Web 3.0: Reclaiming Sovereignty, Privacy, and Full Autonomy

Podcast Highlights

• Why we’re done with “polished” social media posts, and how that relates to shadow work.
• How do we balance the positives and negatives of social media?
• The benefits of a “dopamine fast.”
• The second- and third-order consequences of our connected world.
• Daniel’s first psychedelic experience – 5-MeO-DMT.
• What it was like for Daniel to do ayahuasca with his father.
• How psychedelics shifted Daniel’s attitude towards money.
• What happened when Daniel stopped being motivated by external validation.
• How do firearms, first aid, and martial arts tie in with psychedelics?
• The overlap between psychedelics and cryptocurrency.
• Why are we all so afraid to be afraid?
• Taking a stance on data privacy.
• How to reclaim your autonomy.
• All the money the U.S. spends on war – where does it go?

Show Links

1. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
2. Andrew Huberman’s podcast episode: Defeat Addiction with Dr. Anna Lembke
3. 5-MeO-DMT
4. Erowid
5. Rich20Something by Daniel DiPiazza
6. Strength of Seduction couples’ workout
7. The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
8. Balaji Srinivasan
9. The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul
10. The New Wave Entrepreneur
11. Alpha Mentorship

Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.1 Daniel DiPiazza: I'm an optimist, I think that... Expect the best, prepare for the worst. So I'm an optimist in that way, I think a few things. One, it is interesting how non-local nations are forming. So, for instance, I was reading an article in the Atlantic where it was making an argument that Facebook is essentially a sovereign nation, because it has three billion citizens, and they are actively developing a currency. They tried to launch Libra a couple of years ago, that kind of got squashed, but now they're rebranding it as DM, and that has implications for global commerce because they have more citizens than China, and there are gonna be people who want to use that currency 'cause it's transactive across that network. Even if you look at what Mark Zuckerberg was doing with, I think it was called Facebook essentials, which they were giving to Rwanda, African countries, they always fucking dump bad vaccines and bad internet on Africa and other countries. What they were doing with Facebook essentials is they were giving them an internet connection for free, I don't know if you heard about this a few years ago, they're giving them free Internet connection, but basically it's just a Facebook portal and you can only access the internet through a Facebook portal.

0:01:06.0 Paul Austin: Welcome to the Third Wave Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Austin, here to bring you cutting edge interviews with leading scientists, entrepreneurs and medical professionals who are exploring how we can integrate psychedelics in an intentional and responsible way for both healing and transformation. It is my honor and privilege to bring you these episodes as you get deeper and deeper into why these medicines are so critical to the future of humanity. So let's go and let's see what we can explore and learn together in this incredibly important time.

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0:05:00.4 PA: So whether you're looking for Peak Performance or better health, covering your bases with Athletic Greens makes investing in your energy, immunity and gut health each day, simple, tasty and efficient. So just visit athleticgreens.com/thirdwave and join health experts, athletes and health-conscious go-getters around the world who make a daily commitment to their health every day. Again, athleticgreens.com/thirdwave and get your free year supply of vitamin D and the five free travel packs today. Daniel DiPiazza in his 20s, I had heard of you years ago through the digital marketing kinda copywriting online whole scene. We were then introduced through Gerard Adams, who we've had on the podcast before.

0:05:44.3 DD: Yeah. Yeah.

0:05:45.3 PA: Had a phone call, met for lunch. How has your path of all, would you say over the last 10 years or so, just as both an individual, but also then as an entrepreneur?

0:05:54.1 DD: It's interesting too, like I'm 33 now, and it's to the point where I can make a frame reference and say, "I've been doing this for 10 years", which is cool, and also it's like, "oh, you're really in your career now", and I didn't expect this to be a career when I started. I was just like, "oh, I'm just doing something". And I started off... My career started off from frustration from the working jobs I didn't like, and then the... I kind of metaed my way out of it by writing about the things that I was doing, I created a following around the writing, and then the writing was a bigger ticket for me than the actual freelancing itself. So I kind of slingshotted myself out of that, and then it was at a... When I was learning to develop all my personality before I knew what personal branding was, it was at a good time in the internet where I was able to take advantage of that mechanism of social media, and we'd wanna talk about web 3.0, which is coming.

0:06:49.4 DD: You Know, I took a big advantage of the rocket ship of web 2.0, especially as Facebook and Instagram were taking off, that was a good opportunity to give myself some social capital, so now I can do whatever I wanna do. Over the past 10 years, I've focused on teaching and honing my craft as a teacher, so I'm a big experimenter of my own interests, and I'll go out and I'll try something, and then if it works or if it doesn't work, I'll teach it on, relay that information, and that's manifested itself in multiple different ways, I have a few different books out now, I have some apps out, that's my core business now, I have my personal brand, which I... Now I'm mostly shitposting on Instagram, so I don't know what my personal brand is anymore. [laughter] I'm just...

0:07:35.7 PA: I've been tracking this lately, and like, "Daniel is really going out."

0:07:39.1 DD: Yeah, I'm just doing like...

0:07:39.5 PA: [Overlapping speech]. I mean, zero flux is what it seems like, yeah.

0:07:44.8 DD: Oh, yeah. My wife is like, "You're really going down, aren't you?" I'm like, "Yeah." [laughter] She's like, "Are you really gonna post that meme?" I'm like, "Yeah." [laughter] But you know, it's freeing though too, because I think that even if you just look at the evolution of social media, I think there was a period of time where it was like everything was very polished, and I think it still is to a certain extent, different brands have a polish they wanna maintain, but I think now what resonates more, and probably this is partially because of Gen Z, is no polish, like bad selfies, shitposts, because, and I think that's because we've seen so much just absolute fabrication and lies and over-polish from mainstream media, politicians, disingenuous people, so we wanna see the shit, we don't wanna see the shine. That's been interesting because I think people actually appreciate very, very raw stuff. They would rather hear about a failure than a win, I think, on social media right now, you know? What do you think?

0:08:45.5 PA: What it brings up for me is like the concept of the shadow, which we often talk about on the podcast, Jungian, the shadow work, and so much of what's been amplified through, let's say web 2.0 is, "Oh, this is how great I am," or "This is how great my life is", or "Look at all these travel selfies", you know, or whatever the fuck else. And what we're starting to realize is, like you said, there's a high level of inauthenticity to that, like superficialness, I think that's a word, and people want the real shit, people are realizing that, "Oh, maybe the reason that I'm suffering on a personal level is because I'm trying to make my life something that it isn't, and the way that I find truth within myself is to accept both the light and the shadow." And it could just be that now, what we're stepping into with web 3.0 is a reflection of that realness and that search for inner truth that we're all... We're in an existential crisis, meaning and purpose and all this, and we're trying to find what is that inner truth. And maybe the shitposting and the bad selfies and all that other stuff is just our recognition and our desire to express that on a wider basis.

0:09:46.2 DD: I think people appreciate when you are not just curating your existence, they appreciate when you talk about your struggle. And I think one of the things that is coming to the forefront now, I was just reading an article, something along lines of France is going to be subsidizing mental health care for people because of everything that's happening with the pandemic, and there the question was, "Do you think America will do this?" Which probably the answer is "No." But I think that mental health, at least from my perspective, in the circles that I'm talking in, is a bigger topic than ever before, and I think it's taken more prominence, psychedelics are a part of that, is an offshoot of that.

0:10:22.9 DD: And I think that for mental health, we know there have been many research studies done on... Let's just talk about Mark Zuckerberg's properties that show that it's bad for your mental health. It's bad to... And I'm on it, so I'm not pot calling the kettle black here, but it's bad to consume it, and it's bad to constantly be posting on there. Obviously you can do anything in moderation, but I think that the mental health aspect of that, people aren't taking into account. So when you're creating a curated existence on social media that doesn't represent your mental health or your mental status, it only represents a freezed frame in time, maybe even a picture that you took six months or a year ago, that's not even what you're doing or where you're at now.

0:11:06.5 PA: Catfishing. Catfishing, right?

0:11:07.2 DD: Catfishing. Yeah, it's like it's not real. So yeah, and what do you think about when it comes to the mental health game and social media, there was an exposé that's happening right now with Facebook, and earlier this week, depending on when you're listing to this, earlier this week, Facebook went down for the first time since 2008, the whole network went down. That whole debacle which happened this week was, the speculation is, is Facebook trying to cover up some of its issues, some of the things that are coming out about it, including the very obvious mental health problems it's causing? Do you think that that's an issue that we can solve by moderating social media or does it need to change completely or should we just get off? What do you think?

0:11:45.6 PA: So a couple of years ago, I read a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport.

0:11:50.2 DD: Oh, he was way ahead of the game.

