Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 438: Shane Mauss

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Shane Mauss, brilliant mad scientist, re-joins the DTFH! We command you to subscribe to Shane's podcasts, Here We Are and his new podcast with Ramin Nazer, Mind Under Pod. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: MeUndies - Visit MeUndies.com/Duncan for 15% Off your first order + FREE Shipping! Candid - Candidco.com/Duncan and use code DUNCAN and receive $75 Off your Candid Starter Kit. Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

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You'll get access to commercial free episodes of this podcast Along with awesome extra stuff. There's so much of it. I won't bore you with the details. Go to patreon.com Ford slash DTFH And now my friends, I want to welcome back The brilliant mad scientist who is Shane Moss I command you to subscribe to his podcast.

It's the Here We Are podcast and he interviews scientists And you can find that at herewearpodcast.com Also he just started a new podcast with the brilliant Ramin Nazir Who has been on the DTFH. You know him from the Rainbow Brain Skull Hour Which is at raminnazir.com Ford slash blogs Ford slash Rainbow Brain Skull Hour They've created a new podcast called mindunderpod.com

Check out his many podcast friends He, as you're about to hear, is a brilliant, sweet, wonderful human Now everybody please welcome to the DTFH Shane Moss Welcome back to the DTFH Welcome, welcome on you That you are with us Shane and Gobi to be blue Welcome to you

It's the Don't Contrast with me Shane, welcome back to the DTFH Last night, I think part of the reason I couldn't sleep Is because I was so excited about getting to chat with you And I'm really interested Yeah, well, you know, you're one of these Thank God I have you, thank God my wife exists in my life If I don't have rational people in my life

I will spin completely into the land of the weird Anyway, I'm excited because as we were talking about you coming on this show Again, we decided that we were going to try to do a more focused podcast And you told me you have a thought experiment Or something that might launch us into the stratosphere So let's hear what it is, welcome Shane Yeah, so I just thought when you were like, let's try a focused First off, I'm not a very focused person

So we'll see how this goes And I love the way that you You're able to imagine models of things where things still make sense Within the representations that you're building You're good at suspending disbelief But when something doesn't make sense in a movie And then it takes you out of it You're good at constructing the narrative in a logical way

And that's kind of, so I thought this would be fun to kind of build a short story together That's like a little bit of a thought experiment It's something that I think about So I spend a lot of time thinking about the mismatches with our modern world You know, there's been three and a half billion years of life And now the human impact on Earth has, to this tremendous abrupt change And all of these things that never existed in 3.5 billion years And I was, I've been thinking about this idea of like, what does a hummingbird

Imagine being the first hummingbird that stumbles on a feeder You know, just this enormous, it's just filled with nectar Just artificial, it's not even nectar It's like a concentrated, it's like a pixie stick or something like that You know, it's just like, it's on steroids And I, so I was kind of thinking All of the evolutionary pressures that shaped over millions of years And feel free to like, interject with any of this or ask any questions or anything

And I'm no hummingbird expert But I looked into a little bit of the evolutionary history And they had, so hummingbirds started like 60 million years ago They were plants, plants that were pollinated by insects in South America Insects are cold-blooded In colder areas where they couldn't depend as much on the cold-blooded insects And, and birds that are warm-blooded were able to start feeding off of various pollen That the flowers were, that the flowers were offering

But at the time they had these long beaks built for capturing insects And then they just stumbled on this nectar Well then once that happened and these flowers found this new source of pollinating Then all of a sudden there was this selection pressure for these flowers to make a specific thing for these birds And the hummingbirds got smaller and more agile and lighter They like lost their feet for the most part They got really, really tiny, some of them are like the weight of a penny And...

Thank God Thank fucking God Like, if they were much bigger, they would be the most terrifying bird Well they're so frantic Can you imagine the sound of like a dog-sized hummingbird zipping through some primordial forest? Like, it would sound like someone like shot a lawnmower out of a catapult It would be so scary to hear It would because they have thrusts on both flaps

They have thrusts because they bend their shoulders in a certain way So they can, that's how they can fly backwards and they can fly upside down So then flowers, the flowers evolved to, because the nectar was so expensive to make Flowers evolved to keep everything else but the hummingbirds from getting it So that's why they have like the bells, the bottom bells on the flowers So that only a hummingbird can get It's essentially like what we do for squirrels with our bird feeders It's the evolution of the bird feeder is designed to just allow fucking birds

And not these thieving squirrels to get a seed So it did that but via the long, slow natural selection Yeah, over tens of millions of years Man, that shit, I can never wrap my head around it Shane Like, I want to wrap my head around it but the subtle, slow changes And the way that one creature is like adapting to another Through this kind of incredibly slow mutation It's, whenever I think about it, I totally get the people who are like, that's not what happened godly

Yeah, I know, and there's something You know, like, yeah Go ahead, sorry No, what were you gonna say? No, I mean, that's it, it's just like, that was it, it's just like, though, you know, I understand why someone would be like There's no fucking way that hummingbirds used to be big and then they shrink down And then the flowers change shape This is exactly perfect for what we're going to be getting into

So one, there's this nice evolutionary kind of principle There's this great book called The Red Queen I've maybe mentioned this concept before, but it's basically there's everything in life Between predator and prey, between host and parasite, between males and females within a species, between males competing with one another There's always these kind of evolutionary arms races and there's always, there's usually this kind of evolutionarily stable system Where they're fairly evenly matched, like a very simplified version is you have a wolf or something that hunts rabbits And most genetic mutations that are abnormal are bad Like, at least 999 out of a thousand are bad

But once in a while there's an advantageous one And now that wolf is a little faster And then, and it's able to do better and have more offspring and feed more of its kids It passes this trace on to its kids But then, but then the rabbits start disappearing because they're getting predated so much The wolves have such an advantage But then some of those rabbits that gained this other thing, maybe they got smaller so they hide in the brushmore Maybe they got faster themselves

And then they start increasing and maybe they're too fast for the wolves now And the wolves start dying off except these ones And so there's this usually balanced, very slow through, you know, this is, we're talking about a million generations This happens, this change over time And it seems particularly weird if you think about whatever the particular species is as an individual Versus as a process, you know, so if you see that like it's a flow or like a river That looks like a shit ton of rabbits flowing through time And then you see this other thing flowing next to it, which is a shit ton of wolves

And they're sort of running against each other And then it's the same thing you see, I guess it's similar to like when you see a rock In a river that's been completely flattened down by the infinite flow of what's that Essentially but happening genetically, right? Yeah, and then there's these kind of punctuated equilibrium And there's things that happen like invasive species So we're running into this a lot with our modern world because we have humans brought global travel and everything So now the whole world's becoming connected in these ways that it was

So remember the whole, you know, last year the murder hornet situation This giant Asian hornet, the bees in its native region have adapted For when this giant Asian hornet comes into their nest, the bees can often get and swarm that hornet And kill it before it's able to alert its friends and come in and kill off the nest Sometimes it gets its friends and kills off the whole nest But a lot of times the bees are able to capture it and kill it before it can go and do that But that red queen, so it's called the Red Queen Because there's a scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is running with the Red Queen

And they're running and running and the scenery's not moving, they're not going anywhere Alice says, why are we running so fast? We're not going anywhere And the Red Queen says, it takes all the running we can do just to stay in the same place Wow So that's what, so like back to this wolf and rabbit, like both of them are seemingly very different You know, they're both much faster than their ancestors or whatever are more muscular And they're kind of indistinguishable over time But they're both at the same place, which is sometimes the wolf wings, sometimes the rabbit wings

And that's a lot of how life works, but then with an invasive species, now you have all of a sudden This giant Asian hornet comes to the US where the bees don't have that They've never evolved that trick to swarm a hornet when it comes in to stop it from alerting its friends And then it has, now these hornets can come in and potentially kill off Colony is this, this is why there was a fuss about it last year And this is, we're about at the time that people will start keeping an eye out for them in Washington And stuff like that, but it's because they would have never, that would have never happened before That they would end up in some other region

It's like an arms race of like, America gets a better tank and then the Russians build a better tank or whatever And they keep on going back and forth, and then you take that tank into some developing nation that has never built a tank And all of a sudden you're going to roll right over it Right, or what is it called? The project where they came up with the atomic bomb Where they developed this technology so secretly that they're so far ahead that there's an incredible superiority That there's nothing anyone could do, or like, which is going to happen again with some, God only knows what the fuck it's going to do And we, you know, like some anti-matter weapon or just some, who knows what You know, they're just, you know, a flash of light in an entire city

Like all humans just turn into puddles, moaning globs of humanity And then what are we going to do? What do you do? What happens if some enemy comes up with that? And just out one day, like an entire American city, the streets are just filled with like, silly putty goop That used to be humans You know what I mean? Whoever the enemy is is like, well, you know, probably should surrender Probably have to surrender And sometimes there's... And so that's what happens

Yeah, and then sometimes there's some whoopsie daisies too The last bomb that we dropped was orders of magnitude bigger than we were expecting it to be There was actually US planes and ships that were what they thought were from a distance observing it That like got knocked out of the air and everything They used some certain metal that they actually thought was going to lessen their explosion They thought it was going to lessen how big the blast was going to be So they didn't kill that many, you know, just be like this powerful signal of like, hey, don't mess with us And then it actually had the reverse impact and was much, much larger than they expected it to be

Whoopsie daisies Whoopsies And so, so yeah, that could happen with the silly putty machine as well But that's what the murder hornets are Like anytime that happens, then that's when it like... I think what you're saying is when you have like these naturally competing species Winning does not mean wiping out the other species because then you lose your food source Yeah, your fucks

Keeping the other species alive but catchable Whereas like you get murder hornets, you get that fungus that... What did it wipe out? The oak trees? You get kudzu? Yeah, exactly That's what the... You were talking about lumber being expensive for your fence or whatever before we were recording And this is sorry to share that if you were trying to keep your fence secrets to yourself But that's part of why lumber is so expensive is because of this like...

