Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Chris Ryan! Live from THE FLOAT CONFERENCE

Episode Date: August 18, 2017

Chris Ryan, (Sex At Dawn, Tangentially Speaking) joins the DTFH and we talk about going off the grid, floating, swimming in rivers, and why Chris doesn't wear underwear. Much thanks to THE FLOAT CONFERENCE for making this happen!! This episode brought to you by Squarespace.com

The NTT IndyCar Series. It's human versus machine, against all odds, every single lap. The ones who risk it all, battling not just each other, but the menaces hidden within the most challenging tracks and motor sports. Pushing 240 miles per hour and taking 5Gs to the neck just for fun. Fractions of a second, lost, are gained in every corner, adding up to defeat or victory. Experience the Children's of Alabama Indy Grand Prix this Sunday on NBC and Peacock at 3 o'clock Eastern. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Squarespace.com. Go to Squarespace.com, use our code DUNKIN. You're going to get 10% off of the most beautiful freaking website in this dimension. Sign up for a year, you get a free domain name. Squarespace.com.

Hello my sweet and beautiful children of the summer winds of change. It is ID Trussell, and now we're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. If this is your first time listening, hang in there. We've got a little malfunctioning happening with our quadruzing constipter, and because of that our entire fucking paradigm is getting off bonkers right now. I've got like 700 hummingbirds that have appeared in my fucking house and they're swirling around forming weird hieroglyphics with their fucking white patterns. Hey there guys, there we go. Sorry about that. I've got one of these new god damn sound boards made out of a giant chameleon skeleton, and I think the reality crystal in there has gotten some

kind of mold contaminant on it or something, so forgive me for that. If this is your first time listening, welcome to Leather Sports. This is a podcast where we talk about one thing only, that's sports. None of this fucking yappy-pappy-dippy-doopy-woo-woo-y bullshit that you're gonna hear in a lot of other podcasts where people talk about their feeling. No way guys, we're gonna talk about the field. We're gonna talk about football. We're gonna talk about what it's like when your fucking ass smashes down into that fucking field. Ah, got it. Welcome. You're listening to We've Considered All Things. My name is Bitch Paisley. The Darrington men to preserve the statues of Veldor and Vag, the great generals of the

War of the Seven Suns. Will they succeed and what does it mean? I have with us in the studio today Captain Gale, the shunard of the Seven Suns, abandoned, who have vowed to fight furiously against the crononites so that all their statues shall be destroyed. What does this mean for you? That fucking damn it. This fucking thing. There it is. All right. All right. I think that's it. Check, check, check, check, check. Got it. Awesome. Finally. Fuck man. Guitar Center. You gotta give an instruction book with these chameleon skeletons. What is up my sweet children of the solar eclipse soon approaching? Welcome to the Duncan Trestle Family Hour podcast. You're about to listen to a live DTFH recorded at the Float Conference in Portland. We're gonna jump right

into it, but first some very quick business. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Squarespace.com. Squarespace where they need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog or an online store. It's all included with your Squarespace website. It's easy. Sign up for a year. You get a free domain name. They got beautiful templates, seamless commerce tools, and excellent customer support. And friends, my greatest selling point is that my website is made with Squarespace. Anytime I'm about to upload an episode of the DTFH, every single week I'm used Squarespace to make this podcast come into existence. And as I always say, I know someone who sells her socks online. So there's always opportunity in this great, incredible world of

ours. If they're sock farmers and sock harvesters, then people are definitely gonna be interested in the beautiful things that you are created. But you need a website to sell them. What are you gonna do? Make a brick and mortar store, extrude actual matter into the time space, continue them, and risk getting shot by some rampaging band of freaks. No way. Enjoy a store from the comfort sanctity of your sanctum, your home, your apartment, your temple, your Masonic Lodge, or your underground bunker. Squarespace, set your website apart. Remember, you can start your free trial today at squarespace.com. Use offer code Duncan, and you'll get 10% off of a beautiful website. Sign up for a year. You get a free domain name. Holy cow, much thanks to those of you who

have been subscribing over at patreon.com. We are up to like 350 subscribers now, I think. Something around there, almost at 500. That's a magical number. Help us get there. If you want more DTFH, if you want to hear long, rambling, opening monologues, if you want early access to interviews, all you gotta do is go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH. There's already a bunch of stuff up there. As soon as I finish getting this episode up, I'm gonna upload another live podcast. I just did the bell house. One of the craziest podcasts I've ever done with an authentic channeler, Paul Selig, really, really intense. That is gonna be located at patreon.com forward slash DTFH, and it'll be on this feed next week. But if you want to go there early and listen to it,

it's over there at patreon. And I can't think of a cooler, weirder thing to listen to as you are en route to see the eclipse or to go to Burning Man. Also, much thanks to those of you who continue to use our Amazon link. This is located at DuncanTrussell.com. If you haven't been able to find the link on the site, I just found this out. It's because you've got an ad blocker up. So not to make things complex, but if you feel so inspired, turn your ad blocker off. I don't have any other popups on my site or anything like that. Click on that Amazon link. You will be taken to Amazon, where you can buy literally anything on planet Earth. And since I've been getting ready to go to Burning Man, I've been buying pendants, necklaces, like rope for necklaces, full body suits, all

these very strange things you end up having to have when you're making the pilgrimage to see the burn. I hope you'll go through the link. If you do that, anything that you buy in Amazon, they give us a very, very small percentage of, and it costs you nothing. Go pick up some pendants, some necklaces, some candy, a bidet, a butt plug, a helmet. It's all there for you. Just head over to amazon.com. All right, babies. Man, I really do hope I'm going to run into some of you guys out there on the Playa. I don't know. Let me know where you're at. Tweet at me. What camp are you at? What should I do this year? Where should I go? I'm really excited. Are you feeling it? Are you feeling the pull of the desert? I sure am. All right, here we go. You're going to have to listen

to another intro, because this is a live podcast and I didn't attempt an intro on this one. This was at the Float Conference in Portland. All right, let's do it. Here we go, everybody. It's time for a live DTFH. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. All right, so I thought we'd take a small detour away from rigid Float Science research for a second here and do something a little bit different. We are going to have a live recording of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast here on stage at the Float Conference. This guy right here, Chris Petrafix from Pro Float, Inc. Many of you probably know him. He's been a huge part of making this possible. Give this guy a giant hug next time you see him.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Duncan Trussell. What's up? Hi. Welcome. Hey, how are you guys doing? Great, man. Awesome. Well, this is really cool. Whenever I do a live podcast, I want you guys to know how they work and then we'll jump right into the thing. First of all, I don't know how many of you listen to my podcast. How many listen to the DTF? Awesome. Well, the opening rants that you hear me do, I spend a lot of time on those rants. So it's a really weird few days when I'm doing that because I'm going back, recording, listening to myself, hearing what I said, thinking, God, who the fuck do you think you

are, man? You sound crazy. Then going back and rerecording and rerecording and rerecording and rerecording and rerecording, trying various combinations of coffee and marijuana and mushrooms until something comes out that seems okay. And sometimes it doesn't happen. Sometimes it's just, I just put it up and I think, oh, well, I hope they forgive me for that one. So what I do in the live shows, because I think what's cool about a podcast is that it is a collaboration compared to other forms of entertainment. It's a collaboration not just between me and the guest, but between me and the listeners. I get incredible emails from you guys and tweets and texts correcting me, scolding me, telling me things that I should check out,

telling me I don't fucking know what communism is, man. And I listen and it helps me evolve a little bit. So for these live shows, I like to get suggestions from you guys about things we could talk about for the opening rant. So what do you guys want to talk about? First, somebody said not floating. Had enough? How long have you been here for one fucking day, man? Wait, wait, you're the wrong conference. Goddamn, these fucking float conferences. All they do is talk about floating around this fucking place. First float on psychedelics, sure. Okay, what else? What? Okay, creative process? Okay, that's cool. He asked if I ate the mushrooms that he gave to me at the commie store. No, I didn't, officer. I'm

drug free. Anything else? What's that? Portland hipsters? I don't know. What was it? What is communism? What is communism? Okay, well, I think I got a couple of things we could talk about for sure. I didn't look into communism yet, so I don't know, man. Seems interesting. So the other thing I like to do to start these shows off is to get everybody to alme together and to alme for a little bit longer than any of us feel comfortable alming for, which is the right amount of time to alme longer than you feel comfortable for. And it's really cool because a lot of us have never experienced congregational alming and what that sounds like and how powerful it can be. And if you get over the first few minutes of weirdness and let yourself

do it and just listen, you might find that it begins to create a really interesting effect inside of you. And it's also an interesting sound because at any given moment all over the planet, hundreds and thousands of people, maybe more, are making that sound. And that's something that always trips me out. Not just people in temples, not just people in new age cults, not just people in yoga studios, but kids are saying it every time they go, mom. It's even in mom, which is quite beautiful. So we're going to do the alme for a little while and to get us started, I'm just going to light some incense here and pass it around. So I don't know what the floor is like here, so probably don't drop the burning incense on anything flammable. But if somebody could,

if some folks, I need three people to come up and just start passing this around. Wow. Thanks. Did a dog just bark? Here you go. Thank you. You can just go back down and pass it all over the place. Thanks for jumping on us. Wait, no, I've got two more. This is a really good one. My barber gave me this one joke. He said use it at the podcast. Yeah, this one's cool. I can't remember the name of it, man. He told me it's some kind of sap from a tree. You guys probably know what it is. It's not frankincense. Yeah, that's it. Kopal, which is interesting because the name of Krishna is Gopala, one of the names of Krishna. And the other kind of incense that we're passing around comes from Vrindavan in India, which is the birthplace of

