Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Chris Ryan

Episode Date: January 11, 2018

Oh man.  I can talk about just about anything on the podcast but getting real about my struggles with jealousy and my current thinking on sex and monogamy was really hard. But if I'm gonna open up to anyone about it it might as well be Chris Ryan who co-wrote a terrific book on monogamy called Sex At Dawn and who privately has been something of a mentor to me when it comes to this stuff. So enjoy!  if you've ever struggled with jealousy I hope this helps a bit.

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Hi everyone, it's me, Duncan Trussell, and you're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. This is a mega-episode, one of my favorite episodes of all time, so I'm not going to do a long intro because it's already a two-hour episode. We're just going to dive right into some commercials, and then after that, Chris Ryan will be blowing minds. So now, a word from one of my newest sponsors. Sup y'all, it's Tyler here coming at you.

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cow had suddenly started producing sour milk, or the days when most people only had one eyeball and teeth were considered more valuable than gold, people weren't able to go into their cars and drive to Target or Best Buy or Wal-Mart if they wanted to get products for their farm homes. They had to order from a catalog and it would take six months for their barrel of salted pork or their liniment ointment that they used to rub on their laprodic wounds festering on their arms because for the entire year they had only been eating possum entrails and dirt.

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from me and bought toilet paper. This toilet paper was somehow a combination of, it was thin grit. It's as though somebody used a scalpel to shave the three-day beard from the face of an alcoholic sailor who had died while floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean. And somehow thin yet very, very painful on the asshole. This is bad stuff and it's what I get for running out of toilet paper. Well as it turns out, Amazon.com, they don't just sell books, DVDs, computers, pressure cookers, screwdrivers.

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So if you're thinking about buying anything, whatever it is, ask yourself, do I want to drive to get this thing or can I wait two days and order from Amazon and have the thing delivered to my house? And if the answer is I can wait two days and order from Amazon, then why not go to the Amazon.com portal located at DuncanTrussell.com. If you go on the comments section of any of these episodes and click on the portal, you will be taken to Amazon.com, order whatever you need to order and we will get a very small percentage at no extra cost to you.

So that's a way that you can simultaneously support the podcast that Barack Obama called the safest and most family friendly podcast of 2013 while also supplying yourself with all the various things that a home needs without having to rub shoulders with freaks who are buying implements for their rape kits. Play it safe. Go to Amazon.com and go through our portal at DuncanTrussell.com and the comments section of this very podcast that you're listening to now. We're also sponsored by audible.com.

You can get a free audio book by going to audibletrial.com forward slash family hour. If you sign up for a trial membership, they will give you a free audio book and audio books are great, especially if you're someone who finds themselves unfortunately stuck in that metallic river of hell that we call traffic. If you have a commute, if you're someone who has a bunch of auditions, if you're a delivery driver or for whatever reason, you end up trapped in that terrible, slow moving river of desperation that consists of metallic shells that have at their nucleus sad, lonely, unhappy people trying to hold back their anger and not scream in existential agony at the realization

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We just want you to listen and enjoy the podcast. And if you don't like these advertisements, you can always skip ahead. You don't even have to listen to them. So Hare Krishna, I hope you all are doing well. Today's guest is returning to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast. He is an author who has written the incredibly interesting and deeply controversial book called Sex at Dawn, which explores the ideas of monogamy and open relationships from an anthropological scientific perspective.

It's a fantastic book. It's one of those books that can really shift your thinking when it comes to monogamy, or it can help you understand why sometimes things might get a little weird in monogamous relationships. Highly recommend the book. I also recommend his excellent podcast, Tangentially Speaking. There will be a link to that at dunkintrussell.com. Now everyone, please welcome back to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour. My dear friend, Dr. Chris Ryan.

Welcome back. It's so good to see you. It's so good to be here, man. We're just hanging out. Before the podcast started, we've been drinking wine, catching up. You're always in and out of LA. I'm in and out. That's me.

I'm your in and out man. Wow. Is that such a thing? It's like a back door, man, I guess. I remember when I found out, because you know that song Back Door Man by Jim Morrison. The doors, yeah, I just heard it. Yeah. I didn't.

I swear, I didn't know what that was until way too late in my life. I didn't know that means he likes to put his cock into women's assholes. You know, I thought for a long time it just meant doggy style. That's back when I was innocent. Yeah, I remember when I used to, yeah. I can remember watching the Howling 2 or 3, I don't remember which Howling it was. Remember the Howling movies? I don't think I saw that.

Even if erotic werewolf movies, but I remember watching the Howling with a friend of mine and people were fucking doggy style and I remember saying to my friend, they're doing it in the ass and my friend's like, no, you can have sex doggy style and it doesn't mean it. And I was young, but I remember the look he gave me, I've been ashamed every three years. What is, what do you, is, um, what are the, let me start off with a really big question. What are the secrets? How do you make anal sex work?

Uh, well, first of all, of course, you know, consent is, you know, obviously that's not a place to go uninvited. Right. And it's all about the, you know, I want to say the woman and be heteronormative here, but it's about the receiver being completely relaxed and the way that happens is by getting into it very gradually. So it's a lot of lube and it's a finger first. And it's not, and it's giving that person complete control.

So when she says, stop, you stop, right? Right. Always. When she says, that's too much, take it out, you take it out. So that, you know, and then that person is able to trust you that you're not going to, because, because the, you know, you, you fear and every sphincter muscle in your body compresses, right? It tightens up.

The thing you're trying to overcome is her fear that you're going to hurt her or I am, if you're gay. And so the, the key is that that person knows there's nothing to fear here and then they can relax and they're amazed at how much they can relax. And then once that, once they get through that psychological hump, so to speak, then, then it's easy. Is it as pleasurable for what? Or so they say.

A friend of mine told me. Right. Like you have to hide that. I hope my mother's not listening. And when I do a podcast with you, I think, I hope my mother's not listening to this. You wrote a book. Not about ass fucking. That launched photo, photon missiles into monogamy.

Yeah. Isn't everything fine after that? I don't know. I honestly have no idea. Do you think your mom would be offended if she heard you talking about anal sex? I don't think she'd be offended. But I think it would make her uncomfortable and it would make me uncomfortable to know she was listening.

Oh, moms. Yeah. Moms and dads. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. And Mrs. Ryan, Ms. Ryan, if you're listening, I apologize. I don't think she's listening. I'm asking for a friend.

Yeah. Is it more, do you think it's more pleasurable for men than it is for women because of the prostate? Oh, to be fucked in the ass. Yeah. Well, I've never. I've never. I've never.

I've never. I've never. I've never. I've never. I've never. Oh, to be fucked in the ass. Yeah. Well, I've never been in that position.

Me either. So I don't really know. I, you know, the whole prostate stimulation thing, I've looked into it a bit and I don't know whether I've just got a faulty prostate or what, but it didn't, I didn't really get it. Maybe I didn't do it right or whatever. But I don't know. I mean, I think it's, I think it's a very psychological thing.

Right. You know, and the older I get, the more the whole sexual enterprise becomes psychological. I, you know, it's, it's, it used to be a very physical thing for me, like just pleasure. And I kind of felt like I was, you know, a day I didn't have sex was a wasted day. Yes. And, but now I'm 51 or two or somewhere in there. And I feel like it's, it's become more about the mind now. You know, I'm much more interested.

So to the extent that that's interesting to me, it's interesting because it's forbidden and it's like maybe something this person's never done before. And so she trusts me to, you know, and she wants to do it with me because she trusts me and it's this deep thing. So it's all about the mind and the relation and the connection. Yes. The, the sensation, whatever. Man, I have always been damned to the mind with sex.

I have never been able to enjoy in any real way, just like that physically just fucking I'm way too in my head. So if I, and I haven't done a lot of it, but the times that it has happened where I find myself, you know, in a one night stand as they call it, I always end up like one. I'm drunk probably. I'm not sober. So maybe that's part of the problem, but I go into my mind and I just think, what is this?

Look at you. It's not like I'm ashamed, but it's like, you're like, when the dog humps, my dog has a humping frog. It's got a, he's got a stuffed animal that of all the stuffed animals he likes to hump. You just see it, like whatever happens, it touches this cock, activates something and he just starts humping this frog. Does it have a semen receptacle you can put in the dishwasher? It's whole body is a semen receptacle.

I don't know if he can jizz because I think his balls got chopped off. We're talking about a fox here? Fox. Oh, I should give you the picture I took of you and Fox. You can put up on the post, right? So your listeners can see Fox. But when you see that thing, you know, whatever it is that happens where all of a sudden he goes into a humping mode and he's just humping and humping and humping, kind of even looking

at you and this kind of like, I don't know either man, it's just happening. I know that look. Something about my mind. When I see myself doing the exact same thing, it feels so absurd that to really get into that kind of like, yeah, baby, yeah, take it. I can't do it. Yeah. But the mental thing when I feel like a woman wants me and I want her and there's this

sense of like connection. I mean, these days, everyone's so crazy. I feel like a pervert saying that that's what gets me off. But that really is the thing that turns me on the most. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that you're cursed by that. I would say there's a maturity and a sophistication in that. I wonder, I wonder about that.

Like I wonder, is it maturity or is it fear? I wonder, is it maturity or if it's disidentification with the body? Is it the, you know what I mean? Good point. Yeah. Isn't there something glorious about the Dionysian festival? So can you take a shit without like watching yourself take a shit? I can't take a shit without ejaculating.

There's your problem right there. I think we've identified the problem. That's why anal sex doesn't work for you. You gotta be going out. You got Santorum all over the place. Shitting doesn't bother me. I don't really have many problems. I mean, I don't like, you know, I would prefer to shit in private.

I don't want to shit in front of a person really, you know, like. Have you ever done that? You ever shit in public? Never have. Dude, I have shit in public so many times. I've had the most public shit imaginable. Where? You want to?

This is a horrible story. I've never told in public. This is one of these stories. I've got this idea to monetize my podcast, intentionally speaking. Yes. One of the ideas is that I'll tell these crazy fucking stories and you can pay 99 cents for them,

you know, as opposed to the interviews. Yeah. So this is one of the stories. I was in a place called Pushkar, India. Long time ago. It was like 89 or something. Yes. Pushkar is the second holiest place in the Hindu world.

Why? After Varanasi. Because apparently Krishna was walking through the desert and he saw something. I don't remember what it was. A woman, a girl who'd been raped or someone dying or something terrible made him cry. His tear dropped up in the desert

and it formed this perfectly round, beautiful lake. Pushkar Lake. And I came to this place in India. I was hating India. I'd been there a couple months. I'd been up to Kashmir. I'd had all these adventures and stuff. But I was like, I hated it.

It was overwhelming for me. All the people everywhere and the sensory overload just blew my mind. And I got to Pushkar and because it's a holy place, no internal combustion engines are allowed in the village. The village is beautiful. It's built all around this lake. They have what they call ghats,

which are like steps leading down into the water. Yes. Every night at sunset, the holy men lead their followers to the water's edge. They have these lanterns on chain swinging and they like wash their faces in the holy waters of the Pushkar Lake. And there's no meat in the town at all.

So it's all vegetarian. Wow. And they have bang, you know, bang. Marijuana. Yeah, it's like a marijuana tofu preparation. Yes. And they put it into lassi. So you can get these bang lassi.

Yes. And it's like the best marijuana brownie you've ever had. You're like just, it's so subtle, but you're just pleasantly stoned for like five hours. Sure. It's fantastic. So when I got to this place, I was like, fuck it, I'm not leaving.

This is, I'm going to stay here. Yeah. So I got, there's this place called the Pushkar Palace Hotel, which had been the Maharaja's palace for years. It's all white, washed, you know, pale. It's kind of like Greek, you know, with bougainvillea growing. Wow. Walls around it and beautiful courtyards and all that.

