Ep. 72 - DMT, Science and Comedy with Shane Mauss

I mean, part of it maybe is just that it's really fun for me to explore different ideas or maybe it's like a childish contrarian inside of me that wants to just like rebel against the standard idea of the empty sphere of molecules. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. It's happening, it's happening people. March 18th, Saturday, 420 East Third Street, Los Angeles. There's going to be a mind pod network live event in partnership with No Wave and Still Mind, my friends Yoshino and Justin and Jarell were putting on this event with all of the mind pod network podcasters, Tarbrock will not be making it, but everyone else will be there.

That's all of the people plus special guests including Daniele Bolelli. This is a live event. If you're in the Los Angeles area or you want to come into the Los Angeles, Los Angeles area, March 18th, save the date. So to register right now, to go get your tickets right now, mindpodnetwork.com/mindwave. M-I-N-D-W-A-B-E. I don't think I need to stop, but I did anyway. Also, synchpodcast.com/mindwave. Both will redirect you right to the tickets page, you can find out more about the event. There will be some emails updating you about the format of these, but because you're a listener of this podcast, I'll tell you what's going on.

It's an all day affair. It's going to be some live podcasting, we're doing three slots for that, all of the mindpod network podcasters. We're going to have musical performance, we're going to have a sound bath with crystal bowls for my friend Lulu. Go check out, I think it's episode 37. I saw the other day, I don't know if that's actually what it is, but it's with Lulu. She's incredibly awesome. Her friend Nikki, they do these crystal bowl sound baths, it's going to be a cool little thing. There's going to be a musical performance, there is going to be art, and there's going to be a little party afterwards, and in case I didn't mention it, it's at 420, he's third street, so if you didn't believe in some greater power, this should be proof.

The fact that this event, really my first live event ever, that I've ever participated in putting on, is at 420, he's third street in Los Angeles, so that's going to be pretty sweet. So check that out, I'm going to be mentioning more about what's going on about the event in the future, I just want to let you guys know in the beginning. Okay, let's get back to Shane in this conversation. So Shane, I got hooked up with Shane from Michael Phillip from Third Eye Drops, we're listening to his podcast, right, great, keep it in the rotation, he's going to be at that LA event by the way, they're going to be pretty sweet.

But he introduced me to Shane, and I'm really glad he did, I had seen Shane on Conan. I don't know when, a few years ago, if not more, and it certainly wasn't this type of comedy or things he was discussing now. It was funny, it was funny stuff, but it wasn't talking about DMT experiences, and the, you know, the most outer reaches of neuroscience and how that affects what we're doing. So he's had a bunch of success since then, he also has a really funny album called My Big Break, which is about him breaking both of his feet, his heels. And he also really has kind of discovered and delved into DMT in particular.

And DMT, I think you've, you probably, if you've, or a listener of the podcast, I have not done DMT, I have not smoked it, I have not done Ayahuasca, I feel like I probably know more people who have done DMT and Ayahuasca than any other segment of people I know in my life. It's a lot of people, but I'm very interested in it. The descriptions I hear are fascinating, especially when people talk about entities or beings or aspects of a place they'll go to that are shared across, you know, from different people and different places and not like saying, Hey, I saw this and be like, Oh, I saw that too, but independently verifying that these things.

So Sean, Sean Shane talks about this and it's pretty cool because I think we come from it from not wildly different perspectives. And we talked about this in the beginning of who Shane's trying to target here in terms of his act and what he's talking about. But as you know, I am very often interested in the more mystical kind of ethereal esoteric approach to understanding the universe, the world, our lives, not exclusively, of course, and that's the reason Buddhism appeals to me, especially Tibetan Buddhism, but that's kind of where my natural inclinations go. Shane's is kind of a little bit different.

He comes from the scientific perspective. He talks about when he's being blackout drunk in the past when he was drinking that he would go and crack open like physics books, which I understand. I've done that with like Carl Jung books. It's pretty much impossible to digest, but something in your unconscious. It wants to read that even when you're blacked out. So he comes at it from this scientific point of view and he does this by interviewing and speaking with neuroscientists on his podcast, and he also just has kind of shaped his perspective in part around that. So this conversation, it's pretty long.

It's one of the longer ones we've done. He's super cool and super gracious to do this on a Sunday. You know, it was his day off and he's doing this hundred city tour. It's pretty nuts called a good trip. Go check it out. Like it seriously, if he's coming to your city, I'll have links on the podcast page. Sinkpodcast.com/shane, it'll be there. Check him out. Super cool guy. But this conversation is really interesting because I think we're not coming at it from the exact same perspectives. We're not necessarily disagreeing overall, but something that struck me when I was re-listening to and editing a bit of this is that he talks about to him, it's much more interesting when he has like an overwhelming God experience where he feels like he spoke to God, which is very psychedelicly.

You know, it's a common thing that can happen. He thinks it's far more interesting to not immediately buy into that that's what's happening. You know, what are some other perspectives that could be influencing that decision? And I think that's cool. I think, and he points out, maybe it's just a contrarian in me, but I do think that's an important thing to keep in mind. Like, we shouldn't get too attached to our ideas of what meaning is in particular and what's going on. And, you know, there's very mysterious things at various points in our lives and what's going on in the world at large, and to dismiss that and pretend that we know exactly what's going on is not necessarily the best approach.

So I think there is a lot to be said for this particular approach that he uses, and I like that we could kind of bounce ideas about similar things, you know, off each other. So I really, one of my favorite episodes that I've done, especially in the past, you know, six months or so, just because I feel like a lot on this show, I will agree with people. And I love agreeing, and I love creating harmony, but I also like hearing different perspectives. I like getting more. I don't want to just reinforce and be in my own filter bubble, which can happen a lot these days. So, you know, the more of these, you guys have suggestions for someone who would disagree with me.

Maybe you disagree with me. Email me, Noah@sinkpodcast.com, and tell me who I should have on. Let me know. I've got a ton of suggestions. I'm still working through them. There's some really cool people coming up, tees in that one, you will see. But really, just thanks, everyone, who has listened to the show, listening to the show, subscribed, rating, reviewing, donating, all of the ways you can support this show. This live event that we're doing, and you're going to hear me kind of expand on this idea in the coming weeks, leading up to it, is this is kind of my new focus for what I want to be doing in life, and it's pulling people into interest groups and communities, and then learning more about what we're all interested in, and then creating some type of live place in physical 3D reality where we can meet and discuss and talk about these things.

That's kind of the plan for me for the next few years. You'll hear me talk more about that. I'm not going to go into that whole rant this time. But yeah, that's it. Let's get to Shane, right? That's why you're here. Not further ado, here is Shane Mouse. Hey, man, what's going on? Hey, how are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm great. Cool. Thanks, by the way, for doing this on a Sunday. That's pretty cool of you. No problem. I have the day off, so. That's even more cool of you. So, dude, first off, congratulations on your tour and everything else that's going on. I was listening to your interview with Marin, and I can just hear, I'm really happy for you that you're having kind of all this resonance with other people, and they're getting what you're doing.

I think it's really cool, man. Congrats. Thanks. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, it seems. I get, I think, in some ways why it's happening, and I just thank you. Thank you for coming on, and congratulations. Oh, yeah, thanks for having me. Cool, dude. I'm fresh off listening to that episode to kind of, it's an unfair advantage. I feel like we have, for people who do a lot of podcasts, have their own or have a lot of guests on, you get kind of like the topographical map of someone's psychological state or kind of where they are. So, like, I'm fresh off listening to you say, you know, you're kind of wary of going too far into the mystical state when approaching some of these psychedelic dimensions or whatever with DMT.