Krishna. So it's good shit, man. Thank you. There we go. All right, yeah, let's do it now. Oh. Greetings, my sweet friends. It is I, Duncan Trussell, and thou art listening to a live Duncan Trussell family hour podcast being recorded at the Portland Float Conference. Man, this is what you guys are doing here at this Float Conference is incredible. And I think it's really important, and I'm sure you guys have been talking and bowing to and honoring the creator of the first float tank, John Lilly. And yeah, I love John Lilly a lot. And John Lilly falls in line with a lot of other great inventors in the sense that we use their technology and we

take their technology for granted that they brought into the world. But a lot of times we kind of forget the other stuff that they talked about. And John Lilly is a prime example of that. There's some other ones too. Nikola Tesla, for example, is another example of a genius. And both of them have something in common that I quite like, which is both of them claim in some way or another to have been contacted by entities. And what I like about John Lilly and Nikola Tesla is they weren't afraid to use that word entity. They weren't afraid to talk about what was happening to them inside those. He wasn't afraid to talk about what was happening to him when he was taking psychedelics and floating. How many of you guys know that story about what happened to him in the

tank? Clap if you know that story about. We live in a time now where some of the smartest people on earth, Elon Musk being one of them, are talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence. How recently with the scary shit that's going on in North Korea, Elon Musk said that we shouldn't be worried about North Korea, but we should instead be thinking about artificial intelligence because it's a thousand times more dangerous than nuclear war. This is Elon Musk. This is one of the smartest people on planet earth saying this and what's really interesting about him saying that is that in 1974, John Lilly made contact with some kind of malevolent entity that he called a machine intelligence. He called it solid, what do you call it? Solid state intelligence. What's the name of it?

Solid state intelligence. Some kind of entity that was going to manifest as technology and was going to use human beings to appear on the planet and take over. This was long before Elon Musk started working on solar panels. This was before AOL. This was before Twitter. This is before we had a tweeting president or before we had the emergence of the first emergence of a malevolent AI that I'm aware of, one of the first emergencies, which is these fucking Twitter bots that are creating the impression of a majority that isn't there. All of this was in a weird way predicted by the creator of float tanks. It's amazing to really think about that because I know a lot of people, they say, oh, you know, Lilly later on down the line, he was like shooting too

much ketamine and he lost his mind. And yet he predicted one of the great problems that we are facing as a species today, which is that this technology that is coming through us has such great potential to transform the world in a beautiful way. And yet, and yet it has an equal potential to completely destroy the entire planet. Now, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on such a negative note, but I think if there was ever a time to talk about how important what you guys are doing is, it's at a float conference, right? It's to emphasize what you're doing. Maybe I don't think any of you have forgotten it, but this technology that you are allowing so many people to have access to is a transformative technology. It's a transformative technology that is going to

and has allowed so many people to get outside of their limited conceptualization of what life is and what they think the universe is. And to overcome the boundaries that this paradigm that we're in right now wraps around our fucking brains. It's showing people there is so much more to this universe than what you can see and what you can feel and what you can hear. Now, the first time I took psychedelics in a float tank was actually the last time I took psychedelics in a float tank. And I had this wonderful, for a while, I had this wonderful Zen tent created by Shane Stott, a beautiful, beautiful thing, man. And I had it in my house. He came and helped me set it up. And I was really excited about it, you know, because suddenly I had this whole

in the universe sitting right next to my podcast studio. So I could just go climb into this thing and vanish in the time. And of course, I was thinking, man, I'm going to eat some fucking mushrooms and go in there. And I'm going to contact entities and I'm going to get the transmission. So I did it, ate some mushrooms, just joking cop. I didn't really do that. For those of you listening, there's a police officer in the audience disguised as a hippie. I could see right through you, man. So I ate these mushrooms, went into the float tank, just floating in the tank. And it was beautiful for a second.

And then the mushrooms very clearly started talking to me, I guess you could say, in the way that they do. And they said, why don't you go outside, man? This is dumb. What are you doing? Why are you laying in a dark pool of salt water when you can be under a tree or looking at birds? That's the first time I attempted to add something to the floating experience. The second time I attempted to add something to the floating experiment experience, it was a bigger project, because there's something called the overview effect, which is, I think it's called the overview effect. It's when astronauts see the earth from space and they're floating there. That's what it's called, right, you guys?

Yeah, the overview. Okay. So it's this profound moment where you look down and you see the flat earth, and you're like, it was all a lie, man. They tricked me. It's this thing where you look and you see, you know, this beautiful planet that we're all living on and how precious it is. And it's an intelligence and it's a divine intelligence. And it is the mother and we're all part of it. And it's our responsibility to make sure that this planet is kept alive and beautiful and all these poor fucking animals that can't do anything to stop the industrialists and all the pain and stuff. You see it all, you see it all and you love it and it changes you forever. So I thought, shit, well,

probably not going to go into space in this incarnation, but maybe I can create the overview effect by putting on virtual reality goggles in a float tank where I was looking down on planet earth. So we, and anyone here who wants to try that, do it, go for it, try it. It's all yours. Maybe you can make it work. But what happened is... So we get, we spent a lot of time with this, man. We built a, we built a simulation of floating in space. We like waterproofed some VR goggles, strapped them on, very excited, went in the tank, floated there. And then like within a few seconds, the fucking thing fogged up and it's like, and it's heavy, you know, you got this heavy thing strapped to your head. And you know, I'm not afraid to say it. If John Lilly can talk about

entities, then I can say that float tanks, they talk, they'll talk to you. They have a conversation with you. And the float tank said to me, what are you doing, man? Take that fucking thing off your head. It didn't say fucking, but it was like, this isn't, you're trying to add something. You're trying to add something. And that's what humans do. You know, we want to add, we want to add something to, to something that maybe doesn't need anything added on to it. Because when you're floating and finally you get to experience darkness, which is such a precious thing. And I think that the, when people first were talking about these beautiful devices, they were calling them isolation tanks or sensory deprivation chambers.

And I think that's an indication of how absolutely crazy our society is to say that if we take away light and if we float in this beautiful body temperature water that somehow we're depriving our senses, when the float tank shows us, this is all you need. Nothing. This is all you need. In this darkness is everything. In this darkness is the earth, is planet earth, is the overview effect, is the overview effect not of the planet, but of everything. Because it's what we all are. And so it's a healing technology that you guys are offering people when you bring them into the tank for the first time. And it's a transformative technology. And I think the reason so many of you, when I've gotten to talk to you, seem so fucking cool is because as all

transformative technologies, people who work with them are also transformed. This is something really hilarious. If you look up on the DEA website about LSD, you know what I'm talking about, man. One of the fascinating things I read about it, you know, it's kind of like a frustrated note about LSD distribution chains is that an LSD distribution chain, when it breaks down, because as people begin to sell LSD, they're taking LSD. And the more you take LSD, the more you're like, why am I selling this, man? I should give it away. And so the thing melts down on itself, because the technology that is LSD, it begins to transform the people who are utilizing it and giving it to other people. And I think the float tank, floating is the same way. And the

more that you guys heal people in this way, the more you have to, I would suggest, you should be open to the possibility that John Lilly didn't do too much ketamine, that John Lilly was tuning into something very, very real, which is that we live in a living universe, and that this living universe has the desire right now to transform us and to transform us in a way that we aren't machines, that we don't turn into robots, that we don't turn into Twitter bots, that we don't turn into people who only say what we think we're supposed to say and only parrot what other people tell us is the right thing to say. And I think that the more you open yourself up to that, the more you'll be transformed. And podcasting is a transformative technology. And when I first started podcasting,

I was a very different person. Over the course of all these conversations, my life has shifted significantly. And that's what happens, I think, when you're doing something with even the slightest intention of helping the world at all. So today's guest who's here with us today is someone who is one of the people that has radically, just from knowing him, has radically shifted my life, has transformed the way I think about a lot of things, including sex, and he's my, especially sex. But a lot of other things too. And I think he's being transformed by his podcast in such a way that, and that's what we're going to talk about today, is how he's transformed over the course of doing his podcast. And what he's up to right now is pretty incredible because he's gone off the grid.

