B (4:44)

Gregorian chant. This is how you start your.

A (4:47)

Yes. It stimulates the vagus nerve. I heard. Now, I don't know what the vagus nerve is, but it stimulates it, and it's supposed to be good. I'll teach you after the show. It's not that hard, Abby. It's been too long. How long has it been since you were on the dtfh? Since I was in New York, I believe.

B (5:07)

Jesus, Lord.

A (5:09)

And so much has changed. So much has happened personally for you.

B (5:14)

Yeah. And you.

A (5:15)

You became a mom. I became a Texas breeder.

B (5:21)

You're the Elon Musk of. You're just a breeder now.

A (5:24)

You've been working on this beautiful documentary, Earth's Greatest Enemy. Finally, it's completed. And, you know, in the beginning, you bring up something that anyone who has kids experiences, which is, you know, I'm not saying if you don't have kids, you can't. Like, you're not worried about the future. Obviously, breeders and non breeders alike feel a little nervous about the world, but once you have kids, it's all your chips are on the table and world events become somehow more intense. And so can you talk a little bit about how that inspired you to work on this documentary?

B (6:05)

Yes, Duncan, Yes. Having a child and then realizing, oh, God, I'm. We're all in. We are so invested in the stake of the future of this planet. And, and I, it's not that I wasn't all in before. I never had a choice. We're growing up in the Imperial core. We're American citizens, so all of everything's happening on our shoulders, in our names. But having a kid, it's like, it's so weird talking to other parents throughout my life and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, when you have a family, you'll understand, like this activist stuff. And for me it's like, what do you mean? We don't have a choice. We have to be all in. We have to be invested in our children's lives and the habitability of this planet. Otherwise what the hell are we doing?

A (6:49)

Yeah, it seems like there's like a sort of group of competing ideologies right now. We talked about it when you came in. So sort of. The competing ideologies, basically, how do you mitigate the anxiety of knowing that your children are going to be living on a planet after you're dead? You can't do anything for them and your grandkids are going to be on this planet. So to mitigate this anxiety, there's lots of ways to do it. Right now, let's talk about the first way. And I feel like I need to bring this up and I'm positive you'll be able to address it. So one way one could mitigate the anxiety. When you hear all these scientists saying, dude, you don't fucking understand, like, it's bad. And you see like, even regardless of like, hurricanes unlike anything we've ever seen before, regardless of like, videos of like ice caps melting or shit getting infinitely colder than it's supposed to be. Like right now in Greenland, it's like negative 65 degrees. Just weird weather everywhere. Regardless of all that, you can tune in to an algorithm that will serve you all kinds of counter arguments for climate change. Well, it's challenging because you're walking outside and I live in Texas, but I go on the road a lot and it's weird. Weather's fucking weird right now. I think this is undeniable. Right. So there's more refined versions of the algorithm, but they all are in. The Cabinet of Climate Change is a leftist George Soros fueled conspiracy theory to make money for, I don't know, like solar panel companies. And it's a whole grift. So how would you respond to that? Because that is one really sophisticated way to be, like, well, it's all bullshit, everything's fine.

B (9:08)

Yeah, I mean, I think in Part we were talking about a trauma response to the abject, just reality, our material conditions degrading over time. And that is coupled with these anomalous weather events, I mean, they are extreme. When I saw an inconvenient truth 20 years ago, I was like, okay, the ice caps are gonna melt and the oceans are gonna rise and the polar bears are gonna be stranded on these ice caps. And then I'm realizing now it's everything and everywhere it's extreme drought, it's the wind, it's the fires, it's. Everything is affected by this. But how would I address that? I mean, we did kind of have that idea, do we address the debunking arguments of climate change out of the gate? And we decided not to. And I think at this point, to your point, Duncan, the algorithm can feed you whatever you want and reinforce whatever worldview exists. So what I've seen, people are actually more decoupled from reality than they were 20 years ago. So like the fires in LA, you would think that everyone would be like, oh God, we're seeing climate change on our doorstep. But instead it was like, there's, it's China, lasers, lasers, it's the DEI firefighters. It just became really kind of bizarre in terms of the rhetoric. And it all goes back to propaganda. I look at how none of this happens in a vacuum. Who's pushing the propaganda that climate change is fake? Because it is true that it is a market oriented approach. It is true that Al Gore siphoned that energy and used it into these kind of carbon trading schemes and fraudulent like market campaigns. And that's the problem is that neoliberalism has been so hollowed out and corrupted that they have literally just taken superficialized and tokenized real grassroots struggles around things like climate change advocacy and tokenized it and sold it back to us with products. And that's what they did. And so of course it's hollowed out. And of course you have a whole contingent of people who look at the climate change rhetoric and they're like, this is fake. These are billionaires who are posing this shit and they're not doing anything to actually mitigate these things. So I understand that the problem is this is propaganda pushed out by oil corporations and it has been for decades. It's the same corporations who've told us recycling is the answer while they're pushing out single use plastic bottles right every day.

A (11:35)

So there's a parallel here to the way people dismiss various religions, which is because, like, you know, a priest, like does some horrible thing to a kid or because they're like all the things that we know happen in organized religion. They don't even go to the source material. They just ignore it. They don't even, you know, and there's so many takes on the source material anyway, which is a difference between scripture and like scientific research. But where it's similar is you get this like massive amount of data pointing towards a direction that's horrible and theoretically preventable. And then just like what you said, people like fucking Al Gore figure out a way to cash in on that. And then the fossil fuel companies are like, oh, fuck yeah, let's point out these motherfuckers are cashing in on it. Neither of these things discount the original data set.

B (12:35)

Yes.

A (12:36)

But you could either just like become completely illogical. And these poor fucking scientists who don't know how to talk to people, that's not. They're scientists. If you've ever been around a scientist. Not all of them, many of them, you know, they're not front facing. They never wanted to be. They study tiny little minutiae, little tiny things and it all comes together into this incredible body of work from which we can extrapolate how the future is going to look. So they can't get out there and be like, guys, no, you don't understand. This is in any kind of charismatic way.

B (13:10)

And the thing is, they have been and which is so uncharacteristic of them because you're right, all the scientists that we talked to, there was a whole part of the documentary we took out. I'm like, I am not going to belabor, like climate science. Like, no one's going to fucking watch this movie to be like, I want to learn about climate change. It's like, I want to learn about the military and what they're contributing. And so all the climate scientists that I was talking to, they were just like, yeah, like this is happening. And it's all very, just kind of like monotone. Like they. 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it was like the scientists were just like, the politicians will act accordingly with our data like that. Like, why wouldn't they? We're putting out the data, they'll do sweet. It's such a sweet, naive worldview. But now you actually see climate scientists chaining themselves to Citibank, being like, what? Like, listen to us. I mean, I'm seeing it more and more where they are at their limit. I mean, they don't know what else to do. To say, we fucking told you do something now.

A (14:02)

And now there's Just entire swarms of bots that anytime anyone does any kind of climate related activism, it's going to like parody it, satirize it. Come on. Really? What the fuck? What the fuck? And so meaning that the signal jamming now is so extreme that it there is, it's very hard to get any kind of like message like this across. This brings us to your documentary because you know, it's so wild. It's one of those things that's like. I never once have wondered about how much oil the US military consumes per day.

B (14:44)

Right.

A (14:44)

It's never occurred to me. I've never thought, not that it would, but whoa, what is the amount? How many?

B (14:53)

270,000. 270,000 barrels a day. A day.

A (14:58)

Okay, that is so spooky when you consider that all the wars, yeah, the shit in Venezuela that just happened, the shit in Iran that hopefully isn't going to happen, but probably will. All the Middle east wars from that perspective are because we've made this modular oil consuming dragon. It needs more fuel. And so to get more fuel it creates wars justifying that it needs to exist. It's so fucked up, dude. That is so terrifying.

B (15:39)

I know, I know. And that's the thing about it. You can talk about legacy contamination, which is a whole other part of this story, which is every time the military has built up waves of militarization of the Cold War, Vietnam and now the China buildup, there's different contamination zones with all the bases and testing grounds and expansion. But we're talking about just the maintenance of the arsenal. We're talking about just the maintenance of a global military empire. That's how much oil it takes to just supply and maintain. And to your point, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You need to continue to pillage and plunder every last vestige of oil.

A (16:17)

Oh my gosh.

B (16:17)

And natural resources in order to justify the expanse.