And, you know, rooms were like, you know, two bucks a night or something. Oh, India is so great. Yeah, India. Or you could stay in the dorm room, you know, for 50 cents. Yeah. But I, you know, pushed it a little further and I, and this is desert.

Okay. This is like really desert. And there was, it's like three stories. And then there was a water tower and you could climb up this ladder and you're up on top of the water tower. And it was like a three meter by three meter square with a little wall about half a meter high. Yes.

And I just, so I said, can I just sleep up on the roof? And they're like, yeah, 25 cents a night. Okay. 25 cents a night. Wow. And I've got the best spot in this fucking town, right? Wow. I swear, the first night I slept there, I was lying there.

There's so many stars because they turn off all the electricity at 10 o'clock. So all this, there's, so it's just dark except for, you know, around in the desert. You'll see like someone out in the desert with them. They have a camel festival there every year. This was before the Rafter, the festival. I don't remember.

But anyway, so I was there and I was lying on this rooftop. It's completely dark. Stars like everywhere, fucking stars, man. Like shooting star, boom, shooting star, boom, shooting star. I saw two shooting stars cross in the sky. Wow. Who sees that? You know?

Amazing place. You know, just incredible place. So I stayed up there for a long time. And every night. How long? Well, I was there about three weeks until the story I'm about to, this thing happened. And then I left and went to Gisle, Mary, and did some other stuff.

And then I went back for New Year's. Three weeks sleeping on top of a water tower. Yeah, it never, it never rains, you know? And so I met this Australian guy who's still one of my best buddies, Sean, and, you know, he really knew how to travel. I didn't. I had flown there directly from Manhattan. I got a one-way ticket from Manhattan to New Delhi.

And I'd packed like 70 pounds in my backpack. I had a tent and a sleeping bag and all, you know, water filters and all this shit. And Sean was cruising around with a shoulder bag. Wow. You know, he knew what he was doing. Anyway, so I, so one night, you know, it's India, your stomach gets messed up.

So one night I'm lying up there and I felt kind of queasy. I woke up and it's like, oh shit. You know, you get that feeling where you're like, I'm going to puke in 20 seconds. Yes. So I don't want to puke on my little square area here, right? And on three sides, there are rooftops of the other floors, but on the fourth side, it goes all the way down to the,

the cafe breakfast area where there are like tables set up for breakfast in the morning and there's a table with a juicer and all this. And there's a sidewalk, but between the sidewalk and the wall is a strip of grass about half a meter wide. Okay. So I, and there's no wind. It's completely dark.

So I lean out over this wall and just let it go. You know, and it goes straight down and straight down. And you know, I was sound asleep when this happened. So then I went back to sleep and forgot all about it. So I got up in the morning, went down for breakfast and I was waiting in line at the juicing machine and I looked and there was this tiny little puddle of completely dried up vomit giblets

because it's desert dried up overnight. Yeah. And I was like, and I was reminded of Ernest Hemingway's line that courage is grace under pressure. You like targeted a puke. I was like, you know, hey, I had little time to think. I was in a tight spot. I executed.

I conceived. I executed. I'm a fucking pro traveler. I am a cool dude. Right. So OK, a week later, I'm up there. Same thing. Sound asleep.

Wake up in the middle of the night. In 20 seconds, you're going to shit. Right. So I've been here before. Right. So it's called the lights are off. Everything's cool. There's no wind.

So I leave my ass out over this wall and I let it go. You know, it's like I did the test run, man. So I let it go. I like wipe my ass off. I fall back asleep. Forget about it. OK. Now I should tell you the hotel was owned by a British Countess who was married to an Indian guy.

Some upper class Indian guy. And for some reason she liked me and Sean. I don't know. We're intellectuals or something. Right. She liked chatting with us because we were sophisticated or whatever. So we used to have breakfast with her. So the next morning I get up, I go down and her two cousins had arrived from England.

So they're at this table and I sit down and she said, oh, Chris, this is my cousin. I know. Would you like some juice? And we're talking and I sort of look up and my shit is running down this white wall four story wall all the way from the top all the way to the bottom. Just shit. And everybody knew. Like I was the guy who lived up there because they'd seen me up there watching the sunsets

and so cool. Like, oh, that guy's up on the water tower. He's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. So what did you do?

Did you fess up? Well, no. I tried. So I'm like stunned. Right. I was like, it was like, you know, you get the call like, you know, Los Angeles is gone. There's been a meteor. Yeah.

So I just like got up and I walked to the room where Sean was sleeping. Yes. And I woke him up. I said, Sean, you're not going to believe this, man. And what? Like, man, I just, I shit down the wall. Like, it's what? And he jumps up and he runs out and he's laughing his ass off.

So of course that, you know, so then. The shit down the wall. Of the palace. Sean. Sean, wake up. I've done it. I've done it this time. So then I'm walking.

I go to the shower, the shower bathroom area and there's this little tunnel and like the groundskeeper was named Serendra. Beautiful. Beautiful name. So, and he like confronts me in this tunnel and he says, you're just there. And I said, what? What? You're just there.

I'm sorry. Serendra. I don't understand. You're just there. And then finally somebody, because now we're blocking traffic through the tunnel and somebody says, he's asking if you have dysentery. Oh, yeah. No, that was a monkey.

Great. Great save. I said they were monkeys. Were there monkeys in the desert? There are lots of monkeys in Pushcar, but none of them up on my tower. Yeah. And so the Indian people were like, come on dude, no monkeys. There's no monkey.

So yeah, so I have shit in public. Wow. That is the most glorious story of shitting in public. There's so many shitting in public stories you hear. Many of them are like when someone talks about a dream. You don't really care. It's like whatever. That is like a world record.

That was pretty dramatic. Shitting in public story. Like four months later, I went to Kathmandu and I was looking for Sean's sister who I'd never met, but he told me she's in Kathmandu. Look her up. So I get to Kathmandu. I go to this guest house and I go to the room where she's supposed to be. And it turns out it's like 15 Australians like hanging out, getting drunk and high and

partying, right? And I come in and I'm like, yeah, is Diana? Diana? Is she around here somewhere? And I'm like, who are you? I'm Sean's friend. We met in India. And they're like, are you the guy who shot down the wall?

I'm so glad that you told this story for the first time. Is this the first time you told it? It's the first time I've told it publicly. What an honor. Send me 99 cents if you enjoyed that story. Yeah, but yeah. Tip Chris Ryan for that beautiful shit story. Tip Duncan for the shit story.

I'm going to get some wine. Hold on. Let's cut for a second. You know, man, when I went to India, I did not have a good experience with bonglassies. That was not a gentle high. It was a wretched, not wretched, but we were in Varnaasi and wait, no. Yeah, Varnaasi. That's where the burning got.

Right? Yeah, we were in Varnaasi and we were staying at some, for the people who've never been to India or even thought about going to any, they don't understand that this is an alien planet. It's like going to an alternate dimension. Yeah, I remember thinking when I was there, this is as far away as I could get from New York or wherever my life was without leaving the planet Earth. Yes.

Yes. Yes. It is like going to an alien planet, still inhabited by humans, but the culture there is so vastly different. Their relationship with death is so much healthier. In the West, you know, we were freaked out by death. We hide it. Like right now at this moment, guaranteed probably enough two mile radius, there's at

least three people dying right now or two people dying. Rough neighborhood. Is that not a good statistic? I just made it up. That's a hippie statistic. You know, that's a funny thing about Google is you could like search hippie statistics, hippies ramble about and shut them down. The point is, many people though are dying around you at all times.

We don't see it. We put them in a car, drive away, whereas in Varnaasi, this is the city of where the Ganges River runs through and it's where it's considered a sacred place to get your ashes tossed. Straight to heaven. Straight to heaven. So when you're in Varnaasi, you just see bodies everywhere. Bodies coming down the street, bodies on fire, bodies being incinerated.

The smell of barbecue in the air all the time. People selling. I want one surreal experience I had in Varnaasi. There was a lot of surreal. The whole thing's surreal, but like I was walking, I was sick. This is when I finally got sick in India. So I was just starting to get nice Indian diarrhea and I was sick and heading to like try to get some Pepto Bismarck and I was getting something that I thought might help and I

passed this man selling wood for the cremation gods and it's like it's morning. There's smoke in the air from burning bodies, stacks of wood, the Ganges River. This is not earth anymore. This is really is like a midway point between this life and whatever might lay beyond. It's futile. He's like, how are you doing? And I'm like, ah, I'm all right. How are you?

And he's like, I'm wonderful. This is Varnaasi, so I'm in heaven. And it's like fucking bodies being burned nearby. It was really intense, but when I drank the Bong Lassi, there were a lot of like we went out. This is, I hadn't gone on the Ganges River. It was just one of these spontaneous things where we're like, ah, weed Varnaasi, you can get bong.

It's weed. And I asked the people at the hotel where they were staying at, can you make us a Bong Lassi? And they're like, yes, and they had that glitter in their eye, that fucking glitter that now I recognize because it's the glitter Rogan gets and Joey Diaz gets whenever they give me weed to eat. And I'll always eat a third of it. You see it coming.

Yeah. It's that thing where like we're about to send you to Venus, but at the time I didn't know that glitter. So I'm like, great. We're going to go and gulp it down. And the, the, we're walking out of the hotel. Is this your buddy from the podcast? Emel.

Yeah. Emel, the other guy, right? We're walking out of the hotel. Musician. Yes. We were walking out of the hotel to go to the Ganges River because like let's get stoned and go float down the Ganges River. Not nothing.

There's, that's the thought. I didn't go deeper into the thought. You go deeper into the thought and you think, wait, you're going to eat marijuana, a quantity you don't understand and then take a boat onto a river that is considered to be the most sacred river on planet earth where from the middle of the river you're going to be watching bodies getting incinerated and parts of them floating by babies, dead babies floating by and on the other side, wild dogs chewing on the remnants of carcasses that washed up on the shore.

No consideration of any of this. We get into the boat and I'm starting to get really high and the oarsmen are paddling the boat. It's that, we sounded just the boat and the water and the oars touching the water and then the sun's going down. You could see Varanasi, the funeral pyres are rising up. The old men with the beards and the bells standing up to their waist and the water and the bells ringing and people are dancing around funeral pyres and then my friend Emel is like

leans in to me and he goes, the oarsmen are using telepathy to control our minds. I just had a hippie thought for you. He said it was such certainty though from his paranoid state, I guess it made sense. Such certainty, not like joking, he just realized they're implanting thoughts into our minds. That was one of the most intense marijuana trips but bonglassies are not always smooth and soft. No, well I only got them from this one restaurant in Pushkar and the first time I had one, I had been, like I said, I had been in Kashmir which is Muslim and I had had a lot of really

intense experiences up in Kashmir and now it's like you can't even go there, it's all Pakistani terrorism and it's a really intense thing. I stayed on a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar which was really interesting but that's a whole other story. Why? Why is that another story? There are so many different stories but the point I was going to make was when I got to Pushkar, I had a bonglassie and I was walking back to the hotel from the little village and

the first thing, the thing as often happens when you eat marijuana, you don't realize you're getting high and then you just notice something and you're like, oh, that's right, I must be high. You're like, wow, that red's really red. I was walking back and I saw a cow, there are cows everywhere and this cow just sort of looked at me and there was a woman by the side of the road who was talking about shitting in public, an old lady who was taking a shit by the side of the road and she saw me and she smiled and she put out her hand asking me for a coin or whatever.

And in that moment I was like, I get it. I get India. I get it. It's cool. Everything's cool. Now I get it. And I stopped resisting. It's kind of like anal sex.

It was that moment where I was like, oh, okay, it's not going to hurt me. I can relax. And suddenly like, oh, this is great. And from that moment on, I really enjoyed India but for the five or six weeks before that, I was suffering. I hated it. Have you had that moment in the United States yet? No, I'll never have that moment here.

