The Joe Rogan Experience - #136 - Daniel Pinchbeck (Part 5)

Episode Date: September 8, 2011

Joe sits down with Daniel Pinchbeck.

I know that. What do they mean? No, I'm just saying it's fucking, I mean. They fuck up all the time. Yeah, it's brutal. But it's always live on, it always goes to iTunes in the unedited form. We just have to reboot. It's back up now.

Okay. So where were you? Natural disasters. Natural disasters. How much do you factor that in? So I think what we're, you know, it's basically we can see where we're going at the moment. There's more and more natural disasters coming faster and faster. Some of that may be because of the fact that we're going through a whole solar system-wide transition,

as scientists like Dmitriyev from Russia talks about and this guy Dieter Brose. Some of it may be because the level of human consciousness is more meshed with the natural state of the planet than we actually can comprehend quite yet, which is what most of the indigenous people believe. And I've been visiting, like, we've been doing retreats down to Columbia to work with the Kogi Indians, and they walk like 25 hours down from the mountains to hang out with us. And that's basically the message that they've been giving us from their, you know, older understanding of the nature of reality. You know, it's somehow the level of human spiritual development and how much we are in a reciprocal relationship to our local world, you know, has an effect on what type of catastrophes do or don't occur.

That's their perspective. God damn. So when the earth is sick, it's because we're sick and we're all sick along with it. So as tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and ultimately shifts of the polar ice caps and shit like that and super volcanoes and Yellowstone that are ready to blow and kill half the shit on the continent, that that is all in correspondence with the sickness of this species of us? That's the indigenous perspective. God damn, that's a scary thought. But listen, man, if we look at the ideas of quantum physics that even observing something with certain intentions can actually change the outcome of particles,

when they do those tests, those slot tests, and they show that observing an experiment actually has an effect on the result of the experiment. Or you could say there's no such thing as just being an impartial observer. You always participating in in the outcome that's a better way of looking at it it really does make sense that it it operates on macro micro and ultimately you know this one gigantic level right which is what like western alchemists talk about when they said as above so below how crazy is it, the idea that human behavior

can actually inspire storms? You know, you don't want to say that because you don't want to say that the most fucked up places are the places that get the storms. But I used to do jokes about it. They're cruel jokes that I would never do now. But I used to do jokes about how tornadoes

were attracted to the smell of white trash and that they just circle. When you have too much macaroni and cheese and 40-ounce beer in one air location. It's a terrible idea. It's a terrible joke. It's really cruel to think that you're cooler than these fucking poor people

that live in some place where the sky becomes an angry monster. But it is kind of weird that they only land in fucked-up places. You don't want to think that. You don't ever want to blame people for that, but wow. I mean, obviously we know that's not true because there's geographic

centers in this country where they're certainly attracted to. But the idea that more of them come because people are more fucked up and they're accelerating because our society is deteriorating, that's a terrifying thought that we're responsible for that. Or even on a 1% level, even that, that we're responsible for that. Well, or... Or even on a 1% level, even that,

that we're responsible for just having any influence on it, not that we created, but that we even have any bearing on natural disasters. As I discussed in the 2012 book, the Hopi, for instance, who live in Arizona, tribes like that may have actually chosen to live in very difficult environments where survival is really on a knife edge because it forced them to be able to do things like

rain dances. So they did it on purpose? Or do you think that it was just is that it or is it the result of them living in this difficult environment and develop more character? Well it's quite possible because they had a large choice earlier on of where they were going to leave and it's possible they because they had a large choice earlier on of where they were going to leave.

It's possible they actually chose to leave and live in very difficult environments because it forced them to develop their initiatory and psychic capacities. The only reason why I question that is because back then resources were so scarce and you were on foot, essentially. So if you were on foot, how much fucking ground can you cover and how much do you know about other

lands? How much do you know about if you move five hours south, it doesn't get that cold you don't fucking know actually i totally disagree with what you really well on both levels first of all i think that they they did know i mean for instance we now understand that there was like a sign language even native people who didn't speak the same you know language could actually communicate with a very highly developed sign language that was all across the continent and second of all what they've discovered is that a lot of native cultures were actually more like cultures of abundance than cultures of scarcity, that actually the amount of work that they had to do today,

compared to what we have to do on an average day, was a lot less. But that doesn't match up with your idea of them moving to a very difficult environment to stay alive because it was... Well, I'm talking about the Hopi in particular. Let's say they were like the Tibetan Buddhists of the native people. They chose the most difficult spot. Did they state this anywhere, or is this just a conclusion

or a feeling you have? No, it's a theory. Maybe it's ludicrous, but it was a sense I had when I visited them for the book, and I read a lot about them, anthropological accounts and so on. But the whole thing is, they would put themselves through these extraordinary efforts.

The Hopi snake clan, they would go all around the area. They would collect all of the most poisonous snakes they could possibly find. Then the men would sit just naked wearing loincloths in a circle with their knees touching. They would open up all of the snakes in the middle of the circle. And the men would have to sit entirely still until all of the snakes had crawled past them. Wow. That's pretty fucking wild. They definitely had their shit together when it came to rites of passage.

I remember that movie, A Man Called Horse. Do you remember that? No, I didn't see that. It was a, God, I forgot the guy's name. He played the father in Gladiator. Peter O'Toole? I believe it's Peter O'Toole. I might be incorrect. Anyway, amazing fucking movie, but one of the scariest

parts of it is one of these rites of passage that he has in order to become one with their tribe. He was an American or an Englishman. I forget what the fuck it was. But they hung him by his nipples. They used to do shit to test your limits. Oh, they still do. The Sundances, they put they lance you through the pectoral muscles and hang you up.