0:11:52.0 PA: And then I think he wrote another book, it was about social media and the lack of connection, and the core of what he talked about in that book was how social media... A lot of people are trying to use it to replace authentic human connection, and that it's basically like the fast food, it's like McDonald's compared to sitting down to eat a home-cooked meal with your family, so to speak.

0:12:16.8 DD: It's Hardy's, it's not even as good as McDonald's, it's Hardy's. It's Arby's.

0:12:17.7 PA: Exactly, yeah, [chuckle] it's not even as good as McDonald's.

0:12:22.1 DD: It's Arby's. Well, okay, now let me say this, probably 85% of the friends I have are from social media now, we're from social media.

0:12:32.8 PA: Right.

0:12:33.3 DD: So how do you balance that up? I'll tell you another thing too, I didn't know my dad growing up, I didn't meet him until I was 19, and I met him again on Facebook, and from Facebook, he went and married my mom. So he's back in my life because of Facebook. And maybe he would have found me without Facebook, but you know what I'm saying? So where do you bridge that gap between the real, authentic human connection... Now, now, when he came back, it was 2009, and Facebook was a different beast in 2009, but I made a lot of friends on this platform too, I made a lot of money, I spent a lot of good time, so I don't know, it's a saw that cuts both ways, man.

0:13:05.0 PA: Yeah, yeah, like anything. And I like to track it even to neurobiology. So if we're talking about psychedelics, psychedelics, or serotonergic substances, they help to open up and produce more serotonin, which is tied to contentment, and peace, and equanimity, and all these sorts of things, whereas social media is dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. It's a ton of dopamine, and that's why it's so addictive. And I was listening to an Andrew Huberman podcast. Have you plugged into Andrew Huberman at all?

0:13:33.8 DD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Stanford?

0:13:35.0 PA: He had a woman on talking about addiction, I think her name is Anna Lefke, or something like that, and she was talking about how when we're constantly plugging into these dopamine centers through social media and catalyzing more dopamine, it creates the sense of emptiness, the sense of meaninglessness, the sense of there's really nothing real about this. We do certain things to fill that hole, so to say. And so what she talked about is the need to have a Vipassana, or the need to go on no social media, or the need to do what's become common in entrepreneurial circles now, these dopamine fasts, where people will go in a dark room for seven straight days to reset all their dopamine levels.

0:14:18.4 PA: So if we look at dopamine and serotonin, what I've been more mindful of, and I'm even going through this right now, in the past couple of weeks, I've been doing more and more dopamine, and I'm like, "I kinda feel just empty inside." And that seems to be the current thread for our global society, is a sense of meaninglessness and emptiness.

0:14:37.1 DD: Jeez, Paul, wow. What a nice way to kick off the day. [chuckle]

0:14:41.6 PA: And essentially, we're now coming to confront this by looking at, Okay, social media is an element of this...

0:14:49.0 DD: Oh yeah.

0:14:49.1 PA: But social media isn't... It's the symptom, it's not the underlying problem, the underlying problem is a sense of total disconnection, and it exacerbates the disconnection.

0:14:58.9 DD: Yeah, yeah.

0:15:00.5 PA: And like you were saying, it can help to address that, to some degree, by connecting us with more people. This was the impetus behind Facebook, this was the impetus behind social media, this was the larger belief with web 2.0, is that it would help us to stay more connected, and now we're recognizing that there were second and third order consequences that we had no idea would actually be the case.

0:15:19.5 DD: Correct. Yeah, and I think part of it is, it's one thing to increase the connection amongst family and friends, it's another thing to connect everything and everybody with some sort of commercialized intent, and especially when it comes to, basically, monetizing our personal data, that's not the same. That's not the same atmosphere as connecting you to your extended family, or your friend group. I mean, I remember when my mom was in her 30s, and I was a kid, and she was looking on classmates.com to find her high school classmate, before social media, this was maybe early 2000s, and she was so happy to find people again because she hadn't been able to connect with them in 10 years. Now, we never lose connection. I can find someone who was in my home room in ninth grade, and I can say, "What's up?" And that's pretty cool. So that's awesome, but I think that when social media was created, we didn't think about, like you were saying, second, or third order consequences, shout out to Ray Dalio. I didn't realize until maybe five or six years ago that if something's free, you are the product. That's... I didn't sign up for that. I did sign up for that, actually.

0:16:27.5 PA: You did sign up for it 'cause it's the ultimate bait and switch.

0:16:29.0 DD: Yeah. Right, right. Well, it's kind of like, "Man... " We'll talk about psychedelics in a minute, but I was thinking about things I didn't sign up for. I remember a couple of years ago, and maybe this is 2017, there was a big scam, a big data breach with one of the credit unions, I think with Equifax, and they lost a whole bunch of people's data, and I remember that I was part of that group. They were like, "Oh, sorry, we lost your data." And I was like, "First of all, I never signed up to be a customer with you." I mean, I suppose I did through using banks, through using different types of organizations, but they're like a secondary or third-party merchant that I never actively signed up for, yet you have all my data, and you lost it. And then [chuckle] as a result of them losing it, and losing a class action suit, they were nice enough to send me a $45 check for losing my data, and then [chuckle] the $45 check, when I went to cash, it had already expired. I said, "This is the ultimate [laughter] disrespectful bait and switch." You know?

0:17:28.5 PA: Totally. And I wanna get back into this. I think this is a thriller, and I wanna come back to, but before we do that, I want the listeners to know a little bit more about you, who you are. We talked a little bit about your story. Who is Daniel DiPiazza, where did psychedelics, and 5-MeO, and kind of that experience come into the mix? In other words, before and after, and what was the shift? And then we'll find our greater storyline after you introduce yourself.

0:17:53.0 DD: Who am I? I don't know, I found myself...

0:17:54.0 PA: Yeah, who are you.

0:17:54.0 DD: When you asked that question, I found myself wanting to just drop career titles, or adjectives, or things like that. I'm not sure if that even is appropriate anymore. I don't know, man, I'm just a dude, I'm known for writing things and showing up online, I have multiple different businesses, many of which have failed, some of which have been successful, and now I'm living right outside of Portland. I am a martial artist. I consider myself a genuinely good human being. I'll tell you one thing about psychedelics, and how it crosses the intersection of my personality. The first psychedelic that I did, which, by the way, I wouldn't have been able to do it unless I had a Facebook, 'cause I got connected through a Facebook friend, so thank you, Facebook, it was 5-MeO-DMT, and I'm only realizing now that, that... Maybe I should've started at something that was not that...

0:18:48.0 DD: Well, there is no rules, but it's like, maybe you work your way up through a mushroom, or something, but it's like that's... My frame of reference for psychedelics started at 5-MeO-DMT, and I... My number one fear before using psychedelics... And I know this sounds funny, and it's hilarious actually. My number one fear is that it would change my personality such that I wouldn't find money and capitalism exciting to me anymore. I thought if I get too spiritual, I won't care about business anymore, and that will fuck up my current personal belief system, and that's exactly kind of what it did. I mean, [chuckle] I still do care about the earth stuff, but it totally changed my personality over a period of years to where... I mean, even there have been times where I've just... Especially when I come back from a ceremony and my wife will look at me and she'll be like, "You're different now." 'Cause it's just like the way that you carry yourself, the way that you feel and think.

0:19:46.9 DD: So, my first experience was with 5-MeO-DMT and that has been my frame of reference for after that, what does it feel like to be in a blissful meditation? What does it feel like to be in the interstate between dreaming and waking? I've had such a reference point because of that initial experience that it's opened my mind up, and I think about my high school teacher, Mr. Carol, and he taught us calculus, and he said, "You know, when you get older, you're gonna forget calculus but you're gonna remember that you knew it, and that's gonna make a permanent imprint on your brain, because you're gonna know that you have space for that. You're gonna remember that you knew something, and the remembrance of the knowledge is just as important as the actual knowledge itself, because you can remember that you recalled something at one point." And that has stuck with me as an analogy.

0:20:31.4 DD: Same thing as when I was a child and I would go into the bookstore, I spent a lot of times in Barnes & Noble before they turn it into an absolute trash can. Now you can't even go to Barnes & Noble and actually sit down. They just have these hard wooden chairs. They used to have loungers. They used to have a real Starbucks in Barnes Y Noble, and now they have Barnes & Noble Walmart brand. Like, it's crap now. But I used to go into Barnes & Noble and I used to look at all of the books and I used to think, what would it feel like to absorb all of this information at once? What would my brain feel like if I could get every book and every word? And DMT also gave me a reference for that, because as you know, through this experience, you're getting so much information, your brain is firing and rewiring in different ways that it doesn't fire and rewire in different... Well, it doesn't fire during your normal waking consciousness.