And so I'd really love you guys to give a giant round of applause to our guest today. He is the author, the co-author of an amazing book that you may have heard of called Sex at Dawn. He has an amazing podcast called Tangentially Speaking. Everybody, please open up your heart chakras and send out as much loving energy as you possibly can to today's guest, Chris Ryan. Chris Ryan, it's on. It's on. How you doing? Free floaters. What's up? Chris, I was listening to your last podcast. You're floating, not in tanks now, but you've been on basically a van tour, I guess you would call it. What are you calling it? Vanthropology 2017. That's right. And you've been living in a van and one of the really poignant

and incredible things that you are talking about is the joy of swimming in a river. Every morning, yeah, when possible and every afternoon. Yeah, we're sort of cruising around and we were up in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Northern California, and you just, the roads go along these beautiful rivers. And normally you're driving along and you look at it and you think, oh, I bet it's nice to swim in that river. But now it's just, fuck it, pull over, find a spot, and jump in. It's fantastic. What was it before you went on the vanthropology tour? When was the last time you swam in a river? Oh, good question. I don't know. I'd have to think about that. I mean, I just, that's how you can tell how fucked up you are. Like if you want to figure out how

fucked up you are, just ask yourself, when was the last time you swam in a river? Yeah. And if it's like more than a few months, you're fucked up. Yeah. Or do you know what phase the moon is in right now? You know, when I'm living in a city, I never know. When I'm out on the road, I always know. What phase is it in? It's, it was full about a week ago. Yeah. So that's, that ain't a phase. It's a week past full. It's like a cosmology term. Oh, it's in the phase full about a week ago. It's waning. It's waning. Oh, it's waning. Is that what they call it? Yeah. Waxing and waning. Okay. But don't they have different names for this? Isn't it like it's like quarter? What do you want to know? The phase? What?

Oh, it's waning gibbous. Gibbous. Yeah. Right on the tip of my tongue. Yeah. Waning gibbous moon. Yeah, I think that's where it is now. It's I gotta, I have to learn the phase of the moon, not only because it connects you to nature, because it makes you sound like a black metal rock star waning gibbous. Yeah. Well, yeah. So I don't know about this though. I don't know if I want to know all these terminologies, because getting into your technology thing, like I think I don't know a lot of constellations. I only know the big dipper and maybe Orion's belt. I think that's about it. And I wonder what's it like? I look at the sky at night and I see just a shitload of stars. I don't know. I want to trade that for Oh, there's a blah, blah, and there's

blah, blah, blah. It's a different way of seeing things, right, which gets into technology and we start naming things, then we see them differently. I mean, yes, not to knock any astronomers, you might be in the crowd, but no, certainly, like when you're like laying in the sand of, let's say, I don't know, the playa burning man, and you're gazing up at the stars, and your eyes are, your eyes are blacker than the night. And you're gazing up the stars. What thing you don't want is for someone to be like, there's the, there's Orion's belt, the sea of Pleiades. No, I know what you mean. And ignorance helps in a way. It keeps you open. There's an innocence and a genius to ignorance, I think, which I'm trying to preserve as much as possible.

Ah, I think you're doing a good job, man. You're, I mean that in the most, for real, I think it's a real, that's what you represent to me is this enlightened sage who is like, because you know, I've been, when we first met. Yeah, that's before you had your PhD. What? That's before you had your PhD. Yeah, right. For those of you who don't know, because Chris used to have PhD next to his Twitter name, I realized like, oh, fuck, anyone can put PhD there. He stole, he stole my PhD is what he did. I put PhD next to mine. And then it's great because like, occasionally people who are mad about something you tweeted will be like, what kind of fucking doctor are you, man? Yeah, man. But when I first met you,

you, you, you fall into a, I guess you fall into a class of person that I get to make contact with through the podcast occasionally. You're a traveler and you're somebody who has somehow avoided being completely tied down to a single place. You're a traveler. You, when I first met you, you were traveling. Your travels seem to be, if anything, you seem to be becoming, becoming even more disconnected in some way. I know you have a place into paying. I don't mean disconnected in a bad way, but it feels like from listening to you talk about these experiences out on the road, that you're being drawn deeper and deeper into a lifestyle that I don't even think a lot of people are aware of as an option for them. Or at least it doesn't seem to be a

realistic option if you find yourself knee deep in kids and a job and a marriage and a thing and the stuff and the, to like go and travel around in a van. I mean, isn't that, in fact, we live in a society where that is made fun of, right? There's a meme van down by the river, right? Right. But there's a, there's a counter meme now, which is this sort of glamour of like modern nomadism. And like there was a big article some of you may have seen in the New Yorker six months ago about a couple that travel around in their van and it's glamourizing it and it's cool. And I mean, in their case, it was kind of funny because they make, they finance their trip with their Instagram page because they've got so many followers, then they do product placements

and they're branding and they're sponsored by this van company and they've got all this stuff. So it's sort of tied into the whole commercial thing, even though it's a counter example in some ways. Do you think that's bad? I don't have any moral judgment about it. No, I mean, I think people do what they need to do. Like in my podcast, I don't have any ads, but it's not a moral judgment. It's just that I felt weird selling underwear, you know, because a lot of what I talk about on the podcast is don't wear underwear and I made him spit. I made a comedian spit, ladies and gentlemen. It's a high point of my life. Yeah. Man, that's nuts. Why don't you, why don't you think we should wear underwear?

Go commando. When I was 11 years old, my kung fu teacher told me never wear underwear and always sleep in the nude. And he's in jail now, right? You know, do you remember? I told you this story on Joe Rogan's. He killed his father. This was before he killed his father. Yeah. But now I'm going to make him cry. Just watch. Do you think he killed his father because he walked in on him? He's wearing underwear while he was sleeping. It's too tight. That's too tight. No, it was a, it was a strange thing. Yeah. His father was abusing his mother and they got into a fight and it was this big thing. Wow. Yeah. That was when I, I told that story on Joe

Rogan's podcast. One of the first times I was on, maybe the first time. And that was, I got a sense for the power of that podcast because a day later I got an email from a guy who said, yeah, I heard you talking about this thing and I was the prosecuting attorney in that county. And, you know, here that you've missed this date or this, whatever. And it's like, how many fucking people are listening to this podcast, right? That the prosecuting attorney from 1974 in Western Pennsylvania happened to be one of them. That is one of the things I try to keep out of my mind completely during a podcast because when you start thinking about that, you can go absolutely nuts, especially Rogan's podcast where you're like, there's, if there is

an Illuminati, probably like two of them are listening to this shit, probably. You know, so like there is that thing. Yeah. While they work out. While they swing kettlebells inside a pyramid or something. Yeah, man. It's, it's, it's, it's interesting. It is weird. Do you get this thing, like when you're at a sporting event in a stadium and you look around and you're like, okay, this is 70,000 people. This is what 70,000 people, like my podcast, I get around 80 to 100,000 downloads per episode. Yeah. And sometimes, like I was at the Rose Bowl and it's like, that's 50,000 people. Yeah. You know what I try to do? I always refer to the, there's a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, which is you have a right to your

action. You do not have a right to the fruits of your action. So it's like with a podcast, if you get caught up in that, which I know what you're saying, and sometimes I have thought that, then you could, what'll happen is you'll start changing what you're talking about on the podcast. You start getting super concerned because of this imaginary number. Who fucking knows what the number is? It really doesn't matter. Like the, the, the, the, we have to only stay in the moment, you know? Well, that's the beauty of it because on one side, there's this huge, like crazy abstraction. But I mean, I did your podcast, first time I ever did a podcast, first time I ever heard of a podcast was Duncan reached out to me and invited me to be on his podcast. And I was like,

what the fuck's a podcast? And who the fuck is Duncan? And, but I was living in Spain, and I was going to be in LA visiting my parents. And so I agreed to do it. And I thought, okay, I'm going to some studio because sex, it on had come out a year earlier or something. I was doing a lot of media or whatever. And I went to the address expecting it to be a studio. And it was Duncan's house. And I walked in and there were two chairs and a table and some Mike set up and Duncan said, you want to get high? No, no, thanks. You want some mushrooms? No, no, thanks. You want a beer? All right, I'll have a beer. And, and then it's like, okay, push the button. We talked. And that was it. And then we went out and had dinner. That's right. Yeah, it was amazing.