Whoa. Really? Is that necessary? Apparently, yes. It's the Indian equivalent of teeth straightening, I guess, or Botox injection or something. Oh, it's way worse than that, or way better than that, rather. It's, I think, you know, just having something, like having a bar mitzvah, having

some sort of a celebration. It doesn't even have to be you're hung from a tree by your tits. It just has to be something where, like, okay, I pass through the door. There's a symbolic door. What you're saying for me is a big distinction. For those cultures, initiation was actually about going through some process

through which you would master non-ordinary states of consciousness. What cultures? The native cultures. Initiation was not just a celebration. You actually had to overcome a life-death crisis. You had to be a warrior for them too. You're in a constant state

of defending your tribes and you had to be able to overcome very, very terrifying situations, even in hunting. They had to make a man out of you. Yeah, but I think that a lot of it was really more about learning to have a disciplined approach to non-ordinary states of consciousness. To control states of consciousness?

I mean, what do you mean by non-ordinary? Do you mean like peyote, enhanced? Yeah, I mean, obviously peyote, mushrooms, and these are all native, you know, ayahuasca and so on. But then also things like fasting, you know, and being, you know, not eating for five nights while you're just sitting on a mountaintop or something. What's the benefit of that? Well, it puts you in exactly the same kind of state as the psychoactive substances. Fasting for five days? Sure.

Those will bring on visionary experiences and force you to discipline your mind to be able to withstand ingressions from the astral realms and so on. What do you say to people that say that doing something along the lines of fasting where it's actually possibly dangerous to your body and that's what's causing you to have these experiences is really kind of a silly thing to do in this day and age where you could choose other paths to the same sort of results without damaging your body and shutting things down. I don't know enough about nutrition to tell you whether or not it's healthy, but I've read a lot of people that start talking about fasting for days and days and days. They say it puts strain on your kidneys. It's not good for you. I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't say that it is on your kidneys. It's not good for you. I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't say that it is or isn't. It's not good for you to not eat.

It probably isn't. I don't know. I know people get really weak. I actually know a lot of people who love it and find it to be very helpful. And actually, in terms of extending the human lifespan, they found that reducing your caloric intake is the most direct way to do that. Well, that makes sense. It's just your body's going at less RPMs.

A race engine's not going to last as long. There's a good episode of Penn & Teller bullshit. Look at the cleansing episode where they go through the diets, like the lemon detox diets and shit like that where you don't eat. They also go through the colonics and the whole thing like that.

The whole thing is a crock of shit. Penn & Teller's bullshit makes some excellent points, but they also make some silly ones because they want to find the conclusion that everything is bullshit. That's what they're doing. I don't think they're ever saying. They dismiss yoga. I watched them dismiss yoga where he was talking about,

it's just stretching, it's stretching. I was like, wow, you're crazy. You've never done a yoga class. If you do yoga for two hours and tell me that's just stretching, that shit makes you hot. Yoga makes you hot. I've gotten as high from yoga as I have from a couple hits of pot. No doubt about it.

No doubt. Real strong pot. I've gotten to body tingling moments, especially if you take a real good class, like hot yoga where you go real deep into poses and you really hold them anybody that dismisses that as just stretching you're either not giving me the full information that you have access to or you did a really sloppy job of investigating it you know you can't just say these fucking indian masters that have been doing this shit for thousands of years are just

stretching and that's why they have these very specific poses that they believe activate very specific regions and hemispheres of the chakras of the body. You can't just dismiss that. You can if you want. That's what's so interesting and cool about what's happening right now

and how things are so complex. I was looking at a book by this guy, Dean Radin, who studies psychic phenomena as a scientist at Institute of Noetic Sciences. And we interviewed him for a film. He wrote a book called The Self-Aware Universe. And he analyzes a whole century's worth of data

and psychic experience statistically. He even looks at reports from the US Army and the government, which support the existence of psychic phenomena of non-local communication, mind-to-mind, which means that consciousness is not simply brain-based. It exists in a different way now. But I've also read recently this book by Richard Wiseman called Paranormality, who believes there's no psychic phenomena, you know, busts every evidence for it, you know, and in his own way is quite convincing. You know, so for me, it just makes it a very interesting time, you know, where you can

approach anything and analytically rip it apart and find the weak spots. But maybe what's missing from Penn and Teller and Richard Wiseman's understanding is the sense that intention is somehow a fundamental aspect of the universe. So if your intention is to take something apart, desecrate it, ignore it, and so on, you can do all of that for sure. But within there, you've kind of missed a subtle key that actually makes life worth having in a way. Well, intention is aware,

and you can be aware of it in a very tangible form in the art of stand-up comedy. You cannot be thinking about something different, say something else, and have the people react to it. They won't. It won't work. It's a weird thing. You could have the joke worded correctly. You could say it with the right intonation.