So, and I don't want to pin you down to just the psychedelic stuff because I was doing some research on behavioral economics, and that's super fascinating too. So I want to hear a lot of your different perspectives. But I was thinking if we could kind of start in the neuroscientific realm, if that's cool, and kind of just, because, like, it's fascinating to me when people come to similar kind of ideas or conceptions, but from different angles. And I've always been someone who's not dismissed science at all, but if, you know, I'm someone who over the years through psychedelics has gone in to learn more about out, whereas empirical science, you study the out to kind of understand the inner working sometimes.

So, I love talking to people like you who gravitate towards the scientific paradigm and then somehow see bridges between them. So, do you know of, like, a specific time in your life, or can you recall that kind of got you into the neuroscience stuff, because I know you were talking about, like, blackout drunk and studying physics books, and my akin to that would be, or my relationship to that would be, I used to do that with, like, Carl Jung, you know, psychological things, mystical things. So I kind of get where this driving impetus comes from. Do you have a time in your memory where it's like, well, this was it.

This is kind of, like, drew my interest to it. Well, definitely, I mean, I was always reading little bits of this stuff here and there. I mean, when I started getting a little more obsessive about it was probably about five years ago, I had just ended a relationship and I moved to LA and had this new girlfriend and I was in a weird place in my career where I had just done this kind of big tour for this radio station and I had kind of, I just realized that the comedy, the state of comedy that I knew was kind of just going away in a hurry and there was going to be, like, morning zoo radio and those weren't really the fans that I wanted and those weren't the fans to be doing more thought provoking stuff, which I knew is what I wanted to do.

And I was just kind of grasping at straws for ideas when I moved to LA, like, my manager and agent at the time really wanted me to put together a TV show and blah, blah, blah. At first, I was just kind of, I heard, I had a few jokes about, like, animal mating behavior. My new girlfriend and I, we had actually done mushrooms before we kind of got together. That's a good, good starting point. Yeah, and we ended up, and so it was like, we were already friends, but when we did mushrooms, it was like, the first little bit of starting to, like, develop feelings for one another and at that same time we had watched, we watched Animal Planet, which was where I was sure, and why not.

So early on in our relationship, and she smoked a lot of weed, which I wasn't, I smoked some weed here and there, I kind of already, I was kind of over weed, really, for years, and then, but because she smoked so much, I was starting to smoke a little more, so I was smoking more weed than normal, I was watching more Animal Planet, I was having more sex than normal, and so I was writing all of these, like, animal jokes and relationship jokes and blah, blah, blah, and so I kind of just started getting into, like, looking into some mating pattern stuff and researching ideas and ultimately came up with this idea for, like, I'm going to do a show about the science of sex, and that was back when I was still just like, I couldn't free myself from, like, really needing to get a laugh or whatever, and, and just, like, diving into what I actually want to do, is like, well, this could probably be easy to sell and blah, blah, blah, and, but in that process, I, I started reading, like, crazy, um, I was reading, but, but I, yeah, like, obsessively, and it was just a lot of evolutionary psychology and biology at first, and then, I started picking up on some of the gaps and, and how much it was able to explain and knew that I needed to learn more about neuroscience and, so, um, that, that was the time that I really, really dug in and started reading like crazy and, um, I kind of changed my career and changed what I was doing on stage and everything else, and started, uh, wanting to, you know, uh, have, rather than just kind of tearing down people's belief systems and all that, I, I decided that I would just kind of present a different way of looking at things, not be like, hey, you're dumb because you believe in Jesus, which I had done enough of, and, um, instead just being like, hey, do you know about this weird cognitive bias that we are using that as an in road to kind of explain some evolutionary theories, and, and that also took a few years to kind of figure out how to do that effectively, right, I mean, so, in a, in a lot of ways, it was kind of, you were looking for a bridge or kind of the connectivity between what you were personally going through, what you were personally experienced, which obviously for any artistic medium comedy included, you're drawing on personal experiences, perspectives to kind of shape what's going on, and then as you dug into neuroscience kind of as a map or a template to kind of examine to see what's going on, that informed, you're like, oh, there's something else here.

I, I, do you know, um, have you read anything related to kind of the, the connections between Tibetan Buddhism and neuroscience, because that's a huge kind of area that's kind of overlapped over the past five, 10 years. Have you, have you examined any of that stuff? No, actually. Right. Tell me about it. I will. I mean, I think this is again, based off of, you know, I think there's, there's this weird spot where we are, I mean, for a lot of reasons right now, this point in time, but this science verse mysticism or new aging, new age, right, each can get used in a pejorative sense, right? A strictly scientific paradigm can overlook the emotional or intuitive components that we know exist around us.

The new, you know, new age itself has kind of been pejorative, you know, think of someone with like crystals all around them, you know, with dreadlocks in a bong. And as someone who has had crystals, dreadlocks in a bong, I know that that is a limiting kind of paradigm to put someone in. However, what I find particularly interesting is the intersection of things like neuroscience, physics, and the mystical wisdom traditions that have been around for 5,000 years, you know, three to 5,000 years, like Buddhism or Vedic scriptures, things that weren't just philosophies for religion, like how to be, but also explanations and kind of investigations into how the mind works.

What is our perception? What is the world around us? Is there a meaning to it is this nothing? So what happened is, and this is a no small part to the Dalai Lama, because he always tongue in cheek says, and he very much encourages the scientific dialogues between Buddhism and, you know, the most advanced science and neuroscience in the world. He says, listen, if science proves any aspect of Buddhism to be wrong, we'll drop it. We'll cut it out. Like we are going to total. He says it tongue in cheek because he knows that the thousands of years that this particular brand of Buddhism has existed, they've gone inside.

So like when people are talking about, you know, string theory and vibrations, they're like, yeah, that's kind of the meeting of where this emptiness and what they refer to as bliss. And these are our Sanskrit words. So they're not well, and Tibetan, they're not there, Tibetan words, but they don't really totally jive. But one person in particular, I think you might enjoy as you're kind of discovering the merging of science and psychedelics and these dimensions that we can't specifically explain with either one or the other is this guy, Minja Rinpoche, M-I-N-G-Y-U-R, and then Rinpoche, which is commonly used in Tibetan Buddhism as like a master.

It wrote a book called The Joy of Living, and it is specifically a book exploring the intersections of neuroscience and Tibetan Buddhist wisdom. And I heard you're also a meditator and know that there is some insights to be gained from that, specifically about using and integrating meditative practice for people and also redefining what meditation is. And this is something that's been really important to me because I've been steeped in for my work, working with like spiritual teachers and Rambhas, Jack Lornfield, all of these people, I've learned quite a bit about meditation. That said, it was and still continues to be relatively difficult for me to integrate a daily practice into my life, for whatever reason.

Too much shit to do. You know, the famous Gandhi saying, if you have too much shit to do and you're supposed to meditate 20, double it. I don't always adhere to that. But I know one of the things that Minja Rinpoche does very effectively is he tries to redefine the paradigm of what meditation is. So it's not necessarily just sitting down with your eyes open or closed and thinking about nothing or trying to push away thoughts. But he's saying, listen, if you have 30 seconds, try to shift your state of consciousness into a more observer-like thing or just in taking stuff and not judging it, not judgmental awareness.

And he specifically has gone out to the leading researchers of neuroscience and basically said, what do you think about this? Hook me up to the EEGs, see what's going on neuro scientifically to my mind when I enter a meditative state, try to gain some insights on what's going on. So they're finding all this interesting stuff about neuroplasticity, which I'm sure you know about, gray matter and brain increasing, people's tendency or proclivity to be kind of buffered from negative emotions or pain sensations when in meditative states. So they're really starting to study kind of this stuff. And it forms a bridge over these seemingly too distinct areas.