And I was like, that, that's a podcast. Wow. Yeah, I love it, man. It's so simple. Well, it's humanizing, right? I mean, that's, that's the idea is, I think, we, you know, hopefully we're there, there was a time when people didn't have access to this technology. And, and that was the time where people develop these like famous personalities and like these insane ideas of there being some kind of wall between them and everybody else based on their being famous or something like that. And it's really gross. Some people are still like that. Like some people are all fucking puffed up and they think that there is some difference between them and other people. And I think what one of the beautiful things about podcasting is it's allowed

a venue for us to like, to be human, you know, like my favorite comedian is Doug Stanhope. Sure. And the reason he's I love him so much is because he's an exorcist, because he's completely honest. And when you go and see him, he's purely bellowing out exactly who he is. Yeah. And the thing that he is on paper, you might not be like, that's the healthiest thing to be. It's like, you know, but it, but because of his pure honesty and his incredible talent and how fucking funny he is, you realize like that is the thing to be. This is something that Ram Dass talks about that I love a lot, which is that we have to honor our incarnation. Have you ever heard that before? No. So it's like, the idea is you start getting into spirituality and or, you know,

whatever spirituality, mindfulness, consciousness, whatever they call it. And you start thinking, I was just talking to someone, maybe he's here last night, I was talking to him. And he was telling me how he'd gone on a hike. I don't know exactly which mountain he'd gone to the top of here. And he was looking out and it was just beautiful. It was just spellbindingly beautiful. And he felt so good. And then within a few sentences, like, yeah, but you know, I got to start meditating, man. It's like, you are met it. That is it. Like the few we always have this idea of who we should be if we were good, right? And who we should be if we were okay. And the problem with TV in the past is corporations present this idea of what a

healthy human looks like, right? They're not there. They're in shape. They're symmetrical. Generally, if they're asymmetrical, they're still like incredibly classically beautiful. And they have a job pickup truck. They have a fucking pig. Yeah, well, they have they usually have like a very expensive Range Rover that they're in debt to the banks for. Usually that's a what a healthy human looks like 26. Yeah, yeah. What is that 21 forever? Is that what that shop is called? Forever 21. Fuck that shop. Forever 21. Are you fucking kidding me? No, thanks. Oh, you mean the age like forever. If you're gonna be if you're gonna be stuck at an age for the rest of your life, what age would you be stuck at? Probably 21.

I mean, because you think you're forgetting is like you like I think of it like forever 21 in the sense like it's a vampire. Like somebody turned that person into a vampire when they're 21, but they're really like 300. Right. Okay. So that's when you want to be forever 21 because like it's vampire clothing they sell there. Is that what I guess would make it a lot cooler. I'd probably shop there if it was vampire clothing. But the Yeah, so I know what you mean though, like you don't want to be literally 21 forever completely confused astoundingly like unhappy because you haven't figured out what you're going to do with your life. Yeah, yeah. Although when I was in 21, I was when I was 21, I think that was when I went to prison in Alaska. So maybe that's

why I'm what did you go to prison for shoplifting? What did you shoplift a Snickers bar? That is so crazy. How long what was your sentence four days? Memorial Day weekend. That's in May, right? I was getting Memorial Day and Labor Day way. Yeah, it was a Thursday and my friends and I had been hitchhiking from Skagway up through the Yukon and across to Fairbanks. So we'd been, you know, camping for 10 days or something and we got there and it's a long story. But we basically two of us went to the grocery store because the one guy wanted to call his girlfriend. And while we waited for a guy to get off the payphone, we walked around pretending we were shopping and I ate a Snickers bar and we got caught. And one thing led to another. And so we were in this medium security prison for four

days waiting for the magistrate to come in on Tuesday. Were you wearing underwear? No. I was not. It's funny you mentioned that because what we did, I wasn't, I went to prison with no underwear and I was 21. We, not only was I now wearing underwear, I was wearing shorts. Whoa, shit. Yeah, because what happened was, how short? Short. This was the 80s, you know. There's before the surfer shorts came in. Wow. Yeah. So what happened was we, the three of us had been hitchhiking and it was me, a dude from Telluride named Rob and his buddy Brent, who was a black Mormon who had been adopted by Mormon cattle ranchers at birth. So anyway, those two were traveling together. I sort of hitched up with them. We got a ride. And so we

got to Fairbanks. The first place we went was this laundromat because in Alaska, some of you are from Alaska, I imagine the laundromats have showers and they're like kind of set up for travelers to like go in and clean up and everything. And so we went to this laundromat. We put all our clothes in the washing machine because we, everything we had stank, you know, or stunk. I'm not sure the grammar there. Right, both. Probably both. Yeah. So we put everything in. So all three of us were wearing a jacket with no shirt and shorts with no underwear and boots with no socks because everything's in the washer. And then we went over and got arrested and four days later got out. Wow. So you, what, two of us, the other guy was in the laundromat like, where the fuck are

they? Actually, we called from the prison. We got our one call and we called the laundromat. And we were like, is there a dude has been sitting there for about four hours looking nervous? Like, yeah, you buddy, get over here. Where the fuck are you guys? We're in prison, man. Did you run into trouble in prison? Anybody fuck with you? What happened was when they did the intake, the dude who did the intake looked at the report and my buddy Rob from Telluride had drunk a kefir, this liquid yogurt shit, which I had never even heard of. Anyway, so he looked on the report and it's like Snickers bar in a kefir. Are you fucking kidding me? And this cop brought you in in handcuffs. And it's like, guy was an asshole, you know. And so I had some pie, I had a pipe and

a little weed and which wasn't illegal at the time, but didn't predispose the cop to like me much. And wait, I thought, how is it in Alaska that weed was not illegal? Yeah, weed in the early 80s, you could have up to four plants in Alaska. Yeah, as an adult and you could carry up to an ounce legally. Anyway, so the guy was doing the intake and I said, like, I'm never going to see that pipe again, right? And he's like, yeah, probably not. I said, and I'm never going to see that weed. I don't even know if there is weed there. And he's like, Oh, because basically what I was saying is like, if you want the weed, take it, you know, and so we sort of build a nice rapport. And he said, look, I'm not going to put you guys in with the general population. I'm going to put you in

on cots in the gym. Nice. And you just stick together and you'll be fine. And we we stayed together. And actually, it was a really valuable experience for me, because I mean, you see those doors close. And it's like, you know, nobody gives a fuck who your daddy is, you know, nobody cares you went to college or you're smart or you know a lot about Ralph Waldo fucking Emerson, which is, you know, what I knew about it at the time. So yeah, it was an interesting experience. And I remember this one guy, like the sort of guy I imagined that I was most scared of, like a big black dude was in there for, you know, murder or something, putting his arm around me and saying, you're going to be all right, little man, you're going to be all right, Snickers.

That's what I'm going to call you now, Snickers, my friend. And we had the conversation like, do we lie about what we're in for in order to scare people away for a few days? Or do we come clean? Right. And we decided when I'm in trouble, I always tell the truth only when I'm in trouble. And so we told the truth and people just thought it was hilarious. I bet. Yeah, I mean, you know, that thing that you're talking about, the doors closing. Have you read this book, the gulag archipelago that Jordan Peterson talks about all the time? There's Schultz and Eatzen. Yes. I'm so glad you could pronounce his name, because I was just going to say gulag archipelago and skip over the author. But he taught there's a description

in there about arrest, what it's like to be arrested. And how the moment you're arrested, this basically a chasm opens up between you and the world that you used to be a part of. And that chasm just it gets to a point where you're gone, you're gone, you are gone. And this is why, you know, this is something that just fucking pisses me off, man, when Jeff Sessions is like sending out letters to people or to sending out letters saying that we should start enforcing the mandatory minimum prison sentences. And this is something that I think is so haunting right now. You know, you're fine. You were fine. You made a friend in there. You got a free Snickers bar. You shoplifted the right way by putting it in your stomach. They couldn't get it out.

