The Joe Rogan Experience - #2241 - Rick Strassman

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Rick Strassman is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. His new book, "My Altered States: A Doctor's Extraordinary Account of Trauma, Psychedelics, and Spiritual Growth," is available now. www.rickstrassman.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. So he's got, hi Rick. Hi. Good to see you brother. Good seeing you too. So he's got this place called the Boneyard, my friend John Reeves in Alaska. And he made this for me too. This is like a little skull. That's a woolly mammoth tooth like a molar. Yeah. So he has this incredible place and he was a gold miner and still is

and they started finding like an extraordinary amount of tusks and bones and skulls from animals that aren't even supposed to have been there. Yeah. And it's kind of rewriting history but it's all in his land so he has complete control over it and he has like see there's John he's this enormous dude he's like six foot nine like a big giant man and he has this is just some of it like show those warehouses that he has this is just some of it like show those warehouses that he has so he had a research facility built on his property so they could study this stuff and if we see outside in the lobby there's

actually a bison skull that's like a 10,000 plus year old bison skull so this area is only a few acres this is what what's really crazy. He has one area that's like, I believe it's like four acres and another area that's about six acres. And there's also like a very heavy layer of carbon. of a mass fire and he thinks that this mass extinction event that all the people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson talk about with the end of the Younger Dryas, the Younger Dryas Impact Area, he thinks it's connected to this and he thinks that site might have been hit and all these animals probably in the Great Flood, their carcasses were washed into this sort of valley, in this one area where they were kind of trapped up against the side of this mountain. So he hoses the mountain down with, it's all permafrost, so it's all been frozen forever.

And they have these high pressure hoses and they hose it until they expose like a tusk. And they have, this is what they do all day. Yeah, those hoses are what they used to use for mining gold too. Yes, that's why he has them. Yeah, that's exactly why he has them. He's a gold miner. Yeah, so this is around the southeast coast? I don't know exactly what part of Alaska he's in, but it's really, really amazing stuff.

Yeah. And another thing that he's exposed is that it's the Smithsonian right in New York. No Find out what Museum of Natural History so they had from the same property before he owned it way back in like I think it was the 30s They had so many bones from this part of Alaska where the previous people had found them that they didn't have any room to store them. So they dumped them in the East River. Yeah. And say that they denied that the previous obviously it's people that are long dead. They denied that this happened. And so he sent a bunch

of divers out there. And so they're recovering like these mammoth bones and all these like bison bones, step bison bones in the East River. Yeah, yeah. That are all from his property in Alaska. Yeah, it'd be hard to explain how they got there otherwise. It's only one, I mean it's a literally exact spot to look to. Like he knew exactly where to go. It was all there's records of it of like where they dumped it because and they still to this day have just crates of these bones. Yeah. Is that the reason he chose where he is living in Alaska is because I don't believe so.

No, he was there for gold mining. I think it was something that came up along the way, you know, because he's a gold miner. He's got a lot of disposable income, so he's willing to just spend it on his own to do this. He doesn't trust the museums anymore because they screwed over the previous owner, and even though it's his property and his land, he's supposed to get that stuff and they don't want to give it to him. And so he's got his own research facility that he built.

He spent millions of dollars building this enormous research facility on his property so that they could study these bones. He's got warehouses full of them. Yeah. What's his background? Like archaeology or something? No. He was a swimmer, right? Yeah. He was a swimmer in college and became a gold miner. I mean, he told me the whole story. I don't really really totally remember it But this is not something he wanted to get into the middle near Fairbanks It's near Fairbanks. Yeah. Yeah, so this is this is where John lives. He we do a podcast every year every year He comes back like the last podcast of the year generally and he gives us an update What's going on? Yeah, let me take a look at that map. You know, I spent my first year after finishing my psychiatry training in Fairbanks.

Oh, did you really? Yeah. That's an interesting psychiatry place because the psychology of people that live in Alaska is very different. They're different. They're resilient humans. Well, and they're there for a reason. Right. And their reason is to be at the end of the road. Right. Or their family's there and they've grown up there. Yeah. But you meet like, I felt like I was meeting people from another country. Like I only worked in Alaska once. I did a show in Anchorage.

It was a lot of fun. Me and my friend Ari Shafir. We said let's just fly up there just like an adventure trip We'll do some salmon fishing and then we'll go do a show. That's what we did. Yeah, and It's like the people feel different. They feel different like they're more They're they're made out of harder things. They're like more durable, right? When you're up there, did you get outside of Anchorage like into the interior at all? We didn't do much traveling. We only kind of I've been to Alaska a few times a couple times for hunting trips and I always feel the same way. I always feel like it's another country. It's just like

Very interesting. It's a very strange atmosphere to you know the climate and the geology and your feeling You know because you're up so high on the planet, right? You're close to the North Pole. Yeah when we were doing shows I believe it was July or August where we were doing shows and at night after the show was bright out You go outside. It was like you could see everything. It was it was weird. It was like it felt like it was 5 p.m It's a very strange feeling well in the winter too you have maybe a couple hours of Twilight yeah and that's it and then sometimes all dark for a long time too um well that occurs above the Arctic Circle have you ever seen that movie 30 days of night it's a vampire movie yeah

with Giefer Sutherland no no no no, no, no, that is the Lost Boys Oh Lost Boys, right 30 days a night. It was cooler Yeah, not that there was anything wrong with the Lost Boys It's a little dated 30 days of night is more modern and these Vampires decided to send upon this small town where it never turns light so they could just hunt all the time. Yeah, that's clever Yeah, you know vampires are smarter than they look These are creepy vampires too. They have horrifying teeth.

It's interesting how vampires sort of, we decide that they look like Bela Lugosi. There's Dracula, that must be a vampire. And then some people, they, have you ever wondered the root of some things like that? Like I used to think, I used to wholly dismiss ghosts as a young man. You know, when I was a boy, I believed in them because I was young and dumb. And then as I got older, I was like, maybe there's a reason why so like if I've never

experienced something and then I do experience it, how am I ever going to explain this to people where it's going to make any sense to someone else that hasn't experienced it before? Well, you're reporting on your subjective experience, right? And it's one that a lot of people share. And so you can compare notes. It's like dreaming. You can't really prove that you dreamed or that you were in a dream state. Right.

Yeah, it's a personal experience. Yeah, you know, but that's a common one. So you can compare notes. I think that's how it works. Haven't there been studies done, there's been something done where they've taken people in altered states and had them go into a room or they experienced they weren't connected, they weren't communicating, but they experienced incredibly similar environments. a room or they experienced they weren't connected they weren't communicating but they experienced incredibly similar environments. soccer game all in one place, not to mention golf, tennis, and more. Download FanDuel and get more from North America's number one sports book. Please play responsibly.

19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connexontario.ca. I think that's in my big toe. You know that, that, um, the theory of everything book. I think it's Thomas Campbell. Is that who wrote that? Yeah, it's really good. Yeah. I'm in the middle of everything book. Mm-hmm. I'm not familiar with it. I think it's Thomas Campbell. Is that who wrote that? Yeah, it's really good. Yeah.

I'm in the middle of that right now. It's a big toe. Yeah. It's a very strange book. Yeah. That's the name of the book or the name of the experiment? Yeah, that's the name of the book. It's My Big Theory of Everything, you know, toe as for theory of everything.

Oh, I see. Okay. But it has a picture of a toe on the cover. Yeah. Yeah. When you were doing the DMT studies, it's kind of a similar thing, right? Like if you had never experienced that, and someone was trying to describe it to you,

it would sound completely like nonsense, just like a ghost would. Right. Or even a dream to somebody who had never dreamed. Right. Right, because there are people who don't dream,? It's very strange. Yeah. Yeah, like there are people with no imagination They can't visualize things that's so bizarre. Yeah Yeah, and you give them psychedelics and they report that they can but I mean, how do they know that they are?

right That's an uncomfortable reality that some people's brains don't work the same way Yeah, you know, it's a fact though. It has to be yeah I mean just just look at like cultural choices Just look look at the different kinds of music that people enjoy the different kinds of food that people enjoy And and the different kinds of climate that they enjoy. There's no way we're all seeing the same thing the different kinds of climate that they enjoy. There is no way we're all seeing the same thing. There's no way. If food that tastes horrible to you is like a sacred delicacy to them, you know?

Yeah. One of the ideas I put out in that 2014 book on the prophetic state, the soul of prophecy, I proposed that people respond ethnically or culturally differently to different endogenous psychedelics. You know, the emphasis on the enlightenment experience in Buddhism might be because people in that part of the world produce or are more sensitive to five methoxy DMT, which gives you that wide-eyed experience. And with the other kind of religious experience, it's more DMT-like because it's full of angels

and you speak to things, they speak to you. So there may even be some kind of differential among people as far as the way they're hardwired for spiritual experience even. Well, it kind of makes sense too, if the way they move through the world is through a specific cultural training, right? The way their cultural thinks about things and just imagine being born in an atheist

secular environment and you're raised by those people and then you meet someone who's born in a fundamentalist Christian religion where it's very strict, and then they both meet when they're 14 and compare notes. It'd be the most bizarre versions of the world, right? Well, I mean, one version is there is no God, and the other version is that there is. Right, but there's one version that God is not just a part of your life, but the only

reason why anything was ever formed. It's God's plan for everything that God has, you know, a plan for you. And that if you follow the teaching, the teachings of God, you'll ultimately go to heaven. It's like very structured where the other side, it's like, uh, death, life is suffering. There's, you know, who knows what, what happens when you die but probably nothing you know if you feel depressed you should probably go to the doctor and get a pill yeah yes so you wonder if the atheists biology is different than the believers I wonder if it becomes different right because it don't genes turn on and off expressions of genes based upon stress based upon environments based a lot of things right, and those changes can be inherited, you know, like passed on to the next generation

and the next generation. That's crazy. Yeah, that's a theory about the syndrome of survivors of the Holocaust and their children and their children, is that the stress of being, for example, in the camps activated certain genes, which were then in an activated state, you know, passed on to the following generations. Yeah, I was, we were just, you know, talking about that, like, at what point does trauma end?

What point did the effects of trauma end? Right. Is it in the first generation or the second? And it's not just trauma, right? It's also just stress, like the hormetic stress of starvation. It actually makes the children of those people live longer. Very... Dr. Rhonda Patrick has talked about this.

It's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. That's one of the spin-offs of fasting and starvation. You know, there were a lot, well, you know, speaking of starvation, you know, there are a lot of studies of enforced starvation, like the camps and in Africa at various times. Yeah, you know, so there are some advantages, but, I mean, obviously, to a point. Yeah, obviously, we'd never want to ask someone to do that. But when people do it voluntarily, like when they go on these three and five day fasts,

I've never met one person who said, I'll never do that again. That was fucking terrible and stupid. And I felt really dumb and I didn't feel alive at all. Now they come back with like this very bizarre euphoric, just like, their version of it when they're expressing themselves, it seems like they were like on mushrooms.

Yeah. It's weird. Is that something you something you've tried no I've done a day I've done a day and I sneak in some espresso if I'm feeling you know deprived I don't think I think that's fine because this espresso doesn't I mean no calories right there's no calories yeah um I should do it I should probably do like a three day see what's up because my friend Dana just it. He did I think Dana did a four three or four day He said it was incredible, but everybody reports all this energy, which is really fascinating because I guess that's your body Surviving off ketones. All right, you're in a ketotic state Well when people fast for three or four days do they drink water or they yeah, they drink all you have to I mean

There's a thing called a dry fast and people have done that I've heard of people doing like 48 hour dry fast and that is no water as well. Yeah, you can keep that. Yeah, I'm so not interested in that. Well, you can go on a vision quest out in the desert not drink or night eat and you do start hallucinating. Yeah, I love McKenna's take on that. Do you know that? I don't remember. He told a story about how this monk, the Buddha was in town.

This monk went to visit the Buddha. And he told the monk that he's practiced a city of levitation for the past 10 years. And now he could walk on water. And the Buddha goes, yeah, but the fairy's only a nickel. You know? Right. Because here's my take on some of these things.

Just because it's hard to do doesn't always mean it's good to do. Like there are things that are hard to do but they're good to do. Like if you could run a marathon, at the end of that marathon you're like, wow, I really did something. And you feel good and like, wow, you're a little beat up

but you have a new faith in yourself. That's good to do. It's hard to do, but good to do. But if you run for like seven days and you almost die, maybe, maybe you've crossed that line. Well, I think a flip side of that is simple things can be good for you. They don't have to be hard.

Sure. No, things don't have to be hard to be good for you. A puppy smiling or licking you and playing with you is good for you Mm-hmm. It's like literally like it's good for your body Like when people play with puppies that happiness feeling that you get like what do you do it? What do you do? I know that's actually really good for you. All right. Well this new neighborhood I moved into in May. There's a park Altura Park You wouldn't believe the number of dogs that are being walked around there. There's these little tiny ones. You know, like I haven't lived

in the city in a long time. I haven't seen tiny dogs, but man, there's some tiny dogs out there. Yeah. And Jamie's got a tiny one. He didn't bring them in today, but Carl's a little maniac. He's a little French poodle or French bulldog. He's like that big. Yeah, they're cute. He's adorable. What does he weigh? Uh, with 16 pounds now he's Jack yeah he sounds he really is Jack's got a lot of muscle he's super aggressive not with people like not like

real aggressive like playful just wants to play constantly yeah so I bring my dog who's a golden retriever who's the opposite he's just everybody's best friend if he meets you he's like you're my best friend He loves everybody and Carl just launches himself at him. Yeah, the one dog I had was a miniature Dachshund He was tough he bar really he bit he bit children That's an asshole yeah, that's well he lived 25 years well Well if I lived 25 years. Whoa. Well, if I lived 25 years and I was a dog, I'd probably start biting kids too. Right.

Get me out of here. Well, you know, toward the end, he's wearing a diaper. I had a mastiff and they unfortunately don't live very long. And towards the end, I used to have to carry him outside to go to the bathroom. He couldn't even walk. That's the real bummer is that you just love these creatures so much and they only live 10 years, 12 years, 13 years, you know. Well, do you replace it?

No, you never replace it. You get another dog. You could always love other dogs. I don't think there's anything wrong. I don't think it's like disrespectful to your dog to get a new dog when they die. It wants you to be happy. Well, yeah, it doesn't have anything to do with it. It's dead. It's about you. Like there's this is needless suffering. Do you love dogs? Do you miss having a dog? Get another dog. Like this idea you have to mourn your dog for a specific period of time. Like, it's not a wife. Okay, if your if your wife dies

and then next Friday night, you're on a date like that seems a little crazy. Right? You should probably be sad for a long time but if your dog dies like come on man get another fucking dog right well if it's your whole life you know I love dogs I would never want to not have a dog I just don't get it yeah those mastiffs are big there he was a big fella but they get a lot of like real problems their joints just so much weight. Yeah. Caron roll out weight. Yeah. Yeah.

We were talking about Alaska and up in Fairbanks. Yeah. I was a psychiatrist for the county for about a year. Boy. Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. Well, it was interesting because I had kind of given up the idea of doing research and

I thought, oh, I'll just practice psychiatry. My girlfriend back then wanted to be a wildlife biologist. And we're- Perfect place for that. Yeah, yeah. They've got a great department at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. So we spent two months driving up there from Sacramento.

Just had a great time. Wow. And then I started working up there for a, it was for about a year, cold. The cold, the lowest it got down to was minus 49 one day in February. And you're from New Mexico? Well, Los Angeles actually.

Oh, at that time? Yeah, yeah. Well, it was snowing around Halloween, so I wasn't dressed for snow. I'd never really lived in snow, so. What was it like going from Los Angeles to minus 39? Well I started to work on enjoying the dark. As a rule, people don't like the dark. But there's forest all around town and it's dark.

Especially in the winter, there's 18, 20 hours of pitch black. That's so crazy. So I tried to imagine myself liking the dark. It wasn't all that successful. I lasted about a year. Is there a thing that happens like I lived in Boston when I was a kid and one thing that it really does benefit you with bad weather is that when you have bad winters you really love those summers. Those summers are so special. When me and my friends will like go out on a summer night. It's like we It's like we were so happy. It was warm out. We're outside. We're listening to music hanging out together.

Boston, huh? Yeah. Is that because you have family there? Well, no my family moved there when I was 13 So we moved we lived in Jamaica Plain for a year and then we lived in Newton Which is a suburb of Boston, which is really it was really nice place to grow up. Yeah Um, I was in the Bronx for medical school Bronx New York and I lived in the city for about a year. Yeah, it's like it was great training Yeah, when you get well, I I'd imagine the characters you'd meet and the characters you'd meet in Alaska. I bet you met a lot of people on the

run. You know, I met a lot of Christians up in Alaska. Really? Yeah, yeah. Mostly? Well, my patient population, everybody, a lot of the majority of people were pretty devout churchgoers and very strict about observance of the regulations in the Bible. So it was a fairly conservative type of city. That's interesting. Like, did they impose it on other people? Like, what did they have a gay community up there? That's interesting. Like, did they impose it on other people? Like, did they have a gay community up there? They mostly imposed it on their kids. Yeah, the family dynamics up there were pretty stressful. You know, also cocaine too because it's so dark and people get so depressed. Oh, man.

