Thread by @EpistemicHope

This guy drives around America in an RV, doing interviews with Americans of all stripes.

His videos are really worth checking out. They're among the best window I know into the lives of and minds of people that I never meet.

They're edited to be funny. But they're also honest.

As near as I can tell, he's just actually interested in the cultural anthropology of it. Not pushing a particular agenda or narrative. He just shows up and lets people talk.

Which is so rare that I can't think of another example?

(I would love to be introduced to more.)

And I was surprised to see, in this vice interview, that apparently, he sustained permanent changes from taking a lot of mushrooms when he was 13.

"The more I stay still, the more I start to dissociate. And the more I feel like I'm living in a simulation. Like I'm trapped behind my eyes.

I have permanent brain damage from 'shrooms...I have something called HPPD, it's called Halucinagenic Post Perception Disorder.

I see visual snow and tracers, even right now, everywhere I look, from using too much 'shrooms at young age.

...I was 13 when I was going super-hard with shrooms.
So I guess around that age, Around that age, I started to discoitate a lot.

It went to, like, pretty severe, like, depersonalization, de-realization disorder for a few years. I mean, at that point, I felt like I needed to live more extremely to, like, feel in-body."

This was notable to me because I was reminded of @Aella_Girl

...who is among the top three most even-handed, sincerely curious about others' experience, people that I know.

And she also did a LOT of drugs at a young age, and experienced strong permanent psychological effects.

Aella's obviously smarter than this guy is, but in some sense, they seem to be doing the same thing, in different media.

And the thing that they're doing seems too extremely rare for the drugs to be a coincidence.

@threadreaderapp unroll

Actually, I do want to caveat what I said above. He does have an agenda of a sort: he's trying to show how crazy things are, and how crazy people's worldviews are.

But it is extremely not malicious.

The very rare thing is that it seems to be actually curious. The lines aren't written in advance, or cheer-picked to fit the narrative.

It's more like, "what of the things we actually saw and heard are funny and interesting?"

Curious and open to the complexity of a confusing world where groups are not monoliths and there's no simple story of who's right and who's wrong.