A (16:21)

Wow. It is so. It's like cyclonic. It's like, you know the conditions for a tornado or it's like the perfect conditions to create a never ending rampaging destruction around the planet until we come up with a way to like fuel people blower uppers with like quantum energies. But paradoxically, if that happened, I imagine like all of the current level of military activity that we're witnessing would diminish because it wouldn't need to eat as much anymore. So it really is like. I'm just curious your thoughts on this. You said in your documentary, I'm a product of the war on terrorism, the war on terror, Truly. And the war on drugs too. Don't forget. We've been through a lot of wars, fucking wars. And so we've all been, you know, propagandized in, like, various programs come and go. Right now it's the War on Fraud, State of the Union. Now they're fighting fraud. There's always these wars going on. But I remember the war in Iraq. I remember the protests. I remember in la, going out there, people in the streets, so many people. Because we got this sense, Jesus fucking Christ, we're gonna do this stupid war. And it was like, good. This was the reaction. Yeah. Cut to. Today we have unprecedented buildup of the military, ostensibly to wage war with Iran.

B (18:06)

Yeah.

A (18:06)

And it's crickets over here, man. People are. Now, we just, I guess, accept that the oil dragon is gonna. Fucking Dragon needs to be fed. It needs to be fed. We just accept it. Now. We don't even, you know, obviously people are like tweeting, what the fuck? I thought you were gonna be the peace president. But no, you know what I mean? Like the way we used to push back, it's like we've been subdued. The American population has been subdued to the point of just accepting that this is how we function as a country or what you call an empire.

B (18:39)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's been a full frontal assault. It's our psyche, it's our physiology, it's our minds. I mean, to have that kind of full frontal war on every facet of our lives, it's very, very paralyzing and destabilizing and just the barrage of false news, fake information, propaganda. I mean, to your point, we're so siloed that we can just be reinforced with just complete falsehoods. See what you see. Don't be duped. Like Barry Sanders said in the documentary, I always think this. Why are the richest men in the world forcing a certain narrative to us on social media? What are they trying to amplify? What is the false narrative that they're constructing for us? Why do. Why do they want us to think that half the country agrees with this? How many people are fake? How many? You know, I have to keep thinking of that because having a pulse in just traveling across the country for this documentary, I am completely blown away at how many people are awake, are talking about these issues. Know my work, they're just like, it's amazing. And I think when you're stuck, kind of brain rotted, which. I have been making this documentary and watching the Gaza genocide for so long, I. I was under the impression, like a lot more kind of pessimistic, like, we are completely fucking cooked. We are done for. And now I'm like, actually, I am seeing to your point. Where are the people? I think that people have protest fatigue because they were protesting sustained activism for three years under Biden about Gaza.

A (20:11)

Right.

B (20:12)

I mean, they were doing. And then it's like, Trump gets in and it's like, oh, God, yeah, there's Venezuela, there's Cuba, there's Iran. It's like, what do we mobilize for? Because that's why this documentary is so important, because it's trying to bridge all of these together and saying it's one beast.

A (20:26)

Yeah, yeah, it's one thing. Yeah, it is.

B (20:30)

It's the military industrial complex. It's a military empire that's parasitically and vampiristically sucking every last drop of our blood, sweat and tears.

A (20:41)

Yeah, yeah. Happily killing people. I mean, like, I mean, I know that's an obvious thing to say.

B (20:55)

Foreign.

A (21:00)

This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Better Help Friends. If you, like me, have experienced some kind of relationship issues to the point where you start asking yourself, am I dating the same person over and over and over again? And then you realize, like, no, you're dating very different people, but you're seeing the same unacknowledged stuff in you being reflected on them from relationship to relationship. This is why therapy is really good. If you're someone who's noticed some kind of repeating pattern or who knows, you could just have terrible taste in the people you're dating. But more than likely that's not the case. More than likely there's some kind of shit that you haven't acknowledged or addressed or dealt with. And I speak from personal experience. I have. I've had a lot of benefit from therapy and if you're interested or you think it might be something that could help you dig into some aspect of yourself you don't know how to do by yourself, then you should give them a shot. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the United States. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 plus years of experience in industry leading match fulfillment rate means that they typically get it right the first time, but you can switch at any time, which is pretty awesome because sometimes it's not like, you know the therapist isn't good, but it's just not the Right. Therapist for you. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com Duncan. That's better. H E L p.com/dunk it. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I know it's so obvious, but that. That I think you can extrapolate from that. Anything else that you need to extrapolate, you know, like, for example, if I doubt you know anyone who happily kills people and makes jokes about it, I doubt you do. I don't. But if you did have someone like that in your life, you'd feel nervous probably around them and any other thing they did, like if they shoplifted, if they were arsonists, if they, I don't know, dug up a grave and, like, wore the rotting clothes, it wouldn't shock you. It's like, yeah, they like to kill people. So anything goes at that point.

B (23:37)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (23:38)

And Josh, do you have that thing queued up? Let's just play it if you can get it. State of the Union address last night made the horrific mistake of live streaming it. It's the most boring shit of all time. But this is a clip.

B (23:50)

Oh, God.

A (23:51)

Here's a clip where Donald Trump does. And I just have to say, this is one of the things American presidents do that I feel fairly successfully desensitized to most things at this point. But like when Obama made the joke about dating my daughters. Don't forget drones. And you're like, you blew up families with those fucking things. You really making drone jokes? You piece of shit. You sociopathic Jeffrey Dahmer level piece of shit. You've got a higher body count than Jeffrey fucking Dahmer. And I don't think he made jokes about it. I've seen the interviews. You know what I mean?

B (24:28)

Yeah, he was at least somber.

A (24:30)

He was.

B (24:31)

You're out there fucking doing BBC style documentaries about nature, man.

A (24:35)

Yes, dude.

B (24:36)

And so, goddamn mirror.

A (24:37)

What do you know? Trump does I kill people joke. Go ahead and just play this, Josh.

B (24:42)

Jesus Lord.

A (24:43)

You might have to cut forward. They do this creepy zoom in on Hegseth and that. I don't. What's her. What's her name? Yeah, look at her. What's going on with her? Dude, it's weird. Look at that look.

C (24:55)

Showing American security and dominance in the Western hemisphere.

D (24:59)

Look at that.

A (24:59)

What's going on with. They're just zooming in because it's so weird.

C (25:03)

From violence, drugs, terrorism and foreign interference for years, large, large swaths of territory in our region, including large parts of Mexico, really large parts of Mexico have been controlled by murderous drug cartels. That's why I designated these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and I declared illicit fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.

A (25:30)

Can you pause the paradise? Okay, so I did think at this point, like, God, like, all the people I see out in the streets doing the looking for their keys things on fentanyl, how happy they would be if they heard we're about to get attacked with fentanyl. It'd be the fucking best thing that ever. Fentanyl bombs. They'll be out in the streets. Okay, keep playing, Josh. The Dems will not stand.

C (26:00)

And with our new military campaign, we have seen stopped record amounts of drugs coming into our country and virtually stopped it completely coming in by water or sea. You probably noticed that very seriously damaged their fishing industry. Also, nobody wants. Nobody wants to go fishing anymore.

A (26:20)

What the fuck? Okay. Okay, so. Right.

D (26:25)

Right.

A (26:26)

Same. Same. Like, that gives me the same feeling. Because it's like. It's like, dude, like. Okay, fine. Let's just imagine the propaganda is real. You blew up some people fucking bringing fentanyl in, which does fuck up lives. You blew them up. No trial or anything. We're gonna assume that wasn't fishing boats. Let's just pretend that's true.

B (26:47)

Yeah.

A (26:48)

You still gave the. It's the death penalty. That's the death penalty. Without. That's a public execution. No trial. We don't know for sure what's going on. There are a lot of those fucking people. They're getting blackmailed. I don't want to make them into victims, by the way. I don't know what's going on with that, but let's just say it's all true. These are monsters hauling fentanyl, cackling pictures of, like, destroyed families on their submarine or whatever. They're like. You know what I mean? They're like, ah, this is great. Moab. This is a weapon. Fine. But then to make a joke that, like, now people can't go fucking fishing out there because they're afraid you're going to blow them the fuck up. That says everything. Yeah.

B (27:26)

I don't care if the boat's made of coke or made of fentanyl. Like, you cannot just kill people. And the thing is, no one. No boats were found with fentanyl. Like. Like, the only thing that they found was weed, which is legal.

A (27:39)

Right.

B (27:40)

In many states. So it's like, I. Yeah, right.

A (27:42)

But this is sick. I would love to sail on a Coke boat. That would be the funnest fishing trip of your life. Until it sank. As you snorted your boat up. But, okay, so this to me is a sort of. When I see that at this point, I look at it and I think, okay, that might as well be another species than what I think of humans as. Because if I, as president somehow felt like, we've got to do this. Fentanyl is destroying families. The only way to solve this problem is to drop bombs on smugglers in the sea. Somehow I really believe that. I don't know. I can't get there, but, like, I believe that. And then I ordered the strikes. Killing people. Wouldn't that haunt you. Wouldn't that. Wouldn't that haunt you for the rest of your life that you, like, killed people? Wouldn't that?