I think it's called thousand cankers or something where these... So this is now that we're approaching camping season and we're getting fully vexed And we're gonna get out there and camp with our friends and everything This is why they say don't bring in wood from other places Because if you bring in wood from a thousand... Three hundred miles away or whatever it might be Well, those beetles or whatever had that same red queen The tree adapted defenses for that beetle and that beetle went back and forth

And was able to take advantage of the trees sometimes And sometimes it got... Sometimes the trees one, sometimes the beetle one And now you take that beetle that's been shaped through that process You bring your... Well, you already got a cord of wood You gotta burn this stuff somewhere so you bring it three hundred miles somewhere else Not knowing any better, you see a sign that says

Hey, don't bring wood from elsewhere, you know, buy it here And you're like, why is that a rule, you know? And you do... And then those beetles, if you don't... And then if you don't burn all of your wood Those beetles might migrate into the trees there And you're having that situation in Colorado where like 60% of some species of tree Is being like killed off and devastated

So this is just going to keep on... This is like COVID happening because of this This is going to... Most modern plagues are because of this You also when you lose biodiversity You pack more and more creatures together in a smaller area And create a bigger petri dish And then you combine that with traveling around

And introducing novel things And through this kind of invasive species sort of logic This red queen logic And it's going to... I think we're pretty amazing in adaptable creatures And as long as we keep on having specialists That are studying wood parasites or whatever And that sort of thing

I think that modern problems just require modern solutions And we can no longer be like, oh, it's just nature, whatever I'm sure it'll be fine to bring wood wherever We're just in a very different situation than what we're adapted for But isn't that the... Go ahead, get to the point with the hummingbird I'm sorry No, no, this is all tied to the same conversation, actually

So a hummingbird that's adapted And flowers adapted for it And these flowers are now dependent on these hummingbirds They aren't pollinated by anything else The hummingbird is now... So the hummingbird's conscious experience... The hummingbird doesn't know about its past evolutionary trajectory It just has nectar vision

It just has its eyes out all the time It has these specially adapted hummingbirds You can have a whole tree full of flowers And it will know which ones it already went to On previous days And if they're still nectar there Because they can't... For all the flapping that they do

They can't waste a single flap They are living on the edge of starvation Every single... If a hummingbird goes three hours without food It's probably a goner It goes into basically hibernation Every single night to sleep It's called tarpour

Because it needs to just stop using any energy And then all of a sudden... So your whole life... If you're this hummingbird You just know like your whole life is Oh you just go and you get this nectar And you probably are telling yourself The stories about it too

You've probably constructed... The gods say that five flowers apart Is the best way to... You have this whole morality around it I don't know man I know what you're saying Because we're going to anthropomorphize them For the sake of your point here

But I feel like if... From observing hummingbirds And based on what you're saying I think they're just like I'm fucking hungry Fucking hungry They are Oh god

There's one of those fucking things Stick my beak in There's another of those things But I love the idea of hummingbirds Like having mythology and stories And that would be a very beautiful Version of reality Maybe it's true

I don't know But you look at those things They're just like speed freaks They are speed freaks You know they're like freezing at night Waking up Eating sugar Freezing

Fascinating beautiful creatures One of my favorite birds by the way And they have to... They have to be territorial So another thing that you can predict Is anything like that That's a really rich source But a rare source of energy

In an environment There's going to be... It's going to be territorial So if you were to find some new species That didn't... That no one had ever discovered You could just tell from looking at Like one of its teeth

If you knew what you were doing What kind of food that it ate And then from that You would be able to tell Whether it was territorial or not Because if... If something just eats vegetation Then who cares?

It doesn't matter It's not worth fighting over There's vegetation everywhere But if you're after honeysuckle If you're after fruit trees So primates are really territorial Because there's a richer source of energy And it's only in select areas

So that's everything that's territorial Is things that are in these select areas So hummingbirds are super aggressive And... Yes So one day you... And I do think that there would be... Is a hummingbird having these sophisticated thoughts?

Probably not But I think that consciousness kind of arises From these... Yeah Conscious is the storyteller That comes from all this So here's a... I like thinking about what the brain is for

And then that helps think Well, what are these stories for? So there's a sea squirt that... Is it okay that I'm talking so damn much, by the way? No, that's what I wanted Yeah, no, I love it There's a sea squirt that when it's born So it's stuck in one place in its adult life

And it's basically just a filter And it's just stuff's coming by It's filtering it out That's how it gets its nutrients And then it blows a bunch of sperm and egg Into the water at a certain time They combine, they turn into these tadpoles These tadpoles develop a tailbone

In a brain, in eyes And then they can... They can navigate So all that is sensory tools For navigating the ocean that they're in Until they find just the right spot And then they stick to that one spot And then because they're never going to move again

And they're just filters They eat their own brain and eyes They just digest them What the fuck? And then... Because all you needed... We like to think, oh, the more brains the better But they have a cost

Everything has a cost And so if it's not doing any good to have a brain Sitting in one spot just being a C-squid philosopher You're just going to metabolize your own brain Because everything has a use What a relief, probably Probably the little bit of time they had a brain They were just so horny, terrified, confused

And then finally they get to go back To just a fucking brainless filter The good old days Remember those days? Were we always like this? Wasn't there a time? I feel like I was happier when I was just a filter And you can see kind of the natural inclination

Is when we do have the means to plop in one place We do just want to veg out And there's this inclination like, oh, I'm just going to turn my brain off I'm not going... I'm just going to plop on this couch And I'm just going to slowly turn into this C-squid And eat my own brain Yeah

It's easy Well, I mean, isn't that... That's the... To me, like one of the amazing things about humans And the disaster of... One of the many disasters of humanity Is that we... We can't really turn it off

And we do tell stories But most of the time the stories we tell ourselves are completely wrong And just the amount of energy it takes up To constantly be reproducing whatever the story is You keep telling yourself I mean, most people... They might be smiling on the outside But they're living inside of an existential film noir

Like paranoid horror movie You know what I mean? They might see the most... Whoever you think is the most bouncy, shallow person in your life You don't know what's going on Up there You know what I mean? And a lot of times that story they're telling themselves is one of how horrible they are

One of how much they suck One of how much their friends are at to get them You know what I mean? All that energy That energy I think that's why people get in the heroin You know? Is they just want to shut that off

They don't want the fucking story anymore They just want to be blank You know? But it doesn't really work Because then they have to start telling themselves another story Which is like, fuck, I'm out of heroin and money Are you still there, Shane? Did I lose you? Unhappy with your smile

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Take advantage of this limited time offer To save $75 on your Starter Kit Candidco.com slash Duncan Code Duncan Thanks, Candid! Okay, so Shane, so yeah I remember We had a little technical I remember right where we were and it's a perfect It leads into everything which is kind of

Consciousness is this kind of great exaggerator And a lot of these stories that we're telling ourselves Aren't necessary So I think the last time I was on We were kind of talking about the subject of Say you have a suicidal thought or something Sometimes that's just this feeling of Hey, I'm kind of going the wrong direction

In my life right now And it's just this very nuanced feeling That consciousness then exaggerates To get your attention As if you only had a picture If you're playing a game And you needed to act out Like the feeling of anger or something

You'd make this cartoonish Like you're trying to get people to guess As fast as possible You'd make this cartoonish like Hulk And anger is much more nuanced than that It actually is It's just kind of your brain Trying to communicate through you

Through these kind of ridiculous stories I bet it happens a lot more for humans Than a lot of animals Just because of what social creatures we are Because we get selected for For our storytelling abilities And everything else So then it's this kind of feedback loop

And so when you talk about like Oh, it makes you want to just do heroin Or something sometimes Well, there is a good example of this So the stress response system Say you're in an argument With your significant other The stress response system goes off

You get bickering about like a fence Or whatever that you're going to And then And then But what happens is you resolve the fence issue Okay, we'll get this kind of lumber instead It's a little expensive Whatever settled

You settle that And then what happens is The stress response It kicks in really quick And then there's this hormonal cascade This cortisol that regulates a lot of it And mediates a lot of your A lot of what your energy is used for

So it shuts off digestion, sex drive Your immune system, things like that Because it wants to power You need energy to your muscles And most stress response That's what most mammals need And then the parasympathetic response To dial that back down

That's a new hormonal cascade To reset, to get you back to homeostasis The thing is, is that there hasn't been A real selection pressure to Nothing's ever needed to relax Now, like right that moment So it takes like 20 minutes For those hormones to dial you back down

So even though you resolved the fence issue Your body's still telling you Why are we still stressed out right now? And then you come up with these Conscious narratives You start thinking, you start making a case You start looking back through time At the other issues of the

This was your idea, this house You needed this one, I wanted the one That already had the fence And you start making up other shit To pile on to this conscious narrative And opiates do just the opposite Opiates just like Takes all that stress response

It's just like everything's great Everything's gonna be great It doesn't matter if you're sucking a dick In an alley or whatever You're just like, I guess this is terrific This is just what heaven is Sucking a dick in an alley Well, I mean it is

But my one experience With being injected with synthetic heroin Was after I got one of my balls cut off And they asked me And I'd already planned on telling them I was in pain no matter what How often do you get to get injected With synthetic heroin by a medical professional

In a completely safe environment So yeah, I was like, yeah, I'm in so much pain And they're like, okay, no problem We're gonna give you delotted And I remember It was just the craziest thing I just got my ball chopped off And all of a sudden I'm having the best

Literally the best day of my life And it wasn't like there was Just that thing you're talking about The gradual reaching homeostasis It was just instantly like, oh yeah This life is really good And my friend who drove me My friend's driving me home

And I'm like, what a beautiful day Thank you so much for this ride Oh god, do you wanna come in When we get home, play video games And he's like looking at me with this Just perplexed sadness Like, you know, your reality Is gonna hit you pretty hard soon

Which it did, which is the problem Of those fucking things Is that situation, it doesn't extend I came down so hard And I woke up and was in a lot of pain And woke up and was freaked out On my first day of having only one ball Yeah, of course

But I think it's a completely normal And very healthy thing When you're freaked out and stressed out To not wanna be freaked out and stressed out more Of course And to let all potential methods To get back to like some relaxed state You know, at least cross your mind

And if, so you know, this is This is why grounding This is why integration Not just in psychedelics But just in everyday experience If you're like, I'm gonna watch the news Set an intention How long are you actually going to watch it for

And then afterwards You need to integrate that How much of it was real or whatever I got my second vaccine last week I texted you to thank you For actually inspiring me to get on it sooner Because I was in such a I'm in such a situation

That I'm at such low risk That I was like, I'll let the people That are like out and about So I was like kind of lazy about Anyway, the second day of After my second vaccine I had my immune systems revved up So just like I said

The stress response is about regulating Energy around So when the immune system needs to do its work And it's throwing everything What do we need here? Do we need a fever to burn it out? That's the best Oldest trick in the book

Get that fever But basically you need You need to take all the energy Away from muscles and everything else To get that immune system Revved up and going I went to play pickleball I played half a game

It's old person's tennis It's tennis for people That aren't athletic And I played a half a game Normally I could play all day I played a half a game And I was like, whew Wow, I'm burnt out

And then and so I'm like kind of It wasn't bad I've had worse hangovers But there was the interesting thing was The story going on in my mind I was supposed to record a podcast that day It was like, oh this pod This new podcast

Mind under matter that you're doing It's not going to work out any Nothing in your life is going to work out anyway Why bother doing anything Which is just a very exaggerated Version of why don't you lay down And not do anything Right, and you know

If we talked about this What they call that in Buddhism What that's called So that's called the poisoned arrow And so the breakdown of it The story that gets told Sorry y'all I'm going to tell the poison arrow story again

The story goes like this There's variations of the story The essence of the thing is A king is out on a hunting trip And an arrow flies from the forest Hits him in the arm And he you know His attendants are like

His doctors there and they're like Okay, we're going to We're going to pull the arrow out And he's like, what are you talking about Don't waste any time First we need to make sure that You know that there isn't an army That this wasn't an ambush

