Jesse Michels — American Alchemy (Infinite Loops Classics)

Summary

Infinite Loops Classics – Jesse Michels: American Alchemy

Podcast: Infinite Loops
Host: Jim O’Shaughnessy
Guest: Jesse Michels
Episode: Jesse Michels — American Alchemy (Infinite Loops Classics)
Release Date: August 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

This classic Infinite Loops conversation features host Jim O’Shaughnessy and multifaceted thinker Jesse Michels as they embark on a spirited, far-reaching discussion about consciousness, information, the evolution of civilization, psychedelics, the rise and perils of AI, and the transformative (and often subversive) power of media and storytelling. With references ranging from Huxley and William James to the Matrix and mushrooms-as-aliens, the episode is an exhilarating ride across history, philosophy, science, and society, all with a focus on how new paradigms emerge and why infinite loops — of perception, culture, and innovation — matter.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• Exploring the nature and evolution of consciousness
• Unpacking how media, memes, and information shape reality
• Investigating the historical and present impact of psychedelics
• Debating the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence
• Challenging power structures and advocating for open, decentralized knowledge systems
• Encouraging curiosity, open-mindedness, and the courage to question consensus “reality”

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Jesse Michels’ Path & Philosophy

[04:27 – 09:19]

• Jesse shares his unconventional career—from The Daily Show, Google, and Peter Thiel’s venture capital, to researching with Eric Weinstein, and ultimately launching his own media projects.
• He frames his core mission as “fixing information channels in a way that is empowering to an average person and isn’t condescending to them ... doesn’t conceal them a priori from quote, unquote misinformation.”
• His goal: “If I could do for one other person what happened for me—escaping the limiting worldview of ‘just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic’—that would be cool for me.”

“We have no idea what our current understanding of the nature of reality is—it’s way off... there will be wild overturnings of our current body of knowledge.”
— Jesse Michels [07:19]

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2. The Infinite Loop of Perception and Opinion

[14:16 – 14:35]

• Setting the episode’s epistemic frame, Jim references Robert Anton Wilson:
  • “We are walled cities, shouting at each other over the armaments of our perceptions.”
  • “Opinion is derived from our perceptions. Perceptions reinforce our opinions, which then further control our access to perceptions in an infinite loop... which logic cannot penetrate.”

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3. The Transmission Theory of Consciousness & Psychedelic Mysteries

[14:51 – 20:45]

• Jesse expounds on the “transmission theory” of consciousness (inspired by Huxley, William James, ancient Greek mysteries): The body does not produce consciousness, but acts as “a filter or a prism... we’re only receiving a narrow slice of reality.”
• Historical psychedelic rites (Eleusinian mysteries, shamanic rituals) were ways to momentarily “kill the body” and access a more primordial, expansive state.
• Near-death experiences and altered states are seen as glimpses behind the veil of material experience.

“Our senses are very limited slices of reality... to quote Huxley quoting Blake: if the doors of perception were cleansed, we’d see everything as it is, infinite.”
— Jesse Michels [16:00]

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4. Psychedelics and the Roots of Civilization

[18:07 – 20:59]

• Discussion of Brian Muraresku’s work on ancient rituals and the thesis that early civilizations used psychoactive substances (like ergot) in sacred ceremonies.
• Jesse challenges the orthodox view of the agricultural revolution, positing that the discovery and ritualization of psychoactive fungi may have been a catalyst for societal development.

“If you look at what ergot grows on—it’s wheat, barley and rye, which were the first crops grown in the agricultural revolution... taking this thing was a big part in the spawning of human civilization.”
— Jesse Michels [19:03]

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5. Genius, Inspiration, and The Perils of Power

[21:03 – 24:13]

• Both host and guest lament how paradigm-shifting insights tend to be ritualized, commoditized, and eventually “captured” by people who crave power.
• Cautionary historical tales: David Bohm’s exile for heretical physics, suppression of research, and the transformation of science into a dogma.
• The “stoned ape theory” and the possibility that consciousness expansion played a direct role in human evolution.

“All of the paradigm shifts happen from wacky people... then they get ritualized, they get commoditized, and they become interesting to people who crave power.”
— Jim O’Shaughnessy [21:16]

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6. Mushrooms as Aliens: The Panspermia Hypothesis

[25:11 – 32:22]

• Jesse elaborates on Terence McKenna’s ideas, the “mushrooms are aliens” theory, and Francis Crick’s support for panspermia (life seeded from space).
• Mushrooms are extremophiles, with properties (resilience, DNA similarities) hinting at an almost alien agenda.
• The idea: psychoactive mushrooms served as “zip files of consciousness,” merging with early hominids to accelerate neural development and possibly civilization itself.

“Mushrooms are zip files of consciousness that travel from planet to planet and merge... they can withstand extreme amounts of radiation. They’re sort of symbiotically co-directing our evolution.”
— Jesse Michels [25:49]

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7. Media, Power, and the Psychedelic Renaissance

[32:24 – 43:12]

• The hosts discuss the cultural forces that criminalized and stigmatized psychedelics—burning research, scapegoating scientists (often Jewish refugees), and the political war on drugs spearheaded by Nixon.
• The “Prometheans” (visionaries) are repeatedly opposed by old power structures, but new windows open in times of crisis.
• Current research—and Jim's own support of groundbreaking media projects—signals a possible “second coming” of psychedelics for healing PTSD, addiction, and depression.

“The reason I’m supporting these movies ... is because to socialize it, you’ve got to give people a chance to get tuned in ... We need more stories, like what Netflix did with Michael Pollan’s ‘How to Change Your Mind,’ not less.”
— Jim O’Shaughnessy [45:12]

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8. Set, Setting, and the Double-Edged Nature of Psychedelics

[47:43 – 51:46]

• Jesse cautions that psychedelics are “non-specific amplifiers” and can open people up to negative experiences as well as positive ones; intention and environment are crucial.
• The role of the shaman historically as a mediator and safeguard.
• Ongoing debate: should access be universal or mediated? Jim leans toward safety, ritual, and support for transformative experiences.

“If used with the proper intention, [psychedelics are] so much healthier than big pharma prescriptions... [they offer] a spiritual confrontation with the bad thing, and if you go through that, you come out reborn.”
— Jesse Michels [49:07]

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9. Media, Memes, and the Death of Consensus Reality

[57:01 – 60:59]

• Musical and media shifts: from the hypnotic “do your duty” lyrics of mid-century pop to the mind-expanding themes of the psychedelic era.
• The closing of the ‘60s window (via political suppression), and the argument that a new one is opening via the Internet and decentralized storytelling.
• Embracing memetics: “Reality tunnels” (Wilson, Leary); consensus reality as a product of overlapping, self-reinforcing feedback loops.

“What I call ground-state reality is what most sentient creatures collectively believe at the same time…[but] everybody has slightly different perception filters.”
— Jim O’Shaughnessy [59:07]

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10. AI, Consciousness, and the Limits of Computation

[61:25 – 69:41]

• Skepticism about claims of imminent AGI (artificial general intelligence). Both Jim and Jesse argue: “We have no working model of our own consciousness; we can’t program what we don’t understand.”
• Jesse highlights the “magical capabilities” and complexity of biology—potentially quantum, certainly more than classical computation allows.
• Open-sourcing vs. “closed” AI: Jim makes a passionate case for open, decentralized tools (like Stable Diffusion), arguing that only cognitive diversity and wide participation will yield real breakthroughs.

“Open works because of cognitive diversity... Open always beats closed... The ancient power structures are collapsing, thank god.”
— Jim O’Shaughnessy [67:20]

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11. The Internet as a Colossus: Perils and Possibilities

[69:41 – 79:10]

• Jesse voices concern over the consumer Internet: “It doesn’t make most people better, it makes most people shittier..." [69:53]
• Fears about learned helplessness (“King Joffrey syndrome”) and the flattening effect of metrics-driven vanity.
• Jim, slightly more optimistic, believes Twitter and decentralized online networks can become the “bones” of a global intelligence, if used wisely:
  • “If you could find a thousand people who are signal and not noise... move it into meat space... then it’s gold.” [77:14]

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12. Enduring Lessons: Change, Flow, and the Infinite Loop

[79:56 – end]

• Jim reflects on “fail better” as a philosophy (quoting Beckett)—positioning both individuals and civilizations as “forever becoming.”
• He invokes Heraclitus: “The same man cannot step in the river twice...” to illustrate the fundamental dynamism of life.
• Jesse’s key takeaway for listeners is epistemic humility and curiosity: “Reality as you’re living in it is a compressed version of something that’s much wider. If you follow glitches in visible reality and your intuition, your life can be much bigger.”