B (28:45)

No, because the thing is, we're normal people with empathy and humanity. Someone like Pete Hegseth was literally, like. He's, like, affiliated with, like, a biker gang whose doctrine is kill all Muslims in the world. The. The Gaza Humanitarian foundation. That Pete Hegseth was like, administering this, like, fake feeding.

A (29:05)

Yeah.

B (29:06)

Operation that was going on in Gaza. It was literally hundreds of people who are part of, like, Pete Hegseth's like, like, anti Muslim gang. And they just went there to just like, shoot down Palestinians and mow them down. This was all reported from the whistleblower, Anthony Aguilar, who was part of what? The operation. Yeah, These people are maniacs. They're.

A (29:25)

There you go.

B (29:25)

Yeah.

A (29:26)

So. So. So. And it would make. It would make sense because, like, they are servants of the oil dragon. Right? So, like, basically, like, if we look at the oil dragon as some kind of actual.

B (29:37)

Yeah, Lovecraft. Like, the oil dragon is a dragon.

A (29:42)

It's like a Lovecraftian Eldritch horror. And these are the servants of this fucking thing. So of course they're like. Well, what we know about them is that they really don't give a fuck about killing people. Like, that is no problem for them. They feel like it's justified. Normal. All makes sense. So.

B (30:03)

And they don't care about killing veterans or soldiers that are American either. They don't care about. Oh, no, no.

A (30:09)

Those are offerings to the oil dragon.

B (30:13)

And that's a necessary and offering where it gets every year. You have to do.

A (30:18)

You have to, you know, you have to satisfy the oil dragon wants. He wants more. He likes blood for dessert. Now, the other thing that is really spooky to me about this shit, Abby, is, listen, the Medal of Honor, like, I don't think there's anything wrong with, like, you know, rewarding troops fine. It makes sense. It's A country, that's what they do forever. But why does it have to be a pentagram? You know what I mean? That's how fucking reverse pentagram they. Like, if you have served the oil dragon well, they will hang a fucking pentagram on your neck. It doesn't that. I don't know where you stand on that kind of stuff, but the Alex Jones in me, anytime I see it, it's like, dude, there's a lot of shapes.

B (31:07)

I like how Alex Jones is like, nope, nothing to see here. It's like Palantir. Like fucking surveillance state, police state. Everything is coming true. And he's just like, nope, I'm having.

A (31:18)

He's coming on the show soon.

B (31:19)

Oh, perfect, perfect. Talk to him about it.

A (31:21)

I gotta ask him.

B (31:21)

I want to ask him. This is everything that you prophesy like, this is everything that you said was gonna happen with Endgame.

A (31:28)

Well, but see, this is the. This is the thing, man. To that point. To that point, you know, probably, you know, Behold a Pale Horse, the seminal conspiracy theory book. So all these prognostications were made long ago about this sort of tightening, very slowly tightening news that leads to authoritarianism in the west, right? Like the predictions of the military and the streets, all these things. But the genius of whoever's running these campaigns right now is they figured out a way to do it, but to make it seem like it's part of like MAGA or part of some conservative movement. Meaning that even if you were a conservative, and many conservatives are like conspiracy theorists, many conservatives are. What do we want? Small government, right? What do we want? Like, less war and shit. And so it's this humiliation ritual because here we see the thing itself. You got the military in the fucking street.

B (32:34)

You got masked like state executioners.

A (32:38)

Yeah, state executioners. Poorly trained state executioners.

B (32:41)

Mall cop rejects.

A (32:43)

But those fucking mall cops, though, you know, they actually did more for the anti ICE movement than any of the fucking protesters. Those fat fucks. Because they weren't trained. They fucking. One of our friends is a cop. We showed him that footage. What do you think of this from your training? And he's like, oh, just unprofessional, horrible training. None of that should have happened. And so. But look what happened. Yeah, now they're defunded. They're not getting fucking paid now, like. And also the other thing that happened is Minnesota. What we're seeing there is an example of what I love about this country in the midst of the. What did you call it? The nucleus of the empire. Yeah, The Imperial Court The Imperial Court. Paradoxically, within the Imperial Core, shit like what happened in Minnesota happens, which is just in sub freezing fucking weather. People come out and they don't stop.

B (33:37)

A hundred thousand strong don't stop.

A (33:39)

They don't stop. And it worked. They're gone.

B (33:41)

Well, they weren't expecting, yeah, they weren't expecting the solidarity of the community to come up and face down ICE agents after seeing their neighbors getting kidnapped and people getting shot in the street. They wanted people to be completely shrunk in fear and they. The opposite happened. People came out in droves, unafraid. I mean it was quite amazing. Unafraid women in bathrobes out in the fucking sub zero temperatures. Like just filming these people right in their faces.

A (34:07)

Isn't that curious to you? Amazing. You're sort of like, you're a living paradox in the sense that you are in the Imperial core. You have a life in the Imperial core, a family in the imperial core. And somehow whatever the fuck this thing is, it can't stop people like you. That's what's interesting to me about it. It's like it's far from perfect. If it's in goal as an unquestioning populace that just sort of agrees with whatever the state wants to do, that doesn't push back, that just fucking grins and bears it, the dao is fuff. You know what I mean?

B (34:55)

Who relates to that?

A (34:57)

Well, there you go.

B (34:59)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what are you speaking to?

A (35:00)

You know, in a weird way, you just. The fact that you're above ground right now, right. It shows that whatever the fuck this thing is that you're shining a light on, it hasn't gained full power yet. Minnesota shows that it didn't work. There's a lot of times where you look at stuff it tries to do and it gets its hand slapped back.

B (35:30)

Yeah. It's not absolute and there's cracks and there's weaknesses that you can exploit because it is an absolute. And the thing is, the propaganda is so extreme and the violence is so desperate and extreme because it's a paper tiger, just like Zionism. It's like they know they have lost the mass consciousness of the people. To your point, there is a contingent of society who's been folded into MAGA that has innate distrust in the government. They know that they were lied to about 911 about the Iraq war, but instead of having the clarity that I'm nonpartisan and both parties are lying, they got folded into the whole. Trump is anti deep state, Trump is fighting fake news and legacy media and that was all very smart ban and strategy to say, I'm gonna take all the disaffected voters, the people who are detached from the political system, and actually fold it into the right wing control sphere. And it worked really well.

A (36:23)

Yeah.

B (36:23)

And so the Democrats had no idea what to do because they're a complete failure of an opposition party. And so what you saw was a solidifying like of the strength of maga, taking all of these disparate movements, the conspiracy theory stuff, the Alex Jones people, and folding them all in. The rfp, the tulsi. Yeah, it's actually really, really amazing because I meet people all the time who are critical minded, who fall into these tropes a lot because of just the way that the media spectrum is where there is no room at all. It's. Everything is just consolidated more and more and more into right wings media.

A (37:04)

Do you think, do you think it's true that the stuff that they're saying, that the whole MAGA thing is like dead now? Like the whole thing's collapsing, that no one's buying it anymore? That the, you know, the, the, the reality, what you just said is true? It's like everything you just listed I think are good things, you know, in the sense that I don't want any more war. I don't want to be propagandized by fucking like people working for big pharma or military industrial complex. I want more transparency in all transparency in the federal. I want all of the things that you just listed. And so all those people who got pulled in because they wanted really good things, now they're just like, fuck off. Now there's a don't vote movement happening right now, which I hate. But now there's this activist realm that is like, you know what, fuck it. Honestly, I get it. But they're like, fuck it. How many times are we gonna get tricked by these fucking reptilians? Like just stop voting. There's no point. It's its own humiliation ritual.

B (38:15)

It is a humiliation, humiliation ritual. I think it's designated zones of just trauma response. I mean people who are becoming. I know people who've become quite religious. I know people who were Bernie voters who became maga. Yeah, it is a kind of a. And I don't want to say cult. I just want to say it is a group think type trauma response. I mean you, you want to be part of something because it's too difficult to deal with reality. And, and I completely empathize with that. But I think that MAGA is, is strong I think that. I don't think that it's waning. I. Because I've talked to people who are maga. I've talked to friends of mine who I' really understand their point of view. And no matter what you say, even the Epstein stuff, nothing penetrates the belief system. It is all in as a religious system.

A (39:07)

Right.

B (39:08)

And that's what's so fascinating about it. So I. I don't think that that's true. I think it's the opposite. I think people are digging their heels in more.