0:21:13.1 DD: And just that experience of having all that information inflow, even though after you are back to your normal state, you don't retain all of it, it's still... It's kind of like, it's muscle memory where you're like, "Oh, I remember knowing that." And there are unspeakable bits of knowledge that comes through that don't show up until possibly months or years later. And so, that framework has absolutely changed my personality. It's made me more compassionate. It's made me just way more chill. Like, my anxiety level has permanently... I mean, I still get anxious too, but like, my baseline is permanently low or permanently lower than it has been before pre. So like, my first experience was in 2016, I believe, so we're going on six, almost seven years now, and in that time I've probably done, I don't know, maybe 20-ish experiences with it.

0:22:04.3 PA: With 5?

0:22:06.4 DD: A combination. Sometimes it will be like total 5-MeO-DMT and/or ayahuasca, sometimes in combination. I've had experiences where I have done 5-MeO-DMT and then ayahuasca right after that.

0:22:17.6 PA: What is that like?

0:22:19.8 DD: Well, it's just like kickstarting a mule. It's just like... [laughter] You know, DMT is short.

0:22:28.4 PA: Yeah.

0:22:29.4 DD: And the shaman that I work with, man, he's awesome. He's a Trinidadian dude with a beautiful singing voice. We do it in a safe way, he has a lot of experience, but we'll try some funky combinations and we'll get funky in there, man. It's like watching the same movie, but the DMT is watching it at 5X speed and ayahuasca is at half speed. And I think ayahuasca is much harder. I think DMT is scarier and ayahuasca is harder. Can we just talk about how scary DMT is? I know it's awesome and fun. Can we talk about the scary part? It's scary as shit.

0:23:03.1 PA: The 5-MeO, in particular, right?

0:23:05.7 DD: Yes, yes.

0:23:07.3 PA: Yeah.

0:23:07.7 DD: And I've only done NN a few times.

0:23:07.9 PA: Okay.

0:23:10.3 DD: But, don't you think 5-MeO was scary?

0:23:11.4 PA: I only done it a little bit, like I've never had the full blast of 5 experience because it's been that intimidating.

0:23:17.3 DD: It's scary. Yeah.

0:23:21.1 PA: Oh, yeah.

0:23:21.2 DD: Yeah, yeah. I almost only do the 5-MeO because that's what he has, and it's... Bro, it's terrifying. [laughter] Yeah.

0:23:33.4 PA: For your first experience, how did you react? 'Cause you're a pretty like hard-nosed alpha male. I can only imagine you before psychedelics. I mean, I see you as you are now, having worked with a lot of psychedelics, but going into that first experience, what even pushed you to do that? Why would you put yourself through that? In 2016, what was the impetus behind it?

0:23:55.3 DD: My wife is really into interesting stories on Erowid and new experiences. She actually hasn't done nearly as much psychedelics as I have 'cause I have this obsessive personality. So she's like, "Oh, this looks cool. We should try this." So I'm like, "Oh, I'll seek it out," and I found someone who found someone, and we go to the shaman's house, which is in Topanga at the time. I actually thought we were gonna do ayahuasca the first time, 'cause that's what was my reference point. He's like, "We're not doing ayahuasca now. We don't have time for that. This is a day time ceremony. You're not doing that. You're not doing that. You're doing the thing I like to call Rumi, which is what we call the 5-MeO. You know, like the poet Rumi?

0:24:28.3 PA: Rumi?

0:24:28.6 DD: That's what we call it, Rumi.

0:24:29.4 PA: Beautiful.

0:24:30.3 DD: Yeah, and it's a very Rumi-ish experience. And the honest truth is, since I didn't have any frame of reference, I wasn't scared 'cause I'm just like, "I smoked some weed. What's the difference?" I didn't read the stories. I was just ignorant of it. I just knew that I wanted to experience something new, and I went first and then Sarah went after that. I think the first time that I went through it, I didn't completely... There's like you're going through this tunnel, and there's always a choice that you have, at least from my perspective with the DMT, where you're like, "Okay, I'm either gonna break the personality barrier or I'm not." If you hold it and you really focus and you can overcome that fear, on the other side of the fear is complete personality dissolution, which is bliss and that there is nothing. But just getting to that point is so terrifying, and the first time I didn't even know the space, I didn't know how to navigate it. So it was just like being dropped out of an airplane, and I actually think DMT is scarier than skydiving.

0:25:28.8 DD: I've done skydiving and DMT is much... 5-MeO-DMT is much scarier. It's kind of like, I got respect for it after that, and that's kinda where the fear comes from, it's like, you're swimming with a shark, they might not wanna have anything to do with you, but you respect that thing, you know, or you're rolling with a black belt. They can love you, they can teach you and they can kill you, and you have to just respect them, same thing with Mother Aya, if you're gonna do the Ayahuasca, sometimes she's nice to you, sometimes she becomes a black snake and strangles you. The first experience was unique enough that it caught on to me wanting to do it more, and actually, that's when I started to, after that experience, bring friends to it, because I thought it was such a transformational thing. And over a period of years, I brought... Obviously, I've done ceremonies with my wife, both my parents have done ceremonies with 5-MeO-DMT with me, close friends.

0:26:15.0 PA: Wow.

0:26:15.3 DD: Yeah. My dad has done Ayahuasca, both my parents have done both 5-MeO and Ayahuasca with me, I really try to include my circle. And just so you know, I told my dad before the Ayahuasca ceremony, "Bro, do not go to In-N-Out and get a Double-Double, I'm telling you right now, don't do it." And he's just a hood nigger from Detroit, and he just can't... There's a certain amount of things that's not gonna change, and he's like, "Man, it's fine, man, you know how much drugs I've done?" I'm like, "Okay, this is not that though. This is not cocaine, this is Ayahuasca. It's different." And sure enough, the man was shitting his pants, and he was going crazy, so I'm holding him in side control, Jitsu position while he's shitting himself and seeing his dead father, you know? And he's 300 pounds...

0:27:00.0 PA: Oh wow.

0:27:00.8 DD: And he's 300 pounds of black love. So, that was a good experience.

0:27:07.6 PA: Transformational, for you.

0:27:09.6 DD: Trans... Yeah. For the whole group.

0:27:12.4 PA: The whole lineage, the whole lineage.

0:27:13.7 DD: The whole family. Yeah. Yeah, that was an experience.

0:27:16.5 PA: Did he ever do it again? Or was that kind of a one and done situation for him?

0:27:22.4 DD: He's done a several... I mean, he didn't do the Ayahuasca again. But he's done 5-MeO a few times. He's a wild one. We had a bachelor party where we had a ceremony and he was at the bachelor party, and I'm not advising this, I don't think it's good, smart or safe, but also, he's gonna do what he's gonna do. And this man, he was drinking a fifth of vodka while smoking a DMT blunt. So, he's a tank, man, he's done... He's just done so much stuff, he was smoking a 5-MeO-DMT blunt with cannabis, drinking a fifth of vodka, and he was like, "Man, the fractals, the fractals." I'm just like, I'm not gonna press my belief... I think it's a spiritual thing, I'm like, "Yeah, just connect, man. Connect, go spirit, just don't... "But he's like, "Oh, I wanna try this." I'm like, "Okay."

0:28:05.1 PA: A 5-MeO-DMT blunt with cannabis, and a fifth of vodka. I think that, that takes the cake, I have never heard of...

0:28:12.7 DD: Detroit, Detroit. [chuckle] Detroit, stand up.

0:28:16.1 PA: That... Yeah.

0:28:16.8 DD: Tank.

0:28:18.8 PA: That's a tank. [laughter] That's a 100% tank.

0:28:21.4 DD: A 100% a tank. So yeah.

0:28:23.4 PA: Wow. Alright, so, Daniel DiPiazza, 2016, 5-MeO, since then, you've worked with it, what, you said 20 times or so in terms of...

0:28:32.4 DD: Yeah, like 20 times.

0:28:33.1 PA: How it's shifted you, and you said your core concern going in was you'd sort of release this attachment to money and capitalism, ambition, and yet you're still an entrepreneur...

0:28:43.8 DD: Yeah.

0:28:44.8 PA: You're still successful in what you do, how did that experience sort of change or shift your perception of money?

0:28:50.3 DD: What it really did was just overall lowered my anxiety about life, and most of my anxiety about life was coming from money and business, and I just thought to myself, "I've already died, it doesn't matter." [laughter] We're just walking around and we're so connected to everything that happens on a day-to-day basis that we're not looking at the bigger picture, and so, I just got to zoom out a little bit and I got to see all the games we play with ourselves. You know, I also will say though, that doing psychedelics or combine with non-psychedelic personal development, is the best strategy. So doing other types of personal development trainings, really, you can start to see, you can start to look at yourself. It did lower my ambition a bit in that I don't really care if I... I don't have a certain number that I need to hit, of money in the bank or a certain thing is gonna make me happy.