Yeah. Well, you know, Fairbanks had a boom when they built the oil pipeline between Prudhoe Bay and Anchorage. And so, you know, Fairbanks exploded in population. And when I moved there, it had been shrinking a bit. It's got the university, which is pretty cool up there, and amazing countryside, huge rivers, just enormous rivers. The one outside of town was a good half mile across. Wow. Yeah, I went skiing out there once at 25 below on the frozen

river. It's like, oh, this is pretty nice. And I'm along the shore and there's a dark spot in the middle of the river. And I'm curious, I ski over to that dark spot, it's open water. Oh my god. In the middle of a quarter mile. And you're out there with your weight on skis. So I backed up, yeah, skied back to the shore. And I felt really tired all of a sudden. Yeah. I looked down at the snow and I thought, well, maybe I could just take a little nap.

And I thought, well, you know, I'm getting hypothermic. Let me run back to the car. Do you think that's what it was? Yeah, it was funny. I wasn't cold. I wasn't shivering or anything, but I just got really sleepy. They say before you die, you actually want to take your clothes off, which is really crazy.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I've heard, like in the snow when you're freezing. Yeah. I kind of remember that. And the bears up there are a force to contend with, you know, the grizzly bears. Oh yeah, man. Yeah. One of my friends up there was living in a cabin and a bear just stuck its claws

in the door, pulled the door out of the frame of the house. Jesus Christ. And went into the refrigerator basically and kind of cleared that out. So was he home? Up in his loft, yeah, sleeping. So he was awake while this was going on? Yeah, yeah. Oh my God.

So it just smelled food. It smelled food, it smelled him, yeah. They don't abide by any rules. They don't really care about your door. Well you know when I was up there I learned to shoot a shotgun. It's called a bear stopper is a sawed-off Shotgun you can carry with you if you're in the backcountry Yeah, you know, so there's just a like a 12 gauge. I think it was a 12 gauge

Do you have slugs in it? Or is it? Yeah. Oh, no. No, it had buckshot. Okay have slugs in it or is it buckshot? Oh no no it had buckshot. Okay. So does that make it a 12 gauge? No it's all the pound of the round. So a slug is like a chunk of lead and buckshot is like a bunch of pellets. So the buckshot is like it scatters into a pattern and the further it is from the rifle barrel like how far you're shooting it's's sort of shooting 20 yards. It scatters quite a bit, and it makes an area of impact

about that big, like a basketball-sized. Yeah. Or maybe a little smaller than that. But a slug is a single object, and it has a lot more force behind it. So if you're shooting a bear, I would want a slug. I think it was a shot. It's a deterrent though.

I mean, you'll certainly deter them with buckshot. Yeah, if you have a wide spray, it will deter them. I kind of remember, although this may be wrong, that one barrel had a buckshot in it and the other had a slug. Oh, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, so you can slow it down. You probably shoot the first shot to try to slow them down or to try to discourage them

and if that doesn't work, the second one's lethal. Ah, right, and they're much closer to you at that point. Jeez! Yeah, so it is a pretty fun place to live in some ways. I think just that alone, the environment, just the fact that it gets that cold, it's so dangerous. Everybody kind of has to stick together. You have to help people. If you see people just stranded on the side of the road, you don't just pass them. You have to help them. A person might be dying in there. And if you can get them out of there

and get them to safety, you're supposed to do that. So people like bond together a little bit more up there. Well, and there's also the Northern Lights, which are just incredible. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the reds and the greens. How often did you see those every year? Pretty much every night in the winter. And it was so quiet up there, you could actually, you know, listen to the northern lights. They'd hiss and crackle.

Oh, wow. Yeah, it was pretty wild. They hiss and crackle. Yeah. What exactly is going on with the northern lights? Like, what is that caused by? The magnetosphere and some solar rays. Like, what is what is might be cosmic, but it wouldn't be a solar rays because it's dark, right? Right. Yeah.

Unless it's like something that, like, is coming around the Earth. Yeah. What are they doing? Are they cosmic rays? Must be something. Yeah. Coronal mass ejections. Coronal mass ejections. Yeah, what are they doing? Are they cosmic race? Must be something. Yeah Coronal mass ejects, so solar. Oh, yeah and magnetic activity. I guess there's a few reasons why they could be created That alone might be worth living up there for well in the winter if you could just spend a week up there in the winter And you know, there's all kinds of hot springs in the area, too. How hard is it to get around in the winter and you know there's all kinds of hot springs in the area too. How hard is it to get around in the winter? Your car needs to be equipped. There's these things called battery blankets that you put under your battery to keep it warm. And there's a heat it yeah plug it in yeah it's it's you know

plugged in yeah traffic you know to a parking meter or to the outside of a building. Yeah, everybody keeps their vehicles plugged in during the day when they're at work. You'd have to, right? You'd have to, yeah. And the other modification is an oil pan heater, which is the same basic principle. I mean, it keeps the oil from turning into a solid block.

Yeah. You know, when it gets really cold, your tires are square. What? And it's really hard to drive around in for the first couple of miles. You have to warm up? You have to drive them slow to get them warmed up again. Because otherwise they'll like flatten down at the bottom where your car's been sitting. Right. Whoa.

Yeah, cold. That makes sense. Yeah. Isn't it amazing they still have to fill tires with air? That seems like the stupidest thing. Like if you can get those people that are working on AI to just take a couple years off and figure out tires, just take all these people that are making computers and figure out something that you don't have to put air in. air. With my garden tools or my garden carts, I use solid tires, but they're a lot heavier.

They never puncture. Well, but there's a give factor with tires that's important to handling. There's things that are going on dynamically with tires when you're going around corners and your car has grip You know, especially if you're like if you're off-roading, right they deflate their tires quite a bit. Yeah more traction Well, and it also will Widened your foot it widens your footprint so you won't get stuck in sand. Yeah Yeah, I used to spend a lot of time in Death Valley. Oh wow Yeah, and and you know the canyons to the east and to the west of the valley. So I guess that's the benefit of air is that you can air them down and do stuff with them,

but it seems like the negative side of it of getting a flat and getting stuck in the middle of nowhere because you don't have any air in your tire, that seems crazy. Yeah. Well speaking of- So vulnerable. Yeah. Like the one thing of your car Someone could chose to come by and go Stab your tire and now your car is useless, right? vulnerable, yeah

Yeah flat tires. Um, what? Um, so have you spent your time in Death Valley? No, no, it's a great. Well if you – like you still like to take psychedelics, huh? Who doesn't like to take psychedelics? Yeah. The best place or one of the best places is Death Valley. That's what I've heard. Yeah.

I've had friends that have had mushroom experiences out there. Yeah. I've had some amazing experiences. It's huge, first of all, and it's really old. There's rocks out there that are two billion years old. Really? And you are, you know, tripping, for example, and you're touching these two billion years old rocks and you really feel something that you don't feel anywhere else. Wow.

Very slow moving. It's the wind, too. There's great wind. I learned to watch the wind there you can see like a shrub like a hundred yards away and it's ominous moving and you can follow the wind as it goes up and down the canyon until it reaches you Where you see the particles it's carrying and stuff, you know, mostly the movement of the bushes of the shrubs. Yeah Yeah, I had a lot of firsts in Death Valley. Like in a lot of ways I think I'm still working on some of those insights or those experiences which I had in my late teens early 20s. Isn't that kind of always the case though? I think we come up with our best ideas from 19 to 21. Really? I think so.

Oh, boy. I'm in trouble, though. I don't have very many ideas. Well, you must have had some experiences that steered you in a particular direction, didn't you? Yeah, I guess I did. Yeah. But until I was 21, my whole life was martial arts,

just martial arts training. So my, you know, anything that I was interested in was interested in to make that better. So I'd read like the book of five rings, like Miyamoto Musashi, I'd read a lot of psychology books, I read books on discipline, I read a lot of different books on how to control your mind under stress and things along those lines. Yeah. Well, it was a formative time then, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was definitely formative in that way. Yeah. And you absorbed a lot. Yeah. I definitely absorbed a lot of that. It's just I didn't have hardly, I had almost

zero ideas outside of martial arts. I didn't care what was going on in the world. I was not paying attention to politics. I was not paying attention to world events as long as we didn't go to war with Russia. All I wanted to do was train. Yeah. Well, and look at you now. Well, it opened up the door for a lot of other stuff, but at the time if you had asked me questions I would have not been a good person to talk to. What kind of questions wouldn't you have been able to answer back then? Well I knew nothing about the world, like nothing. I knew nothing about other countries, I knew nothing about the way politics work, I had

no interest in the economy, I didn't care at all, I didn't know how anything works, don't know the rules to any sports. Yeah, I didn't know what's happening when a basketball game is going on unless the ball goes in The net I don't know the rules of football I don't I didn't know anything like most of my life because it was all I was thinking about was martial arts when I was young Yeah, it's like being a monk almost in a lot of ways it was yeah, because the way we trot a monk almost in a lot of ways it was yeah because the way we try the way we treated the gym like I remember I had this girlfriend in high school and she wanted to fool around at the gym and it was the dojang so it's called but I used to teach there and I had keys so I was there and she wanted to fool around there I'm like there's no way you can't we can't do anything here it's like a church or a temple. Yeah. Like I was 17, 18 years old, however I was, like

kids are so horny. Like anytime you're alone, you get a chance that she wants to do it. And I was like, we can't do it here. Right. This is not possible. We can't do it in the locker room. Right. We can't do it in the premises. Like this is a church. The ground you stand on is holy ground. It was to me. Yeah. Because to me it was like this place is, this is where I'm serious. This is like a different place. The rest of the world is the rest of the world. But in this place I control myself.

I control the environment. I exist by the rules. And there's very strict rules. You bow. Even if no one was around, I bowed to the flag every time I entered into the Dojang. To the flag. Always. Yeah, what did that represent?

It was a Korean flag. Yeah, so what did it represent? Just represented respect. Respect for the country? For the space that you're in. Like, you're bowing before you enter this space. Like, it didn't matter if it was a flag. I wasn't really bowing to South Korea I was bowing to the idea that this is a very sacred space that I'm going into. Yeah

In my Zen training over the years, we did a lot of bowing to statues to people to images to photographs Before we ate we would bow to the food to people, to images, to photographs. Before we ate, we would bow to the food. Yeah, it's lots of bowing. It's an interesting experience to bow, to really kind of get yourself together and lower your head and be humble,

to be like in the presence of something greater. Yeah, I think it's beneficial for people. I think that kind of voluntary humility is very important. And if you can establish that as an ethic and sort of get it into your psychology. Well, you know, it's really important to be humble. I've been studying about humility. There's this great line.

Humility is the ladder through which one can grasp every other good thing. Ooh. That is great. Yeah, yeah. Humility is the ladder through which one can grasp every other good thing. Oh That is great. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I try to read this once a week and that really is great Yeah, and I'm gonna be really humble. I might be the most humble person there ever was I like how you got that you actually photocopied that it's got the darkness where the binder is in the center Yeah, yeah, it's a serious thing. That's awesome. That's awesome. What a great quote. Yeah, it's like to not be humble.

It's like, we like our sports stars to not be humble and that's about it. Everybody else, we appreciate a little humility. Even sports stars, you know, praise Jesus or something. Well, I mean, can you be too humble? Sure. Which would look like what? Well, you can be too humble in the sense that you don't

have confidence in your ability to do something that is sort of open, some open-ended, you don't know how it's going to turn out, something where it's dangerous, you're going to take a risk, you have to be bold, you have to have enough confidence in yourself that you can navigate a thing that very few people navigate. You know, if you choose to start your own business, if you choose to like quit what you're doing and go on a journey because you really feel compelled to do, have other life experiences. If you're too humble, you might not be willing to bet on yourself.

And I think that would ultimately be bad. Yeah, I think one would ultimately be bad. Yeah, I think one of the things too about being too humble is you just suppress all of your feelings. You think you should have no feelings at all. In other words, you know, responding to things in your world. Insults or harm being, you know. Right. So you can get in a bad relationship and have someone yelling at you all the time and you just humble you handle it Well, if you think you're humble you might not be able to handle it. Although you might pretend that you are Well, if you pretend long enough you become humble. Yeah, you could become you know what I always tell guys

I say this whenever possible You should aspire to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid. Who do you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid? Pretend to be really interesting, really nice, really kind. Just wouldn't it be easier just be that person? But there's like a success aspect of the courtship thing where you want to like show your success, which is anti-humble. Yeah. But you got to be careful with doing it because then you look braggy, but you want to like

show the person that you're dating that you're valuable. You're a person who can accomplish things. So many people just put on a show when they're meeting people, like they're dating, they put on a show. They pretend to be someone who they're not. I'm like, when have you better? Have you just become that person?

Well, I think that's one of the advantages of zoom is there's no pressure when you first meet someone who's having zoom dates are people doing that? I've done it. Okay, you freak. It's a good move. Yeah, it's like almost like a podcast. Well, and you wouldn't necessarily feel the pressure to you know, go to bed right away Of course and you don't feel the pressure to like have to get out of the situation if it doesn't go well

You can just kind of hang up by yeah, and you can meet somebody it's rough You don't want to just abandon them. Well, you can keep it low-profile to you could just be in your bathroom You know sitting on the toilet, you know Sure, your friend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah keeping it low profile keeping it casual But like if you look at the numbers you're seeing the numbers of the way people met in the past versus today I think it's 25 percent meet online now and get married. I think it's more than that. Oh, wow I think it's a really high percentage of people who meet today meet online. But the thing is this was a video so it showed like 1900s where like everybody sort of met either

through family or through church or that kind of deal. And then over time it becomes women enter the workplace and then people are meeting people at work and then the internet comes along it just Yeah, what do you think of arranged marriages? Well, it sounds terrible You don't have any choice and if you have domineering parents then your parents are gonna match you up with somebody else's kid because they're friends with this guy and you know This this guy's son is looking for a wife and you're a lady that as a dad that tells you what to do

And you're like what am I why I don't want to marry this guy. I don't even know this guy Well, your parents would need to be straight shooters You want you would want to if your parents are straight shooters would they be doing an arranged marriage in in certain cultures? Yeah, there are a lot of arranged marriages, and I think they do tend to work out I haven't looked at the data, but they couldn't do worse than the marriages You know success rate now if you can leave a little pad of paper and a pen just laying around so they could write you A note when no one knows about it. What's really going on? I bet it'd be like a message in the bottle like come when no one knows about it, what's really going on. I bet it'd be like a message in the bottle,

like come save me, help me. How's Linda doing over there? Oh, she loves it. She loves this arranged marriage. Linda's like, save me. She can't go anywhere. Where's she gonna go? If you're in the kind of controlling culture

that even considers an arranged marriage, you know, I mean, it's a very strict culture. Not saying it's negative, but it's very strict. And if you have great parents and they're really wise in their choices and you're in a culture that has an arranged marriage and your parents are like super kind and generous and they trust you and they love you and they think you're amazing and then they want to hook you up with an amazing person, maybe it can work out. But generally, I think you should give people the freedom to do whatever they want to do

And maybe that lady never wants to get married Maybe she's decided like I don't like how this is I want to throw myself into my work. I want to travel the world I want to do this like you could do whatever the fuck you want to do. Yeah, right. Yeah That wouldn't work in those kind of cultures. No, so I don't like that I don't like that. I don't like anything where people are telling you what to do. And that's what an arranged marriage is. It's someone's telling you what to do. If you can't say no, I mean, maybe I'm ignorant. Well, I should say like maybe an arranged marriage is a proposal like they propose this arranged marriage,

they both agree on it. Maybe that's what you're into. I think that's the case that if there's no chemistry at all and the woman or the guy says forget it I'm not interested I think you're free to yeah I would guarantee you that's not always the case especially in some more restrictive parts of the world where women you know are forced to like follow completely different rules than the men, which is a reality of the world we're living in today. There's parts of the world where they think in a very archaic way, and women are second class citizens.

I mean, the mid-east, I mean, look at that place. It's just, it's a blaze. Yeah. It's a blaze. Well, I have a good friend of mine who came on the podcast recently and was talking about his experiences in Afghanistan and how crazy it is there. And he's like, it's like you're going back in time a thousand years, like the way women are treated and children are treated, the amount of pedophiles and open molestation of boys and just murder.