No, because coming to the United States is a surreal thing for me. It's because obviously I'm American. I grew up here but I've been living overseas for more than 20 years, more than half of my life I've been out of the country. So coming back, it's like a recurring dream or something. It's like, I know exactly how this works but it's still foreign. It's still weird. Weird.

I've been in LA for four days. I've been driving around in my dad's car. I don't have like an iPod or whatever to plug into it so I listen to the radio, right? Classic rock, whatever I scan, you know? I've heard Frankie goes to Hollywood singing, you know, relax, don't do it, like nine times in the last four days. Like what the fuck? What is that?

I don't know. It's like going back in time when I come here. Well, you're listening to FM radio. I'm listening to FM radio and it's just like... Which is like listening to toilets flush. Yeah, and also, I mean you get some good shit or whatever but the point is it's like... Or TV, you know? I'm at my parents' house so the TV's on and the commercials.

Like, I haven't watched commercials in English. You know, I don't watch Spanish TV at all but, you know, I download shit on Netflix or whatever. I never watch. And it's just like, wow, this is fucked up here. But they're speaking my language which makes it... How do you think it's fucked up? How would you define the type of fucked up that this place is? Like in India, you might say it's fucked up because you'll see lepers crawling through mud and women shitting themselves

while they ask you for money. In the United States, why would you say it's fucked up? How would you say it's fucked up? I would say it's fucked up sort of... And this is why India is so interesting. It's almost like a 180 degree difference in its fuck-up-ed-ness. In that India is so in-your-face reality. You know, like poverty, that's fucking poverty.

That's like someone who's starving right in front of you, right? And the disease is like everything is there, visible. Whereas in the US, it's like an entire culture built on denial. You know, the whole... This is this giant edifice of distracting you from what really matters and what really counts. What is that? What are we being distracted from? From the reality of life. Like as you said, the fact that people die, right?

And deal with that. And you're gonna die. Deal with that. Like have that be part of your awareness of what life is. Like poverty, you know? Like, oh no, poverty, whatever. It's not happening right in front of me. In LA, you see it.

You know, there's real down and out shit in LA. It's kind of like America is this gothic, the classic southern gothic plantation house where in the basement is the incest child that they're ashamed of. So they keep it down there as much as they can. Because in America, you know that there are people dying of AIDS. Well, that's happening right now. You know, I don't know when you're gonna post this. But right now we're like an hour or something away from a government shutdown

because the Republicans don't want poor people to have health care. Yes. And what the fuck, man? And let me just say this. I need, this is a good time for me to say this. Because I rail against Obama all the time because I don't like the drone program. Oh, yeah. It bugs the shit out of me.

But I must say that I got a letter from my health insurance company saying that I now get to reapply for a different plan. And in the letter, it says we are no longer legally allowed to deny you based on pre-existing conditions. Which means that because of my ball cancer, if I wanted to do a different plan to get more coverage, I couldn't do it. Right. Because I have ball cancer and so now I had a pre-existing condition.

Lucky for you, you had insurance before you got the ball cancer. Yes. How many guys, single dudes your age, have health insurance? Man, since I got it, you know, people, guys, you know, I was at the ice house and a guy came up to me and he's like, man, I don't have insurance and one of my balls is like really swollen and I don't think it's good and I don't know what to do. And of course, I'm like, look, man, it doesn't matter about insurance.

Like, you got to go. You'll die. It'll spread and it'll just get, you won't die. It's generally survival, but it'll spread and be more and more expensive to cure. Yeah. But the fact that there are a group of these withered old shit fucks. With government insurance, by the way, for them and their families. Yes.

Trying to roadblock this thing is quite dark, isn't it? Yeah. That's dark. Yeah. So that's, I mean, in that, that's part of the whole picture I see in this country, like the whole thing, it's just all bullshit all the time, you know? Like, oh, let's watch the NFL this Monday night football. You know, oh, let's, but let's not talk about brain damage.

Let's not talk about all the, you know, offensive and defensive linesmen who at 55 can't fucking walk or hold a cup of coffee in their hand. You know, it's, or let's talk about poisonous friendships. Let's take it to a deeper level in the fracture fractal. What about the poisonous friendships that can spring up? I don't know if it happens in other parts of the world, but where you have a relationship. What about the poisonous relationships where in the relationship you're acting like, oh, we're so in love or we have this marriage yet you are both cutting each other to pieces

at any chance that you get pretending that that's not happening. Well, I think that happens in other cultures too. Oh, it does. Yeah. In Spain, there's a, there's a really bad problem with men killing their wives. All right. Like old, old couples who've been together 30, 40 years, you know, they just like throw each other out of the window and shit, you know?

And it's, yeah. Yeah. I think that's more about the institution of marriage than it is about American culture. Yeah. But I mean, the other thing American culture like war, we're the most war-like society in the world and yet it's 1% of the people we never see them except for when they freak out and shoot a bunch of people, you know? They're not getting healthcare.

They're not getting medical care. They're a three year waiting list to see a psychiatrist if you have PTSD and you're a veteran, you know, the highest prison population as a percentage of population in the world. Yes. And it's like this country is full of shit, you know? And they're still saying we're number one, bullshit. There's nothing, you're not number one in anything except throwing people in prison or executing them or turning your back on the poor.

It's, so I think that on the good side, it's a very dynamic place and it seems like we're at a turning point. It seems like we're at a point where people are listening to your podcast and reading books that, that question the dominant paradigm. So I think we're at a point where young people are like, fuck this, this, this doesn't work and looking for a new way to do it. But unfortunately, we still have these old fucks in Congress and. Oh, they won't last.

Do you think this is a, do you think this thing that's the thing you're talking about there with people resisting the violence and resisting the repression of information that's happening in the country? Do you think that's part of like what the New Agers called the global awakening that they have been predicting since the 80s or is it, do you believe in that stuff? Do you subscribe to that stuff? You know, I really didn't until I started, you know, I've had a couple of conversations with Rogan who you introduced me to and he's into that.

You know, he really believes in the power of the internet and, you know, and I've talked to some other people who really believe in that and I guess I've been, I've been swayed a bit by that. I tend to be more cynical and look at structural issues. You know what I mean? Like, you know, people say, oh, we got to get out, turn out the vote and vote these people out of Congress. I look at gerrymandering and say, yeah, the game's rigged, you know, every game is rigged

at this point from Wall Street to DC to whatever it is, but I do think there's some, there's something very valuable about young people. For example, on my Facebook page, that's a Sex at Dawn fan page sort of in the last six months, you know how it tells you like people who have liked the page recently and are following it? Yes. I've seen hundreds of people from Iran and you can tell because they have that weird script, the beautiful script, you know, and it's like, wow, a lot of people in Iran are

tuning into this. That's pretty cool. And that wasn't possible 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Because sexuality is a way to be revolutionary without having to get caught on fire by a government. Right. And it's a very revolutionary act. You know, we had people in Iran translate our book to Persian.

They wrote to me and said, can we do this? So there is a sexual revolution happening in Iran because I've heard that. Yeah. A big sexual revolution happening and there's, I don't remember the percentage, but a huge amount of the population proportionally is under 30. So it's a young, young country. Right. You know, what it is, is that there is this sort of, if you were to look at the, if you

were to turn the sort of, I don't know, dominant paradigm into a planet, then you would have, what do you call that? You're a doctor. So you probably know this. What do you call the crust, the ex, the, the highest crust of the planet? What's that called? Oh, isn't it just the crust? I don't doctors know every planet.

Why? I ain't that kind of doctor. Whatever it's called. Don't y'all know every answer to every question. It's called the, there's the external, the top most crust of the earth. And there's the mantle. The mantle. And underneath that is magma, red, hot, potent, magma, free land.

It's what made Hawaii, right? Still making it. On top of it is all this old shitty crust. Right. Well, that old shitty crust right now are all these old, country men and women who unfortunately got indoctrinated into a really repressive ideology. No matter what part of the world it is, for whatever reason, a lot of people got scared. They were raised by frightened people and they turned into like very angry, fucked up

leader types. That's the crust of the subjective, or the, the planet that we're in right now socially. Hmm. And right underneath that is this like, roiling magma and that roiling magma is you see it exploding out from time to time. And I think most recently you saw it explode out when Obama had to go patting down his little red carpet and say, all right, we're not going to bomb Syria because the fucking magma came out from every side in the UK for the first, what was it, the first time in

however many hundreds, hundreds of years. They were like, we're not going with that. No. Yeah. We're not doing it. Yeah. And the reason is because there's an instant connectivity to the representatives from the public and that didn't used to exist.

Back in the 1800s, if you wanted to let your representative know that you didn't want to go to war, right? How would you do that? Yeah. What do you write a, write on a scroll and have, have your slave ride a donkey into DC. You can't do it now. It's like an instantaneous transmission and it's happening in mass. So I think that that's, that's what, what, what's beautiful and terrifying about what's

happening right now is that in any time there's a volcano, it's generally, it tends to be a violent eruption. It's not a. Yeah. The problem is that when the magma comes to the surface, it becomes crust. It gets sprayed with mace too. Meet the old boss same as the new, or meet the new boss same as the old boss, you know, it, it.

That's a fear. Yeah. I mean, you, one of the things, yeah, I'm working on this book called civilized to death and it's sort of about these issues that you and I both love talking about. And one of the things I'm looking at is politics, right? And how modern politics differs from the politics of our hunter gatherer ancestors. Right. And what's so interesting is that in pre-agricultural societies and people who haven't read Sex

at Dawn or, or haven't listened to me, you know, do my spiel don't, may not know that for 99% of our existence as a species, we were hunter gatherers and there are consistencies in the way hunter gatherers interact with each other and the way they live and organize their societies and all that. And then about 10,000 years ago, there was this extreme shift where everything changed from the way men relate to women, the way adults relate to children, the way we relate to the natural world, the way we get food, the way we, you know, the way violent societies interact with other societies, everything changed.

And so the, we're indoctrinated to believe that this very recent reality is the reality, is in fact, it's just the crust on the planet, right? In fact, I was looking at numbers. And if you look at American history in terms of the 200,000 years of our existence as a modern species, and you sort of do the proportions to only look at post-agricultural societies, which is the Greeks, the Romans, you know, blah, blah, the Egyptians and so on, is like, you know, saying, let's look at American history, but let's start in 2002. Wow.

You know, that's how small the percentage is. Wow. And we don't even care. All the hunter-gatherer stuff are like, whatever. Whatever. 20th century, 19th century, it doesn't matter. Yeah. Let's just look at, you know, 2002 till now, right?

Wow. And that'll tell us what's real. Sorry, man. That doesn't work. But anyway, the thing about politics that's so interesting is that in hunter-gatherer societies, you become a leader because people follow you. You don't become a leader because you want to be a leader. In fact, the worst thing you can do, like the number one disqualification for leadership

is showing any interest in being a leader. Wow. That's genius. Because it's ego, right? Because only the smartest people, the smartest people are like, I am not going to be a fucking leader. I don't want to tell people what to do, right? But if you ask my opinion, well, my opinion is I think we should go to the river for the

winter because it's a little warmer in that valley and there are normally fish we can eat. That's my opinion. And people say, he's normally right. This guy makes some good decals. Let's do that. Okay, let's do that. So you're the leader for that, right?

But the thing is leadership is completely fluid. It's all based upon the respect with which people hold you. And the leaders tend to be the poorest people because they share the most. They're the most dedicated to the idea that everything is shared. So like a leader might be a really good hunter, but he and his family don't get more meat than other people. And in fact, there are all these mechanisms built into the societies to protect. I was reading this account from an anthropologist who was living with people in Botswana, I

think, studying them for a while, and he decided to try to repay them for all their generosity. He went and he found in the region he was in, he went all around and he found the fattest best ox he could find because they were having some sort of party and he bought this ox and he brought the ox and he presented it to them like, hey, I want to help out in New Sears. And he was really hurt because this old woman was like, Jesus, you don't know anything about buying meat, do you? Like you bring us this bag of bones and then someone else was like, oh, I don't think there's going to be food for everybody on this thing.