0:29:37.2 DD: Which makes me a little sad, 'cause it's like, oh, you know? I don't care about making $100 million anymore, but that might be the reason that I actually make it. I don't think that I'm excluded from that because I don't care anymore. I think that it really comes down to just how I'm living my life. I don't have a need to have a certain amount of money in the bank, and I also don't think it would make me any happier. I just wanna be able to meet my needs, to exceed my needs, where necessary to provide for my family, but I don't have like... You know, like you watch Wolf of Wall Street or The Expression or these movies and shows where people are like just obsessed with that money game, I just... Eh, why? Why, for what? How is that gonna help my Jujitsu? It's not, you know? Not gonna help it. I can pour money on the mat, nothing happens, you know? It's like, I like the things that you can't buy.

0:30:24.2 PA: Let's go a little bit deeper into that, 'cause before we even started recording, you were talking about how you're probably not gonna have kids until you become a purple belt in Jujitsu.

0:30:31.5 DD: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:30:32.7 PA: And it sounds very similar to what I've said, but I may be a little bit more even superficial where I said, "Hey, I'm probably not gonna have kids and family until I can afford to have help in the house, and maybe have a million dollars in the bank," something like that.

0:31:00.0 DD: You know, I'll tell you what drives me. For a long time in my life, I was giving 80% and it was so much better than everybody else's that everyone gave me applause for it. And they didn't know that I was giving my 80%. I can think back to so many examples in my school life, my professional life, my personal life, you know? All the way back in high school, I could get pretty good grades without studying too hard. I mean, I was still a good student, but I wasn't giving my max. I always joke myself up. I used to say, "I'm the slowest fast person," which meant like, I can be with all the fast people, I'm not at the front of the line, but I'm definitely up there with them and I'm barely even trying. So that was good enough for me.

0:31:38.8 DD: Even with my book, when it came out. My book, Rich20Something, do you know, it hit number 11 on the New York Times list, which means it didn't actually get on the list. It's 1 through 10 [chuckle] and I hit 11. And let me tell you too, I was one or two... I easily could have gotten it to number 10, to 10 or 9 or 8. There were multiple things I could have done. And there were some specific moments where I was just like, "I'm just tired. I don't feel like putting any more effort in right now," or, "I've already gotten what I came here to get," but that actually pissed me off looking back at it later. And the thing is too, everyone praised me for it. Everyone gave me pats and daps. Everyone said, all of my stuff that I've done, even when I'm giving my 80%, because it is better than the average, people are like, "Wow, you're awesome." And I'm thinking, "I'm not even hardly trying," you know? But that has kept me back. It's held me back, but I haven't had a lot of burning need to give my full 100%, because I get so much good, positive feedback and I live an awesome life at 80%. And that has been a deep thing. You know what I mean?

0:32:36.9 PA: A lot of external validation, right? There's a lot of...

0:32:37.6 DD: So much external validation and this isn't my family's fault either. It's nobody's fault but mine. When I was a kid, my mom... I'm an only child. She would always be praising me for what I'm doing. My wife doesn't have a certain standard for me where I have to hit a certain number. She's gonna say, "Awesome job, great work." And that's fine for our relationship, but for me personally, I have known for a while that I've only been giving my 8 out of 10. And no one else is gonna tell me when I'm not giving my 10, because they don't know. Only I know how much power I actually have. So for me, what's driving me, especially recently, is really giving my 110%. Like, really, really saying, "Okay, I could quit now and I would still be one of the first in line, but is that enough for me? Do I feel comfortable with that?"

0:33:26.5 DD: 'Cause for a long time, for years I felt like... Guilty isn't the word, but I felt like I betrayed myself, because I wasn't living in true alignment with... Even with my writing, man, dude, I write some fucking awesome shit. Like, some of the stuff that I write, I'm like, "Is anybody reading this right now? I just broke down metaphysics here. Hello, is anybody reading this?" And if it doesn't get the external validation, I'm like, "I'll just go back to shit posting." But for me it's not enough to just rely off the external praise. So what's driving me, especially recently, has been really tapping in, being honest with myself saying, "Is that the best you got? Is that all you can do? Where are you selling yourself short? When are you calling it quits when you have more?" And so that's what's been driving me.

0:34:14.9 PA: And so let's take that. And as a follow up question, what then would be that personal mission, right? So if you're going from giving 80% to 100% or 110%, where do you wanna drive that energy towards?

0:34:30.5 DD: Well, I know it sounds...

0:34:31.9 PA: I mean, Jujitsu sure, the purple belt, and jujitsu is clearly one practical thing, but I also know that you're starting a new podcast around this new wave of entrepreneurship.

0:34:41.1 DD: Yes. Yes.

0:34:42.0 PA: And I sense that with your energy and your drive and your capacity that having that towards an outcome that is actually beneficial to many is definitely part and parcel of who you are.

0:34:56.4 DD: Yeah. I mean, look, I have a few different things that I'm working on. I have a company called Strength of Seduction, which is a fitness company and we have apps and DVDs. Yeah, DVDs. Yes, we actually sell DVDs.

0:35:08.6 PA: Tell us a little bit about that.

0:35:09.5 DD: Redbox...

0:35:09.9 PA: 'Cause I love what you told me about this.

0:35:10.7 DD: Redbox still exists.

0:35:11.6 PA: Does it?

0:35:11.7 DD: Let me share this. Yeah, Redbox is still around. They're still selling DVDs. So, just remember there are like 50 million people on dial-up in the US and they're like web 1.0 and a half, you know? We have a... It's like the Black Beachbody. It's like these fitness DVDs for couples. It's couples fitness. We actually launched this back in 2020. And this is the first one we launched. It kinda looks like softcore porn. It's not, but it looks like it. It's all just Black people working out together, couples loving on each other, working out. This is something I thought about back in 2010 and I didn't act on it for 10 years 'cause I'm like, "I don't know if it will work. It's not the right time." We decided to go for it. And within the first 18 months, we made over a million dollars just selling DVDs and books and all this stuff.

0:35:54.5 DD: And there you go, perfect example of giving my... That wasn't even 80%, but it's like, not acting on what I thought was good for me and useful for me. And we have 40,000 families who have been working out together and getting in shape. We have a whole couples meditation program. We have couples yoga, all this different stuff which is affecting a lot of families. It's fun. So that's an example of the ripple effect of me just actually putting in the work that I know I can do. But running a business is hard. But it's been really rewarding. And then on my personal projects, I am... When you're talking about what am I putting my energy into, I'm moving away from just teaching what I am comfortable with in my comfort zone. You know, I made a lot of my personal brand and my name for myself online around teaching, freelancing, like basically, how to find a service that you can sell through either a hobby or a passion or a skill that you have that's existing, and how to market that online. And hey, it doesn't sound that revolutionary now. Back when I was talking about this stuff in 2010, it was blowing people's mind. I mean, it's still very useful, but like especially when the web was still really developing, this is something that people didn't even know about. And so, I was one of the forerunners of that whole line of thought. That's awesome.

0:37:14.0 DD: And also I felt like I've grown up a bit. So where I'm putting my focus now is take people through different experiences. So my focus in my work that I'm doing now is a combination of talking about the new wave of financial technology. And so that's... I feel like there's a strong parallel between psychedelics and cryptocurrency or blockchain in general. We were just talking about that before the podcast. Even with just Mycelium as a metaphor for decentralization of personal finance and that whole industry and blockchain technology. I'm spending a lot of time talking about that online, educating myself and others. I don't consider myself an expert in crypto or web 3.0 or blockchain. I'm just a very interested person who's also learning.

0:38:04.6 DD: So I think that's important. That's like the first pillar of the new wave, talking about that. Talking about physical self-defense. With everything that's happening in the world, I think it's even more important than ever to just learn how to take care of yourself and your family. So one of the things I've been talking about as well, and again, not even positioning myself as expert, more as a facilitator of information and experiences, just talking about self-defense, personal defense, firearms training, which if you're... You're not in Miami anymore, you're in Utah, though. I think they're pretty much...

0:38:34.6 PA: I'm in Utah.

0:38:35.6 DD: There are Texas, I'm pretty sure they're firearm-friendly in Utah.

0:38:39.1 PA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

0:38:39.2 DD: And talking about that, and also talking about emergency first aid, so things of that nature, like really understanding of how to take care of your physical body, how to take care of your personal and physical safety, I think is important. And then the third element of that is psychedelics, which I categorize as spiritual, transformational and as mental health has a component as well. So between new wave financial, new wave personal defense, new wave mental health, psychedelics, I think that's a nice little stack that is genuinely rooted in my interests, because what I was finding was when I was just teaching the business strategies and tactics, I was feeling like it was a drag 'cause like, "Oh, I have to go show up and teach this stuff." So it wasn't giving me the energy to teach it with the enthusiasm that I wanted to, and that was causing me to not give my whole 100. So I wanna do whatever is gonna give me the cause to really fulfill all my potential rather than just teaching inside of a box because I know it's popular and comfortable.