Why do you think, at least in particular, that Jerusalem is just such a hotbed? It's a point of contact and conflict for all three major religions, Islam, Christianity, and I mean Judaism all claim that small bit of land. I wonder what it is about that part of the world. Well, it's got to be from the Bible, right? I mean, that's the significance of it as holy land, you know. The concept of holy land is always so, so if there's a place where it is literally in the Bible that this is the place where Jesus is going to return to, well this is

gonna be a place where people do battle over. Like you can't let the enemy control the place where Jesus comes back to, because what if Jesus comes back and they immediately snuff him out because they're Islamists? Right. Well it goes even further back than that. You know, it was the location of the temple. The temple of the God of the Hebrews was built in Jerusalem, the first and the second. How much history is there? Like, how far does it go back? Well, you know, Judaism began what, maybe 4,000 years ago, and the first temple was built, gosh, I should know this, it stood for 400 years, then it was destroyed, and the second temple lasted around 400 years. It was destroyed in 70 CE, the second temple. When was the first temple in

existence, Jamie? So even if that's if that's the timeline so that we're looking at about 4,000 years, all right You know like Abraham, you know the first of the Hebrews lived around 18 1800 BCE so 2000 BCE the first known mention of the city. So that's 2000, 2000 before current era in Middle Kingdom Egyptian. How do you say that? Excreation? Excreation texts? What does that mean? Excreation texts? Excreation? Oh, curses. Curses? Yeah, yeah. Really? Yeah, execrations are curses, extreme curses. Really?

Yeah. If you execrate someone, you are really cursing them. Ancient Egyptian hieratic text listing the enemies of the pharaoh, most often the enemies of Egyptian state or troublesome foreign neighbors. The texts were most often written upon statuettes of bound foreigners. Yeah. Bulls or what was the other word it said there? It said bulls or... It's blocked out. Execration texts. Yeah. Or blocks of clay or stone. Wow. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of an Egyptian exocration text. Jesus. How wild. Yeah, so Jerusalem is an old city and you know the temples were there a long

long time ago. Yeah, and you know the location of the temples relates to dreams of Jacob who was laying on the ground and on a stone and made of a vow to the God of the Hebrews who Jacob was communing with to build the house of the Lord there. And so there's a long history of that part of the world being associated with the patriarchs and with the temple. Christianity has an association to Jerusalem because of Jesus. I'm not sure what the connection between Islam and Jerusalem is. It's clearly more recent. Well, isn't it

always this sort of situation where when someone really likes a thing, everybody wants it? Yeah. You know. Well, there's things called greed, envy, and jealousy. I've always, you know, liked the distinction among those three qualities. Here it says, Jerusalem is revered by Muslims as the third holiest place on earth, and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is viewed as an optimal, optional rather, complement to the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. Unlike the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is undertaken individually at any time of the year.

Hmm. Well, you know, I've never been to Israel. Now is not a good time. No, no. And, you know, there's this thing called the Jerusalem Complex. Yeah, I've heard of that before. Yeah, you are like... You think you're a messiah when you get there.

Right, right. I'm the messiah, right. So that might be a problem. You could see how it would really be a problem if someone was inclined to that, headed in that direction. Well, I think one of the problems with the current psychedelic scene is this messianism. You know, there's going to heal everything, there'll be world peace, it'll be a utopia.

There's also, I think, a prevalence of this kind of spiritual narcissism. Oh, good. I'm glad you see that. Yeah, it's important. It's a prevalence of it. It seems like there's a lot of people that attach themselves to this thing and then use this to behave in a completely different way. They behave like they're the... instead of a person who's experiencing it like everybody else, they're like a leader, right? And I think there's a real danger

in that expressing these thoughts to other people as pure facts. You know, the way to live your life, like, listen, you don't know how stop, okay, there's ways, there's ways you've learned to live your life better because of that, you should be just talking about those experiences. But when you start giving people instruction, and how to do things, and then know organizing people together I think that's a symptom of this spiritual narcissism that people if you're attached to this you're attached to something divine which we I think we would both agree it is you can imagine that you are divine or you can project that you are divine you know I think there's a temptation to do that

Well, I think it strengthens pre-existing For example personality traits like you're saying like if you're a narcissistic person and you trip you'll just get more enamored with yourself More convinced that what you think is true. That seems terrible. Yeah. Well, it's one of the dark sides of psychedelics. Well, that's weird, right? Because as you were saying before, like there's people that want to think it's like a cure-all. It's not necessarily. It's a tool. And if it was a cure-all, it would have already cured us.

We would have been cured like thousands of years ago. People would have worked out all this nonsense. Mm-hmm. Right. Right. I think it just works on what's already in your head. You may not acknowledge it or think about it or even remember it and psychedelics will shed light on what's already there. Well, how about the Vikings? Right? They would take mushrooms before they kill people. The berserkers? Yeah.

Yeah, the berserkers. Well, see, I mean you could do anything you already and you don't believe in Yeah, yeah and something you're already, you know, you're an inclined to believe. Mm-hmm You believe that it's good to go slaughter people Well, I think that's one of the interesting things about but I'm about you know, Brian your rescues book Mm-hmm is that I don't think these ideas came from the drugs I think they were just made more manifest, more meaningful, more real than they were before because of the drugs.

So if you're a Viking and you wanna go out and kill, if you're living in a religious community with certain beliefs and you want to believe them even more firmly or practice more intensely, psychedelics could have that effect. That makes sense. I mean, again, like we're talking about like the culture that you live in is that this is the view, whatever the constraints of that culture, this is the window in which you view the world. You view it through this culture and you view it through these

belief systems that you have sort of adopted over time. Yeah I think that's what's going on with the beings in the DMT world. I don't think they are necessarily freestanding intelligences, but you know they're the way our culture, our personal culture, and our larger culture culture and wrap in a visible form certain information, certain kinds of input, either from the outside world or in your own mind. So it's culture-specific, I think, the visions that you would see. I don't think they're like aliens from another planet, although I kind of thought that in the beginning But as time has gone on and I've heard more and more stories

I'm more inclined to believe these are simply projections, you know taking the garb of You know the personal, you know, Millie you yeah, maybe The problem is yeah, maybe yeah, because like you can go down that road and just decide, oh, no, no, no, no. What these are, these are thoughts, and thoughts have a consciousness of their own. And we think of them as being independent, like they're just created by the human mind. But no, the human mind's probably tuning into these things and they can appear as entities I think thoughts might be a living thing Well, they sound stupid to say out loud. Yeah, but the idea is

Everything that exists on earth that humans have created every single one of them came from an idea Which is weird. Yeah, because it's had so much of an impact. So much of an impact on the world. Well, you know, one of the ideas in the medieval philosophers was that, is that, you know, thought, or thoughts are intermediaries between you and God. You know, they're angels, which are exchanged between you and God. You know, they're angels which are exchanged between you and some divine external source of information. You know, so if you're thinking of how thoughts have directed the world's, you know, growth, I mean, you could even extrapolate to, well, you know, maybe it's, you know, the divine, you know, plan, you know, for humanity.

Well, there's certainly something going on. If you just, if you objectively just step outside of human culture and just watch the world, it's certainly moving in a very specific direction. And that direction is tech, very much technologically driven. There's something really crazy going on in a technological direction and then all that stuff is coming from ideas. So ideas are popping into people's heads. They're over the course of hundreds and thousands of years. These ideas are propagated and given to other people and they expand upon them and then more ideas take place and then more execution

of these ideas and it changes the landscape, and changes the ocean, and it changes the seas. It's very, very weird. Well, I think it's a case of cause and effect. Certain causes produce certain effects. And the rules of nature, let's say, or the rules of thought, you know, like how the brain creates thought, you know, they are, you know, regulated in a particular manner. You know, there's an order to chemistry, certain chemical reactions occur for this or that reason.

You know, so it's as if, you know, the system is already set up to encourage certain behaviors, have certain ones, certain ideas form, and other ones not form. You know, cause and effect, if you, you know, like if something bad happens to you, it's because of what happened before. Something good happens to you, it's because of what happened before. You know, so you learn from your experience to do things that result in you feeling better, you know, positive outcome. You know, so, you know, the system is developed that way, that, you know, that, for example,

if you get angry, you might stub your toe. You know, that's how it works, and you're in pain, and you think, oh, I shouldn't be angry. Or you're nice to someone, and they're nice to you, as opposed to being mean to you. So, I think the world, I think existence on a setup in a certain way to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. Yeah, that's what's weird.

I think the technological stuff is pretty interesting now. Yeah. But it speaks like a larger phenomenon, which is how cause and effect has been set up. Well, it's how cause and effect has been set up, but it's also, there's a very weird competitive drive towards technological innovation that exists with people because it's attached to

monetary gain, right? And the companies that are involved in the most technological, sophisticated work, whether it's AI or whether it's social media, like when you're programming things in giant scale, it's incredibly profitable, incredibly profitable. and the technology moves along with the profit and Ultimately, it's gonna make a being It's pretty close pretty close to making a being. Yeah. Yeah well, I think the future lies as much in Genetic engineering as well. Oh, yeah, it's not like it's binary. Right. It's only this one thing or nothing. Yeah. Yeah. I think the biological and manipulation and the AI development is

going to be, I think it's going to produce a hybrid. 100%. I think so too. I think that's the only way we live. I think we have to like accept the fact that they're here and join them. Because I think as biological meat vehicles were just too limited our evolution is too slow You know, it's like we're like if you decided to run your entire business on a laptop from 1995 Like it's too slow. You can't do that anymore Like you have to catch up if you want to be a part of this world today, and that's not that long out anymore. Like you have to catch up. If you want to be a part of this world today, and that's not that long. 1995 is 29 years ago. Just crazy. That's not that long ago. That laptop's useless.

Yeah. So in what kind of ways has AI impacted you? It hasn't impacted you yet. Yeah, it hasn't impacted me. Well, it has in visually. I've seen a lot of like really wild things online. There's a bunch of them. Like there's one that I posted that some guy made it's a Donald Trump playing Creedence Clearwater Revival on a guitar pull it off on my hands you see this and Kamala Harris is in it and and McCrone from or Justin Trudeau's in it, but it's it's so realistic I mean, it's obviously not like you look at you like I know it's not really them, but it's so close. It's it's so realistic. I mean, it's obviously not like you look at you like I know it's not really them

But it's so close. It's weird. Do you like credence love creed? Yes. Yeah, I love credence and It's a fortunate son, so it's a banger song. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great song It's Donald Trump. You see Donald Trump playing guitar. I know senator son It's pretty Trump you see Donald Trump playing guitar. I know senator son It's pretty recent scroll down Keep going there it is Give me some volume look at Putin's on the drums Kamala Harris is where to which that look at that Come on man. Give me volume. Oh, we can't We get in trouble with the YouTube police. Look at that Kim Jong-un

Biden this is crazy. Look how good this is though. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's not quite good enough where you can't tell that It's AI generated, but it's unbelievably close. Yeah But it's unbelievably close. Yeah. Obama's the Joker. How bizarre. Yeah. So weird, right? Isn't it weird?

Yeah. It is hilarious. It's scary though. It is. And Jamie was just talking about Sora, that there's a new version of Sora that was released. Was it today? I'm waiting for it to show up on my account, but yeah, everybody who's got... What is Sora? I'm waiting for it to show up on my account, but yeah, everybody who's got what is our I can use Sora is

Sora is a new video Generator through AI so you put in prompts so show him the Japanese one I'm gonna show so this Jap or is there new stuff. There's all sorts of stuff. Yeah, okay So the Japanese one was incredible so it's like show me a street in Japan where the snow is falling and You know like a drone shot from overhead so you see these people and it looks Entirely like a real scene It looks absolutely someone's nine months old so this is just older stuff, but it's like a prompt for puppies in snow look at this Who doesn't like puppies who doesn't like puppies? But that's fake. This is what's crazy. This is all

generated by AI. And it's pretty indistinguishable. Yeah. I mean, look at this. This is all AI. Nuts. Good thing I'm not on drugs. I know you'd be like, what? Look at this. This is AI. Incredible. That's insane. This is waves hitting the rocks. Yeah a movie trailer And you know actors are fucked like they're in real trouble Because you can make movies like this now. Well, so our writers writers are fucked Yeah, I don't think writers are as fucked as actors are though because some writers like you know There's the Quentin Tarantino to the world that are just gonna take turns because of just his own

Psychology that you're not gonna take you know like we're Stephen King when he was younger Like I don't think you're ever gonna be able to write Carrie on a computer You know I think you need the human experience for some stuff that's creative, but not for the video? Yeah, well, it touches upon creativity, like is creativity the difference between AI and humans? Well, maybe it's not. And that's what's really scary. Because we like to think that's the one thing that we have above AI is we're creative. Yeah, great. Get it to write a Beatles song. What if it writes a way better Beatle song the Beatles could ever write?

You know what if it knows what's really gonna move you you know what if it right writes a Sheryl Crowe song that makes you cry You know Then you're fucked Ex Machina, did you ever see Ex Machina? Yeah Yeah, that was pretty good. I'm doing a top 10 all-time favorite movies. Yeah, it's it so rang true Like there was not a moment in that movie. I was like bullshit get out of here It's so rang true that that thing that they would be able to manipulate you super easily Especially if you're a young man, and you're you know awkward with women and it's this perfect woman

It just happens to be a robot. Yeah, who cares if she's a robot? Yeah. Well, that's funny The version of the thing by John Carpenter is my it was one of my favorite movies. Oh, that was great Yeah, you know, they're both body horror in a way Yeah, sort of right, you know, the other robot right isn't human. You know, that's horrible, right? It's pretending to be though and it's tricking you just like the thing just like the thing did. Yeah Yeah, the John Carpenter one is awesome. Yeah Yeah, like I've watched that twice and both times I regretted it because every time I close my eyes There would be visions of these these like mutations happening. Yeah, and that was another one that was up in the freezing cold

Yeah trapped up there. There's a new one of that they did in the I think the early 2000s. It was pretty good. Yeah, it was the prequel apparently. Yeah. Was it? Yeah. Well, they used a lot of CGI, rather than practical effects like the carpenter version. Right. Yeah, right. Which makes it, for whatever reason, not the uncanny valley. You don't really think it's happening. It seems kind of fake. Yeah. When they use the visual effects, like I've had Rick Baker on the podcast. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. And, you know, like things like the American Werewolf in London, he used like a real physical thing. And it looks like a physical thing. This is, you know, robot or whatever it is it bites a person this thing that he's pushing towards you it looks real and

candy you only see it for a brief second but your brain registers that's a physical thing whereas if you see the video your brain registers well that looks cool but I don't think it's really there yeah yes it's a visual effect it's not a practical effect right exactly and you have to there's a suspension of disbelief right like do you ever see I am legend it's a good example of it yeah I am legend was cool but it was like 2000 what when was that when was I am legend 2004 so about? Okay, back then they weren't that good. So there's a scene where the lions are in the park, like in the streets, like they have lions out there

because the civilizations collapse, the zoo is open. It looks so fake. Well, can you see like an intersection between AI and psychedelics? Like could you give a robot LSD or something like it? Well, no. What I was going to say is I think AI can give you some, and McKenna actually talked about this as well, that he believed that with virtual reality and computer simulations of trips it will get to a point of sophistication where you can visually simulate exactly what a psychedelic trip is you know and then there becomes this real possibility

within our lifetime of recording dreams now if you can record a dream can you record a psychedelic state sure right well I mean why not Now if you can record a dream, can you record a psychedelic state? Sure, I mean why not? Right, if they can, I mean I don't know how far away they are, let's say they're 50 years away from being able to do something like this, but if they can map out all of the synapse in your brain and all of the different neurochemistry that's going on,

if they can map that out and then attach it to some sort of a some ability to visually record what you're experiencing. And they can then have something like through a neuro implant like a neuro link or something like that. And then completely put you in the exact state that this person is having when they're on nine grams of mushrooms. That totally seems like if we can send video through the sky and it lands on your phone, it looks perfect. I think that's doable.

I think that's doable within X amount of years. It's not a thing like cloning people through a Printer like that's too far away. But I think the idea of recording your thoughts and then Figuring out what causes different reactions inside people's body how your visual cortex Interplays with all these different chemicals that are going on inside of your brain. Yeah, I think it could be a mass telepathic experience. Like if everybody was sharing the same experience at the same time. Yeah, I think that definitely. I think that definitely and definitely the possibility of a completely universal language.

Especially if we can enhance our brains. So if what they're talking about with Neuralink is multiple steps of use, right? Multiple steps of the way they're going to have this. First they're going to use it for people that are disabled. Like we had the guy in here, was the very first Neuralink patient. Oh, very cool. It was very cool.

He plays video games and he's like, his eyes are like an aimbot. So wherever he looks at it shoots. Cause like he can move his eye, instead of hand-eye coordination, it's just eye coordination. So he knows exactly. So it's like instantaneous visuals on things.

So he's like really good at video games with this. And that's better than not having that. So he plays better with the Neuralink than a person like myself would with just hand-eye coordination. So you would imagine that if he can do that better, the next thing it's going to be able to do is restore vision. And if they can restore vision and then they can create artificial eyes, you can have things like night vision.

You can have thermal imagery. You're going to be able to do things with your eyes that a biological eye can't do. And we might get to the point within our lifetime or our grandchildren's lifetime where people get rid of their eyes really quick because your eyes are bullshit. Your eyes don't even see through walls like what do you do these stupid fucking biological eyes and then the next thing you know you've got something that enhances your brain and gives you complete access to the internet instantaneously just through the mind, just through this implant and through

the mind and then everybody gets together and says listen I would like to learn Swahili, I'd like to learn Portuguese and Chinese. I don't have the time, no one has the time to learn 190 languages or whatever there are out there. Why don't we all just create one universal language? Would you think people would want that? I don't think leaders would want that. Yeah, because it would lead to everybody talking with everybody else. I don't think Russia would be down with that.