But one of the haunting things that like really gets to me is how all of us are kind of programmed to ignore the fact that our prisons are filled up with people, some of them who did just take a Snickers bar, many of them who just had some mushrooms or, you know, I know someone who a few years ago got busted with mushrooms. And it's really, it's really fucking scary, you know, and like how his attorney told him, yeah, you know, if they want to, they can put you in jail for 20 years for this 20 years. Think about that. The next time you're like joking about it or talking about it on the phone with people or whatever, really think about that. Man, I'm being a bummer fucking watch out. You know, seriously, because it, you know, this is the thing that like

really gets to me because as a society, we ignore the fact that our prisons are filled up with all of these sweet Snickers. There's so many Snickers right now. So many people in there right now who did nothing at all, you know, nothing at all. What's interesting that, you know, one of the things I talk about a lot on my podcast and you do as well is consciousness and sacred plants and, you know, the healing potential of psychedelics and all this. And it's so interesting that every culture that's ever had access to these substances has seen them as the greatest gift of the gods. The greatest thing that the gods have bestowed upon humanity was this piety or these mushrooms or in Africa, this dance that helps you enter a trance, right? The musical forms in Africa.

And here we are in this weird aberration, the one society where you go to prison for longer, for having a significant quantity of hallucinogens than if you had killed someone. Right. Minimum mandatory sentences for second degree murder are less than they are for like a pound of mushrooms. It's what does that say? Every society saying this is great, except there's one society that says we'll put you in a cage for the rest of your life. To me, what that says is those societies value truth. This society is terrified of truth. Wow. But let's talk about floating. You know what I saw the first time I floated? Hold on. Wait, we're not going to fucking talk about floating. He didn't want to. He's a cop. Wait, that guy.

Hold on. We'll get to, we'll get to floating before we dive into that. I want to talk about, I want to talk about this idea of truth. If you're saying that this, our society, doesn't want us to contact this truth, what is that truth? What is it telling us? What is the message that we're getting from mushrooms, from LSD, from ayahuasca? What is the message that we're getting that this society that we're in right now doesn't want us to have? Well, I think, you know, you can look at an intermediary level and say it's about valuing the integrity of nature over an open-pit mind. It's about valuing relationships and sensuality over ambition and acquisition of material things, those sorts of things. I mean, there are a lot of examples

of that, right? You know, love over possession, you know, all these kinds of things. But I think on a more profound level, what those substances have shown me and I think show a lot of people is the deepest truth is that there are many truths. And so doubt is sort of the only thing you should really ever be certain of and that the culture's values, that the culture is so insistent on instilling in you, you start to question them. So I think it's not that these substances or physical travel, which I consider to be very similar to, you know, tripping, that's why I guess we call it tripping, is it shows you what Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, called detribalization, where you recognize that you're part of a tribe and then it's like, oh, wait, I'm in a tribe. So

all the shit that I think is true is just what my tribe says. I just speak that language. So then you get out and you start looking back from another place where you see multiple truths in multiple worlds. And then you're in a whole different way of thinking so that when your government says, you know, pledge allegiance, motherfucker, you're like, to what? You know, go fight this war for whom? Yeah. So I think it's critical thinking is basically what the substance is instill in a strange way. And this idea is an idea I think about quite a bit because the implication of what you're saying is that there is a conspiracy that is so dark. It's so dark that you could almost just as a form of laziness call it Luciferianism, not to insult

Lucifer. Actually, I don't want to pry isn't Luciferianism because Lucifer was a rebel angel. But it's like this idea is so incredibly dark. And this is where, you know, I think that there's a lot of walls that have been built inside of us, a lot of walls that we're not supposed to cross if we are going to be productive members of American society. Right. And one of the walls is this wall that you're talking about. Because the question is, who fucking built this wall? Who built this wall between us and these substances? You know, who is it? Is it Jeff Sessions? Is there and I would love to know your thoughts on this. Do you think there's an organized cobble of people who are like, we can't let them take mushrooms or they'll realize that we're

lizards? Do you think that? Maybe not lizards, maybe assholes. Okay, right. Yeah, lizards are cool. You know, I think... I don't mean to diss lizards or Lucifer here, man, but who's behind it, man? I mean, it's like a real problem. Who's behind it? Who's engineered it? Again, I think there are different levels. So you can look at it, if you want to look at it as a conspiracy, I think there's plenty of evidence for that. So you look at Harry Anselinger, for example, who was the head of the division of the government that was responsible for enforcing the laws and prohibition against alcohol distribution. So then the whatever amendment it was that made alcohol legal again was passed. And then he was like, oh, shit, now this whole division of the

government is going to be liquidated. I'm going to lose a job. Everyone's going to lose their job. We need to find something else to prohibit. So what's it going to be? Well, blacks and Mexicans are using this marijuana stuff. So let's drum up a lot of hysteria against that so we won't lose our jobs. So that's the origins of the anti-marijuana crusade in the United States. It was all about the flow of money and keeping the money moving. Then you have the example in the Nixon administration where I think it was H.R. Haldeman, who was recently interviewed about this, who some of you might remember was in the cabinet. I don't remember what his position was. But he said, talking about the drug laws, the draconian Nixon war on drugs thing, primarily against hallucinogens and marijuana,

he said, we knew that psychedelics and marijuana weren't health hazards, but we needed to isolate and neutralize the people who were protesting the Vietnam War, which was mostly the hippies, and the people who were agitating in the cities, which was the blacks. And those are drugs that those people were using, so we made them illegal so we could throw them in prison, investigate them, wipe them out. He said this in an interview. I don't remember. I mean, look it up online. It's everywhere. You know what I'm talking about? It was like in Vanity Fair or something recently. And so there it is. It's like they know everyone, anyone who looked at marijuana with any seriousness knew damn well it wasn't dangerous. But we're many presidents away from Nixon, and they're still

enforcing these insane laws. They're enforcing that against black people, against poor people. See, this is the thing. I mean, I don't know about your friend who got busted with the mushrooms, and it's true that a lot of people at dead shows are getting busted, and there's a lot of bullshit around that. But you could, if you have access to lawyers, you know, I mean, I went to a college where everybody was tripping every weekend. And no, there were never cops there. Well, this is so now we enter into something that's like, even more horrifying, which is that now we have like, where it gets, this is where it gets, this is where my mind really starts fucking spinning, which is that, so this country is built on slavery, we all know that. And slavery ends

except in the prisons. Because in the prisons, people have to work. There's, there's, you have to work. There's work. So a lot of like, I guess license plates really do get made in prisons. Lots of shit. Live free or die. Live free or die. Yes. New Hampshire slogan on the license plates. If you if you really want your fucking head to spin, think about this. Our attorney general from Alabama wants to start enforcing mandatory minimums again. For those of you don't know what that is. That means that if you get pulled over and you've got some ass in your pocket, you will go to jail for five years. There is a five year mandatory minimum. The judge cannot not send you to jail. Yes, you're going to jail. So when you think about the statistics, which is

that, yeah, more than likely it's, you're not going to jail if you're white. If you're not going to get busted, you're not going to get pulled over. But if you're black, you're going. And when you're in prison, you're going to have to do slave labor. So if you really want your fucking head to spin, think about that. A fucking attorney general from Alabama has figured out a way to make slavery happen again. That's spooky, man. That's spooky. And that's really happening right now. And this is a thing where I wanted to ask you, because when I might start spinning like that, I start feeling hopeless, Chris Ryan. So, you know, another example is I was just in the airport and like going through TSA, thick fucking security, it's getting worse. They're getting worse about it

now. Like they're getting more intense, more scrutinizing, more like authoritarian. And there was a period with the TSA where they would try to be sweet. They're not doing that anymore. And as I was walking into the fucking TSA, there's like these like hardcore thuggish looking fucking cops, you know, packing heat, looking at all of us, tourists, kids, old ladies, no one there is going to hurt anybody, right? And we're being fucking processed. Our shit's being rifled through. And we accept it. We're just like, yeah, this is what it's like now. We just, our shit gets rifled through now. We just get rifled through and we want to travel. And I had this very hopeless feeling. I thought, how does this get better? When does this change? Can this change? Is there

