The Men who Stare at Lasers (Premium E275)

I love listening to these episodes on LSD

Trans women are destined to usher in a new age of Consciousness, which is why the shadowy forces of Evil are persecuting them. This has happened once before but it was a trans man, and that man was Jesus, as evidenced by his lack of Y chromosome and Stigmussy

Just me or does this have tinges of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? The idea that the universe/earth/reality is a creation by aliens to answer the unanswerable questions is literally the origin of earth in that series

“The frog showed up by my bed & it was as real as you or I, so obviously I was like, welp I guess I live in this subreddit now.”

It's sad that the dude who admired his physicist granddad ended up so dumb and lazy. Instead of doing a fuckload of maths and a PhD and slogging away to write long ass proofs and stuff, he's just like "whoa. i solved it with drugs and lasers bruh". If I was his granddad I'd be disappointed.

I know japanese and now I'm tempted to try this

When I was maybe 6 years old, I had a moment where it was like I became conscious all at once. I sat down on an empty bottom shelf in the bicycle section of Walmart and just...thought about how unreal everything felt and how I could never be certain what's real. Then I stood up and got on with life. That feeling never went away, those thoughts never went away, but I'm, like, normal about it? Seems like a lot of the brain breakage people have about faith and religion, existence, reality, simulation theory, etc etc is just because they didn't have that moment yet, and as adults, they ascribe way too much significance to it (and they immediately find a community online that encourages them to turn it into a whole solipsistic conspiracy/woo thing that conveniently excuses them from having to care about other people and what happens in the world).

Iirc 5-MeO-DMT can be taken as a pill? Maybe that's what Jake's thinking of lol

The thing is, lasers actually do look trippy when you stare at them… but the reason you see the “1s and 0s” is because of physics! Unlike normal light sources, lasers emit light of a single wavelength, so the light can constructively and destructively interfere with itself much more noticeably. When waves cancel each other out, thats when part of the beam looks dark and when they add together it looks brighter.

Imagine the Wachowskis create the most important, revelatory film in the history of human experience, and then follow up with Speed Racer.

LIV AGAR

Best thing about this EP is that I now have audio of Liv saying "Liv's inside the dream"

Liv....... Wait for it.... Agar.

I have made a bet on how long into an episode will it take Jake to make a Ghostbusters reference followed by a side bet of how long it takes. Julian to belittle Jake for that reference.

Liv Agar

Jake's take on the televised countdown clock to the apocalypse is basically the plot to the little(?) known 1996 Canadian movie "Last Night". (Except the universe is never revealed to be some grad students' failed project)

As an Alaskan who went to college out of state in the mid 2000s, everyone at college also nicknamed me Alaska, and I returned home to find that many other friends who went to school out of state also were called Alaska by their dorm mates. It’s hilarious to hear that same story again from a completely different perspective

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There's little as ominous as an IDF soldier - ex or otherwise - who thinks they're in a simulation. Hey, how many Palestinian lives being brutalised/murdered has this convenient belief washed away guilt and excused you of?

I like how Jake can just reference ship shows now with no further context or explanation because he established the concept in a previous episode so now this is just an established TV analysis term used in the literature.

I was playing No Man's Sky when it got namedropped in this episode. Coincidence? Or definitive concrete proof that we live in a simulation?

it's so exhausting how consistently these techbro pseudointellectual thought experiments eventually arrive at "eugenics is good, actually."

ok fine but how long do you have to look at it before you don't even see the code, you just see blonde, brunette, redhead...

Mystical experiences inspired by cosmological beliefs based on philosophical thought? Welcome back neoplatonism

We were created by SEGA and we're all living in a Yakuza game. Anyone who isn't involved with the Yakuza is a filler character

What are “ship shows” again? I didn’t think that digression would be on the test.

Liv Agar

At 25:45 there's a guy who talks about making noises with our "meat flaps". Bro definitely got that from "They're Made Out of Meat". https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

Hilarious… I do feel a teensy bit sorry for the poor guy who has no idea how many people have discovered the nature of reality while tripping balls 🥸

Listening to Jake stumble through concepts he doesn’t even try to understand without Julian to give him the podcast gimp treatment is rough.