They'd probably censor it. Well, there was a time back in the Tower of Babel, everybody spoke one language, one tongue. And look what they did. They just built a big tower. And your God looked down and said, they have one language, one tongue. Yeah. And you look what they did. They just built a big tower and your God looked down and said, you know, they have one language and one tongue and look at what they do. Do you, what do you think? Like when you think of biblical stories, what do, I mean, I've, I've, I've spent far too much time speculating about the origins, but I'd like to know like, what do you think that was? Well, I think the stories could be seen as if they were real,

you know, kind of like the DMT world. At a certain point, I had to look at the DMT world as if it were real. Otherwise I would suggest it was, you know, something else. It was psychoanalytic, psychodynamic stuff. It was Jungian archetypes. It was psychoanalytic, psychodynamic stuff. It was Jungian archetypes. It was your brain on drugs. But if I took as an act of faith that it was a real world, I treated it as if it were real. And that's the way I approach the Bible, the Bible stories, as if they were real. Like it, if you read it carefully, it's a very coherent picture

of creation, of history, of the relationship between the spiritual and human worlds. And if you just enter it rather than interpret it as something else, then it starts opening up in a way that is quite interesting. For example, the flood, or well, for example, the flood. Or, well, for example, the Tower of Babel. If you look at preceding chapters, after the flood, God told man to spread out, to populate the world, because it was just Noah and his family after the flood. And then they had children and the directive

was to repopulate the earth. And instead they built this tower. So people kind of wonder why was the generation of the tower punished as it were by being dispersed and their languages were confused. But yeah, you know, so it's a cohesive whole. You know, the stories build upon each other. There's history.

Certain things occurred because of the behavior of certain people, certain ideas, certain practices. Yeah. of certain people, certain ideas, certain practices. Yeah, you know, so it isn't as if it were, you know, something else other than what you're reading. And that makes it important to understand the language is written in, you know, which is Hebrew. You know, so if you really want to understand at least the Hebrew Bible, what some call the Old Testament, you really need to know the Hebrew language because you can make the translation for yourself.

They say all translation is interpretation. So if you know the language directly, you can then make your own interpretation. Yeah, ancient Hebrew would be the most fascinating one to read it in. It's incredible. If you could understand it. Yeah. Do you read it? Yeah, I retaught myself biblical Hebrew.

Wow. How long did that take? Oh, I don't know, 16 years maybe. That's incredible. Well, you have these big old dictionaries, right? These concordances. Yeah, and each of the words has a three-letter root. Right. Yeah, and just depending on context, these concordances. Each of the words has a three-letter root.

Just depending on context, they can mean a lot of different things. Every time they appear for the first time, I would scribble in the margin of the text what this means. So you self-taught. Yeah, yeah. Well, as a kid, I went to Hebrew school a few hours every week and I learned conversational Hebrew and modern Hebrew. So that gave me a leg up when I started learning biblical Hebrew.

How different is biblical Hebrew from conversational Hebrew? Very different. They're really Byzantine word forms and grammar and words that appear once and never again in the biblical version of Hebrew. Once. Right. One word appears once in the whole 22 books of text. What's the word? Well, there's a number of those words.

Oh, wow. Yeah, they're called hapaxes. Whoa. H-A-P-A-X. Yeah, they appear only one time in the text. They have to figure out what that means. Whoa. Can you guess because of context?

Yeah, you can guess because of context. You can also, you can guess because of neighboring languages, like Hittite or Akkadian or Phoenician or Sumerian. Oh wow. Yeah, so it's an amazing language. I love the Hebrew language. That's one of the things that really got me hooked. It's very, you know, it's extremely irrational, but it's really telegraphic too. You could write one word that may encapsulate the meaning of six or eight words. You could write one word that may encapsulate the meaning of six or eight words. You could put together a biblical Hebrew word, for example, that might say, I found, let's

see, boy, I'd really have to think that through, but you can combine a lot of ideas in one single word. You know, that's, you That's the gist of it. So when we're thinking about the world and we're using words, we're confined by the way the English language interprets the world. Exactly. Yeah. And that's one of the things I loved learning about biblical Hebrew, is the grammatical forms open a window to parts of reality that just are ignored all of the time. You know, there's a notion of the reflexive tense, which means you're

doing something to yourself. So, for example, you might say, I sat down, or I sat myself down. And I sat myself down is, you know, the reflexive. And I sat down down and I sat myself down is you know the reflexive and I sat down is what's called the perfect yeah you know so the convolutions of grammar really open windows to you know views of your relationships that were invisible before and if you're using this and you're reading these ancient ancient stories and trying to interpret them and then trying to break it down into English or Greek or Latin whatever they did. The first translation was Greek and after that Latin. Have you ever done any reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls?

You know, I haven't really. I've read about them, but I haven't read any of the scrolls themselves. You know, one of my longstanding projects is a translation and commentary on Genesis. But Genesis is 1200 pages so far. Whoa. Yeah. So I'm not sure how I'm going to ever get you know that published but I think if I Condense it to you know something more manageable. It would be an interesting read for people. So what are you doing with it?

What are you doing this like when when you set out? What was your goal? Well, it was an expedient kind of reaction I was scribbling notes into the margins of my copy of the book of Genesis and there was just no more room. So I said, I've got to put this into a Word file. Yeah. So I'm going to put it into a Word file and it was pretty big. Yeah. So I'm still working through it. Well, there's all these commentaries to the text. You can't know the score without a scorecard, you know, without a program. Yeah, so there's a lot of very interesting and intelligent commentators. So those would be a lot of the notes that I would

write down. And I was compiling all of these interesting perspectives on the text. Wow. So are you reading it in ancient Hebrew? Yeah. Oh, wow. And I'm both doing my own translation and collating the commentaries from 20th or 30 different commentators. So when you're doing your own translating, are you comparing it to other translations and seeing how other people interpreted it? You know mostly other Jewish translations. Are

there but there are there a lot of straight from ancient Hebrew to English or is it a lot of like to Greek and then to Latin and then to English like how how are they usually done or how were they originally done? Or how were they originally done? Well, the first translation was to Aramaic, and then to Greek, and then I think to either Arabic or to Latin. So the first translation was the Dead Sea Scrolls as far as we know? Well, the translation of the Bible itself, you know, the five books, the first five books, and then the intervening, you know, 17, the prophets and whatnot, you know, those were, you know, translated into, you know, different languages, you know, book to book. You know, the Dead Sea Scrolls are both, you know, books

of the Bible with slight modifications or completely independent, you know, kinds of text. How many of them are books of the Bible how many of the stories? I think Isaiah was found in the Dead Sea caves Maybe some Ezekiel maybe some Leviticus, you know, you know like a number. Yeah, but not the whole Was Ezekiel the same as it was in the Old Testament? Mostly mostly there are modifications though with you know, the Dead Sea translations, you know, versus the ones we read today.

Ezekiel's the wildest one. Ezekiel really got me hooked on the whole DMT, endogenous, spiritual experience kind of motif. You have the visions of Ezekiel chapter one. Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, there's this, you know, roaring sound and he falls down and angel picks him up and there's like You know blue ice above and a roaring sound and we know within a wheel of the wheels and the angels with the wings On their wings as completely DMT like yeah. Yeah Yeah, I mean I was really impressed with the overlap of the two sets of experiences the UFO community latches on to Ezekiel as well

Yeah, you know the the depictions I was what I saw an image today. I should have just saved it and sent it to Jamie but it was Angels it was in a visual interpretation like a drawing of angels as described in the Bible and these angels look like flying crafts they look like flying geometric patterns yeah I'm trying to remember is a German guy I think who was really into yeah this that's the visions what I saw today but it was something like that. It was something like that. That was what it was, Jamie. Yeah.

That's exactly what it was. With a gyroscope. Yeah. Like, this is angels as described in the Bible. Yeah, the four faces, a lion, a bear, a man, and an eagle. Who is that drawing by? I don't know. Just a...

Chariot Vision of Ezekiel... Van Daniken or something? Oh, Eric Van Daniken, that guy? Yeah, I think. Is it that? No. No. That can't be it.

I think that that's just an old art piece. Ophanim. Go to the Wikipedia again, Jamie, so we can get be it. I think that that's just an old art piece. Oh funny See we go go to the Wikipedia again, Jamie. So we get the description didn't have anything. It just said it was a typical traditional depiction Mm-hmm. Okay, so it doesn't say who Yeah, like a wood cutting of some sort kind of how it was described. It's the von Daniken thing is fascinating I had lunch with him once where Peter teals house. Oh cool. Yeah, so It's the von Daniken thing is fascinating. I had lunch with him once where

Peter teals house. Oh cool. Yeah, so Eric Weinstein said hey, I would like you to come to this lunch We're gonna do with Eric von Daniken, you know a lot about that guy stuff. I'm like, oh, I know everything about that guy stuff Yeah, I've seen Chariots of the Gods like fucking ten times. I've watched a hundred interviews with this guy It's very he's like all in on the idea that UFOs created all this stuff and they're all Chariots of the Gods, like fucking ten times. I've watched a hundred interviews with this guy. He's like all in on the idea that UFOs created all this stuff and they're all flying spacemen. Well, who created the UFOs? That's a real good question. He doesn't have that information.

Yeah, that's the first question I would ask him. You know, he's a very nice guy. I don't want to say anything bad about him, and I really enjoyed Charades of the Gods It's a fun movie. It's like have you ever seen it. I know it's wonderful. Yeah from like 1976. I played in the movie theaters I remember when it came out what year is Charades of the Gods. It's pretty old But in it you know he's all in on everything being evidence that UFOs were here and a lot of like real sketchy connections, in my opinion. I'm more inclined to go the Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson route. I think there was a very sophisticated civilization that existed.

Like yeah, what year? 70. Damn. But we saw, I saw in the movie theater when I was a little kid. Yeah. But I think that it's there's real evidence that there was a sophisticated civilization, the Egyptian pyramids are enough. It's just like whatever the hell was going on there. That was an insanely sophisticated civilization that existed 4500 years ago, ago at least and probably went back quite a bit further than that You know according to their hieroglyphs. It went back 30,000 years, you know, whatever was going on there was pretty incredible and

I think to just say that the aliens did it it seems a little a little silly because there's no evidence that the aliens did it There's evidence that there was people around back then. Yeah, it's a case silly because there's no evidence that the aliens did it. There's evidence that there was people around back then. Yeah, it's a case of Occam's razor. You know, the most sensible explanation is probably the most likely. Yeah, but then there's also so many stories of us being visited in almost every ancient culture. Well, you know, is that like being visited or just the experience of being visited?

Are they the same thing? Well, one would be, you know, physically manifest and the other would just be manifest in the mind. Well, I think a lot of people are starting to lean in this general direction of that, of that perhaps we're trying to measure something that cannot be measured. Perhaps we're trying to like put something on a scale that does not necessarily physically exist but also has the attributes of something that physically exists or they can manifest something that physically exists but what it's kind of an illusion and the whole thing is kind of going on simultaneously, inter-dimensionally, and that this is why we struggle with our definitions and just our overall

acceptance of even the possibility of it being real. I mean people I think most people When you talk to them about UFOs if they don't have any skin in the game, they'll tell you they believe in UFOs They'll tell you that we think they think we've been visited because it's fun But if you said to them if you had a bet everything you have everything you have on the government has have, everything you have on the government has recovered crashed UFOs and that they visit us and they come from the Palladies star system and they've been here from the beginning of time. Or there's weird conscious experiences, weird doors, portals of consciousness that open up that allow you to see things

that might not necessarily be physically measurable, but also real. And that these things are what everybody's talking about in these ancient religious stories. These things are things that people are talking about when they claim they've been abducted by UFOs, then something landed, and even like the physical remnants of these crafts, that might, all of it might be just a part of this very bizarre psychic experiment that's going on. That as the mind expands its ability to understand other realms and as the month like you have to think of You don't have to but the way I think of it is like we didn't used to be able to see So it was an emerging trait of single-celled organisms

No sight if you believe in evolution it goes to multi-celled organisms eventually goes to sight So it's an emerging part of being a living thing, as you can see. Then language. We didn't used to be able to talk, now we talk freely. So there was an emerging thing, an ability that human beings had. And I think consciousness, psychic ability, precognition, remote viewing, all this stuff. For most people, that's a nonsense thought. But I think the thought is so prevalent in so many different cultures. Psychic phenomena is discussed ubiquitously in every corner of the world. And I think it's probably an emerging part of being a human being.

Well, do you think it's biologically based? It would need to be if it were, you know, universal like that. Chemically based, biologically based. I'm sure it probably has a lot to do with the diet of the creatures, right? I mean, if humans are consistently, if they're in the Amazon, you're consistently taking ayahuasca and eating mushrooms and having rituals, you're probably in that realm more often than a regular person who eats McDonald's and drinks coffee at Starbucks and is stressed out because they work all day and is on SSRIs.

You're probably not getting much of that at all. There's a lot of telepathy, I think, that occurs in those kinds of cultures. They share dreams and they share visions very interesting Well, you know that that's what they tried to initially call harming right discovered it They try to call it telepathy telepathy and exactly right, but it already existed under the definition under the Nomenclature they called it harming so they had to like, okay. Well, it's already named Cool to call it telepathy. Right? It was synthesized by somebody and got that name But the people that were experiencing it then when they wanted to name it telepathy and there was they wanted to name it that because

They were experiencing telepathic Right, they were having these weird experiences where they're sharing moments shared visions. Yeah Yeah, well, I think you can share visions just like you can share thoughts, you know, you can or you share feelings. I think just a little more complex. The thing about that is if it's local and there's other communication, right? If you're both in the same room and like your friend says, not the pyramid. I see the pyramid now. You know? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Or if you guys are nowhere near each other, you can't hear each other You can't and then you independently write down what you experienced and then that person says that's exactly and they have the exact same thing

So they have no interaction with you before they write down what they experienced or recorded or what have you but there's the same They're having the same thing. Yeah, do you know of Rupert Sheldrake's work? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I've had Rupert on you have okay great Yeah, I'm so he's spoken to. You have? Yeah. Great. Yeah. I'm sorry. He's spoken to you about his... Morphic resonance. ...his morphic resonance and these large scale experiments with a lot of people from the public.

They will make cold calls and people are expecting them. The dog knows it's going to come, that your owner is going to come home much sooner or at a different time than, and they can sense it and they're ready. So there is, you know, like awareness at a distance seems to be. But I think it also must occur between people or things which have already got a strong relationship Yeah, like rats when they teach them how to do a maze on the East Coast They figured I'd do a quicker on the West Coast. You've seen those right? Yeah. Yeah, and you know crystal formation I was you know thinking about a dream I had once of

my washing machine I was traveling and I had a dream about my washing machine that stopped working and I Called home and I said, you know, how's the washer and she said is broken. I Spoke to Rupert and I said, you know, can you explain that and he said you must have a strong relationship to your washing machine Well, you know Yeah, kind of sense. I mean cross species, you know it. Yeah, kind of makes sense. I mean, cross species, you know, cross life forms almost, communication. Well, I mean, do you think things would work out if there were universal language or, I

mean, would we just build a tower of Babel all over again or would we like do something good for everyone? I think we have the potential now because we're if we can develop universal language when you have real communication with people globally that's never existed before. Instantaneous real communication through devices that's never existed so that's a different factor when you consider a universal language so if you have real communication with people then you have cases. That's never existed. So that's a different factor when you consider a universal language. So if you have real communication with people, then you have universal language.

And then here's the big one, the ability to detect deception. So if we really are all communicating through some sort of neural implant, and we really are doing this telepathically with a universal language, and we're experiencing each other's consciousness in a way that eliminates all possibility of deception. You can see envy, greed, anger. You can see these things in people's thoughts. If this becomes a possibility, and I think it's within the realm of science, I think it's within the realm of technological possibility, when that does happen, it will mean a very different thing to be a human being. And I think it could be one of the greatest things that's ever happened because it would force us to only communicate at a higher level. You you there would be no benefit in bullshitting anymore. It would be the opposite.

It would actually be detrimental. You would be ostracized. No one would want to communicate with you anymore. Well, you'd be speaking the truth all the time. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. All the time. There'd be no more lying no more lying impossible to lie which I think is fascinating I don't think that would work why not well I mean there are some lies that are told for the sake of peace right but what are the parameters like what are the confines of our society and of our just geopolitically, you know, in terms of environments we exist in, like why? Why? What lies would be good for peace? They wouldn't be better if everybody just knew exactly what was going on.

Well, if everybody knew exactly what was going on, that would be something different. But I think, you know, in the meantime, there are some, you know, some benefits, you know, to white lies. Sure. As a human being. Right. With a limited ability to communicate and, you know, you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Sure. Yeah. But if you're not a human being anymore, essentially, you're a cyborg.