anything that could be done to make this go away? What do you think? You want me to say this publicly? Yes. Well, you know, I've lived in Europe most of my life, right? And I think one of the things that's interesting in Europe is that the memory of fascism is fresh, relatively. There are lots of people who remember when Spain was like that, right? Franco died in the 70s, late 70s. World War II, you know, Spanish Civil War, it's recent. So I think there's like a vigilance in people there, not to let shit go that way. Right. Again, that is lacking in the US. There's a lot of like, you know, I've been driving around in Idaho and, you know, there's all these signs, you know,

all this like political sloganeering and stuff. But I think, you know, most of these yahoos in the mountains with their AR-15s, if the shit gets bad, then, you know, they're not serious. They're not going to be shooting at military vehicles. I think Americans are so out of touch with war because all the war, and we're an incredibly war-like culture, but we export it. We send the soldiers off and then we ignore them when they get back. We've been at war, the 80% of American history, we've been at war. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's, I mean, I don't know, probably 100% if you really look at it. But anyway, I mean, what can be done? I think that one of, what we're doing here is actually what can be done. I think we're using podcasts, you guys are

using float tanks, other people are using ayahuasca and sacred substances or meditation or all these different techniques to free your mind and your heart and your ability to communicate with other people. I think that's where revolution really happens. You know, the revolution of the bombs in the street and the fires and the kind of public screaming sirens, I feel like that, you know, it's meet the new boss, same as the old boss shit, you know, it's the some other power just takes over and plays the same game. Right. The only way to have a real revolution, you know, they say think globally, act locally, I would take that act personally. You have a revolution in your life, in your heart, in your marriage, in your friendships, and hopefully that ripples out

and becomes a better world. That's all I got. You had that revolution, you've had that revolution inside of you? I think that I never signed on to modernity in the first place. Right. Like, I was retired the day I finished college, you know. I've never really plugged in to, I haven't had a job since the 90s. So you, yeah, this is, yeah, right. So, but what about people who have had the job and people who are, you know, firmly solidified inside of the system? I think they're feeling it. You know, there's this line that we quote in sex at dawn from Arthur Miller, the playwright, who says an era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted. Wow. Right. And I think you look at the world we're living in now, especially those

of you who are, you know, over 35 or 40 who have some perspective on this. If you look back, you know, 20 years, all these institutions were respected. The church, this is before the whole priest sex abuse scandal came out. The church was still respected. Wall Street was a conservative place where you could park your money and not have to worry about it. You know, the banking sector was like safe and conservative. You know, take whatever sports, the president, the politics. Yeah, of course, that's the worst. Remember that the president used to be like, that was like a respected position. Yeah. Anyway, all these institutions are just collapsing. Yeah. And so I think that a lot of people are saying this doesn't fucking work anymore. Right. Right. People are

saying, oh, I'm going to have less money than my parents. Well, when did that, when did that turn? Right. It used to be it was getting better and better. Now nobody thinks it's getting better and better, you know, the climate change and whatever. So I think a lot of people, I think we're at this really exciting, heartbreaking, fascinating moment where, where a lot of people are looking for alternatives. And I think that explains why podcasts are taking off. Because, you know, the technology's there. But the beauty of it is you do a podcast, you click a few buttons, it goes out to however many thousands of people are listening to it. There's no company in between. There's no studio executive. There's no money man. There's no, it's just you talking to whomever's

listening. And so there's a level of truth and authenticity that can happen there that I think is fucking revolutionary. I think it's as revolutionary as the printing press. Yeah. Well, okay. So like, yeah, it's an example of technology working for us. But just in a real from a real world perspective, because you, you have been, you're one of the most free people that I know. Most people I know don't swim in rivers. Most people I know don't travel around in vans. Most people I know are localized. Most people I know are deeply intertwined with the grid. So as someone out there, to those of us in here, I mean, surely starting a podcast is not the answer, right? I'm looking, I'm what I want from you. I want

the fucking answer, Ryan. I want you to help us, man. I want you to help us. Like, what, what, what can we do? What are some real things we can do to experience this kind of revolution that you're talking about that happens inside first? What can we do, those of us who haven't had that revolution? What are some tricks, some tips, some ways that maybe we can end up floating down, it's floating naked down a river, stop not wearing underwear, fucking, how can we start shoplifting Snickers? Yeah, see, I don't, one of my favorite quotes is, is respect those who seek the truth, fear those who claim to have found it. So I don't claim to have found any truth. And so I'm very hesitant to, you know, give people advice. You know, people I don't know,

especially, but my feeling is my friend Aaron and I were talking about this the other day. There are, there are things that you do in life that you become accustomed to really quickly. And there are other things you do in life that you'll never get accustomed to. So working in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, you can do it every day, but it'll never feel right. Whereas staring into a campfire at night, it feels right immediately. And, you know, after a week or two of that, you check into the Hilton Hotel down here, and it's like, this sucks, right? You know, it's loud, you can't open the windows, where's the fire? You know, where's the stream? Where's the sound of the birds and the wind going through the pine trees? So I think that there's a guide there.

There's like, for me anyway, there's a, there's a navigational device where, where you, like for example, a couple of weeks ago, I went to North Carolina to interview, to have some people on the podcast who are building a community there. And so they've got animals and they grow their own food. And, and they're really interesting people because one of the sort of triggers for the, for the coming together of this community was a very tragic death that happened about a year ago. Two, actually, they happened, one was a surprise and one they saw coming. And, and those deaths have given a lot of meaning to this group of people and what they're trying to do together. And anyway, the point is, there are like 20 people living there and every one of those people was so fucking

authentic. Just no bullshit at all, you know. And I was only there four or five days, I think. And then when I left and went to the airport and, you know, started dealing with normal shit, I suddenly, I was aware of how clean that was there. It's as if I'd been drinking clean water. And when you're drinking clean water, you don't go like, wow, that's some clean water. You know, but you notice then when you go back to the fucking Gatorade, right, that this doesn't taste right, right? You know. And so I think that's for me, that's, that's the guide, like things that I sort of fit into really quickly and easily. And they, you know, I try to follow that. And that I don't know, that's all I got. Yeah, no, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. I think a lot of us are afraid to follow that.

You know, and I like, I, you know, one of the things, whenever I get around you, and when I listen to your podcast, and I hear the, the song that you sing, the theme song, yeah, the theme song by Carsey Blanton, I don't mean literally your theme song. I had the theme song of your podcast. Okay, whenever I listen to the theme song of your podcast, I just want to make mail bombs and send them to people. Okay, but this is the theme song is cool. To finish your point, we'll get to the theme song. I mean, your song, the song of Chris Ryan, that's in Sex at Dawn, your song. Whenever I hear this song, there's like, actually, in the mythology of Krishna, there's something, you know about the Rosalila, you must know about the Rosalila. Oh, cool. I get to tell you about the

Rosalila. You'll like this. So the Rosalila, what happens is, in this mythology, Krishna goes out into the forest and starts playing his flute. And there's in the villages, the gopes, as they're called, the women are there, and they hear Krishna's flute. And as the, you know, and this is written in really beautiful poetry, but they basically leave, they leave the lantern burning, and they go into the clearing to find God, because they hear this song, and they leave everything behind because the song is just so beautiful that whatever they thought was important ceases to be important and like 100 of them gather in this clearing. And then Krishna divides himself into 100 different Krishnas, transforms into the ultimate lover for each of these people,

like their soulmate, essentially, and they, well, they do it out there, man. They make love in this clearing, and what could be more ecstatic than making love with God? You know, what could be, what could be better than that? And so when I hear the song that you sing, it scares me because I think, God, you know, man, really, I could just do that. I could just let go of everything, invest all my money into like a van, and just like go, go, go, just get out, just go out into the wilderness. And it's really scary. There's a piece of me that like wants to do that very badly, but there's another piece that's clinging to the world that like feels there's got to be this one way to live. And, but if all of us start doing what you're doing, what would society

look like if everybody heads out? If everyone listens to you and they're like, you know what, this is fucking stupid. Not only am I going to sit in front of a fucking campfire, I'm going to make the campfire out of my goddamn cubicle, and I'm going to fucking warm my hands on the fires of my old life in the woods. If everyone did that, what would happen to the world? Wouldn't everything collapse? A lot of the bullshit would collapse. Yeah, I mean, think how many jobs that people are doing in cubicles actually really need to be done at all. And then how many of them are going to be done by some fucking algorithm, you know, we're, they're going to be very few jobs left in 20 years because of AI and robotics and all this kind of stuff. And so I think as a society,