0:39:41.4 PA: And so from you... I love that, but I'm gonna keep going deeper, so get ready. So from your perspective... Yeah, another layer. Psychedelic spiritual transformation, how does that experience then lead to a willingness to adapt this Web 3.0, these concepts? But I've also just noticed this, as an observation, that a lot of folks who are in the Web 3.0 space, these new financial technologies are becoming interested in psychedelics, and a lot of those...

0:40:14.0 DD: Or vice versa.

0:40:15.1 PA: Yeah, some sort of spiritual transformation are then asking, "Okay, what is the relevance of cryptocurrency?" And there's a specific cohort of folks, a lot of them live in Austin, Texas, who are getting into self-defense and hunting, who are really into psychedelics, and then who are talking about setting up their own sort of networked state on a thousand acres in the hills outside of Austin.

0:40:40.3 DD: The Jesse Elders of the world.

0:40:42.5 PA: The Jesse Elders of the world. I just was...

0:40:44.1 DD: I like this a lot.

0:40:44.7 PA: With Jesse this past, last week in New Orleans so it's funny that you mention that.

0:40:47.7 DD: He's so intense, he's so intense. I think he's a great guy. I don't know him personally, but I just am like supportive from the sidelines. So, good question. Look, I think the basic thing is, one, open to new experiences. Crypto is a new experience, and it might lead to psychedelics. Psychedelics are a new experience, they might lead to crypto. I think you have to be open to risk, although I would say that in general, like crypto for instance is volatile but not risky. It's volatile in the short term but not risky in the long term, simply because you wanna talk risk, look at the dollar. That's risky. They keep moving that debt ceiling, which never really existed anyway.

0:41:25.7 DD: We're already upside down. Like you're just clinging to a life raft, if you're really thinking about making all of your wealth in dollars. It's just gonna be worth less. Maybe not worthless, but worth less every year. So I think let's make that distinction between volatile and risky, and I think maybe a similar thing can be said for psychedelics. The experience can be volatile, but with the right setting and guidance and preparation and care, it's not that risky. You have to always put the disclaimers on it, and you have to check for your contraindications with medications, but it's not that risky. Alcohol is riskier.

0:41:58.2 PA: We have all these cultural norms around alcohol, right?

0:42:01.9 DD: Right.

0:42:02.2 PA: But way more risky actually, which is...

0:42:04.5 DD: Way more risky.

0:42:04.7 PA: Sort of the hidden thing about that. I like that, I like that distinction. Volatile, but not risky, risky, but not necessarily as volatile. It's sort of like with alcohol or with fear, you're blowing yourself alive, and if you choose not to adopt psychedelics or crypto, then you're actually... That lack of hormesis in the short term will lead to a greater risk of death, whatever that means, in the long-term.

0:42:30.3 DD:Exactly, maybe not personal actual physical death, but financial death, mental health death. [chuckle]

0:42:37.8 PA:Depression, and other things like that.

0:42:40.4 DD:Depression, yeah, that's a form of death. Death of self. Even going off of willing to accept change, and that whole cohort of people. A slight branch off of this is, we know that within the past year, maybe past 18 months to almost two years now, the Navy confirmed that there were videos of UFOs, and we saw these videos. Now, this doesn't surprise anybody who has been paying attention to this for a long time, and there are plenty of people who feel very validated by this, and if the Navy confirms one thing, there's also tons of other things they're not gonna confirm yet. They've been saying for 50 years, "There are no UFOs, there are no UFOs." Now they're saying, "Oh, actually, well, there are. We just don't call them UFOs, so that's why we didn't say anything." Okay, we have video now. So, we're a hop, skip and a jump from, "Oh, we found aliens," which it's not that unrealistic.

0:43:33.0 DD: And I was asking my mom the other day, I said... And this is someone who's done the 5-MeO, but she's very in her pattern... And I said, "Mom, if there are aliens, wouldn't you wanna know?" And she's like, "No, because that would be too scary," and I'm like, "But that's the truth, though. If it's the truth, wouldn't you wanna know, regardless of whether it was scary?" She's like, "No, I'm afraid to be afraid." I'm like, "Oh, that makes a lot of sense." Because just like with crypto, just like with psychedelics, just like with even self-defense, there's the fear of the actual event, and then there's the fear of the fear, and I think that that's something to consider when we're talking about large cultural shifts. People are very much afraid to be afraid. Same thing with Covid where we're not even just afraid of the virus, we're afraid of feeling that fear. Who said that, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"? Wasn't that Kennedy?

0:44:27.1 PA: Yeah, that was Kennedy.

0:44:28.2 DD: He probably didn't write that, but it's a great line.

0:44:30.3 PA: It's a great line.

0:44:32.1 DD: And so I think that goes back to what you were saying about like, what's the connection point? I think that there's a certain group of people who are saying some of this stuff is scary, but I need to be prepared, I need to understand, I need to know the truth, and I'm not content to just put on the blinders, because if we look around us, when we take the blinders off, we see, man, there's a lot of crazy shit happening, and we're being lied to on a consistent basis by the government, which is also not surprising, but I think it's probably getting worse. I mean, everything from... And I've put this online too, so I don't mind saying it here. I was not a Trump fan, I'm not a Trump fan, and I'm not a Biden fan, but I think it might actually be worse under Biden. The things that are happening in terms of the crack down on...

0:45:12.0 PA: The consolidation of power and...

0:45:12.5 DD: Yeah, the consolidation of power.

0:45:14.1 PA: The autocracy that's coming with vaccine passports and...

0:45:17.8 DD: No one likes to hear that, and especially as a black guy too. People are like, "What are you talking about?" And I'm just like, "Man, I'm just looking at the facts." I'm just looking at the facts, it doesn't look good, but that fear is being used as a powerful force of control. If you look at what's happening in Australia now, especially in Melbourne. Have you seen what's happening with the cell phone check-in systems with the apps, the check-in apps? Have you seen that?

0:45:39.4 PA: No.

0:45:39.8 DD: You didn't see that?

0:45:40.8 PA: No. What is it?

0:45:41.3 DD: S1: Oh my gosh. They're doing at-home quarantine, and basically what's happening is, you have a check-in app that everyone has to download. And they call individuals randomly for at home check-ins, just to make sure that you're not leaving your house, and If you don't answer within five minutes and verify your identity with a photo, the police will come to your house. This is happening right now in New South Wales, in Melbourne and I put this video up of the news and I said, "Australians, can we confirm this?" And Hundreds of people who live there were confirming it with me, this is happening. So it's like, that ain't right man. Fear.

0:46:21.2 PA: Fear. Let's weave in your point about the new wave of entrepreneurship. How does supporting psychedelics, cryptocurrency, and self-reliance in a way, physical self-reliance, how does amplifying that and teaching that help us to go beyond this current paradigm that we're now experiencing with COVID-19?

0:46:42.3 DD: I think that it helps to develop courage because courage, I think Buddha said this, I'm not going to take credit for this, but courage is not...

0:46:49.5 PA: Winston Churchill?

0:46:50.7 DD: The absence of fear. [laughter] Fuck, it's Winston Churchill. Well, I don't know if it maybe... Courage is not the absence of fear, it's the mastery of it. So it's like just playing with the fear, it's recognizing the fear and doing it anyways, developing courage in the face of it. There's a great book too that really laid out a lot of these points 20 years ago. You probably already read it: Sovereign Individual. Have you read this book?

0:47:12.3 PA: I have.

0:47:14.1 DD: This book, I gotta just tell you, this was written 20 years ago, I wanna kiss these authors on the mouth. Now, the only thing that's kind off on this is the first chapters about Y2K and you're like, "Oh, that didn't happen." But everything else though, it already has happened or is happening. Even they call out Osama Bin Laden by name and then say exactly what was going to happen in this book. I'm like, "Damn, do you guys have a Stargate in your office? What's going on here?" They're so dead on. And even in this book, they're talking about the antidote to this fear is self-reliance. And self-reliance comes in many different forms. Financial self-reliance is one thing because we're all very attached to the movement of money and economics, whether it's a personal bank account with the stock market or all these things. We saw in 2008 when the stock market crashed, everyone was like, "I lost my whole 401k." That whole thing, we're relying on that.