Right. And you're connected through a neural link to the whole world. There's going to be zero benefit in lying. Right. Well, you're suggesting a new species of man. I am suggesting a new species of man. Yeah. One of my favorite books is called First and Last Men.

It's by Olaf Stapledon. He's a British science fiction writer from the 1930s, 1940s, and he describes 19 species of man that extends over 2 billion years. And the final species is living on one of the outer planets. They live 35,000 years because that's how long it takes to learn everything. And every so often they all communicate telepathically around the whole globe. And it's like this big event, obviously. It happens every, whatever, 20,000 years. Whoa.

Yeah, and they work up to it. Yeah, it's an inspiring book, actually. It's one of my favorite. You know what another more controversial thought that I have about all this stuff is that ultimately the big bottleneck with information is going to be money because money right now is just ones and zeros, right? Money is just information. We agree that you have X amount of dollars here. That's we agree. It's not a gold standard anymore. It's

not backed by anything. It's just a weird thing. So that's information. The trend with technology is we have more and more access to information and ultimately we're going to have instantaneous access to information. But then we have this money thing. We have money which is – and as people get better and better at cracking and coding, like you're not going to have encrypted money. You're not going to have encrypted – it's not going to be possible, especially when quantum computing becomes ubiquitous. We're all operating off – it... Like, it's all done. And if this happens at the same time,

when we're all sharing our thoughts, impossible to lie, and then universal language and money, so then you have an even distribution of resources that's not based at all on capitalism. It's an abandonment of capitalism, but not in like a Marxist communist way, in sort of a practical utilitarian way to deal with the fact that everybody's communicating with everybody instantaneously.

You can't have a guy who lives in a fucking castle and another guy who lives in a favela with a dirt floor and no food if we're all existing as one. Well, it would require a change in human nature. Yeah, well, human nature won't be human nature once this happens. Whatever you think of human nature as of now, it's like, you can tell me something, I don't know if you're telling me the truth.

I can kind of guess, I have a feeling, but I don't know. So that makes progress slow. Well, do you think that the technology will change human nature? Of course. Yeah definitely. Yeah. But just by design if you if you're communicating telepathically and you can instantaneously detect it, it makes deception impossible right because you're only able to like express your thoughts. Yeah I have a feeling that won't be very popular. Well, it won't be popular with the kind of humans that exist today. Right, you know, so will the human nature have to change

first before there's an agreement to undertake that? I think it'll just change with it. Well, one of the good things is we might be able to completely eliminate things like depression, suicidal thoughts, mental illnesses. Maybe we could recognize that these are simply patterns in the way this thing operates. And if you just optimize it, it no longer has these patterns. If everybody has like this increased level of dopamine, for example, yeah, yeah, yeah, like everybody just increased dopamine 300%. Well, and increase oxytocin. Yes Yes, everybody loves everybody loves everybody walking around a state of tripping. We're all in ecstasy together It's a low level where you're functional, you know, I'm gonna crash your car, right? You probably won't have cars anymore

Anyway, they'll be driving you around well an interesting, you know thought is you know, maybe you can increase levels Of endogenous DMT in everyone genetically. Sure. Or on cue. Like, whenever you'd want it. Yeah. I think, you know, the rapture may have a biological, you know, basis in that regard. Like it's a, you know, timed event. Right. Which is worldwide that turns on the DMT synthesizing machinery and everybody connects

all the minds together in a universal language. That's one big blowout. And we emerge from our violent monkey past and become the next version of what it means to be a human being. Well which would be non-material. The DMT world is non-material. Right. It's visual. Well, which would be non-material. The DMT world is non-material. Right.

It's visual. So we might just transcend into some. Like, I think everybody in this kind of scenario, everybody would drop dead. But isn't it more than visual? It's visual in the sense that you experience it with your eyes, but your brain is experiencing something, too. You just don't know what to do with it.

You don't know where it goes. So you say, it's visual. I'm seeing it. But you're not just seeing it, you're experiencing it. Well I think it's a world made of light. I think that's the way and you know and we perceive light through the eyes. It's visually you know experienced. Right but whenever you have a visual with your eyes closed, it's tough to call it a visual. I mean, obviously, it's interacting with that part of your brain. Right. Well, you call it that after the fact.

After you come down, you know, when you're drinking a Coke. But have you ever opened your eyes? On DMT, there was this video I was watching the other day online where these people, they put them on DMT and then they had lasers. The red laser effect. Yeah. Tell me about that. Yeah, I just found out about it a couple days ago.

You? You just found out about it, that's crazy. I just found out about it a couple days ago. Yeah. Yeah, a friend is putting together a piece on that phenomenon, he wanted my opinion. Can you explain it to people what they're experiencing? Well, I think what happens, and you know this is just a very cursory assessment of the project, but you know people smoke DMT and then they project this white or

this this they project on my red laser onto the wall and if you look very carefully at it from what I understand you can see the matrix you seen code and my laser mm-hmm yeah yeah can we take a bit of it yeah yeah yeah that of a break ladies and gentlemen we'll be right back it's bit of a break, ladies and gentlemen. We'll be right back. It's not that he doesn't have faults. He most certainly has faults. But they all have faults. It's just they had control of the media and they turned him into something that he wasn't

just 10 years ago to them. Very strange how it was done. Yeah. You know, and we all were a victim of it. Everybody, like, you don't want to admit that he has any positive qualities, so you get labeled a Nazi. Yeah. Well, and why do you think that happened?

Well, because he is an outsider, and he is someone who did not come through the political system, so doesn't have all these relationships and all of these intertwined conflictions with corporations and all these different businesses that have paid for his campaign, the campaign self-financed. And then you have someone who didn't play the game to get in there. And you can't have that. You can't have that. If you have that, and this guy doesn't want wars, he doesn't want us giving money to

foreign companies and foreign countries and propping up dictators. We can't have that. We need that. That's part of the American machine. That's how it all works. The military industrial complex. It's real. Yeah, it's been real for a long time. I mean, when Eisenhower talked about it on television at the end of his term, it's kind

of a crazy moment in history that was just broadcast on television and wasn't really revisited until YouTube came around. It was ignored. Yeah. Yeah it was you know conveniently ignored. Yeah. Yeah um I think with RFK Jr. when he gets in we have a real possibility of opening up psychedelic treatment for veterans which I think is the best way to start it off, because they're the most deserving of it, they're the people we ask of the most, and there's been a lot of people that have had some pretty profound changes take place

because of psychedelic experiences. I think it's going to need to be scaled up. And what that scaling up looks like still isn't really worked out. I think they should develop special clinics, you know, where you wouldn't actually be doing research and you wouldn't need incredibly strong data to justify that kind of treatment. You would just need an indication that it was helpful. Right. And a specialized therapist, pure drug, it wouldn't be schedule one kind of super restrictive research but it wouldn't be just Wild West and anything goes.

I think there needs to be some kind of middle institutional development where, you know, a lot of people can go who would benefit from psychedelic assisted therapy. And yeah, the vets make sense. You know, so many homeless people are veterans. Like in Albuquerque, there's an enormous homeless population. A large number of them are vets. They're really not treated all that well when they get home.

No. No, they're not. And it's not like this idea of not having robust clinical research to show efficacy, like on a physiological level. That doesn't really exist with SSRIs anyway. And they're already prescribing them. Like there's so much anecdotal story, so many of them, of guys going to Mexico, taking Ibogaine, taking DMT, psilocybin experiences, and coming back and just like sorted their life out. It's amazing.

A couple of weeks ago, we were at a conference up in Denver, and I was doing some book signing. Some guy, my generation, came up to me, and he told a story after he returned from Vietnam. He was using basically every drug in a bad way, bad drugs in a bad way, and he smoked DMT one day, stopped using everything. He even moved to live across the street from a liquor store to be able to demonstrate that he had that willpower that had just changed with one DMT experience to assist any future drinking. Wow. Yeah, so those kinds of stories he just can't ignore.

There's too many of them, and I know I have personal friends that have gone through it and changed their life, quit drinking, got their shit together, became a much nicer person. Like sometimes people are just burdened by the stress of what they've experienced, especially war, which is the most horrific thing that people can experience. You're burdened by this and sometimes they don't know how to shut those demons off. They don't know how to shut it off and something can come along, whether it's a DMT experience,

ayahuasca, ibogaine, there's a bunch of different anecdotal stories that I've heard of different things. I was reading something about Colorado today. Colorado is doing some new psilocybin research thing where they're opening up clinics now? Yeah, yeah, they're gonna be opening up these healing clinics, which will be more or less, you know based on the Oregon model

You licensed the therapists you you know have to account for your supply of drugs and your quality control those kinds of things I would worry about that. Like we're talking about like control and That's where you would open up the door to potential Spiritual narcissism. Well, you could see someone starting a nice cult that way. Well, who controls the mushrooms? Who controls the mushrooms? Well, you know, it wouldn't be the first time that psychedelic cults, you know, emerged. Yeah.

Well, are you familiar with the Rajneesh story? Which one's that? In Antelope, Oregon there was this... Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Wild, wild country. Wild, wild country. I love that one.

That's Osho. That's Osho. Osho. Osho? Osho. Yeah. Osho or Osho? I think Osho.

You got me confused. I said Osho. Which one oh show show oh show He's my favorite. Yeah, but the people are retarded yeah That guy yeah that guy oh show I read his book Because I watched while our country was so blown away by it that I read his book and it's actually like very interesting I mean, I think he's written more than one book. I forget which one I have but I read it a few

years back and I was like this is a fascinating person like he doesn't seem like our cult leader. What's the main message that he's trying to get across? Well it's just sort of like a guidebook for life like see if pull up his books I'll tell you which one it was. The book of secrets. He's got a centero. Can you show me what they look like so I can see the covers? One would always wonder if... It's one of the few books I have that's a physical copy too I'd have to go back and look at it. You kind of wonder if these are transcriptions of his talks or things that other people helped him write or write things that other people wrote for him For the people is or by the people by the people

They did a dirty thing there They took all those homeless people and they brought them to the so they could count as voters And then they kicked him out. Yeah, weren't they trying to poison the city council or something? They poisoned everybody. They Yeah, they poisoned people when they were trying to take over politically. But that was that one woman. What was her name? Rita? Was our name? The one woman who got in trouble. She she was kind of running the cult. Right. She was pretty brutal.

Well, you know, I spent some time at a Zen monastery. I was actually, as a young man, thinking of becoming a monk. How long did you spend there? Not that long, because my depression lifted while I was there. I think my motivation to become a monk was because of how depressed I was. I didn't think I was able to really function any other way than, you know, than in a cloister, more or less. Yeah, but then my depression cleared and I went back to school.

But I stayed associated with them for over 20 years and went up there. What do you attribute your depression lifting to? Well, it was, I think it was a minor enlightenment experience. That's not to say that I'm enlightened or anything. But if you look at the phenomenology of the enlightenment experience, it's on a scale. There's gradations like the major one and then smaller little ones.

I was walking back from a work assignment. They were asked, well, one thing they liked doing was because I was a medical student back there, back then, thought I was hot shit. I was always given the worst assignments, the worst work assignments, like clean the toilets or knock down this hill. So one day they said, can you move that hill?

So I had my shovel and my pick us 22 years old or whatnot. Yeah. And I was coming back from the work project. And my depression just lifted right off my shoulders. It was the damndest thing is about 1530 seconds or so. I thought, Oh, that's pretty interesting. Yeah. And the end of the day came and I woke up the next morning and I was still feeling pretty good. Wow. And yeah, you know, so I was indebted to them for helping pull me out of that bad

mood. It was a bad mood too. I had to drop out of school. Was it directly after you had to move the hill? It was on the way back to the tool shed. Hmm. Yeah. Did you do anything before that physically? I don't remember what my other work assignment was. It was an afternoon work assignment, as I remember. I mean in your life. Did you ever do any hard labor? Oh. Ever work out? Ever take a sport? Yeah, I ran track. You ran track?

It was the sprints though, so it was just a sudden burst of energy. It wasn't anything prolonged. You know, I've done a lot of strenuous hiking and backpacking. The sprinting, when you were doing that, were you particularly happy or depressed when you were doing that? No. Well, you know, sprinting itself is great. I don't mean that.

I mean, during the time period where you were participating in sprinting, did you have any depression? No, no. Well, I suppose, you know, you know, teen angst. Yeah, you know, teenager angst, you know, growing up in the San Fernando Valley. Right, that everybody has. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. I had that while I was doing martial arts. It's not like it cures it. But I do know personally me, if I go long periods of time where I don't exercise, I get depressed. I don't feel good. I feel shitty. I feel off. I think our bodies put vanity aside because I think a lot of very intelligent people associate exercise with the vanity but I think your body has a physical requirement to achieve like homeostasis to achieve balance to achieve like an ability to kind of like exist in a neutral place you're always affected by the world but the more neutral you are the better like the more you're just you exist and you're not like constantly wound up about something or constantly upset about this or constantly fearing that or being overwhelmed. I think some of that is in response to a lack

of physical movement. I think the body is designed to exist in a very primal world that doesn't exist anymore And so because the body had a lot of requirements 10,000 15,000 years ago I think we're still programmed in that general way and That the only way to keep a balance of the mind and the body together for me is to Constantly engage in exercise, rigorous exercise. Yeah. What kind of diet do you follow? Mostly I eat meat.

Mostly meat. Mostly meat. Yeah. Beef? Yeah. I eat beef, but I eat a lot of wild game, a lot of elk. I eat deer and wild pigs. I do eat some vegetables sometimes, but only if I feel like it.

I don't eat them for nutrition. I eat fruit and I take a lot of vitamins. Yeah, and no greens. I mean, I'll eat greens every now and then. I'll have like a salad if I feel like having a salad, but I don't think I'm having a salad for health. You know, I think it's for taste. Yeah, it's for just I like eating stuff.

Yeah, do you like pretzels? I do. I try not to eat them. Yeah, I love pretzels. That's for taste. Yeah, it's for just I like eating stuff. Yeah, do you like pretzels? I do I try not to eat them Yeah, I love pretzels. That's my week. They're kind of bullshit, but I was at the mall the other day and we walked by what is it? Annie's Annie's pretzels. Is that what it is? It's crack. I didn't eat one but that smell the smell in the air was like there was a giant-ass line a huge line There's no line for anything else in that food court, but that pretzel line was big. There must be something in those pretzels. Deliciousness?

Yeah, MDMA. They're so good, they're so good. No, there's no MDMA, it's just delicious. You feel terrible right after you ate it, like what did I do? That's like MDMA. Yeah, but there's no 5-HTP that you can take that's going to help you. The down you feel off of a pretzel Sometimes it's worth it though because they're so delicious especially the ones that wrap a hot dog in the pretzel. Yeah

Yeah, a month or two ago. I was at Union Station in Los Angeles and there was a stand. You're selling, you know the You know the encased hot dogs in Yeah, you have to apply a fair amount of mustard. They're so good though, right? It's delicious, terrible for you. So good though. We took an Amtrak back from Union Station to Albuquerque. You know like an overnight.

How's that? Well, it was quaint, but it wasn't like efficient. It's too slow. It's pretty slow, pretty noisy. And you start thinking, I could have been on a plane. I would have already been there. Right, it would have been just two hours rather than whatever it was, 14 or so.

Yeah, that's stupid. Well, I mean, look at European trains, though. You can really have fun on a European train. They're comfy, they're on time, good food, good coffee. What's the fastest train? Is it Japan? Do they have the bullet trains? I think the Chinese Chinese or the Japanese. Yeah, really really fast Yeah, that's one of the things that Elon was trying to do with America

They were trying to put bullet trains that would take you from San Francisco to New York City in like a few hours Yeah, I mean there should be no reason not to do that. The only reason would. Other than the automobile industry. Well, also tracks. Like, who's watching those tracks? If you're going 1,000 miles an hour or whatever you're going, who's watching the tracks? Who's making sure someone doesn't put something on the tracks?

Right, right. That's even a concern now. But yeah, it would certainly be if the people are going 1,000 miles an hour. Yeah, like, I'm amazed at how few derailments there are. If you think about how many trains are flying back and forth. Yeah, well, I lived in Gallup, New Mexico for years, and it's a train town, more or less. And you know, there were, I think they, there were three trains came through every hour you know 24-7 so

Wow. 70 trains, 75 trains every day would go through town and there were very few derailments. That's crazy. Yeah yeah they're pretty effective. But you're constantly waiting for trains then like there's always those things that come down ding ding ding ding ding. Oh yeah. You gotta sit there and wait while the train flies by. Yeah it was a point of controversy in that little town like were they going to build a tunnel underneath or a bridge over yeah yeah you know the business folks in you know the downtown area and it would be noisy too that trains would go by you know 35 miles an hour and they're big trains. Some of the cargo trains are more than a mile long and they can just take forever to cross Second and Third Street and you're just stuck there.

Yeah, fuck that. Right. Well, I just wouldn't want to be in a place that's that noisy, especially if you're in New Mexico. It's kind of quiet. Well, your bones rattle when the trains go by and You know, they honk their horns like they have to do three then two then three then two Well, there's some apartments in New York's New York City, right?