And I think because of where we are in this time, and no small part to people like you who are fusing worlds together, right, like, I'm sure this has been part of your psychedelic experience. But when you have enough of the heroic doses or whatever is going on yourself as you know it, the shame, the know, you either see the layers that show you that it's not really a real thing or it just drops away and you're like, holy fuck, like I've lost this sense of eye. I've lost this sense of me. I see the inner connectivity of this stuff. So what seems to be happening aided by technology, aided by kind of where we are culturally society, society and historically, we're merging all these worlds at once.

That's why you're able to do a psychedelic tour where you're getting like, of course you're getting people coming up to you after shows and you're selling out shows because you're talking about direct experience that so many other people are having hearing and having and being, but then they see outside in the world of our traditional kind of paradigm we're in and they're not getting the answers they want. So these direct conversations provide kind of like an entry point into discovering things. But I really think you would be very much interested in this Tibetan Buddhist. They're the most scientific of the wisdom traditions I've found to date and I've studied this stuff just kind of in the same obsessive ways you have my entire life.

They got lists, you know, they name all of the emotions. They name all of the different states. They have the barter realms, which not only deal with life and death states and the in between states, but also the dream state, all these kinds of places we can go to interact with this stuff, yet they pull it out in a way for people from the West and that's been a big thing. You know, they got kicked out of Tibet when China took over and started killing everyone. A lot of them, you know, went to European countries and this country in particular. So we've got this like, you know, poke around anywhere in the country, you'll find some Tibetan Buddhist center somewhere, which is fucking nuts anywhere, middle of the country.

So I really think it's my grandparents are from a little town Lansing, Iowa. My uncle has a is a Buddhist and there's a huge temple and this tiny little town. I mean, there's not, there's nothing around for hours really, right? But yet there is some, there's a temple. I live in now, I just moved to the Hudson Valley, five minutes away from me in a rural aggregate cultural town, there's a Tibetan temple. There's another one 25 miles away and they're all founded by the same kind of people. It's a very, it's a way to kind of get into, I won't, I won't just use the word mystical, but kind of the less empirical studies, the outside to get in more of the inside to get out.

It's the more accessible I've found for a lot of people because they're not saying things like, you know, there's Brahma, there's Brahman, that's the God that is selfless and existing and pervading through all things like this is a Vedic or a Hindu, or you hear of Hinduism and there's, you know, thousands of gods as a turn off to someone who is already inherently biased against religion, which unfortunately, you know, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, the Abrahamic religions are just, you know, they're written by an asshole. Like, let's just be clear. This wasn't like God divining a word, it was some dude with a fucked up, you know, situation in all these things culturally and wrote all these crazy shit down.

There's certainly allegorical truths in these other things in them, but they don't necessarily have anything to do with how we literally should be living our lives or like what the meaning of it is, although there's that validity in all of them. So another part of it, I don't want to jump around too much, but I really, really enjoyed hearing your DMT experiences. First question for you. Have you done ayahuasca yet? Um, I have and, and by the way, I just want to say that I, when, I mean, I, with my show, I separate myself from New Agee kind of thinking specifically so that I can get, like, one, the New Agee crowd is already coming out to see my show.

Right. Already knows that. I mean, we get it. They're pretty friends, they already get it and, and like they don't need to be reached. And it's, it's the people that are like a little on the fence that, um, that are the types that will be turned off by saying, you know, I saw these gods and went to different dimensions and all like there are just lots of people. I mean, there's going to be people that are interested in that as well. Um, but that's already like being met by other people as well. So it's not, it's, I, I don't, I don't think that what I do is present some like clear absolute truth or anything like that.

I definitely intentionally tweak things in my act to present my ideas in a certain way. Um, I mean, and I have my podcast here we are where I pretty much never talk about psychedelics. Um, I'm constantly just cramming for tasks. Right. And so, yeah, I'm looking up some of the smartest people in the, in the country and then asking them about what they're an expert on and, um, hold your own and have some insightful questions to ask. Yeah. Trying to. And so it hasn't really allowed me much time for it. So basically I, I've never really even studied psychedelics, to be honest, I take my own psychedelic experiences, and then ideas about neuroscience or psychology or whatever and kind of try to figure out my own ideas, especially I'll go through and see what other people had to say.

But I'm a little overly, I'm, I'm concerned about, um, other people's influence already. I'm, I'm concerned about the way that that can influence the trips themselves, and they can be like self-fulfilling prophecies. And, um, and I, I also just want to present a different point of view. I, I probably bias myself too much and just like, make it unique rather than just like, just say exactly what you want to say, you know, I also have, uh, you know, I also want to be unique, which that doesn't mean that I'm exactly saying, you know, the truth as I see it all of the time. Um, I mean, it's a version of possibility.

So I have, you know, say 10 different possibilities of what might be happening during a, from say a given DMT trip, and I'll take some of the possibilities that I think are, um, the best ones to deliver the message that I'm trying to deliver and get, get more people interested. And just get more people talking and, um, I, so, um, so that's just to say that, I, I mean, I just wanted to make a point that I'm not like against the way they stuff. I'm not like, I'm certainly not against Buddhism at all. Of course. No, no. And I didn't mean to. Yeah. I didn't, it wasn't implying it. Yeah, but, um, I, I just, I mean, there are things that set off lots of red flags in my head.

And some of it is, um, the hypocrisy of the new agey, um, it's out of control, no, it's out of control. It's, it's, it's spiritual bypass, it's fucking insane. I mean, some of the egos on some of these ego less people is really crazy. Like, and even, like, oh, so this is a word for master. I'm like, well, what kind of fuck is calling themselves master? It's that, it's that sort of stuff. So, if, if people tried to, like sometimes, sometimes people like, well, like, call me a shaman or something or no, no, no, no, no, I'm a Shane, it's close, but not quite the same thing. And so, I mean, I do take issues with some of it.

I do, um, I'm probably overly critical, um, but, uh, but yeah. So anyway, that's, that's kind of the point of view that I come from, um, in my show for now, which may completely change and it's changed, right? Life changes. That's just one thing we know for sure is that impermanence is a fact, right? We know that. Um, no. The question, I forget, I forget what your actual question was because I just wanted to go back and clear that up. No, and I actually want to touch on this because I think it's, we can get, the question was have you done ayahuasca, but I'll let you answer that later. But I think you're touching on here regarding the new age, um, scene and let's just call a broader spiritual and these words have been co-opted and they mean different things to different people, but you're talking about this aspect of using kind of the new age or spiritual and mysticism, essentially as a spiritual bypass, right?

That's how it functions for a lot of people. Oh, well, I'm into this particular line of Buddhism or I'm in this particular line of bhakti guru worship and I do this type of yoga because that Kundalini yoga gets me high and this is my thing. Those are all in their own right when done right and correctly valid ways to getting to fundamental truths. When it becomes a problem is when you attach your ego to that. This is Cho Gem Trungpa, another Tibetan Buddhist, um, and I'm not a, I'm not a Buddhist. Um, I just find that there's a lot of clarity in the writings and one of the famous book he wrote, um, is called spiritual materialism and it's fucking awesome because it is essentially calling everyone out and this happens to fucking everyone, whether it's psychedelics, meditation, new age, science, everything.

Everyone gets into these rigid ideas of what something is and they use that and attach it to their character, say, well, this is who I am. I'm science Noah. I'm new age Noah. I'm Guru Noah, whatever it is. And that's how they relate to the world and that's just how we navigate a complex situation out there. So it's not inherently like a bad thing to do, but when we really start identifying that eye with that thing, you get the cult of personality, you get, you know, people buying into concepts that maybe aren't as spiritual or beneficial for us as people and the world as they should be. I mean, I work with a lot of, I have worked in the past.

My day job was a digital strategist, basically building out revenue systems and offerings for spiritual organizations. And I decided to apply my skills to that place because I thought, well, these people will be ego less. They will be totally united on the front for working solely for the wisdom and compassion of humanity to enlighten people and make them have the tools they can use to make their lives better. What you quickly learn, regardless of the size of the organization, is people and businesses are fucking people and businesses and they have the same issues in every, whether it's the science people, whether it's the new age people, whether it's the, it's the same things you see across or politics, whatever it is.