I know we're going to have to go hunting and they just like pissed all over his offering. And he got really hurt and he's like, what the fuck, man? I thought this was a great ox. I mean, I'm trying to help out and finally one of the people took him aside and said, dude, don't worry about it. This is how we do it. You can't, we can't let you be proud of your gift because when people get proud, then they start telling other people what to do and then it ends with them killing somebody.

God, I love that so much. That is so sophisticated. That is so sophisticated. Yeah. God, I love that. Yeah. And it's the opposite of how our society is oriented, right? Jesus Christ because the demon is in us because we'll give a thing to a person.

We'll give a thing to a person that you love and some piece of you, you almost can't prevent it. Some piece of you will, underneath there will be like, oh, look how great I am. Right. Look at that. Yeah. I'm going to own you now. Could you sign this so I can write this off on my taxes?

Wow. No, that's so genius. I think that's so genius because it's like the connection should be with the group, the tribe as a whole, not the individual. It should be, and the most important thing is that we're all working together to be happy. And in a relationship, it's the same way. Relationships get so fucked up when a person is like, see what I've done for you. Do you see all the things I've done for you?

Look what I do for you every day, every day, what I've done for this family. That's a very Western thing, isn't it? Yeah. All sense of gratitude. And it's very American as well, I have to say, because we're so individualistic and yeah, but I had a Spanish girlfriend for a long time and she was here visiting my family and all that. And I remember one of the things she said was, you people say thank you all the time.

You say thank you. And she used to say to me when I was having lunch with her family, it's like, oh, can I have some wine? Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. And I was like, well, you shut up with the thank yous. Like, you know, they're giving you food because they love you, man. You don't need to say thank you all the time.

You know? We're all like beaten orphans. We're like beaten street urchins that got taken into the mayor's house and given a couple of French fries. Thank you, sir. Oh, my God. Yeah, so you're right. So the United States is a haunted house.

We're twisted. We're like the Texas Jainsaw Massacre family. Because at country, we're twisted because we can't accept love. We have a real big problem accepting love because we've been primed to apply the laws of capitalism to relationships because we have capitalistic relationships. So if there's a, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a, everything's in exchange. Yeah. And everything is work oriented.

I just read a gray on the flight down here. I read this paper by Peter Gray, who's a developmental psychologist. And he got interested in anthropology and reading about hunter gatherer societies, right? And he's studied kids for most of his career and particularly play. And he'd written about like how, you know, play is so important to psychological development of kids. And when we, and not structured play, right? Just kids hanging out playing, right?

And so he started reading anthropology and he realized looking at all these hunter gatherer groups like, wait a minute, the entire hunter gatherer social system is based on play. It's you're there because you want to be, you can quit at any time. It's sharing based. I mean, think about what happens to your ball game if the kid who brings the ball won't let other people touch it. Right. I mean, that doesn't fucking work.

And it's like he went, he goes through all these different, you know, characterizations of play and every one of them applies to hunter gather existence. So sometimes there's this debate about what, you know, what I call the neo-Hobbesian vision like Steven Pinker and people like that, who talk about how lucky we are to be alive now because life was so solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short before the start. I'm in that camp. We'll talk about that in a second. Keep going there.

Oh, okay. So, I mean, the truth is that anthropologists who have studied hunter gatherers and lived with them, like the guy who bought the ox, have documented that they spend about 20 hours a week on average, including, I'm talking like the Kalahari Bushmen who are in the harshest environment on the planet, spend about 20 hours a week working what we call work, right? But what are they actually doing? They're hanging out with their friends. They're going hunting.

You know, the women are going out gathering together. They're chatting. They're not playing with the kids. They're things that we do for vacation. Right. Their whole life, sir. Their whole fucking life is a party. Yes.

And that's why when Westerners meet hunter gatherers throughout the historical record, these first contact accounts, every time the Westerners are like, let us show you how to hunt or sorry, let us show you how to farm. And the hunter gatherers are like, sorry, why would we do that? One guy actually said, why would I learn to farm? There's so many mongongo nuts in the world. Right. What's your fucking point?

Why do I want to do that? You know, man, I, you know that, I don't know where it comes from, but you know that, the saying, as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. And the meek shall inherit the earth. You know, I love that because I kind of see like where humanity is, is like the asshole teenager phase where if the earth is our mother, yeah, right now we're rebelling against our mother. That's good.

We're disrespectful to our parents, just like every teenager. Yeah. Fuck you. I'm going to do what I want. I'm going to act the way I want. You can't control me. Only in this case, it's the planet. And I have a very naive idea, I think, which is that I think that what you're talking about,

we're going to get closer to that again in a different way. It'll be a new way. But there's this transitory period. There's that place where the magma comes launching out of the crust where this period of sexually repressed, angry, generally men in control is going to fade away. They're going to die. You know, man, they're going to die. They're giving me the most hopeful vision of social development that I've heard in a

long time. I think you're right. It makes a lot of sense. In fact, there's one of the chapters in the book I'm writing is about our relationship to the environment. And in the manuscript right now, the first line is when it comes to Mother Earth, we're all motherfuckers. Yes.

Yes. Yes. And we have problems with our moms, you know, like in real life and with the earth. And it's hard to accept, you know, one thing like a mother, once you get to a certain... If you're a kid and your mother like does the thing where she licks her thumb and wipes dirt off your face, you don't even think about it. It's just part of what she does. It's part of the same thing.

But when you get older, your mother does that, which is really just a sweet, loving gesture, which is like, I'm going to clean up your face and you're like, stop it. Don't touch me. You're embarrassing me in the same way. Look at us. So separated from earth. So we're so not just separated from earth, but we're separated from the idea of accepting love.

And yet we're obsessed with women. Oh, yes. And we're obsessed with nature. Right? I mean, we got our kombucha and our, you know, whatever yoga, whatever bullshit we're doing that's trying to align us with nature and not my study. But I don't think it's bullshit. I think...

It's not bullshit, but my point is that it's inherently contradictory. You know? Right. So we're obsessed with the planet and yet we go to Whole Foods thinking we're healing the planet. Yeah. Well, you know, I, as far as the planet stuff goes, I always go back to that wonderful George Carlin bit about the earth and plastic.

You know about that? Have you ever heard that bit? I've heard everything he's ever done. So you know the bit where he's like, everyone's worried about plastic, but he's like, maybe that's what the earth wants. Maybe it wants to make plastic. Right? So it's like, he's like, the earth is going to be fine.

Humans are fucked. That's what he says. The earth has been through how many different extinctions? The earth has been through so much shit, meteor impacts. Do you really think the radiation from Fukushima or whatever little humans are going to make is really going to fuck up the earth now? Humans are fucked. Now that's where I disagree with Carlin.

It's a very cynical bit. I don't think humans are fucked at all because if you go and look at like what's been happening lately, if you turn your eyes away from the psychic sewage that comes pumping out of the mainstream media, man, I could name a few things right now that are happening that are so beautiful. Kenya, if you heard about what happened in Kenya, the, at the mall, the satellites, yeah, the mall, there was like, I don't remember how many people died at, what is it, 40? Yeah, I don't know.

40 people died. It's a tragedy, but if you look at what, in other occurrences, satellites using some new weird geo-scanning technology found enough water for 70 years. Oh, I did read about that. Yeah, huge aquifer under the desert. Yes, yes, yes, 70 years, and I mean, that's wild. That's going to transform the landscape of Kenya from dirt to farmland. The problem is, and we get back to the structure, you know, my structural view of history and

economics and all that, the problem is what's going to happen. Chinese who are already buying up Africa are going to come in and either buy or steal land, and then they'll drill down into that aquifer and they'll grow food for China, and it's going to be very difficult for the Kenyans to end up getting any of the money from that. So the Chinese get the food. Right, yeah, and it's colonialism, just like the United States has been getting the oil. Right, but still, someone's getting the food from it. The point is that technology is like, you know, okay, so Kenyans only get to eat food

grown in Kenya, and Chinese only get to eat food grown in China, and you know, it's, it we're earthlings, and you know, by the way, I'm, you know, quickly trying to react to that in a real hippie way. It sucks. I hate it. I want the Kenyans, I want it to be, it's a small world. They're all dancing. We can take floats through their beautiful river, but I think that in the course of human

history to imagine that things floating in space were able to find a reservoir of water completely undiscovered. But isn't that just like flash bang bullshit? I mean, is it really going to make anyone's life better? I'll show you, I'll show you the video of the Kenyans dancing as the water comes pouring out of the... That's because they think they're going to get the water. I think they are.

And you don't know that they're not. Do you know, do you know the worst place in the world to get a decent cup of coffee? Kenya. Well, Kenya, probably, but certainly Guatemala and Nicaragua, which is where a lot of coffee comes from. Or El Salvador. Right? Why?

Because you've got corrupt governments, right? United Fruit Company comes in, you know, if the government won't play ball, they just CIA takes them out, puts in a new government that will play ball, then they export all the good shit and the local people get nothing. That's the way it works. It's always worked out. Yeah, but it's not going to keep working that way. Really?

No. We know because here's the difference. Unfortunately, out of the earth has spawned a connective neurology that is the internet and the instantaneous exchange of information. The ability to protest now, the ability to map the movement. I wish I agreed with you. Look at what George Clooney just... I think people retweet some bullshit and think they've done their part, including me.

Including me. Including me, but that's the... Where's Edward Snowden, right? Where's Julian Assange? Those guys should be winning Nobel Prizes. Where do you think Edward Snowden would be prior to the existence of the internet if he did the same thing? Well, Daniel Ellsberg is a celebrated historical figure.

I think Edward Snowden would be feeding worms underneath the ground right now. Well, and he may well be soon. And I think we'd be dropping... No, I think that he already would have been taken out. They would have killed him in a second. Well, what's the difference? You're under Putin's thumb in Russia. You're alive and you've got all the information out and you're a global hero.

I don't think he's a global hero. I think most people consider him a criminal. I don't know about that. I don't. You don't. But I... Reddit doesn't. And Reddit represents a huge, huge demographic.

I don't think so, man. I think that you get the mainstream media and you get this illusion. Because I was talking to my girlfriend, we're talking about Christians. And the idea of how televangelists and the horror of the... I don't know. There's a clip on the internet of Pat Roberts talking about how gays should just be allowed to die out or some weird shit. Then I start thinking like, okay, aside from the Christians I've seen on TV, what about

the Christians I've met in real life? And man, they're all hands down. Awesome. Yeah. Have you seen Den Savage's new thing? No. I think it's called They're Not All Like That or We're Not All Like That. Oh, wow.

And it's Christian saying, hey, we respect our gay brothers and sisters and we think you should have the right to do this. We're not all like that. But the confusion. There's a confusion that happens. How about this new pope? Yeah, but yeah, he just excommunicated somebody for some... Did he?

Yes. He just fell on his ass. He was doing so great. And then he was like, yeah. It was, I don't know enough about it. I probably shouldn't talk about it, but the double-edged sword of connection via technology that's happening right now is that your information sources will dictate what you think about humans. So if your information source is the news, the mainstream media, Drudge Report, or any

kind of fear-mongering mechanism that is pumping out fear to the world, then you're going to start thinking that people are fucked. But yet, if you consider your interaction with humans, that's what you should be gauging things on. You know what? I learned that getting back to our earlier conversation, that's something I learned so much from traveling. When I said, I'm going to go to India, I'm going to go around the world, it was back

in the late 80s, before the internet, before all this stuff, right? And people were like, are you kidding? You're going to die. You're going to be... I mean, the first time I went to Mexico, in like 83, I think, I didn't speak Spanish, and I took this, I got a kung fu star, you know, the stars like Bruce Lee would throw. I got a kung fu star, and I put a gold chain, like a fake gold chain, I wore it as a necklace, and I made one link weak, so I could pull it, that would break, and then I'd have this

star at the end of a two foot chain, and I could swing it like nun chucks, and I could keep like a lot of people away from me. You're so cool. I was badass, right? And because I was scared, I was going to Mexico all by myself, no idea, no English, no Spanish, no idea. And after like a week there, I was like, what the fuck am I doing wearing this? No, but everybody's nice to me, everybody's helping me, nobody's trying to rip me off

or hurt me, or, you know, and I ended up, I mean this is another one of these long stories I'm going to tell is like the bonus thing, but I ended up living with these land reformers who are, who later became the zapatistas in Chiapas, right? Yes. And I ended up, I met this guy, Ankel, and all this shit, I mean I ended up teaching self-defense to these land reform peasants in Mexico, this was my first trip out of the US. You know martial arts? I studied from 8 to 15.