Where the apartment buildings there and the trains going right in front of the apartment exactly. That's crazy Yeah, like how cheap is that rent that you agree to? Yeah, and the long-term effects on your mental physical health Yeah, well whenever someone's crazy in a movie they always lived there. He's lived like right where the train is You know, he just kind of accentuates their craziness, right? They get no rest. I know well, you know, my mom's mom lived in a little town in Western, Pennsylvania and You know the coal trains would pass through her backyard, basically. There's a little hill in her backyard and the train tracks.

And I really enjoyed sitting there as the trains went by, smelling the exhaust. That was something that was an early manifestation of my enjoyment. Have you seen these in China. Whoa, that's crazy. It goes through the building Imagine if you're above that trying to sleep fuck out of here. Yeah, that's nuts Yeah, they couldn't find anybody to live there. You could. Well, I guess prisoners maybe. Somebody would agree. It could be a jail or a prison too.

Yeah, or just some crazy person. They just think that's a good idea, you know? Mm-hmm. A lot of people like to live in different ways. I also have this, like, their market's right on the train line. Whoa. And they have to like pick up the stuff when it comes through. What? Yeah. And that's efficient. So they quickly grab their baskets and stuff and pull it out of the way.

Yeah. Because like people are walking on the train track. That's nuts. That is crazy. And rather than move, they just figure it out. Wow. Eight times a day, seven days a week. Wow. You have to put things away. You have three minutes. Oh, really?

Wow. How many dogs do they lose every year? Well, suicides too. I'm sure. You know, lots of people that, like, the small town that I was living in, yeah, that would be like a regular thing if people would lay down on the tracks if they were having a bad day. Imagine if we can cure that with Elon Musk's Neuralink.

Everybody sign up. Yeah, on the reservation, it might be hard to get the word out there. Yeah, they probably don't want to listen to you anyway. They probably want you to take it so that you all go extinct, they'll take over again. Some crazy white man idea. Yeah. I mean, these are people that were hesitant to agree

to get photographed. You know? They're going to be the last adopters of this stupid fucking brain implant these stupid white people are doing Well, you know, well, well, so gallop is you know, like on their reservation, you know, pretty much the Navajo reservation Yeah, and it most of the population is native Yeah, so it was pretty interesting you, living among the natives for 14 years. And their view of white people is they're noisy, they're superficial, and they're kind

of dumb. Well, there's plenty of examples that would support that if you were inclined to be less charitable and make a rash generalization about white people? Well, I learned to be quiet there because there isn't anything to do. And there aren't that many people. We were talking about this before it aired. One of the big reasons you moved out of there was it's hard to get health care, right? The health care was rather

poor yeah like I came down with pneumonia this is 2014 and I was not I didn't receive the best care ended up getting C diff because of all the antibiotics what is that this horrible diarrhea it's like a fatal diarrhea I think 30,000 people in the country die every year from C. diff Whoa, yeah, and I was battling that You know it The quality of the care was you're so poor that I was taking notes and I thought if I lived through this I'm gonna write about it. And yeah, so that is the basis of that autobiographical

Novel I wrote a few years ago. Oh. Joseph Levy escapes death. Yeah, it's an account of… I remember I was worried about you but I didn't want to pry because we had gone back and forth in the email and you were just telling me your health was not well. Oh yeah, yeah. We were talking about the possibility of me being on your show. Yeah, just too sick. I can't travel. Yeah

Generally people don't bounce back when they say they're that sick. I was really worried about you, but I didn't want to know like how does one you know, I Don't want to pry, you know I felt like if you want to tell me about what's going on you would tell me what's going on Yeah, it was a really hard time Yeah, and I bounced back like I look great. Yeah, I look better than ever actually. Oh, thanks Yeah, I swore I would bounce back and feel even better than I did you know before I got sick Yeah, but it was a chore. Well, it did strengthen my belief in God, speaking of God. I wasn't quite, well, that, you know, God was not quite ready

to take me, and I wanted to become closer to that power that let, you know, that let me live. And did you feel like, because God was not, God did not want to take you, Did you feel like you had work to do? Yeah. Yeah, I had to get back to work I had to continue being useful like I just couldn't rest on my laurels. Yeah Yeah, I mean if you had called and you said how's it going I'd say bad Sounds like it was real bad. Yeah. That's why I was worried. Yeah. Because you know I'm just too used to getting those kind of emails and then you hear that

someone passed away. Oh yeah. I know. And you know in my generation it's you know kind of accelerating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So when you did finally get out of this, how long was like the actual sick period, how long was the period where you're really hurting? Well, the pneumonia was about 10 days and the C. diff started about 10 days after that and went on for six weeks. Whoa. I lost 15 pounds.

Whoa, a new thin guy to begin with. Yeah, I didn't have 15 pounds to lose. So yeah, I found a good psychotherapist. I went in there and fell asleep the first visit. I said, I'm really tired. I feel really weak. And that was it. And I started working with her for

like the next four years yep because obviously things had gotten so you know so dire because I wasn't taking care of myself right so I had to kind of get to the bottom of that yeah you know so took another maybe seven months before I started to feel like my strength back and my brain functioning again. You know, one turning point, this might interest some of your listeners, is I got vaccinated for the flu in January,

which was nine months after this all started. And it was the most painful vaccination I'd ever had. It was beyond 10. It wasn't even throbbing, it was just constant, like beyond any pain in my arm I'd ever had. It was beyond 10. It wasn't even throbbing. It was just constant, like beyond any pain in my arm I'd ever felt. How long did it last? 12 hours. And I woke up feeling great. Wow.

Like the best I had felt in almost a year. So after 12 hours, just wore off. I went to bed thinking, God, I hope this wears off or else I'm going to have to get some attention. Yeah, it just wore off and I felt pretty darn good the next morning. How weird? Very weird. I guess my immune system just really needed to just get socked or something. Yeah.

And it seemed to have, you know, done the trick. Just strange that you'd have like a local pain that's that intense. It was... Generally don't hear about that. Yeah. Yeah, it was just at the vaccination site. Very interesting. Yeah, weird. Do you just at that vaccination site. Very interesting. Yeah, weird. Do you get vaccinated?

This might be a personal question. No, you can ask me anything. Yeah, no. I almost got vaccinated for COVID. Right, I was wondering. I was totally willing to do it. It was the early days of the pandemic and the UFC had allocated about I think was 150 or so doses for all their employees because they were running shows during the pandemic when everyone was terrified of it.

So I go to Vegas to do this UFC event and you had a test before I leave, then you fly, you test when you get there and you know they're really strict with their protocols, make sure that no one was sick. When people were sick, like if someone, like a fighter's corner man was sick, everyone was kicked off. All those people were off. The fighter couldn't compete even if he was negative. Oh, okay. Because he had been exposed.

Right. So they were real strict. And so they said, we have these vaccines if you want one. They didn't tell me I had to take it, but they said, if you want one, I said, sure. I said, can I get it right before the fights? And they said, sure. And they didn't know that I had to go to the actual clinic or the hospital. So I contacted the doctor. I said, hey, I'm here. Can you vaccinate me before the show? He said, you actually have to go to the clinic on Monday. Can you stay till Monday? I said, I can't, but I'll be back in two weeks for the next

event. So during the time where I was going to get shot and then two weeks later, they pulled it. So the Johnson and Johnson vaccine got pulled because people were getting blood clots. And so then two people that I knew that did get it had strokes. I don't know if it was a coincidence, but it seemed rather odd. And then I started getting nervous. And so then I started reading different things by different scientists that had opposing perspectives on both the efficacy and the safety of the vaccine. And then I got COVID. And then when I got COVID, I got over it really quickly.

And then I got attacked on CNN. So I was like, okay, what's going on here? Like, why are you guys upset that I took a certain medicine and got better? I've never even heard of such a thing. And they started labeling it, this ivermectin as a horse dewormer, which is crazy, because it won the Nobel Prize for people.

So it was like I was watching this bizarre thing take place in scale on mass media against me, but against me in the most preposterous way possible because I was healthy. I got better quick. Like in three days I was better and I made a video. In six days I was working out like full steam. I didn't, I didn't get sick for long at all. And I listed a bunch of different medications that I took. But for whatever reason, they labeled ivermectin as the thing that needed to be attacked.

And it was they all in lockstep, MSNBC, CNN, newspapers, all of them making these ridiculous statements that I was taking veterinary medicine. I got medicine from a doctor, from a pharmacy, an actual human doctor, medication for humans, and more importantly, I got better, like really quick. Like, what is happening here? This is the strangest thing I've ever seen in my life. It was like this mass psychosis that was propagated

by the media who were only intent on keeping everyone terrified and offering only one solution and that solution just coincidentally happened to be insanely profitable. Yeah, that's hard to figure. It was weird to go through. It's very, very weird to go through. So needless to say, I have become very skeptical about a lot of narratives that are expressed constantly without any real examination. Well, do you think they're going after you or going after the Ivermectin? Going after the Ivermectin, 100%. I was a simple, easy to make fun of person who did a ridiculous thing, and that's why

they were able to say, horse dewormer. But it's such a dumb thing to say because it was a playbook that would have been really effective in 1998. You could have gotten that done in 1998. The problem is there's too much information that's available. And when you're mocking a person for taking a drug that a human being won the Nobel Prize for in like 2015 for its use in humans, like that seems insane. Also you're knocking people taking off label medication under the advice of a trained physician? What?

Like what's going on? And who are these people that are doing this? These talking heads on CNN? Why are they all agreeing? How come not one person is saying, hey, what is the reason why ivermectin would be taken in the first place? Oh, oh, it stops viral replication in vitro? Well, maybe there's some, maybe there's some reason to use this. Maybe these doctors are correct all these anecdotal stories about people taking it and then getting better quickly Like is there anything to this but there was none of that in the media? Because they are sponsored by pharmacy to good drug companies who clearly had marching orders. Yeah, what do you make of this? Virus that's killing folks in the Congo?

Jesus, who knows? Yeah. I don't know anything about it. Yeah. 170 people have died. They don't know what it is. Some African virus. Fun. See if Bill Gates has been visiting there lately. I don't know. I'm terrified of pandemics for sure I just that one wasn't one to be terrified of and they made us terrified of it, which makes me terrified Yeah, because that was one where they you know We talked about this in the podcast where they made fun of Donald Trump because he was saying it's less than 1% of the people Who get it die and then CNN was mocking him saying it's 3.4 percent It's 3.4 percent. You know was it was considerably less than 1%

He was right, but they had marching orders and his marching orders was to scare the shit out of people and to tell them to get vaccinated It was a scary time. Yeah sure Yeah, yeah, they closed down the town that I was living in back then Gallup They it was closed down you couldn't go into it if you didn't live there God so weird for nine days Well, you know nine nine days is better than California. California, they did a whole year and a half of, like, complete restrictions. They were stopping outdoor dining just arbitrarily. I had a friend and his brother works for the state, and he said to the lady who was in

charge of it, he said, why are you stopping outdoor dining? There's no evidence that there's spread through outdoor dining. And she said it's the optics. The optics. Like we're going to shut businesses down for optics because they had to show that they're doing something because there's like a noticeable spread that's being reported in the media. That's called virtue signaling, right? Yeah. Well, it's also the real problem is their jobs are not dependent upon their society functioning.

They get paid no matter what. So if society crumbles in all these businesses, they owe 70% of their restaurants at one point in time. 70% just went under. That's insane to continue a practice like that, especially where within six months, they should have known that it wasn't as fatal as everybody said it was. When they already had the data in about how come all these people that are dying, they

all have like significant amount of comorbidities. How come all these people that are dying are over the age of 80? It doesn't mean fuck those people. It means protect those people people but let everybody else get back to work. Like you just have control of these people and you're continuing to enforce this control while their lives are destroyed. How many people turned to drugs? How many people committed suicide because they lost everything completely out of their power? How many lives were lost? How many kids had their childhood

stripped away from them and have significant learning problems, not just because they didn't go to school, but because even when they went to school, they had to wear a mask. So the whole reading people's lips and hearing sounds come out, everything was weird. Reading faces was weird. If you're a toddler and your experience is going through the first couple of years of your schooling and your preschool with fucking masks on, like what is that? What do we do to these people? Well, we'll find out. Yeah. Yeah. And the only good out of it, in my opinion, is that people realize that it was stupid, and they won't be as quick to accept it in

the future. You think if there's another pandemic? Right. I don't think people are gonna accept the government which is filled with a bunch of fucking silly people that have decided to run the government having complete control over whether or not you can run your business or you can decide to take you know a trip somewhere or you could visit your parents when they're in the hospital like all that is crazy. Yeah. I wonder what impact RFK Jr. is going to have on the delivery of healthcare now. Well, he's going to have so much of an impact that they're talking about preemptively pardoning Fauci. Like, how do you pardon someone that didn't do a crime?

Preemptively. How are you pardoning someone where he's not? Not only is he not convicted of a crime. He's not even tried. He's not Accused he's not indicted. What do you I guess that's called blanket immunity. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's never been done before There's never been preemptive pardons. Yeah. That's an interest that may have been committing crimes It's weird. Yeah. Well, do you know much about the fluoride story? A lot of people wonder about the pineal gland and DMT synthesis if you have a calcified

pineal, which is more likely if you're fluoridated. Have they ever done autopsy studies on people that in high fluoride areas check out their pineal glands? Or is this just like one of those things that people say? Well, it's the case in lower animals that you feed them a high fluoride diet and their pineal glands calcify more rapidly. I'm not sure what the human literature is. So when you say that, when they calcify more rapidly, like what animals are they serving

them fluoride? Oh, you know, rats, mice. And what have the results been, like significant differences? Yeah, I mean, you know, these experimental animals, pineal glands anyway, yeah, they do calcify more rapidly. You know, but whether or not that actually correlates to a reduction in melatonin production, for example, I'm not that familiar with the literature.

Is the number commensurate with what would even be possible through fluoride in water, or would have to be some other form of poisoning? Is it like a very high level of fluoride that they're giving them? With the experimental animals, yeah, this fluoride-rich kind of poisoning. Is it like a very high level of fluoride that they're giving them? With the experimental animals, yeah, this fluoride-rich kind of diet. So then the question would be,

what about the accumulation of fluoride in small doses over the course of a long lifetime? Yeah, I'm just not that current on the literature. There's a couple of things that occurred that caused pineal calcification. One is aging. The older you get, the more calcification there is. Back when I was current on the pineal physiology data, which was a long time ago, like 40 years ago, there wasn't a relationship between the degree of calcification in the human pineal and production of melatonin.

You know, so, like, at least according, you know, to the data from the 80s, you know, the degree of calcification wasn't, you know, functionally significant. You know, but I get an email here and there wondering if fluoridation of the pineal might reduce the production of endogenous DMT, which might, you know, theorize takes place. Yeah, but we don't really know quite yet if the pineal even makes DMT, you know, let alone if pineal calcification might reduce it. Wouldn't it be interesting to measure different lifestyles and then also look at the age in which these people are and see if there's like when they die if there's calcification? You know, give you one person who's a marathon runner and they're 65 versus one person who's

sedentary, drinks a lot and they're also 65. Yeah. You would think it would correlate and they're also 65. Yeah. You would think it would correlate with your overall general health. Right. Yeah. I mean, and if you're thinking that it's age-related, it may be age-related or is it exposure over long periods of time, you know, where it accumulates? Because the amount of fluoride that's in the water is very small.

And this is one of the things that people point to when they say that it's not dangerous. It's very small. But the question is, like, how, where does it go? Like, does it actually leave the body or does it accumulate somewhere? Yeah. Well, you'd have to compare, you know, you'd have to compare autopsies and older folks from, you know, from areas that never had fluoride in their water versus those that did and I am certain those studies have been done you know

like I said I'm just not that current on I just don't buy the idea that you should put fluoride in the water to prevent tooth decay I just think that sounds like the way I've described that I said that's like putting sunscreen in the apples because some people get sunburned. Like that doesn't seem logical. You could just brush your fucking teeth. Like you don't need to have this weird neurotoxic chemical in our water, even in low supplies. Yeah. Would you put fluoride in the toothpaste?

No. I don't have fluoride in my toothpaste. I don't have cavities. Oh, I do. I've had a few cavities. Do you eat sugar? I love sugar. That's it We found it. I don't hardly ever eat sugar

Yeah, me occasionally have a cookie or something like that, but it's not a normal thing for me I think it's diet. It's diet and it's brushing your teeth. Yeah Well, and I think exercising your jaw too like you're chewing gum, right? Xylitol gum supposed to be really good for your jaw, good for your teeth. If you have a healthy jaw, healthy chin, I mean, you breathe easier. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, I don't know how they got started with the whole fluoride in the water thing, but it seems like a giant scam. Like big fluoride is still selling fluoride to all these different water departments and they don't want to stop. That's the only thing that makes sense to me. It doesn't make any sense that people would be willing to potentially sacrifice their children's IQ.