Look for whoever shot the arrow first And we'll get it out of me So then they bring a hunter You know who's like Who is there He's like, yeah I'm your majesty I didn't mean to shoot this arrow at you

But it's poisoned, right He's like, well what kind of poison is it And get my pharmacist here To figure out the right antidote Before we pull the arrow out And so anyway There's a million variations of the story But the essence of the thing is

The king goes through all these Like ridiculous examinations About what's happening Trying to figure it out in his own head And by the time he finally like Is ready to have the arrow pulled out He dies from the poison So the idea

The way that translates into real life is You look at your You catch a glimpse of your bald spot When you're, if you're me And you're when you're like Maybe trying on clothes pre-pandemic You know when the fucking mirror Is in the dressing room

And like suddenly you see How you look to everybody Your whole life But from behind And you haven't seen it You know what I mean You're like, oh my god Oh my god, no

You know what I mean It's shocking And you're like I've got asymmetrical love handles And fucking dad bod And going bald Oh my fucking god What am I gonna do

I gotta work out Why don't I fight And I work out five years ago And just keep working out And keep taking those fucking jiu-jitsu classes What's wrong with me Is something wrong with me Maybe I just

Maybe just compared to other people I'm weak I'm a coward I'm a weak fucking coward You're like trying on pants You know what I mean Exactly That's the story

And that's the poison arrow Because really all that happened Is you saw something That everyone has been seeing You know it's not like Just cause you saw it Suddenly now everyone's like Oh my god

That's how the person looks from the back That's literally what they see Anytime you walk away from them So unless you're walking backwards But the point is like This is the This is like one of the One of the ways humans torture themselves

Is they can't It's hard for us to just be like Bald spot And then just keep going to try on the genes We generate these recursive Thoughts that go on and on and on and on and on And those are the stories That make up the identity

That we claim to be us Yeah, yeah And whichever ones that we It is There's this Intuitively you have a thought like that And that thought just feels real Like oh I had a thought

That thought must be based on something And we just aren't great at putting together The nuance and the complexity Of what's actually happening Which is way way way more subtle Than I'm a total coward piece of shit That should have been exercising earlier Whatever

You know it's so much more subtle than that It's elemental isn't it To me you're saying it's complex Quite often it really is isn't it It's just like If you manage to peel away The reason you think you're feeling The way you're feeling

Whether for example like take hunger For example And just experience hunger As it is Without thinking where you're gonna get your meal From or what's coming down the pipes That you're gonna eat Just feel that feeling of hunger

As it is That's it Suddenly if you really like Start looking at the hunger Just as it is I see what you're saying That's when you realize Whoa just this feeling

Is a combination of different feelings You know like there's a tightness It may be and then there's also like this Like achy feeling But then there's also this like Kind of like you know like It's a weird imperative to get food But anyway the point is

If you just stay with that feeling As it is You know it's interesting And that it's easier to work with Well you know then whatever the story Is you're telling yourself about That particular feeling That is an adaptive feeling

In the context of a species That is a hunter gather And doesn't know when their next meal is That has evolved to have fat cells Because there's not refrigerators around Because you do need to store energy For a rainy day And so this feeling of hunger

Would have driven your ancestors To go out there and do something about it Yeah And now it's maladaptive Now you do have a refrigerator Now you don't need to worry about having to If you aren't going to have food for a few days You're going to have food

But you are living in this With this drive that is like Hey get it well the getting's good Eat as much as you can And now there's this modern issue Of obesity that never happened before So that brings us back to like the hummingbird What happens you have this perfect

You're living on the knife's edge Of survival You have this fine tuned metabolism Every flap counts And now there's this limitless source Of energy that other than needing some Insects for some protein Now it's just there

I found my new home I should just live here now I never need to do anything again This is amazing And you see this guy come out to fill This is better than This is better than anything you could have That's ever happened to any species

Never in 3.5 billion years Did a species just show up All of a sudden there was just unlimited Resources, super saturated resources An unnatural amount of energy Like concentrated into this And it's there You don't need to work for it or anything

And then this guy comes out To feed the feeder every 3 to 5 days Or whatever if he's doing it right So you don't get infections or whatever You don't get sick from germs And you might start to think What is this thing? Is this some god that comes

That gives this unlimited source This amazing phone And you don't know that that's not a god That's just some dude named Phil That got a Christmas present He didn't really want But decided to hang it up in the yard Anyway, it looks like

Thinks you're kind of nice But isn't, you know This guy doesn't revolve around you But it would make sense Egoscentrism is such that We all find ourselves at the center Of our own perceptual universe So you're going to think this guy

Spends a lot more time thinking about you Than he does So then you start relying On this source of nutrition That this god brings And then this god Just doesn't fill the thing one day He just totally forgot

And now you've raised a family You've developed these rich new traditions About this source of life And the dude just forgets So you go to like check And see He has this marvelous structure That we call houses

But this crazy nest That you've never seen anything like it before And you see him go into his nest Maybe you should go and check on him And you go to do that And you bang into a window Because never in your evolutionary past Never in the 60 million years

Was there some transparent Solid structure That you needed to navigate Otherwise you might have adapted To look out for glares or something So you bang into this window And maybe that's enough for Phil To notice

That oh Those hummingbirds are out there Maybe I should feed them And he takes care of it Well what happens then Is there's this Pavlovian conditioning Of like Oh

You bang into the window And then you come out And get fed And you start attaching Kind of narratives to that And building this tradition There's this There's this

Do you know I think we've probably talked about Skinner boxes before That the idea of Sure of course Yeah And so there's this great way You can kind of teach a pigeon superstition

If you put A pigeon in this In this environment Where everything is really predictable It does some task And it gets a reward And that's how life has always been It's entire life

And then one day You just throw a reward in Out of nowhere It'll be like What was I doing To get that reward Was I flapping my wing Like this

Flapping that wing around Like oh that's my lucky dance That I do And it will just develop Like this OCD Tick Because it's better to It's better to perceive patterns

Even when patterns aren't there It's called Apathinia Where you tend to like See things in the clouds You tend to put a face on things Where it isn't See this is great man

Because this is A subject that's been coming up On the podcast The last podcast with my teacher David Who I work with With meditation And so there's a concept

That comes up In the form of Buddhism I study And it's called disowning So the idea is You're supposed to disown Like if you have some Dramatic experience When you're meditating

Or after you're meditating It's not like you're supposed to Ignore it But the language that gets Used is disown it Because exactly what you're talking About will happen Like especially with meditation

Where one day you might For no reason at all Experience the most incredible Bliss that you've ever felt in your life And it doesn't make any sense Suddenly what we were talking about Is one thing that doesn't get Mentioned a lot of times

When people are offering meditation courses Is that you might Suddenly start feeling like Your heart just got broken But No one dumped you Your parents didn't die You didn't lose your job

Just all of a sudden You feel the most incredible Overwhelming, sweet Sadness that you've ever felt But it's not connected to anything And so that Weirdly that feeling is like Overwhelming for a lot of people

Some people stop meditating after that But then some people kind of Recognizing how remarkable That was They go back To the cushion And they try to do Whatever they were doing

When they had that feeling That blocks up the whole thing Because So what ends up happening Is you get frozen In this loop Where you're trying to reproduce Something that's gone

And so the recommendation is disown If you experience I think it's a version of Robert Anton Wilson's Agnosticism It's like these things happen They do, they're remarkable Unbelievable Exactly when you were writing their name down

But then also You know At that very moment A bird flew by Your window that reminds you of that person Why? Who the fuck knows? But But if you

Turn your whole life And you're trying to replicate those miracles Then all that ends up happening Is everything gets stale Because you're Then you start missing The actual miracle Which is just the right nowness of things

Because I was It was Saturday I was sitting with my family We just got my oldest son A kiddie pool And he's splashing around in it And the family's there, we're so happy

But I start thinking to myself I'm happy But I'm not as happy as I was A few weeks ago You know what I mean? And so because I'm holding And then the story starts Well, why aren't you as happy as you were a few weeks ago?

Well, it's because I'm not sticking To my workout routine And then the story starts And the whole time I'm pulled completely out of that moment Because I'm holding up one thing That's long gone against the thing that is You know what I mean? So to me

This What you're talking about, that's what it reminds me It's like this cargo Cult mentality This never ending attempt To make To repeat something That's way gone

It's so tragic because the whole time You're doing that, you're missing what is Right now And then you have kind of this You have Confirmation bias in every moment So you're also You're also

Doing things like Well, you have like Motivated reasoning And so if you're Looking for a reason To think something Consciousness is all too happy To build a case

There was no crying here You just felt good Feeling not as good As you did three weeks ago Is not a crime Slow down lawyers in my head We don't need to construct all of the evidence To just pile on

And pile on the reasons For this and then there's Also these kind of intermittent rewards So the way The reward system works Is if you have So you want a Pavlovian train Something and you have this

I remember when we talked back June or whenever it was And kind of the beginning ish of Covid and I was like Everyone watch out for one thing Which is Like Take the hit right now

And just accept that this is Going to be a long haul And then work on slow Incremental gains from there And you'll feel better each time If you instead Slowly Tell yourself it's going to be another couple of weeks

And are just disheartened Every two weeks that's just going to It's going to break people And there's pretty Strong neuroscience to break that up And so if you want to train Say your pigeon again You want to train it to press this lever

They used to train them to guide missiles That was like when some of this first Started was like Like a military funding To have pigeon guided missiles To have a pigeon in a missile To peck in certain ways To guide the missile

They ended up abandoning it But they learned all these Amazing things in the process And That is some doctor strange Well It really is So you turn the light on

You go You want it to hit a lever When you turn the light on It's in a cage You turn the light on And the pigeons just going around And then one day just out of curiosity Or sometime that day it hits the lever

A reward pops out It goes ooh this is terrific Dopamine releases in the brain Hurray and then eventually Dopamine becomes the motivator Now when the light comes Once you learn to make that connection Oh when the light comes on

Hit that lever you get the reward It goes off when the light goes on Not when you get the reward It goes ooh I know just what to do here It's like you already got the reward But then you get complacent If you just get that one reward Every time 100% of the time

You're gonna take it for granted I'll get to that lever whenever I get to it Whatever If it stops getting the reward You're going to abandon it completely But if you do these intermittent rewards If you give it the reward 50% of the time Then it's twice as motivated

For half the chance of Actually getting the reward And so this is why like gambling Such an issue too For people this is why like Social media and posting things Like I hate how I am We're hackable

Yeah we're really So is that what you're getting at here Are you saying that technology is our hummingbird feeder Is that what you're saying Yeah And yeah and there's these kind of Emergent properties That are happening where we're now

In this modern environment Where we have this like This rich source This easy source everything's easy You don't need to go out and hunt for your food anymore But then there's these Unexpected things that happen to this hummingbird Now all these flowers that were dependent

On the hummingbird pollinating it They start drying up And dying And now all these other Insects and stuff that were dependent On that they start dying too And now there's this desert This desertification that

Starts happening And now you go If you're that hummingbird you're like Why is what I'm happy But why am I not as happy As I was three weeks ago And you look around And you go what's different

Well my environment's changed A lot and also I noticed that other people When they have these great gifts That They have this same sort of Desert My god this isn't a god

This is the devil This thing's It's the fucking demier Yeah yeah The matrix master Hold on wait we're gonna pause We're gonna take a break I gotta use the bathroom This is awesome

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Or a domain Thank you, Squarespace We're back So So Yeah, so basically I feel like there's a few different streams We're covering here

One of them is Something Jared Lanier talks about Is a huge warning to us Which is we're hackable We're way, way more hackable Than we like to think that we are And

We're so fucking hackable That Many of us are actively Being exploited And again, it's like If you're being exploited by natural systems It's a whole different follow-up For example, let's take the exploitation

Of I don't want to call it exploited If I go running My brain is going to reward The shit out of me for that And I'm going to feel really good But if Some company

Figures out a way to even remotely Replicate that Via some system Of social Intoxication Instagram, Twitter, whatever Then I might not run as much Or like let's say

Like the joy I get from like Learning something on the piano Here's a perfect example Recently, I started playing What has got to be The dumbest game ever created By any human on earth, but the most Addictive, Mortal Kombat

Oh yeah, this game is It's just the dumbest My, when my wife comes in And watches me playing it She's just like They can't even fucking spell combat Because they spell it with a K You know what I mean?