So that's an important thing to touch on because I think we have to be skeptical. We have to be discerning about where we put our awareness and attention with everything, right? And when you're looking for a potential map or template to navigate things that aren't as easy to figure out as like, I touch fire and it's hot. I'm not going to do that again. But you have to figure out like a complex system of like, how do I live my life? What's a moral and ethical way to like engage with other people, like those types of things, it is important to vet and this is where I think skepticism, healthy skepticism is incredibly important.

You have to vet these things and you don't always make the right choice. Like trial and error is a huge fucking thing. But the reason I find a lot of the wisdom traditions to be useful is they've been around a really long time. And when you, like you said, come to some type of idea or conception or realization about a psychedelic experience you had and then you go out there and you see like, holy shit for thousands of years, people have been talking about this same type of experience and this is their particular perspective. It becomes kind of like a resonant thing. For instance, I'll use the story of when you were on your DMT trip, the Purple Woman, right?

And your friend Bob had the experience of then he was like, yeah, this Purple Woman was there. It's like that fucks up our templates for how we see the world normally. It doesn't fit in with our paradigm of like, why is he seeing something that I saw that I thought was my kind of objective or subjective experience rather? How is that happening? So that leads me back to the DMT question because I know when you broke your feet, which I'm really sorry that happened. I broke my foot in 2014 and it was fucking awful. I couldn't walk for like four months and it changes your whole world. But I know when you're doing that, you have these DMT experiences and you were about to do ayahuasca, right?

Which is a much more drawn out kind of, I know a lot of people have done ayahuasca. I know a lot of people have done DMT, but it's a much longer experience of the DMT thing and it's not as intense, right? It's not for some people. But I would love to hear-- It's the best that I did. I did. It was very mild. Yeah. Yeah. Relatively speaking. Relatively speaking. I had probably smoked DMT 50 or 60 times by that point and DMT is exceptionally intense. Yeah. I've never done it. I've found ayahuasca to be pretty underwhelming. Can't wait to do it again. A lot of it was that I was turned off by the cult evive and I just couldn't really get myself into it.

I just simply can't really be in a room full of 20 people puking. It's just-- Didn't appeal to me either. I can't get where I need to be in my head when there is people vomiting all around me. Weird. That's so weird. I'm going to do more ayahuasca experiences in the future, just like one-on-ones. Yeah. Cool. And so I'm looking forward to that. I mean, one, I make this point a lot in-- I mean, this is one of the biggest kind of close my show with the whole piece about, like, we all just get wrapped up too much in our own versions of reality and it's inescapable. But once you go, oh, this is the absolute truth.

That's the shit that-- that's when everything goes wrong. And it doesn't matter who's saying it if it's a scientist or a Buddhist or it doesn't matter. That's when you've just created so many limits for yourself and I mean, for me, it's-- for me, it's much more challenging to take something like a psychedelic experience where I see some God or spirit or a different world or whatever and it will feel like that and it will feel like I just had a conversation with God or saw the beginning of the universe or whatever. For me personally, that's much about what my journey with DMT has been about is being like, OK, that's what the face value of the experience was.

I just went to some other fucking dimension and there's like gods and stuff like that and then had all this information and was overwhelming and then just trying to pick apart and figure out how that could be happening in our heads and it really-- it also-- sure, I mean, it is a scientific approach, I guess, only because I'm not being like-- I saw God. But I don't think-- I mean, it's not-- it's certainly not traditional science. There's almost no way of studying this stuff as far as I can figure out right now because in my way of seeing it, so say it's this multiverse within your head running these various simulations and we all have these kind of, say, an ideal woman in our heads.

If you're a straight guy, you have this idea of a perfect woman, well, in this other different dimension inside of your head that's, say, like inside out the movie, say it just looks a little different than it does in this perception and say it is purple colored and this purple colored hologram of this really sexy, like, attractive playful woman and so that's kind of my approach and it makes me think of a lot of-- when you talk about, like, this has been around forever or whatever-- yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm often just like, well, I don't really give a fuck. Love it. And I also-- I mean, a lot of things work for reasons we don't understand them working, like, say-- Totally.

Totally. --something like acupuncture that seems to work for people. So, either, like, Asians are magic, right, or there is the way in which your brain perceives pain neurologically is you have these basically two inputs going into this pain system. You have this long-term, like, achiness, soreness in this short-term-- ooh, ouch, get your hand off of that. And they basically can't be working together at the same time. So if you have this long, achy thing, and then all of a sudden you stab it-- Interrupted. --and you interrupt it with that short-- and so-- so, I think that-- when I think about the things that, you know, people see all these things in common, which I see that stuff all the time-- Of course.

--things that I'll just read, you know, a lexicon of different things, they're trying to write some shorthand for, like, DMT, like, visual things, have you ever seen that? I haven't seen it. I've never done DMT, so I haven't researched it. Hello, synchronicity listener. Here I am again in the middle of an episode interrupting. Why would I do such a thing? I want to tell you about something I've been working on for the past 68 months-- really 10, 15 years. But 68 months, I've been working specifically on a course, an online course, around creativity. And what does that mean? Is a great question that I have asked myself consistently.

I found out, sent out some surveys to people who listened to this podcast, some other people who are interested in what they were looking for, and what emerged is a lot of people are looking to either start and/or sustain a creative practice. And I've noticed from implementing one for myself over the past six months to a year how some of the positive changes from doing that extend far beyond just your creative projects that you may be working on. So there's nothing you're going to do right now. I'm not asking you to sign up for anything or do anything. If you want to stay updated about this, the best way to do it would be by joining the synchronicity email community.

You can do that on syncpodcast.com. Check it out. Pop up will happen. Oh, no. It's a pop up. It's not so bad. Sign up. And you'll start getting emails about this. And if you want to find out more, shoot me an email at know@sinkpodcast.com. And I'll let you know. That's it. Just want to let you know about that. You'll hear more. Stay tuned to this space. Let's get back to the episode. Bye-bye. Well, I mean, I've seen probably like half of things that people describe. The other half don't strike me as anything familiar or whatever. But that's really interesting, right, that I'm seeing all of these things that other people are seeing.

But I don't think that that has to be like anything outside of our heads. I still believe that we have, I still believe we have these ideas. I think it's basically exemplars. I think that just like I can't tell if the blue that you see is that I see, but it's still the same part of the brain interpreting whatever color we are each seeing. And so now with psychedelics, you're artificially turning those parts on. So now, if you, now rather than me seeing blue in the environment, if you turn that part on artificially, now I project blue in a way that looks like the environment, because all of this perception is within our heads and why wouldn't it, if I stimulated the same part near brain, why wouldn't you also see blue?

And, believe me, I've had plenty of trips that I'm like, well, there's no explaining that shit. I've just had like premonitiony kind of stuff, but I just, I mean, part of it, maybe it's just that it's really fun for me to maybe like explore different ideas, or maybe it's like a childish contrarian inside of me that wants to just like rebel against the standard idea of the empty, the spirit molecule. Right. I mean, I could be, I mean, I just have a million biases like everyone else in the world has. And so, I mean, sometimes I do trips and I feel like there is some math that sprung into existence, and it was like this flat pattern that expanded out of control, or like, it just by nature expanded, it was like this math, it's like the realm of possibilities.

