Name: Joe Rogan Experience #561 - Bruce Damer
Uploaded: 2014-10-14T08:05:23.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #561 - Bruce Damer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-10-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #561 - Bruce Damer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-10-14. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #561 - Bruce Damer

Thanks for doing this man. I'm very excited. My pleasure, Mike. Alright, here
we go.
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
There's only been two people ever that Dennis McKenna has recommended for this
podcast.
You and Josh Wickerham. So that puts you in very lofty company.
Aye, aye, aye.
Dahmer, that's the way?
Dahmer.
Dahmer.
Bruce Dahmer.
Or if you're French, it's Dahmer.
Is that how your family pronounces it? Is that the correct way?
Dahmer is the best.
But do your friends call you Dahmer? Does anybody give you full respect in the
French heritage?
No, no, no. That's a thousand years ago.
They gave it up after a while?
They gave it up after they invaded Britain.
Oh.
1066.
That's clever. That's a good move.
You've got a very unusual background, man. I mean, Dennis would not stop raving
about you.
And then when I started doing research on you, I was like, you were, this is
the craziest story
of all time. Not the craziest, but it's pretty crazy. You were in Burning Man
during Katrina
with, you were partying in Burning Man with people who work in the Pentagon.
Yes.
When Katrina went down.
Yep. Camp Playa-gon.
That is the most ridiculous thing. That gives me great discomfort to know the
people who
work in the Pentagon are partying at Burning Man.
Rocking.
We called for Blackhawks, but we got the order denied. But that's a whole other,
that's a whole
story.
Well, that's, well, when Katrina was happening, you guys were amongst the
people that were
in Burning Man, the very few that had a connection to the outside world,
correct?
Yeah. We had a, you know, we're, our camp was doing the Wi-Fi and the internet
for Burning
Man, for the public and emergency networks, the private network. And so we had
a dish and
we could take over satellites. So one of our guys took over a recon satellite,
took it offline.
Is that legal? Is that legal or is that a Pentagon move?
It's a Pentagon move. So he took this thing offline and I'd actually been at a,
it's an NRO,
National Reconnaissance Office. I had been at an NRO launch just the year
before. And then
I look over and I see the logo on the laptop and I say, what are you doing? You
know, to this man
who remained nameless. And he said, shut up, turned his laptop away and he
pounded in a code and he
took this thing offline. And so our Iridium phone rang, you know, this Pentagon
wireless satellite
phone. It's like the, the general on the other side is saying, what's going on?
And basically the,
he, he instructed the guy not to answer. So we then had control of this thing
and we could watch
Katrina come in. Whoa. Because the government wasn't doing anything with all
this national
resource assets to, to help people. And this was the frustration that he had.
He wanted to be
evacuated to be taken out off playa with Blackhawks and heavy duty helicopters
because he had just come
back from the Asian tsunami, you know, the Bande Ache event. And then he went
straight to Afghanistan.
And then he went to Baghdad. And then he came to Burning Man. I looked at this
man's face and was like
lying deeply, you know, just unbelievable stress. Can you imagine? This was his
job. He works on title
10 money doing extreme comms, extreme emergency relief efforts. And he's
invented all this shit like
cell phones that come down on parachutes that'll run for a month. And people
pick up these cell phones and push a
button. And there's somebody who speaks Tagalog right on right there to say,
what do you need? What are your, what's
your position? Whoa. Isn't that cool? That's amazing. It's amazing. The cell
phones run for a month. They're like
in rubberized cases. This guy's invented all this technology. So this rubberized
case just has a massive battery in it.
It comes pre-charged. Yep. Yep. Wow. So this guy, you know, really thinking. So
here, here we have a natural disaster
happening in our own country, you know, barreling in. Nobody at Burning Man
knows about it because there's no
cell phone service. Right. Then back in 2007. It's barreling in and 2005 rather.
And we watch it coming in.
Now the, the amazing thing is we, we saw it. You could watch a video from orbit
on this screen,
on this guy's screen. And you could watch people walking down. Like we saw a
levee breach,
the first levee breach in like the ninth ward or something. We saw that on the
screen from plot,
from our camp at Burning Man. So when you say you took over satellites,
satellites that are broadcasting,
what is it? Broadcasting media? Like it was, is it news?
It's a high res, no high res reconnaissance imagery. Okay. So it's a satellite
that is like one of those
spying on bad guy satellites. Exactly. Whoa. Yeah. No, I couldn't, we couldn't
read. Are you allowed
to talk about this? If someone finds out about that, is that like, is this an
issue? I don't think so.
I mean, that seems like something that would be really frowned upon. Well, the,
the phone,
the iridium phone kept ringing. Yeah. It's like your dad's calling, you're
having a party. The
neighbors are calling your dad going, Hey man, uh, I don't know what your son's
doing, but the lights
are on. There's a million people on your front lawn and the phone just keeps
ringing and you're like,
ah. But these guys knew who they're dealing with. This is this innovative
genius type guy that is
totally respected in the organization. So the general that initiated the
inquiry was covering for him.
Oh, I see. So the general could then contact space command and say, I can't get
any information.
Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. So he had put the satellite in some kind of fail safe
fallback mode. So they
would spend the next several days trying to get back into it. Whoa. And he was
just like bypassing
it and keeping them out. Burn hydrazine and locate, you know, stuff on, on the
planet. Wow. So how in 2005,
tell me all the details, but he said basically don't, you know, I'm doing this.