Like you're playing something where they don't know how to spell The main thing No, they know how to spell it K, it was Mortal Kombat Isn't it funny That we're like, oh, well your generation Just doesn't get Mortal Kombat

We had We had arcades We had, you know It's something you're getting older And like, you know Come at me mother fucker I will fuck you up with cheap moves I will fuck you up with cheap moves until

You scream at me from Wherever you may be and your kids Will start crying in the background I love it, but the thing That I realized At some point with my many video game addictions And Mortal Kombat only bring that up because It's highly, it's a very complex

It can get as complex as you want And you gotta memorize all these Like combos And you string these combos together And it's a delight But The time that you're spending Learning those combos

You could also Learn how to play piano And which is what I'm trying to do right now And there's only a certain amount of time in the day And I get the whole like, well you need to have Some fun too or whatever But I get just the same Dopamine release

When I like it finally like Figured out like, oh that's what that Note means I'm trying to learn to read music or Holy shit, my left hand Is working And it's free of my right hand It's working on its own and I've always wanted to do that

Wow, wow I can't believe that But The hummingbird feeder, it's Mortal Kombat It's like, you know what I mean And it's not like some Neutral hummingbird feeder

The fucking thing is designed To keep me glued to it That's where Manipulating me to like I wish it was honestly So this is where shit gets weird It's where the code Is manipulated

And just There's just So messy, our modern world Because even going for a run Which is terrific and healthy for you It's bizarre Part of the reason why it's so difficult to do that Is because it's a

Bizarre thing to do There's people that do There's tribes today that Still persistent Use persistence hunting That means you're in Africa in the heat of the day You pick the warmest

Time possible and then You aren't as fast As some As some mammal As some like elk or whatever And so you run You jog after it And because humans can

Sweat and cool down And other mammals need to Stop to breathe the pant To cool themselves If you just keep this thing having to move And you jog after this thing For three, four hours In the heat of the day

It'll just fall over And then you stab it And that's how you eat that day And we're built to be having to Imagine getting done with all that And then they see someone On a treadmill Just running in place

Like, what are you doing? Like, oh, I do this for fun I do this to feel good I run in one place To feel good I'm not chasing something I'm not hunting something I just do this for kicks

They would think you're insane Because it is a sort of insane thing to do And just as that hummingbird Has now been adapted That hummingbird has been adapted To eat twice its body weight And sugar a day because of what it needs to And then when it's migrating

Some of them need to Swim across the ocean To get from Florida To Central America They need to, they'll stop Or I think Texas actually They'll stop and they'll put on Twice their body weight

In two or three days Just eating And that's what they're adapted to do But now, now you're doing that And you're ballooning up And you don't need to Swim across the ocean anymore So now you're just

Now you're just larger Than you need to be And now your wings aren't holding up And you need a heart beating A thousand beats per minute It's probably pretty fine Tune for just the right amount Of sugar and everything

And now you're having cardiovascular diseases And everything else And you think that And you're trying to come up with stories Of like why is this happening Is this thing a devil that did this Or is it just that I'm doing the wrong

Because sometimes it stops feeding us Is it, so then you develop Rituals of like oh sometimes If you're banging on the window Well banging on the window isn't always going to get us attention So then there's intermittent rewards So then it's like oh if the do is right On the morning it's because

You want to catch him when he's like in his kitchen Or whatever and you develop these Rituals over time That end up working and you come up With really dramatic lore About them because The more dramatic The more salient it is

And the more a brain's going to attach To it and so Especially as social creatures That's a lot so if you're back to If you're back to Say fighting You're fighting with your significant By the way Duncan was not

Fighting with His significant over a fence Fight adjacent Honestly we were fighting this Oh yeah no we've You know we've been married long enough now Where we're really learning how not Like when we're fighting adjacent

You know just like I'm getting better It's generally usually The solution is Really simple it isn't complex But no The reason Shanky's bringing up this fence I have friends who are now making fun of me Because I've been in an infinite

This pouring Householder Project To try to get a fence around my house I love it It is so hard to think forever And it's not as easy as you think It should be easy but it's not

Anyway the point is We were talking about the stupid fence But it's for the millionth time That's the problem The first time we were talking about the fence It was exciting And it's also The thing is you and I Duncan

We have to build A podcasting empire And we're writing We're managing all these big things And then it's those straws Like the camel's back It's always the Little tiny nonsense

Shit like the tech issues Those are the things that break you Not the grand We can come up with fun things To talk about and all that That's the easy part The hard part of life is putting up With those small

Those thousand cuts of Dealing with a lumber company And then You almost want to just burn the house You almost just want to be like You know what we fucked up Let's just call it a day And incinerate this fucking house

So what happens in that 20 minutes That you've resolved The fence issue but your hormones Haven't dialed down If you haven't yet learned as a couple To like oh maybe we need to take a 20 minute break Or 25 minute break

Let that parasympathetic Response do its thing And then revisit this And it's probably fine If you instead keep piling on And you're keeping that stress response Activated longer But here's the thing that we do as social creatures

Is you reach out For support so you're still Stressed and you're like Am I crazy? Then you call a friend And you go They're giving me this hard Time over this and that and your

What's your friend going to do They're your friend they're going to be like Yeah you shouldn't put up with that Now they're building this Dumb case for you They're reinforcing a thing That should have never been reinforced In the first place

Exactly You overly attached to an idea And now you're bringing in the troops To like your social You're bringing your damn Network into this stupid fight That you shouldn't be having In the first place and they're

Helping you build this dumb case Okay so So here's the When you're telling me all these When you're making this beautiful Connection Between hummingbird feeders Modern life

Technology Dopamine hijack systems I kept thinking of like The Archetype of the like Jesus in the desert being Tempted by Satan or the Buddha About to achieve

Realization A similar situation appears Where there's a Essentially like I guess If you wanted to reduce it to the most I don't know Something maybe obnoxiously Basic

They're invited to instead Of like let go of the world To Utilize various dopamine Hijack systems Power Fear Which is a great

Way to hijack someone's Nervous system Sex All the things so like Both of these in a lot of these stories That's what happens is that there's temptation The temptation is from the world Trying to hijack your shit to hack you

It's essentially you're trying The world's trying to hack you So This is The birth of like Religion or philosophies It's That aren't superstitious

That aren't like you know Based on some kind of like cargo Cult mentality but more along the lines Of an identification of a problem Wait a minute Our nervous systems are constantly Being hijacked by Shit in the world

And this never ending Hijacking Is Reducing us to the level of Reactors In the world and usually the way we're reacting Is wrong usually our suspicions Are unfounded usually

What we think is a miss isn't A miss at all I mean I don't know how many times You've run into the person Who is living a life where they are certain All their friends hate them Have you ever run into that person? I have People who think

Who have this suspicion That everyone they know Secretly Distains them And that's how they start acting And so they start getting weird And they start getting needy And they start getting scared

They're like look I just know you don't like me Why don't you just say it? And it's like what are you talking about? I used to like you But now I don't know It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy It really does Yeah

But so Or the other side of that is just like You end up Coming up with a solution That involves all this effort And energy expenditure Because you've made up an animal That you're going to capture

There isn't even something to chase You just made it up And then finally you get the thing you're thinking of And you're nothing's changed at all You're in the identical situation So that's where you hear What's called What is it Alan Watts I think

Alan Watts called it the perennial philosophy That's where this transcendental idea emerges Which is We need to just deal with the reality That we're kind of blind But not blind like our eyes are Covered with a blindfold But blind in the sense that there's so much stimulus

Happening And so many More than likely completely wrong Uh Reasons that we're coming up with For how we're feeling or what's happening That it doesn't really make sense anymore To try to make sense of the world

You know what I mean This is where people start using The word intention Which is like okay I'm going to help people You start finding like a basic You need a basic basic thing Which is like oh yeah

I'm fucking hungry as shit And I'm annoyed My mouth is dry My neck is tight Here is My wife She wants a fence around the property But

If I start getting into like I feel this way because of this and that It's only going to compound An already stupid tedious problem Rather than a very simple What do you need What do we want How can I help

It does seem to boil down To that You need something far more simple Than these Fucking Neurological hijacking mechanisms That are becoming increasingly complex And increasingly powerful

And increasingly subtle Because if you don't have something like that Then you're going to get You're going to smash into the window Over and over and over again You know what I mean You're going to be in hell This is why

I mean grounding is just so important too Because there's So there was a ton of things That I thought of there So one part of why It makes sense for the mind's eye To exaggerate things is imagine that Skinner box again

I don't know if a study like this has ever been done But imagine that Instead of doing some Because once you get complacent You don't just need the intermittent rewards But you can also just give the thing a raise And it will care again So once it takes one for granted

And then you can give it three And it'll be excited again ten But then ten will become what one Once was But then when you have a hit When you have a drop When it goes down to five rewards You were getting ten

Now you're freaking out Even though that's five times What once made you happy Now, based on context I'm not as happy as I was three weeks ago This can fluctuate Your brain is kind of always Measuring these things

But imagine that reward Imagine you saw it ahead of time It was behind a glass So you knew if it was one reward Or five rewards or ten rewards I would imagine The motivation Would go up depending

On how many If you see behind the glass That there's ten rewards Now you're very excited to hit the lever One reward you're like I'll get there, whatever Now imagine Now take the blinder off again

And you don't know what's behind there What is going to motivate you more Is that exaggerated Mind's eye You're going to imagine Oh, I bet there's ten back there That's what's going to get you up That's what's going to motivate you

And get you out of bed Well, the same thing happens with fear In these scenarios You're going to be that much More motivated to be vigilant I was outside I've been outside It's been nice here in Wisconsin