It's like every possible combination is what this kind of formula creates every combination of everything that exists, and then when it's complicated enough, it becomes conscious, and that's kind of what we think of as God, and but God itself doesn't even got this conscious math like is aware, and it's observing and knows everything that's happening, but doesn't really have any control over any of it, like it just needs to, every possibility needs to happen, there needs to be, you know, like God needs to be both like a millionaire and a homeless person, and alien planet, spectrum, right, right, right, even imagine it in grass and cement, and just needs to be every possibility, and, and so, I mean, I'm not saying that's not the case, and it certainly fucking feels like that, like, I will, like afterwards, I will report, like, a trip or write it down, and I will, here's what I saw, no judgment, just, you know, and so I've seen plenty of stuff like that, and I just, I don't know, I just, the point that I'm at my life right now, I just keep on coming up with, when I challenge it, and when I poke at it, and this isn't like, scientists can't do anything with this really either, like, so say you're going, to say it, so say it, I'm right, it's all in your head, it's this inside out kind of these multi, these many different dimensions, right, and I got plugged my computer in, okay, um, oh, second, um, well, they can't see this, so, like, a neuroscientist right now can have a really good idea of what, like, a neuron is doing, and maybe even, like, oh, there's this, uh, kind of, little bits of circuitry in here in a way, like, these neural loops where you activate one, and then this habit has been formed where these, this loop communicates with one another drive in action, which is very small, and then we can have these ideas of, um, okay, we all have these many hats, maybe, maybe there's a part of your brain that's for when you're kind of, uh, at work in a part of your brain for when you're with your girlfriend, you know, yeah, like, foggy conceptualized ideas of, like, the higher up processes, like a hierarchy of, like, how things would be kind of compartmentalized or areas where you'd be processing certain segments or aspects of your life, or perception, but to be able to see that this, like, inside out kind of dimension where there's, like, where your ideas take shape and, uh, is my way of looking at it, like, ideas take shape and create lives for themselves and replicate, and then I run through all these simulations until a useful idea is molded, and then, back into your consciousness, well, in this inner world, it might look like a fucker, that the idea that I have for some part joke might, might look like a giraffe, you know, I have to go through this weird fucking world, and then when the giraffe is good enough, it pops into my consciousness, and that, and that's the perfect part joke.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. And, and there's, so there's no way of studying this, and until we can start getting some sort of, like, DVR for the mind, you know, kind of, um, figuring out what, how to interpret the neurons in our visual system, so, like, when you can tell someone to, um, picture a barn, and then, and then they're in an MRI machine, and then we'll show you the fucking barn that's in your head, then we can maybe really start making some progress in what's happening in this DMT world, um, until then, I think it's all pretty fucking wild speculation and that's the other, the other thing that really, so, um, I mean, I think that it's also easy to, like, for me, I just think about how many times, like, throughout history, how many, every time humans have come across some thing that they don't understand, like, "Oh, God did it, why is, why is there a son?

Well, two gods must have got together and had sex," and then they, like, shoot this thing out, and then hopefully they have sex again tomorrow, or maybe we need to fucking sacrifice something, so, yes, they've been wrong every fucking time, and, and, um, so the chances that this is the time out of a billion, uh, a billion different for every fucking grandma, that's, like, God must have blessed me with this nice parking spot, and it, like, our brains naturally do this, we, we need to have, we have this kind of, um, DNA that's, we're, we're incredibly flexible, and we're born into all these weird, unpredictable environments that need to be flexible, and we need to have these goal-orientation systems.

Frames and paradigms, yeah. Right, plus forward, and, um, and so this, like, what's the meaning of life that everyone seems to be after, which is a silly idea in my, I mean, why, why isn't there an infinite amount of meaning, and why isn't everything so, like, based on context and subjective, and, and, and why isn't there just as much infinite meaning as there's no meaning at all? Yes, yes. And how can you escape any of the, like, M, but I think the reason why there's, like, the singular meaning in people's heads is an illusion meant, meant to prod, that's evolved, that's been really beneficial, that's meant to prod you.

The idea of meaning is what's prodding you in the butt in an arbitrary direction, but keeping you, giving you enough confidence to keep on eating and moving forward and spreading your face. I love it. I love what I'm saying. But the, like, the, the meaning, it's the thing that you think you're going toward is, is not a thing. It doesn't exist. It's, uh, it's a mirage, um, but keep on fucking walking. You know, we don't know what happens when you stop. Um, and, and so, um, some of the things that, so, so the way that I, I look at even say, um, these, like, like, I was raised Christian or, and, or any of these, um, Abrahamic religions.

Yeah, yeah, any, any of these, like, even, I don't even do it, but now I'm not even sure that it was just like some asshole just making up a bunch of stuff. I think that, I think that we got as humans got better and better at running these simulations that could project further and further into the future. Um, I can close my eyes and kind of imagine what it will be like the next time I see my girlfriend or what, what it will be like to age and be like, yeah, there's, what it will be like to die. And that seems like this cut off line that is just like very, like, it's a liminal ballantry on death, your, your brain would perceive such a threat, like, if you were really evolutionarily speaking, that's bad, real bad thing.

And it would fire off the amygdala so much that you wouldn't be able to now, now you're kind of grounded in this fight or flight syndrome and you can't really process this in a thoughtful way. And I think, um, I think our brains evolved this kind of barrier where, um, so if you can think about like what your genes will be doing and meaning your kids will be doing after you're gone and think about how to set that up the best to spread more genes and well, maybe I need to instill this idea in them like, like say, you take two religions. Um, one of them is, uh, I say, you take like, Buddhism where no one's having sex, uh, or, you know, like a Buddhist monk, a monastic monastic style of living.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And put that against like Catholicism where fucking all the time. Yeah. Why? It's just for God, both of these things are for God and then see what religion is winning in a few generations. So what? So, so I think that people, I think that there is this, um, like what heaven is is this part in your brain where you can take these, I mean, I will keep on going back to these kind of exemplars. These kind of, okay, what happens when you die, oh, you get to, you get to meet all everyone you've ever loved and you get to be in this perfect, uh, uh, you know, everyone's in their prime.

There's no sickness. There's no hunger. There's no flaws and all the different people are like off in this house. Yeah. They are not around you. It's no like icky gaze around or whatever it might be and, um, and, but through constructing that world in your mind, you then do have this very tangible idea to pull from to live your everyday life projected out into reality at that point too, right, which cumulatively over time would create these systems and structures that we potentially don't have to beat yourself up too much because it's so unrealistic and don't worry, you'll get there. You know, after all this silly life stuff, you're going to go into this perfect place anyway.

So, you know, don't fret about that. Don't beat yourself up. Just, you know, keep going like kind of work toward this thing. Well, this is up, you know, construct some, some sort of system that works like confession where you kind of get to hit the reset button so you don't start thinking of yourself as a failure and a criminal. Yes. Well, so there's so much packed in to what you were saying. I guess we can kind of go in reverse chronological order there and I'm mindful of your time here, but religions clearly have served the function culturally and society as tools, whether co-opted or intended as such, to manipulating control behavior and psychology for large swaths of people, not describing any specific intention to that.

So I'm not saying it's for evil, maniacal purposes or to get money or anything, but that is a function of how religions work. I'm not saying that's not what they're just accidentally stumbling upon a couple of little nuggets of truth or cultural memes, that kind of work, exactly, which is why it's not similar to what you're talking about in terms of conceptually of the idea of heaven. This is not totally a reach here to connect how why Trump was elected, right? There is still this idealistic American dream, make America great again, and this isn't just Trump. Hillary was doing this to you. All politicians like to say, let's harken back to the days of this utopian society.

Although if we look back in the context of history, when did that happen? When was that happened? A year and a month. Yeah. Tell me the day. I had a pretty good Valentine's Day, but yeah. Let's rewind the tape. We've been recording this and show me all this fucking perfection. So from there, I also want to plug out this idea of time and linear time as a concept, which we know can definitely get fucked with in the psychedelic or meditative state or any transcendental state. This idea of time as a concept, as a linear progression as we go through from birth to death and then whatever, if whatever ideas are after that, that we know just from relativity, just from hardcore like shit, we accept a Newtonian and Einsteinian physics.