But if your mind isn't into it they can smell it it's the weirdest fucking thing in the world a connection that you have with an audience it could be an audience of 200 or it can be an audience of a thousand if you've reached that full connection it is like a giant mass hypnosis there is a some sort of a relationship that you had with these people. And if somehow or another something hits you, you remember something or something bothers you, or you think about an argument that you got in with your girlfriend or a bill you forgot to pay or any distraction that makes you feel in a negative way, even if you're saying the words the same way, the audience will feel it. They will feel it and they will back off

you. You can feel it. You can feel them go, he's not engaged. It's legit, man. It's real. You can't tell me it's not. I've always said that, you know, I do my best to write, stand up, I sit down. I do my best to put in the time to be there to make the writing happen. And I do in the time when I perform enough so that I get on stage that I'm really comfortable and I relax. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I'm not exactly sure how that shit is even coming out. I don't know where it's coming from. I don't know what's happening, and when I'm on stage, when I'm completely locked in, I am as much a passenger as I am the person who steers it, and as long as that works, as long as I'm in that groove and the audience is in that groove the whole thing will go seamlessly but one little

hiccup one little bad thought one little error one little stress point and everybody hops off the ride and waits and looks at you he goes you gonna get this thing going again and you yeah okay get back in everybody get back in there right okay we're okay you know what you're doing now? Yeah, I know what I'm doing now. They can tell. And that's a psychic connection. That's a legit, tangible psychic connection. When you're on stage, you feel it from the crowd.

You feel like waves of positive and negative. You literally feel the energy. You can say that, right? You've had really good sets on stage and you've had jokes that bombed and you've had people angry at you you felt that right don't you feel it like a wave it it affects you just like anything like it getting hit by a snowball you know yeah like if you got a bad joke on stage if you got that's

the worst if you had a bad joke on stage but uh and it would hit before you were like having a great day after that you're having the worst day ever. Just like if you just got hit in the face with a snowball. Your life is the exact same life. Literally none of the hard details have changed. And yet you feel like a fucking loser. Because these people have let you know you have not given us what we want. There's this weird sort of an exchange that's going on with an audience.

I think hypnosis and trance are things that are operating much of the time. Have you ever watched a mass hypnosis show? Yeah, I did watch it in college once, yeah. Thanks. They used to have them all the time in Boston at the, there's a place

called the Comedy Connection. Every week they had this guy, Frank Santos, who would do a hypnotist comedy show that seemed like bullshit until you saw it a few times. And when you saw it a few times, you would realize, oh my God, these people are really fucking under. It's so weird. And not everybody.

He would know. He would go up to the people that weren't and he'd look at them and go, okay, you get off the stage. And he'd pull the people off the stage. But the people that were up there, for whatever reason, he found their hack code. He got into their frequency. I tend to look at most of our politicians and news anchors as kind of Illuminati

sorcerers who use a trancid gnosis to keep people in a lowered state of consciousness, a lowered state of suggestibility. Illuminati. I hate black wizards. He got robbed by a black wizard. A guy dressed up like a wizard put a gun in his chest.

Sort of. Guy had a fake beard on. Really? So he called him a black wizard. It sucks, man. There's this guy at my Starbucks, and I feel so bad for him because he totally reminds me of him. The guy that robbed me. And every time I fucking walk in there, I'm just like, damn, i'm fucking totally just eyeing this guy more than like i normally would eye somebody suspecting

i'm like waiting in line and i'll just be like what's that guy doing like a dog that used to bite you yeah exactly and he i've caught eyes with him like three times i feel so fucking bad about this i might have to switch starbucks because of it just switch starbucks yeah i'll just do that just you know it's on you, man. Yeah. But then he's kicking me out of Starbucks. What if it's him, too? That's probably even weirder.

The idea that you somehow or another manifested that is where things get really spooky. You know, the people that believe that you manifest every single action in your life and that you have some sort of ultimate control. I wouldn't say it's not really you. It's more like the Vedanta perspective. Basically, there's like a singular consciousness. You know, we're kind of like, you know, we're part of the projection. Okay.

What is the way, if that is the case, how can I avoid some horrible bullshit in my life? Can I just have to do the right thing and be super nice and always go in a positive direction? You can't control that shit, dude. You can't control it. I'm starting to think that you can't control it at all. If you can't avoid it, just ignore it. What's the bullshit that you can't ignore? Oh, well, just life and death. People dying.

For whatever reason right now in all my life, for whatever reason right now, the last year to two years of my life have been the most psychotic and crazy, but yet I've also been the most successful. Pause, please. Pause, please. The most successful. Pause, please. He's been dating porn stars.

Okay, what the fuck, man? You know what I'm saying? I also watched a dog fucking die. I've also got mugged by a gun. I've also fucking had a million other things that lately that has been happening that in my whole life never has... My life has been boring as fuck.

And now I'm having horrible things happen to me at the same time as I'm having the best time of my life. Well, you know, maybe there's something wrong in the formula of how you're interacting with the grid. Maybe there's something wrong. Forget it. Forget your life.

Put it away. You're not even you. If you had to look forget it. Forget your life. Put it away. You're not even you. If you had to look at your life objectively. I mean, how many people get audited? Hold on, let's take an exercise. I got audited too. What the fuck? Bro, a lot of people. That's how the government steals money from you.

Hold, please. Not one of my friends have got audited. Hold, please. Hold, please. If you were not you, okay? Forget about the emotional attachments you have, all your issues. How would you fix you? What would you say, you know, the one thing that we would like to correct about Brian

would be X. What would it be? What's the number one thing? Yeah, if you could, instead of working at something, if you could just correct something about your behavior, the way you think about things, or the way you look at the world, or anything, what would it be? Do not throw cum on walls. Okay.

What if you just stopped doing that? I really don't. It's related. I really don't. Do you think it's related? I really don't. Like, I never think negative about myself. I don't feel like I have any flaws. I don't overthink my personal problems. This is what I'm trying to get to.