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “Opinion is derived from our perceptions. Perceptions reinforce our opinions, which then further control our access to perceptions in an infinite loop ... which logic cannot penetrate.”
  — Jim O’Shaughnessy quoting Robert Anton Wilson [14:17]

• “The body doesn’t produce consciousness, it is a prism... we are local nodes of consciousness, receiving just a slice.”
  — Jesse Michels [15:00]

• On the criminalization of psychedelics: “We burn all this incredible research... The craziest person to ever occupy the Oval Office was not Donald Trump, it was Richard Milhous Nixon.”
  — Jim O’Shaughnessy [34:13]

• “Mushrooms are zip files of consciousness that travel from planet to planet ... and merge themselves with higher hominid creatures to give them knowledge.”
  — Jesse Michels [25:49]

• “Psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers... with the proper intention, they are confrontation experiences. You go through that pain, and come out reborn.”
  — Jesse Michels [49:07]

• “The history of computing is more bound up with AI than we admit... We’re definitely in one [a hype cycle] hardcore right now.”
  — Jesse Michels [69:41]

• “If you can find a thousand people who are signal and not noise... move it into meat space... then it's gold.”
  — Jim O’Shaughnessy [77:14]

• “Life is movement, life is flows, life continues to unfold... The same man cannot step in the river twice.”
  — Jim O’Shaughnessy [80:47]

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Conclusion & Guest Takeaway

[83:46] Jesse Michels’ two “magic microphone” ideas for humanity:

1. “Know that reality as you’re living in it is a compressed version of something much wider.”
2. “If you follow ‘glitches’ in visible reality and your intuition, you can find new worlds within this one that will change your life and the people around you.”

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Useful Timestamps for Key Segments

• Jesse's background & media journey: [04:27 – 09:19]
• Transmission theory of consciousness / Psychedelic rites: [14:51 – 20:10]
• Origins of civilization & psychedelic catalysts: [18:07 – 20:59]
• Panspermia & mushrooms-as-aliens: [25:11 – 32:22]
• Repression and return of psychedelics: [32:24 – 45:12]
• Set, setting, and the double-edged sword of psychedelics: [47:43 – 51:46]
• Media, memes, and consensus reality loops: [57:01 – 60:59]
• AI, qualia, and open innovation: [61:25 – 69:41]
• Internet, Twitter, and global hyperconnectivity: [69:41 – 79:10]
• Closing philosophies & key takeaways: [79:56 – end]

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Infinite Loops continues to live up to its name—revealing, riffing, and revising the loops of perception, culture, technology, and consciousness. This episode is a thoughtful reminder to stay curious, humble, and vigilant as we traverse a weird, ever-shifting reality.

Transcript

[Jesse Michaels]

The consumer Internet right now is not a net positive. I like Twitter. I think it's a really cool tool. There are aspects of Instagram that I like, but these things, by and large, suck. And they don't make most people better. They make most people shittier. I worry about what the modern Internet does to people and that we haven't designed it in a deliberate enough way. And even people who I really admire, I've seen them lose themselves entirely.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Hi, everyone. Jim here. We're taking a short pause on new episodes through the end of August. We'll be back at the end of the month, but in the meantime, we're digging out some of our favorite conversations from the archive. Enjoy. Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim o' Shaughnessy with yet another episode of Infinite Loops, and I have a confession to make. My guest and I have been chatting. You'll hear a lot of the chat because we were recording and we'll. We'll figure out the good stuff. But I was so excited for Jesse Michaels to come on my podcast, and I got to tell you this story. So there's a great story that was. Or a. A piece, a substack forwarded to me by a friend by Robert Reinhardt named Paradigm Shifts. Right. And so I read this, and I'm like, I love this guy. I love this guy. Go to try and find him. Nowhere. Like, absolutely nowhere. So I start searching, searching, and what do I find? I find one of Jesse's videos, which we're going to talk about as we get into this. But more importantly, I found Jesse. And I was like, I'm sitting there and my wife is looking at me, and she goes, oh, you. You went down a rabbit hole and you found something else, didn't you? So I'm going to give you. I'm going to. I'm going to. First off, like, you are an amazingly accomplished guy. So Columbia, Columbia, intern at the Daily Show. One of my. In the Jon Stewart era, one of my favorite shows. You worked for Charlie Rose. You worked at Google for four years. What I love is in your bio that they sent me, it's like, worked at Google for four years, then he got tired of the fucking bogans bureaucrats. For those of you read Doug Adams and the Red. And so he went over to Peter Thiel's Capital, where you are looking at tech. And. And you also, when you found the time, researched and. And helped Eric Weinstein with his podcast the Portal.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Which I think is great brief story. And then I want you. And then I'm Just going to set you loose and listen to you. So Peter Thiel was a neighbor of mine in men.

[Jesse Michaels]

No way.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah.

[Jesse Michaels]

Oh, cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And we're on the same floor. And, and we didn't. It's like we were elevator buddies, right? Like, hey, you know, what's up? And one time he comes out when he made the. Does he admit now that maybe it was a little misguided to try to steer Trump in the right direction?

[Jesse Michaels]

To try this, like, the support of Trump?

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

No, no, no, no, no, no. The, the actually trying to do smart things for Trump because when he was in the elevator, he had. I'm really not kidding. He was holding a thing of folders, right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like, literally he. His arms were extended and the folders kind of like came up right to his nose.

[Jesse Michaels]

Huh.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And I looked at him, I'm like, Trump. And he. And then he. He just kind of did like.

[Jesse Michaels]

Interesting.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Anyway, yeah, welcome. And, and so, like, when I went through all your videos, I just said, first off, this guy obviously is a modern day Robert Anton Wilson. People who listen to the podcast know how much I love Robert Anton Wilson, but welcome and thank you. We're gonna dive in and we're gonna start with consciousness, but tell us a bit about yourself, why, why you started the video channel. Etc. Yeah, a great, great story.

[Jesse Michaels]

It does. Well, first off, Jim, thank you so much for having me. And we were talking earlier. I see your career in many ways is a really cool blueprint that kind of opens up the possibilities for what somebody like I can do ideally in the future. And so this is really cool. I appreciate it. Yeah, I guess it kind of dovetails with, in terms of what, what I care about and what I'm doing. It really dovetails with the conversation we were just having before your very generous intro, which is about media, mainstream media dying. And I saw that. And, you know, you mentioned that, you know, just interning at the Daily show and Charlie Rose and I also had a startup back in the day in college that was like a news aggregator. I've basically always been interested in the future of news. And that's always been like the masochistic thing for me because news is such a sort of carnivorous den of, you know, it's like the worst incentives, a lot of really bad people. But I do think it's this, you know, Archimedes lever to change society, fixing information channels in a way that is empowering to an average person and isn't condescending to them, doesn't conceal them a priori, from quote, unquote misinformation that, you know, some bureaucrat, you know, says is not state doctrine or whatever. And so my goal now is, you know, you mentioned the transition from Google to working for Peter. That was kind of a night and day. You know, most people who know the reputations of both, you'd be like, well, you know, that's a crazy transition. And I really did feel, you know, the term npc, you know, non player character, I felt kind of like turned off and like I was like, you know, in the Matrix NPC style in the mothership at Google. I did. And, and, and, and meeting Peter gave me to, to reference one of his favorite philosophers, Rene Girard, kind of a memetic model of like this person is, is so intellectually kind of insatiable and then, and then he's also trying to sort of win in the free market. And, and that really opened me up. And, and you know, my, my job with him was, you know, in investing kind of in private market stuff, you know, typical venture. And then, and then also kind of exploring out their ideas. And you know, I ran our speaker series and stuff like that. And so that, that second piece of the job really opened me up to the fact that we have no idea what our understanding of the current, our current understanding of the nature of reality is, is, is way off. And, and that's not a crazy thing to say. That's a, that's a, that's a historically accurate thing to say at any given point in time. You know, there's a, there's a, there's actually a good book called the Half Life of Facts.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah.