We know it's not real. We know our perception of time is only something we can say, well, relatively we were here and now we're here. So this is time and this is this plane that we're existing. So that also, evolutionarily, fucks with a lot of this shit, because if we're just in one moment, which is again, a very mystical idea, which is there's only now, there's only now, yes, we can remember the past, yes, we know there's a future, but this is really the only state we ever operate in, right? We can't leave totally in the future. We can't leave totally past. We can create mental abstractions of what's going on, but this is our experience, right?

And that gets, again, fucked with when you're on psychedelics in a lot of different ways. This then puts another interesting wrinkle on kind of the function. The two things I also wanted to go back to is I think you've defined kind of one of your ideas about consciousness and the brain kind of being the either signal or tuner that we process and filter experiences through. Are you familiar? I mean, the other thing I want to add here is this is, right, we're talking primarily about our conscious above the threshold of awareness experiences. I am one of the people I read a lot of, and my podcast is called Synchronicity because of him was Carl Jung, right?

And Freud and Jung stumbled on to this concept of the unconscious roughly the same time. Freud, Jung studied under Freud. And Freud basically had the theory, I'm doming it down significantly, that the unconscious this is where we process all of these things that our conscious mind isn't capable or doesn't want to process. So we have an Oedipus complex here because this is somehow related psychosexual to your relationship with your mother and this will dictate emotions. And we can see this played out, which is why Freudian analysis and its subsets still are used today. Jung basically said this. He said, listen, yeah, totally.

I get that there's an unconscious and I see what this is going on. But there seems to be underneath the threshold of our experience, which just lets fundamentally we can't get there right now, it's hard, we can investigate, we can get little shadows on the wall, but we can't really see while we're awake and processing what's going on. However, we do have gateways to what is going on in the unconscious. Jung's main thing was dreams. He would analyze people's dreams and say, here are symbols, here are what he called archetypes that shape kind of our collective experience. And there's stuff below this that has been repeating forever.

And Joseph Campbell is another person who kind of latched on to the monomyth or the hero's family. This story that we tell ourselves to, you know, the rest we go, we go outside the threshold of our regular experience, encounter mystical or divine experiences, have a complete destruction of our identity before, then slowly reintegrate those experiences and become back to the beginning where we're processing what's going on again with this new fresh perspective. So this is all deal dealing with the realm below our conscious threshold. I fundamentally believe based on my personal again, I'm extrapolating from my personal experiences and kind of relating it to other stuff, but from my psychedelic experiences, it seems when you can shift your consciousness, whether through meditation, whether through psychedelics, tune it a slightly different way, you begin to have access to these unconscious states that we regularly filter out.

So the DMT experience could be accessing either valid other dimensions of existence or this unconscious realm, which maybe in itself is another dimension. And the way the unconscious seems to work is primarily through symbols and archetypes. So when we're talking about the purple woman, we could say two things. One we can say this is the archetype of all femininity, all qualities. I mean, when I, when I said exemplars, that's just what exactly right, exactly. This is the manifestation of that. Now we can also say from there, say two other things, we can say, well, this is an allegory or a metaphor we use to process this concept or idea.

We can also say, well, this should exist. This is actually a real place, which is why we can independently verify that this stuff is happening in there. Now all of this stuff I love, but my primary kind of drive when talking about psychedelic experiences or any transcendental experiences is that's great. But how do we reintegrate it into our normal kind of base waking level life experiences? What lessons can we learn? What things are applicable? And then how do we take those, reintegrate them into our lives? The more I've done that throughout my life, and I don't, I am very much with you, when it comes to absolute truths, whenever someone is claiming anything that, my alarms, five, no fucking one.

I don't like that. That freaks me out. The two concepts I seem to be comfortable with attaching my belief system to right now, as we're speaking, are wisdom, which to me is just can be easily defined as clarity. It's clear seeing, no extra shit filtered on top of it, no, you know, glasses with all this muck and mudge is clear seeing that's wisdom and then compassion, which is, you know, the will and the desire to have everything be okay for everyone. And this is maybe an idealistic, totally non achievable thing. And I will say in our 3D reality on earth, I don't think that's a real thing. We're not going to be working towards some utopian society, even though if we have the impetus to and we're trying to and I'm trying to and you're trying to and everyone's trying to.

I don't think that's a solid state will arrive at before the earth burns up or we destroy it. I don't think that's going to happen. But I do think these two aspects, which you could call heart and mind, wisdom and compassion seem to be a template that work pretty well for any situation. If you can look through those two lenses, if you can filter through any experience, obviously doing exactly what you're saying, get as much perspective as you can, whether internally or externally to validate certain theories or hypothesis, like that's, that's what we should be doing. We shouldn't be one of the reasons, again, not to always go back to Buddhism here.

But there's two things that I think are very important with Buddhism that kind of allowed me to investigate it more. One was one of the famous things that Buddha said was, don't take my fucking word for it, you dumb dums, investigate this shit yourself and see if it jives with you. And that has been co-opted over the years by charlatans who will use that as a calling card and then immediately begin to tell you what the fuck is going on. So I'm wary of that. The other aspect of this, Buddhism is not inherently a theistic religion. There are elements of it where there's gods, there's demigods, there's all of these things, but they're general premise and I'm, again, generalizing there's a lot of facets of Buddhism.

But their general premise is there is emptiness and then there is manifest things. And the union of these is what creates everything that includes the six illusory worlds that we live in, which would be the hell realm, the realm of the hungry ghosts, the animal realm, the human realm, the demigod realm and the god realm. And these can, again, be viewed allegorically or metaphorically or as actual states of existence. But outside of that, which we kind of find ourselves in, there's these other realms that are outside of the realm of existence and they say even outside of those, there's this void.

And when they say void, they don't mean it like this is this black hole of nothingness. It's more like empty space that anything can be projected or create it out of. And then when you dig a little bit deeper, this kind of loving awareness is also kind of supporting that. So it's this weird idea of nothingness and lovingness that kind of merges that form the core of Buddhism. But they don't say like, this is from God, God did this, this is all our own experience. So it's, it's a hybrid in a lot of ways, which is why I think a lot of people do eventually find it appealing is it's like a hybrid of where we are with our scientific and theistic kind of things.

It lives somewhere in the middle and tries not to get too pinned down. And for, you know, contemplative science that believes in reincarnation, that can be difficult to do because that's that you're immediately going to lose like 80% of people or however many. They're like, what? No, you don't know that dude was that guy before it doesn't fucking make any sense. So I ask these things, you know, for you because it's interesting to see how our own theories of ourselves and the world evolve as we go through different experiences in my life. But I will say this regardless of our particular perspectives, it seems like we're talking about kind of the same thing, right?

I mean, like to you, when someone asked the question or you said, when someone says the meaning of life, like what, what responses could you have to that? If I said, like, what the fuck is going on? Why are we here? You know, here we are. Why are we here? I mean, I think that, like I said, I think our perception of meaning is simply an illusion. I mean, in a way that like there's no like singular goal and there simply can't be in my way of thinking like how could there be one direction, otherwise we would all be kind of doing it. We had already kind of evolved and then it again, but time is a fuck up in this thing because if we're looking at a linear trajectory, 100%, but if time isn't how we actually experience it, we could all be doing something, right?

We could something I don't know if I totally believe this, but why not cosmology I like is earth, this realm, realms of karma, things that have reactions and, you know, two and then reactions to those things. This place is kind of like a training ground where our school where we're supposed to learn certain things and I don't want to get too preachy about any of this stuff, but I think suffering is a big component of where we are. It's an indisputable fact of life is suffering and not unlike some horrible like this is the worst thing. But we're not always happy. Not always comfortable and everything isn't always great.

