Fuck Yeah Fridays! Weekend Update, Video Entertainment, Thoughts on Zionism, Trailer for short R2O film & a Peek at Intro to My New Book: Death, Life, Consciousness, and Cosmos (for paid subscribers)

Miscellaneous content for Friday and Saturday nights at home. If you like what you read then comment, share, and support this Substack with a paid subscription!

Greetings fans of complexity science, cognitive psychology, rational thinking, free will, spirituality, and social movements that empower the people and challenge the status quo and centralized power. You are “Neuromantics” and you are the reason I blog. I know the articles have been few and far between as of late, but I hope that the pieces I published last year gave you deep insights into both the inner realms of your consciousness and also global affairs of the utmost importance.

Fuck Yeah Fridays (!) are meant to be a little more informal and entertaining, with the goal of shaking things up. This last month was a memorable one in many ways, and it changed my perspective on just about most things (via a “mental phase transition”), in ways I will be writing about in my next book, which will be a science book like the last one, but also a memoir — sort of. More on that in a bit.

We have an interesting audience here at R2O, made of people who found me through my Joe Rogan podcast appearance, my David Pakman Show appearances, The Young Turks’ shows, as well as my Raw Story and Psychology Today articles. That means we have people who lean left and people who are more center-right, and that we have people who hate and love Trump (or at least believe Trump is better than the politicians in office). That’s beautiful, because one of the central goals of R2O is to unite the Right and Left and the secular and the religious. If you have been paying attention, you’ve probably started to realize that there is no real fundamental difference between the politicians on the Right and Left anyway.

Similarly, Fox News and CNN both use the same talking points handed down by the Associated Press, though their opinions do sometimes diverge because they play for opposing teams, which again are really the same team. So it’s a big game designed to make you think there are two sides, when really it’s one big club, owned by the corporations and billionaires of the world, who want to keep power and wealth in the hands of the few.

If you haven’t figured that out, then you have no right to make fun of the Right, because you have been programmed by propaganda (and some of it was likely mine, as I’m always playing the game), though now we are all armed with Game Theory of Mind, which will allow us to play 4-dimensional chess — read the recent post if you haven’t already! Though I think if you are here, then you are the choir that I need to stop preaching to. So with that out of the way, let’s move on.

Since it’s the weekend, and you are probably reading this at night, with a drink or a bong, let’s get a little psychedelic. I personally haven’t drank hardly at all for many years because I found it to be the key to my productivity, though I did think weed was God’s gift to man up until very recently. I haven’t smoked since the new year began though, so I’ve returned to my straight edge roots (I grew up playing in hardcore punk bands where it wasn’t cool to do drugs), and I haven’t had this much mental clarity in as long as I can remember. So for those of you who are straight and sober, these vids are intended to put you into a state of mind known as criticality, where mental phase transitions are possible.

The first one is the music video “Bombay” by the Spanish artist El Guincho that came out in 2010 (who now collaborates with massive pop stars like Rosalia and The Weeknd.) I saw it at a party when it was new and thought it was one of the most creative and strange things I’d ever seen. Warning, it’s for mature audiences. In other words, there are lots of boobies. Don’t worry ladies, I imagine the women in the video are staunch feministas.

I saw this short on Adult Swim around the same time I think, and I was very confused as to when the show was actually going start. If you didn’t watch Adult Swim in the early 2000s, it was a golden era for TV, with odd cartoons like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, that you should definitely spend some time exploring if you haven’t.

The last video I have for you all is a quick but strikingly powerful visual illusion that makes you feel like you’re trippin’ balls for about 6 seconds. For you sober cats, this is your invisible magic mushroom. It also serves as proof for a statement repeated frequently at this blog and also in my book The Romance of Reality, and it is simply this: The map is not the territory.

In other words, your conscious experience is not of reality directly, but a virtual or mental model constructed by your brain’s global representation of the slice of the world it has become aware of, through a lifetime of experience and a long history of biological evolution, stretching back to the origin of life. The lesson here is that your mind is susceptible to hallucination and deception, and being armed with this knowledge allows one to stay “meta.” By being in a meta state of mind, and knowing that your map of the world is not the actual world (again, the map is not the territory), you gain a new level of control and awareness that can give you something akin to cognitive superpowers. This is a fun one.