This is what I'm trying to get to. I don't know if it's either or. I don't know if you... Look, there's babies that are killed in drive-bys. And when I hear about that, I go, well, that doesn't... How the fuck does that work? What's going on there? You know, did the baby have some negative thoughts? And then I think about it and I think about all the positive things that have happened in my life and all the positive

things that I know have manifested themselves through a certain type of thinking, a certain ethic, a certain way of looking at the world. And I wonder if it is either or or if it's a combination of things. You know what I'm saying? Daniel? I tuned out for a second, sorry. I don't blame it. I just personally think that the only choice we ever have

is to look at the bright side or the crappy side. So why not just always look at the bright side? Yeah, but you were looking at the end of civilization. At the moment I was looking at your Doom statue and your voodoo doll and your sort of Balinese demon there. Welcome to the dark side.

Well, no, I'm actually, the Balinese stuff is just, I've always been fascinated by Eastern art. I think it's beautiful, and I think it's amazing how cheap it is. You could get like this amazing thing. And because it's haunted. That's why, because there's little kids that made it. Little four-year-old kids made it. Little ginger kids.

This is artwork, man. I love this. I have one of those things, too. I'm not really into, like, you know, I've bought paintings before, and I don't kind of get a lot of what people are really into. I was at a guy's house once, and he had a picture on the wall. And I go, oh, did your kid make that? And this guy goes, oh, no, that's like $30,000.

And I went, what the fuck are you talking about? It looked like some painting on some ripped pieces of cardboard that were randomly stuck in a beautiful frame. And I really thought that it was something that a kid did. So I don't get that shit there needs to be a pure one that's just that kind of shit like gold buddhas but more of a corporate place that's just super cheap like that could be like ten dollars i want to buy a dragon mask i want feathers i want to be cheap you know because like that kind of shit's popular everyone likes that kind of shit why don't they make it like a walmart of that shit brian i think you're missing

i also think that they should make cat food and dog food into one food they could probably easily do that i don't think they can i think they have different dietary needs all right they can all eat chicken right okay so put that on the list well if you want to go straight they could all eat basil all right put chicken basil on this guy is brutal to work with man i'm sorry it makes sense right bro i brought a serious man in here He's a fucking New York Times best seller It drives me crazy You're talking nonsense About cat and dog food

You lazy cunt Why don't they just do that Go out and buy the cat food It seems really easy Go out and buy the dog food Stop fucking up the show My cat's eating dog food And my dog's eating the cat food

Why don't they just mix it You got a problem That you got cats For a bunch of ex-girlfriends You fuck This guy He gets a new relationship And he's like

Oh my god We should get a kid And they go out And they get a fucking dog And then the girls dump him And he's got a god damn zoo At his and he's like, oh my God, we should get a kid. And they go out and they get a fucking dog and then the girls dump him and he's got a goddamn zoo at his house. it's like watching

Little Orphan Annie. I'm like, Daddy Warbrooks. Sorry, man. This is a serious podcast but it's also, it's also a comedy podcast. The good news is,

we've had an excellent conversation. I guarantee you a lot of people will buy your shit. So, hey Joe, I was at the comedy store and there's that whole ghost, that ghost thing that happens at the comedy store. There's no fucking ghost anywhere. I guarantee you a lot of people will buy your shit. Hey, Joe, I was at the comedy store, and there's that whole

ghost thing that happens at the comedy store. There's no fucking ghosts anywhere. I'm so tired of... Do you believe in ghosts? Of course. Oh, my God. Joe, I was sitting in the green room behind the main room. We were all smoking pot. Who doesn't know that ghosts are real? I've collected so many

incredible stories about ghosts. Really? What do they do? I mean, a friend of mine, I mean, her friend's brother had committed suicide, and she was sleeping in the house where he had died. And she had a dream that they were

having sex, and she woke up from the dream, and her covers were up, and there was this kind of spirit figure over her. And as soon as she began to open her eyes, it dissipated. There's no way that could have been a dream inside a dream. No, of course it could have been anything. Of course it could.

But, you know, it's only, I mean, you know, because there's no, you know, how are you going to verify this type of thing? When I've collected a whole number, you know, of anecdotes told to me by people and observing their, you know, their state, their efforts to kind of understand it, to fathom it. My own experiences also I've had similar. I think that there's no doubt that probably psychic energy collects in physical environments. And when people are no longer there, if they have a stake in that environment and they're

not finished with their business in the world, they hang out. The energy of regret and resentment or something, some sort of a bad energy is enough to keep a residue of that person. When my father died, he had a loft full of his paintings and his sculptures. The last, and he had a big freight elevator.

I was working with two guys, bringing his stuff out. As we were bringing out the last shipment of his sculptures down in the freight elevator, suddenly the light bulb just totally popped, and we were in darkness. We were all looking at it. Nobody had touched it. Somehow that psychic energy that was constellated between us and him caused this thing to happen. Or the light bulb.

Joe, I was in the green room. Like the phone call that you didn't have to make today to me. There are certain things when you feel the synchronicity, it's like a click. It's like you have an intuitive acceptance that you're being shown

a little bit of the fabric of space-time making a little bit of a ripple or something. I was in the green room, seriously, with eight people, nine people. This is at the Comedy Store? The Comedy Store, if you didn't know, just FYI, was Ciro's Nightclub. It was Bugsy Siegel's hangout in Hollywood.

A lot of people allegedly were murdered there. Every single person who has been there for more than X amount of years has some sort of a ghost story. Every one of the waitresses has something. Managers have something. How much of it is psychosomatic?