[Jesse Michaels]

By this guy Sam Arbusman, who actually works with Lux. There you go. Yeah, I'm sure you would be familiar. And it's true. Just like radioactive isotope decay facts and the consensus has a decay function. And I disagree with Steven Pinker. I don't think we're at the apex of human enlightenment. I think we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And we've made a lot of progress, but there will be wild overturnings of our current body of knowledge and kind of exploring the fringes of knowledge in that context at Teal Capital opened me up in a way that I think was really good for me kind of developmentally. And so the goal with the show and sorry, this is a crazy roundabout answer is to do that for other people. Like it's almost speaking to my npc, you know, Google or college self where I was kind of, my, my look ahead function on life was Like I have to basically rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. You know, like the country's kind of moving in the wrong direction and I have to do these sort of, you know, zero sum extractive jobs that are nominally prestigious and, you know, not really add any value. And by the way, we know everything that there is to be known about the world. And so the flip for me was so positive that if I could do that for, you know, one other person in the world, like that would, that would be cool for me. So that's the current goal.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So I mean like, again, as I was saying to you earlier, we are, we are so aligned on like so many things. I, I think if you can. Oh, like we. I gotta try to stop myself from making Matrix references. But like the Matrix is simply the hero's journey and Plato's allegory of the cave.

[Jesse Michaels]

It's totally, that's what it is, totally.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So of course we're gonna make a ton of references to it because. Awesome. And the one little thing I love about the Matrix that I always, I always ask people to kind of test them like so Matrix 1 and 2 I thought were awesome, great movies. Three I thought kind of sucked. But there was one really interesting scene in Matrix 3 that made me go,

[Jesse Michaels]

ah, these guys interesting.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And the scene, interesting. The scene was this one where they believe. Right. They are in ground state reality. Right. They believe they're in the. In quotes. Real world.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yep.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

They're not in the real world. And how do the directors and writers of the Matrix suggest hint that to us? They think they're in the real world. They see machines coming. The killer machines. Hunter killer machines. You know, the ones with tails and, and Neo looks at him and goes. And they die. All the machines die. The real world.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Spoiler alert. Yeah, you just. Different level of the Matrix.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And that's the whole consciousness thing that I wanted to make our kind of our first part of our conversation because I love what you're doing there. Like, I'm a huge Huxley fan. I'm a huge. Yeah, I'm sure you know the book the User Illusion. Have you.

[Jesse Michaels]

No, I don't love it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You're gonna like. I can't say the author's name. It's like Thor.

[Jesse Michaels]

Okay.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But it's an awesome book. It's like, it's a little like go to Escher Bach. Like, huh. You gotta read the page and then realize you didn't understand a thing.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And you gotta read it again. And then you gotta read it again. But I could not agree more about, like, another book that I. That I go on and on about is the Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, of course.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And so that's where we are. The end, the apex. Are you kidding me? We're just starting to go up the stairs, man.

[Jesse Michaels]

I agree.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And, like, when I hear people talk about, you know.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Compared to, you know, a lord of the manor 500 years ago, you're a regular, at least in this country.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Pretty well. Right.

[Jesse Michaels]

Totally.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But. But okay, so Maslov's hierarchy of needs, the material part, that's all pretty much solved. Even if you're, like, in the bottom cohort, which we'll talk about, because I think that they're being mistreated by the bureaucrats who want to control their lives.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But there are solutions. That takes that control away from them. But you're right about. I think we're just beginning to knock on the door of trying to even think, figure out what consciousness is. Right. And, like, so you see, all of the marketers were just steps away from AGI. Right? From general artificial intelligence. Are you kidding me? Like, I have a good friend and. And were an investor in his port, in his company. His name's Jeremiah Lohan. And. And he's a genius. And. And so we're talking about AI. And he goes, listen, man, AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It's algorithms.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right. Totally.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

It's just fast. Right.

[Jesse Michaels]

It's really cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And an advantage. But we're not going to figure out AGI until we figure our own consciousness.

[Jesse Michaels]

I'm with you. That. Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

We don't have a clue. Honest.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And you know, again, back to your theory that I'm going to just set you loose on the. The idea that the brain is an editor of data hitting our perception screens. Right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes. And.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And that maybe. Maybe it's a receiver as opposed to an originator.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I'm going to turn it over to you because I have other things that. That. But I'm going to do two quotes from Robert Anton Wilson that kind of set the stage here. So the first is, he says we are walled cities, shouting at each other over the armaments of our perceptions.

[Jesse Michaels]

That's great.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And then he follows that up with, opinion is derived from our perceptions. Perceptions reinforce our opinions, which then further control our access to perceptions in an infinite loop. Thus the name of.

[Jesse Michaels]

There you go.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Which logic cannot penetrate. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna turn it over to you and. And ask you to explain for our listeners and watchers which I think they're gonna love it sort of the transmission theory of consciousness and why it's so fascinating.

[Jesse Michaels]

Well, let's get into it. Yeah. You said you're, you were a Huxley fan. Huxley was a big proponent of this, as was William James, you know, who's known as the father of American psychology and pragmatism, but was also little known fact, the president of the American offshoot for the Society of Psychical Research and was incredibly interested in all this stuff and worked with some other people like Frederick, Frederick Myers and others, and inspired people like J.B. ryan later. And I think it goes back to, you know, everything goes back to Plato. But you know, that our, that our lower senses are actually misleading. And there is a, the body doesn't produce consciousness, actually is a prism or we're a local node of consciousness where we're only receiving, we're a filter, basically. We're receiving just like we see, you know, between 500 and 800 nanometers of the electromagnetic magnetic wave spectrum. All of our senses are very limited, you know, slices of reality. And to, to quote Huxley or who was quoting William Blake, we're, you know, the doors of our perception are narrow. We're not seeing everything. And the default state, the primordial soul state is actually omniscient. And that soul is being ported into a limited prism of the body. And if you look at mystery rituals, whether it's putting your hand in a glove of bullet ants in the Amazon or the Eleusinian mystery rituals in ancient Greece, which Plato and Socrates and Aristotle all did, these are your temp, you're temporarily killing the body. That's what, that's what most mystery rituals are. And the idea is you experience, and this would be the Platonic idea, you experience noesis, the, the knowledge of the primordial soul. So if you think about it, you're killing this collapsing function and you're glitching into a default state of greater omniscience. And then you're coming back with much greater kind of psychic awareness and knowledge. And this is going to really trip you out. But if you look at a lot of the recruits for the CIA psychic spy program which ran from 1972 to 1995 called Stargate, a lot of these guys had experienced near death. And if you, if you listen to people with their, you know, near death accounts, they talk about, you know, their consciousness is bouncing around the room. They see them, their bodies from the top of the hospital or whatever. And so yeah, that's, that's my belief is that the, the, the body is somehow tethered to something more primordial and wider, more expansive.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And like I had a guest on. You were talking about the ancient Greek mysteries and the various cults of Demeter and, and Persephone and the Elysium mysteries. And so anyway, I have Brian Morescu on as a guest.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Wrote, you know, the Religion with no Name and it's all about. His thesis is why did these cults work out so well? Because they had a great marketing line which was, hey, come, come visit our cult and speak with the gods.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And basically Brian's thesis was. I think they were putting more than beer in those chalices. And like literally we didn't have the tech to be able to analyze these ancient chalices and you know, gourds that they're making this stuff in. And then when we finally got it, he took a leave of absence to run this down. Yeah. The early analysis. And I'm much less cautious than he is because he wrote the book. Right. So, you know, an abundance of caution is needed. But like what he really found was they were putting psychedelics in there.

[Jesse Michaels]

Ergot. Yeah. Which contains LSD and, and, and the narrative that most people. And he doesn't go this far, but let' go this far. The, the narrative that most people have around the advent of civilization is that the agricultural revolution happened and then we just had more time. Like leisure is the basis of culture, so we had more time and then we could specialize and we could create cities and start to write things down, create mythology, that sort of thing. And I actually think if you look at what ergot grows on, it's wheat, barley and rye, which were the first crops grown in the agricultural revolution. And if you think about the. How trippy society is like really going from hunter gatherer to where we are now is a weird. You need visions. And so I think that had. That was a big part, I think in the spawning of human civilization overall is just taking this thing that was. It's similar to what Albert Hoffman experience where it was like accidental and then I think it was ritualized later. But.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, yeah, totally. And like I, I love the idea that you also rip on the, you know, the Roman idea that genius was actually a gift from the universe from the gods. Right. But the Romans saw it as like external to humans.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes, yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

That I announced at the beginning with the, with you. The first video that I found of yours and got me into your channel. Basically posits the same thing. And it quotes all of these geniuses, right? Like the guy who came up with the DNA strand. Like, yes. The quantum equations that completely transform quantum physics. These guys tripping balls, man. They were like, sitting out in the forest. They had hearing.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You know, like, people don't understand it. And you. I'm a huge fan of David Baums. Right? Yeah. David Baum wrote this breakthrough theory called Hidden Variables.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

What's really interesting, and I think really plays a part of this is the idea that all of the paradigm shifts happen, right. They happen from wacky people and. And. And then they get ritualized, they get commoditized, and they get. And they become interesting to people who crave power. To people who crave power. What are these people? Well, they're the worst kind of person. And Doug Adams, if you're a fan of his, said, yeah.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Anyone who's demonstrated that they want to be or can get elected President of the United States Autom likely be not allowed to do the job.