A (39:16)

Well, you know, I. I don't. I don't know. I've like. And I honestly, like, I've really been trying to like, look at my. Lately I've been trying to like really be mindful of my own sort of black pilled cynicism that seems to be floating around inside of me. Because right now, another, like if I'm escaping into ideologies right now, it's not really an ideology. I would say, like I'm imbalanced towards nihilism right now where I just, you know, I see shit like that. I think it's something incredibly weird about the fact that blowing up kids in Palestine, it did have an effect, but not as much of an effect as like, weirdly there seems to be some hierarchy of bad things to do to kids. Right? And abusing them like Epstein did seems to be more disturbing to people than blowing them up. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's more disturbing. That's got more people coming out of the MAGA umbrella than the blowing up kids part. And that's weird to me. It's like because the oil dragon has gotten us all used to like. Yeah. You know, sometimes you blow up kids.

B (40:30)

Yeah. Yeah.

A (40:30)

It's an accident. Oh my God.

C (40:32)

I did it again.

A (40:32)

Oh, fuck. I don't know why it keeps happening.

B (40:34)

20,000 kids.

A (40:35)

Oh God, I breathed fire. Kids again. I'm sorry.

B (40:39)

I was hungry.

A (40:40)

Why does that keep out? I just want oil. I don't want children. But then this Epstein fucking thing happens. And so I'm really curious your take on that as an emerging phenomenon in the culture right now, Abby. Because you're saying the military industrial complex is in control. Is that the same thing as an oligarchy? And to tie that into Epstein. What the fuck? Suddenly we're realizing this? I've read these emails. Jesus fucking Christ. So suddenly you're realizing all the shit people were saying these super rich people were doing is true? So is it an oligarchy or is it like the military's secretly in control or is there no difference between those two things? And how do you think this Epstein file shit is going to play out over the, over the next few months?

B (41:27)

I mean, there's several things going on here. I think the psychological impact and effect of the rapidity of war crimes and heinous atrocities that Israel has committed. It looking at like the entirety of the Iraq war and the Afghanistan occupation, I mean all of the massacres, the Guantanamo Bay torture, Abu Ghraib, like all these things, it seems like Israel's doing that kind of shit weekly. And so I think what does that do to our minds when like blowing up the first hospital that they did and then blamed it on Islamic Jihad? And what that did was then normalize every subsequent bombing of every single hospital in the Gaza Strip. No one talked about it the same way that they did the first one. Everyone was arguing and debating whether or not that was even real. And so there's some sort of psychological effect of having so much like, like an over inundation of heinous things that you can't even process real time. And then it just becomes all the same. It's like there's no even point where you can be like, react accordingly or appropriately because it's so folded in with everything and so normalizing and you have to kind of compartmentalize it to just like live your life like, like you have to just be like, well, another day, another kid's brains being blown out on my screen. Guess I have to go like put one foot in front of the other and go make money.

A (42:47)

Yeah.

B (42:48)

And I think that what this did, it's created such an unprecedented level of not only paralysis from the global stage, I think an exposure of all these global institutions that were really just appendages and, and farces for the U.S. like the UN, NATO, all of this is, is just basically stage managed by US power. And so what the Gaza genocide did was reveal the hollow, bankrupt nature of all these global institutions. It made the entire world stage appear like, oh my God, everyone is just following the beck and call of like the U.S. right? And there's such a level of impunity. That's what leads us to the Epstein stuff. It's like when Israel, when you don't hold war criminals to account from the Iraq war, when you have someone like Obama saying look forward, not backward, then you get Gaza, you get levels of impunity that we've never even anticipated or envisioned.

A (43:42)

Terrifying.

B (43:42)

And now it's like now when you set the stage of Gaza, what is next, actually. And so the Epstein thing coming out like a bomb and it's like, well, this is what happens when the rich can do whatever the fuck they want with no consequences. This is what happens when you have someone like Jeffrey Epstein as part of this managerial class of powerful people who are administering these systems, working in these systems. And so when you ask, is it an oligarchy, is it a kleptocracy, is it the military industrial complex? It's a tiny group of billionaires. All of these corporate boards of directors sit on interlocking boards. They're on the media companies, they sit on the oil companies. They all are part of the same system, right? It's just been laid bare like it never has been. I mean, Trump's first term, he had all the weapons contractors, CEOs in his office and he was like, I am the arms salesman in chief, like, I'm gonna make you guys rich.

A (44:39)

Fuck.

B (44:39)

And before, it was like you had the revolving door. You had like one, one step away from like a general, you know, fucking the military industrial complex coming into the Pentagon and being forward facing. But now it's just right when he stole, right when he black bagged a sovereign leader, Maduro, the next day, you had all the oil executives in the White House and he was just like, it is a fire sale for you guys, right? And so these people are in control. Trump is just the perfect vehicle and conduit because he's a total grifter, total doesn't give a about anything. He's a complete con artist. And he is the empty vessel. He's the empty vessel for everyone, everyone, all the crazy outliers to attack their own agenda to him. And that's why they're barreling as much through as possible. It's the chaos president. That's why it's like, what do we even focus on? How do we respond to this?

A (45:29)

Right, Right. Yeah. And you know what's, as a comedian, like, this has to be said, do you know one of his superpower, he's funny.

B (45:39)

He's funny.

A (45:40)

He's fucking funny.

B (45:41)

He's not as funny as he used

A (45:42)

to be, but he's getting less funny. He's not gonna be funny when World War 3 starts, when he quips about like irradiated fucking Idaho or whatever, when he makes a funny joke about. But the, but that is a superpower. You really see how powerful that is. And it. Because if somebody's like funny like that and affable in his own kind of like eccentric way, even though you're getting all the fucked up signs of like. No, no, no. You could almost just desperately, out of some sense of desperation be like, ah, but he's funny. So you know, he's dust kind of. And it's weird. It is weird. It's magic. It's like there is to me from. I love to look at things through a magical lens. Looking at what he's doing as a spell, like he's casting these great spells, like these distortion spells. Apparently he was. I don't know if you heard this or not. Didn't. I'm not a journalist, so I don't fact check and I should because I talk too much. But the. Have you heard that somehow he was connected to a manifestation church? The church he's. Can you look that up? Let me. Josh Trump. Manifestation church. I'm pretty sure. So meaning like, like old school manifestation. Pre secret manifestation. Ernest Holmes manifestation. Which. Let me see here. This podcast has been supported by Squarespace Friends. I think in the history of websites, there has never been a better time to build a website than right now. We are in the dawn of the AI era. It's happening. And what's incredible about Squarespace is not only do they have an AI that will help design your website, which is so nice, they already have a modular system that you can make a beautiful website and you could do it fairly quickly. But there's questions you have when you're building a website. You know, stylistically, things that you're writing, information you're trying to get out there, and the ability to have like an AI companion that can help you work out the best way to organize your website. It's badass. You just gotta try it out. But the reason you want a great website right now is because you've probably been building weird shit with AI. I mean, my God, that's all I do now. Used to play Dark Souls 3, now I just go on Codex and make weird fucking apps. It's so fun. And you need a place to put those, to display those. You could literally make a web only app and put it up overnight and it would look pretty good, anything you want. And Squarespace is the perfect medium for this way for you to display the cool stuff that you've been making with artificial intelligence. Squarespace. It's everything you need. You can get a domain name for the Techno messiah that you're making and want to show the world. You can build a domain name for that being, and then you can build a website around that being using Squarespace's incredible technology. Display whatever consciousnesses you've summoned from the abyss. And if trapped in a technological form via some app you're making with a Squarespace website, if you want to, you could try it out for free. Go to squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch, use Offer Code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. It's squarespace.com duncan. Use offer code duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a DOM. He went to a church influenced by Norman Vincent Peale. I've got the Wikipedia up right now. Best known for popularizing the concept of positive thinking, especially his best selling book, the Power of Positive Thinking. And so wrapped up in this is like at that time there was this whole manifestation movement, Ernest Holmes, a lot of people, and it was religious in nature. And essentially the idea is that what you say becomes reality. And so some people connect Trump coming out and saying things are better, things are great, not as like Orwellian propaganda, but as a ritualistic manifestation. He is saying the way he wants things to be because he believes that that's how things will become. And it fucking works is the other problem. That stuff actually works. And so that's the confidence.

B (50:52)

Yeah, to never back down.

A (50:53)

Never back down. Always say, like, you manifest your will into the world via, like language and belief inside. He believes it too. And so you know, when you're. Even though you might be aware of the impending unemployment rate, it's going to happen because of AI. Even though you might be aware, or of the potential AI bubble popping altogether, even though you might be aware of these fucking things instead of like, you know, you would expect a good leader to do balancing what you're saying with that. You just fucking say. You just say, the Dow's at 5,000,

B (51:32)

the Dao's at 5,000. Well, did you see the Apprentice? The movie? Not his show?

