure that the average person listening has never thought about that exact thing in terms of disease spread before because like a lot of people you don't hear about that on the news a lot of people don't and so I think that I think that if if we can start presenting like good faith arguments and say hey science isn't just this like elitist it's actually something that every single

person can participate in yeah when you say was this idea that my that I have testicular cancer and I'm definitely a goner was that theory valid or not you had the theory and then afterwards you discarded that and that is that's exactly what that's a huge part of what science is and so I would say anyone listening can make things falsifiable

I thought I was having a good faith conversation with someone on twitter the other day why did I think that who knows but you know I thought I thought I was like addressing interesting concerns about the vaccine which there should be concerns about the vaccine and then this person was finally just like I don't know I just think they're trying to sterilize well if that's where you're starting from one I guess that's what I'm against is you starting from the place of

vaccines are inherently just people trying to poison us and sterilize us or whatever but if you are starting from that you're going to have a large sample size of like 80 million people if 80 million people get sterilized or even some portion of them become sterilized you will be right but you need to be able to say to yourself if 80 million people get this

vaccine and nothing has gone wrong then what I will know is that my fears about the short term implications of a vaccine are unfounded there might still be long term things that we can't know yet and I don't know exactly how to like train people into thinking that but I don't see why that can't be conversations that people are having on the news yeah well that's what you're saying that that's it

is like stop making the taboo like this is the problem is like the infantilization of people who are having really deep spiritual thoughts or feelings related to COVID and the dismissal of it you know like the problem is this people in the world are religious people put a lot of value gathering together to go to church

if you as a secularist or a scientist as an atheist I'm not saying you but whoever think that just casually shrugging off over 5000 years of societal practice and cultural habit is possible you're not very scientific also the assumption a lot of people are making

which is really not a great assumption is that folks care that much if they die that's a bad assumption to make like some people the idea of going to church and because you went to church you get sick and you die that fits into a religious narrative that you become a martyr so all I'm saying is this when I am watching who's the guy who got the Emmy in New York the politician they

gave him an Emmy for his New York speeches Cuomo so when I'm watching Cuomo talk about like tell people like I know you want to have a Christmas but Covid is the Grinch you know what I mean it's like you talk to these people like they're 8 year olds you're talking to Orthodox Jews you're talking to devout Muslims

you're talking to hardcore Christians who don't care if they die they just want to take communion from their perspective that's fucking irrational but if you think telling somebody who legitimately believes that that is the flesh of God if you think telling them that they should be thinking about the Grinch when they celebrate the birth of their savior you might as well just put on black fucking robes

and start shitting on an altar because that's what you look like today and what a crazy misunderstanding of humanity to me that's where it's so bizarre not everyone's like you Cuomo for some people Christmas isn't about exchanging gifts it's the most sacred day of the fucking year and you telling them prohibiting them from gathering together is to them an act of like malefic cruelty

and evil and so to me I think it's too late honestly Shane when I was asking you the question I don't think we could fix the messaging now but the next one the next pandemic ministry or whatever you want to call it a cobble all those names sound sinister a group of people who recognizes okay we have the secularists the atheists the scientific materialists we got the racists we got the fucking Satanists we've got the people who want to die we've got the people who don't want to die

we've got a lot of different swaths of the population here let's come up with a language for each of them you sound like a god trying to peddle different humans to some other some other god come on we got it go on three times a whole batch of secularists you know what I'm saying is it's like if Fauci for example could go on camera

and say hey I heard a lot of you believe that Luciferase is in this vaccine and that we want to inject you with a devil and then you know come up with a way to not be like and therefore you're out of here if you gotta stop you guys name it we'll just put it to a vote online you guys you guys get to name it you guys clearly know more about naming this and that

we make the things you guys name it but not even that just say to them look I get it you think that I am a servant of Malik and you are legitimately scared I'm going to try to make you or your family or someone you love infertile and that I want to keep you from going to church they have to approach people from that perspective of like I don't believe that and I'm not that

but I'm gonna address you where you're at which is you know what I mean speak to people in that place so I don't know how to do that but it's like this whole casual dismissal of huge populations of people is killing people you know we're dealing with a fucking translation issue here it's like that's all but there's also I don't think that you can hope

for a silver bullet in terms of messaging I think that you're going to need black representatives in black communities with black messaging speaking in a way that black community can relate to I think that you're going to need female representatives speaking to I think you're going to need conspiracy people that are like this guy that Jack Rowland that made