Chick goes wrong. People we know die. People we know get sick. We died. There's a whole range of things we experience and I don't think it's meaningless. I don't think this is just like some evolutionary thing we got thrust into and this is it and we have to deal with it and it could be. I don't dismiss that possibility in any way, shape or form, but I think a potential function of suffering within this cosmology would be what ends suffering? How do we get out of this fucking closed loop theoretically? Is there a way? Is there something we can do to jump out of this and we have little signs? We have little guideposts that say, well, you know, when I was really nice to that person and I was listening with all my heart and they said they needed something and I gave it to them, I wasn't really suffering right then.

Everything kind of did feel utopian at this point and now we could then go and say, well, this is just because neuro scientifically we evolved to release dopamine when we're doing something nice for a member of our tribe because that allows us to succeed. So this isn't an absolute thing, but I do think there is a way to, you know, create a system whether it's totally illusory and I will give you, it's, I'm 50/50 that it's either completely illusory that we make up and tell stories to make ourselves feel better or that that's not to mean that I want everyone to starve to death. Of course not, right.

Of course not. No, no, it's great to have goals. I mean, I think when I talk about the idea of a singular meaning being an illusion, not that there is no meaning is that I think that to me it's very freeing. So maybe I'm the one just like wish thinking here because to me, I get to create my own meaning in my life and to make my life mean whatever the fuck I am not. I mean, there's, I mean, I can't fly or whatever there's, you know, physical limitations on some level. Yeah. Yeah, some limitations. But I also, I mean, and this is just like the skeptical dick in me that I hear stuff like compassion and so I mean, compassion is great.

I wish there was more of it, but I certainly don't think it's everything. And I also don't think that like for me, it's not beneficial to think of it in a magical way. I have a, I have a joke in my, in my act about people talking about like universal love. Yeah. Yeah. And you just got to make love with everybody because like every time I do it as a spiritual breakthrough and get some message from God, it usually has something to do with how he needs to be using his dick more and the, but the reason like, but more importantly to my point is that is that the way that I view it is that love is this evolved emotion meant to motivate certain behaviors, just like every other emotion.

It's just be that we're such wish thinkers that you, you, and that's the good one. You know, oh, you want more of that. And so like you never hear anyone when they're shipping be like, oh, I'm really tapping into this universal paranoia right now, like I'm getting this message from God about how but you have, right? We have, right? Awkward. We have tapped into that. I'm sure. You know, it's enough. You do. They just don't like to talk about it as much. Exactly. Exactly. And when you do, it's like a thing that you fucking resist and like push away and like, oh, no, no, no, that's not what, you know, that wasn't, there's never anything, there's no magic or universal universal attribute attributed to it.

It's just like, oh, no, that was just a, that was like a, a flaw. That was a little bump in the road toward this perfection that I'm heading toward. And I think that, I think that especially in meditation, which I love meditation, but I think that there are safe places in our heads that feel very warm and comforting. And there's also fucking madness in our heads. Totally. And sadness. And I think that we, how do we approach that, right? I very hard to like fight one off and then, and then like, oh, that, like, we attribute this kind of safe, like almost like motherly kind of feeling in our head and like, that's it.

That's, that's, that's what we're going on, which is what it sounds like when you're underwater, by the way, which is what it would have sounded like in the prenatal environment. I just had a kid. It's weird to see how they, yeah, and of course it's every fucking religious sound. I mean, I'm skeptical that a lot of a lot of people are just trying to find this safe place and actually are non-consciously not even realizing that they're just trying to crawl back into their mom's vagina. I love it. I think that we should be careful with that. But I think, I also think that because we can have goals and we should strive to, I want to feel all the love that I can, that means that I still have to understand it.

I don't think to me, making it out to be some magic thing, it doesn't help me feel more of it. And. Shouldn't. And it, and it would be a trick. It'd be like a trick you were playing on yourself, if that's the direction you're going. So, I mean, we can figure out that, like, okay, you know, this is, we're on this hedonic treadmill, we're bottomless pits of want, we are never, ever going to be satisfied. But if, if rather than trying to win the lottery, which you'll be super happy for a month and then you're going to crash and go back and go back and say, yeah, if instead you have these, like, you just kind of aim for setting some reasonable goals and have these incremental, you get like a raise each year or whatever, these little measurable milestones and, and you'll want to go down, you know, this, and then, and then, you know, just kind of figuring that out.

And then, I mean, it's, to me, it is mostly neural chemistry. I mean, I think that, I, I think that dopamine and many of the rewards and just like happiness and a lot of us, oh, I think they're drugs. I think they're all drugs and I think they're exceptionally addictive. I think we go through withdrawals. I think that people do fucking crazy things for them. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fucking get our hands on more of this stuff, but just like figure out how to use them effectively and, and, and moderation. So I mean, it's like tools, right? We're talking about various tools and things we can use.

I mean, I also, one thing you said that I think is again, really fucking important. It's why partially again, I'm a young fan is he identified the shadow aspect. We all have this shit inside of our own personal psychology and collective psychology that we find unsavory, right, jealousy, greed, all of these things that we're familiar with. We know they exist, but our natural tendency for most people, and this could be a cultural thing, could be an evolutionary thing, could be a society, whatever it is. Our natural tendency is to go, this shit sucks. I don't want to deal with that. I'm going to go do the thing that makes me feel good.

And then we get on this little racetrack that this closed loop of trying to make ourselves feel better. People can so plant that with any number of things. However, when you turn to face that shadow stuff, the stuff in you, like I, the more this weird thing has happened to me, the more I've acknowledged the shitty parts of my life, the more I acknowledge that I yell at my wife when I shouldn't, because I'm angry or I'm an asshole and has nothing to do with her, the more I stop saying, well, I don't do that or I'll get over it, I'll fix it, and that makes the problem worse. But when you start to turn to the roots of what's getting this and try to shine the light of awareness, again, on what's going on, in the same way when you do a psychedelic in that sense of I dissipates, that very often happens with emotions.

If you turn towards them, really just try to put as much investigation and awareness of what's going on. Now, I don't mean that's going to happen overnight. I don't mean that's going to happen in a month, I don't mean that's going to happen in years, I don't mean that's going to happen in decades. It could take an entire life to get a shred of benefit, but one of the things at least related to meditation that's helped me on this way is you get that gap, that tiny little gap before you react, for me, I'm still in the phase where the gap is there, I see it, and then I still fucking react, I still cannot stop.

It's really hard, but you can kind of widen the gap and then choose how to respond rather than just reacting. I think this is why this is a little over the place. This is why I think Donald Trump is a good thing for this country and I am not a Trump supporter. I don't want to ever be confused with one, but I think we're now seeing this fucked up kind of cancerous insidious avatar for what has been going on underneath the surface of this country for a long time and now we have a fucking choice. We can pretend it's not happening. We can try to destroy him in whatever ways we're familiar with destroying people or we can say, what the fuck just happened here, really, not just dumb racist voting for people, not just people co-opting people through psychological and behavioral tactics, what really fucking happened here?

This shit is bizarre and I think if we do what kind of it seems like the normal paradigm for humanity has been, we're probably going to turn away from it, but if we can force ourselves to look, and this is my thought experiment for everyone with Donald Trump, and I don't live in this state of mind very often, but if you can get to the point or you're going to have an ounce of compassion for this guy, don't have to condone anything he does, but if you can get to that point, that's the gap in our kind of empathy muscle that if we strengthen that, we can potentially, over hundreds of years, however long, figure out better systems to live in because without getting into all the inter outer personal psychology that's going on, the world is clearly running off systems that are fucked up at this point, right?