[Jesse Michaels]

Totally. Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You know, and Nietzsche's maxim about watch out for the person whose urge to punish is strong. These people are not good people.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And so what happens is we kind of ritualize it, and then we. We decide who's a heretic, who's not a heretic. Right. The. The book that I mentioned to you earlier, the New Inquisition, Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science by my pal Robert Anton Wilson, basically makes the case that it was in this. Turning science into a dogma and to a. A religion of sorts. One could be exile, from which one could be called a heretic. And again, if you know, your evolutionary theory, like hunter gatherer, exile equals death.

[Jesse Michaels]

Like, yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

They didn't have to kill you. The world, which was very inhospitable, was going to kill you in a day. So exiled from the tribe was this. You know, I can't do that. But. But then you look at David Baumgart, Hidden Variables. And I did a thread on Twitter because I read this incredible piece that I really couldn't believe.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

All about Oppenheimer sending messages to the. All these other genius quantum guys.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Saying we gotta. We gotta pretend like we didn't read Bomb's thesis on hidden variables, because he read. And we can't have any commies in if, you know, Oppenheimer. That didn't come from him. Some.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

One of these troglodytes who was in power told Oppenheimer he had to do it.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Essentially, like they box bomb out and

[Jesse Michaels]

he got exiled, basically, like sent to South America.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, they.

[Jesse Michaels]

Exactly.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

They really exiled him.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah, actually, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So. So I think that, like, the way this all comes together, like, you know, Terence McKenna I love. I had his brother on the podcast.

[Jesse Michaels]

Oh, cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like, really cool. But the stoned ape theory.

[Jesse Michaels]

Oh, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like how we came along. Which kind of leads me we're going to jump around, which is great.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

To, to the theory of the mushrooms are aliens. Right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And. And so panspermia theory, I think it's called.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Is that right? Panspermia. Yeah, yeah, that, that basically Francis, the founder of DNA, Francis Crick, apparently I didn't know this, so.

[Jesse Michaels]

Thank you.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I, I learned something today. I learned that he, like, was a proponent of this, of this theory.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like, I think is great, but tell us about it. Mushrooms are aliens, tell us theory.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah. So it actually connects with what we were just talking about, where ergot might have spawned modern civilization. And if you think about, like, you know, I love. If you're looking for the next paradigm in science, look at the gaps and what we currently have. And the gaps in what we currently have in evolution are like the doubling in human cranial size from 2 million years ago to 300,000 years ago, from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. That's weird, right? And Terence McKenna had a great explanation for this, which is that hunter gatherers would follow scat around trying to find prey, basically. And mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, would grow on the scat in, you know, savannah and Africa and they would, they would consume these things and then, and then that would create, you know, all sorts of new neural pathways that would actually change their epigenetics in a way that was inherited and caused literally, like, you know, the creation of the prefrontal cortex, the doubling in the cranial size. And that's one gap. And then to me, the other gap is, why do we have human civilization? You know, just the last 5% of the existence of Homo sapiens, we have civilization. And, and you could explain that with some sort of Ray Kurzweil esque, like, curve or whatever. But, like. No, I think there's something more to that story. And maybe there were past civilizations that got to where we are and there were cataclysms that wiped them out. I'm very interested in that. But it's an important question, right? Like, why in the last 5% of our existence do we have everything we have today? And before that we're literally just hunter gatherers? And I think mushrooms answer that question too with ergot, which is you know, a fungus. And then you get into the, the Francis Crick stuff, which you have a really credible scientist talking about. You know, mushrooms are extremophiles. They can withstand extreme amounts of radiation. So I think they are zip files of consciousness that travel from planet to planet and merge themselves with higher hominid creatures and give them knowledge. And I think they're sort of homeostatic in nature. And what they, they try to make the people sort of ecologically somewhat conscientious and then may maybe also give them kind of primordial wisdom around how to get off the planet, which is something Terrence McKenna constantly speculated about. He's, in fact, there's a quote from Terence McKenna where he would say, within, he's speaking to the mushroom. He's like deep in a trip and he goes, it goes. Within my memory exists the blueprints for hyper light drive. So if you're trying to be a Kardashev for scale civilization, what would you do? Would you show up as like a kind of a higher, you know, a hominid creature that's like a foreign invader, like a green alien thing and you know, like basically invite the present civilization to attack you, or would you subtly merge with that new civilization and then change the way they think and act in subtle ways and sort of co op them? And if you look at bullet ants in the Amazon and cordyceps mushrooms, the cordyceps literally take over their brains and like move them around. And then everybody has a microbiome, right? And it's, it's, it's now passe this, it's cliche to say, you know, your microbiome affects the way you think in a profound way. Everybody also has a microbiome. Nobody talks about that. Everybody has fungus that lives symbiotically with the bacteria. And people talk about Candida affecting your, you know, mind and your, your stomach in bad ways and other fungus as being possibly beneficial. And so I, I think this is a, yeah, it's a profound theory that, that fungal DNA is more similar to human DNA than plant DNA. So I think in some ways it's why we're so susceptible to fungal disease is because our tissue, we often mistake fungus for human tissue. And so I think there's something very special about it. And I think it contains ancient wisdom and it's kind of symbiotically co directing our evolution. And then the more speculative part that Francis Crick writes about is, is that doing it from some distant galaxy. And I think that's possible too. You you probably would have had to have put the fungus because I don't think the mushroom spores would have been able to have traveled that far. But Carl Sagan wrote a thing about this. You put the fungus on ships and then give them CO2 and algae and you know, maybe that would be enough for them to survive. And then, you know, maybe they spill out everywhere here. And Francis Crick was coming at it from the lens of he didn't believe 100 million years was long enough for DNA to have formed on Earth. Like the primordial soup argument was not satisfying to him. So I think there's an abundance of evidence for something like that being, being true. But I'm a dilettante YouTuber, so I don't get, I don't get taken seriously when I, I need somebody else to write about it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You know what's so cool about that is like I, I, one of my hobbies when I was young. Well, still even today I like to write treatments, like fictional treatments. And that was one of the ones that I wrote like when I was 20. Yeah, I wasn't mushrooms. But it was, it was essentially the same, it was a sci fi, Right. And it was essentially what happened was the, the highest form of civilization realized it was D and it decided that it had to send life out into the universe. And you know, it was horribly derivative. But then, but like it had a lot of the same themes, which got me kind of thinking.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So I keep all, I've kept journals since I was 18, so it's very helpful because you get called a liar in your own handwriting often. And anyway, so I was like getting ready for you and then you start thinking about it and you're like, well, I look at, this is kind of the base story of some of our most popular oral traditions of some of our most popular novels, of some of our most popular movies. Right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like they, it weaves its way through them. Yes, that, yeah, you could, you could make the argument that, okay, that was completely coincidental. I don't think so. I don't know.