And got this little fountain Out back And I'll watch these little birds Come by to drink from the fountain In every single one of them The land, they're like They're looking around, they're looking at me I'm fifteen feet away

They're fidgety and nervous They take a little drink of water And then they're like And then they check to see if that was okay And then they take a longer drink of water And then, bam, they're off Better get the hell out of here That went well, okay

Let's get out of here before the trouble starts It's like, dude, you could just chill And have a drink of water there If you knew the reality of the situation Which is that I'm not going to attack you I'm just here watching you But you need to imagine that

Well, what if this thing does decide To just throw something at me Or whatever, that's game over I don't get to live another day To take that back And so you imagine these Kind of worst case scenarios And so this is where there's this idea

Of learned helplessness That comes in, which I think that When you're talking about the people That are like paranoid And I think that we've all I know I've gone through that in some manic states That's why I'm so vocal About paranoia

Because I know what paranoia can do To the mind, which is You can have the most outlandish Idea of something And everything in you All of your logic is going No, that's not right I'm not in a Truman show

You know, Duncan's not playing Some joke on me And it has me on my podcast And pretends to be interested And then afterwards tells people Listen to what this idiot's saying Of course that's not what's happening But what if it is

In that moment when you're like Oh my god, the cost involved On the sliver of a chance that that is Makes it become more real Have you ever heard of the availability heuristic? No It's the more readily You can imagine something

The more probabilistic Your brain tends to believe it to be So, simple study They go, here's the control, they go Hey, you're taking a flight For $30 You can have this life insurance If your plane goes

If you die during this flight For any reason Crash, you have a heart attack Whatever, your family gets a million dollars And most people are like No, thank you And then the other condition is All right, $30

And your family gets a million dollars life insurance If there's a terrorist attack On the plane More people sign up for that Even though the first condition included Terrorism in every possible scenario Yeah But when you start creating an image

When you start going like Oh, now you can picture someone with a vest Like that's going to blow up the plane or whatever This is why if you're selling someone a car You get them behind the wheel You get them imagining Oh, now I can I'm driving it to work

I'm driving this to the beach Oh, I could take this camping Okay And they do the same thing The other similar one is there's like There's like There's like a description of a bank teller And they're like, this bank teller

She's a female She wears like this or that And this other thing And what is What is the chance that That she is a feminist And people Rather than just like a female bank

You know, someone comes into the bank They're wearing this or that What's the chance that she's a female bank teller And then what's the chance that she's a female Bank teller feminist They'll pick the They're more likely to pick the Rate the feminist one higher

Just because it's that much more specific It draws more of an image Even though if she was just a female bank teller That also includes the feminist thing And all these other things But you just can't picture it as much And so we really like to picture things And create these stories

And then that makes them more real So now There's two main stressors in life Which is lack of predictability And lack of control If you can't predict things That sucks If you can't predict a shock happening

That sucks But if you can do something when you're shocked Okay, that's something And then the lack of control is like Okay, you can't You have no control over getting shocked But you know when it's going to happen A light comes on, you're gonna get shocked

You can at least brace yourself You can at least like plan accordingly And those are just stressful situations But if you take both of them If you just put something in a cage Filled with unpredictable shocks There's no, it has no control It can't move to the other side

There's nothing it can do about it It learns helplessness It learns that this world Is full of unpredictable shocks That I have no control over Now if you put it back in a situation Where it does have control It does have predictability

It can't learn that It takes it like 50 times longer to learn Than if you would have just put something fresh in it Would have learned right away That sucks That really sucks And so what happens when you take predictability And control away from say like a global pandemic

Or the many things that happen in our lives Loss of job or something like that What is the conscious narrative That is going to validate that feeling If you're little lawyers in your head Want to build a case That the world is full of unpredictable shocks That you have no control over

What does that case look like You start looking for there's like these Superpowers with these agencies These super brides that are This world They are out to get me specifically What's even the point of expending energy When I know I'm just going to get shocked

And have no control over it anyway Why waste the energy putting effort into anything It's much cheaper energetically To create very very dramatic stories Of why nothing is worth doing Wow Yeah right Like you want to come up with or

You want to come up with And sometimes those stories are so insane Man Sometimes those stories are so ridiculous And again I want to say that I'm saying this from a non-judgmental point of view I'm saying this from a lived in experience Of like you know I've been to psych wards

I know what paranoia feels like I've told myself endless stories in my life That nothing is worth doing So many times I've fallen If anything I teeter I really have to watch The learned helplessness aspect of life Is something that my brain will grab on to

In a hurry You give it a chance to say that Like none of this shit matters And nothing means anything My brain will be like ooh I can get down with that I can get down with that narrative And it's dangerous and it's seductive

Well yeah I mean it is very seductive And it usually is like Whenever that's happening to me What's happened is I have Transplanted relative reality with absolute reality You know what I mean It's like the other day I'm having a conversation

With some people that we just met And this guy Super cool people by the way But you know we were saying like it's cold And this guy did the thing Which is You think this is cold? This isn't cold

You know what I mean Like you gotta go to Michigan right now It's cold as fuck if Yeah exactly So this is like And we were laughing Cause like that always happens I've definitely done it

But then in an event What we're talking about is relative reality Which is no shit Like if you've ever been to the vacuum of space Compared to the vacuum of space It's fucking sweltering right now Like So that's

But because we live in a system Where that relative reality Gets so fucking Is infinite In other words it's like What you think you're tall You're six feet tall Have you ever seen Jupiter?

I mean like Jupiter Do you know what I mean Six feet tall people would take To wrap around Jupiter I don't know But a lot of you You'd have to be way bigger To be the size of Jupiter

But so if you get too If you get for me If I get too into that Absolute reality Where I'm comparing myself Or my problems Or the world Or what I could do in the world to

Some to the vastness To the infinite vastness Yeah sure You're gonna become completely You're gonna become meaningless You know like yeah You're just like What are you

You're less than anything You're not even a You know we look in the microscope You see the thing I don't know what it is Something Miba maybe I don't know

You see the thing getting eaten You're not like Oh my god the horror Yeah That thing's just got ripped to pieces But because it's so much smaller than you And so much different than you You don't give a fuck about it

And theoretically There's beings infinitely more Advanced than us Infinitely larger than us Infinitely everything Who like maybe are vaguely aware In a way of like When a nat goes into a window

They're gonna feel like that When the planet When the sun's super novice You know what I mean Like a It'll be a thing in a second In their eye They won't care

They might even think About a planet of sentient beings Who cares Stupid You're boring things You never got off the planet Really Fucking idiots

But the All I'm saying is like When I get So that means I've gotten too Out in absolute reality You know what I mean Like I'm saying

Once you start getting down into Like their relative Relative reality Then there is a reason To keep trying There is a reason to keep trying And you know In that

My friend Imo and I Just had this conversation about this You know which is What is the reason to keep trying What is the reason to keep trying When it truly is Random electric shocks You know

That come in the form of like Fucking fence The shoelace breaks Whatever You know You're like For no reason You like

Thought you were done pissing But you're 46 Suddenly piss It gets in your teeth You know what I mean I'm so happy that I'm not the only one You're not the only one But like

All I'm saying is like The So this is where If you boil If you condense it down To just like The as-is-ness of things Why wouldn't we just give up

Or why wouldn't you just lay Why wouldn't you lay on your back And just give up And imagine you have no power Or authority or anything Over the world Why wouldn't you just do that And there's a lot of answers

There's a lot of answers to that But the one we just talked about With my friend Emil Is um Rebellion Basically the idea is like What we have as humans That makes us so exceptionally powerful

And incredible Is that regardless of that shit We can just decide No I'm getting back up You know what I mean Just that Is pretty fucking amazing

Just that No It doesn't matter Am I in the Some matrix maze Run by a demiurge That's like Said all these technological traps

Around me Or whatever they may be Entwined me in a body Where my nervous system Is like Being completely manipulated By everything around me To make me do some stupid

Little fucking pigeon dance Just because Who knows why Who knows why This is why Camus uses the cursed Sisyphus Pushing the boulder up the hill For eternity

Having to watch it roll back down And where Sisyphus fucks the gods Is he's like No, I'm gonna keep doing it I'm gonna keep doing it I'm gonna keep happily doing it And that means that you didn't Get me motherfucker

Yeah Yeah, I have to do this I guess because you're making me do it Yeah, I guess I'm in a human body And I guess I've got a dick And I guess I like to fuck And it makes me excited And I have fucking weird nipples

For no reason I don't make milk And I guess like I'm gonna worry about my bald spot And yeah But In the midst of all of it I'm still going to

Be me and happy And as I am In the midst of that Regardless of the shocks Yeah You keep shocking me motherfucker I'm gonna keep doing what I do Anyway, in there is this rebellion

This like sweet Like Indomitable kind of thing That a human has the ability Has the capacity To To You know, actualize

You know And I don't mean to keep rambling But No You were talking about Your advice about In the early days of the pandemic Dead on

You were like This shit isn't ending anytime soon I was still believing Like a few months maybe It'll It'll go away And you were like Oh no, no, no

We're gonna be in this For a long fucking time And it's gonna be longer than you think And it helped me a lot man Because like I didn't attach myself To some bullshit idea That you know

That this was gonna end anytime And one of my friends was telling me In Victor Frankel's man's search for meaning One of the things he noticed is that people Would start saying We're gonna be out of here in a couple of months We're gonna be out of Auschwitz in a couple of months That's where they were

We're gonna be out of this concentration camp In a couple of months We're gonna get liberated Two months would pass They're still there And those people They'd either kill themselves or just die After those two months

Because they'd set up A time that they were gonna escape And that was Even though it gave them Two months of like Okay It long-term ruined Yeah

You know what I mean? Yeah So you strip away that And I wasn't even I wasn't even being like Negative or fearful Or trying to fear monger Or anything at the time

It was just It served me so well I've been able to I've been able to take on all these other projects Like this super fucking awesome thing That I'm doing with Rameen Nasir How Mind Under Matter But I've been able to

I'm in a place now Where things are like The summers looking really good COVID-wise Hopefully people keep on getting vaccinated I'm a little worried about the fall If we don't get high enough numbers Of people vaccinated

And mutations and stuff But I might be in a situation now Where I'm like Ooh, things might be getting better More like a little sooner Than I had anticipated in my head And that's such a beautiful reward That I get to have

To like great It's happening sooner I never had to endure the like Ugh More of this And I'm not counting my chickens by the way But things are I mean the vaccines are looking

Absolutely incredible Getting people to take them That's another issue altogether But yeah I mean And by the way In terms of like Us getting hacked all the time

You know We've been hacking people through Making people laugh through like We use disgust to hack people You go That group of people They're cockroaches Or that

That's a filthy woman Or that person makes me sick You're hacking peoples Often without knowing it You're hacking peoples Disgust mechanisms Which he talked about fear and sex and the other Disgust mechanisms are another motivator

That make people pay attention Like Oh this person is disgust Well you're not eating that person There's no reason to attach it to You know A disgust mechanism But it's so powerful