I studied kung fu. I had a black belt and I taught, you know, I was like, that was my thing. And then I told the story on Rogan actually, then my teacher killed his father. How? In a fight. It was a really intense, weird thing. And it was funny, actually I learned something because I told that story on Joe's podcast and then I started getting emails from people who were from Western Pennsylvania who knew

about that case. This was when I was 15, so this is 77, and I even got an email from a guy who was like an assistant district attorney who had handled the case. You know, this is something I hadn't thought about in 30 years and suddenly I'm like getting all these court documents and stuff. It's interesting. Like I forget when I'm doing podcasts, I forget people are listening, you know, it's funny. But which it can be dangerous.

By the way, did you know, if you have any friends who aren't American, they need to be very careful about admitting they've ever used drugs. I've got several Canadian friends who are not allowed to ever enter the US because they admitted they had smoked marijuana in Amsterdam. Are you fucking shitting me? No. No, I just talked to two friends last week about it because I've got some, you know, friends, foreign friends who need to be able to come in and out of the US.

That is wild. And they, this guy's a lawyer and he said to me, yeah, man, that's real. He said they flew through Seattle, they got pulled out and asked a bunch of questions. There's one guy who was a professor, no, a psychiatrist who had done LSD psychotherapy when it was legal. And he was crossing the border. They took him out and they said, oh, they googled him or whatever in there and they're like, oh, LSD psychotherapy.

Have you ever tried LSD? And he said, yes, of course. I've been in the passport, never allowed in the US again because he's used illegally. Oh, these pigs. They're so desperate. Look, they're going to put up a fight, man. They're putting up a fight. They're going to put up a fight.

That's all they know how to do. They can't stop it. They're going to try though. They're trying, but it won't work. They can't stop it. It's too late because look at, look at Seattle, look at California, look at Denver. California is becoming legal, hemp. They're allowed to grow hemp in California now.

It's like you, at this point, the genie is out of the bottle. You've allowed a psychoactive and pathogen to get into the bloodstreams of the population. You've been trying to brainwash. It's not going to work. It's going to work for a little while longer and how long that little while is really does depend on how vocal people become and how clever people become about protesting because, you know, protesting, like when we think of protesting, we really do have a primitive idea of protesting, which is go out on the streets and gum up the gears.

You were saying, you know, I just feel like I, you know, I'll tweet whatever. It's like, no, that is protesting. It works. That works. It creates a trend. It creates a movement in the zeitgeist that causes things to change. Tweets are good. Anything's good.

Anything is better than nothing. If it's a tweet, if it's a post on Facebook, if it's sending a link to someone showing them the truth about the NSA, showing them the truth about what's happening with Snowden, all of these things create a shift in the collective mind. And the collective mind is the thing that I think stopped Obama from selling some fucking missiles or from making some money on the missiles. He was, the hellfire missiles was going to launch into Syria. So I believe that it's, it's definitely a conflict.

We are in a conflict period right now. It's us. And by us, I mean people who don't want to incinerate human beings or turn human beings into money. It is a really interesting time to be alive, you know, the Chinese thing, right? May you live, the Chinese curse, may you live in an interesting time. But do you ever feel, sometimes I get this feeling like I was born too late to really enjoy the party in the 60s and 70s and too early to enjoy the party that's just starting

now. Shit. You're not born too late for that Christopher Ryan, you're in the middle of the fucking party. Well, but it's just starting. It's just getting underway. And by the time it's really rocking, I'll be 60, you know, it's like nobody wants a 60 year old at their party.

I do. But do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, I do know what you mean. Like we're, we're living in this lull between two important periods. Well, no, but that's, right, exactly in this, and that's why we, people living right now have an extra responsibility to become a activist in whatever way that they can. Get the party started. Yeah.

You've got to get it going. And the way you get it going is by, there's a lot of different ways, but I think what you were saying earlier about this conceptualization of giving that hunter-gatherers have, I think that is a great place to start, which is if you can eliminate spiritual capitalism from your life, eliminate the idea that, and I was just reading this wonderful, actually listening to a lecture from Ram Dass talking about unconditional love and how, you know, the more you meditate, the more you get into bhakti yoga, the more you get into the idea of like, you know, falling in love with love as he calls it, the more you realize you want to

love everyone, you want to actually just give love to everyone as much as you can. And then when, if you think that you should have some reciprocity for unconditional love, then you thwarted this form of spiritual discipline, which is this idea of like, oh, I want, if I'm going to give you unconditional love, but I want you to think I'm very holy and special, which is so funny that in a society built into it is a reaction of like, this is a ridiculous ox. Yeah. What was he gave?

This is a ridiculous thing that you would give us. Bag of bones. Bag of shit. No one's going to be able to use this because it's like built into their society is a mechanism that will advance spiritual evolution because you will overcome the reward mechanism that people are addicted to and which makes them want to currently want to do good. Get rid of that and just do it because it's, because it's, it's, it's what life does. It's what the earth does.

The earth spits out berries, coconuts, deer, all kinds of wonderful delicious things. How long did it take evolution to make a porcupine? I don't know. Remember you said that, you came up with that when we did that last podcast with Daniela. You threw that out. One of my great dreams, you know, sometimes I think about like, shit, if there is like an afterlife and there is a heaven or some kind of place where I can exist with the same consciousness I have now to think back to how crazy it was to be human.

Man, I hope that they have some kind of like time VCR where I can rewind at a speed of like hundreds of thousands of years a second to watch the way things evolved and grew to watch the transformation of land masses and watch the strange bubbling up of life from the gooey mess that was earth. God, I'd love to see that. So if you could live at any moment in human history in any place on the planet, being born as just a random person, have you thought about where and when that would be? Yes.

I have thought that. And it would either be right now or it would be during the time when Jesus was around. Really? Yeah. Because I would like to see the historic Jesus. I'd like to see if that being existed, I'd like to come in contact with that being. I think that'd be super, super amazing. Do you think you would know though?

I mean, if you were there, he'd just be another dude. I think he would know I was a time traveler because he's Jesus. Oh, I see. He'd know. So he would be really impressed. Hey, what's up? Like, you know. Like, Duncan from the future.

Also Buddha too. You know, I, you know, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha was a historic figure. This is definitely not a fabrication. So, you know, yeah, I think it would just be a person. But I think that being around, you know, being around the sort of, what do you call it? Is it called a linchpin, doctor? The thing that things pivot on? Yes.

Yeah. To be around the pivoting hive, the pivoting being in a hive of primates would be really potent to see that, what that, and all its purity and all its raw form. It could also be Hitler, you know, there are a lot of them. Yes. Yes. Yes. Hitler was an attempt, but it didn't work.

But like to be around like. Did Jesus work? Yeah. Jesus worked. Really? Sure, it did. I don't know, man. I think Jesus would be pretty disappointed by what's been done in his name.

Oh, sure. All that. Yeah. But I think he recognized, like if you read the scriptures, you see that there was a recognition of the way power deals with love and that power like. It worked for Jesus. Didn't really work for human society though. Well, yeah, but yet we don't know that actually.

You don't really know that because if you, it just depends on your POV. If you, if you believe, you know, if you, if you fall in line with like the anarcho-primitivists like Zerzan, who believe that everything started falling apart the moment we started representing reality with symbols that weren't reality, then yeah, you know, like everything past that point is fucked. Like there's this kind of wild, orgasmic flowingness to what you're talking about, this tribal life of just being in tune with the earth and wandering through life, living with, living close, close, close to the vibe of the earth.

And then as time progressed, we separated and somewhere along in that separation, some beings emerged, Buddha, Christ, and they started saying things to people who are really fucked up. Like this is a time when you would just nail someone to a, you would crucify people regularly, stone people regularly. So in the midst of this kind of like what maybe people like you, not people like you, but someone who views this ancient and greater part of earth is a more positive time, something went wrong or something fucked up and people got really cruel and awful.

And then these beings started popping up saying, wait, the most important thing is love or that's Jesus. And then with Buddha, maybe it's something more along the lines of we are all one thing. We are all the earth. We lost track of that. And so that information is permanently injected into the paradigm. It's there. Now, the way people react to that information does not a mark of whether that information

is right or wrong. It's like, if you see love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbors yourself and then go sit in a booth and fly a drone over a village and drop missiles on a person and turn someone into fucking hamburger meat, I think you've probably misinterpreted that scripture a little bit. Yeah, you know, it's my bias, but I tend to see so many things in terms of hunter-gatherers versus farmers, you know, because the hunter-gatherer, the central organizing principle of hunter-gatherer life is sharing, sharing of food, sharing of shelter, sharing of childcare, taking care

of each other's kids, taking care of each other, right? And it's not because they're noble savages, it's because that's the best way for everybody to survive, right? Yes. Because you get a deer today, I get a deer next week, we share it, we both live. It's beautiful, but it's also very utilitarian, it's very practical, right? So that's why I say they're not noble savages, they're just doing what works in that context. And then the agricultural context is very different.

What works in the agricultural context is, fuck you, I got mine. You know, no, I'm not going to lend you any money, because I'm going to keep it for my family to maximize my genetic legacy, and my, my, my... This is my land. Yeah, that's right, get off my land, all that bullshit, right? So you've got these two diametrically opposed worldviews, and they sort of, you can apply them, you can like overlay them onto so many of the conflicts we've got in the world. Democrat-Republican, you know, help the poor, fuck the poor.

You know, I mean, it's so clear, you know, women are equal in hunter-gatherer societies, women have great status in early farming societies, women are farm animals. You know, they'll shall not covet thy neighbor's wife. Oh God, like she's a fucking pig. Well that's the thing, everybody thinks that's about like, oh, respect your neighbor's marriage. Read it in context. They'll shall not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his sheep, nor his ox, nor his slave, nor his house.

His slave. Right. But can I talk to you for a second? I feel like you're coveting my slave, man. Were those conversations having like, hey, look, I want to talk to you for a second, and listen. Yeah, speaking of coveting, Arnold, he's my slave, and he's great. He's great.

He's really, really, really good at working for free. Yeah. Can you please stop trying to buy him for me? Yeah, you're making Arnold. I'm not selling Arnold for the last time. Arnold the slave. Yeah. Look, the idea is to, I think the idea is to understand the macro in as clear a way as

you can. What's the macro? The macro being the like, geopolitical state of things, or the vampiric tendency that capitalism has to convert human life into money. Or the planet earth. Yes. Into money plus waste. Which is, you know, kind of like what Zerzan or the anarcho-primitus are talking about,

which is like transforming life into symbols. So the moment you do that bizarre alchemy where you convert living, beautiful life into bank account numbers, which is what happens anytime a bomb drops on a village because the bomb cost a certain amount of money and dropping the bomb cost a certain amount of money and that money went to someone's bank account at the cost of someone being evaporated. So whenever you do that, you have the conversion of a human being into numbers in someone's bank account. Right.

Basically. It's a kind of satanic solar panel. So. I love the way your mind works, man. That's it. That's what it is. So. Satanic solar panel.