How much of it is suggestion? How much is other comics? And I was sitting there with like eight other people. We're just smoking weed, hanging out, talking. And suddenly the door sounded like somebody shot a gun through. Like it didn't feel like sound like somebody just shook it or kicked it. It seemed way more powerful than that to the fact that I think everybody in the room kind of got down. I was like, what the fuck was that?

And we all kind of got down like on the couches and on the ground as if we all thought for sure that was a gunshot. Right. Well, just let me stop right there. It's an old ass building. Here's what's important. This is a building from the 1920s that's on a fucking fault line. Those buildings shift. And every now and then they shift, and they literally go, crack!

And it'll make a noise. I've been in the comic store when it makes noises. Okay. It was scary as fuck. I'm not saying that it wasn't a ghost. No, I was probably— But I'm saying that the most likely explanation is that— I thought it was another comic, and it's just like the secret.

Like, oh, yeah, we take this plunger, and then we just hit it as hard as we can. There's like an old comedy secret. I'm sorry. My grandparents lived in a supposedly haunted house, and I stayed there with them in Newark, New Jersey. And it was on North 9th Street, and there was a guy who actually died in the house. And he was a guy who was renting a room there, and he died. And they always thought that this house was haunted because the house was always making noises. But it's a fucking house that was built in, like, 1909.

You know, it's an old fucking house. And when you're dealing with a place like New Jersey that's moist all the time and it rains all the time and then it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter, wood is like, you know, it's an organic piece of, you know, construction. It constricts, it expands, depending on the moisture in the air, depending on it being cold or hot. And the old houses like that, they make a lot of fucking noise. They creak. They're always like,

and people are like, this fucking place is haunted. Or it's an old house, man. But I'm not completely averse to the idea of ghosts, but a lot of people that talk about ghosts are full of shit. Well, I just think if there is ghosts, there would be an easy way to prove it, and we've talked about it before. You just go to somebody that's wife died in a rape,

and you go to his grave or her grave and just start humping her grave or something like that. Oh, dude. If there was such things as ghosts, ghosts would come out and be like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? Maybe not. Maybe they wouldn't want to indulge you in your nonsense. Maybe you would hit the wrong frequency. Oh, dude. You know, if there was such things as ghosts, ghosts would come out and be like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? Maybe not. Maybe they wouldn't want to indulge you in your nonsense. Maybe you would hit the wrong frequency. No, come on.

Maybe, look, maybe it's not something that can easily be tuned in. Maybe it's like the northern lights, like the idea of, you know, you can't capture the northern lights and put it in the fucking beam and blast it on Manhattan. The northern lights are, you know, it's ethereal. It's some sort of a thing that, you know, it moves and pulsates in the sky. You know, maybe that's what, like, a ghost is, like a very minor version of that. Like, it doesn't have a rhyme or reason for when it exists or doesn't exist, but sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. No, I think it probably does have a rhyme and reason.

It's just we don't understand those laws yet. You know, there's, like, you know, it's not to say that it violates nature. It's just that our understanding of natural law is limited by our mental conception, by the type of science that we've constructed, and so on. Are you convinced? I mean, when you look at the evidence of ghosts and not look at ghost shows, if you look at ghost shows— Wait, wait.

What evidence are you talking about? Do we have any solid evidence ever that there was a ghost or just speculation? Almost entirely speculation. There's no scientific evidence. Well, that doesn't mean that they're not real because if you think about what a ghost is if a ghost is something that's not in this dimension it sort of flits in and out of it and how do you measure that i mean science is it's you know everybody says well science says there are no ghosts or there's no scientific evidence of ghosts well science was not really designed to measure shit like ghosts. Science is designed to measure how much does lead weigh,

what happens when a star goes supernova, observable things. When you get something like a ghost, if a ghost was real and it's an incredibly rare phenomenon that depended on some really exotic conditions, how the fuck are you going to measure that? I'm giving the offer if there's any ghosts listening, they can fucking rape me tonight, and they can just rape my ass all day long with their ghost dicks, and if it happens, I'll let you know.

I got news for you. If they're going to come here from another dimension, they can do better than you. For instance, there is decent and interesting evidence around reincarnation. Really? There's a book, what's his book by Ian Stevens, who's a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote a 2,500

page book called Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersect. And he found all around the world there were children who had spontaneous recall of past lives and often very specific. Like in India, they would be like, well, I lived in this town, my wife had

this name, I had two kids. So in a number of cases, he found these kids, and he went back to the towns that they talked about, and they found this family and established that there had been this connection. And there was a sense of familiarity. No, no genetic. No genetic line? No genetic line.

And sometimes the kids would even have a pronounced birthmark, like a birthmark on the neck or something, and it would turn out that the previous incarnation, perhaps, had died of a wound to the neck in a fight or something like that. Is it possible that the connection is an abstract one, that they haven't met it yet, but that yet there's not a balanced value to learned experiences that are transferred through genetics, like instincts, and that perhaps some instincts that we have are really like things go wrong, you learn from them,

that's why you're afraid of cats. I mean, kids are afraid of monsters that live in New York City. Well, this is like a seven-year-old kid suddenly out of nowhere saying, you know, I have a wife in Agra, I have two kids, I need to see them again. But this is my point. Isn't it possible, I mean, isn't it possible that somehow or another that there is a memory that through whatever mutation or whatever extreme condition or weird circumstance as far as like physical biology becomes a more potent one? through generations, awakens. This memory awakens. This experience that someone who shared these genetics so many generations ago actually did have, that all of a sudden, for whatever strange reason...