[Jesse Michaels]

I'm like, look, I don't, I don't think so either. They show up at the end of life and the beginning of life. What is growing at Chernobyl right now? Mushrooms. Like mushrooms are they, they can just withstand extreme, extreme post Cambrian explosion. What showed up first? Mushroom. So I do, I think if you were trying to reboot society, if you're trying to send a spore out, I, I, I think no pun intended.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And that kind of Leads into the whole psychedelic question, which I become very interested in. I am of an age where, like, when I was a kid, I bought all the propaganda, right? Like, your brain on drugs never touched a psychedelic because it was like, oh, man, I don't want to jump out an open window. Right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Then Michael Pollan writes his book, how to change your mind. And I'm reading it, and so I'm. I'm concurrently fascinated, but really pissed off about the fact that when I learned about all the early research, there was amazing research being done. And here's another thing with people and their prejudices. Like, we decided that anything German was bad, right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The German scientists, and here's the great irony, who were almost exclusively Jewish Germans, right? That the Germans exterminate it. And then we come along and see it not as, like, you know, as just pure research, right? We see it as German research, which means Nazi, blow that up, like right now and burn. They burned all of the research on psychedelics and, oh, man, they burned the research that was being done by German nutrition experts that, guess what they were finding. That's fine. That's fine. You. You know, you could have as much fat as you want. That isn't what is going to cause you problems, right? So we. We burn all this incredible research. Because, Nick, by the way, a pet theory of mine.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Craziest person to ever occupy the Oval Office was not Donald Trump. It was Richard Milhous Nixon.

[Jesse Michaels]

Interesting.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Batshit crazy. Real.

[Jesse Michaels]

Why do you say that? Why. Why do you say that?

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Why do I say that? I mean, how do you have. Like, this guy was. He was on every page of the dsm. Psychiatric model or manual.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right. Definitely paranoid.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Paranoid to an extent that people only now are beginning to realize. As you listen to these tapes, you listen to Kissinger and his recounting of. Oh, yeah, he always got half in the bag every night and called me. And when he was totally, you know, just wiped out on booze, he made me come over and pray with him. Like. Like you just start reading.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And so what happened was Nixon needed. Needed a scapegoat. And if you. If you really do a deep study and a deep dive on the whole war on drugs, which is like. It was. It was one of those things where Nixon was like, ah, I've got a new enemy.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Because, you know, Timothy Leary, the eighth. I'm a huge believer, right. That go through phase shifts, and there are phase shifts where humanity has the opportunity, where what I say, the Prometheans are among us.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

If you want to like here's a cool thing for. For your channel. Right.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

At popular music right up until like 1963. And what you'll see, you'll find Diana Shore or whatever. And the lyrics like will blow you away because they're like hypnotic suggestions like don't be blue, don't be sad.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right. Go to your right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Do a good job, pay your bills. Like literally this is. These are in the lyrics of their popular.

[Jesse Michaels]

Well, that's wild. Do you think it was sort of brainwashing or.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Oh, absolutely.

[Jesse Michaels]

And why. I, I always thought like Santo and Johnny was like that there was a. Definitely a weird hypnotic thing going on there. You know, like, like sleepwalk. Totally.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But. But then look at, look at the difference between House of the Rising Sun. Look at, look at that.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

On Ed Sullivan. And they've got their suits on like the Beatles did. Right. They had the ties that. And the house in New Orleans. Right. And then just go forward five years. Everything is psychedelics. It's like open your mind open.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like. And there's no way that the conventional square establishment of that era.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

From being willing to even entertain those ideas. They were like danger. Danger.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

People are going to free their minds and yes minds. They're not going to be good little citizens and. And do everything we want them to do. We better have a war on drugs.

[Jesse Michaels]

You're right. And all those FBI like that. You know, Chaos and cointelpro. I think we're basically tracking dissidents and then kind of. This is a crazy theory I have, but it's not my theory. It's. This guy, Tom o' Neill wrote this book called Chaos that somebody like Manson was kind of an MK Ultra patient and was a. You think about all the people he hung out with. He was, he was. He lived with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and he was also hanging out with Terry Melcher. That. You know, the Jello House. It was Terry Melcher owned. Terry Melcher was, you know, produced Turn, Turn Turn by the Birds and was Doris Day's son. So he had a. You know, he was kind of music legacy. And Yeah, I, I think. And I live in Laurel Canyon, so there's a lot of trippy weirdness here too. And. And so I, Yeah, I totally think that it. They saw it as a threat and then, and then they. And then they had all these attempts at co opting it. And this is a really weird fact and I don't know where this goes, but there's a Book actually called Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. And it notes that it's a. It's a good. But it's. It's actually not even worth reading, to be honest. It's. It's. It's. It's. They're like a few takeaways. The one that's most interesting, I think, maybe, is Jim Morrison's dad was a guy named Rear Admiral Stephen Morrison, and he was in charge of pulling off the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which never happened. But he was like the, you know, like the Deep State guy, like, doing that.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah.

[Jesse Michaels]

And so there's a lot of. Yeah, I think. I think there was. There's a lot of meddling. There's a lot of CIA and FBI meddling in that world because it was threatening, like you said. And then. And then. And then, you know, it's ironic, I think, Joan Didion, it was like, August 8, 1968, is the day the 60s ended. And that was the Tate killing, you know, for the. For Manson. And so maybe they. Maybe they partially accomplished the job.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So the interesting thing is, like. And. And again, you know, my veneration for Wilson is like, this is where I found, like, all of this stuff after I. I had read Michael's book about. About psychedelics immediately, like, did 180° or 360 or. No, 180.

[Jesse Michaels]

Sorry.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I did a complete about face and I'm like. Like, these things are miraculous.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And now we're back to mushrooms, aren't we? Because psilocybin, John Hopkins is doing. And we. I've been supporting a lot of the research using psychedelic medicines to help soldiers get over ptsd.

[Jesse Michaels]

Awesome. Cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like, it's. Honestly, Jesse. It's a light switch. It. And it's like one or two treatments. Because the other thing, as you look into it, and it's kind of like. It's like the entire world just upside down. Because if you look at drugs and addictiveness of a drug.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So what are. What are the ones at the top? All the legal ones.

[Jesse Michaels]

All the legal ones. Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Nicotine, alcohol, those are all up here. What's at the bottom? Psychedelics.

[Jesse Michaels]

Toads, just. Yes, completely.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So if you've ever done, like, psilocybin, your next. You don't wake up the next morning thinking, I got to do more psilocybin. Right. Jones. And for it, quite the. Yeah, right.

[Jesse Michaels]

You do wake up less fearful and more in touch with yourself and less dependent on external authority in a way that I think is subversive.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Totally correct. And so that's why I now am making up for lost time in supporting like all of these initiatives we have. We're sponsoring two movies that are being made about it because I think, oh wow, got to turn it into stories for.

[Jesse Michaels]

What are the movies?

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Well, one is being made by a team that are following five people and, and the genius of it is that they're following people from what we on the coast call flyover America. Sure. These are all people like from Oklahoma, from Texas. And like they kind of intentionally. Because I asked them about it when I, when I decided I was going to kick in as an executive producer. I'm like, did you intentionally like find red state Americans who were heavily into psychedelics? And they, they, they're wonderful people. They, and they're like, they smiled and kind of started to laugh and said, you're not going to believe us. It wasn't intentional. But yes, of course we see that now as the movie is coming together so follows five people on their quest to become facilitators for psychedelic medicine. Right in. In the guy that I love though. And I don't want to give too much of it away because I don't want to spoil the movie but is a state trooper in Massachusetts who is incredibly articulate, who was suicidal, was cured in quotes by I think it was two psilocybin experiences.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

A huge advocate for it and he's suing Massachusetts right now because it's, it's illegal for cops or military to use psychedelics or weed or any of these so called prescribed or forbidden drugs. And literally as you. I was just watching one of their, the rushes that they sent me and it's him passionately explaining, listen, we should be putting psilocybin in the water. We should be putting LSD water. Because number one, he said he his thesis and let's be clear, everyone listening. This is a thesis. This is not a fact. Okay, but so this is a thesis which is he believes that half of police, bad police shootings are due to horrific PTSD that the cop has. That that could be one of the best ways to stop all of these bad shootings. Major if they would just admit this, that these like it's a really stressful job to be a cop.

[Jesse Michaels]

Totally.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And then he also lays out a fact and this is a fact. I never knew this.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Law enforcement people, men and women who are in law enforcement die 20 years sooner than they. Than the actuarial table would suggest they should die.