0:48:03.4 DD: And now that I'm in my 30s, I'm lucky enough to have made it this far in my life, I've made it older than Jesus. [chuckle] And I can see... I've seen a couple of these downturns now, so I'm like, "Oh, okay, this is just how it goes," but now there's an opportunity. So in 2008, I wasn't prepared to take advantage of it, but now I'm like, "Ah-ha, I see." I think there's an opportunity for self-reliance through education in the blockchain space, the crypto space. And If you're listening to me right now, just know that humans have a hard time imagining scale. Just like you can't imagine 8 billion people because it would be too many little dots to imagine in your head, you also can't imagine where we are on the adoption curve and you might... Of crypto. And you might think, "Oh man, I'm too late." You're not though. There are about 150 million, 120 to 150 million crypto holders worldwide. That's still the top, what, 15% of the first 15% of the population?

0:48:52.7 DD: I know it's crazy, right? But think about it, most people who in other countries, besides rich Western countries, don't have money to get into this stuff really. They're not really using it like that, and we're in a bubble where we think it's a big deal and it is, but we're in early... We're not the innovators of it in the beginning, but we are the first wave of it, not the third wave even, the first wave. So you're still early, so take the time to educate yourself now and learn and become an adopter that early enough whereas this hits mainstream, you're familiar with all the technology. When you talk about even just stuff like NFTs now, your mom's not gonna catch on to NFTs until her birth certificate is an NFT, and then she'll understand, but for now yeah, it's stupid little crypto punks. It doesn't even matter if you buy one, but you should go on OpenSea, which is the eBay of NFTs.

0:49:38.2 DD: Then if you realize that there are 600 million people playing Fortnite, but only 200,000 users on OpenSea, but that they did $3 Billion of transactions last month, you realize, wow, there's a huge gap here. And so that gap is gonna be filled at some point, and maybe you should go on OpenSea and find a little... This is what I did, I found an NFT the cost like $25. It was like 0.0000 whatever, Ethereum, and I just wanna learn how to use MetaMask to buy it, to get it. That's it. I don't care about flipping it. I know you can maybe do all those trades and flips all this crap, that's fine. I just wanna learn how to do it, so that I'm in the game, familiar with it. My strategy for crypto is very simple, I'm just dollar cost averaging, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and maybe a few... Buying some Cardano and some other things that maybe are interesting to me, but I'm not like, "I was day trading a little over the summer with Altcoins." I was getting so much FOMO and anxiety and just like, "I can't be watching... Refreshing Coinbase all day, this is gonna kill me.

0:50:34.1 DD: So I just have my automatic withdrawals, and it doesn't even matter if the market's going up or down. That's whole point of dollar cost averaging, if you're buying on a dip, you're gonna get a little bit more. If you're buying on a spike, then you're gonna get a little bit less. Here's another thing to remember too, if you're just getting into crypto. It's not about the dollar amount, your dollar equivalent of how much crypto you have and how much dollars it's worth. Because the dollars at some point are gonna be worthless. It's all about just how much crypto you're buying over time and just hoarding the Crypto. It's not about how many dollars is it worth, 'cause you shouldn't really even be... Especially a Bitcoin, you should try your best not to sell it. When you're buying it, you should just be holding it. So, it should be for the long term. So just get in, get your feet wet, get just the tip, just the tip, just wiggle it around in there and yeah, just be judicious with it. It's gonna do better than a savings account. Like, even if you think about the rates you can get on savings on some of these, like you can stake stuff with some of these DeFi accounts, you can be getting 6%, 7%, 8% interest. What's your bank gonna give you 0.03? It's like, no brainer.

0:51:35.9 PA: Yeah. I think Gemini gives like 3% to 7% depending on the coin you choose to invest with.

0:51:43.1 DD: It's way better.

0:51:44.9 PA: There's more and more adoptions from the banks, which is good. And, to kind of go back to your point about the sovereign individual, one thing that came up for me was this concept of the networked state, which I've been tracking a little bit.

0:51:57.5 DD: Oh yeah.

0:51:58.4 PA: Balaji's talked about it, I don't know, maybe six months ago on the Tim Ferriss podcast. He wrote an article on 1729 about, the future of network states and how the virtual comes before the physical. And while I think The Sovereign Individual is an important book, it's very libertarian and very individualistic in that. And of course we as humans, we need connection, we need community, we need tribe, we need to be with other people, and Web 3.0, presents that opportunity. I think that is what people see as one of the big promises is as these nation states, whether it's Australia or Canada even is now getting more and more autocratic, the United States in certain places like California is becoming more autocratic, people want to be free at the end of the day. People, we as humans desire freedoms and desire to be free, and it feels like this kind concept of Web 3.0 is, I don't know, a new north star to point to that's gonna help us to evolve out... Help us to step outside of these new autocratic regimes that are stepping in. Now, I don't know what that means in terms of if it means there's gonna be these little sovereign city states that are within these larger autocratic regimes. I don't know if it's gonna be like The Hunger Games. I don't know if it's gonna...

0:53:16.1 DD: Oh, Lord.

0:53:16.6 PA: We're gonna have like a massive wasteland and there's just gonna be a city here and there. Like, I don't know how dystopian that we want to go with this.

0:53:24.4 DD: As long as I can be in District One, fuck it.

0:53:27.2 PA: Precisely. [laughter] What's your feeling of the future? What's your feeling of Web 3.0? What's your feeling of city states and sovereignty? What's your feeling of... Are things gonna get drastically worse before they get better? What's your pulse on where things are headed at this point in time?

0:53:41.9 DD: I'm an optimist. I think that expect the best, prepare for the worst. So, I'm an optimist in that way. I think a few things. One, it is interesting how non-local nations are forming. So for instance, I was reading an article in The Atlantic where it was making an argument that Facebook is essentially a sovereign nation because it has three billion citizens and they are actively developing a currency. They tried to launch Libra a couple years ago. That kind of got squashed, but now they're rebranding it as DM. And that has implications for global commerce because they have more citizens than China, and there are gonna be people who will want to use that currency because it's transacted across that network. Even if you look at like what Mark Zuckerberg was doing with I think it was called like Facebook Essentials, which they were giving to Rwanda, African countries. They always fucking dump bad vaccines and bad internet on Africa and other countries. What they were doing with Facebook Essentials is they were giving them an internet connection for free.

0:54:42.7 DD: I don't know if you heard about this a few years ago. They were giving them free internet connection, but basically it's just a Facebook portal and you can only access the internet through a Facebook portal, and the search engine was a Facebook search engine, and the links themselves would only show like a preview of the actual web article, and then you had to buy credits to read the whole article. And their argument was, "Well, some internet's better than no internet." But everything else was like through the view, the lens of Facebook. And so they're making the argument like Facebook has way surpassed its organizational structure as a company and it's now a nation and it should be dismembered essentially, which I... First of all, what's the point of antitrust if it can't dismember Facebook? I'm not even arguing that Facebook should be, but the fact that there hasn't been any motion to is surprising and strange. And also another thing, if Mark Zuckerberg, this past week, depending on when you're listening to this, it's gonna be a different time, but when Facebook went down this past week, Mark lost $6 billion, $7 billion in a day, of his net worth. How can he afford to lose that, but he can't pay his taxes? Facebook can't actually pay proper taxes because we know that they're not actually paying their fair share.

0:55:55.7 DD: We know that if... And I'm not even saying eat the rich. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying if the... Just talking GAFA, the Web 2.0 monsters, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, if just those four companies paid their fair share of taxes compared to the percentage you're paying in California if you're over there, compared to the percentage I'm paying, we would've been able to have a massive amount of relief on all the debt that was being spent just in the last year, federally in the United States. It was not gonna change everything, but it sure would help if Bezos wasn't using every possible loophole to pay nothing in taxes. And it's like we know that in... I'm gonna get back on the social, where we're going... We know that the US in 2020 printed 30% of the money, the total amount of dollars ever printed in the history of the United States was printed in 2020, 30%. So, that's like overfilling a pool by 30% and saying, "Hope it works." It's not gonna work. It's not good, man. So if just those companies did their fair share, we would have a lot cleaner of a system going on here, I think.

0:57:03.8 DD: To go back to where we're going, I don't think that Web 3.0 is gonna completely upend these monolithic companies 'cause Facebook has already made the assertion two years ago that they're gonna be a company of the metaverse. If there's one thing that Mark Zuckerberg is he is a visionary, straight up. Yeah, his face looks reptilian now, and I don't know what type of work he's been getting done, he obviously needs to get some sun and some vitamin D, he needs to stop cutting his hair like Julius Caesar, but the man is a visionary. I have an Oculus, okay? And I'm actually scared to use it, but I think it's kinda fun. They're gonna operate in Web 3.0 as well, and they're still gonna have a lot of data on you, and they're gonna do the best they can to retain and get more data so it's not like, "Oh, as soon as Web... " 'Cause there is no start date for Web 3.0. It's like, "Okay, guys, in 2023, Web 3.0 is starting." It's already kind of started now and it's developing.