That we create these metaphors to do that And so modern technology Is just doing a little bit of like It's just adding on to what we're already doing And there's beautiful ways of doing this too Like marketing all these things Like You do an ad read

And you create a beautiful experience for someone There's the same There's I don't mean to make this This is a Here's just a thing that I saw recently That cracks me up I didn't mean to attach it to anything else

But there's I just saw this story Or I read this book about marketing And it was about how You can fool Wine sommeliers By like adding If you add red dye to a white wine

They'll start using Descriptions that are more Associated with red wines Than right wines usually Because our tongue Is one aspect Of the experience of tasting It's the presentation

It's our eyes It's the How is your server How was the story The server builds up these So they test all these things You can build this This is my grandma's recipe

And she went through all of these things You can build It adds to the experience This is why This is why you put Like you go and see a painting In a museum And you're like

Why do people like this painting? And then you read the description And you're like Oh wow I see that brush stroke now Well they do this Yeah They did this with pâté

They decided to take dog food And turn it and make it look like pâté And see if people could tell the difference And they couldn't Like people that liked pâté They couldn't tell Oh god They couldn't tell the difference

And part of You know My inclination My cynical inclination Is to go See you're living a lie You know That pâté

That pâté That you were spending so much money on That was bullshit You could have just been eating dog food And I did this to myself Like I trained myself to like pâté Because I just decided I should like it

And I didn't So I kept on eating it Until I had an appreciation for it And now And I do that to myself I'm like Shane You idiot You trained yourself to like dog food

But the reality is Is there's more to the taste experience Than just the tongue So you can have the cynical You trained yourself to like dog food Dude I first had pâté In France

I like meat It seemed like the sort of Like I like ahi tuna and stuff Seemed like the sort of thing I should like I try a bite I'm like this is revolting I hate this And there was some thing

Because I had that with wine earlier on too But then I learned to appreciate wine And I was like that's what I needed to do with pâté And so for years Duncan I'd be like by myself On the road I would like order pâté And so like fancy French place

Or whatever I'd eat it Nope Still don't like pâté One day I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico I order it And I'm like ooh I like this pâté This is like a seven year journey

For me to enjoy pâté For who knows what reason I'm doing this for Just this feeling like I should And then two weeks ago I'm reading this book And there's this dog food study And I'm like you fucking moron

You spent seven years Spending all this money To like dog food So that's the cynical take The optimistic take Is that there's just a lot more Going on to our sensory experience And when we do enjoy

When we are grateful for the environment That we're in When we do have the culinary expert That's spent all this time And you can really appreciate it And much like this human experience That we're in Is insanely troubling in a lot of ways

Because we have all these mismatches Of like now we gotta find ourselves On these weird like stationary bicycles And stuff What? Why would you get on a bicycle? That doesn't go anywhere Completely insane

But you have to stay healthy But it's also being human Evolution never saw something like this Like what that hummingbird went through There's never been anything like this That a species like an apex predator Got so powerful That it would just throw scraps

Till there was never a shark That was such a good hunter That it would throw scraps Just because it liked the way some other fish looked And thought they were cute So it would feed them regularly Once in a while you'll see some fun video Of like a goat falls in love

With a cat or something like that But never has a species just been like You know what? We're doing so great We're just gonna start giving away crap Feed the birds We're gonna feed birds We're gonna feed deer

We're just gonna start feeding other crap too Wait you're gonna feed the birds To trap them and eat them right? Like you wanna eat them? No, just wanna look at them I wanna take pictures of them I just like their feathers No I kind of

Yeah And the feathers were doing it for me for a while And now I just kind of feel the sense of responsibility I don't even care that much about the bird anymore But I'm gonna go out there and clean that damn thing anyway And maybe you're even helping their migratory patterns In doing this But because by the way I don't wanna

It was just a thought experiment To my knowledge there's nothing wrong With becoming birds correctly And I'd probably encourage you to do so actually But the idea that we get to do this That we as miserable as we can feel sometimes We're doing so well That we can just throw crumbs to other species

Not for a trick Just for amusement It's incredible It's incredible And it's incredible also the implication Because if we go back to this idea of relative reality And use that with intelligence Which is many people say

Well you can't do that yet Because we haven't found life on other planets But we're here And we did this We did this We got to the point of an apex predator That is now keeping pets Not just keeping pets

But using essentially eugenics We're breeding Like we took tigers And turned them into like tiny adorable Purring little things You know what I mean We did that on purpose That wasn't wolves hunting

That was like the people Who created the fucking pyramids Over time Gradually like The same with dogs And the same with so many other creatures So that to me the implication Is really profound

In the sense that In the same way in your awesome story About the hummingbird When we've assigned some kind of Ability to contemplate its reality It's thinking all these Probably very lofty things You know what I mean

Maybe it's thinking like I must be incredible That this is happening I must be fucking incredible It's giving me this juice I did everything right And I maybe know something about me I told myself if I just kept on

Doing everything right And going to every fifth flower In striving day in and day out One day I would get a sign And then it appeared Yeah Right But you know humans

When we start contemplating our place In the universe and the possibility Of a greater intelligence Yeah It may be even the possibility Of a panspermia Greater intelligence Having some hand in

Our evolutionary process Or the seeding of the earth With genetic material Yeah We think to ourselves Well It must be because we're amazing Whatever did this

You know Like it has a special Like probably a special Some people say We're being trained And we're being like Sort of gradually groomed To take on the role of God

And maybe the hummingbird is like You know maybe I'm getting They're doing this Because they're going to give me a house Like this eventually or something But not realizing like No

I just think it's cool to see a hummingbird Which is why I'm doing this Similarly if there's some vast intelligence It could just be like Yeah Like we might just be like We might be like that fog They put out in clubs

You know what I mean Like we just might be that sentient fog To some advanced intelligence That got us on its version Of fucking Instagram You know what I mean It got some stupid thing Makes a human planet

See the humans They run around They blow each other up And like that's it We're just giving something A mild kind of entertainment If that It doesn't really care

Maybe it made the whole planet Populated the planet with us But it doesn't really care Maybe it was given the planet Just like you know what I mean Somebody gives you a bird feeder And it's like yeah Alright I'll fucking seed it

With genetic things Just for the fuck of it The point is man I think when you start realizing like Our place in the universe Isn't necessarily one In which we are the chosen lambs Of the divine

You know what I mean We're God's children Or we're this or that We could just be some kind of You know Something like mildly entertaining For a not so exciting God There's never been

It's so unfathomable That no one's made this movie Aliens are always coming To take it over Or they're helping us Or they're saving us It's like very human centric They're real wrapped up

In what we're doing Never does like Never does an alien Just show up like Sprinkle a bunch of like Tablets with fanciful technology They're like Oh look at how much

They like these things And then kind of get bored With us and then leave And then we're left going like What was that? You know it's kind of I guess the closest thing Would be the

What's the What's the God's are crazy Or whatever The coke bottle falls out of it And like the meaning making That goes behind that It's sad Cause you know

Like I love ancient aliens But the sad thing is Generally like the idea is Like they're coming back Like they left They're gonna come back But really they They just weren't that into us

They might have come They're just like Yeah I don't know There's like that planet By that little fucking stupid star And it's got things on it But there's so many other Cooler like versions of it

That why would you even go there? I was I had this rock climbing Partner for a little while That was like He was like The boyfriend of My girlfriend's friend of the time

Or whatever So we just got like Partnered up you know Rock climbing And I'm not Unless you're hitting record Or I'm on stage I'm kind of an introverted person

And I can be like A little timid and everything So I'm climbing with this guy For a while I knew he had some computer job And I'm like Oh why haven't I Have I not asked him

More about his work Why hasn't it And so I like We had lunch And I asked him More about what he does And realized Oh this is why he's been

Keeping this from me What his job was Was that So there's a There's a It's basically like an ad farm So what his company did Was supplied an app

That would run ads All the time on phones So what you Like hey You want to make a few extra bucks Just get a whole Get 20 cheap phones That you're going to plug in

And just download this app And then it runs ads On your phone all the time The person running those ads Hoping that it's reaching real people Pays an amount of money It's fraud It's absolute fraud

And so they're paying money for this And then you're just harvesting This ad money And then they're always having to Because like You know they're developing systems To catch these cheats doing this And stuff they're always trying to

Out with this And I remember thinking at the time If this is a simulation That's what I think the simulation is Like you're an ad On someone's phone That they bought To get a couple extra dollars

For a thing And I realize no one's even watching this That's amazing All of human history It's just There's a fucking alien just trying to Skip, skip, skip, skip I hate this fucking thing

I hate this human history So fuck, skip, skip, skip So boring Yeah well I mean that is the You know my One of my friends man He had this Just off handedly once

He was like Telling me about like ants He was like you know an ant Get stepped on by a human But it doesn't know That's even what happened It doesn't know what fucking humans are Or what you know what I mean

And a human dies And it's like oh I died of this disease But it's only because of the You know limited perception It can't see that like In some higher realm You know what I mean It's like a

It's a fingernail that just got clipped It's probably something you know It's a plant that just a leaf Got plucked off a plant Oh and I'm sure ants are just At peace with genocide At this point in their evolutionary history There's just like huge sloths

Of them being wiped out In like not the most predictable ways All the time you know Some primate sticks of Puts a stick in their hole And they climb on the stick And they just get licked off the thing And it must happen all the time

There's a Or not Hold on a second Or not I mean isn't that the Isn't that the great terror Like one of the most Prohibited technologies

If it ever happens The thing that they won't allow For a while Will be anything that lets us Feel the experience of other animals Ants, birds, whatever Because unless like You know you feel like a hummingbird

And it's just like Nothing It's like It doesn't feel like anything It's just some robotic Nothingness that zips around But should you feel like The experience of an ant

And realize it loves Do you remember Do you remember that What was that awesome Like alien sci-fi movie Starship Troopers Do you remember that movie? Yeah a little bit

A little Let me bring you back It's an amazing fucking Commentary on fascism But at the very end of this movie With delight This telepath like Communes with an alien

And with a big smile on his face It's like they're afraid They feel fear It's delightful What I'm saying is You know as a human If suddenly you realize like Oh no

Actually Every blade of grass Every creature Everything is feeling love Joy Happiness Sadness It didn't have anything to do

With your fucking nervous system You anthropocentric fuck It was just the nature of things Oh Oh It would talk about being paralyzed You know what I mean Cause then you would have to decide

Like how do I take another step How do I do anything You know I'm a conquering dragon thing That just kills As a matter of its existence You know what I mean Part of being able to live in the world Requires imagining that trees

Are just fucking like Bits of like planetary pubic hair You know that loggers trim Versus like what they really are Habitats Shade Oxygen producers You know what I mean

Like we don't want to think about that We don't want to think about that We want to pretend it's just like Trimming a beard when you clear cut a fork You know Add to that the motherfuckers might actually Like you know be sad Is there being ripped down

It would be a difficult way to Like it would be hard to be Well if it makes living any easier Something would theoretically Probably need a limbic system To have the rich emotional experience That we do So it needs to at least have a little bit