Yeah. So you see that, you know, that's the macro. So you see that. Okay. Well, I see that's then that's going on in the big, big picture that there are a small percentage of people. It is a small percentage of people who are totally cool at doing that. But then you always have to take it back to yourself.

Yeah. And you, and that is where the world gets better. All politics is local. Yes. And personal. And personal. Local is in your relationship with your friends. Yeah.

Your lover or lovers and your pets and your kids and the people that you go to, you shop at stores, like the stores you go to and the people you interact with there, the people who bag your groceries, the people who give you coffee. So that's it. Those are the people you're interacting with. So the idea is, okay, I don't want to, I don't like what's happening in the macro, which is the conversion of life into money. So where am I doing that in the micro?

Where am I converting a relationship or the interactions of a relationship into a thing, a form of capitalism? You're paying me for this podcast, right? Yeah, thousands. Okay, good. Good. Just want to make sure. That's what's beautiful about podcasts is they're free.

They're free. They're free. And that's what's beautiful about, that's what's beautiful about, not to say that people shouldn't make money, not to say that people shouldn't profit from their work or that there shouldn't be some reward. That's the thing. You're living this world. You've got to play by its rules to some extent.

But you can still eliminate... But you've got to be conscious. Yes, you can be conscious and you can, as much as possible, you can eliminate from your life. And man, I've fallen prey to the sickness, man. There's like, I went through a pretty, shit, I released all these, I was so mad at South by Southwest for asking me to come and perform there for free. And I released these YouTube videos like pointing out how ridiculous it is that they want me

to come there to perform when they're charging money for tickets. Oh, really? Yeah. They want you to perform free but they're charging for tickets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Were they going to fly you down or anything? No, they wanted me to pay for my own flight. What?

Yeah. Insanity. Fuck those guys. Right, that was my reaction. That was my reaction. Now, man, I keep getting thrown into this place, probably because I've been reading, I've just been getting really reading Ram Dass' new book and just this idea of wherever you can eliminate reactivity and wherever you can eliminate the idea of getting something

back for doing something nice. Yeah, but let's face it, you're a performer and they're making money on your performance and they're not sharing that money with you, which is bullshit. That's exploitation. I think you're right to say fuck that. Yeah, but you know, man, I think that business model's fucked up and I'm still glad I released the video, I guess, but I've just noticed there is a kind of like malfunction or the thing that we've been taught.

You do this and I'll give you this. Right. That thing we've been taught might be very, very, very wrong. By the way, I'm not a Christian. I'm not a Christian. I'm a Christian every day. I'm not a Christian, but I do love spirituality. I love reading the scriptures.

Are you a Harry Krishna? What the fuck is that? Because I heard, listen to that podcast with your buddy. I'm not a Harry Krishna, but I love it. Dave, what's his name? Dave McClain. Dave McClain. I just listened.

I told you before we started recording and listen to that podcast and you were like, I told you that was back in the day when I was chanting Harry Krishna every morning. I still chant Harry Krishna. You do? Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't that make you a Harry Krishna? Well, no.

I mean, the Harry Krishnas are, when people say Harry Krishna, they're referring to ISKCON, which is the international society for Krishna consciousness, which is the kind of fundamentalist Bhakti Yoga. So we're talking about George Harrison songs here or what? Well, we're talking about Bhakti Yoga. And Bhakti Yoga is the sort of the way of connecting to the universe through love. And there's so, in the same way that there's so many different sects of Christianity, there's all these various sects of Bhakti Yoga and ISKCON, the Harry Krishnas being one

of them, what they all have in common is they tend to chant the Harry Krishna Mahamantra, which goes, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. And that mantra is a really wonderful thing to chant. It makes you feel so good if you say it over and over again, and it's not owned by anything. Anyone can do it. You don't have to be, you just chant the mantra you feel, but you'll feel good. So I love that form of meditation.

I love mantra meditation because I have ADD, or I don't know if ADD is real, but I have a wandering mind. Monkey mind. We've all got it. I have a big monkey mind. And chanting is really good because when you're chanting, the way people tell you to chant is like, you're going to think about other stuff, but just keep bringing your mind, just listen to yourself chanting as much as you can.

That's it. It's so simple. So you keep bringing your mind back to it. When I chant, I tend to be a much more calm, loving person. Have you ever done vipassana? No, but I, you know, I was just checking it out. There's one up in the desert that... Yeah.

A 10 day thing. Yeah. Yeah. I did it. And my wife, Kisela's done it twice. Wow. She's hardcore. But what is that like?

Can you... Do you have time? It's... Yeah, I got all the time you want, man. There's nothing I would rather do than hang out with you. I got it. Likewise. I mean, seriously.

Okay. I'm going to pour some more on. I don't care. Thank you. I feel the same way. Hold on. Rolling. Rolling.

I just... I've interviewed some great people for my podcast recently. I was in New York. I did like eight recordings in six days. I just was on like a podcast frenzy. Isn't it great? I got to... You know, I know I've done this before, but I have to thank you publicly for getting

me into podcasting because I enjoy it so much. You people, why do you always say thank you? Yeah, exactly. God, it's so much better. Yeah. What do I owe you now? Fuck. You know, man, the reason I really love that story so much is because I want to say this

without... God, I hope I don't sound puffed up when I say this. I don't want to sound puffed up. You're not puffed up. So who cares? Is that what you're saying? I'm very, very, very grateful to anyone who listens to this podcast. Yeah.

And sometimes I'll get emails or people will come up to me thanking me for it. As much as I appreciate that, it always feels weird because it's like I love doing this. It's like you're thanking me for breathing. Yes. Yeah. Yes, exactly. It's that thing where it's like this whole thank you thing. It's a funny ritual and it's nice to do and I appreciate it in all, but really there's

a bigger idea, which I love, which is the bigger idea is like shit, man. What if we're all just part of this growing expression of human understanding or one little tiny piece of it or one little pixel in this bigger picture that's emerging and like shit. I don't know. Anyway. Well, you know... That sounded puffed up. No.

Should I delete that? No, no, no. You don't delete shit. Right. But no. I mean, you probably get the same sorts of emails that I'm getting, although you probably get a lot more of them, but a lot of them are from... I find people in their 20s who are looking for a way.

They're like, what am I doing? You know, I just got one today from a guy who's like, okay, I read your book, I listen to your podcast, it's great, I love it, but man, I'm jealous. I'm really jealous and I've had these relationships and they all end because I'm so jealous. And you know, I don't know what to do. I mean, can you recommend books? Can you recommend... And...

What's your answer? Well, the answer is the fact that you're writing me an email asking for this means you're dealing with it. All right. You're there, man. You're in the ring. You're fighting your battles. All right.

Good for you, you know? Yeah. Or I get emails from people saying, yeah, I want to travel. I mean, you talk about traveling. Where should I go? What should I do? I mean, I got this job. I hate it.

I'm 24 and this woman wants to marry me, but I don't really love her. Dude, the fact that you're reaching out to me knowing who I am, that's your answer. You're not reaching out to a guy who got married at 22 and stayed working for General Electric his whole life, right? If that's your role... You already know the answer you want. Exactly. So you're just...

I'm the mirror, you know? And to be in a position to offer that reflection to people is so fucking beautiful. And I agree with you. I feel so gratified that people take time to listen to this stuff. It's amazing. Yes. But it is... And get something from it.

Well, I think that I get from it, hopefully I'm getting from it. I think I get from it so much, like getting to talk to, you know, just getting like the chance to like talk to people who have such interesting perspectives that it really creates it. I would do this even if we weren't recording a podcast, but the reason we know each other is because you invited me on your podcast. At this point, we're friends. It doesn't matter if the mics are on or not.

But yeah, when I was in New York, I interviewed six people or seven people or whatever it was, none of whom would have made time to just hang out and chat with me if I weren't doing a podcast. Isn't that weird? Well, it's a reality of life. If you email somebody like, hey, I think you're really cool. When you hang out they're like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. And I record our first conversation in life.

They're like, I'll be there in a second. Yeah. Well, you know, if you say I've also interviewed Duncan Tressel, famous comedian. Please. You know, any like who lay out some names, people make time for you. It's fantastic. Well, I think that I think this is probably similar to like the salons that people used to have where people would get together and exchange information and because it's, it's,

it definitely is some, some aspect of this growing, I don't know what it is, this growing collective that seems to be emerging and every almost every, every form it's, it's coming. It's everywhere, this thing. And you know, and that makes me very hopeful. And I think that there is a fusion that can happen. You know, like how like, God, I keep talking about Jesus, friends, I'm not a Christian. I guess this is where my mind is right now. I think you might be.

Maybe I am. You're a closeted Christian. Maybe I am. But, um, you know, like, uh, Christ is always talking about this marriage, you know, he's always talking about this marriage that's happening, this union. And I think that there is a, you know, and, and then you get into the dialectic, you know, which is that, uh, the tension between the thing and its opposite creates the synthesis, which is the third thing.

So here we have these wonderful opposites, the classes, Hegelian. What? You're laying Hegel on it. Hell yeah. So like now what do we have? We have your hunter gatherer, Dionysian, sort of utopian, wandering through the wild, beautiful and, and, uh, uh, complete, like completely in, like deep in the flow of the world and

that home of life. And then you have on the other side of it, this sort of like terrified of the world, trying to separate ourselves from all like aspects of organic life, trying to control, manipulate, contain, categorize- Stainless steel hermetically sealed coffins. Yes. What the fuck? Yes. Yes.

Yes. Exactly. So you have these two diametrically opposed points and that creates a tension. Hmm. What, you know, genetic tension, that kind of sense in a human that I am missing something almost like someone who was in the middle of a great love affair gets amnesia and wakes up having forgotten this thing. Like that wonderful movie, uh, no, not momentum.

There's a great movie about, um, if you could erase a lot of the Jim Carrey thing, yeah, right. Where they go to a doctor and Montreal and erase their memories. Yeah. So here you have humanity having this beautiful relationship with the earth. Something happens. You get this amnesia for getting how wonderful this being, this being where you're a part of is.

Yet this longing is inside humans is itch. So I think that there is a potential, uh, for reacquaintance with that energy, but in a much more amplified way, a much more massive way, a way that, uh, it wasn't the, in the same way that we can't feel the earth like people a thousand years ago might have, uh, they can't experience the connectivity that we're experiencing now. Yeah. And they don't have the technological means to find that aquifer in Kenya and to, to do really interesting things.

I mean, the last chapter of this book I'm working on, it's called, uh, charting a prehistoric path into the future and it's exactly what you're talking about. It's finding, if we could just get our shit together, we could live in paradise, all of us. All of us. We've got the technology now. We've got the intelligence. We've got the way we've got the communication.

We've got a worldview. If we could just, you know, apply what we know in an intelligent way, if we could organize ourselves and find a way to deal with the dickheads, right? In other words, oh, you brought us a bag of bones. Thanks a lot. If we could do that, like neutralize the ego. Yes. Because the thing is, I mean, I'm also, I'm also, there's a chapter about money, right?

And the thing is, like our whole thing is built on getting more money, right? But the truth is that above a certain threshold, money stops mattering. Absolutely. It's like, it's like a wine. I don't know how much this wine you're drinking costs you, but it's, I'll bet it's $17. That's what I was going to say. It's between $10 and $20, right? Because above $20, $30, $35, it's bullshit.

It doesn't taste better. Nobody fucking even knows. There are all sorts of taste tests where they've done them blind to taste tests. It's true, man. I'm a fool. No, no, you're, you're, you're in the range, you're in the range where it matters. No, I'm above the range. Well, you know, then it's all about ego and it's, it's a gift.

Oh, look, I'll be, oh, I spent a lot of money on this bottle. Yes. Look at the label. The truth is that, you know, people blind test wine testers, they don't know if they're drinking white wine or red wine half the time. It's, it's complete bullshit, right? And it's the same thing on a much larger scale. Mitt Romney's not happier because he's got 20 million fucking dollars.