A (51:37)

No.

B (51:37)

It's really fucking good because it shows. I mean, this is fascinating that he was in this bizarre church and it kind of like, it really plays with his whole con artistry and the way that he does dictate the narrative and it just becomes doctrine. Yeah, but what's also interesting is, like, it shows the Apprentice, it's like his early life. And it shows how he was totally under the tutelage of Roy Cohen, the guy who basically sentenced like the Rosenbergs to death. And this guy, that whole mantra was like, never back. You lie, lie, lie, and you never admit defeat.

A (52:12)

Right.

B (52:13)

You just always say that you were right and, and Donald Trump was just kind of this empty vessel and just. It basically adopted this guy's whole Persona. But it showed him just how to be like that. And it was. It's so fascinating. It also shows how he raped Ivanka or Ivana. I'm sorry, Ivana. Sorry. That's.

A (52:33)

It showed that.

B (52:34)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because she talks about that in her, her book.

A (52:36)

Gross. Yeah, that's. That's that.

B (52:39)

And it was like transactional. He like, bought her for like a hundred thousand dollars.

A (52:43)

Jesus Christ. I mean, see, this, this is the problem here. And I think we need to refocus, and I think you're really good at doing that. The problem here is that when you, when you start looking into things, God help you. And you start realizing that all the things you were. That you thought you should discount, all the things that you should. You hear and you're like, that's not true. I'm not gonna even fucking look that. Take another bong rip, you conspiracy dipshit. That didn't happen. When you start digging in and you realize, oh, my God. Oh, my God. There appears to be an alternate reality happening within the imperial core. There is the sort of, like, default reality we all kind of hang out in. And then right outside of that, there is an entire other reality. It's the Roman fucking Empire. It's fucking Caligula. It is. Nothing's changed. We might as well be in a time warp. We might as well. It's like what Philip K. Dick said. We're still at the time of Christ's crucifixion. The Roman Empire is here, A time warp happened, and we're all stuck there. But when you see what's happening, this. This is just the crazy shit you hear about. The Roman Empire was doing fucking vomitoriums, you know, like cutting people's belly open so the wine pours out and you know, you're like, well, we're past that savagery. Then you read the fucking Epstein emails. Then you hear what you just said, and it's like, no, actually, no or not. The Roman Empire just figured out how to hide the fun stuff from the low level citizens. That's it.

B (54:24)

And one thing that's interesting with this movie is it's like, if we can't get behind clean water, clean air, right? Like, just. Just let's get down to the basics. None of this is political, nor should it be. Like, I don't know why the environment, I don't know why sustainability has become like, to your point about climate change, even if you do not Believe that climate change is real. You know, that burning coal and just like fossil fuels extracting that out of the Arctic, that's not good for the environment, right? Like, take away whatever the greenhouse effect is. Just you could see the black plumes of fucking methane gas coming out of, like, these AI data centers. Like, you know that that's bad, right? Can't we get behind regulating this kind of runaway train of the billionaires putting out this shit. That's what I can't wrap my mind around. Why is this partisan? Why is this political?

A (55:18)

Okay, well, this is something that's, to me, when it comes to the environmentalism. What's interesting in environmentalism, though, I'm sure, like, you know, there's like books out there that I just haven't heard of yet. But more often than not, a disconnect happens between human beings as being part of the environment as much as anything else. We're part of the biome, and our consciousness is part of the biome. Our thought patterns are part of the biome. And so we're obvious. I mean, it seems so fucking obvious, but it seems to be left out, which is like, we are also the Earth, but we're the Earth making a sort of set of decisions that might be fine for one person, but when it's the whole global population doing it, of course it's going to create unprecedented destruction. I mean, we drop nuclear bombs on cities. We did that. We have nuclear weapons that we, the State of the Union, this motherfucker casually kind of talked about that. It's a good thing. Even though that's the end of the fucking world. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is there is no difference between the presidents, the military, the people, and the environment. It is the environment we're looking at holistic across the board. I don't want to call it a malfunction, but a kind of. Just like it's all melting down, I guess, is what it's melting down in our heads.

B (57:00)

It is a melting down.

A (57:00)

It's melting down out of our fucking heads. It's literally. You want to talk about global warming and put it in a psychological sense. People are getting heated up. Yeah, People are mad now. People are angry across the board. We're heating up like it's all the same. And so to me, it's like, fuck, okay, the answer's got to be some kind of consciousness shift. Like, it's like that. That's. That's got to be the only hope is that, you know, if we. If we don't get people to, like, reframe what's important.

B (57:33)

Yeah, I mean, they've. They've. They've put us into these camps. And that's what's really unfortunate because they've. They've done a very good job of rerouting and reorienting our anger and channeling that into each other. Conservatives, maga, trans people, immigrants, all of this is. Is a distraction from the fact that. That billionaires are stealing every last drop of clean water to feed these data centers. That is, they're poisoning all of our. They're toxifying our food and our air, and they are paying no taxes. Palantir, I mean, you'd want to talk about people who are just sociopathically making jokes. Alex Karp is talking about how people need to fucking die and heads need to be chopped off. I mean, these people are so.

A (58:18)

I saw Peter Thiel's Antichrist talk.

B (58:21)

I went to him. Oh, you saw it in person?

A (58:23)

I saw it in person.

B (58:24)

How was that? Oh, did you feel the energy radiating off of.

A (58:29)

No, no, no.

B (58:31)

Talk about the Antichrist.

A (58:32)

Also, before I go on, I just want to say something I'm moderately proud of is that over the course of my podcasting career, I've been attacked by the right and the left, viciously attacked. And it's an amazing thing to, like, I feel like I must be doing my job because across the board, at some point, some political ideology gets pissed at me. And so the. So I went to see Peter Thiel give his talk and because like everybody else I had heard, this is like some dark tech warlock and he's gonna be evil. It's gonna be evil. And so. And I was, dude, when I got the image, I'm like, fuck, yeah, I gotta see this. I've never been like, you know how often you're on legitimately, like, evil people. And then as it turns out, at least. And again, this is obviously an hour and 20 minute talk. So it's not like I can like, other, like, we can look into, like, Palantir and sort of from that, like, extrapolate where the people are who, like, created Palantir. But in this moment of watching him just a tech bro, that's all I got. He's just a tech bro. Reminds me of any other tech bros that I've met. Just, like, you know, similar, I guess, in a way to, like, Trump or anybody else. There's something, you know, because of the people he's, like, been engaged with, there is a sense of, like, probably your ability to Connect with most people is you're not able to do that because of the strange friends you must have. Right? I mean, look at the fucking Epstein list like he's in a thousands and thousands of times, but God, I wish I could have brought you that. Beautiful.

B (60:17)

You would love that.

A (60:18)

You would have loved it. And it so.

B (60:21)

But rarely would you sit in front of someone and be like, you're emanating evil.

A (60:24)

I mean, dude, that's how dumb. That's how dumb I am. That's why I'm not a journalist. Because I legitimately thought, like, you would

B (60:30)

have been like, you know what? You're a good guy. Let's go grab a beer.

A (60:32)

I thought they're gonna do the imp. Oh, I'm so susceptible to propaganda. So that.

B (60:38)

So you're just a misunderstood autistic guy. You're sick. Highland all over the place, but you just have autism.

A (60:46)

But what was fascinating about the talk, which you would have found really interesting, is that it's like, what happens when a tech oligarch gets into Christianity, reads the book of Revelation, the eschatological Christian prophecy for how the world ends. What happens when a tech pro reads that? And you know what happens? They're like, I think we can patch the Book of Revelations. That's what I gathered. It's like a six talk series. That's what I gathered, was that he was like, somehow like walking this line between a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelations mixed in with that kind of weird Silicon Valley. Like, we can fix anything. We can fix anything. We're gonna live forever. We can do anything. The book of Revelation. Okay, okay. How do we stop the Antichrist from coming? Okay, well, let's look at like, here might be some moves we could make to at least forestall the arrival of the Antichrist. It was wild, right? It was Joseph Heller. Catch 22. Level Absurdity where you're just sort of watching it scratching your chin. And so. But I think if we just. What you're pointing out here, which we all know, maybe not everyone does know this, but we're all people. We're people. And there are fundamental realities that everyone around the globe contends with. You know, we want food, we want shelter, we want to feel safe, safety for our kids. We want to be happy. This is how it works. All the other stuff. Then you get these layers of ideology on top of that. The ideologies informed by propaganda of one kind or another. And somewhere along the line, there's a them and a me. There's the, you know, I look at Trump and I'm like, that's not me. I look at, like, the fucking oligarchs. I'm like, I just don't get it, man. Like, you seem like aliens to me. So what I've done in that moment is I've divided. Now there's an oligarchy, the military industrial complex in me. Right. And it's true on one level. It's fucking true. But they're doing that to us.