0:57:53.0 DD: Just like in the early days, when Web 2.0 had taken on, and I remember just like when... Before Facebook even had a mobile experience, being on a flip phone and then transitioning from a flip phone to like an iPhone, and that difference and experience, and we're kind of in the flip phone phase now before Web 3.0 takes off where we don't have easy access to the tools of Web 3.0. Sure, there's Coinbase, but it's like you're not really using Web 3.0 in your everyday life really. It's not... Blockchain is like a concept. I understand it conceptually, but it doesn't drive anything in my life, and so... But Facebook sure does. Other Web 3.0... Amazon sure does. So we're not in the phase where it's mass adoption, a part of our everyday lives. Web 2.0 monoliths will integrate themselves as much as they can into Web 3.0. The opportunity for us though as individuals is to take a piece of the pie back. We might not be able to get our data back, it's not about that, it's more about going forward, how do we wanna proceed?

0:58:50.1 DD: So just like the episode on Tim Ferriss that you mentioned, one of the things that's been coming up for me which I think is highly relevant and I think should be included in this idea of financial new wave, self-defense, personal protection and psychedelics mental health is taking a real stance on privacy. Because when we went into Web 2.0, we weren't even thinking about that, we're like... In Web 1.0, privacy was like not even a concern because we weren't exchanging that much valuable information. We were just like, "What time does the coffee shop open?" It was just informational. Then Web 2.0 started to ask for information in exchange for services, and we thought it was dope 'cause like, "I get all... I get to use Gmail for free? How is that possible?" Now we realize it wasn't free. And I think what will happen with Web 3.0 is we're gonna have more of an option for, one, how we wanna operate.

0:59:37.1 DD: And this is what was being discussed in Tim Ferriss' show is like, "Do you wanna have an avatar or a persona that is detached from your personal identity, that is an avatar that can't be canceled, that can have credentials that go with you from platform to platform but aren't attached to where you live and your home address or what your personal phone number is or your career?" And that actually hearkens back to Web 1.0 because if you read Edward Snowden's book, one of the things he talks about is how in Web 1.0 one of the greatest benefits was you could be completely anonymous. I remember going into AOL chat rooms back in the day and no one was using their real name, everyone was using stupid little screen names. My AIM instant messenger was like, my first one was SilverSurfer5488, and then I changed it to MrBigglesworth01, and it's just like... But that wasn't me. That was just my avatar.

1:00:27.6 DD: Now, my avatar is my real name online and that opens us up to a lot of... From cancel culture to data theft to just social anxiety and social pressure, all these different things that it creates. There's the benefit of it, which we already have talked about but there's also the drawbacks. I think Web 3.0 is gonna give us the advantage of being able to review what privacy we want to maintain, create more of a walled garden around our personal identity. I think also just from a logical perspective, that is probably gonna be helpful when it comes to like taxes and the way that we're being basically milked like little cows. Whenever you have a Democratic welfare state, which now we're talking sovereign individual, basically you're just an economic unit to the government, and they see you as a unit of cash and they wanna get as much as they can each year. I think what's gonna happen in the future is that as we start to develop better boundaries around our privacy, better ways to communicate anonymously, better ways to send information without a third party, better ways to bank for ourselves, it's gonna make it easier for us to choose where we wanna live, how we wanna live, who we wanna be, and what level of protection we want.

1:01:35.9 DD: And so that I think is gonna be where the future goes, and we're not even there yet. I think it's gonna take a decade or more before we fully understand the implications of this, but I think that that's inevitable. I mean, shit, get on Signal right now, start with little baby steps. Start to work in different ways of maintaining and improving your privacy. Start using a VPN, which is a virtual private network when you're connecting to things online. I'm connected to my home network right now so I'm not calling my own advice, but it's like it's easily intercepted. Same thing with text messages. We know, dude, iMessage is getting hacked all the time, and you might think, "Oh, I'm not that interesting so who would hack me?" or "I'm not hiding anything," but it's not even about that because, one, hackers or people who are trying to just do malicious things, usually they're not targeting individuals, they're targeting whole packets of information.

1:02:25.0 DD: So they might get a million or three million users' information and use that to run massive programs on like extract financial information, extract personal information. It's not really about you, it's about the concept of your data being fairly open door to different entities. I was even reading an article recently that you can pay hackers in Serbia $150 to just go and find personal information on someone based on their screen name. It's not that hard, but most of us aren't coders so we don't really know what is even possible. So I would say we're moving into a generation of increased ability to protect our privacy, increase ability to transact anonymously, the speed of transaction, fewer third parties interrupting our conversations or interrupting the flow of our life and our money and our careers, and that's gonna be a very positive thing.

1:03:12.4 DD: I think going back on responsibility, it's also going to become incumbent on us to become even more responsible over all that stuff. One of the reasons why GAFA, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon are so convenient is they take away responsibility. They do all the work for us, they do all the heavy lifting, and we like that to a certain extent. So for instance, even if you think about the banking system, we love the fact that Chase will just handle the money thing, and if I lose my password, I can call them and they'll give me my password, and if I lose my debit card, they'll send me a new one. With DeFi, where we have control over our money, if you lose the password, that's kind of it. Obviously, they might be coming up with companies and systems to help prevent some of that stuff, but it's still gonna be more self-serve than it is now, and most people don't want that responsibility because it gives them one more thing to think about, so they're willing to trade some of that true freedom and that true responsibility for ease of access.

1:04:04.3 DD: And there will be a breaking point where ease of access becomes more and more of a liability, or I should say ease of access through a third party becomes more and more of a liability, and to truly be moving forward, you're gonna have to take some of this responsibility back on yourself, and that's gonna be something that the new generation is already looking into, but the older generation, or even just the general consumer, is gonna have to make a choice about because they're gonna be leaving themselves open. But just like there, that's gonna be an issue. Like I said, there are still tens of millions of people on dial-up in the center of the country, and they haven't even switched from analog to digital yet, so there will be some people who never change, but we have to know that that's happening and it gives us a big opportunity.

1:04:47.3 PA: Whoo.

1:04:47.4 DD: I didn't even had any coffee.

1:04:49.4 PA: Just the tea, huh? Well, that...

1:04:50.6 DD: Just the tea. It was green tea.

1:04:51.4 PA: That did the trick. Well, so I had a good friend who I was living with for a month here in Eden in May, and he was like, "You gotta read this book, The Technological Society."

1:05:01.5 DD: Okay. Let me write that down.

1:05:01.8 PA: By Jacques Ellul. And actually, The Technological Society was written in the mid-'50s and Aldous Huxley recommended it as the top, top book on the downsides of all this technology.

1:05:15.4 DD: These guys are on it, man.

1:05:17.0 PA: Yeah, one thing that I talked about with this friend of mine, whose name is Edowsa, he's been in the podcast before, is this concept of when you accept convenience, it's a trade-off for actually cultivating self-reliance and skills. So when we accept all this external convenience and we sort of delegate out all these responsibilities, we actually become way less skillful and way less self-reliant as a result. And what I'm hearing you say, and what the sovereign individual talked about, and even what psychedelics really help with, or psychedelics help us to reclaim that power and to reclaim that agency and that ability to create, and when we come to recognize that truth that it is 100% our responsibility to create what it is that we wanna create and that every choice we make is part of that creation process, we become much more mindful about what it is that we're choosing with our life.

1:06:12.1 PA: And I feel like that's a big thing to pay attention to in this transition to Web 3.0 is if you have full 100% responsibility and the choices that you're making are going to end up creating the life that you live, whether that's good or bad, how do you align those choices and make those choices in such a way where you end up where it is that you wanna end up? You end up with freedom, you end up in community, you end up with health and well-being, you end up in a way where you can support yourself and be self-reliant. And that's very difficult because the whole story that we were born into, the whole culture that we've been born into, particularly that's been developed over the last 100 years, has been convenience, has been victimhood, has been giving up that power and responsibility as a trade-off.

1:06:55.4 PA: And we're now recognizing that it's sort of coming to a head with the sort of nature of autocracy that's coming in in Canada and Australia and the United States pretty soon, it's... People are waking up and going like, "Holy shit, what did I give up?" And actually, "How do I reclaim this?" And that is not an easy path to start, but once you commit to it, you realize that there's no other choice, and that if you're to live a life that is free, if you lived a life of choice, a life of creation, a life of great health and well-being, that you ultimately have to be responsible for all the choices that you make.