There's a direct correlation between high levels of calcium in the water, or excuse me, high levels of fluoride in the water and low IQs. This has been established. So if that's true, that should be a fucking giant red flag for people. I mean, once you eliminate all the other environmental things that may be consistent with the people that have lower IQs in children, if you're just pointing only to fluoride, if this is one thing that varies, like this is a potential real problem. We know that leaded gas reduced people's IQ. You know that, right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. When they used to have leaded gas, like people like me and you who grew up at a time with leaded gas, you probably would be like have a 10-point higher IQ if you didn't grow up with leaded gas. I mean, there's some sort of a percentage. I think it's a small percentage, but it's been measured. It's been measured.

Find out like what percentage IQ, what percentage of a detriment is leaded gas to your IQ? Because they actually have done studies on people and like what happened once unleaded gas was introduced and how children's IQs went up. Oh yeah super helpy yeah yeah it was quite helpful. It's still in the ground in some places. Well it's still a lot of pipes. Oh really? Yeah. Lead pipes. Oh yeah. Yeah the whole Flint thing. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh right right right. Yeah they use lead pipes. How crazy. That you're drinking water. Well the Romans used lead pipes. I know. you're drinking water. Well, the Romans use lead pipes. I know yeah for their plumbing. Yeah

You know the Latin name, you know for lead is plum You plumb them. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that's why you know, the pipes were called plumbing That's probably why the Coliseum got started. They're all fucked up on lead poisoning and just willing to throw their Soldiers to the lions. Nearly half of US population exposed to dangerously high lead levels. So what does this say about IQ? Here it goes. Exposure to car exhausts.

Estimate childhood lead exposure has on average led to a reduction of 2.6 IQ points per person. That's nuts. Research also found that non-Hispanic black people, individuals with lower family income to poverty ratio, and those with an older housing age were likely to have higher levels of lead in their blood. Well, probably because they lived in urban areas where there's more car traffic, right? Most likely. Yeah, if they're inhaling lead particles. If they're in cities, people that live in like very congested areas Wow

1973 environmental protection agency issued its first call for manufacturers to begin a gradual reduction the amount of lead and gasoline I bet they're gonna look back at fluoride the same way we look back at leaded gas Yeah, we're gonna go what the hell were we doing? It doesn't even make any sense. Oh Let it gas. Yeah, we're gonna go what the hell were we doing? It doesn't even make any sense. Oh It's for your teeth It's for your brush your fucking teeth and if you use fluoride in your toothpaste great just spit it out Don't swallow that shit right you don't swallow to my friend Eddie said it best he said If fluoride wasn't a problem, why would they want to sell you? Toothpaste without fluoride and why does it say fluoride-free in the toothpaste?

Why do people gravitate towards fluoride-free toothpaste? But because of studies like this, where they've found that it actually, there is a correlation between IQ levels and fluoride. And at high levels, it's fucking dangerous for you. But there's all these people trying to dismiss it. Oh, stop. What's the big deal? There is nothing to this.

Look at the amount of fluoride. What about accumulative? Do we know? Do you really know or why are you so willing to accept the fact that it's a good idea to throw neurotoxins in the water supply? Well, you know, they may have just discovered it, you know, through serendipity. There may have been some... Well, they did discover it through that. There was an area in Texas, I believe, where they had high natural levels of fluoride in the water, and there's a corresponding lower instance of cavities.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think it's Texas. Google, how did they start putting fluoride in the water? I'm pretty sure it's that. Some healing springs of some sort. Yeah, some mineral rich fluoride water. I don't know, but either way just brush your teeth. Stop eating so much sweets and brush your teeth. Both those things are a good idea. Fluoride in the water? Not a good idea. If you want to sell fluoride and tell people to add it to their water, fine.

But put it in everybody's water? That's crazy. That seems crazy. Yeah. Well, I mean, as a dentist or when I was a small kid, we used to get these fluoride treatments. Yeah. Yeah, with this like blue gun kind of gel, kind of gel that they would, you know, put in a splint and you put it on your upper and lower teeth for like five minutes or whatnot.

Yeah, kills bad germs, a fluoride treatment. Well, yeah, lower your curiosity. Yeah, lower your IQ, which is maybe not a bad idea. And you got to wonder what the thing you were talking about before about some people just don't have imagination Mm-hmm, which is really crazy to think that some people are just they just got Bad hand. Well, they can't make stuff up. They were they must be quite practical, right? I mean you see what you see is what you get. There's no abstracting. That's very charitable. They might just be dull. They might be dull-minded, you know?

I mean, there's a certain percentage of our population that has an IQ below 85. I think, what is it, like 15% or something like that? Was it higher than that? We were talking about it the other day, but I don't think we ever researched the actual number. But it's significant enough where you're like, whoa. You're running around the world with an 85 IQ. It's hard. Well, you kind of wonder about the IQ test, right? I mean, it was what was it called?

The Stanford-Binet test. It was developed way long ago, may not really measure all aspects of intelligence. So that's true. It may be somewhere within 85 point IQ is smart in other ways, like emotionally intelligent, for example. Okay, so with a 70 IQ, you have like 2%, 2 point something percent of the people. When you get to 85, you have 13.6%. So 13.6% have an IQ at 85 or below.

That's a lot. 34% is 100 to 85. But you have to also factor in education, right? Like to take an IQ test, you have to be able to understand concepts, you have to be able to solve problems, and you most likely would have to have been exposed to many problems when you were younger for you to understand how these work. And some people have had a very poor education and they might be intelligent, they might be very emotionally intelligent. Right, right. Yeah, that was what I was thinking is that, yeah, it would be a different scale of intelligence than purely cognitive. Right, right.

Yeah, well, that's one of the interesting elements about genetic engineering of the humans. There is a big article in something I was reading, oh, ecstatic integration. It's a newsletter put out by Jules Evans, a friend. And he dove into genetic engineering amafetuses. Like you can have a three DNA fetus or embryo, like the mom, the dad, and some super smart person or super amathletic person. know, like the mom, the dad and some super smart person or actually a super athletic person, you know, so you could do like a chimera almost in, you know, the human situation. Whoa.

That's probably already happened. Yeah, it is happening offshore. Yeah. That was the gist of, you know, China's probably creating a race of super people. Well, the first, you know, genetic Well the first genetic engineering of the fetus occurred in China. It was a fellow working to develop HIV. That's what he says. Yeah.

But it accidentally made them higher acute. Accidentally. Yeah. Well, so that guy's back at work. Yeah. Well, he went to jail for a little bit. Right. He's got a big lab, lots of funding.

It's kind of weird. It seems like they kind of made him a scapegoat a little bit, which they tend to do over there. Well, you'd think that in a lot of ways that he would be celebrated. Like, for example, the Scottish scientists that cloned that sheep in Dolly. Dolly.

Yeah. They were heroes. Sure. But I think we think very differently about it when it's being done with people. We get super nervous, especially if you're gonna be the first person that does it. There's gonna be a lot of outrage, and I think some of that outrage is gonna be by people that wish they did it first. So they're gonna be pretending that this is horrible that you've done this. All right, they were scooped. Yeah. I wonder if there is that kind of reaction with the first heart transplant or the first kidney transplant if the originators of the

methodology were Demonized because you know they were like you're putting somebody else's heart in your place has to be right especially well We're lucky that it was done the 20th century Imagine if it had been done in the 18th century the 16th century, you know if you in the 1500s said, okay I know how to save you this guy just got run over by a wagon. I'm gonna take his heart out I'm gonna cut you open put his heart into you Like what right and that would have even worked because your body would have rejected it back then because they didn't have the proper drugs It allowed people to accept other people's organs and suppress your immune system.

So your immune system doesn't reject the organ. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I never was in a heart transplant operating theater. You know, once in an emergency room, actually, I was able to, you know, crack somebody's chest open and work on their heart and you kind of of, you know give it the massage. Well the person you know was quite sick he was dying and we tried everything, you know like everything, you know like we used a defibrillator, we put some epinephrine in a big

syringe, put it through his chest into his heart, didn't help. And the last thing that we could do was do open heart massage. Yeah, open chest massage. It was crazy. It was crazy. Yeah, and there were a bunch of – like a number of students around and we each took turns like squeezing it and feel it was pretty.

Did he got last after that? No, no. You know, by the time you open up somebody's chest and start squeezing their heart with your hands, yeah, it's kind of... So did he make it through that day or how long did he live for? No, he never woke up. Oh, Jesus. You know, medical training is a pretty interesting experience.

The kinds of things that you learn to do to the human body and the kinds of things that people let you do to them because you're a physician. It's a very interesting development of a role. For example, when we first started working in the hospitals, you know, there's a dress code. You know, this was 1976 or so. And you know, like, you know, there were lots of hippies in my class and, you know, the dress code was to wear a tie. And you know, the hippies were saying, oh, forget ties.

And you know, the teacher said, think what your mother would want to see her doctor wearing. And everybody got all kind of guilt ridden and, oh, yeah, OK, our mom would like to see us wear a tie. Right. Yeah. You know, so you're working to a role. You're like, how you look and how you talk and how you carry yourself.

Yeah, it's a very interesting conditioning, social conditioning. And you have an extreme position of authority. Yeah. I mean, you could ask people to do things that nobody else would ask them and that they wouldn't even entertain if anybody else had asked them. Yeah, it's a very privileged position. It's very cool if you know what you're doing and you don't let it go to your head

but yeah, it's a unique apprenticeship. Yeah, and they can do some wild things today. I mean I'm living proof of it. I've had three knee operations, two knee reconstructions. Yeah, well a couple of years ago when I was out here for the first time, you were having some bleeding into your knee, as I remember. Bleeding.

Swelling? Like swelling? Some bad swelling, at least. Maybe they withdrew some blood from that joint? Oh, you know what it was probably? I had probably had what's called Regenekine. So Regenekine is when they take your blood out and it's like platelet-rich plasma but they spin it in this centrifuge and it creates this like yellow liquid which is like a super potent anti-inflammatory

and then they had injected it into my knees. Okay. Yeah it's it really helps heal things. I had it done on my back, I had it done on my knees, it's amazing stuff. Yeah so you've gotten a bunch of knee surgery Yes, yeah, my knees are pretty beat up. My back's pretty beat up and my knees are pretty beat up That's from your martial arts. Yeah. Yeah, most of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you have a knee replacement or no? No, I don't need that. No, it's not that bad. Yeah, not nearly as bad but Quite a few people I know have one my friend Matt got one. He's a former UFC welterweight champion, Matt Serra. He's younger than me.

He has a knee replacement. My friend Michael Bisping, he was a former UFC middleweight champion. He has both of his knees replaced. His two artificial knees. Yeah, and they're doing okay with their new knees. Yeah, I mean better, right? Like they were in severe pain to the point where they just couldn't take it anymore. And they can do some pretty amazing things with resurfacing of the knees now

They you know these titanium heads have you seen them? Yeah, pretty incredible Yeah, they lop off the end of your knee screw in this new one, and it just functions My feeling the fear I have though my fear is that it's only good for like 20 years or so. And then what do you got to do? You got to go back in there and lop off it again and put a new one in? Yeah, well they may have some new development. That's what you would hope so. Yeah, you would hope so.

But I mean you're banking on that. You're like essentially making a bet that, okay, you can chop off the end of my knee and in 20 years they're going to have some new thing. The thing that would give me pause today, and again, I'm not giving medical advice, but if today biologics are coming so far that they're able to regenerate both meniscus tissue and also cartilage. So they can do that now. And there was a study in Australia where they did that recently, and I think there's something

else going on somewhere in the United States where they're showing promise in that regard. So I think if people could just hang in there for a little longer. According to my friend Brigham, who owns Waste-to-Well, which is a stem cell clinic out here, he is convinced that these kind of like super- surgeries are gonna be a thing of the past they're gonna be able to regrow tissue and Fix like literally fix knee problems back problems things along those lines neck problems neck problem Yeah, we're already doing a lot of that in Mexico Where there's places like the CPI the cellular performance Institute. I had a friend of mine Shane Dorian. He's a big wave surfer

you know, I can imagine so a pounding thing in your back and crushed by a 50-foot wave, you know and He had it done to his spine where they go into your discs and they inject stem cells into each individual disc they actually put you under and you're supposed to like be you know real relaxed for the next like six weeks. No heavy exercise at all. You just kind of go walking and after a while it starts to kick in and now he has no back pain anymore. Yeah. Is he back surfing?

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, is he back surfing? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, stem cells, well, you know psychedelics affect the, you know, formation of stem cells into new neurons, that's called neurogenesis. Yeah, psilocybin in particular, right? psilocybin, ketamine, DMT. Doesn't lion's mane do that as well though, like non-psychoactive mushrooms? I don't know. See if lion's mane creates neurogenesis. I think it does. Yeah, pulse damage would know. I think that's one of the things that Paul Stamets talked about was doing it in a stack, like doing psilocybin

along with, yeah now exactly what it was. Lion's mane mushrooms can promote neurogenesis and enhance memory. Yeah, I take that stuff. I take Lion's Mane all the time. And I always wonder how shit would my memory be if I didn't take it. Yeah, when I was recovering, I spoke to Paul and said, help me, I need help. He said Lion's Mane. He gave me that giant mushroom, that thing on the desk over there. That's what that is. That big log looking thing. That's a mushroom. That's a mushroom. It's a huge one. I was wondering what that was. Yeah, that's a mushroom. That's Paul Stanowitz brought me a mushroom. Yeah, nice. Yeah. His fascinating character. Yeah,

I like Paul. Great guy. Yeah, really great guy. I think he just got something replaced. Like a hip. A hip or a knee. Yeah. Something along those lines. Well, you know, my friends that have had knee replacements, they're out skiing, they're playing golf. Yeah. They've really had a miraculous turnaround. Yeah. You can do amazing things now. It's incredible.

I just think that we're real close to not needing a fake one. Real close to being able to generate new ones. Well, you know, the organ, I would like to replace with my eyes I've been like as a kid. I've been nearsighted and nearsighted and more nearsighted So I would love to have artificial eyes if you know, they worked out Well, that's what we were talking about earlier that they're going to be able to do that someday. Yeah Yeah, I'd be happy with that I might wait around as long as I can to get some like I can see pretty well

If it's if the environment is brightly lit, you know, but if it gets you know darker dim It's it becomes difficult dude. You're gonna be able to see through walls see if you can find that article about potential Because there's not it's not just Neuralink. There's a few other competing companies that are doing very similar things and One of them are very confident. They going to be able to restore sight. In how many years? I don't know. And then on top of that, the possibility is enhanced vision, and that's what we're talking about, like being able to, you know, see like warm things like in blind sight device being

developed to restore vision and people have lost their sight No, there was one That was saying you're gonna be able to have infrared night vision a bunch of different Possibilities on top of the fact they're gonna be able to restore a site that eventually I don't know how you Google Google this, that wasn't just restoring memory, excuse me, restoring vision, but enhanced vision. And then it's going to be far, I think they're promising vision far greater than what human beings are personally capable of.

Blind site enables superhuman vision beyond natural limits like infrared becomes cognitive process not just biological. So that's what blindsight is. Okay, so that is the same neural link thing. And then on top of that, you're going to be able to like zoom out. So you know, like you ever take like a Samsung phone, they have 100x zoom, and you can just zoom in on something like way in the distance like, wow, that's crazy. You can really zoom in on stuff.

You're going to be able to do that with your eyeballs. Yeah. A feature enhancement too. Yeah. Yeah, you can be able to see that with your eyeballs. Yeah. A feature enhancement too. Yeah. Yeah, you can be able to see people look way better than they really look. Just put a filter on. Yeah. Everybody's beautiful. Yeah. That's what Elon said on a tweet about it. Yeah, so there it is. Musk explained, the blind sight device for Neuralink will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see. Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from

birth to see for the first time. Here's the part that truly expands the horizons of what we think visions can be. At first the vision will be low resolution like Atari graphics, but eventually it has the potential to be better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultra-violent, or even radar wavelengths like Gey LaForge who's Jordy LaForge? Star Trek. Oh well I mean that'd be a lot of information wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah so what would you do with it all? Depends on what you try to do you know. I guess if you try to find people hiding in the woods you could be able to

see them. Yeah or become Yeah, or become a philosopher. I mean, with those enhanced processes, I mean, you could kind of direct it in any way that you'd like. Do you think that enhancing the human body like this is what the future of humanity holds? I think it's a stage we'll go through. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure how far along it'll take us. It may just end in our demise. But I think it's a stage that we obviously are passing into now. Some people think that's the mark of the beast from the Bible. You know, the

people who get the chip. The Mark of the Beast. Isn't that on the forehead or? Maybe that's the best spot for it. It's 666 is the Mark of the Beast. Right. Yeah. But isn't that like open to interpretation?

What is it saying that you've read the original one? What is the Mark of the Beast in the Hebrew Bible, the ancient? Yeah, yeah, that's the Christian Bible. That's the Book of Revelation, that's the New Testament, which I have not read amazingly enough. How come? Well, I'm pretty busy learning ancient Hebrew. Yeah, yeah, I have enough to study as the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. It's, I mean, if you were going to prophesize about the end of humanity, you'd probably prophesize about someone accepting some sort of a chip in their brain and everybody being

forced to do it, some matrix type situation. I could see why people wouldn't see that this, and it might be just the inevitable transition from biological to cyborg that we're probably going to have to go through anyway? Well, the end of the world will, at least according to certain traditions, as Harold did, by the Antichrist. And the Antichrist is the master of the lie. So I think it's interesting to kind of use that perspective as a way of seeing where the future on this heading. So the Antichrist is mass media. It's the master of the lie.