And this is just an early live video of a Tool song that I find particularly spiritual. Tool was a bit too mainstream for my tastes as young man, sadly — though I did love the singles that came on MTV in the early 90s, this being one of them — and while finishing The Romance of Reality I immersed myself in their latest album, which I got to see performed live with some buddies just after completing the book. It wasn’t the same as being up front in a small venue like these people were, but it was still a neat experience.

I’ll be sharing playlists in future Fuck Yeah Friday posts, as music fuels my creativity, and I’ll also be starting mix tape sharing groups. I love just about every genre, from Persian pre-revolution psychedelic rock, to the new Taylor Swift album, to old school hip hop, which was my first true love (as a 7 year old I heard the Boogie Down Productions song (featuring KRS-One) called “My Philosophy,” which starts with a looped sample that says “Yes, I’m a philosopher, I think very deeply!” which I like to believe inspired my interest in philosophy. Actually, my true love as a 4 year old was Michael Jackson and The Bangles, so that’s not quite true. But if you have music suggestions that I might not have heard of, leave them in the comment section! (I just realized only paid subscribers can comment, so I will make sure future FYFs have no paywall.)

One more song, because it is the one that inspired me most while writing The Romance of Reality, besides Kate Bush’s Running Up a Hill, but everyone and their mom has heard that now thanks to the show Stranger Things. You likely haven’t heard this song, unless you saw the British indie film Bronson with Tom Hardy (Mad Max, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises), which features it in a pretty interesting scene. It is the darkest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, and something I can’t fully comprehend. I just don’t know how you write something like this, and although it’s super obscure, it’s also really respected by people in the music industry (David Bowie was a massive fan, for example). Scott Walker passed away somewhat recently, and his catalogue is worth spending time on.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Road to Omega, you should check out the latest posts, which I put far more time into than my essays for the publications I write for. So even though I posted less than an article a month, I put quite a lot of thought into them.

The most recent was Harmonizing Humanity: A Unifying Worldview is the Only Lasting Solution to Peace in the Middle East

This is an in-depth essay that analyzes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of the ecological law known as the Competitive Exclusion Principle, which predicts a dark outcome should things continue along the same path we’re on. But that future can be averted if the world adopts the view of human civilization as a "superorganism." This isn’t some obscure solution based on science no one understands — it is an implementable solution that is quite simple, and despite the so-called experts telling you that the problem is unfathomably complex, it is something that can be solved in a year if politicians quit playing the games they are paid to play.

That’s the sad truth, and it’s going to take a global populist movement for the world to realize that. The good news is that this movement began many years ago, and has been waiting to be steered in the right direction. A new progressive movement, that appeals to conservatives who are sick of the right-wing governments bought by corporations, is what is needed. I know it’s not what progressives want to hear, but that’s because we’ve been brainwashed to believe our Christian or Muslim neighbor is the enemy, when they are not. Our enemy is the greed and corrupt laws that make it impossible for any politician in the world to win an election without taking money from billionaires or the corporations they own.

Let me be clear about the situation in the Middle East with no regard for maintaining the normal PC standards that have prevented everyone in mainstream media, both Left and Right, from being even remotely honest about the situation. Israel’s far-right government, currently led by Benjamin Netanyahu — who actually supported the terror group Hamas (don’t believe me, believe The NY Times and The Times of Israel) — has been carrying out a systematic ethnic cleansing program for almost a century under the philosophy of Zionism, which says that Jewish people have a religious claim to the land. If you’ve been told something else, you’ve been lied to.

This philosophy wouldn’t be problematic if the land weren’t already occupied by millions of people. But be careful — if you criticize the Zionists you’ll be called an anti-semite and that’s worse than being racist, because you’re a genuine Nazi! The truth is, the Zionists are the closest thing to modern day Nazis, and in their minds the brown people of Palestine don’t deserve basic human rights. The UN has classified Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as war crimes for decades (check out this recent article in The Guardian), but you’d never know that because the U.S. media gaslights the nation at levels that I’d never believe myself had I not done the research. The gaslighting is hard to spot because it is so egregious no one would think Anderson Cooper had the cojones to lie with such a straight face.