this amazing painting behind and sent me and listened to my podcast he used to he like went looking for ancient pyramids and stuff and now he's someone that's like hey look I went like I looked for all of the things I loved the idea and everything too I got really involved in it and you know there were some flaws with the

so we're going to need like that guy speaking to the conspiracy community and so there's each thing is going to require a different bit of messaging for my money I think that people don't haven't heard near enough about the long term impacts one because it just hasn't been long enough but I think that I think that 10% of people

could easily be having long term impacts if not using months of productivity and never being quite right like how much would you like people aren't scared of death but part of that is because you get to be like I'm not scared of death like everyone's scared of losing their taste and smell for the rest of their life there's like there's nothing tough about like I'll lose my taste and smell like no one's going to say that I don't think you know I think it's got to be financial man

I think all that shit doesn't work it's like you want to talk about long term people are worried about long term anything there wouldn't be cigarettes there you know what I mean there wouldn't be sugar to me trying to scare people the long term stuff isn't going to work I think it has to be financial motivation like if you don't get COVID you know for the every quarter that you go without getting COVID we're going to give you five grand or something you know yeah and you can do you can teach people how to do

like appropriate cross-cultural analysis which is a simple people are already doing it people are already saying like look at Sweden they didn't do this whole act and look at that and it's like well actually they closed down all the schools except for you know past high school and college they went remotely they kept things under under 50 and the big difference was people didn't have the same pushback because they actually put their version of the CDC in charge

all their politicians went this isn't our thing listen to listen to these experts and what they have to say they opted for a little more of a herd immunity approach which they're now walking back and their economy dropped down basically just as much as ours like something like 8% ours dropped 9% or something but if you look at Taiwan they had a drop of like 0.5% now if you go there I just saw some some comedians tweet they're from Taiwan they went back

there they they quarantined for two weeks they got it they got a chip in their phone they had they had to they got driven by the government to a hotel they couldn't leave their hotel room for two weeks they got food delivered to them a doctor called them every day to check on them they had multiple tests and then they have a chip in their phone afterwards so they have contact tracing of course people are going to have big brother issues with with with this but

but this is this is just like no one's saying hey I'm not proposing we do this I'm going to give you an example of what other people have done and after they got out of that there are some people wearing masks in the street and stuff and you'd probably see more than you would under normal conditions but the subways are full the restaurants are full and there's basically no covid there whatsoever and when covid does pop up it's stomped out same with New Zealand and their economies have been

because explaining to people as me as an entertainer who needs to be able to get people in to the sea I just did a solo episode addressing the dichotomy between like it's either covid or the economy and it's they are they are tied together and you can see that cross-cultural analysis shows that that actually the places that had the lowest covid actually also had the lowest drop in economic factors and the reason why that is is because

say I go covid it's a hoax I'm going to go and do my show right now well it's already you know I do all my own marketing I already know how difficult it is to get people into a showroom without covid before pandemic it was all that I could do to get 200 people into a room to see me in a given city now to be like hey guys this is being a little overblown and every and now I'm getting people to from in some people's mind risk their lives to

to come and see my comedy show now you might be saying that's like I dine out under normal conditions I dine out twice a week I've gone I've gone to one restaurant since covid and I've ordered takeout twice which I should order more takeout and support local restaurants especially because another thing they have separate supply chains if people knew that restaurants had separate supply chains and there's a bunch of shit in local farms going to waste and there'd be a way of supporting your local farms as well

and you can possibly get groceries there so each one of these has a different thing but anyway for me to get people to to come to my to show show is the same thing that people need for if they want me to come to their restaurant I need to have consumer confidence to go out to dine out and you Duncan could sit there and be like Shane you're just being a wimp go to the restaurant that doesn't convince me to go to what are your thoughts on outdoor dining like isn't the idea that out

if you do it outside that your the transmission rates are very low like it's the I think it's I think outdoor dining is a lot a lot better this is just I'm just like using an example of there's still going to be lots of people that aren't going to go outdoor dining that would otherwise die I'm not saying no one should outdoor diner I'm just making the point that consumer confidence will

is dependent on COVID numbers and whether people believe outdoor dining is safe or not there's still going to be a large percentage of the population that would normally be coming in dining with you or dining outdoors that will not as long as the US has the highest rates of COVID numbers which by the way here's something interesting you know why so people are worried about the vaccine being rushed right legitimately there's I just heard I just heard about