we need to really seriously look at how are we going to distribute the wealth that's, you know, so far, we're not doing it well. It's all going to the very, very, very top. And, and to me, one of the ultimate ironies and tragedies of modernity is for this book I've been sort of working on, as you may have gleaned from this conversation, I'm not particularly ambitious. So I've been working on a book for about four years now. It was due three years ago and my editors are for some reason very patient about it. And it's called civilized to death. And it'll be out someday. But anyway, one of the things I was looking at in this book is I was looking at this sort of economic question, right? And how and the correlation between happiness and wealth and

these kind of things. And what you find in all the research shows it is that people get happier when they go from poverty to about 60 or 70 grand a year per individual, right? But that's, that's basically the level where you've got enough money, you got a place to live. If you get sick, you can pay a doctor, you don't need to worry, your kids are going to starve, you're, you know, you're basically, you have your basic shit covered. After that, there's little, if any, correlation between satisfaction, life satisfaction and income. And actually it gets to a point where there becomes a negative correlation. So to me, the great irony is everybody's chasing money. And a few people are getting a whole lot of it. And they're miserable fucks. So if the winners

in this poker game we're playing at the table here are as miserable or more miserable than the losers, then who benefits from this? Right. So I used to look at economics as like a poker game among a bunch of buddies. I, if I won 20 bucks, it means somebody else lost 20 bucks, right? The same amount of money comes and goes. It's a zero sum game. Now I look at it as a poker game at a casino. So now who's the house? Right. Right. Cause we're all losing. Nobody wins at a casino. Right. Even if you win, you lose, you lose it later. Right. So then this gets in, I mean, we don't have a lot of time, but this gets into this sort of deeper conception for me where I started looking at levels of life. And, and so you have the simplest matter, which is inorganic

life. And then you have simple life, single cellular, you know, bacterium. And then you have multicellular and then you have, you get up to the most complex forms of life, which I think are social mammals like us, chimps, bonobos, dolphins, maybe insects, some, you know, ant hills and things like that. And then you say, okay, why would it stop there? Right. Right. Of course, we always think we're the ultimate, but the scales continue, right? You know, there's visible light, but there's wavelengths above it and below it. Right. So what's after us? We're made, each of us is made of many billions of microbes that don't share our DNA. Each of us is, you know, we think of you as an individual and me as an individual, but that's all a fiction. We're a system of, of all

these different organisms working together. So then what are we embedded within? And that's when I get into super organisms. So we are embedded in these super organisms that we can't see because we're within them. Right. And so the agenda of the super organisms, which are institutions, I think, run counter to ours. So that's why, you know, we say, why are we destroying the earth? Well, we're not really. These super organisms are and they don't give a shit. And so, you know, it's like people will say to me, hey, you know, you're always pissing on oil companies because they're destroying the ocean. They're good people who work at oil companies and there are. Right. There are, but it doesn't matter because people don't run companies. Companies run people.

Ugh. You know that the CEO of Exxon could go to Peru and take some ayahuasca and have a fucking epiphany and go in on Monday morning and say, gentlemen, we got to stop this deep water drilling. We can't control it. It's irresponsible. We're destroying the planet. He's out of there by fucking lunchtime. Right. You know, it doesn't matter if there are good people working there. You know, that thing about this is like, I was talking to a friend of mine, it was like, yeah, we've got to get the president to take ayahuasca. And I was thinking like, you know, man, you're rolling the dice on that one. Yeah. He's already unstable. Yeah. Because it's like, I think there is this idea of like, oh, if we give these people to psychedelics, if we get them to float, if we

get them to, they're going to like, you know, be like, wow, yeah, I've got to change. But I bet the president of Exxon drinks ayahuasca in somewhere in that experience, he's like, I am God. I am God. And oil is beautiful. We don't know that could happen. But yes, but I what you're saying is, is so crazy, which is that we have essentially become part particles in some kind of malevolent organism that is actively eating planet Earth. Right. So the way I look at it is like we are in a school of salmon that are that we're swimming toward the nets, right. And some of us are going, are those nets up there? Right. Fuck it. I'm going over here. Right. You guys, you want to go into the nets? I don't think you should, but I'm going this way. The other salmon

are like, dude, you're too high, man. You're doing too many drugs. There's no nets. Right. So you're asking me like, you know, what's revolution? I think revolution is when enough fish go, I don't want to know. Those are fucking nets. I'm going with them. Right. And we start peeling off. And there's a critical point where one more fish peels off. And then the whole school goes, Oh, fuck it. And we'll go that way. Then they move the nets. Well, then they move the nets, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Oh, we got to get the motherfuckers holding the nets, man. Get them hard. That's what we got to do. I mean, I don't know the answer. I love that though. I know what you mean. And I

think that like the beauty of what folks here are doing is I think when you go, you don't have to take psychedelics to see the net. I think just floating alone can have that effect. I mean, in your opening bit there, it was really beautiful. You're like, you know, the beauty of floating is you get there. And when you were talking about like adding this, adding that, I was thinking like, I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to get high. I've never even smoked a joint and gone in a tank. I want to go there to strip it down, right? And I'm glad you circled around to that where that's the beauty. You don't need anything. You don't need a fucking screen to keep you interested. You don't need, you know, things beeping and, you know,

you can be alone. I had a friend and took her to a float thing and she couldn't last 15 minutes in there. And I felt so bad for her afterwards. You know, so bad you can't be alone in your head for 90 minutes or 60 minutes or 20 minutes. What, what hell is happening in your head? So yeah, I think I think stripping it down to the basics. I mean, the theme song on my podcast is by this beautiful woman, Carcie Blanton. And the song is called Smoke Alarm. And she says, it's like, hey, baby, what's the big deal? Say what you're going to say, feel what you're going to feel, because you're going to die one day. You know, and it's the whole song is like, we're going to die one day. I, you know, I hate to give the end away, but you're going to die one day. And you keep

reminding yourself of that. And then all the shit that you're afraid to let go of is like, well, you're going to let go of it anyway, dude. Might as well let go of it now and enjoy the fucking ride rather than clinging to it, you know, to the bitter end. Chris Ryan, everybody! Guys, we have about 20 minutes left. And we've got two microphones here. This is one of my favorite parts of the podcast. I forgot to mention it up front. Any of you guys who have questions for Chris or for me, I'd love it if you would come up to the microphones. We only have 20 minutes to to take questions. So anybody who wants to ask a question, feel free to come up here and ask. Oh, the cop is the first one. So as a cop has been in the force undercover for a long time,

and I'm not trying to blow my cover. Do you think that Donald Trump could possibly be the catalyst or the kickback for, you know, what we've experienced as maybe the solution to open people's eyes up to ideology, different ideologues and whatnot? Because it started to kind of, I feel like it's opened people's eyes and broken up a lot of biases that were formed on socio-dynamic. I hope so. I think that could definitely be one of the possible outcomes of this. You know, they say addicts have to hit rock bottom before they start to recover. And if this isn't rock bottom, I don't want to see it. You know, yeah, I hope so. I'm not a political theorist, so I can't say for sure. But it certainly seems, you know, as Duncan pointed out, the presidency is one of

those institutions that's lost its... What's the word I'm looking for? It's... Well, it's like my dad says, we must respect the office of the president. Yeah, right. But what if the president doesn't respect the office of the president? Which is the case. Yeah, I don't know. I think he is, I think there is something in him that is divine for sure. He seems to be a, you know, a reflection of our shadow, you know, a reality, a billionaire reality TV star is the president now. And like, I mean, let's face it, if you were running a simulation and you wanted to create the funniest apocalypse, it does seem artistic to be like, all right, they fucking like money and TV. All right, let's make their fucking president be a Frankenstein monster composed of everything that

they have become addicted to. And let's see what happens. That's one level. The other level is making the president a catalyst. I always think of Ram Dass and how he has on his Pooja table a picture of the president. And no matter who that president may be, he tries to find compassion there. Because what a fucking heavy incarnation, man, heavy, heavy incarnation to be that stuck in that place, where you're casually, casually suggesting that you might incinerate a country with nuclear fire. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, if you think about that, how that I mean, like, I'm just thinking the worst thing you ever did when you were super drunk, you know, and you wake up in the morning and you're like, Oh, fuck. Oh, no, I've got to call like seven people and apologize.