[Jesse Michaels]

Wild damn crazy crazy.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Oh and so the, the reason I'm supporting These movies, we'll probably end up making one through infinite films ourselves. But the reason, like, I'm supporting these is because to socialize it, right, you've got to give people a chance to get tuned in.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Can't like, blame people who are not tuned in to something like lecture them and say, what do you mean you're opposed to psychedelics?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You have to begin a conversation.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I think one of the best ways to begin those conversations, like they Netflix that they did with Michael Pollan on how to change your mind, that we need more of that, not less. And we need. We need to hook into. I believe we are emotionally based creatures and that the emotion that drives us, like the one ring to rule them all, is fear. And rather than yell at people for, like, their programming, we. We need to, like, move it step by step with better stories. Like, with better. But you ever think about this, like. And yeah, these people again, the five protagonists, one of them is a woman who had rheumat arthritis and literally had crippled herself because she was addicted to opioids. She couldn't get out of bed. And two, Two sessions with psilocybin, completely free of her addiction.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah. Wild.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The before and after of her. Like, before you're. You're like watching somebody who's near death, honestly.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

After she's like, bouncing around and like, so bringing it back to, like, the power structure, the top down. Right. Like complex adaptive systems, all emergence comes from the bottom, not the top.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So these ain't like. I'm not saying that hierarchies don't exist. They do. They exist everywhere. If we're going to talk about, like, looking at spores and looking at. There's hierarchies down there too, man. Yeah, these, like, these things, it's like, holy. There's like, hierarchies everywhere. But what you. What I'm hoping is that we are in another one of these phase changes that, like, the Prometheans are among us right now. I believe, like, you're in that category

[Jesse Michaels]

and I don't know. Thank you.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And like, people are going to be willing to listen. Right. But like, the, The. The whole mushroom thing, it's like sometimes even people who, like, know me really well, they're like, jim, you do realize you're, like, fucking barking mad, right?

[Jesse Michaels]

No, I'm, I'm with you. I, I agree with everything you're saying. The one caveat is that I would say, and I'd love to get your take on this is I think mushrooms and psychedelics can be kind of non specific amplifiers. Correct. And so you can generically amplify, you can, you can be tapped into bad through them as well. And set and setting and intention are super important. I didn't realize this. I think Stalin actually micro dosed and that was like a wild revelation for me of like, okay, these things can be like totally misused as well. But if, if used with the proper intention, I think they're so much healthier than traditional, you know, like, like big pharma prescriptions, generally speaking, because those chemical compounds usually are sort of escapist in nature. It's like I have a pain and I want to fix the pain. And you fix the pain kind of locally with the treatment, but you lose something. And what's cool about psychedelics is it's more of a confrontation experience. It's like a spiritual confrontation with the bad thing and you go through a painful shedding process. And I just am a philosophic believer in like, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And so I think there's something really special about psychedelics where like you, you have to face the bad and you, and, and then you go through that, and if you go through that earnestly and genuinely with proper intention, you come out on the other side reborn, which is, you know, beautiful.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Totally agree about set and setting. Totally agree that it should be a mediated experience. I mean like again, once I went down this rabbit hole, like it was always mediated. It was, it was sanctified. It was shaman. The shaman was the most important person in the village.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And all of these Native Americans, like, they, they had their, what we would call medicine men, but they were shaman.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And, and it was, it was a ceremony that was mediated by the shaman. Set and setting were very, very critical. So I completely agree with you. Now I've, I've gotten just like really serious pushback from people when I've been talking about like psychedelics and, and the fact that they should be mediated. It's like what an elitist opinion. And it's like, and they're like, psychedelics should be available to anyone who wants them on their, on their own time and whatever. And listen, I, I, I'm not an anarchist. Right. I, I am absolutely believe in as to maximize freedom as much as we possibly can. But I don't, I don't want Mad Max as the result.

[Jesse Michaels]

Sure, sure.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So, so, you know, I get, I get their argument. So you know, I, I got introduced to a shaman and I thought, okay, I'm gonna, I'M gonna go try psilocybin.

[Jesse Michaels]

Cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Amazing experience.

[Jesse Michaels]

Awesome.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And, and at the end of it, this guy, probably the most evolved human being I've ever met in my life.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And it's a shame that I can't say who, what his name is because it's.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Still illegal. Yeah. At the end of the, the, the experience. And he, he's very much set and setting. Like you got to talk to him for four hours before so he can make sure that you're not going to have a psych. A psychological break.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But, yeah, like one of the first things that I said to him was everyone should be able to do this. And I'm like, I should. I, I would love to be able to like, set up a foundation that.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Made this available. And he smiled and he goes, don't worry, Jim. Psychedelics will probably be legal in probably outside 10 years. And I'm like, I'm like, really? Why do you say that? And he just gets this big smile on his face and he points at

[Jesse Michaels]

me and I went, ah, so that's part of your purpose.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So I go, why are you pointing at me? You don't mean me individually. And he goes, no, no, no, I don't mean you individually. I mean you as the archetype that I'm associating you with. And I'm like, you're calling me the man? And he's like, I know you're not. But he begins to tell me, he said over the last five years of his practice, yeah, clientele completely changed. Yeah, it was Wall street guys, women, it was high power creatives from the.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

From the music and movie industry and it was politicians.

[Jesse Michaels]

I have a weird theory about this. It's. I think the boomers had a chance to like reawaken in the 60s and 70s. And then all the stuff we're talking about, the Timothy Leary, you know, it all got just marginalized. And then the zombie growth era began as well. And it was like the paradigm shifted from, you know, exporting cars, like you mentioned, to extractive models of, of, you know, wealth creation or individual wealth creation that, that weren't adding to the pie. And I think things are capitulating again economically. And I think you're going to see a lot of baby boomers and other people just ready for this now because they're like, there's something about downturns that are just so good for. They're hard and they separate the wheat from the chaff, but they're so good for society psychologically and they make people open to things that they were previously not open to.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Totally agree. And I think you're absolutely right about the. I'm. I'm a cusper. Like, if you read demographer Jonathan Pontel, I was born in 1960 and look at demographics. That was actually the largest number of births in any year, surrounded by 10 years on other.

[Jesse Michaels]

Cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But so what he says is the definition of boomers, which is the traditional one between 1946 and 64. He said that's insane. And he's actually got a book on it. And like, he did attitud. Attitudinal surveys and everything. And he's like the group that was born between, like 1958 and 1964, like, attitudinal. I was born in 1960. Had nothing in common with what he called real baby boomers, who were my sisters.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I'm the youngest of six. I'm the martini baby.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Thank you. Like, use the booze. Thanks for having those martinis or I wouldn't.

[Jesse Michaels]

That's awesome.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But like, I. I grew up with all of my older sisters bossing me around.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like, I'm the. Were seven years from the next member of my family.

[Jesse Michaels]

Oh, wow.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

In a way, I was kind of like an only child when they were all the way at school and then all like, at the holidays. I had this huge family and. And so. But Pontel argues that, like, this. These wide swaths of. Of demographics don't really aren't as useful as we think they are. But I think you're right about the early boomers. They did have that chance. They did. They were going there. And now this brings back to the look at music. Look at 1968, 1967 in particular. We're talking some, like, really, really cool. Far out.

[Jesse Michaels]

Oh, yeah. Like, what are you thinking of? I.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Well, I'm thinking of Journey to the center of your mind, which is Ted Nugent, people of all people. Like, no, the guy guitar. Let's not. Let's be clear. But like, his whole thing was. Was psychedelics and then he changed his, you know, his tune, so to speak.

[Jesse Michaels]

Totally. One was Sergeant Peppers had to be around. Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Like 1967, I think.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The Beatles, of course, went and did psychedelics and got literally transformed. Look. And the Beatles are a great example of this. I'm a huge Beatles fan. John Lennon.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Natural.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So. So. But look at the Beatles pre psychedelics, look at the Beatles post psychedelics. And it's like Night and day, if.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, it is.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You know, I want to hold your hand.

[Jesse Michaels]

Lennon was. Became like a Jesus. Like. Yeah, exactly. The most corporate, basic sort of lyric.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, I am the walrus. Yeah, like it. So that was the window that got slammed shut. I think we're opening another one right now. I think that the Internet being socialized and more importantly being pushed to mobile has. Has. You know, it's not my term originally I. I stole it from Matt Clifford, who we're invested with in his entrepreneur. First the. But the idea of the largest variance amplifier in history. Right. And. And now like is on it. And so it you. The command and control structure of the late 60s, early 70s, in which Nick. Which allowed Nixon to shut psychedelics down.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Remember there were three TV channels in America.

[Jesse Michaels]

Three.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Right.