Does anyone have the parkour video with the cuts??

Y'all listen to entirely TOO LITTLE Terence McKenna. Machine elves, iykyk.

DEVS reference!! Yah Brad!!

Dude's theory of 'why they created the simulation' is literally the plot of Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy book 1.

I had old windows in a house that passed by a busy road with lots of light pollution so I put up heavy curtains but in the gap between them light would make a pinhole camera reflection on the wall. They looked like a scratchy Tolkienesque script cross with cuneaforms in shimmering bands. I watched them shift and fade and reform, they were luminous and I'd like to pretend it was a communication through a bad medium that got garbled and therefore lost to me, I couldn't communicate back and their message got lost. That was just a fun little game my sad brain did to play with this normal phenomena of glass and light to make it entertained because I was depressed and lonely. I wasn't even on weapons grade brain drugs I was sober and or a little weed. I didn't delude myself that I was the main character and found the key to unlock the quest to do the thing - I was just at first confused then put two and two together about lenses that I'd leared at uni about how people used these phenomina to cheat at painting. I get that people don't know how light works and the wack things it can do but it just speaks to how empty and boring and sad your life gets to the point where you think you can see the Matrix.jpg and you are infact Neo.

Enamoured with the idea of opening my third eye to the hidden realm only to find it’s littered with artefacts in the kitsch Japanese script used almost solely for marketing purposes and jarring band names. Like dude I might be tripping but I’ve got a mad urge listen to listen to マキシマム ザ ホルモン

I really really really don’t like that I know the lore and understand the reasoning behind why Jake calls those shows “ship” shows. I have to give my sim some rest away from QAA…

Psychedelics and orange juice- my HS health class teacher told us if we ever dropped acid, our brains could break and we would become the last thing that we saw… she used a glass of orange juice as an example, saying that “you could think that you’re a glass of orange juice, trying to stay upright and not to spill yourself!”

This sounds like one of those Troy McClure ads.

not to be earnest in the patreon comments, but god I love the thoughtful and silly way that Jake talks about existential issues in this ep. what a beautiful man

There are a lot of really good ideas for satirical sci fi stories in this episode.

That does totally sound like a Travis quote.

Wouldn't this imply that in the simulated reality, the language of the heavens isn't Enochian, but like, Python

I love how they brag about serving in the IDF. I guess killing palestinians is easier then handling the bars

livagar.exe

Yeah but it actually works, to a degree. Its cool, its neat. Try it out, dont burn your eyes.

this sounds like every french postmodernist philosopher’s wet dream

Liv agar

Why did they use a green laser in The Matrix and not a red one?

FYI, fuck Resetera. I got banned for being TOO Black. Liv Agar.

An episode on Nick Bostrom and the Future of Humanity Institute would be a great way to do an overview of the tech-utopian ideas floating around Silicon Valley.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is absolutely one of those games that makes you see it even when you're not playing it. I've had the same thing happen with Tetris and Katamari Damacy.

waaait, was this the first "ship shows" reference outside the episode that "explained" it? is it so fetch now? do we understand what it means?

Raga vil

Nice one, Jake! The "businessman trip" is DMT deep lore.

Not a real episode unless we get a 2K reference

Not going to claim anything beyond enjoying it at the time but more than a little surprised Jake hasn't watched Devs

Why do I feel like I’m listening to a Dharma Initiative video on LOST at the 7 min mark lol

Brad was extremely patient with Jake on this episode, bless him.

Maybe we are here to the destroy the planet to the extent it supports our own species existing and deciding if we are anxious about that or not

That Julian cut in was perfect I was literally like Julian would be losing his mind and there it was lmao

So couple of things. :) This guy read the three body problem and tried to steal the idea of the sophons talking to him and watching him….maaaybe too much DMT. Also, katakana is for loan words in JP so they’d only be for things either in English, or Dutch or German…so probably not actually *in* Japanese. Oh…and Liv Agar

I'd love to see you guys do a movie-night-style episode on the Zero Escape trilogy of games, and/or have Jake livestream them. They predate QAnon but hit so many of the same conspiratorial beats that you guys are going to be absolutely howling. And the first one is a literal ship show.