Of some neurons going on probably But at least feelings in a way that we That's a probably friend We conceptualize them By the way Speaking of aliens I know I've been hounding you about this But you gotta check out Alien Worlds

On Netflix because it's Here's why I'm not gonna watch it You keep recommending it And here's why I'm not gonna watch it It tortures me I can't watch it because It makes me sad That that isn't

A real alien world I know it's so But it is But it's like It's not science fiction It's science speculation So what they do is They'll take an evolutionary biologist

Being like Oh here's why these stock-eyed flies Have these eyes that go out Real weird and long It's because of the sexual selection pressure And then they go through a few things And then they're like Okay on this planet

Where we think there might be life The gravity is slightly different And it has more suns So here's based on What we know about how evolution works here Here's what you might expect life To look like with little more gravity Or a little more sun on it

And then it combines fantastic CGI And stuff I think you dig it I'll check it out again Because my main issue with alien stuff Where we differ is like the I guess it's kind of Reverse anthropomorphizing

It's that everything looks so human-like We're like well If there's a superior intelligence I imagine it's like Us with a slightly better brain So definitely bipedal Maybe longer hands Hands are great

Stuff like that Where it's like It might look like spiders And things like that Is what alien life might look like So I like that kind of speculation Yeah I do too I'll check it out

Yeah I don't It's really weak of me That I can't watch a thing Because it's not real What the fuck is wrong with me It's more It's like David Attenborough Speculating on alien world type stuff

But then regarding ants There's one thing That I do think That we need to be aware of In our modern environment Which is there's an ant colony In South America Where they have

The way they navigate things Is kind of like flocks Or other things Where they're taking Like subtle cues from various Like oh okay That bird sees something Maybe we don't

So if it darts in this direction We'll just follow it Well these ants do this similar thing And once in a while So they're navigating Based on each other's hormonal trails That they're leaving And once in a while

Too many of them will get off course A little bit And get turned a little bit And what happens is They start spiraling Have you seen this? The death spiral And then they just

Keep on spiraling around And around in a circle Having no idea Like just following the trail That usually gets them Where they need to go And now it's just Millions of them

Just marching themselves to death In a death spiral So we do need to keep an eye out For things We need to keep an eye out For things like that Good night everyone Have a good night

Sleep tight Sleep tight I always have We're not in a death spiral I love to I have my bias One of my many biases Is that I tend to

I tend to attach to the dark Cynical side of things More than is probably accurate I don't think it's cynical I think the only thing I think like I remember By the way

We've been going for a long time I feel like I'm taking way too much of your time Okay So like when I was in Religion's class And they were like Reading some verse from the Bhagavad Gita And the verse had something to do with being detached

Like the attitude in the world It's literally like the most scandalous verse Which is The wise mourn neither For the living nor the dead And it's like People at this liberal art school Kids

They're just like What the fuck You're saying be detached From this life that Because it says things like Passionless You know Fixed

Passionless And people hear that and they're like But That's who I am It's the thing that weeps When I hear Inya You know what I mean

Like that's me And So I think like A lot of times When people are hearing something They'll say oh that's cynical But it really isn't Cynical

Necessarily As much as like It's just the way things are And that If you Want to live a Seizured life You know

Where instead of like Strobelites Activating Your epilepsy It's like Boobs Or Cigarettes

Or whatever And it's not as literal Seizure you're having But it is kind of In the sense that like It sets off a string of reactions That always lead to the same result Which is a kind of

Weird stupid death spiral Yeah You know what I mean But if you want to say That's what it is to be human That's life man It's like That first sip of whiskey

And then you have your cigar Bed on the fucking game Get a blow job from the thing And then you wake up And you do it again It's like if you want to say That is what life is all about I think that's actually quite cynical

You know that What's I don't know which What's like What's less cynical You know Like pretending that a human life is one of Like self induced ups and downs

Acting By the time you're in your 30s or 40s Surprised when shit doesn't work out Even though it's like Consistently hasn't been working out For a long time I don't mean working out

Like you lose the job or whatever I mean literally like Shit doesn't really work out here You know But we're supposed to always be in a Constant state of like Shock or surprise or Anger or fear

Like whatever But at some point it's like You know I'm sorry I'm rambling but It's like the thing that ruined my addiction To My embarrassing addiction to World of Warcraft Was and I'm sorry This is such an obvious thing

But all of a sudden I realize like Literally the same loop is happening here Like All that's happening is the shit I'm fighting Is getting bigger And more colorful And the things I'm fighting it with Are getting bigger

And more colorful It's the red queen And the speed that I'm shooting at it Is getting like faster But it doesn't matter because all that's Happening is the things Exactly The things just get bigger

So that the thing That used to be amazing the speed Is now too slow Then it speeds up again And you realize like ah This is just a stupid Never-ending repeating loop With increasingly colorful bullshit in it

That is like completely hijacked My nervous system Yeah level one was just as Challenging as level 20 Now and it's the same rewards It's the same amount of challenge It's just On a different scale

Same feeling Of desire mixed in with like Disappointment mixed in with like Oh wait I figured it out But that's really not much different Than any given human life You know it's like a similar situation That we're in here right

You realize like even if you are Massively successful what's happening You know your nesting box gets bigger Yeah yeah That's it You know what I mean Your nesting box gets bigger Your

The thing you drive around The nesting box to get this shit To bring back to the nesting box Looks cooler You know but That's pretty much it Yeah yeah You know so

All I'm saying is I don't think it's cynical at all To kind of look at Human society as it is right now And say If this isn't a fucking death spiral I don't know what it is Yeah

Like We won't be the first species To hit a peak and And collapse It happens all the time Where some new invasive species It finds itself in Some really favorable environment

Where now it can have a ton of kids And do really well And everything is great And then it overpopulates Eventually runs out of those resources And then just massive Drops off the cliff And

Drops off the cliff Yeah And then it starts over again Which is great I mean that's the I think that There's something to be said for Not

Quite Buying the whole thing That's happening You know like Not being completely Do it for as long as you want to do it But at some point It's like nice to realize

Like you You aren't that important In fact You know what I mean Like and that's not bad Like that's good Even if you were important You wouldn't be that important

I think that This is something that Comedians and Scientists can really take advantage of As this alien anthropologist idea Like okay Take me out of it As much as I can zoom out

Imagine humans weren't here Imagine this wasn't a tradition Imagine that and now look at it As an alien and you're like Explaining to this alien What's going on Now things look pretty bizarre Our traditions, our habits

Look pretty bizarre from this alien anthropologist Point of view because you realize Oh many of our behaviors Are just these historical leftovers We just kind of do things The way that they were done in the past And some of these things served Different times and different contexts

Better even as we sit here Giving advice to like our younger Selves basically of like Shane I wish you would have learned This little aspect earlier Of not needing to be The top of the Status pyramid

Or whatever because you're going to find that Embarrassing anyway And want to run from it The moment you have any kind of spotlight And But the thing is Is like different stages of life We needed different

Just like that sea squirt Needed a brain for a while And then doesn't need a brain anymore The same thing happens with Puberty and hitting middle age These different systems take over So some young person might Be listening to us thinking we're bestowing

Some like grand wisdom But maybe you do need A little bit of that like Maybe you do need that to get addicted To the video game for a little while And you need to work through Through all that you know Yeah no I'm not

I'm glad you said that I'm glad you said that because Let me just interject for one second Yeah I'm not trying It might sound like I'm being a little nihilistic Here or something like that Not at all It's your car

Like you have this karma here This momentum And it's playing itself out It's just playing itself out And the Idea isn't necessarily to Suddenly stop doing anything Because we're all getting hijacked by dopamine

Hijacking systems in nature And technology But rather we don't have to take it so seriously That's all It doesn't have to be like with our Gritted teeth and our fists clenched And our fucking ulcers Bleeding and our fucking

Assholes tightening as we Grip our fucking lives Like we're falling out of a plane Into the mouth of a dragon or some shit We can actually just Simultaneously Honor whatever our particular desires And our incarnation is without having to be

So ripped to pieces By Day to day disappointments That's what I mean Humans are the The most chronically stressed species On earth just because We have this super well adapted

System that isn't fit for Our modern world But it's also I was thinking about Remember those two trails of the wolf In the rabbit that you kind of picture In your mind of like this It's almost like a molding evolution Just like wolf or whatever over time

Well no one cares About that one wolf Along the way necessarily But there was like Something really beautiful And important that Each and every single one Of those wolves were

A part of something that was Really quite significant and special Yeah That's it man, that's it That's how you can simultaneously like Over your life without Becoming like An ego maniacal gravity

I'm the best wolf there's ever been No you're not You're a system You're part of a system And we don't know what the system is growing Into like nobody In a million years looking Back on whatever like weird lemur like

Creatures we like apparently Are distant ancestors would Have looked at that and been like We'd be shooting fucking rockets Into space When a relatively short amount of time It's gonna be Fifty times bigger

It's gonna have a massive brain You'd be like that's a just an annoying Weasel thing that's us And similarly like We don't know what where we're headed You know what I mean we don't know what we're gonna turn into And there's a lot of people who have some grim Prognostications

But you know maybe we would have had some Prognostications seeing some Ancient weasel you know We would have thought you know this fucking planet gets hit By meteors and you're probably gonna Get eaten by a wolf or something like that You're never gonna make it to launching rockets You know what I mean so

I think something about Being aware that you're part of a process Is a bit of a relief You're not the end you know it's not stopping With you Everything that you value You Gotta be wary of attaching too much

To it because you can take the same species And getting Getting taller might be Advantages In one strain of it because It can now see up over the grass And it can see things better But then the one that went shorter

It hides in the grass more It's less susceptible to predation Because it's hiding in the grass But the taller one's a better predator So if you're the The taller one you're probably telling yourself This tale of like Being tall is the way to be

Be as tall as possible all the time And then you end up getting Snagged up by something Whereas if you're the short one you're telling yourself The same story like oh being short It's great isn't it nice just being So stealth Being stealth is the way to be

And then you don't see enough stuff to eat And starve to death so there can be Pros and cons to either side Of it But what about this one Helping other people is the way to be Just help Just cook people dinner

I don't mean like you know just That like to me anytime I start doing that I'm insta happy This is What about that Well I think that Cooperation is something that One it's co-virgin evolution

It's happening like you mentioned It's happening in other species It's rare when it happens So there's game theory and like Tip for tat and that sort of thing And it actually It usually is Like the product of

A bit of incest Early on in a species Where there was enough genes being Some species Found itself drifting off in an island And they got Separated from the rest And then they were more genetically

Similar So it made sense to be Less competitive and more altruistic But then when you introduce That new That species once that species builds And then grows goes back into That old system

That new system of cooperation Beats tip for tat Every time it just needs the ability To get there in the first place And then once it does Cooperation Cooperation slays In every

AI model Of game theory that they've Tried And the thing is There's these weird things Happening now of People attacking Your virtue signaling