[Jesse Michaels]

Cbs, NBC, ABC or abc.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And there were two newspapers that were considered national newspapers. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Child's play, man. You want to shut down. You want to shut down something, you just call your buddy, the editors of both Wall Street Journal and New York Times and you call the three network heads and you're like, this is what you are doing.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

FCC license. We're going to do all that. Boom.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I also think though that you don't have to even be a conspiracy theorist to see that like, you mentioned memetics. Like, I was into memetics long ago and, And I think it mimetically. It got people interested in mimetic transcripts because.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes, see.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And read about today. But like, I think that there is this emergent function of people. Like something happens. Right. Path dependency kicks in and like people start agreeing on it. Like what I call ground state reality is what most sentient creatures on the earth collectively believe at the same time. Right. So Tim Leary and. And Robert Anton Wilson have this idea of reality tunnels.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So that you. Any sentient creature. And this, by the way, would inform your thesis about it being like external consciousness. Because what. What. They make a very compelling case that everybody has slightly different, you know, nervous system and everybody has slightly different perception filters. Like, for example, there's a speculative theory in. In psychiatry and psychology that really all schizophrenia is. Is filter failure.

[Jesse Michaels]

That's what I think it is. I think it's an antenna move oscillating between the wrong frequencies. Boom.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Real simple. And like, and. And to. To your earlier point about like allopathic medicine, right? Yeah. Medicine is at least we have antibiotics and at least people know to wash their hands now. But medicine is. Is like not the way to do things if you want to. Want to cure something. You don't treat the symptom right, treat the cause right.

[Jesse Michaels]

I agree with that. Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And so again, mines are opening up now at, like, a rate that I certainly. More than any time that I was aware of either, retrospectively, obviously. I was eight in 1968. Yeah. I wish I could have gone to Woodstock, but I couldn't. My mom wouldn't let me.

[Jesse Michaels]

My dad tried to bike there from California.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Did he really?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

How cool is that? Did he make it?

[Jesse Michaels]

I think he got to Nevada or something.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I love that. Maybe Burning Man. He. He stopped by Burning man or never done Burning Man.

[Jesse Michaels]

I think he. I think he always laments. He wishes he was. He acts like a hippie, but, like, I'm like, daddy not realize I'm not a hippie either.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Let's move on to AI because we share a lot of viewpoints on AI Specifically, we're both really skeptical about ag.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, right. Yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Everyone's worried about the Terminator coming along. And again, if you read Deutsch, devotes an entire chapter to it in the Beginning of Infinity, and he's like, guys, we can't. We. We have no working model of our own consciousness.

[Jesse Michaels]

That's right. That's right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Are we going to try to program it into a machine? We can't do it.

[Jesse Michaels]

And we should. We should get into that because that's. That's huge. I think. Yeah. The. The model of. Our misunderstanding of the latent magical capabilities of biology are misinforming the way we're treating AI. And I think the Turing model is that biology is a classical computer. And if it's a classical computer, yeah, you just get more compute and you run neural nets on it and, like, you get AGI. The body is not a classical computer. It might be running a classical computer. Computer might have some components that, like, are analogous to a classical computer, but I think it's something much more complex and an area I'm super interested in. And this is probably a pure. A poor mashing together of things that don't quite fit. But is quantum biology. And we're finding more and more that things in the body act in sort of quantum ways, despite its sort of warm, wet, and noisy nature, which is not usually auspicious for maintaining quantum coherence. But I think biology and evolution is way more sophisticated than we realize. You can point to all sorts of anomalies in it and all sorts of weirdness in it that belies a complexity that is far beyond some deep learning model or whatever. And it's not just token Prediction. And so, yeah, I'm. I, I'm with you. I agree with you.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And again, you know, I. Maybe our listeners are going to be bored because we just are like a mutual admiration society here. But I think you're absolutely right. I think that again. And Deutsch points this out and, And I've been kind of obsessed with it too.

[Jesse Michaels]

The.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The note, the idea of qualia.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right. Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So. So one of the. I'm trying to explain. I have four grandchildren and I. My two older ones are now at the. Papa, why is it Papa? Why Papa tell me this, you know, and so I'm trying to keep up with him. And, and my oldest was asking me about, like, he had heard me referring to Qualia. And he's like, papa, what's qualia? And I'm like, pierce, do you know the movie Ratatouille? And he goes, yeah, I love Ratatouille. And I go, do you remember where the mean critic takes the bite of ratatouille? And all of a sudden he's back to his childhood and he's. His mom's hugging him and he's loving that. And Pierce, like, I love that scene. And I went, that's Qualia. In other words, that bite of food triggered all of these memories.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Which again, have a bunch of like, God knows where they are in the neural net. But we, We. It's hard to even describe qualia and.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So you're gonna model it. I don't think so. I do. I do, however, think that even AI as, as a tool is going to be amazing.

[Jesse Michaels]

I agree.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I'm clearly on the side of OpenAI. I'm the chairman of the board of Stability AI Cool. Open AI Company I. And is one of those things, like, I try to, like, I'm. If I had a philosophy, I guess it's a mix between stoic and daoism. I try to, like, not let things that my own actions can't affect. I try to, like, not let them get me crazy. Right. And. And so one of the things I was kind of getting crazy about was this. Seeing the big tech emerging as kind of a panopticon. I really hated that idea. I really. Idea of the select few because it, it just smacks of everything I'm opposed to. Right. People who think they know everything, I instinctively dislike because I know nothing. Same when you finally have the courage to admit that to yourself. Like, all of a sudden the world just becomes that you open your aperture. Right. Psychedelics open your aperture. And I think that AI can do that too, used correctly. But I believe that Open is going to be the way. There's a reason Linux runs the Internet, right? Open source.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And to have the temerity to assert that. I know all of the use cases, Jesse. I know every single use case. There is one that I don't know is wrong. Just go wrong because I don't know it. That's insane to me.

[Jesse Michaels]

I agree.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Saying only the Batman is certain in my opinion. And so like Open works because of cognitive diversity, because we don't know all the use cases. Case in point, we open sourced stable diffusion In August of 2022, a Cambrian like explosion.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

New apps, new uses, new everything came about like way more than we thought would ever come. So open always beats closed because doesn't. I don't say, Jesse, you can't use these tools because, you know, I'm big, you're little, I'm smart, you're dumb. You know these ancient power structures which are collapsing as well. Thank God.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yet you still have the. Oh, it's dangerous. You know, AI is dangerous.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right. That's what Google is trying to say right now because they're falling behind.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

It's kind of breaking my heart. Because those guys, if you look at what they were saying in interviews in like 2002, they were basically talking about AI back then.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And so now I'm not going to blame them because they're not running the company right now. But the fact is, I think AI, especially of open AI, which allows many different minds to use it to build APIs, to build apps, etcetera, is going to be incredibly useful. And because it's all it does is is it allows us to look into latent spaces that we can't without, like the help of psychedelics, human can't do efficiently right now. I'm not arguing yet, ultimately maybe do it. But for now, being able to have 80 billion parameters and lightning speed to, to, you know, go through, but. But basically that's what it is. My, my friend Jeremiah Lowen, who I'm also an investor in his company, Prefect, I had him on. He's genius. And we're talking about AI. And he goes, yes, AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It's just algorithms. And they're just going. So I think that like you had it, you had a piece where you, you said you worried, which I think is a wise worry, by the way. You worried that AI could lead to learned, helpless, where we kind of outsource our thinking, so to speak. So talk about that a Little bit.

[Jesse Michaels]