I once took what Erowid enjoyers would call a “hero dose” of 4-AcO-DMT, which is a synthetic tryptamine similar to psilocin. I ended up having such a profound experience that led me to stop experimenting with psychedelics and drugs entirely. Looking back, everything I saw in this out of body 10 hour trip, was completely influenced by all the Terrance McKenna YouTube videos I had been watching. But, at the time I truly believed I had tapped into some other dimension or ancestral knowledge after traveling through kaleidoscopes worlds in the style of Alex Grey, meeting the machine elves, and even R. Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin’” guy was there too for some reason. I realize now that you are really just getting completely fucking zooted on those kinds of drugs and you’ll for the most part experience what you go into it expecting or hoping for, and drawing any real meaning from it is fantastical delusion. I am thankful that the “ego death” I experienced or whatever you want to call it, basically made me straight edge and I haven’t really listened to Phish or STS9 since…

2CB can be taken as a pill, can't confirm how effective it was as this experiment was aledgegly not done in lab conditions and it's difficult to separate out the effects of 2CB from LSD & mushrooms when it's your first time and you're at a music festival. Sky did turn pink though, which I was told was a 2CB effect.

The thing about the Wachowskis is, they did make a movie explaining the reality of the universe but y’all weren’t ready for Speed Racer.

Danny sounds like Elon when he talks and therefore I want to punch him in the face

Jake, when you spoke at the 59:25 mark, it made me cry, because I have that fear. I’m afraid that I’m not gonna accomplish everything that I want to accomplish, because, to me there is too much cool shit out in the world that I haven’t experienced yet. Sounds lame. I know, episode was awesome as usual.

Yesss! More "A Serious Man" references please, Jake.

The Laser experiment sounds just like the old Lucid Dreaming experiment that floated around on the early internet. You basically cut a slit in two halves of ping pong balls and place them over your eyes, then you set up a machine that rotates red light onto a wall or into your eyes and you'd start to hallucinate. Does anyone else remember this?

Simulation theory is just a stupid tech bro version of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch Moment, when the individual is confronted with the reality of what's on the end of every fork. Material reality is obfuscated by culture, by customs and rituals we treat as real. It's not a novel or profound observation that reality is mediated and can appear as unreal, but of course Musk et al think they're special.

Missed opportunity to name the episode “Critique of the Goler Programme”

These guys always think they're the ONLY person who's ever had an existential crisis, the only ones who have ever dissociated. "I was sitting there and suddenly I... I just realized how everything started to feel so fake? Like I almost forgot who I am... Are these my hands? Is this my body? How do I know it's really there? How do I know this isn't all dream? Could I wake up in a second and realize I'm still a baby? And old man? And Alien? A sleeping neanderthal?What if this is all a game? What if if I'm in a coma?" Yeah, buddy. Welcome to being 11.

L I V A G A R

Live Agar

So back in college I knew this kid named Jeff. There were a few Jeffs at my school so this Jeff was knicknamed Spazzy Jeff. Why was he called Spazzy Jeff? Well for example he had a part time job at the campus bookstore and decided to look right into the barcode scanner for long enough to temporarily blind himself in one eye. I don't think he saw the face of god/aliens/the computers.

I love the ship shows

as a former experimental physicist who worked at CERN, the cranks have moved from solely emails to also bugging you on linkedin. one also called us on our office number which was mostly super confusing as we didn't even know the number for that phone, so were shocked an outside crank found it

Next time we see Brad he will be Neo from the last movie. Blinded, bandage over his eyes. Talking about the secret code of the universe forever burned into his retinas.

I think we need to incorporate DMT and laser gazing into all IDF training

#DontDissSkrillex lmao

Let's say you see the source code of the universe, so what you probably aren't going to be able to interpret it in any useful way.