To be clear, Hamas is a sickeningly brutal extremist organization that must be eliminated as quickly as possible (but humanely, if possible, as they have been radicalized by desperate circumstances), but the terror groups that emerge in these conditions are as expected as lung cancer in a person who smokes 3 packs a day their whole life. The nightmarish attack committed by Hamas (which was actually greatly exaggerated by the news, and that’s a fact, though that point is of little relevance now) gave the far-right Zionists the perfect excuse to murder or displace millions of Palestinians from the holy land forever, and this statement will be proved if they are not let back into their homes after Hamas is no longer a threat.

Of course, the war will stretch on for much longer than needed for this very reason. In fact, experts have suspected that Israel intelligence knew about the attack, and one could reasonably assume it was allowed to happen so that the Zionists-Nazis could justify their ethnic cleansing agenda. Let me be clear that I am not talking about Jewish people — they have my love as much as Christians and Muslims do. Zionists, and specifically those who are consciously aware of the true nature of Zionism (which is probably just those in government), are the only ones I’m referring to as Nazis. I’m not talking gas chamber Nazis; I’m referring to early stage Nazis, because what is happening right now is not at all different from the beginning moments of the Holocaust. The nightmare isn’t quite as nightmarish, but I imagine if we could see everything that was happening from a God’s-eye view, we’d be sick to our stomach.

If this portrayal of the reality bothers you, you probably are going to be triggered by this newsletter regularly, so you should probably fuck off now…. Actually, you should get used to truth bombs here and be thankful for it, and you should listen to this punk song that I didn’t understand in middle school as a skateboarder in the early 90s, but loved nonetheless. The lyrics are pretty insightful, though jaded and extreme.

An amalgamation of Jewish scripture and Christian thought
What will that get you? Not a fuck of a lot
Take a look at your promised land
Your deed is that gun in your hand
Mount Zion's a minefield
The West Bank
The Gaza Strip

Soon to be parking lots
For American tourists
And fascist cops, yeah

Fuck Zionism
Fuck militarism
Fuck Americanism
Fuck nationalism

Fuck religion

Since my new book is going to be a memoir, I’ll be writing more about my life, because it will give you insight into my perspective. I grew up being obsessed with music, TV, film, martial arts, and skateboarding, though philosophy was always in the background. Although my family is living the American dream now, with my father and brother both working in government with six-figure salaries (my dad is a patent examiner), we grew up in small two-bedroom apartments, mostly in the outskirts of DC in Alexandria, Virginia — until I was in high school, when we moved into our first house. When I was a child there were years when we didn’t have a car, and times when we bought groceries with food stamps. This upbringing shaped who I am today, so if I seem a bit radical in my stance against the corrupt elite, you are beginning to know why. It’s not that I’m jaded, it’s simply that I’m starkly aware of the reality that many if not most Americans deal with.

Fortunately I had a super loving family, and great friends — even though growing up in my neighborhood was rough — and I do feel privileged in many ways. But the truth is, there are a lot of Americans who simply have no idea what the slice of America they don’t have to see is like, or what those people have to deal with in life. Even I don’t know, because there’s always someone less fortunate than you. To my white friend living in the townhouses across the street, I lived in the “ghetto” — at least according to his mom, who wouldn’t let him come over (ironically my friends who lived in the bigger houses behind the townhouses were allowed over).

And I was actually well-off compared to the kids living in the apartments next to us, which we thought of as the ghetto, and we were both better off than the kids in the homeless shelter in between our two apartment complexes (where my brilliant friend Darren Kelley, a physicist and one of the first blockchain designers ended up years ago, but that’s a story for another time — though a goal of the Road to Omega project is to save Darren, who developed schizophrenia and has been untreated for almost a decade).

The life I live today is not so different from my youth, though I don’t think I knew one scientist growing up. I continue to skate, and play hardcore music (you can hear my band The Takeover here), and that counterculture lifestyle has shaped my sense-making lens in no small way.

For funsies, here’s a little montage of me skating in the late 90s/early 2000s, and although I can do only a few of these tricks today, it doesn’t stop my old ass from trying. In fact, I’ve been trying to skate more and play more guitar, as it is bringing me mental clarity and reminding me of all the things that made me who I am today (which is a constant work-in-progress).