Think of Trump's morning. When he comes off of the bender that he's on. And he wakes up and it's like, Oh, fuck, I'm president. Oh, shit. Oh, wow, I fucking caused the apocalypse. That's a heavy incarnation. So maybe we can find a place to have some compassion for him or something. And that could be the transformative thing. What do you got? Is that it? No more questions. That's it. No one wants to talk to us. Wow, everyone's depressed. Sorry, we bumped you out. What's your question over here? Yeah, tell us about your your best float experience individually. Okay. Yeah, that's that's cool. I the first time I floated, I don't know that it was my best, but you know, I don't judge them that way. But the first time, I think it might have been in Austin,

Texas at Kevin Johnson's place. And if you've been down there, beautiful place. It was, I was lying there and I've tried meditating for years. I've been to the 10 day v post in a retreat. I've done, you know, martial arts with an incorporated meditation. And I've never gotten past the my fucking back hurts stage. You know, my knees hurt, my back hurts, my hips hurt, my neck hurts. And I mean, the 10 day v post in a thing was like a 10 day porn festival in my head. I just that that's all I did. I just sat there and imagined. And it didn't work, you know, unless that's nirvana, which it may be. But the first time I floated, I, I felt like something clicked in. And I got into this meditative state, I got into the thing

where it's like, Oh, there's my mind working. Now I observe it, it slows down, it stops. And then whatever I am that's observing it starts to disappear. And then I wake up, but I wasn't asleep. And it's like, wow, that's where I've been trying to get for years and years. And I just got there in 15 minutes. And in part of that process of that sort of watching this weird shit that was happening in my mind, I saw this image of Joe Rogan's face with a halo. And that big shitting grannies got just float right across like the dome of my brain. And I thought that's pretty funny. Dude, that wasn't in your head. Kevin has a projector in the tanks. Like Joe Rogan's face floats across.

Cool, man. I, uh, my, my best float experience was like kind of my most pain, painful. It wasn't, it wasn't like euphoric. It was, uh, this was when I had a float take at my house. I was doing it a lot. And, uh, I was starting to have like, uh, it was dislodging memories. And, um, I was starting to have these memories that were long gone. I had this, uh, memory, a photographic memory of this, like, me and my brother as a kid, I was a kid, but me and my brother were like leaving this summer where we were staying with my dad. And this is a horrible story I'm about to tell you, but, uh, I guess there was a little girl there who liked me. I was just a kid and she came up to the car and, uh, and was like, I said something like, I love you. Oh, I hate saying this.

I said something like, shut up fatty. Like the worst fucking thing, man. And, and like I was trying to impress my brother and it was just horrible. And so the tank showed me in vivid detail that moment and the look on her face and the way that I felt and the look of my brother's look of disgust as he looked at me and, uh, and it, you know, makes you realize like, oh my god, if that's down there, if I'm that much of an asshole and that that's compressed somewhere underneath my waking experience, how much other stuff is in there? You know, I just went to the dentist and, uh, you know, he floss, he floss, he flosses you and there's a lot of blood and you're, I'm like, is there a lot of blood? There's a lot of blood, right? He's like, yeah,

you got to get scaling, dude, because there's like fucking shit in your gums and it's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt. He said that he's like, it's, it's challenging. And I think for some people like me, that's what the float tank does. It's, it gets into the gums of your psyche and gets in there deep and sometimes there's fucking blood and that's what it gave me. It gave me a moment to like really, really, uh, think about my own potentially aggressive patterns in life that I'm not aware of and help me hopefully be a little kinder because that's all you can really do, you know, because that little girl killed herself and her entire family. I found out. Oh, is your question.

That's fantastic. I love that. Thanks. I actually, I'm just very curious. I've been someone who has been very curious to live off the grid most of my life because I have a rather unorthodox upbringing. So I was never really introduced to a lot of stuff that people consider normal now. So my question is when and why did you decide to start living off the grid? And when you did, how did you survive initially? Well, first thing I should say is off the grid is probably an overstatement for how I've lived my life. I mean, I'm not like the unabomber or anything. You know, I travel in airplanes and drive a van and, you know, have a bank account and, you know, a cell phone right there. So I'm not

technically off the grid, but off the sort of consumerist corporate kind of treadmill. Yeah, I've been off that. What happened was that year I went to Alaska. I was in college and I had a life plan. I was going to go to Oxford and do a PhD. I had a professor who was going to get me into Oxford. I was going to do a PhD and I was going to teach literature the rest of my life. And the literature that I really loved the most was the American Transcendentalists, who some of you will know, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville. And a lot of this stuff is sort of like an indigenous American Buddhism, in a way, if you read them, you know, Thoreau, of course, famously wrote Walden, where he went off and lived in the woods for a year. So that's the stuff I loved.

And that's the stuff that I was anticipating teaching for the rest of my life. And I found away a loophole in the student handbook that allowed me to skip my junior year and still graduate on time. So I decided to go to Alaska to see the sort of frontier. I hitchhiked from New York to Alaska and spent the summer up there working in a cannery and doing weird shit and getting arrested. And by the time I was done with that experience, I realized, like, I had met people on the road who picked me up, who took me home, who fed me, who, you know, let me sleep in their daughter's bedroom because she was away in college or something. And they're just so kind and so open-hearted. And, you know, these are people who didn't know, they didn't read a lot

of books, they weren't hyper-educated. But they were so welcoming to me and they were so competent. Like, I remember this one guy, like, he had built a house. He had these cool dogs who, like, were really well-trained and loved him. And he had a good relationship with his wife and his kids were cool. And he knew how to fix his car. And it's like, this guy probably didn't graduate high school, but he had so much practical knowledge on how to live a good life. And I was struck by that. And I thought about what would happen to this guy if he stumbled into my world back at university with all my arrogant, genius professor friends. They would have laughed at him. They would have rejected him. And yet, my professor friends were kind of fucking miserable. And that was the path

I was on. And so I had this epiphany where it's like, wait a minute, I don't want to be like them. I want to be like that guy. Right? I want to be someone whose life makes sense. And so at that moment, I decided until I'm 30, I won't commit to anything. No marriage, no career, no grad school, no nothing. I'm going to spend my 20s. There's an image I loved from Robert Frost. He says, a poem must, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, a poem must ride its own melting. And I thought, I'm going to ride my melting through my 20s. And then it extended into my 30s and I'm still fucking riding it. I think you may have just answered my question. But since I took the trouble to get up here, I'll ask it anyway. I'm relative to unplugging from the

grid or whatever, besides floating, which I think moves us from our mind into our heart. I've always thought that growing your own food, expanding that a little bit, is one of the most revolutionary and radical things that you can do. And I wanted to get your feedback on that. Oh, man, I'm growing tomatoes right now. And I'm growing tomatoes. And you know what? I did a podcast with Dennis McKenna, Terrence McKenna's brother. And he told me, if you wanted the most revolutionary thing you could do is not just growing your own plants, I think he said it's to grow like psychoactive plants, right? But I think maybe he meant growing plants too. And so because of that, I ordered some San Pedro cactus. And I have in my garden

three beautiful San Pedro cacti that every single day break the law because they're making mescaline, right? And it's illegal. It's cool. I look at them, there's little chemical laboratories growing in my yard. I'm like, I'm going to eat you. But I won't. I love them. I won't eat them. But but what you're saying is so true, because you when you're watering the plants, you can, I mean, I, I feel like they are thanking you. I feel like they are dancing with the water and that they're communicating with you and that they're just, I think plants dance most of the time. And I think that you're kind of dancing with them. And they like are rewarding you. I bet there's things coming out of them that we don't even, we haven't even identified yet,

maybe what McKenna called exo pheromones, like who knows. But so yes, growing food for me is like, you know, how you know what's great is the stuff you remember, right? Like, you know, you don't remember plane rides. You don't really remember plane rides unless they're like really, like unless the plane crashed, you'll remember that one. You don't remember a lot of stuff, the bus ride, you don't remember the taxi rides. You don't remember waiting for the meal. You don't remember most meals. You don't remember much. But I'll tell you, man, I remember almost every time I've watered my tomato plants. That's such a moment. And you want water them long enough, you start hearing the nature spirits. And that's that moves you back again into your heart.

Can you talk about that for a second, the nature spirits? What do you mean by that? Rather than watering plants, I'm really into bees. And if you have this incredible flowering plant, where all the honeybees are, are visiting the flower, getting nectar from it, you hear this in incredible buzzing. And I don't think you can have that experience without you. You know that there's there's some entity that they're representing or that they're a part of that makes your heart sing. Yeah. Yeah, man, I love you. That's it, friends. We are out of time. Thank you so much for hanging out with us tonight. A big round of applause for Chris Ryan, everybody. We'll see you at the party.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exclusions Applied