My cat doesn't even need to be high on DMT to be fascinated by a laser shining on the wall

Sooooo....the difference between understanding the meaning of life by taking a drug and staring into a laser, and joining a religion is?

“former IDF soldier turned parkour enthusiast and American Ninja Warrior” awesome I hate him already and I haven’t even started the episode

First time I took acid, I made the mistake of doubling down halfway through the trip, thus making it a 16-hour affair. By the time I went to bed it was the middle of a bright July afternoon and I was still seeing iridescent glyphs gently gliding across every surface. I remember thinking, "Yeah, yeah, alright, I've seen the Matrix, but can someone please shut it off so I can SLEEP? Thanks!" 😆

Intrusive thoughts are just chat trying to fuck up the LP

I love how dude says "this space that I've occupied" lol ex IDF wow what a slip

" I reckon if he had been in hamas he'd have managed to do the monkey pegs" is a stellar line from this episode.

Isn’t the real reason for feeling “something is very weird and wrong” in church or Disneyland just the fact that they are, just like the matrix, stories that both get confused with and invade our actual lived reality. Is this just too boring or actual real world response activating compared with thinking it’s a simulation or your own broken brain? Thank you for allowing me to ponder this while snorting with laughter💚

Pharmahuasca can be taken as a pill, you need an MAOI in order to activate DMT via the oral route. Source: Misspent youth on Erowid.

i was just listening and packing up my stuff to leave work and "the Brad Signal" doubled me over in laughter. and i want to hide this because i don't want to ruin it for anyone else but some people walked by and side eyed me as i cackled, thank you Jake

Estrogen would save some of these losers. Feeling like life is too mundane and like you're some other being next to all of the other people who are normal is a feeling that to me led to my trans awakening, similarly to the wazowskies. Just give it a shot, see what happens ;)

I am once again asking Jake to do a "Ship Show" podcast

Jake Rockatansky

liv agar

Travis View

I bet those pills were 4-ACO-DMT, which has more of a psilocybin analog effect iirc, haven't done it in 15 years so idk tho

*writing on a pad like the Marc Cuban gif* smoke dmt and stare at lasers

*raises hand* I'm a professional Japanese translator. I'm happy to be your guinea pig if (IF!) you can somehow get me the DMT here in Japan without the government (or my wife) finding out.

I love that the ghosts of both Julien and Travis appear in this episode.

Awe Jake my 18 month old son has one of those astronauts too! We also love it at sleepy time

Liv laugh love Agar

Julian Feeld

Getting trapped in the wrong timeline is basically the plot of Twin Peaks: The Return. It IS a terrifying thought.

I admire Jake’s commitment to making “ship shows” a thing

It's also funny it's not only ripping off the matrix but Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

great to hear from jack, brendon, and liza i really enjoy the x files anonymous podcast

I’m definitely doing this. Love DMT. Also, Liv Agar

I just got zapped with my sleepy time space man laser too!

people who try to "figure out" what they saw on DMT are the worst. you have to just enjoy it and forget about it. it will drive you insane if you actually spend time trying to wrap your head around what you've seen. it's fun but fundamentally *impossible* to understand.

i feel like its cheaper to just give yourself a dissociative disorder

I have been WAITING on you all to cover this. My Ex roommate was into this, he’d do this shit for days on end, with his laser. Even tripping my balls off all I could give him was “I think it’s just a laser and light dude”

Ethereal Julian laugh is sending me

Liv agar

I'm definitely on the side of "wow my brain just went crazy for a little while" when it comes to psychedelics. But I do greatly appreciate their capacity to convert the mundane into the profoundly beautiful, even if for a short, limited time. In the end, it is just drugs. But in the moment......

Looks like QAA is well rep'd here. Welcome!

if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does the matrix state machine get updated?

Isaidgoddamn... I haven't listened yet, but I already know this is gonna be 🔥 QAA!

Liv Agar

If there really is no spoon, how am I cooking up all this fentanyl?

Liv Agar

Brad Abrahams

Jake Rockatansky

Hell yeah