B (62:50)

Yeah.

A (62:50)

And we're doing it to each other. Now there's, oh, you must be a MAGA person. You fascist piece of. Oh, you must be a leftist commie piece of shit. You fucking piece of shit. And then. You know what I mean? Now instead of dealing with what you're talking about, class. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Nobody wants to go there, wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to talk about it. Because the moment you start talking about it, they're like Karl Marx over here. It's like, dude, no, this is. Ha. This is how it works.

B (63:17)

Well, you look at something like Covid, which was such a culture war, you know, I. I never took a strong position on anything because I was like, I understand why everyone is so militant in their own.

A (63:29)

Yeah, sure.

B (63:30)

I totally understand everyone's viewpoint. The problem was, as everyone was fighting, billionaires tripled their wealth. They cannibalized this country.

A (63:40)

Yeah.

B (63:41)

All the small businesses shut down and they fucking ate it up.

A (63:44)

Yep.

B (63:45)

Every store, every, like, tiny business that, like, defined my childhood in Berkeley. Everything was gone. And I look at their wealth, I'm like, wait a minute. When did Elon Musk almost become a trillion? Like, what the fuck happened?

A (63:58)

Yeah.

B (63:59)

You know? And here we are still trying to adapt to, like, the socialization of that fucking trauma.

A (64:05)

Yeah. I love that you keep going back to that. I love that you keep going back to that. I think that is a fantastic diagnosis. Sometimes I feel like you need to simplify because. Especially when anything you say publicly or anything anyone says of note will instantaneously be echoed. Warped, transformed. Either the light will be. They'll shine a light on it, making it seem like, you know, distortions in its own right. Or it'll, like. The point is, by the time it, like, filters through default reality, it's a meaningless thing, even though it might have had some meaning. So we have to simplify here.

B (64:46)

Yeah.

A (64:47)

And that, to me, that thing is it. It's a grief response. In a culture that doesn't understand they're going to die. That's what we're looking at here. It's a grief response. Everyone's having grief and go ahead and say, precious little snowflake. No. If you've ever been through grief, fuck you go nuts. And it's not like anything else and no one prepared you for it. And I think that's what we're all dealing with. Some kind of collective, unacknowledged. Which is the most dangerous kind of grief, unacknowledged grief. And because of that, we've all gone fucking nuts. And I can. Someone who's like, lost his mom to fucking cancer, has one ball and my fucking dad died of copd. I. I know a little bit about fucking grief. And dude, I didn't want to acknowledge it. I didn't want to go to therapy. I wanted to snort ketamine until it went away. Didn't work. But your analysis, I think, is dead on. It's a cultural grief reaction to an unprecedented level of change.

B (65:51)

Yes.

A (65:52)

And nobody seems to realize that's what's cooking under there.

B (65:57)

And the thing about this movie, Duncan, is that it is a time capsule of the Biden administration. This is the status quo that has been brow beaten into us. That this is good.

A (66:09)

Right?

B (66:09)

This is normal, this is justified.

A (66:12)

Yeah.

B (66:12)

This is fucking death.

A (66:14)

Death.

B (66:15)

This is death.

A (66:15)

Death.

B (66:16)

This is what the neoliberals have told us is like what we should fight for, right? And preserve.

A (66:22)

That was weird. Wasn't that weird?

B (66:23)

Yeah.

A (66:24)

When all of a sudden, like, the liberals were somehow, like, they were seemingly for war. That was where I got really confused because, like, I always assumed the oil

B (66:33)

dragon needs to be fed.

A (66:34)

The oil dragon must be fed. Yes, yes. It's not the oil dragon who's bad, it's who controls the oil dragon. That's what it is. Don't get rid of the oil dragon. It's a good dragon with a bad mask.

B (66:51)

Well, like this guy in the movie is like, I ask and I'm like, well, what do you think about these alternative energy sources? Because you see the Pentagon trying to mitigate their propaganda and reframe it, because they see the writing on the wall. They're not climate change deniers. They are all trying to militarize and securitize the bases. They know that climate change is a national security issue, so they're. They're acting accordingly. But of course, forward facing their denial, pretending like it's some sort of, like, scam. But I've had generals in this movie admit to me, like, we, like, this is a fucking pipe dream. We need oil. Whoa, Was that like a thunderstorm outside

A (67:27)

or the oil dragon caps. The oil dragons out there. Did someone say oil?

B (67:36)

And then, you see, I'm at this panel called Superiority over the Arctic or whatever, and it's these, these commanders who are just like, we want corporations to come and experiment. It is an open invitation to come and experiment in the Arctic.

A (67:50)

Fine.

B (67:51)

It becomes like a hive mind of just collective insanity, right? Because to your point, these are human beings. We're not. I'm not. This isn't Peter Thiel. This is a fucking general, right? Like, he has kids. He's not going to live in Mark Zuckerberg's FE seed vault in Maui. Like, what the fuck are you thinking, man?

A (68:06)

Right, Right.

B (68:07)

You know that corporations that are going to perpetuate the collapse of the Arctic is going to just continue to catalyze, like, the worst effects of climate change. Like, what are you talking about?

A (68:17)

Right? Yeah, I mean, I all. Like, this is where I get. This episode of the DTFH was supported by my friends at Amantara. You know, it is wild that, like, in people's yards all across this great country, there are like statues of incredibly psychoactive mushroom that has been used for thousands of years in all kinds of interesting ceremonies. It's the Mario mushroom. Was Christianity, early Christianity connected to the same mushroom that you see in Mario Brothers? I don't know. But what I do know is Amanita muscaria is incredible. And when they sent me a sample, I finally got around to trying it and it's just like a dream come true. It affects the GABA receptors. So you get this kind of like, chilled out, nice, yet psychoactive experience. And also, I took a relatively low dose. I'm not sure what would happen if you wanted to go for it. But here's the good thing about Amantara. You can go on their website and they can help you with dosage. They Recommend Starting with 1 to 3 of Amantara's 500 milligram Amanita Muscaria capsules. Honestly, I. I don't know how much I took. So maybe I took a big dose, I don't know. That's usually where people hit that dreamy, euphoric, relaxed state. And here's the honest point. Don't discount Amanita if that doesn't take you there right away. Dosage can vary person to person. Some people need four, five, even six capsules to really dial it in. Start low, feel it out, and treat it with curiosity. You can always take more, you can never take less. Don't forget that, kids. But yeah, this is one of those things where you actually have to take enough to understand it. It's cool. Also, they have Blue Lotus. Blue Lotus. It's a euphoric, heart opening and deeply relaxing buzz. Some people compare it to a more enjoyable, less paranoid version of cannabis. And that comparison finally made sense once I took enough. Again, this is another one where the secret is you have to dose it properly. This is what's cool about Amantara. They specialize in doing the stuff properly. Clean, sourcing, clear education, none of that sketchy gas station mushroom nonsense. Don't get me started. That stuff is the worst. I don't know how Amanita ended up in chevrons, but don't take chevron Amanita, guys. Don't unless you want to ruin your night. There's a huge difference between any kind of, I don't know, head shop Amanita you might have gotten and this stuff. This stuff is completely different from that. They're the largest importers and exporters. They're the largest importers and exporters in amanita in the US and they've helped over 50,000 people. And it shows in the quality. They carry other plant medicines too, but Amanita and Lotus are clearly their thing. If you're curious, you can check them out at www.amantara.com Godunkan and use code Duncan22 for 22% off. I mean, don't do that thing that I used to do, which is like, just because something's legal, you're like, yeah, okay, well that means it doesn't do anything. That is not true at all. And so I don't even know if they're allowed to talk about this aspect of it anymore. But apparently some people have used Amanita to help them sort of get off of benzos because both affect the GABA receptors. It's interesting not saying you should do that. It's just like you might just be somebody who enjoys Xanax and would like the addition of some kind of psychedelic experience while being on Xanax, which when I say it out loud, it's like it's the perfect. That would be the perfect drug. I don't know. Throw in some Viagra into the mix so you could be on Xanax and tripping with an erection. I'm rambling here. I'm sorry. Amantara. Thanks you guys. Into like Ram Dass territory where he's like, the best thing you can do is work on yourself so you can help the people around you. I know that could easily be misconstrued as a, you inspire me. Because you're like, no, fuck this, fuck this. I'm not gonna go fucking meditate the oil dragon away. I'm gonna get this information out there. And you're passionate and it's inspiring these days, but I do feel like if not everyone can handle the data that you are connected to and you could easily go like nihilist from looking at how big the oil dragon is and just think, you're not stopping that dragon. I'm just gonna do the best I can. Fucking check out whenever I check out. And that's just the way it is. So to me, it's like, if we're part of the environment and we have to look at like, okay, where is that in me? Where's the Donald Trump in me? Where's the oligarch in me? Where's the fucking Epstein in me? Understand what part of you, if given that level of cash, might actually do some of the shit you are waggling your finger at. Maybe you don't have that in you at all. But honestly, I don't know. I don't know because I've never had a billion dollars. I don't know what that's like, which is why real quickly, go to my Kickstarter. I want to do an experiment and see what happens if I have a billion dollars. Let's see, just for fun, but do you know what I mean? Like, if we keep. Even though I'm not saying these people aren't monstrous, but if we keep doing that, it's just violence and chaos and like, how do you find compassion for the worst of worst? I can't do it. That's what really sucks. I'm saying this is like, I just, like, it's very hard for me to do that, but I feel like that's gotta be the move because as above, so below, we gotta. We. It's classism and it's the environment. And these are the primary things, probably not disconnected, that we.