the so the Ebola vaccine took five years and that was the world record yeah but all of the stages all of the same stages that would happen in any vaccine trial have happened with COVID it's just normally wouldn't have the resources to be able to do the number of trials there was I think in June the last time I talked to the scientists that told me a number there was like in June there had been nearly half a million trials like that that kind of scientific

effort is going to yield some results but anyway the reason why the trials have been able to go so fast is because there's so much COVID so you have a control group and you have an experimental group and normally you'd have to wait ages you'd have to wait five years to be like well let's see if this group got more Ebola than this did because there's just not that much Ebola around in the first place and this is

why this is the this is super dark but this is why it's two American companies that finished the trials first and more vaccine companies from around the globe are moving their trials to the because we have more COVID it's not our ability to innovate that's so depressing hey I want to ask you this I want to close out on this

and can I adjust my timeline too that I gave at the end of last show we're going to move the COVID clock hands not much but it's just one I'm not really moving my COVID clock too much but a couple scientists I've talked to recently don't agree with my clock I will say that I'm more optimistic so which I probably shouldn't be

so the last time that I was on I think this is like how impressive science can be is me not knowing much about this stuff other than talking with people that do work on vaccines and stuff I just shared what they had told me which was more confidently than I should have was like there's vaccines in the works they should be some ready by December they're going to be starting to be manufactured by January you and I should have them by May ish the general population by June

this is back in June and now we skip ahead and that timeline is not only did that timeline hit the mark almost exactly but the vaccine is way beyond it's like the wettest of dreams people were crying when they got the results back that was 95% effective people were crying so I said that means that leave in wiggle room I'd be touring by September

we're talking like people actually sitting packing together indoors not even a distance show that's what I estimated in December 2021 September 2021 most people think that's too optimistic here's my reasoning for thinking that still could happen and I do think it is too optimistic so a lot of the people that are the most against vaccines are also the most cavalier about COVID are also going to unfortunately and sadly going to have the highest

rates of COVID spread in this coming this winter is going to be an epic catastrophe it's going to be so bad by the time February rolls around things will be looking much much better because they'll be where things are right now and so that many people will have in my opinion there's been

fairly strong encouraging data that reinfection isn't what people feared it might be six months ago I thought people might be able to get reinfected by this in three months after they've had it and then it's worse that time and then three months they can get it again and then again and again and again so it might not you might have been perfectly healthy first time but now you got a pre-existing condition the second time that you got it

and then the third time you got it and it's unpredictable whether it's attacking in the body it's usually lung sometimes it's the brain sometimes it's you're losing your sense of smell sometimes it's other organs and so is this just going do we just slowly make this slow death from COVID and that's why I'm like guys what the fuck are like it reminds me of that scene in HBO's Chernobyl where they are like just looking at the explosion and they don't know what all this raining down on them and they're like they're like

making so sorry so then I get off so I would say that because of that and because enough vaccines I think will still follow that timeline and they're more effective than first thought that timeline still holds true because so many of the people that are adverse to getting vaccines aren't going to have the same rates of reinfection and because there's they're getting so many

way more vaccines out tens of millions out much earlier than I thought that they would there's going to be so much more confidence within six months because six months from now there's going to be six months worth of data and if one of these three vaccines or if all three of these vaccines aren't what we hoped that they were there is another 40 on the way you'll get to take your pick so that's beautiful you're saying summer that summer we're going to be back at

the bars summer we're going to be rubbing shoulders with people without worry about dying wait people don't people don't agree with me when I when I say I don't think academics I hope you're right though man that would be so wonderful that doesn't seem that far away and it's good things would have to come out so all of the unknowns that happen right now need to be like positive outlines that that happen

life rarely it's easier for things to go wrong this is just entropy you know it's easier for things to go wrong than it is for things to go right things that would screw that up one I don't think they know if getting the vaccine actually stops you from getting and spreading covid if it doesn't stop you from getting and spreading covid then forget everything that I just said that's so fucked up you know what I'm picturing Shane I'm picturing

this in August or September somebody this is what I'm seeing I'm seeing someone huddled behind a car I don't they like maybe found like a phone or something with ear buds attached to it a little juice and they are hitting play listening to this or like just zombies running down the fucking street because the covid vaccine actually turns people into some kind of like maniacal zombie and they're listening shaking they're at me like no Shane

all over their clothes you for bullet it's better than you ever thought we're covered in blood we have a taste for it well we'll see now I want to jump out of covid land for a second and this is something I meant to ask you up front do you have about 20 more minutes okay so this is my question I want to know what you think about this I'm sure you saw maybe you didn't what I'm going to read it to you and I want to know what you think