I don't think there's any idea that genetic material could hold memory like that. Well, what about memes? What about the idea that even racism can be transferred genetically? I mean, that's a really kind of a widely considered idea, almost unprovable, but considered by mainstream scientists. I think that like a lot of those ideas about all these things being inherited by the genetics being this kind of master molecule are actually being kind of challenged right now by the emerging biology of epigenetics, which is recognizing that, you know, awareness actually

begins at the boundary of the cell where chemical signals are exchanged. There's a kind of cognitive process that happens even at the permeable boundary of the cell as some signals are allowed in and some are ignored or rejected. And then what's allowed in actually then influences how the genetic material expresses itself and reproduces itself. That actually it's not so much the genetic material as the master molecule. It's more as if the whole cell is a unit of cognition or awareness.

This is very much thinking of people like Varela. But is this a theory, or they have done a detailed... This is a theory. Okay, but they haven't done a detailed accounting, right? But everything's a theory. They have, yeah. I mean, this is, you know, you look at the biologist Bruce Lipton. He has a book called Biology Beyond Belief,

really looking at how consciousness and awareness begin even at a cellular level and how that in itself influences and inflects how the genetic material expresses itself, that the genes are not master molecules. The whole idea of it is so fascinating, the idea of what instincts... Where do instincts come from?

Is it all from one initial source? Stay away from fire, you get scared when you see snakes. These are all learned impressions in our material, the material that makes human beings. There are certain things that you show people, and children when they're really young have certain fears and notions of the boogeyman and the monster that lives in the woods and the things in the dark.

A lot of these are imprinted from being killed by jaguars, from some proto-hominid that lived 5 million years ago. They got killed by jaguars. Those instincts are still tingling in the background noise of our minds. That's possible.

Have you ever heard of Rupert Sheldrake's ideas around like morphinogenic fields? Yeah, about dogs knowing when their parents are coming home. So maybe there was this species encounter that was like a near-death encounter for humanity and it left this morphinogenic field of fear and terror around the snake or around the jaguar or something like that. Yeah, well, we are certainly moving, I mean,

if I had to guess, into some sort of a state where that becomes more and more aware don't you wouldn't you agree what what becomes more and more aware the state that of this interconnectedness this morphogenetic field this idea that you know that we we are living in some sort of a complex mesh work of biological life and natural natural laws and physics and space and radiation and all of it together combined. And it's sort of, people are realizing it now, like way more than ever before. I mean, when I was a kid, there was none of this talk. There was nothing along these lines.

Yeah, it's extraordinary. And maybe that is pointing towards a kind of next phase of, you know, evolution as a species. I mean, do you think it's technology that's going to do that? Well, I think we have to look at technology itself as an aspect of the evolution of consciousness. You know, that actually like we're tool using and tool making species. We make a new tool. Then we look at the tool or the instrument we've made and it reflects us back at ourself. And then it gives us new metaphors for understanding ourselves. Then it allows us to make another more advanced tool, and that creates a whole new set of metaphors.

So now we've gotten to the point in our tool creation and tool using where this feedback loop is happening faster and faster. So we're having, but it's still, you know, a tool is a projection of our consciousness, of our thought into the material realm, which then gives us information about ourselves which then leads us to create another tool which also advances and evolves our consciousness in that process. Do you ever get to the point where you get upset that you have a connection with these items, these technological items like phones, or do you not regret it ever, or do you just accept it and enjoy it? I think it's very fascinating. Part of's also i mean as we've been part of what we've been doing with reality sandwich is bringing people down to work with indigenous shamans and elders so

recently we went down to the columbia and worked with these kogi guys from the mountains in columbia and when we hung out with them we were in a place without any electricity for eight days so no phone no computer and after like a day and a half, I was like, what did I want all that stuff for again? Like, this is so much nicer. You know, suddenly you can see the stars, you know, you're at night, you're like light a fire, then the fire goes out, you go to sleep,

you wake up at dawn. I mean, you know, I think that actually we may find that we've gone way too far on this technological path that we thought that, you know, we've had a kind of, in a sense, the religious belief of modern society is linear technological progress leading to some kind of singularity or transformation. We may actually back up from that and be like,

well, wait a second, where is this stuff leading to? I mean, actually, I have more plastics in my tissues. My eyes are going bad from looking at these tiny screens. You know, why is life constantly mediated by glowing rectangular screens anyway? That actually, we might want to, you know, retract from this technological path and develop in a different direction, which doesn't mean rejecting technology. It's more about mastering our projections rather than feeling that we always have to get enmeshed in them and then move in that direction. Is it sort of like riding a bike too fast and you're going downhill and you go oh fuck like it's good to ride this bike but i've gotten kind of

away from my own biological control of this situation well that's certainly what's happened to us as a species i mean um you know on every level we've been seduced by our technological projection projections in a sense we've been seduced by our technological projections. In a sense, we've lost our grounding on the planet. Do you ever consider the idea that when some sort of a weird symbiotic relationship where it's our job as the host to create this environment where the parasite, which is technology, this new life form that we've created to exist and then ultimately discard us because it is the next stage of not organic life, but of consciousness. And that consciousness, the next stage of consciousness will be artificial consciousness

created by this, this consciousness that was created by biological life. And that we are only here to usher in the next stage. And that next stage is an electronic form, a stage that doesn't have emotions or nonsense or any of this shit that's permanent. It that's not the way I look at it. And there's first of all, we don't we don't we don't we don't know. We have no we have no reason at this point to really believe that, you know, an artificial intelligence can become conscious in the way we are. I mean, machines may have, you know, a form. I mean, everything may have a form of sentience, but but but, you know, we may still have a very important role if we're in our proper state in the cosmic unfolding.