Right. Right. Right. I mean, I've threw weird quirks in my life history. I've hung out with really wealthy people. I mean, I was just on this 130 foot yacht a couple of weeks ago with the guy I met at Ted, whatever, really cool guy, wonderful guy. He's filthy rich.

He's not particularly happy. Right. There's no correlation between how big your yacht is and how happy you are. That's the fucking crazy secret. I was listening to this great, this American life about this guy who went around. His job was to go to people who had just won the lottery and offered a buy like they had done the payout over time. And he would like say, look, I'll give you five million dollars right now in exchange

for, you know, you sign over the payments and all that. So, and he was talking, so he met a lot of people who had just met, just won the lottery. He said they're fucking miserable. They're all miserable because their friendships are gone. Their family life is gone. They're like drinking too much, they're driving fast cars, they're wrecking them. Money doesn't make you happy. So the whole idea is like we're on this wheel and the whole society is saying, run faster,

run faster. And the truth is the faster you run, it doesn't bring you anything except exhaustion. And then your life's over. So the whole fucking thing is a scam. You know? Why am I ranting about this? Don't stop. There's a book.

There's a great book which I should give to you. It's called Finite and Infinite Games. Yes. Philosopher at NYUCon, James Kars, I think his name is. And somebody gave it to me years ago when I was in my 20s seeking knowledge and all that. You know, who gave it to me? Actually, it's funny, Richard Belzer's brother.

No way. Yeah, he was a friend of mine, Len Belzer. Wow. He was a friend of mine when I lived in New York and I was working in the Diamond District and he gave me this book. It's a very slim volume. It's like sort of, you know, chapters of three paragraphs. Yeah.

And what he says is, he says everything you do is a game and there are two kinds of games. Finite game and infinite game. The finite game is a game that you're trying to win. Yes. The infinite game is the game you're trying to keep going. Everything in life falls into one of those two categories. God, I love that. Yeah.

So one is about domination and the other is about unity. Yes. Right? And again, for me, it falls into hunter-gatherer farmer. The farmer's about, this is my land. Get off it. The hunter-gatherer's like, hey, let's share what we find here. Chimps and bonobos.

Same thing. You throw a packet of food into a chimpanzee enclosure. They fight over it. A few people, a few chimps, they share it among themselves, the ruling coalition or whatever. You throw a packet of food into an enclosure of bonobos. They look at it. They all fuck. And then they share it.

I'm a bonobo. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah. And that is, I think that is what we're all waking up to is that that's more what the universe is like. And it's the only way we're going to survive. So it's what you said earlier about returning to a prehistoric perspective on life.

In the end, it shall be as in the beginning, right? I think that's where we're going or TS Elliot in the four quartets he wrote, in the end of all our travels will be to return to where we began and know the place for the first time. Yes. That's it. I think that's it for humanity. That's it for humanity.

And this period that we're in right now is a very special time. It's very special. We're in puberty right now. It's a great time to be alive. And I think the other side of it is so beautiful. And we get to be a part of like the expression of it and its initial phases, which are, you know, right now it's very primitive. It's, you know, you and I sitting at a table with microphones and this Zoom weird R16 controller.

But in, you know, 30 years, it will be the transmission of feeling states to the entire planet. The, or maybe a hundred years, but I'd say around 30 will be being able to transmit neurological states of consciousness to the entire planet so that when a person reaches a particular so in, so in other words, instead of like the, the predicament being like you see a Zen master, you see someone who's like radiating the light that comes from a lifetime of meditation and then encourages, encourages you to meditate for life. I think it'll go to a point where it's like, no, you can experience what that's like and

have that connection immediately with like, oh, shit. That's what I really am. Well, they say, you know, that's what hallucinogens, you know, Timothy Leary often said like, or maybe it was Ram Dass who said that hallucinogens take you to the top of the mountain, but then you find you wake up and you're back down, you got to climb. That's Ram Dass. And it's a great thing to get to the top of the mountain because it's, it gives, it encourages you.

And I think it's a wonderful thing. Like when I smoked a dimethyl tryptamine recently, it was this confirmation of so many divergent philosophies that I read all coming together into this one blissful, very short moment where it's like, oh, shit, it's real. It's total, it's all this nonsense that I've, or stuff that I thought, maybe this is crap. We're all one thing. There's one connective life force that's just some love principle that only wants to nurture and embrace and heal.

You hear that and it's like, whatever, but then you smoke DMT and it's like, oh, wow, it is real. It's there and I'm it and it's me. But how do you know that's not a delusion, you know, a chemical induced delusion the way like alcohol can go, I love you, I love you, man, you know, and then they wake in the next day is like, yeah, whatever that guy, I don't know. I mean, how do you know, why do you take that more seriously than any other chemically induced state?

Well, I can answer that in two ways. One is, well, how do I know? Anything's real. There's always that. There's that, you know, because everything's a chemically induced state. Everything is a. I love, who is it, McKenna's brother, Dennis McKenna, who says, like, you know, they talk about like, oh, drugs and drugs, like your brain is drugs, you know, your entire being

is drugs. Yeah. So we have this sort of like external wave form that is all of whatever it is out here, this sort of quantum soup that's surrounding our optic nerve and all the various sensory mechanisms that make up a human being. And you know, that enters into us through those mechanisms and then it gets translated into a neurological representation that we call reality. So yes, how do I know that that out there is, is real, but is it because, is it because

it's a primary thing uninterrupted by some intermediary like alcohol or DMT or marijuana and somehow that direct connection makes it more real? No, because as you say, it's not direct. It's inner, it's, they're all sorts of intermediaries. They're serotonin and dopamine and testosterone and all this shit that's unavoidable. It's very, it's wildly from person to person. Exactly. And there's no direct relationship with reality at all.

That's one response. And the other response is, you know, man, I can't say anything more than find some DMT and smoke it as soon as you can. And then answer the question for yourself because the experience is so... You're going to get picked up by the NSA again. I'm already picked up. If I'm not picked up by the NSA, then the system is malfunctioning. No, I mean, taking out to the camp and all that.

Yeah. Hey, it's, it's not that bad a camp. They have a pretty good gym. Do they have canoes? Treadmills. Oh, treadmills. Well, that's something. They would have treadmills.

NSA loves treadmills. They don't have like, like wheels you can run on like a mouse. I saw this New Yorker cartoon, it's two mice, like with the running wheels and one mouse is running and the other one's just sitting on his wheel. And at the bottom it says, I had an epiphany. Beautiful. That's the story of my life. Give me a hammock.

I don't give a shit about anything else. Speaking of epiphanies, Terrence McKenna describes DMT as, I just read this as a niagras of epiphanous beauty. And that is a very apt description of this state. A niagras? Like the Niagara Falls. Yeah. Is that a word?

A niagras? He made it up. He was in chains. And you're like lying there on your back with your mouth open, trying to swallow it all? You just, it's so interesting because there's a sense of a thing or a presence or a thing being like, it's really weird, man. And I, you know, maybe it is because I'd read it, but it didn't seem like some placebo thing that I read.

You smoke it and there's an immediate sense of like something being like, just calm down. You know, there's a presence. There's a presence. Just, just relax, just take this. And then for me, it was a microtubules like just a, like thousands and thousands and I don't know, just an infinite amount of like, like mycelium or something, like coming out of nowhere and connecting with my chest and my, my chest. And then the sense of something pumping in, just love or this healing energy, just kind

of pumping in with almost like a doctor who has a person on a table being like calm, just calm, hold on, just calm down, just calm down, just calm down. And then, um, then you close, if you open your eyes, you see kind of like, uh, very heavy duty, like psilocybin, LSD level, warping of matter, uh, but it's much more beautiful and less like, you know, when you're on acid, it feels like your consciousness is kind of like bending or warping with the acid. That's not really happening. There's more of just like the observer of this beautiful sort of like warping sense, but

you don't want to look out of the world. You close your eyes and that's when you go into this just matrix of pre-creation. This kind of like pre-existent state of perfection that is somehow manifesting as us, as humanity. And, uh, it's just so tranquil and beautiful and peaceful and, uh, perfect and loving. And, and, but then there's like this, like at one point I'm like going through this weird maze of geometries and there's this corner and right around the corner, there's this like flickering light shooting out of this corner. And then it's like, you're suddenly just back on the couch.

And my, my friend told me, well, you know, that's the problem with DMT is that to get around that corner, you have to like inhale quite a bit of the smoke. It's like rocket fuel. If you don't, it burns off so quickly because it's already in your body that if you do it in the right way, and the reason people like ayahuasca is that apparently it can, you're more likely to turn that corner. And when you turn that corner, you like blast into some other completely alternate dimension, which, you know, maybe I wasn't ready for that alternate dimension, but I got what I

needed to get from the thing. Um, and, and also what's crazy about DMT is when you're, when you, 10 minutes afterwards, the hallucination stop 30 minutes after you still feel high in this beautiful way, four hours after you realize that you can't stop, you're still smiling. And then like the next day you wake up and you're happier than you've been in so long and you find yourself grasping for this. For me, I found myself grasping for the depression. Right.

I was looking for the darkness and it's gone. So you're like trying to grab onto this darkness, but there's no darkness. So now you're like, what the fuck? I can't find the sadness anymore because you've been shown this pre-existent state. The one question I had, I'm sorry for the DMT rant. No, that's beautiful. The side effect of DMT is that you don't never stop talking about it. That is a bad side effect.

But the first rule of DMT club. Yeah, you do feel like you've been inducted into some kind of secret society, but it feels like it feels like the answer to everything got whispered in your ear. And then you can't remember what that was, but the calmness and the sense of peace that came from the answer stays with you. It's like you're not allowed to like understand it completely yet that sense of like, oh, okay. I don't need to freak out anymore. Almost as though you were having a really terrible trip and someone that you loved came

up to you and was like, hey, man, you're just really high right now and you're going to be fine. You're really going to be fine. And then it's like, oh, and that doesn't go away and it hasn't gone away to this day. It's still with me. So I'm very surprised that's an illegal drug. Well, all the good drugs are illegal. You think about this, there's a chapter in my upcoming book about that.

I can't wait to read this. I can't wait to write it. Jesus Christ. I guess I should get work, stop talking about it and write the fucking thing. Uh, yeah, I just, I just talked to my editor a couple of weeks ago when I was in New York and, uh, it was a funny conversation because it was, the book is due tomorrow where tonight is September, whatever it is, and tomorrow's October 1st. It's due tomorrow, right?

So I, I had this lunch with him and I was like, yeah, I don't know. I've got the, you know, my dad's been sick and I'm, we're moving a lot and I'm doing this TV thing and I'm the, I'm really busy with stuff. And he just held up his hands and he's like, look, Chris, uh, I don't care. If you need me to pretend I care, I will. You know, some writers need that, uh, but I really don't. You just write it when you write it, you know, it'll be great and we'll publish it when you give it to us.

And it was like, wow, I've got the best editor in the world. Is the editor going to sign to you by the publishing company or you? It depends on your, your deal. In this case, he's the same editor who did sex at dawn at Harper, but he left Harper like two weeks after sex at dawn came out. And then this book went to auction, which is like every writer's wet dream where like different publishers are bidding on it. And, uh, he actually bid more than anyone else than I guess I can say this now because

it's all done. It's all done with him anyway. I mean, unless the other bids were way, way higher because he's such a cool guy. He's he, and he knows me, he knows how I work. He knows when I give him a manuscript, it'll be 80% like ready to roll. So when you say he bids on it, the publisher's bid, so it goes in a circle like, and your agent handles it. So like, you know, it'll be like, uh, you know, uh, uh, Random House will say 80,000

and then, uh, and they've got an hour. So then the agent sends out an email saying, okay, Random House offered 80,000. And then, you know, Simon and Schuster will say 90 and then it's got to be 10 grand each bid. Wow. And then like a hundred and then 110 and then it goes around and around and around until there's a bid and an hour passes and nobody tops it. Wow.