Yeah, mass media is the master of the lie. Corporate media is the master of the lie. Corporate media is the Antichrist. Corporate media leads us into wars, justifies all kinds of crazy things that we do. We take over foreign governments and install our own puppet dictators and have everybody convinced it's a good thing. Well, the concept of the Antichrist is very old, you know, 2,000 years. You have Christ, you've got the Antichrist. So, you know So there's a God and there's a demiurge. Yeah, so it's a notion that has carried a lot of weight for a long time. Yeah, yeah, so you think that the media is the anti-Christ?

Well, I think... Or could be seen as? Well, you could see corporations as being in sort of a demonic state. So if you have an obligation to your shareholders to consistently provide higher and higher profits every quarter, and in order to do that, you have to do things that will cost people lives and destroy people's lives. Like, for instance, the Sackler family that got everybody hooked on opioids. Is that not demonic? That seems very demonic. And if I was under the throes of its spell, if I had gotten caught up in opioids, it would be very similar to

being possessed by demons, having your life ruined by devils. Very similar at least in result, right? Especially if you wind up committing crimes because you want to get your drugs, you wind up in jail, your life is over, maybe you destroyed other people's lives. It's very demonic in that way and like in the result, in the end result. The end result is evil. Well, you know, look at the opium wars in China. Mm-hmm You know the British imported opium and there's a huge opium addiction problem in China Mm-hmm. And yeah, it was you seen as a demonic scourge, you know, like a Diabolical affliction and in its results it is demonic

It's just we're we're we're like hung up on pitchfork, forktail, horns, demon, you know, but in action, it's clearly demonstrably demonic. Well, demonic in what way? Okay. If you can lie about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, and you can justify an invasion of Iraq based on these clear lies, and then through that invasion, 500,000 children starved to death because of embargoes, countless people are killed that didn't have to be killed, loss of at least a million lives over the course of the

entire war and then the starving people afterwards. That's demonic, isn't it? For those people? Well, does that mean that you believe in the devil or Satan? I don't know what I believe in and what I don't believe in because I haven't experienced it. Maybe if I experienced Satan, I'd be like, well Satan's real But you're allowed to believe in God

But as soon as you start saying you believe in the devil people look at you sideways You know, like you could be the president and you can say God bless our troops. Nobody blinked bats an eye but if you say the problem with America is the devil and we will find the devil and we will root him out of our world and That's what we're gonna spend all your tax dollars on now. Yeah, I mean America is the devil and we will find the devil and we will root him out of our world. And that's what we're going to spend all your tax dollars on now. Yeah, I mean, like you could... I think good and evil are real things. You can pray for God to bless their troops and you could pray for protection from Satan's

influence on the troops if you were able to put the two like on Right as soon as you bring up Satan publicly you lose all the secular people Right, you can sit you can you could praise God and people go out. It's in the fucking steps, you know pledge of allegiance It's normal whatever. Yeah, but it wasn't even until what was it like Teddy Roosevelt? like who put pledge of allegiance Allegiance in? It was when we were battling the communists, and that's when God got put into the Pledge of Allegiance. Mm-hmm. Well, you believe in good and evil. Like, I think what occurs is the more people do good, the stronger the force of good is, and the more that do evil, the stronger the

force of evil is. And then you have the Holocaust well You know like you know how do you perceive that force is it just energy or do you? Anthropomorphize it into like a being that you can you recognize and think about right? But there's kind of no denying at least from a recognizable If you had to like look how do you quantify it how do you measure it there's no denying that evil takes place you know like the you could come up with any number of massacres throughout history and you say that's an that's

an evil act uh there's no question right. So evil is a thing that's real. If there's good, there's evil. Right. And then there have been many, many things that people have done. You're like, wow, good exists in the world. There is still good. So we know both those things are real things.

We just don't know what's the root of them all. And are there really angels and demons? Are those the scapegoats for this bizarre dance of good and evil that just exists in the world? Mm-hmm. Well, if, you know, if it weren't, you know, for Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, there wouldn't be any perception of good and evil. It would just be true or false. You know, which is, you know, the reason that Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden because in the beginning, they were living in a world of

either truth or falsehood. And after eating the fruit of the difference between good and evil, they became opinionated. Oh, that's good. I like it. That's bad. I don't like it. But they became opinionated, oh, that's good, I like it, that's bad, I don't like it. But the issue of true or false got muddled, and they no longer were fit inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, of paradise. What's your take on Lilith?

Yeah, Lilith. Well, there's no mention of her in the Bible, per se, but there's a lot of mention of her in the Bible, per se, but there's a lot of mention of her in the rabbinic literature that sprung up after the Bible. Yeah, yeah, the story is that I think after Cain killed Abel, you know, the Adam... No, no, was it after that? No, I think it was after Adam and Eve were expelled from their garden that they stopped having sex. So Adam then was sleeping with Lilith and they spawned innumerable demons as a result

of their relationship. And after a while Adam and Eve reconciled and they got things together again. Yeah, but Lilith plays a role in the understanding of evil in the world. Like it's the result of the spawn of Lilith. What do you think Lilith was originally, if it was a thing? Yeah, I don't know. Well, that's called Midrash.

It's the explication of the Bible by the rabbis. So this was called extra biblical. And I've only looked into extra biblical stuff to a certain extent. What's the source of that stuff? The imagination. And I think the surrounding environment, societies, culture, influenced by the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Hittites. There's a lot of accumulation of other cultures onto interpreting the stories that occur in the text.

A lot of fanciful things and entertaining things like, for example, Lilith source of the you know demonic entities out there. Mm-hmm Yeah, I found out about Lilith like six months ago. Oh really? Yeah, I never even heard about it Do you remember when we found out about Lilith somebody brought it up on a show, right? Yeah who brought it up? I'm wondering I don't remember but I was like what who's Lilith. Yeah, was it Jordan Peterson? It could have been yeah I was like, what? Who's Lilith? Yeah, was it Jordan Peterson? It could have been. Yeah, but very possibly. Because he's a keen student of the Bible.

Very possibly. I do not remember, though. But I remember thinking like, wow. And then the original story, so when you're talking about the biblical translations of the Adam and Eve story that we're all accustomed to, it's all a watered down, sort of very strange translated version of the ancient Hebrew, but you've read the actual ancient Hebrew version of it. What did you get out of it? Like, what did you...

Well, you know, most of the translations of the Hebrew Bible are quite good. Like, you know, the King James version, it's very accurate. Yeah, it's a bit stilted. Is anything missing in the translation from when you read it in ancient Hebrew, or do you think it's pretty clear? It's fairly one-to-one correspondence between the Hebrew words and the English translation. Certain things are interpreted through a Christian lens because the Christians wrote the King James Bible translation. Right.

Yeah. But the words and the grammar and the narratives, you know, they're pretty much accurate. Yeah. You know, they spent a lot of time working on painstaking translations, you know, so, you know, there was a responsibility, you know, to do it accurately. Imagine that story, like trying to like pass that one down for a thousand years. Yeah. Like yeah so there was only two people and then there was an apple. Right. And a snake talked Eve into eating that apple and everything got fucked. Yeah yeah it's a very strange story. It's a very strange story. What do you

think it really was all about? I think there were two people named Adam and Eve. For real? As if they were real. Hmm, what do you mean by that? Well, if you imagine that there was an Adam and Eve and you visualize the garden they were in and the snake and their interactions, you know, there you have it. So you think the biblical interpretation is a literal recalling of actual events that took place? No, I don't think that. Well, you know, it's like if you smoke DMT and you enter into this world, it's true, it's overwhelmingly convincing. It's got its own laws, its own system.

You know, things are regular, like certain things happen, certain interactions take place. Yeah, and you're there. You're convinced it's real and you interact with it to the best of your ability. So I think that's the case with the narratives in the text. It isn't a matter of interpreting what they mean as much as understanding what happened. Boy, that's obscure. So it's not interpreting what they mean, but understanding what happened. Yeah.

Like, you know, what did the snake say to Eve? So a snake really talked to Eve, though. It was as if a snake talked to Eve. As if. Yeah. So perhaps a psychedelic experience, perhaps an altered state of consciousness? No, I think it was a case of a woman standing near a tree and a snake coming up to her and saying certain things and they have a conversation. For real? For real. Mmm, as if it were real. Well, you know, the stories have been told so many

times. Right, that's the problem. And, you know, they seem, well, if you... Seems like you're blaming everything on Eve too, which is like a little suspect. No. Like you're herced out of it. Well, the one who got punished without even having a chance to explain himself was the snake. So God asks Adam what happened and he asks Eve what happened and he just lays it on the snake. Right. And the snake's like, I didn't tell her anything. I can't even talk. This lady wanted to eat that apple. She blamed me. Well, back then snakes could talk. Or in that world, snakes talk. Well, back then, snakes could talk. Or in that world, snakes talk. How so?

Well, they were the wisest of all the animals in the garden. So they could speak. Right, but you speak of these things as if like we're talking about when you go to the zoo, the monkeys swing from the vines. It's normal. Snakes talk. Well, it's a bit of a paradox. Yeah, you're like if, if you...

Let me ask you this. You know, so if you treat those stories as if they were real, you're opening yourself up to this universe of Adam and Eve were in the garden, then they had Cain and Abel, you know, Cain killed Abel, then Cain had children, and his children begot the 70 nations, and then there was a flood because mankind was bad, you know, Noah and his family survived. They all spoke one language afterwards. There was on the tower, you know, there was Nimrod, there's Abraham, there's Isaac and Jacob. So it's this world which seems to be quite coherent, quite consistent at all, ties together, is quite consistent from book to book, from narrative to narrative. It is a different way of looking at the Bible.

It isn't dogma like you have to do this or you have to do that. Or it isn't like a Jungian archetype or a psychodynamic, you know, wish fulfillment. It's this world that, you know, that is articulated, spelled out in a very ancient, very influential text. Mm-hmm. So, is it also possible that something completely different took place, but that over time and over a oral tradition of who knows how many hundreds of years before they actually wrote it down, and then writing it down, that you're getting a version of the actual event that's

very different than what really took place, but you think about it like the version in the scripture. And if you think about it in the version of the scripture, are you thinking about it like as if this was an event as recorded, or are you thinking this is a representation of an archetype or some sort of moment in human history that they're trying to recollect and pass down? Well, if you consider the text to be prophetically received, your prophecy is communication between the divine and man. And the text was prophetically received. In fact, Philo of Alexandria, one of Terence McKenna's heroes, used to say, the most accurate historians were the prophets.

Because they heard it directly from the initiator of the event, the witness of the event, the one who could understand the event in the huge context. You know, so it's a prophetically received text, which means it contains information received from a spiritual sort of level, which you would think is a universal field of sorts. How much have you ever paid attention if at all to any of that ancient Sumerian stuff like the Anunnaki? Some, some. Yeah I watched this really great documentary a few years back. Yeah you know but I you know but you know but I wouldn't consider myself as knowing much about it.

Right. That to me is one of the weirder origin stories. Yeah, yeah. So what is that origin story? On my recall, it's quite fascinating, but not the details. Well, there's multiple versions of it. First of all, the story of the fantastic story is told by Zechariah Sitchin. So Zechariah Sitchin, who wrote The Twelfth Planet and he wrote several other books, he was a biblical scholar and a linguist and he spent a lot of time studying the ancient Sumerian text, the cuneiform. And what he believes is that it tells a story of an ancient relationship between a race

of beings on a far distant planet that's in an elliptical orbit, and it comes near Earth every 3,600 years, and that they had engineered human beings out of lower primates. They had accelerated our evolution and that all of what we know about the cosmos, all of what we know about, you know, they have these detailed, I don't see the ancient tablets, so they have a detailed map of the solar system from 6,000 years ago, right? The Sun in the center and they have these really enormous beings and these enormous beings were supposed to be these things called the Anunnaki Okay, and the literal translation is those from heaven to earth came. Uh-huh It's it's one of the weirder like if you love a great science fiction

Version of the origin story of humans. It's the of the weirder, like if you love a great science fiction version of the origin story of humans, it's the most fun one. Yeah, it brings to mind, you know, the sons of God, you know, the Bene Elohim, which occurred in the story of the flood and Noah. The Nephilim too. Yeah, yeah, the Nephilim, thehaim, they were huge. They were giants. Men of renown. And they intermarried or they had sex with the daughters of man and from them came a race. So that story is interpreted or perceived through the lens of the Hebrew Bible too. Really? Yeah. Well, that is a story in the text, before the flood,

is that the B'nai Elohim come down to Earth. They have intercourse with the daughters of man. And out of those relationships comes this race of giants. That's the most fun one. Yeah, yeah. Isn't it? Well, they all got swept away in the flood. You know, so that's an interesting turn of events.

Well, if you interpret the flood as the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, which created the flood, it lines up. Right, right, that does line up. Yeah, it lines up time-wise, lines up with how it would go down. Yeah, just no evidence of giants. That's the only thing we're missing. If they found some giants? Well, in the meantime, you can assume that the giants were real and understand their origin, what they were like, what they did, why they did it, what the results were.

Yeah, the bizarre thing is they've isolated this area outside of the Kuiper Belt where they believe there's a large planetary body that might be multiple times larger than Earth that exists out there right where you would imagine that this thing is. If there really is some sort of a planet Yeah, that comes close to us with these super advanced beings. Yeah, I think I've heard of that actually yeah That it gets fun. Those get fun. Those those I put away rational thought just to pay attention to that stuff Well, and if it were true And then what? Well, and if it were true, then what?

Well, if it were true, that sort of is what everyone's seeing when they're seeing UFOs and UAPs. They're probably visiting or they probably are always here. They're probably watching to make sure we don't blow ourselves up and probably assisting us on our journey of evolving past this primitive violent state that we currently find ourselves in. One would hope. One would hope. Yeah. Yeah. Or they could be just you know doing the opposite that they may be stirring up trouble. Maybe maybe they realize that people need trouble in order to get things done in order to join the Galactic Federation.

We have to figure out a way to get off the planet. The best way to get off the planet is to develop superior weapons. Yeah, you know, kind of withdraw from the brink of the precipice. Right. Yeah, that's the story of humanity basically, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Well, that's what's interesting about origin stories, right? And that's what's interesting about the biblical texts is that there are these stories about things that have gone horribly wrong and influences different things that happened to humanity and different cataclysms and disasters. And

these stories are shared through different cultures, which is really interesting. Like in the Epic of Gilgamesh there's a flood story real similar yeah yeah most of the if most of the Middle East has got a flood story an origin story yeah yeah yeah this makes you wonder well it makes you wonder if it's true yeah yeah so you know that's why I think like studying one particular tradition in great detail can kind of help you kind of resonate with ones that are more universal. Yeah. Well, that one is so common, which is really interesting when you see the evidence, like the younger dryness impact theory evidence. Like, of course, 11,000 plus years ago,

this is probably what happened, and the story gets passed around forever and ever, and everyone sort of remembers it. Yeah, well, do you like Graham's documentaries? Yeah, I do. Yeah, the other Netflix ones. They're fascinating. I don't like all the anger that comes out of it,

all the people that get mad at him, and the disparaging remarks and how some archaeologists have severely overreacted to it as if it's some horrific threat. But it's fascinating, just the raw data about the size of these stones, their alignment with constellations, the fact that these things have been there for at the very at least 4,500 years some of them and some of them even further than that when you get to like go Beckley tap a like it to me it's just incredible to imagine people living 11,000 years ago like what is life like what is that experience like what it was it like talking to people yeah well

those footprints around, you know, white sands are super cool. Yeah, that's not far from where I live. That's 22,000 years. Yeah, you know, kids running around in the mud. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, it's very interesting. Alter States, this is your book.

New book came out, well it's gonna be coming out tomorrow. Oh, and I took your advice and I narrated the audience. Yes. Beautiful. I'm so happy when people do that. December 10th, my altered states. And it is going to be available everywhere. Yeah. Inner traditions publishes it. Yeah, it's on all the usual resources. And you can go to RickStrossman.com and you can see this and everything else. Oh, and you can pre-order it. You can order it for me. I will inscribe it and I will sign it. Oh, beautiful. Oh, that's awesome. That's very cool. That's only 20 bucks. All right, man. Yeah, the book is illustrated as well. Yeah, there's some pretty funny stories in there and each of them has got at least

You know one illustration. Oh cool. Yeah Who drew it a friend from Birmingham, Alabama named Merrily Chalice That's crazy. That's crazy. There's some well, there's one called steak on acid You ever eat steak on acid. No I have not. This is great. These are cool drawings. They're great drawings. Oh that's awesome. Yeah.

Rick, thank you so much. It's always great to see you. Thanks Joe. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. Alright. Go buy the books folks. Bye everybody. Bye!