Or everything's too Politically correct and everything I'm not saying that that's not the case But I will say that if it is the case It will be the first time In 3.5 billion years That a species has cared too much

And that was its undoing Wow Wow That's so cool And it- Ah Shay, that's beautiful It's never happened You don't apocalypticize yourself

By helping, by caring It's so weird that Ego wants you to think I'm the subjective personal level People get this fear That if they start doing that shit They'll cease to exist Which is weirdly kind of true

In the sense that if you really get caught up And like, you know, I'm lucky I've got kids and wife And there's always help That needs to be done But anytime I'm like doing that I feel energized

I feel The way that I think I'm going to feel If I go off by myself and Lay down and close my eyes The thing I seek in my Being a recluse I find that in helping It's like everything makes sense

When you're helping So yeah, to me that's the It's the boring secret Or something It's like, oh, are you suffering Let's just see what happens What do you think is going to happen Here's a virtue signal

Whoever's out there rolling your eyes You fuck That's the funny thing about that It's like, oh what, you think I can't stand my ground? You think I can't come back At you? You attack me? You think I won't give back? Alright, try it

Let's face it, claiming virtue signaling Is virtue signaling Which is a different type of virtue signaling When you get in a never ending Infinity mirror of virtue signaling It's a waste of time When I'm reading anarchist literature When I'm reading any kind of

Communist stuff or any kind of Socialism, generally in there There's this idea of Do you know your neighbors You need to go meet your neighbors And that sounds so dumb But a lot of people don't do that So next door

To my house is A senior citizen Who has dementia and has a caretaker Who almost burned her house down So they fixed it Thank God, but I'm there And I'm walking With forest and there are these

People in front of the house with the woman Who I hadn't seen yet, so I stopped And it was uncomfortable and weird And I said, hi, I'm your neighbor And this very nice lady Was like, oh hi Introduced me to this woman who has dementia And then I said to her

Hey, here's my phone number If you ever need me to check on her Or you need anything right away I live right there, so here's my number And her face Cracked, man You know what I mean, it cracked in the best Way

It was no longer a stranger, it was a person Who saw that I'd been through that With my dad to some degree I knew where she was at Opened up this light Beautiful light came Like not literally, but it was the most sweet Beautiful thing

And anyway, all I'm saying is You're not gonna get that shit From playing Mortal Kombat You know what I mean, you're not gonna get that From winning You're not gonna get that from winning whatever the thing is You're trying to win You only get that from going

To your neighbors and saying, do you need anything? Yeah And then always, it's not Why we've been programmed to think they're gonna slam The door in our face You know what I mean, so I love what you're saying Maybe that's where we're headed Maybe all this bullshit isn't

A death spiral, it's like We need to be marching around in circles Long enough for us to realize This is fucking everything up It's killing the planet It's killing ourselves It's making everything meaningless By trying to constantly serve ourselves

I mean, I know what I'm saying Serial box bullshit But try it, friends Just see what happens if you go and Knock on your neighbor's door and ask if they need anything Well, I think it's good timing to hear a message like this Because what happens is So

Remember when COVID First started and everyone was like I think I already had COVID I had a week where my eyes were watery And stuff like that And I think it's because Much like I could sit here And explain

Some like revolting Thing or whatever And make someone dry-heave You know, I can activate those Or people use disgust or whatever What happens is Is that the immune system Is looking for threats

So if it's hearing things If it's being fed Ideas or whatever What will happen is the immune system Will be like, okay, there's a threatened environment And I've got to handle I either need to get away from this Or I need to handle everything that's in this environment

And I've got to keep everything out I've got to keep all outside All the difference Need to stay out Different ideas Different ways of being Outside Different people

Keep the different Any different thing If you're sick And you have your own challenges To face You close in And isolate more And you start signaling

Like here's my tribal thing You start attacking Other tribes And so it's kind of The way things went down It's not like they couldn't have Gone a lot of better ways But it's also pretty natural

For People to be averse To outgroups and helping When there's this Subliminal cue Of a virus going around And now as things are Beginning to

By the way guys, I wouldn't get Too, too ahead of ourselves Just yet I would say I would tell people to live a normal Like have barbecues and hikes with your friends And stuff like that rather than go to indoor Gatherings

For a minute But besides that This is like a perfect opportunity Now that people can go out Again, maybe instead of Partying and everything like that Right now Like getting, doing that

Maybe going out and greeting Your neighbors and trying to be more This is me talking to myself Trying to be more understanding Of one another And trying to be a little more altruistic Because this has been If, you know, we've talked off

The air about how kind of There's aspects of the pandemic that I found To be really exciting And much of it is like the chance For a reappraisal And the chance for a restructuring In a reset in our Society

And I think that we'd be missing A really great opportunity If we didn't Cooperation More cooperation into We're set up perfectly for it Um, and so Yeah

There you go You know what, friends, this week Do something to fucking virtue Signal about it And then virtue signal the shit out of it Just see what happens Just do it Because to me is a long-term

Selfish Cunt as I was diagnosed Um LTSC Is terrible It gets a lot of people It's really It's a real epidemic

It's another pandemic Yeah But the reason that I was Being so selfish Was only because I was trying to Feel a way That I feel when I like

And making breakfast for my kid Or when I'm doing something that Really doesn't have anything to do With directly pleasuring myself I just didn't know That that was, you know, I'd heard these Obnoxious virtue signaling hippies Say this shit over and over again

But I'd barely done the experiment And like having started Once you start down this road It's not like you're some amazing person Who feels better to help other people Than it does to help yourself What you're saying would back that up too Is though at some level

We recognize That this is our Destiny as a species Is to become cooperative In an extreme way To become like I told you Here's a fun kind of anthropological

Study that I think I told you briefly I was reframed in this conversation We talked about this off the air I had these anthropologists on Last fall, one of them studies Witchcraft and like hunter gather Communities and

And it's really Interesting that The things that You know how acupuncture Like Scientists can go And study acupuncture and be like Oh damn, they hit

Like this nerve at this perfect place That Releases this thing There's a whole jargony explanation Of why it works, but damn it How do you figure something like that out It's something that's stumbled on Through trial and error over time

And so a similar thing happens Where there's this tribe of people What will happen is They will get a Waterborne virus So you have to understand Before germ theory Which people still push back on

Your chiropractor will forward Like terrain theory And try to be like, oh, your brain's not connecting With your immune system I gotta adjust your spine for you And then it will communicate properly You don't believe in microscopic things Do you? Of course not

You need to pay me money And so Before germ theory Before people could pick up on this idea Of things that we'd stumble on Like God bless you came as a thing Of like figuring out sneezes Where kind of

Method of contagion and stuff Right, oh yeah, yeah, yeah And so this tribe They have They'll get a waterborne virus And they'll call the doctor Which we call a wish doctor But it's just their doctor there

And so one The placebo effect is incredibly important To you too And believing that you're healing Is something that It's a different mindset than thinking that you're sick And so if you can have someone Come in

And do this ritualistic thing That creates this like Okay, you were sick before Now you're healing That's a different sort of thing That's happening in your mind In your extremely complex And powerful immune system

Maybe giving you some remedy or whatever But then there's stories attached to it Which is that an alligator The ghost alligator Came in Through the water at night And bit you And you

You must have been doing something wrong You must not have been serving So first off, it's really interesting That they without Exactly putting their finger on it They're tapping into Oh, this is connected in the water To some way

You know, and then it's just this Exaggerated story of this alligator And then There's victim blaming often Attached to it You've done something wrong Because we don't want to For the same reason why I learned helplessness

Is so dangerous It's better to perceive patterns And So you don't want To believe that things Can just randomly Shock you So you must have done something

You must have had this coming And so what they come up with then Is that Oh, you must not have been being generous enough In your Community And so then they prescribe Giving away some of their things

Or doing some act of generosity And That one Just like the experience of the Pate Like hearing the whole story Will make it taste a whole lot better Than dog food, even if it is dog food

Having this story Attached to it really makes The immune system work It makes this believable story That you can have this placebo effect In your immune system Can start doing its job Better to have a fancy

Water filter, absolutely Any day of the week, but given their Circumstances, this placebo Works really well And then it's this socially reinforcing Thing, so what's happening This person's kind of at their weakest And they're giving stuff away

Why would that be helpful? Well, now you get this reciprocal Altruism where you were just Altruistic, you shared caring And now people are caring for you The most That is brilliant I would love to know

If there's been a study where People If there's any kind of correlation With service in a stronger immune system If something about Helping people somehow actually Strengthens your immune system for some reason I think there would be a lot of sexual

Selection pressure too Because you're showing Much in the same way that Is like, look at how many Look at how many resources I have so many resources I can burn them In this conspicuous

Conspicuous fashion I just paid $10,000 more than I needed For this emblem On the car That differentiates And acts of service can be That same way

So the problem with virtue signaling Is that maybe it's like a disingenuous You say you're helping people and you're not Helping people or whatever And expecting something in return Expecting to be praised or something like that Right, but if you're actually So it's not that there's

There's not a threat there And it's not that people don't take Advantage of systems pretending Like they're doing good when they aren't But to actually go out And show that you have You are so robust That you can also help others

That's some sexy ass shit That's gonna get Your dick or pussy sucked Probably So that's the answer All we gotta do is flip the switch From Mercedes to helping I think so

Too late for me Not That is not a virtue signal It's bad, maybe I'll cut that out I don't think I will We gotta go, man We just did an epic mega podcast This was a two and a half hour podcast

Thank you I could talk to you for a hundred hours Yeah, me too, man Thank you so much for giving me your time How can people find you? Well, my thing that I'm the most excited about Is Ramin Nasir Who has also been a guest before

And an amazing artist I was actually going on his podcast And then we talked about doing a collaboration On his own podcast called Mind Under Matter I look through all Ramin's art Which is meta stuff about making art About motivation and stuff

And then I put together kind of like Sciencey ideas That it makes me think of And then I share them back to him And he's quick as could be And super funny And does all these impressions So I put together a narrative

And then Ramin I'm like the setup And he's the punchline typically And then also And he's more into like Mysticism and stuff And then we think of a piece of art That has to do with that episode

So the art inspires ideas And then the ideas inspire a piece of art And it's really fun You're two of my favorite people On Earth, man So like this combination I can't wait to listen, Shane I'm glad you paired up with him

That is a perfect Perfect mix That's perfect We actually don't even plan on having guests On but we've already We've already talked about this When we start When we start having like a bonus

Episode once in a great while We'd love for you to be the first one actually I would be honored I'll do it in a second Just let me know, please You and him Just like even if we weren't recording it As some kind of like fun

Like embarrassing club We could call ourselves the Virtue Signalers American Virtues The American Virtue Signaling Club The Virtue Signalers of comedy That's not a bad idea Shane, thank you for your time I really appreciate it

Wonderful chat, thank you Shane Moss everybody All the links you need to find Shane will be at Dougatrussell.com along with offer codes For our wonderful sponsors Candid, Squarespace And me, Andes Thank you all so much for listening

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