1:07:29.1 DD: What's interesting too, just from a psychological perspective, is when you look at some of these... And I'm not anti-vax at all, I'm not... But what I think is so interesting is the resistance from people who are saying... For instance I posted up a video of the situation going on in Melbourne and lots of people were saying, "Oh, this is wrong. Obviously there shouldn't be this level of surveillance. This is obviously, infringing on people's freedom," but there's a fair amount of people who were saying, "If you idiots would have just gotten a shot, it's not that bad. Like, if you just stay and if you just listen, the government is trying to help you." What I think is interesting is how people will fight for the limitation.

1:08:13.8 DD: Some people are fighting for freedom, other people are fighting for the limitation, and my supposition and my invitation to people in that post and in my other stuff was, it's not just about this one individual circumstance. It's not just about vaccine or no vaccine, or what's happening with COVID, it's like whenever you cede your personal agency to somebody else, they don't readily give that back. That's just the way of the world. Shit, 9/11 happened 20 years ago, and last month they were fondling my balls. It's still happening. TSA, it permanently changed the airline experience, and that comes from a core of fear. What do you think... How many terrorists are actually looking to get... And we could go down a conspiracy theory hole of, "The government knew about that and it was a created event," that's a separate conversation, but what do you... What percentage of people do you think...

1:09:11.1 PA:It was aliens. It was aliens, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [chuckle]

1:09:14.5 DD: And we could even go further down a more logical rabbit hole of, "We created that event by first propping up Osama Bin Laden and first propping up Saddam Hussein and then flipping it on them and then... "

1:09:23.1 PA: Which is true because we supported...

1:09:24.8 DD: Which is true.

1:09:25.4 PA: Afghanistan against Russia and provided the Taliban with a bunch of weapons and... Yeah, totally, 100%.

1:09:31.3 DD: And we also just recently did it again. We pulled out and left all of our shit there. We left billions of dollars of machinery and equipment in Afghanistan, and that's gonna give us an excuse to go back. And by the way, did you know that for 20 years, I verified this with several sources, for 20 years, the United States was spending $300 million a day on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, $300 million a day, okay? Where is that money? When we entered into Afghanistan, Afghanistan was the sixth poorest nation in the world. Then $300 million a day flowed into them to help restore their democracy, and when we left, they're still number six. Where did the money go? [chuckle] Hmm.

1:10:14.7 PA: Halliburton.

1:10:17.1 DD: Yeah. It went to five defense companies which have 10Xed their value over the past five years, which is the exact same thing that's happening... And those are no bid contracts, which is the exact same thing that's happening with these vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech, and do you think that that money that we're giving... The free vaccines we're getting is not free, we pay for that. You pay for that, it's not free, and those companies... In Forbes last year, I was reading an article with the CEO of Pfizer, and he was on the cover. And this was before the vaccine was ready, it was like February, it was the February edition.

1:10:49.5 DD: And I remember the quote that ran chills through my spine, he said, "We're gonna produce a billion vaccines and we're gonna use every single one, not a vaccine will be wasted." I said, "I don't know if that's the position that I want the head of the person making the vaccines to say." "We're gonna create a billion and use them no matter what?" That doesn't seem like it's health-focused and sure enough, they... And how did they know they were gonna do that? Because they were guaranteed the funding, just like, "We're gonna create a billion bombs and we're gonna use as many as we can, and store the rest." It's just a money thing, so yeah, I mean... I don't even know who we were on the thread, but, yeah, we've seen this before.

1:11:30.4 PA: We've seen this before. Yeah, and it's an oligarchy, right? And we've been living in an oligarchy, and the oligarchy is becoming more and more clear and present and those who think we still are in a democracy are fooling themselves.

1:11:42.0 DD: Oh, so that's what we were saying, yeah, there were people in the comments who were also supporting these limitations. And what my argument was like, look, it's not just about the vaccine, which I understand that people are on both sides on that, and I'm not anti-vax and I think even... I think in terms of the science, I don't think that Bill Gates is putting nano chips in it, I don't think that it's gonna drop your sperm count or give you a third arm. I think it's probably okay, I think your body is pretty sophisticated, and your natural immunity is much better, the vaccine is a narrow, it's a narrowly-focused vaccine, that attaches to a few of the proteins from the research I've been doing and it's not gonna cover a wide spectrum of these new variants that come out, you'll probably be healthy and fine if you get it, it's probably fine. But it's more of like, if we allow them to mandate that, we are implicitly giving permission to create other mandates around things, whether it's COVID because this... All you gotta do is think one year into the future, that's COVID-19, we're on '21 now, we're gonna be in '22 soon, new variants will always come up.

1:12:35.9 DD: No one has really taken into account the fact that this isn't gonna end, we're not gonna stop wearing masks, there's always gonna be something. And it also gives them license to create other restrictions around things that cause fear, and that is something that, it translates. So we wanna be really careful about how much ground we give there, and I think it's better to give little to no ground when it comes to personal sovereignty. It doesn't mean that you can't get vaccinated, you can still wear a mask if you want to, you can respect others in that way, you can get vaccinated if you feel like you need to. But once you have to and you get your rights taken away just like we're seeing in California now, they're taking away... They just passed a bill on October 6th, I don't know if you saw this. They just passed a bill that you have to show vaccination status to go into even a higher number of public venues now. They're vaccinating kids, K through 12, and you might say, "Well, what's the difference between this and the measles, mumps or rubella?" Well, the difference is one, this is not something that is having a huge effect on the child population anyway.

1:13:32.2 DD: Two, these aren't vaccines that are stopping the spread of COVID. They're creating some decrease in symptoms, but people with the same viral load or even potentially more, are still spreading it even if they're vaccinated. And the concept of protecting the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, doesn't make logical sense to me. So we're creating all these new rules, we're creating new social backdoors, even if you wanna talk liberal politics, it's like, "My body, my choice," but then I know this doesn't apply. You can't tell me what to do with my body if I'm getting an abortion, but I can tell you what to do with your body if it comes down to vaccines, it's like, there all these side doors, and so we just need to be very careful.

1:14:06.2 DD: And I think that people who are fighting for the limitations, want so badly for it to just go back to normal, they want so badly for it to just be like it was and not worry about it, it's like, "I can't until this is over." But I don't think it's gonna be over, I think things are changing, and so we need to say that was the world that we're in, we're stepping into a new world, what do you wanna build that world upon? Do you wanna build it upon fear and restriction? Or do you wanna build it on respect, optimism and logic?

1:14:38.2 PA: And true health, right?

1:14:39.7 DD: And true health.

1:14:41.1 PA: 90% of COVID deaths are tied to obesity, right? [chuckle]

1:14:44.7 DD: Ooh, they don't like that one. They don't like that fact. They don't like that.

1:14:47.4 PA: Yeah, they don't. Or vitamin D supplement would prevent most COVID-19, but vitamin D is free and widely available through something called the sun, believe it or not. So there's all these convenient things, and I myself, I'm not vaccinated, I had COVID about 15 months ago. Research has come out that shows that natural immunity is actually better than vaccination, and so the evidence is not compelling, considering that even with vaccination, there are an increased number of cases for something called myocarditis, which is related to the heart. And so I just... I'm not convinced, and I've never been convinced, and yet, I recognize that if you're old or if you have health issues, that the vaccine may be helpful in some ways.

1:15:29.5 DD: Some people should get it.

1:15:30.8 PA: Yeah, totally. It's not black and white, there's a thousand shades of grey, when talking about this. And I feel like, the more that we as individuals have the autonomy to make those decisions based on what's best for our situation. Especially considering that the vaccinated are still spreading this around, it's not like it's killing that, that just seems to me, to make more logical sense.

1:15:50.4 DD: Like with these other vaccines, if you get a measles vaccine from my understanding of it, you're not gonna be spreading measles to others, after you get the vaccine. And this isn't even a vaccine that's of a typical sort, it's an mRNA vaccine, which has been tested in the lab for a long time, but this is the first international roll-out of it, it's experimental.

1:16:09.7 PA: It's experimental. Experimental. Alright, well, Daniel DiPiazza, everyone coming at you from outside Portland, Oregon. Check out his new podcast, The New Wave, what is it?

1:16:19.4 DD: Entrepreneur. The New Wave Entrepreneur.

1:16:21.0 PA: The New Wave Entrepreneur, I'll be on that in a couple of weeks, so...

1:16:23.1 DD: You will be.

1:16:24.3 PA: I probably timed this well. Daniel, thanks for hopping on. If people wanna learn more about you, what's... If they wanna follow you, what's a good place?

1:16:32.5 DD: On all of Zuckerberg's platforms @danieldipiazza, my website is alphamentorship.com. That's where I'm giving out all of this real info, check it out, you can get on my email list, I'll talk to you there.

1:16:46.2 PA: Sweet. Thanks Daniel.

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