But should we? I mean, if we are a step along the way, who's to say that that step eventually continues along a biological train? biological train. Maybe it really is truly our destiny to create some sort of an artificial life that's not burdened down by our monkey DNA and all the instincts that we needed to evolve to this point with the curiosity that would allow us to make something as crazy as artificial intelligence and computers. Maybe we're just the carriers. Maybe we're the carriers of the disease that eventually takes off and develops on its own. I guess part of what I would suggest to you is that part of our opportunity right now is to become co-creative with the evolutionary process and that in a way means that we have to step into a much more responsible and mature role where we actually become participants and and in a

way we still kind of enjoy the spectacle of our own alienation and our own potential destruction so we kind of enjoy kind of like elaborating these sort of futuristic mythologies of how our technology is going to overwhelm us or devour us. I mean, that might be the case, but all we really know at this point is that we have will, we have intelligence, we have consciousness, and we're not using it very well. So the first thing I would think that we would want to try to do is use it very, very effectively to see what type of better situation we can rapidly create. Rather than fobbing off our responsibility onto, oh, there's going to be this technological thing or it's too late, we fucked the planet or there's some new age psychic children coming along. or there's some new age psychic children coming along.

All that stuff to me is just bullshit ass dodges that basically is other ways that we're avoiding taking full responsibility for the planetary situation that we as a species have created, which for me is really the only way we're going to possibly create a better world in the time that we have before things go to hell. Well, I do agree that as a person who's a big proponent of team people,

I definitely advocate the idea of us figuring out what the fuck we are doing and making it better for all of us and our relationship with the planet but to me that doesn't seem like you're fobbing that off but considering the possibility that we are merely here as many other parasites and hosts are in this world and you look at like grasshoppershoppers where they're infected by aquatic worms and the aquatic worms trick the grasshopper into jumping into water and the grasshopper drowns so that the

worm can be born out of its body. I personally think that we actually are infected by a parasitical agency and I would say that agency is something like the dominator empire complex. The sense that we have of separation from nature, the sense that we have of separation from nature, the sense that we have the right to, you know, annihilate ecosystems, dominate ecosystems,

control other people, the whole trip of empire, the slavery. I mean, there's still tons of slavery around the world, domination of women. That's the parasite that's eating us alive right now. And that's where, you know, if we can go through our inner initiatory process, we can begin to, you know, find the antidote or the cure to that. But it's not about, you know, from my perspective, like giving it up to technology, you know, as an amazing thing. It's more like reclaiming our human capacity. And for me, that's really where the knowledge of the indigenous people is not, you know, folktale, it's not silly, it's not worthless. It's actually something that,

you know, those of us who care about, you know, seeking to, you know, move into an evolutionary, you know, framework, you know, they have tools and gifts for us. And that's why part of what I've been trying to do over the last couple, well, a lot of my work, but now in a different way, is build bridges to the indigenous people and their knowledge systems. You know, so I'm working now with the Kogi in Colombia and also the Sequoia from Ecuador. What I meant by that was not that it has to be, it almost like when I, when I, when I look at the relationship that we have with with technology and i look at the relationship that different parasites and different hosts have it just as a consideration you have to think about the fact that our society is completely obsessed with

pushing innovation we're completely obsessed and i often look at the dominator culture what you describe and i say well you know you're right i mean that is a huge fucking problem i mean war and the domination of other countries and battling for resources but what do you say to people that say that there's no way you can have a society that that reaches this particular height this fast without that as a byproduct and that in fact the reason why people push so hard to innovate and to create new things and conquer new boundaries both scientifically and socially is that it's all almost a byproduct of this desire to innovate and create and produce this next thing and that this is all a part of us creating some artificial thing, some intelligent thing.

I think we have to break the trance of technology, which is not to say that we reject technology, but we have to break that trance that somehow, you know, this linear technological progress is necessarily, you know, bringing us to something super amazing. And for me, the shift in the future is more to a kind of psychotechnical phase of development. By that, I mean that, you know, if you do, you know, if you've had the DMT and the ayahuasca experiences, the yoga experiences, and so on, you recognize there are these vast dimensions, you know, within the psyche, that are basically unknown continents. you know, within the psyche that are basically unknown continents.

And in a sense, that for me is where the action is going to lie for us in the future, you know, as well as potentially exploring other planets, other solar systems and all this stuff. But at the moment, we really more need to get control of our thought projections. And the only way to do that is to undergo an initiatory process that involves, you know, kind of getting into our unconscious patterns. Initiatory process? Like what? What do you mean? Yeah, well, I mean, like, you know, hanging, you know, fasting or hanging by your pecs for six days or taking ayahuasca, you know, for a couple weeks until, couple weeks until you're so nauseous that you can't believe it, but still vision and insights keep coming up and they begin to heal you of your pathetic

humanness. Well, you say pathetic humanness, but then are you completely averse to the idea that we are just here to develop something else? Which I mean, we obviously are just a step along the way and we'll be unrecognizable a few million years from now. I think that what we're here to develop is integrity, consciousness, and willpower. And once we've developed that, then we can think about what else we may develop. At the moment, we don't have that. We just think we do.