Right. What,
what kind of satellite internet connection was available in 2005? It was a very
small,
slow upload. Yeah. A little bit quicker download, but still pretty whack. Right.
By that time. Yeah.
The next year I think they got the big tower on the playa, which had the dish
that went right to
Gurlack with an OC3 connection. But what does that mean? What'd you just say?
It's like a really fast,
sort of almost like a radar dish. Gurlack. What is Gurlack? Gurlack. Oh, you
haven't been out
there, huh? No. I'm just, you know, I love hippies in small doses. Hippies to
me are like pizza.
You know, I just can't, I can't eat pizza every day for like a month. I was
with, uh, but you can
hang around Plyagon, Pentagon people. Yes. I could probably hang around your
camp.
Billionaire. If I went out there with really dirty people. Billionaire camps
with Sherpas.
Sherpas. Sherpas. That's the. They brought Sherpas. No, they're, they're white
people.
They're servers for the billionaires in their billionaire camps. Oh, that's too
much. And they have walls of motorhomes around. I want to hang out with a
hundred thousand in air camp. I don't want to hang out with a billionaire camp.
I want to hang out with people who are like in RVs and like everybody's clean,
but I don't need Sherpas.
Well, come, you know what I, here's a secret that I'll tell you on here. Oh,
well, it won't be a secret. It won't be a secret. Might want to mime it.
So Dennis hasn't been to Burning Man. Dennis McKenna. Good. Me and him. Same
page. So I've. Two old guys who don't want to party with young kids. So I told
him that Dan, to tell you that Dennis would only go to Burning Man if you went.
Oh, did you do it the opposite way? I did the opposite way. You're just playing
us against each other? There you go. Yeah. That doesn't work with me, but
thanks. That's sweet.
So Gerlach. I would go anywhere with him though. You'd go anywhere with Dennis.
Yeah. I really would go with him just to talk to him for days. Yeah. Yeah. He's,
he's amazing. The world's most amazing teddy bear.
Yeah. He's a, he's, he explained the stoned ape theory in a way that I've never
heard anybody explain before with science and the way that psilocybin interacts
with the human mind in a way it was like, oh yeah. Oh, that had to be a part of
it. You know, I'm sure there's many factors that led to the increase in human
brain size. But when he describes it, you're like, oh, it's fucking mushrooms.
It has to be.
Yeah. And you know, we were at a meeting, uh, an event yesterday where all the
psilocybin research was being presented by the, the Johns Hopkins teams and
UCLA and, and, uh, Madison things.
These people are doing psilocybin funded research to, for smoking cessation,
end of life, um, you know, reduction of anxiety and PTSD.
Yeah. And this one young researcher, Matt, that we talked to, he basically said
this amazing thing, which was, we're not plugging up neurotransmitter portals
to deal with addiction here.
We seem to be hitting higher order brain functions, much higher, rather than,
you know, plugging up your desire for nicotine.
We're, when we watch the fMRIs, when we put people under the magnet, which
means put them in an fMRI, real-time brain scanning, we watch this, the parts
of the brain talking to each other.
Like the default mode network seems to be changed.
And is this why you're under while they're on mushrooms?
See, I would have to think that that would...
Or psilocybin.
Psilocybin.
I would have to think that would radically affect your experience.
Because, is an MRI and an fMRI similar?
Because I've been in an MRI before.
It was like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
If I was on mushrooms and I was in an MRI, I would freak the fuck out.
Ah, okay.
Yeah, I've never been in it.
You've never been in one?
FMRI is just functional MRI.
Right.
You've never been in an MRI?
Never been in an MRI.
Oh, I was in one less than a year ago.
I had an issue with my back and I had a bulging disc in my back, so I had to
get it examined by an MRI.
And you lie down on a plank, like a little skinny little gurney thing, and they
roll you into this tube machine that's a giant magnet.
And all I could think of was some story that I had heard about some kid who
died because they left a fire extinguisher in the room and then turned on the
MRI and it sucked the fire extinguisher into the magnet.
Wow, wow.
And killed one freak incident out of a billion usage.
It was like a torpedo coming through the room.
Yeah, it killed somebody.
But it's a very claustrophobic and strange experience.
You roll into this thing and just lay there.
You can't move.
And you're hearing bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
And it's going like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick around your head.
It's all just echoing around you.
I mean, you get earplugs, you put earplugs on, you close your eyes and you just
deal with it.
But I would imagine that tripping on that would be incredibly strange.
So I would think if fMRI is very similar, it's functional MRI.
That's what it means, right?
Functional MRI.
If it's the same machine, that would, I mean, the old adage is, you know, five
grams in silent darkness, right?
That's what Terrence always described.
Terrence McKenna always prescribed.
Our buddy.
This is like the opposite of five grams in silent darkness.
Yeah.
This is like, well, maybe they've got it just down to a baseball cap now, you
know.
I don't think they do.
I don't think they do.
I've had two MRIs actually in the past year and a half.
So I'm pretty sure.
Maybe by the 2050s we'll all be like, this is a theory that I have of where all
this is going that I can reveal to you later.
Oh, excellent.
I'm absolutely interested.
But what I was thinking was that the whole experience of psilocybin depends
very much so on where you're at while you're experiencing it.
If you're in a beautiful, peaceful place, like the colors are brighter and you
see like all sorts of cool visions and you have this connection to nature where
you feel like you're ground