And since I’m over-sharing, here’s a song I produced around 2005 which I’m still quite proud of with the artist Kid A. In the near future, I’ll also be uploading music from my band Mon Chi Chi, which featured the mega-talented singer-songwriter Natalie Prass and the bassist Steve Terebecki from the Austin psych-rock heroes White Denim. 2024 is a year that I hope to release all the music that I made in the 2000s, with these people, as well as the producer Gabe Niles, the rap artist D.R.A.M.’s executive producer and creator of the beat for the hit song Cha Cha. I consider most of this music to be “meta music,” and I hope to make this genre a real thing with my collaborators and maybe with you. So if you make music you consider to be meta or psychedelic and spiritual, drop me a line. The song below doesn’t fit into that category, but I’m fond of it anyway.

And here’s me in a little skit we made probably in the year 2000, and for the record my friend’s character was invented before the movie Napoleon Dynamite came out. Matt Close, the world will never know, but you were on to something!

Yes, we were weirdos, and we still are. I hope to be able to do these kicks again by the end of the year, though I’m not sure that’s possible at 43. We’ll see.

OK, back to business. On a side note, I’m half Iranian, with many family members over there that I talk to on a weekly basis (I lost my grandma last year to Covid who I never got to meet in person, but my grandpa is almost 100 and going strong!), and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raised tensions between the U.S. and Iran in ways that have me deeply concerned for my family here and abroad. We should all be this concerned, because we are rapidly sliding into WWIII, and we need to take that very seriously.

The solution to this problem is in this article posted late last year. I consider it one of the most important things I’ve ever written. This Substack has about 2k subscribers right now, which is a solid start, but with those numbers there’s no real causal influence. So if you think this theory, which was influenced by Game Theory and Theory of Mind, can do some good in the world — a theory of language perception and conflict resolution — then you should spread the word!

Game Theory of Mind: A Psychological Framework for Understanding Human Interaction and Resolving Conflict

I’ve lost about ten paid subscribers in the last month, which is understandable given that I didn’t post in that time, for the reason mentioned at the beginning of this article. But if you are one of those people, or one of the free subscribers, please consider becoming a founding member or yearly subscriber, or even a monthly one. The more funding I get, the more time I will devote to this Substack, and by the end of the year I’m hoping to make this my sole focus (another neuroscientist and author roughly my age has done this successfully — Erik Hoel — who writes the spectacular blog The Intrinsic Perspective, so it is possible for a scientist to make Substack-ing something like a career).

Lastly, here’s a sneak peak of an 8 minute film we made about the data privacy crisis and global surveillance state that is coming should we not do anything about it. This is also what the novel Road to Omega is all about, so this is something of a promo vid for that. Next Friday paid subscribers will get access to a draft of the first chapter of this book.

Here’s the cover art that is a bit outdated now. So the artists Ben Stottlemeyer and Candace Renee Ponton will be working on that. It’s pretty cool, don’t you think?

For paid subscribers, below is a rough draft of the first half of the introduction chapter for my new book, to be published by BenBella Books (who put out The Romance of Reality), or some other publisher if my agent is successful in starting a bidding war this month! So stay tuned — more content from my forthcoming book and my novel Road to Omega will be dripped chapter by chapter (up to chapter 5) to paid subs in coming posts. And as promised last year, but delayed because I was fakin’ on the bacon, lots of content is coming, and you can be sure of that because I’m tired of freelancing full-time because the paychecks take too long to arrive!

If you become a founding member ($100), as I gift I’ll send you a signed copy of The Romance of Reality, or one of these nifty t-shirts with original cover art. The eye graphic didn’t make the cut but it’s the Neuromantic symbol, and the Road to Omega art team is working on new designs as we speak. These will also be for sale soon, so if you’re interested, email me at bobbyazarian@gmail.com and I’ll get some pressed (these graphics are not perfectly sized or placed because they were a test run, so know the new ones will be a bit sleeker). Due to mailing costs, this is only available for those who live inside the U.S., unless you’re willing to pay for shipping of course!

The next post will come in about a week. Until then, spread the word Neuromantics and those who prefer not to be labeled!

We are one, and we are many.