Do you feel happy that you're, and I believe you are, one of the people that's sort of an agent of this sort of, I believe right now, currently, we're in a very unusual age of enlightenment. And I think that the level of enlightenment that we've achieved culturally over the last year, certainly not everybody, not last year, last decade, certainly not over everybody, but generally has been more than anything that I can ever remember in my lifetime. And people like you that are pushing these ideas and people like you that are trying to challenge the way people view things and the standard predetermined patterns of behavior we seem to have come to accept, you're a part of moving this thing along. These kind of discussions are part of moving this thing along, where people in college or people who are getting their first jobs,

people who are starting their own first business, they're stopping and they're reconsidering the direction that they move forward and what their motives are and whether or not they're just caught up in momentum. Yeah, man, I feel extremely humble and lucky. Do you feel obligated? Yes, I feel tremendous obligation and responsibility to do what I can to help out, you know. So what, is there a way to stop this?

What is the number one problem that we have? If we have a yearn for destruction and we're constantly moving in that direction? The number one problem that we have is that consciousness and subjectivity are mass produced by a system that is basically keeping us in a state of passivity and ignorance. Is that system a natural system? Is that system there because everything else, like the way alpha wolves treat beta wolves, that system is almost set up in place so that there is an antagonist? Sure. I see it as an evolutionary process and just as the embryo has to push against the shell and finally break through or it doesn't. You were inspired by an antagonist.

Ali needed Frasier. Absolutely, yeah. have a powerful military, industrial, corporate empire complex that has sunk its roots into our subconscious processes and our psychology. And it requires a lot of disciplined effort to recognize how it is operating through us on so many different levels and then begin to turn it around from within. That's the facts, bitches. That's about it.

That's all you're going to absorb. I haven't absorbed this. This is an awesome conversation. Thank you very much for coming over here, man. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Everything that I thought it would be, plus more. If anybody needs to get a hold of you or check out your stuff, what should they do? And what did you hand me here?

Okay, so I'll give you a quick rundown. Evolver.net is our social network. Evolver.net. We have the Evolver social movement. We have about 50 groups around the world now, mostly in the U.S., who beat up every month. We do consciousness raising. We create a theme that could be the future of psychedelics. It could be extraterrestrials.

It could be sustainability or permaculture. We use those as both gathering points where people raise consciousness and learn, but then also nexus points for communities to build. How long have you been doing Evolver? It's been about three years. You emailed me about this a long time ago. It was the first time, but I'm so overwhelmed by shit online.

I understand. Me too. Don't worry about it. So it's like a Facebook, like a psychedelic Facebook? Well, kind of. It's a way for a kind of global community that's trying to understand this new paradigm and move into it to reach out to each other and then self-organize. Has anybody ganked my name, my screen name?

Can I get my screen name, Joe Rogan? Beautiful. And then we have a web magazine, Reality Sandwich. Reality Sandwich.com. We're doing live webinars. We just did one on shamanism practices with alberto volado so that's evolver intensives.com and now we're doing a line of books that include this book here jose arguelles's book manifesto for the newest sphere

which is about this idea of a transition from the biosphere to the newest sphere nice and what is this is you're on the ipad right you have ibooks and everything like that yeah for sure we got ibooks ibooks so evolvereditions.com and for sure. We've got iBooks, iBooks. So EvolverEditions.com. And there's probably some other stuff. And UnifyEarth.com is this idea for this December 21, 2012 global event. People can actually sign up. There's a resource map there.

What is that again? This idea to use a Cirque du Soleil-style spectacle. No, no, no. What is the name of the site? UnifyEarth.com. UnifiedEarth.com. And also, if you're into books, Breaking Up With a Head was how I was introduced to Daniel. It's a great book, and I read half of

Quetzalcoatl. I am a fucking ADD retard, though, and I put it down. I'll pick it up again, now that we've had such an awesome conversation. Daniel Pinchbeck on Twitter. Please follow him on Twitter, along with following Red Band, and follow the Death Squad on iTunes. It's a fantastic

podcast collection of comedians. We had Steve- Squad on iTunes. It's a fantastic podcast collection of comedians. We had Steve-O on yesterday. Steve-O was on yesterday. There's a great show with John Reap and John Heffron that he just started doing. There's Freddie Lockhart has a show called What's Good Now. There's Ari Shaffir has a great show called The Skeptic Tank. Tom Segura and his woman, Christina, have Your Mom's House. So there's a lot of great podcasts on there.

It's a lot of fun. It's, of course, all free. The Verizon Wireless Center, October 7th. Me and Joey Diaz and probably Ari, too. I haven't talked to him. But the tickets just went on sale today. So we'll be there October 7th. Thank you very much, Mr. Pinchback, for coming back.

Thanks very much for having me, guys. I appreciate it. Thank you very much to The Fleshlight. Go to joerogan.net. Click on the link for The Fleshlight. Enter in the code name Rogan. Is this the first show that you've ever been on sponsored by The Fleshlight? Yes. Yay! Success. What is The Fleshlight? go to joerogan.net, click on the link for the Fleshlight, enter in the code name Rogan. Is this the first show that you've ever been on sponsored by the Fleshlight? Yes.

Yes. Success. What is the Fleshlight? Do I get one? Yes, for sure. I'll hook you up. We are trying to combine seriousness, legitimate thinking, and completely ridiculous bullshit all together in one soup to let people know. Enjoy it. Enjoy it, bitches. It ain't gonna last. it. Enjoy it, bitches. It ain't gonna last. Thank you very much, Mr. Pinchbeck.

On Saturday, the August, September, rather, the 10th? Yeah. Saturday's the 10th. Saturday the 10th, Tim Ferriss is coming by and the 11th is Anthony Bourdain. Alright, thank you very much. Love you, bitches. And big kiss. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.