And notice this is as simple as putting together a comedy tour and trying to make a career for yourself doing the things you love and want to be doing, like it's not really set up to do that shit. You've had a forge a path for yourself that were aided and abetted by technology and all these things now, but still like, it's not like, oh yeah, I want to be a person who talks about consciousness in a lightweight way that's not making people fucking freaked out or heavy. I want to be able to support myself and encourage people to have these dialogues. That's not a thought someone could really even have like 50 years ago, there's like, how do you do that?

You need to be like a millionaire to like put out some massive message across traditional media. Now we can kind of create these systems that if they're aligned with, this is the weird part to me and we can wrap it up because I know we're going on forever here and I want to be mindful of your time. One of the things that's impressed upon me is that there is a direct and real connection between what's going on in our inner psychic worlds and external reality. And not in the obvious sense, like I think to pick up my phone and I pick it up and I do it, but ideas, concepts, physical things that happen out in the world can be related to internal things.

This is synchronicities, these are coincidences, these are transcendent experiences. We're again at such a, we're kind of in the dark with all this stuff. I think some of us are kind of, many of us are waking up and seeing kind of that this shit is going on and we're beginning to make the connections and kind of get it out into the world in a broader context. I think that's what my podcast is, podcast on my and pod network, your tour. So this is kind of like the beginning, I hope, of a transformational stage where people start to begin to questions, you know, be a little more skeptical of the systems that put up are put up around them.

And how do we use these things again, to me, it comes down to the same fucking thing. How do we make sure that this place where we live now is first better for ourselves, not in a selfish way, put on our own oxygen masks, make sure it's okay for us, then how, if we're able to learn how we did it for ourselves, teach people around us, you know, give them the tools and try to force them into anything, if that pattern is followed, right, this is the projecting into the future stuff, if that pattern is actually followed for any serious amount of time, culturally, I think we have a positive impact on the planet.

And so that's where a lot of this stuff is kind of born for me. But I just want to say, man, like I got, I have three rapid fire questions for you that are really easy, then I'm going to ask you a practical tip, but do thank you so much for coming on. Like I absolutely love having conversations like these, I'm glad Michael Phillip introduced us. He's a hell of a guy. So I'm going to wrap it up. These are easy questions. We don't have to get like ontological or heuristic about them. What's your favorite color? I'm not sure that I have one. I don't know. Currently. I would say like a liquid metal kind of color.

Cool. Like a metallic kind of. Cool. Cool. What's your favorite number? Well, I don't have a favorite, no, I just have sentimental about my numbers. I don't consider my geometry very sacred. All right. Pick a recurring one. I mean, probably like, since I was a kid, 23 Michael Jordan, the best, of course. It's just in my brain. It's just there. Are you big? Are you a big smart fan? No. No, not at all. I don't like it at all. Interesting. I liked Michael Jordan when he retired, I stopped like exports. Yeah. Yeah. Same with a basketball. I played a little bit of basketball, not not terribly seriously, but we'll go to 23.

What's your favorite animal? I'm pushing you on favorite here. I can already tell. I just feel like I'm going to be excluding so many wonderful animals. What's your spirit animal, Shane? I mean, part of me wants to like take like a pragmatic practical approach and say dogs because I can actually like have them, but I guess I would say sloths right now. Cool. Fuck yeah. That's pretty badass. They're so weird. They're really weird. They're so weirdly slow whenever I see one. It's just like, how are you fucking doing that? Why are you going so slow? All right. Last question. What's a practical tip and this can be anything that you could share with people listening that's helped you in your life?

Well, in kind of game theory and prisoners dilemma, there's this idea of two people in a salad. If you rat one guy out, if you rat the other guy out, they get seven years in prison and you get to walk free. If you both rat each other out, you both get six years in prison or whatever, the numbers and everything. Sometimes it's a reward rather than a penalty, all the stuff changes. But if you both cooperate, you get two years and so you're kind of playing this game over and over again to see who like gets the least amount of years like for your score of this game. And they put together all these various complicated formulas for when you should, right on the person, when you should cooperate and they run them all through a machine and see what wins.

And it turns out that tip for TAT was the winner originally. So someone in one game, someone tells on you, so you just got seven years and you were trying to cooperate. So the next game you hit them back and you tell on them and then hopefully that will straighten them out, right? But then they started programming in some errors in the system. So once in a while there would be these signal errors. And so someone was actually cooperating, which is the best thing to do for operating. And then so once in a while there'd be a signal error that would so if you and I it would tell me that you just told on me, even though you didn't you cooperate.

But from as far as I can see, you're out of me out. So now, according to tip for TAT, I should then punish you back. Well, now from your point of view, I just write a view off. I started it from your point of view. And now this is like, so now you hit me back in a scapable thing. And so they ran a program that was basically tip for TAT with forgiveness, which is just allowing for there to be signal errors from time to time and being like, okay, I feel wrong to that time. Hopefully it was just some sort of miscommunication. That's before we fucking get too crazy with that. This is one of those things you need that gap for.

Yes. And before you yell at your wife next time, I just like to go maybe there's just some very big misunderstanding. I mean, it happens all at every fucking day, every day, every every like fight that I have with my girlfriend, and actually this current girlfriend I've been with for a while, been pretty fortunate in that regard, our fights are far apart. They're pretty tame and they're resolved really quickly. And I think a lot of that is just, it's helped me to recognize, and then I can point it out to her. And you just, whatever you thought, like this joke that I posted on Facebook or something was like me talking about being single or something, I was like, no, no, you look, did you see my post before?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, I didn't see that. Oh, wow. So Facebook's fucking with your relationship. Now you have the contact, that's just like one silly example of thing that actually happened. Yeah. I posted a thing and then I posted a second thing, like a follow-up tag to the joke, and then the one made me like come off as single or something made her uncomfortable. I so confused, and then like rather than get upset, I was like, wait, did you see the first one? See the, and then she hadn't. And so there's, and then boom, resolved, whereas if I just tack her, I can still get her to see that it was in the wrong context, but now we're both worked up.

We're not thinking clearly, we're both on the defensive or aggressive. And so I think that's, I see that all the time with people. That's wisdom. Yeah. Well, you're talking about his wisdom. You've learned that's wisdom. That means. No, no. I mean, in the sense that it's a goal worth striving for, certainly. I mean, it is. I know what you mean. Yeah. It's clarity. You know, you're, you're learned over time. I'm sure about exactly what clarity is. I love it, man. Um, dude, thank you so much. Thank you. Really. I really appreciate it. And I like, and I hope to do it again because I like that we have kind of different perspectives at various ways of looking at this stuff.

I think that's ultimately like, that's super beneficial for everyone. So I really, really appreciate you coming on in. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Well, how do you do listening past the music person? Great job. How would you think of the episode? I thought it was pretty good. Uh, thank you, as always, for listening this far. You are the true fans. Um, I hope to see you if you can make it to this L.A. event, uh, this mind pod network thing. Really cool. Um, I am going to be meeting a lot of the people on my iPod network for the first time in person too. So it's going to be really fun for me.

I think it's going to be fun for you. If you can make it, if not, we're working on some ways to potentially live stream it. So you know, maybe Facebook, we got to figure that out exactly, but stay tuned. We may have some information there. Thank you. If you are a person who is donated, subscribed, uh, rated reviewed, those are all awesome ways to support this podcast, um, podcasts need support these days. I think it's a good thing to demonstrate that we can do it. I think it'll lead to more things, uh, being put out into the world that maybe can actually be intended to help people. Um, a weird thing kind of emerges sometimes where if you want to help people, you're not necessarily thinking about how to make a lot of money, but we should still have systems that can support, um, people who are trying to do good things who maybe aren't thinking about the money.

I am trying to be a bridge and think about the money for those people, including myself. If you can, that would be awesome. If not, no worries. Your support just by listening is super awesome. So that's it. That's it this week. I'm going to see you next week.