That is so cool that you get to experience that man. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Although I mean publishing is, is on the down slope. So, you know, it's kind of a bummer because, you know, we're, I mean, I'm incredibly grateful to be in a position where publishers are fighting to give me money. And then say, yeah, take as much time as you want to write the book.

That's even better. But, um, you know, my, my agent, when it all ended, my agent was like, you know, five years ago, it would have been twice this much money. All right. It's just like, Well, and it's also because your next book, you won't use a publisher. You'll just write it and then you'll sell it yourself and you'll make three times whatever they offer.

Well, I was thinking on this book to do that. Yeah. And it was funny because I told my agent, you know, below this number, I'll just publish it myself. Because we don't need publishers. You needed publishers when there were bookstores. Bookstores are gone. What do we need a publisher for?

Well, you know, the chain bookstores are gone, but the independents are doing well. And the, you know, what you need a publisher for is credibility. That's it. Right. But that's crap. That's crap on one level, but someone told me that. Another author told me that it's the credibility you get from going to book signings and having this thing.

Well, in the media response to it, if you're publishing a book with a major publisher, then Newsweek's going to look at it and, you know, you'll get that kind of, you'll get invited to the, maybe the daily show or whatever. So that matters. But the thing is it matters less and less all the time. And in my case, you know, the first book was published with Harper, Harper Collins, second book Simon and Schuster. At that point, it's like, I got the credibility, you know, I mean, two major publishers have

like paid me to write a book. So, you know, I'm not a shitty writer. So with that, I think you can go independent and people will say, okay, this is a serious writer. It's not someone who just like put up there. No, that's the dream. You can go Louis CK on your next one. That's exactly it.

And you just, the problem is you don't get that overhead. You don't get the initial. And you don't get all the bullshit of people telling you, you know, no, the cover has to be this or we're going to change the title to that. Isn't that wonderful? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's so beautiful.

It subverts all of that nonsense. I love it. It's great. And that's the, you know, I mean, the whole podcast thing, like we've, you know, people give a shit, you know, and you get to develop an audience and then you say, okay, I got a book and I've got an audience. I don't need you. Right.

Everything's going this way, man. I mean, it's so like on a super, um, we've done it almost two hours now and I don't want to end on a super capitalist, capitalist bent, but it's not capitalist because it's like in LA, there is a car service now. There's a, instead of like, if you wanted to go drinking or like a share thing, you would have to get a taxi. Yeah. So, which is the responsible way to drink.

If you're going to go drink, don't drive. That's retarded. What are you doing? You're going to buy a $6,000. Seriously? Yeah. It's like five or six grand. You're going to pay.

If you get a DUI, it's the best. It's the worst. You wake up in the morning, you're in jail and you've run over a couple of people. So don't drink, obviously it's, it's, uh, alcohol does not help you drive. You're funny. You're funny. Like within 10 minutes, you're like, go out and find some DMT, but don't drink and drive. No.

And I mean that. I'll say it. I know. Smoke DMT. Don't smoke DMT and drive. That's my public service job. And don't smoke DMT and drive either. No.

And then it would be impossible, though I have heard fighter pilots have done it, but I can't believe that. But, uh, uh, but, but, uh, so now, so, uh, the option, uh, before the internet was you would call a number to a cab company and the cab company would come and get you. And so then the internet comes out and there's an app that you can use where it, uh, tracks your GPS and you can press a button and a taxi comes to get you. But now there's a new thing in the big cities called Uber, which is for, uh, a limo. It's the same amount as the taxis, maybe $10 extra, maybe $10 extra.

You press a button within, I like, I couldn't believe it because my friends had been telling me about it and I was going to go out and drink. So I didn't want to drive. So I'm at my house and I'm like, well, I don't want to get a taxi. I'm going to try this Uber thing. Not by the way, guys, not sponsored by them at all. This is a non-sponsored, uh, story. I pressed a button on the thing within two minutes.

That's how eerie this is. Within two minutes. Like, you know how like your dog will shit and like within a second, there's flies all over it and you start thinking, like, are those flies standing by? Where are they? It's like the grass just covered in flies. Are we covered in a world of flies? Like, well, how did that happen that fast?

Like within two minutes, that is not an exaggeration. The thing's like in two minutes, your driver will beat you up. So you're the shit, the limo's the fly. Like there's just, I guess in LA, there's just a swarm of limos driving around neighborhoods waiting. Waiting. So suddenly within two minutes, you're in the back of a limo. They'll tell you how much it costs.

Uh, it's the exact same as a cab and the difference is when the tip is included in the amount, so the cab just drives you somewhere and you get out. Like your mom is dropping you off at a movie theater or something. And that's it. It's beautiful. That's technology. And I've heard that there's the same thing for like, uh, Airbnb. Have you done that?

I've heard it. I haven't done it, but I've heard about it. I just did it in Portland. It's great. It's fucking great. Same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The sharing, uh, economy through internet is definitely a cool thing. And it relates back to the hunter-gatherer, you know, right? Like share, take care of each other. It's a win-win. You know, I mean, And cut out the pig cause when you cut out the middleman, exactly. Cause when you have like a, uh, you know, not all, obviously not all

publishers are pigs, but, you know, when you, uh, quite often, gatekeepers, the gatekeepers inevitably take more than they deserve. Yeah. And maybe in the old days, when you didn't have access to a printing press and you couldn't like print and distribute your book, they had more value. But now their value is, is gone from being like this thing where it's like, Hey, I have access to a massive distribution mechanism and a, and a, and a machine that will print your book out.

It's gone from that to, I'll give you credibility, kid. Yeah. It's worse than that because back then they would not only give you, uh, the distribution and all that, they would cultivate writers. They would say, look, you're, okay, you're not that good now, but we think three novels in the future, you're going to be really good. And we'll take a loss on each of these first three novels and we'll send you on a speaking tour and there'll be a launch party.

And it's like, and now there's no speaking tour. There's no launch party. I'm supposed to hire my own publicist, but the royalty structure remains exactly what it was. So they're like, we're going to keep taking the same thing. And ebooks, they take, they take 25% and how does it work? You get, as an author, you get, uh, 17%. So you get 25% of the 70 that they get.

Cause Amazon or iTunes or whatever, it takes 30 off the top. So that's absolutely no extra cost to them, no distribution, no editing, no paper, no nothing, and you're getting 17% as a writer. What the fuck, man? It's so fucked up. Yeah. And paperbacks, you get 8%. So the idea is we, you know, there, there has to be a distribution

mechanism that's not based on those, uh, yeah, well, they're done. They're done. I mean, now with, you know, ebooks and, you know, whatever, even print on demand, you know, if you want a paperbook, you can print it, you know, and the author gets more money, everybody's happy and you don't have to like play, you know, like when I wrote Sex of Dawn, one of the, the, I mean, Ben left and then there were other editors, I had all these issues and stuff. But I remember during the, the review process, like they were, they said,

um, Penguin Poon Tang, you know, uh, I don't think we can really Penguin Poon Tang and I, and I asked my father, who's a writer, and my father's like, are you kidding? Keep that in there. Peng, that's hilarious. Penguin Poon Tang. Yeah. And now I get all these emails from people saying Penguin Poon Tang, you

cracked me up. That's funny. It's like, it's cool though. Isn't it cool to see how like you have this, you know, a recurring pattern that's happening in almost every arena, which is that these old, crusty ship bags, who've been trying to hold back, uh, art or hold back, whatever the creative flow is, are being subverted by technology. And I think that there is something beautiful about that, whether or not

it's going to end up okay. Who knows? We might have be sucking sarin gas by the end of the night. I don't know. But I think that I just take such delight in the watching people who have no real value, who have climbed up onto this totem pole and made it seem like they have some value. It's so fun to watch them fall down.

It's so fun. It's so fun to watch them be diminished. It's so fun to watch the air go out of them. It's like, no, man, the people are what's important. Not you. You're just some fucking raft. Right. You're a bouncy house.

Yeah. Don't get proud. Don't get proud about your, the ox you brought us. Yeah. It's a fucking bag of bones. It's a bag of bones. Dr. Chris Ryan, this has been one of my favorite podcasts ever. Uh, thank you.

Hi, 10. Hi, 10. Uh, how can people find you, sir? chrisryanphd.com. They could follow me on Twitter at chrisryanphd. Uh, my podcast is called 10 Gentially Speaking, which you've been on. How many times not twice? I think twice.

Yeah. Where is it located? It's on, you know, it's everywhere. iTunes, stitchyourferalaudio.com. It's on my site chrisryanphd.com. I'll put a link on my site, friends. And, uh, obviously, if you've never read, uh, Sex at Dawn, go and read that book because it is so fun to read and it really spins you.

You know who I met today? I was at, uh, my agency. It's, this is like such a Hollywood thing. I was at my talent agency. You know, and, uh, in the waiting area, I said, I, I turned around. There's this woman on the sofa and she said, oh, yeah, come sit with me on the sofa and I knew her like, who, who the fuck are you? I know you, I know you.

And I said, like, I know you. Who are you? She's the blonde on the office, the uptight bitchy blonde. What's her, I don't remember her name is, but. And she said, yeah, have you ever seen the office? Like, oh, the office. You're the like uptight, sexy, kind of sexy, kinky, you know, who's fucking Dwight and you know, like, oh, yeah, yeah.

So anyway, we started talking and she was like, uh, yeah, you know, I'm single for the first time since I was 25. I got to read your book and I gave her a card. Oh, shit. She's cool. She's really nice. It's a great book and it's a book that I really love the book because I read the book as a monogamous person and, uh, and it really like mixed me up.

But I've, I'm still a monogamous person yet. I feel like I'm monogamous, understanding more, well, that's the thing where it comes from and it's, it's, it's deep in my understanding of like what I'm engaged in, in relation to what people have engaged in for so long. And I think that's super cool. And I mean, you know, people say to me like, well, you know, you're, you know, isn't this an indictment of monogamy? Not at all.

My, you know, my parents are, have been monogamously married for 53 years. It's not that there's anything wrong with monogamy. It's just saying, this is why it's hard. Yes. It's not hard because you're a fuck up or you're immature or you have Peter Pan complex or, you know, it's hard because it's hard for homo sapiens to be monogamous. Right. So that's not at all saying there's anything wrong with choosing that.

It's just saying, Hey, good for you, man. I think that's why it's good for people in monogamous relationships to read, because it banishes that weird demon of like, you know, where, like, if you're like traditionally monogamous and you, you see your lover, look at someone else. Oh, and you'll feel you in jealousy and freak you out. But then when you understand the biology behind it, you realize like, Oh, of course she's going to look at someone totally normal. Let's work with that instead of freaking out about it.

And so it's strength for me, it has been that book and that idea behind the book has been one of the primary banishers of jealousy for my life because by reading the book, it's like, Oh, I get it. Like if someone's hitting on my girlfriend, it's not enough front against me. It's not someone hurting me. It's, it's just nature manifesting in a very normal way. And your girlfriend's incredibly hot. Let's face it.

She's beautiful. I love her. Yeah. I'll be hitting on her next time I say, please do. Yeah. Well, anyway, it's a great book, guys. Don't hit on my girlfriend. No, you care.

Guys, read, read Chris's book, Sex Adon, follow him on Twitter. And of course, listen to his podcast. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Awesome pleasure, man. That was Chris Ryan, everyone, the author of Sex Adon. If you like the Dugga Trussell family hour, why not give us a nice rating on iTunes? Hare Krishna. Thanks for listening.

See you soon. You're listening to my favorite Elliot Smith song, The Biggest Lie. Love you guys. Smith, not the name that you call me. You do make me want to die. Oh, I just told the biggest lie. I just told the biggest lie.