I'm nervous I'm sure you're you're going to tell me about aliens yes former Israeli space security chief says extra terrestrials exist and Trump knows about it a galactic federation has been waiting for you to reach a stage where will we to reach a stage where we will understand what space and spaceships are haim a shed said a former Israeli's okay so I'll read a little bit more

a respected professor and retired general he shed said the aliens were equally curious about humanity and we're seeking to understand the fabric of the universe a shed said cooperation agreements had been signed between species including an underground base in the depths of Mars where there are American astronauts and alien representatives a shed added that president Donald Trump was aware of the extra terrestrials existence and it had been on the verge

of revealing information but was asked not to in order to prevent mass hysteria the white house and Israeli officials did not immediately respond a su gow a spokesperson for the Pentagon declined a comment a spokesperson for NASA said one of the agency's key goals was the search for life in the universe but that he had to find signs of extra extra terrestrial life a shed anyway what do you think man this is by the way this is not yeah this is not just some rando

no I know but say his title one more time though space security chief come that's a favorable position that I think gets created if people really like you we're gonna make you space security that's like

that's amazing for a lot of reasons and that dude has a book out so like anytime listen I want to have a book out soon and I hope that you don't take everything that I have to say as like 100% because I'm going to have motivated reasoning and everything else at that time so I could I could approach this in a few ways please let me say that boy you I trust your well do I trust your judgment mine mine don't about aliens

like I think that I think that a given listener of yours would have a better sense of space stuff and physics stuff than I haven't read I love physics it was my first love I haven't read a physics book in at least 10 years and and so so like I tend to like I don't want to I was just recently I learned two facts about dinosaurs one was that

the average size was the size of chickens we just tend to like the really big ones and two that that that the blue whale is is is bigger than any dinosaur ever I confounded that recently and someone talked about dinosaurs and I couldn't wait to interject my fun fact and I said like blue whales were dinosaurs and I and I made a total mess I knew like a tiny little bit overest I was like I know about dinosaurs

because I just heard two little fun facts so I don't want to do that here here's what I here's what I so one I'm not the person to talk to about this to here's what I think about aliens for sure there's a like the mathematical odds of they're not being something at least one thing smarter than humans in the universe is insane you don't take those odds like anyone betting against their

being something smarter than humans is such a ego centric arrogant point of view like it's crazy to think that in my opinion and but it's also kind of equally crazy to think Donald Trump is keeping the lid on much of anything let alone let alone the alien spoiler but yeah you're right I mean he what's the

fictitious national inquirer he used to cite the national inquirer when he was running for president the first time and so you're saying that if there were aliens that were in contact with Trump you'd better fucking believe right now we would be seeing like he would somehow involve the aliens well you know how he always always projecting shit when he can't like lock her up and like stuff like whatever he does

he like projects it on something we were talking about projection earlier like I feel like he'd be like projecting like weird like thinks he's keeping a lid on it but like I would just be like talking about like oh this guy acts like he has some big green head and a super spine like it'd be like slipping out in like weird subconscious ways here just come out you'd be just like look trust me the fucking aliens hate Biden they hate him the aliens think Biden's an asshole

I know you mean I mean look I feel differently about I think that there has been what's interesting about what this guy is saying is that this is a aside from the fact that I agree with you like space chief or anytime you say you're in charge of space security and you're talking about literal outer space it's ridiculous so thank you for pointing that out but I do think that he's respected enough

that it's bizarre that he would say it like he does that he would be concerned about and he's in his 80's so it produces like the possibility like oh he's already on the way out anyway so why not just leak about the aliens but also this idea of some kind of galactic federation having contact with like politicians it gets repeated over and over again in different ways

you know that the part that to me that I always get confused about and this is what I would love to wrap up with by asking you this question is what from your perspective just if you had to like just come up with a prognostication so let's say that it finally happens like Trump walks out with an alien which would be a very depressed to me that would be the thing that did me it

like that's where I'm done that's shit my pants and just getting the bathtub and like just babble until they haul me away to a lunatic umbrella but imagining that Trump in the last days of his presidency has a big press conference it's like here's an alien he's the best alien these aliens are really good an alien comes and talks to us what do you think regardless of who ever brings alien up