B (75:45)

I think that the system benefits and rewards the worst traits of humanity. So yes, I think that capitalism in its current form, it is breeding sociopathy at the top, the most corrupt and sadists. I mean, so when you have that kind of reward system, it totally makes sense that these are the people who are controlling society. The people who have no fucking capacity for empathy, for the understanding of the environmental impact and degradation of their policies. And you see someone like Trump being like, we're going to go after Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, it doesn't matter the consequences the problem is, to your point, relating to each other on a human level, that we are around our friends, our families, our colleagues. I used to be very self righteous and very like, like angry.

A (76:32)

Yeah.

B (76:33)

And I, I go through, I oscillate. You know, you saw the good takes. I cry and get pissed a lot because I'm a human being and I have to process all of the crazy that is being thrown at us. But I also have to have humility and empathy of where people are at because we are all victims of propaganda. So active duty soldiers, veterans, coming to them and, and relating to them on a human level.

A (76:55)

Right.

B (76:56)

Why did you join the military? Why do you want to join the military? Military.

A (76:58)

Right.

B (76:59)

What, what's going on in your life? Right, right. We are all part of this. And that, that is what I am realizing more and more. And I'm, I'm actually very. We are, but, but it's, but the thing is everyone can agree on those fundamentals that we talked about earlier. It's just that everyone gets distracted with who we're directing our energy toward. And the thing is we all are fatigued with, with. We're over at work to the bone, dude.

A (77:26)

Yeah.

B (77:26)

You know, our parents, they were able to. My mom didn't have a job. She was a stay at home mom. We were a middle class household. They had, they owned a home. Like not like to even engage in activism or engage in these subject matters. It is so difficult.

A (77:39)

Right.

B (77:40)

Because we're just trying to live. And so that's where people like me come in. We're so inundated with bad information. I try to synthesize and try to reclaim a reality that is meaningful, that matters, that empowers you. Because there's a reason why the richest people in the world are trying to obfuscate us from these bare truths that are right in front of our faces. But never acknowledge that we live in a global military empire that's subjugating the planet at the barrel of a nuclear armed gun. It doesn't need to be this way.

A (78:06)

Yeah.

B (78:07)

We don't have to live like this.

A (78:08)

Yeah. You know. Yeah. We don't have to live like, we don't have to live like not to be this way.

B (78:12)

We can have creativity and ingenuity about imagining something different. We've all succumbed to the dark. We don't need to succumb to the darkness.

A (78:20)

Right.

B (78:20)

Don't. And when you say how do we. How do I like keep my resolve and stuff? It's like, I don't, I, I don't succumb to the darkness. And also, I look at my kids and you know this, too. You have four kids. It's like the unbridled joy and optimism from a child's imagination to be like, why are things the way they are? Yeah, well, son, a bunch of of parasitic billionaires wanted another yacht, and so that's why we have to step over bodies in the street. Like, these people can't have homes. It's like, my son is just like, this isn't okay. Like, he carries around a little bag of change with him, and he's like, I want to give this to them because I want them to have help. And I'm like, holy. This is. We are so conditioned to normalize horrific things around us, right? There's some side psychological.

A (79:11)

It's easier. It's.

B (79:12)

It's easier.

A (79:13)

It's easier. It's easier to go to numb out, Numb down.

B (79:16)

And so there is something really amazing about, like, the beauty. Like, I live in Portland, Oregon, in this beautiful enchanted forest, and the love of nature is, like, my religion. And to see my kids, like, just running free and frolicking around in the woods, and I'm like, this is what we fight for.

A (79:37)

Yeah.

B (79:37)

We fight to preserve what's left. The beauty, the love.

A (79:40)

Right, Right.

B (79:41)

That's what I want, you know?

A (79:43)

Yeah. Yeah, I feel it. It's inspiring. It really is. Like, I think if anybody is gonna get people like me to, like, wait, sorry, hold on one second.

B (79:53)

Is that me? Is that my, like, notice, like, we're out of time.

A (79:56)

Well, it's Peter. It's Peter. Teal. You know, Josh, delete the last 30 minutes. Hold on, let me turn this off. It's actually. It's funny because it's Aaron, my wife, texting both of us. Yeah, I think that the work you're doing, like, you know, whenever I'm like. Cause, you know, again, like, we do hear versions of this thing that you're illuminating for some reason. You really have a way of, like. I don't know. Like, I think if Abby spent all this time working on this fucking thing, I think maybe there is something that could be done and that it doesn't have to just be, you know, and regardless of where you stand, you fucking MAGA people out there, regardless of where you stand on, like, ice, you gotta really push back against wanting the military in the streets. And we don't want that because, dude, the midterms are gonna be a fucking slaughter. And the pendulum in America swings. The dragon master changes. And the dragon master's POV might not align with yours. And if the Dragon Master has made it normal to have troops in the street because of immigration policy, the Dragon Master might decide to have troops in the street for other shit that you don't like, and then what? So we own the libs.

B (81:29)

Like that's, that's. I mean, it's fucking real.

A (81:31)

Bingo. And people gotta understand that there should be a universal, universal rejection of the military in the streets of America or masked agents doing shit. And by the way, the masked agents, they weren't fucking. The people who've died have been Americans. They're killing fucking Americans in the streets, man.

B (81:52)

And look at the erosion of the first amendment. I mean, the fact that I have to worry now about talking about these things. I mean, you said, obviously I have the freedom to do so, and at this point I do. But we see people who are just here on work visas who are just writing op EDS about Palestine getting deported. It's very scary to see basically policing our thoughts 100 speech now. And I don't know where that's going to go, especially the criticism of Israel.

A (82:18)

It's not going to go great.

B (82:20)

No. And this is the inevitability, the whole militarization and the military surplus buildup that's being poured in with the MRAPs and the L Rads to like local police forces. This is an inevitability of feeding the Oil Dragon because you need to continue to expand, you need to continue building. Why did the military budget continue to go up even when we withdrew from Afghanistan? It's like it's, it, it can, it's a for profit corporation.

A (82:42)

Right?

B (82:42)

That's how it operates. And so you're going to inevitably have all of the surplus military equipment because they need the next gen. They need to blow up all the equipment on site, all of the bombs and bullets on site, so they can get more next year. Otherwise they're not meeting the profit quotas.

A (82:59)

You got to burn the, the bullets like, guys, we got to start shooting

B (83:02)

and then create cancer for all the local pot. All the soldiers who are there sitting next to these fucking munitions that are being exploded daily because they have to continue to get that amount. And all of the equipment is then given to either the Taliban, ISIS or the police forces here.

A (83:17)

And that works great because if you give the military equipment to your enemies, then the Oil Dragon will have a reason to go in again. Oh my God. It's so demented, Abby. It's so diminished. But it's good. I mean, honestly, if you don't get a clear picture of what's going down. How are you going to do anything about it if you don't at least have some big picture view? And this is what your movie, your film, your documentary is. And it's like just wild. I just, it's wild.

B (83:48)

It's kind of like what you do, you zoom out. You're a rom dog. Like you are very into zooming out and looking at like the world with like a bird's eye. And so am I. And for me it's very clarifying and empowering. I want to see things the way they are. I don't want rose colored glasses. I want to fucking be crystal clear, baby.

A (84:10)

What is it?

B (84:11)

What are we looking at here?

A (84:12)

That's it.

B (84:12)

Don't lie to me. Don't gaslight me.