Because I, I, yeah, I, I think in some ways this demarcation of this is AI. Like it's almost a false demarcation between AI and like cs. Like, like, like CS is like, you know, it's like self updating. CS has been around for like a, you know, pretty long time. That's like the goal of like, you know, any sort of interfaces to be like adaptive to like person using it. And so I think in many ways the history of computing is just, is more bound up with AI and then you get these sort of hype cycles and we're definitely in one hardcore right now, which is interesting. But I guess what I worry about is the consumer Internet right now is not net, a net positive. I think for the average Western person beyond some, if you get access to Google, you get access to Facebook and you're living in a third world country, clearly a net positive. And then there's some, you know, Maslow's hierarchy and, and beyond a certain point it gets really unhealthy. And what I worry about is if we're just kind of running blindly towards this world where we're all have a super low latency, high bandwidth relationship where we have chips in our brain essentially. I worry that you're just going to have a higher latency, lower bandwidth relationship with the consumer Internet as it stands. And I like Twitter, I think it's a really cool tool. There are aspects of Instagram that I like, but these things by and large suck. And they don't make most people better, they make most people shittier. And Twitter is like, is are. Do we really live in a world where everyone is worthy of publishing aphorisms and axioms? Like no, we didn't. Like, no one's worthy of that. Like maybe, you know, some, like I, I'm sort of elitist and I would preclude myself from this. Like I shouldn't be like, you know, like mouthing off, like, who am I? Like, why are, why do we have this tool where people just pontificate all day and you send needless flare signals to, you know, like, what was really crazy, this sort of wake up call I had is I was on Club. Remember that clubhouse spike when that was all the rage? For a hot second, for a hot second. And I was on the app and it was like in the heart of COVID which was the only context in which that app, I guess made sense in retrospect. And you had Mark Andreessen and Sam, you had all these kind of heavy hitters in Silicon Valley. Mouthing off about what they thought about really keystone important issues. And then you find out that it's being run through this Chinese API called Agora. And like they're just storing all this stuff on the, on the servers. And like I, I'm sure you're woke to what's going on between the US and China right now. And that, that to me is Twitter too, where it's like, I love Elon Musk and I'll try to support anything he does and I'm paying for Twitter because I want to see him win. And yet I'm like, I don't know if it's the best. That's the best. That's a poor compression of this guy's abilities. And so yeah, I worry about, it's a long winded answer, but I worry about what the modern Internet does to people and that we haven't designed it in a deliberate enough way. And then all we're thinking of is more compute, more compute, higher bandwidth, lower latency relationship. And I think you're going to end up with a lot of people who are. You end up like King Joffrey. You end up this spoiled brat because the, the, the pain and the ability to forego instant gratification, kind of all the typical marshmallow test stuff needed to really build character and be like a good person, I think requires at least like maybe 18 year foregoing of the consumer Internet. And then maybe you can have some relationship to it where like you're very deliberate about how you use it. But I haven't seen even people who I really admire, I've seen them lose themselves entirely. So I worry, yeah, I worry about that.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, I think that's a legitimate worry and a legitimate concern. I, I'm, I maybe have a more hopeful, optimistic take on, on Twitter in specifically I, I think for better or worse, Twitter is going to emerge just because of the network effect. I think that Twitter is anti fragile. God knows that everybody's tried to it up badly and yet it keeps persisting.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I think that it's the beginnings of the first global human colossus where we literally are creating a global brain.

[Jesse Michaels]

And

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

now lots of caveats around that. I use Twitter quite a bit because of that belief and but you've got to use it. And I think your point about like dropping a newbie in. So here's, here's a thing where I was lucky that I was born when I was born, right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I was out with a friend and we were talking about it and

[Jesse Michaels]

we

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

both decided you know, that we were kind of the last generation of men in particular who had regularly had gotten punched in the face. Right? Like punch you in the face and people in the face. And like, you were like, oh, okay, that. I guess I was being an. I. I'm gonna stop. Right. And so I think that the. Because of that, I was able to look at Twitter when I had the thesis that, like, new media was going to win and old media was dying. And then I started getting active on Twitter and actually switched everything over there because I had this idea that it was going to be the first global intelligence network, for better or worse. At least it would be the bones of leading to one. But a lot of steps are required. Right. So I talk to young people all the time, like in my industry, but also, you know, people want to like, hey, coach, what. What do I do here? And. And one of the first things that I notice when I'm talking especially to like, anyone under maybe 30, 35, probably 30, is they. They are confused with success in metrics that are vanity metrics.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes, yes, Followers.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Those kinds of things. And I, And I immediately try to tell them, don't pay any attention to those. No, you are gonna. Here's how you could use Twitter. Like, if you could find a thousand people who are signal and not noise.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Follow just a thousand people, right? If you can. If you can reduce the noise. Because you're right, Twitter right now is incredibly noisy. Right. Clubhouse, which you referred to even worse.

[Jesse Michaels]

Right? Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Okay. But if you, if you take the steps, right, and curate really aggressively and then. And here's the real key. Move it into meat space. In other words.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yes, yes.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Somebody along on Twitter. It's how I have to be more than half the people who work for me at Oshana's Adventures.

[Jesse Michaels]

That's cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

More than half of them I've never met in person.

[Jesse Michaels]

That's awesome.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But. But basically we meet this way, which is not perfect by any means, but half of them are in India or Singapore or. Hey.

[Jesse Michaels]

And.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And I meet them ultimately, which I think is the final step. The final step is to be able to meet and people in. In physical space. Because, like, we are bleeding information, we humans, right? And like pheromones is our thing. And like all micro expressions, all of that, which you just can't pick up through screens. But if you, if you do that multi step and much harder, by the way, much harder way of using it, then it's like gold.

[Jesse Michaels]

Totally.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But I totally agree with you. The consumer Internet. And again, maximize the Objective function for revenue.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

One set of prompts, right?

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

This now. Buy this now. Right. We can also maximize the objective function for human creativity. We can maximize the objective function for human happiness. Totally.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So that's one of the reasons why I like wanted to get it like back to my Taoist stoic thing. When I, when I saw that like stability, AI truly was open. I'm like, I can actually make a difference here. I can like by investing in them and, and propounding for them. I maybe hopefully just a tiny little bitty itty difference. But that's like, that's what makes me enthusiastic. I'm absolutely not Panglossian here. There are going to be a lot of problems and like, like Beckett, try again. Fail again. Fail better.

[Jesse Michaels]

I like that. Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So we're gonna try again. Fail. But then we might fail better and we might create new, better problems. Listen, we're always going to have problems. Always. I think, I don't think we ever get to nirvana. I don't think that, you know, that that place exists. But we are forever becoming. Right. Stasis is death. In my opinion. Stasis leads to entropy, leads to death. And, and life is movement, life is flows, life continues to unfold. And this idea, like, it's nothing new. Heraclitus was a pre Socratic Greek philosopher. The same man cannot step in the river twice because he's the man and it's not the same river. And that's like, life is flow, life is change. That's what it is.

[Jesse Michaels]

And so you just, you just answered my question of how you are so vibrant and so you, you, you kind of incidentally answered it because I mean that, that's your, that's your core philosophy. That's really cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, it is.

[Jesse Michaels]

I'm inspired. I'm gonna, I'm gonna adopt that and discard my answer.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Well, I'll discard some of my answers and adopt yours just to be.

[Jesse Michaels]

Okay, great.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Equal trade fair about it.

[Jesse Michaels]

All right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I am having so much fun that I realized that when I don't have my nanny saying, jim, you can't record for two and a half hours, all those people, that's. This is my little private indulgence. We didn't even get to. Okay, so I'm gonna make you make an on air promise. Will you come back? Because I didn't.

[Jesse Michaels]

I would love.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Okay, great.

[Jesse Michaels]

I'd love to come back. And I'd love to meet you in person at some point too. It's been an honor for you a

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

lot and if you're ever here in New York, we can get together. I would love that.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So great, you'll come back where we'll talk about crypto. We'll talk about.

[Jesse Michaels]

Yeah.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You know, disaffected youth and nihilism and all that stuff. I have a theory about that too. But for right now, we always ask guests. We're gonna. We're gonna dub you the emperor of the world for one day. One day. One day. Can't kill anybody. You can't go Stalin or. Can do is. We're gonna hand you a magic microphone. Okay. Magic Alistair or Aleister Crowley. Sense of magic with a K at the end.

[Jesse Michaels]

Okay.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You get to.

[Jesse Michaels]

That's bad magic, though.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

No, no, if you read it, there's another one totally misunderstood that he was a weirdo, no question. But like the idea of. See, we can't do this. We're gonna. You know what we're gonna make.

[Jesse Michaels]

I know we're gonna keep going for

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

the next one, so.

[Jesse Michaels]

Okay.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Anyway, we're handing you this mic and you can speak two things into it, right? And you by doing so are going to incept all 8 billion people on the planet right now. And maybe a couple of dolphins and crows and whales too, who knows? But you're gonna them so that when they wake up whenever their morning is, they're gonna think, I just had the greatest two ideas and I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna change everything I do. Because these are the two best ideas I ever had in my life. What do you got?

[Jesse Michaels]

Awesome. Okay, I'm gonna take this. My. This is my bike. I think know that reality as you're living in it is a compressed version of something that is much wider and that if you follow places where, you know, kind of glitches in the visible reality breaks in it and follow your intuition, that inner voice which is also, you know, hard to suss out from. From other voices that can be. Lead you down bad paths. But if you can do those two things, your life can be much more expansive and bigger and you can find new worlds with this within this one that. That will change your life and the people around you.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Fantastic.

[Jesse Michaels]

I love it.