I'm sorry I made a lazy trump joke what I'm saying is what do you think happens over the next three days upon a global realization that we are being colonized communicated with or influenced in some way shape or form by aliens and have been for the last hundred years what do you think would actually happen to society yeah I think that well one perhaps it's that like Trump

didn't want to reveal the aliens because he is worried they would steal the stage a little bit so maybe Biden will maybe Biden will diplomatically reveal the aliens to like I don't know I mean I love the show The Leftovers on HBO is like one of my favorite things about and that was like what do people do in this like unexplained but absolutely objective reality happens and like how do they

make sense of it and what cults are formed and everything else and how do people deal with like everything else is normal it's basically they still need to like go to work and everything else everything else is like the same the aliens were here last week and you weren't freaking out about it why freak out about the aliens now nothing's changed but so one I'll say that one interesting thing about both AI and

aliens when people are always like scared about their takeover is I think that as humans evolve and science evolves and our ability to acquire knowledge evolves it seems that a very a very emergent and like standard property of that is that you gain more and more empathy and curiosity for those things so I'm not as worried about Terminator robots

because I think that we are more kind to say animals the more that we learn about them then certainly our ancestors were before they were like mindful enough so hopefully something that is quote unquote more intelligent than us whatever that means would would be would be even that much more of a steward and would would be so I love the idea that aliens would be curious about us I don't think that aliens

would have anything of value to get from earth like in terms of resources and creatures that are burning fossil fuel something that figured out how to move across the galaxy undetected by us is not operating off of like I don't think they're gonna like here to take our gasoline or even like our fresh water or something is one of the ways we put we box aliens in

could it be the aliens maybe they're more interested in cultural things maybe no writing music you know maybe did those once you get to the point of infinite energy and some kind of insane technology to travel across the universe at that point the things that would be valuable would be more like art or stories or something they're here for our stories shame I absolutely

think that could very well be the case like the anthropologist that I just talked about why why wouldn't you want to research something like this I think you know in an ideal world much like a scientist doesn't want to study a rat in a lab or or doesn't want say you know they do a number of tricks so someone doesn't realize what they're actually being studied for right or whatever wouldn't something more advanced learn a lot more from

figuring out ways to be like flies on the wall or have like tiny invisible drones flying around or something like that they know that we can't yeah it makes sense I see yeah that's that's interesting right and then if you're and then at that point if you're like trying to preserve like a species or so and and if you can if you can kind of calculate like hey when this person says when when a Gavin Newsom

goes to a dinner it kills like this segment of like maybe they can mathematically like figure that out or they're just knowing like little bits of butterfly effects that are this this is what I thought every time I've had like a manic episode for like DMT experiences or whatever this is what I think is happening is they're able to figure out you know this whatever the equivalent of like a nuclear bomb or something like that

the person that thought of that was influenced by this was influenced by this was influenced by this so that we can hear like when Duncan Trussell had this great idea that that influenced or even just a silly idea but it influenced like some world leader that happened to be listening that influenced this other thing what was he listening to on Spotify and and watching like on YouTube the three days before that influenced that thing and so you could

go back and create these like small number of influences that maybe like the outcome is that life sustains a way of looking at things it's like it's looking at it's zooming out and looking at things as a process interdependent process and like using some yeah I think an advanced intelligence would

do that that makes sense like it would be interested in the not just the result and not just the impending result but also the tiny little flutters and how far back can you chart that and what does that look like like when if there were a way to quantify that or to visualize it would you be looking at a new life form

would you be seeing an actual life form that's living outside and inside of time simultaneously you know and it seems like an alien maybe that is what maybe I'm again I don't know who this guy is really but if like we imagine just for fun that these aliens are real and the aliens are waiting for us to understand what a spaceship is

it's almost like they're saying you you're not seeing the spaceship yet like it's right there but you're not going to see it until you look into something deeper than what's right in front of you and I love your ideas that you have during manic episodes are pretty interesting man not to encourage it but it's pretty cool thanks I try to make the most use out of a sometimes difficult situation but