A (84:14)

That's it. That's it. This is one of the root causes in Buddhism. One of the root causes of suffering is ignorance. And so, and that means active, not dumb. It means actively ignoring things. And so I think if we were to sort of analyze the culture right now, that seems to be the predominant poison in the culture right now is varying degrees of actively ignoring. Ostensibly for one's own sanity or just to not feel anxious all the fucking time. Or for fear of being like sucked into some embarrassing movement or something. Or being hoodwinked again. Because that's the other problem is people use people's anxiety to recruit.

B (84:55)

Yeah.

A (84:56)

And so ignorance, actively ignoring. And you're not actively ignoring. And you are, by the way, not to wrap this podcast up on a dark note, but we're cooked. Look, you're cooked, you're cooked.

B (85:09)

I don't think we are.

A (85:10)

No, I don't mean like, I mean, okay, what I mean is this.

D (85:17)

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A (86:33)

This is my black pill side coming out and I can't wait to hear your no or not. We are. We already allowed them to have full access to our devices. All the information, all the emails. It's been suctioning that shit up. You know, what's his name? The dude had to move to Russia. What's his fucking name?

B (86:54)

Oh, Snowden.

A (86:54)

Yeah, Snowden. He showed everything, like, here's what's going on. So they've gotten all of our data and sure, maybe some of it's encrypted or whatever. And they've got it in, I don't know where they're storing it. Some underground oily, fucking reptilian, subterranean, deep underground military bunker with all the phone calls. It's in his Ivy. His Ivy is made of phone calls to your grandmother. But the problem with all this data that they've collected on all of us is it's too much. I mean, just imagine suctioning up every American phone call every single fucking day. Like, if you look up at how many terabytes of information gets pushed through the Internet every single day, that's a lot of data, a lot of data storage. But also, how are you going to go through all of it? Well, now we have AI. So an AI could easily, easily go through all the data and grab anything they want, anybody they want, whenever they fucking want it. And people like you, I bet your Ivy cover is like a big part of Peter Thiel's wall. Dad. Ivy. It's so fucked up. But, and so from that perspective, we look at what's happening in the ccp, the AI, facial recognition, super fucking surveillance where it knows everyone's name walking down the street. Then you look at the. What's happening with the. What are they called? Netflock? The Flock cameras everywhere. Yeah. And the ring doorbells and shit, and the meta glasses and we, you know, all this data is going through some server and guaranteed is getting suctioned up into whatever the fuck Palantir is or whatever versions of that that we don't even know about existing, meaning that any of us who have expressed views against the Oil Dragon. If you look at each presidential regime, not as okay, now we're going to do it better or we're going to fix it, but as consecutive phases of a long process that inevitably takes away rights and gets people more accustomed to the destruction of the Oil Dragon, then somewhere down the line, that surveillance technology could easily be used to justify arresting you 100%.

B (89:14)

The retroactive case.

A (89:16)

Yeah, that's why I say you cooked and I'm cooked and Josh is super cooked.

B (89:21)

I mean, there's so much to say. I mean, first of all, when the Snowden leaks came out, it was this mantra of like, the government's spying is horrific and bad and all encompassing. But Google no evil, Google good. And I was like, wait a minute. Looking back on it, I'm like, we got like, all of us were like, okay, government spying bad, but Google would

A (89:39)

never good, no evil.

B (89:40)

And then all of a sudden, you see the virtue signaling is completely dropped off the map and everything's folded into the infrastructure of ice. Yeah, Gaza and the surveillance state. I think that we are at a precipice of, of unprecedented crises, the environmental catastrophes that we're facing down, as well as this kind of high technological overlap with, with just general barbarism. I mean, really just unrelenting, just naked colonialism back to this kind of like, we're gonna just take your and you can't do and we're putting a nuclear arm gun to your head to do it. And that, that level of impunity wrapped with that technological, like high tech war machine is, is something that's very insane. And it's really easy to just be like, we are fucking cooked to the max. However, there's also an unprecedented thing, like I said before, the hollowing out of neoliberalism. The fact that people are now aware that that is an empty vessel that there's no avenue to provide for people. There's no answers in that. That. And so I think that I've seen a consciousness shift that you are talking about. I have seen sustained action. Tens of millions of people around the world with this international framework and lens that we're discussing right now. For the first time in my fucking life, I was in the streets during the Iraq war. I was in the streets during Occupy. This is very different. There's a moment where people are realizing the stakes, especially young kids who are like, I don't have a future.

A (91:07)

Right?

B (91:08)

I, I am in. I'm all in.

A (91:10)

Right?

B (91:10)

There's no evading this. And so I Am seeing something that is absolutely beautiful which is like a burgeoning explosion.

A (91:18)

Right.

B (91:19)

Of, of, of ideas, creativity, consciousness.

A (91:21)

Yeah.

B (91:22)

And people are realizing we cannot just passively post. Like we're not gonna post our way out of this.

A (91:28)

Oh God.

B (91:29)

We have to get together and be creative and we have to figure out how are we gonna be like have collective agency. I mean for example, the richest men in the world see what you see. Don't be duped. Every day I am paralyzed by the inundation of bad news. We find out the worst shit in the world happening within instance. What we don't see is the good things. Divestment campaigns from weapons contractors across the country.

A (91:53)

I don't even know what that is.

B (91:55)

Literally so many college campuses are sponsored by Boeing, by Lockheed Martin, their engineering departments, et cetera. Kids across the country have divested. So they have removed the investments. They have lobbied the campuses to do successful divestment campaigns. Every. I was just in the Rust Belt. All across Ohio, Wisconsin. I, I've, I. Every city council has like DSA people taking over city council. Pro Palestine people taking over city council. In Portland, I have, we have three DSA people who are like sitting on city council doing incredible things like trying to pass like just incredible measures that I'm like wait, if we focus on hyper local efforts while having that international framework while not getting completed, completely paralyzed by the federal election cycle, what Trump is doing on a day to day basis to assault all of us. There are incredible things happening. Well, data, 25 data centers got.

A (92:52)

I don't like the DSA. I don't like the Dsa. I don't like them either. I don't and I'll tell you why. It's a, to me this is, See, this is probably where we diverge. Tell me, hold on. Before you start posting, hold on to me. What I see there is just another version of the same fucking thing. It's this fantasy of the state being able to save you. It's like, you know, the DSA to me seems like it's just like a, it's just another scale of the fucking oil dragon. Abby. I see it as. And again, listen, maybe I'm probably wrong, I'm wrong about a lot of shit. But to me what I see there is just. It's gonna be the same thing with. It's gonna be a prettier scale.

B (93:37)

You mean just electoral, like just the whole electoralism. I hear what you're saying.

A (93:40)

And also because you know the way the state functions is. It's like there's yeah, I'm sure you've read David Kraber, right? So it's like behind every form you have to fill out, there's someone with a gun who will kill you if you don't, you know, government forms. Eventually, if you don't fill out the forms in the right way, there's a sum. Your. Your probability of being shot begins to like slowly increase.

B (94:07)

No, I hear you. So when I. Electoralism is a dead end in this system. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's perpetuating the bipartisan status quo of just military empire. No, I hear what you're saying, Josh.

A (94:17)

Take. Take that timestamp so I can memorize what she just said.

B (94:24)

That's why we need some sort of block outside of electoral politics to force the hand of power. Otherwise, that's why they. That's why they co opted labor. I mean they really. They've been working hard, man. They've been working hard and that's why we got to get back to the basics.

A (94:39)

And you've been working hard too. Clean air, Abby Martin, everybody. Give me a break. Where can people watch your do. Where can we.

B (94:48)

Yeah, yeah. That you never ask that you'd never ask up front. Earth's greatest enemy. And Earth's greatest enemy. No, we're not talking about soldiers. We're not talking about people in the military. We're talking about the fucking. We're talking about the oil dragon, baby. Insatiable thirst, beautiful. From the oil dragon.

A (95:08)

We have to stop it.

B (95:11)

We have to curb that thirst. We have to. Yeah, we have to minimize that oil dragon. We're not talking about not having a military. We're talking about not having a military empire. We need to decommission the scale and scope of the military empire. And that idea that if we weren't an empire, China or Russia, Russia would be. It's a pipe dream used to justify our atrocities and subjugation of the planet. We need to start thinking of things in a different way. We need to start envisioning the planet in a different way and looking at each other with empathy and humility. Because none of us have all the answers and all of us are victims of propaganda. So please join me earthsgreatesenemy.com thank you so much, Abby. Thank you.

A (95:49)

That was Abby Martin, everybody, fighting the oil dragon and I think with some success. Thanks for tuning in. Come see me out there. Join my night stream. I'll see you tonight. At Strayer University, we help students like you go from will I to why not for over 130 years we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking Can I? To Yes, I can and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.

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