I yeah if you think about think about like you know you see all these tragic things on like a David Attenborough documentary you see like this elephant seal tossing itself off of a cliff and and do you think like and these guys have to go do we stop if we can stop it if this thing's starving do you feed it do you interfere with the process and science is usually like no but at what point

do you at what point is not stopping in something from dying the same as killing it it's just like the trolley problem where I think this is just a human error where it's like it should mathematically it's easy there's five people on one track one person on another track it's heading toward the five you have the ability to pull the lever and you kill the one and people have a real hard time

with this because now you've taken the action and that action killed the one person so now four action murdered that one person well you're in action murdered those five people so like at what point do you start like meddling and stepping in a little bit here and there it's tough to say and maybe it's just maybe when you're that far out and it's just like mathematical pragmatism like

neuroscientists like neuroscientists that study things on rats they tend to not want to study brain damage because to do that you need to take a mallet not a fucking rat in the head with it and they're like I'd rather inject it with a cancer thank you very much like you know it is it is it's really fucked up but but they're also I think that part of the reason why this vaccine happened so fast was because they used

this new system and they were able to take they were able to take the the you know the genetic data from what COVID is and they were able to they in AI was able to formulate formalize the possible vaccine compounds in two days they had discovered the vaccine in two days so it took this long to test it

so think about what you know some super intelligence that I doubt is trying to help us make some space jalopy so we can like sit at some table with them or whatever but certainly why wouldn't there be all sorts of things to learn from all of everything in the universe including life complexes ours if it is indeed complex which is certainly

I would say that all life on this planet is a lot more there's a lot more to be gained from say like an asteroid in space and certainly there's plenty of asteroids to learn what you need to learn from asteroids already there doesn't seem to be as abundant life and much in the way that we are clamoring the anthropologist that I just talked to are clamoring for any semblance of like okay well there's still a couple tribes that haven't been

influenced that much by us like can we study them like of course like any alien that could would I would think be going to every far reach of space that it could to find every untouched thing and also trying to that's so cool yeah it's like you the only thing that's fucking interesting about us is that we don't know there's aliens it's fascinating the only thing that's

the only thing we've got that would even draw them here is like wow they they actually think they're alone in the universe holy look at how they act wow that's crazy yeah I get it man that's maybe they're bartering we're like okay we like something happened a spaceship and now that like we got to come down and like they're nice enough that they don't want to kill a single human being like so can we reason with these like so otherwise

you'd have to kill these people so that the word doesn't get out but can we reason with them can we barter with them so that they don't okay how can we stop this insane like president or whatever from like blowing our cover is there are there ways that we can interact with like a small group of these humans so they don't blow our cover for the rest of us because because Jim slipped up and he got found out and now

that's it man no I think you're that's the best answer like it's not so much that we're not ready to see them it's that they know that if we see them it's gonna fuck up their ability to study us and the way they currently are and also the only reason they would contact us in contact the military or the leaders is because they thought we were gonna blow ourselves up with nuclear bombs so it's like and they don't want which just happened really recently with like you know

North Korea was just a few years ago where we were like no I'll blow you up that's the seal going off the cliff you know my son loves this John C Riley narrated Disney show about bears and you better fucking believe if I had put millions of dollars into a documentary about bears and it looked like one of the bear cubs that I've been following with the camera was about to get eaten by another bear making the Disney dog that's not going on Disney I mean like you can't do a kid's show and be like oh yeah also

sometimes male bears will just eat the cubs you know what I mean I'm gonna stop it from happening that's probably what's happening with aliens is they're like you know they know that if we blow ourselves up the whole thing's over so won't be anything left to study that's it I mean the thing is is that humans are this is hopefully you know something I mean we are this is the next great mass extinction that we're that we're approaching and so

you know there's also for humans to think aliens are going to learn that much more from us than say a dolphin or a cockroach for that matter is a little bit human it's a very human thing to say I love talking to you and thank you so much for expanding my mind today will you let my listeners even though most of them know you

by now let them know how they can find you yeah I mean my baby is my podcast here we are where I interview a different scientist each week and you can hear me very awkwardly and keepishly ask exceptionally long-winded tangential questions and then get told everything that's wrong about them and if you go to ShaneMoss.com my documentary Psychonautics is on

Amazon I often forget to plug it and people love the documentary I get tons of great feedback all of the time so if you haven't seen it Psychonautics the comic's exploration of psychedelics on is something I'm proud of Shane you are the best thank you very much for giving me so much of your time Hare Krishna Shane thank you that was ShaneMoss everybody make sure to go to

ShaneMoss.com also check out our sponsors thank you Blue Choo thank you Squarespace and thank you Shutter for supporting this episode of the DTFH but most importantly thank all of y'all for making this my job I love you for it stay safe out there let's get through the next few months get blasted with this experimental vaccine and then let's hump

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