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Episode: #2241 - Rick Strassman

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 03:16:23

Episode Shownotes

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.

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Summary

In this episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," Joe Rogan talks with Rick Strassman about his new book, "My Altered States," which explores trauma, psychedelics, and spiritual growth. They discuss intriguing archaeological discoveries in Alaska, the nature of subjective experiences, and the impact of trauma on gene expression. The conversation touches on the complexities of humility, arranged marriages, and the role of psychedelics in personal insight and healing. Strassman argues that psychedelics are tools for exploring the mind, not cures, and raises significant discussions on consciousness, AI, and the integration of technology with human evolution.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#2241 - Rick Strassman) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_05
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06 Speaker_01
Showing my day, Joe Rogan podcast, my night, all day.

00:00:12 Speaker_04
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.

00:00:24 Speaker_04
That's a woolly mammoth tooth, like a molar. Whoa. Yeah. So he has this incredible place and he was a gold miner and still is.

00:00:36 Speaker_04
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. And it's kind of rewriting history, but it's all in his land. So he has complete control over it.

00:00:55 Speaker_04
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 so he had a research facility built on his property

00:01:11 Speaker_04
so they could study this stuff. And if we see outside in the lobby, there's actually a bison skull. It's like a 10,000 plus year old bison skull. So this area is only a few acres. This is what's really crazy.

00:01:25 Speaker_04
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 So it appears there was some sort of a mass fire.

00:01:41 Speaker_04
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.

00:01:54 Speaker_04
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.

00:02:10 Speaker_04
And 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.

00:02:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, those hosers are what they used to use for mining gold, too. Yes, that's why he has them.

00:02:30 Speaker_04
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.

00:02:41 Speaker_04
And another thing that he's exposed is that it's the Smithsonian, right, in New York? No.

00:02:51 Speaker_04
Find out what Natural history museum in 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 storm So they dumped them in the East River.

00:03:12 Speaker_04
Yeah and say that they denied that the previous people obviously it's people that are long dead and They denied that this happened. And so he sent a bunch of divers out there.

00:03:21 Speaker_04
And so they're recovering like these mammoth bones and all these like create like bison bones, step bison bones in the East River. Yeah. Yeah. That are all from his property in Alaska.

00:03:35 Speaker_01
Yeah, it'd be hard to explain how they got there otherwise.

00:03:37 Speaker_04
There's only one. I mean, it's a literal 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.

00:03:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, is that the reason he chose where he is living in Alaska?

00:03:55 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:08 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:17 Speaker_04
And, you know, 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.

00:04:28 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. What's his background? Like archaeology or something?

00:04:32 Speaker_04
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 totally remember it, but this is not something he wanted to get into.

00:04:50 Speaker_01
It's near Fairbanks.

00:04:51 Speaker_04
Yeah. So this is where John lives. 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 on what's going on.

00:05:04 Speaker_01
Yeah. Let me take a look at that map. You know, I spent my first year after finishing my psychiatry training in Fairbanks.

00:05:12 Speaker_04
Oh, did you really? Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting psychiatry place, because the psychology of people that live in Alaska is very different. They're different.

00:05:22 Speaker_01
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.

00:05:29 Speaker_04
Or their family's there, and they've grown up there.

00:05:32 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:05:33 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:47 Speaker_04
We'll do some salmon fishing, and then we'll go do a show. And that's what we did. And it's like the people feel different. They feel different. Like, they're made out of harder things.

00:05:59 Speaker_01
They're, like, more durable. Right. When you were up there, did you get outside of Anchorage, like into the interior at all?

00:06:06 Speaker_04
We didn't do much traveling. 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 very interesting.

00:06:21 Speaker_01
It's a very strange atmosphere too, the climate and the geology and the feeling, because you're up so high on the planet. You're close to the North Pole.

00:06:32 Speaker_04
Yeah, when we were doing shows, I believe it was July or August where we were doing shows, and at night after the show, it was bright out. You go outside, it was like you could see everything. It was weird. It felt like it was 5 p.m.

00:06:44 Speaker_01
It's a very strange feeling. Well, in the winter, too, you have maybe a couple hours of twilight.

00:06:50 Speaker_04
Yeah. And that's it. And then sometimes all dark for a long time too.

00:06:55 Speaker_01
Well that occurs above the Arctic Circle. Have you ever seen that movie 30 Days of Night?

00:07:00 Speaker_04
It's a vampire movie. Oh yeah. With Kiefer Sutherland.

00:07:03 Speaker_01
No.

00:07:03 Speaker_04
No no no. That is the Lost Boys.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
Oh Lost Boys. Right.

00:07:06 Speaker_04
30 Days of Night was cooler. Not that there was anything wrong with the Lost Boys, it's just a little dated.

00:07:12 Speaker_04
30 Days of Night is more modern and these vampires decided to descend upon this small town where it never turns light so they could just hunt all the time.

00:07:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's clever. Vampires are smarter than they look.

00:07:25 Speaker_04
These are creepy vampires to the horrifying teeth. It's interesting how you know vampires sort of we decide that they look like Bela Lugosi, you know, there's Dracula that must be a vampire and then some people they

00:07:40 Speaker_04
Have you ever wondered, like, 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.

00:07:52 Speaker_04
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?

00:08:09 Speaker_01
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.

00:08:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's a personal experience. But it's a common one, so you can compare notes. I think that's how it works.

00:08:29 Speaker_04
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 where they experienced, they weren't connected, they weren't communicating, but they experienced incredibly similar environments.

00:08:48 Speaker_04
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00:10:02 Speaker_00
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00:10:13 Speaker_00
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00:10:27 Speaker_00
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00:10:31 Speaker_04
I think that's in my big toe. You know that that the Theory of Everything book? I'm not familiar with it. I think it's Thomas Campbell. Is that no? 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.

00:10:44 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:10:46 Speaker_04
It's very strange book.

00:10:47 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's the name of the book or the name of the experiment? Yeah, that's the name of the book.

00:10:50 Speaker_04
It's my big theory of everything. Toe is for theory of everything.

00:10:54 Speaker_01
Oh, I see. Okay. But it has a picture of a toe on the cover.

00:10:57 Speaker_04
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.

00:11:14 Speaker_01
Or even a dream to somebody who had never dreamed. Right. Right. Because there are people who don't dream, right? Which is very strange. Yeah. Yeah. Like there are people with no imagination. They can't visualize things. That's so bizarre. Yeah. Yeah.

00:11:28 Speaker_01
And you give them psychedelics and they report that they can, but I mean, how do they know that they are?

00:11:33 Speaker_04
Right. That's an uncomfortable reality, that some people's brains don't work the same way. It's a fact, though. Well, it has to be. I mean, just look at cultural choices.

00:11:47 Speaker_04
Just look at the different kinds of music that people enjoy, the different kinds of food that people enjoy, and the different kinds of climate that they enjoy. There is no way we're all seeing the same thing. There's no way.

00:11:59 Speaker_04
If food that tastes horrible to you is like a sacred delicacy to them, you know?

00:12:04 Speaker_01
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.

00:12:23 Speaker_01
The emphasis on the enlightenment experience in Buddhism might be because people in that part of the world produce or are more sensitive to 5-methoxy DMT, which gives you that white-out experience.

00:12:36 Speaker_01
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.

00:12:45 Speaker_01
So there may even be some kind of differential among people as far as the way they're hardwired for spiritual experience, even.

00:12:55 Speaker_04
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 culture thinks about things.

00:13:06 Speaker_04
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, you know, religion, where it's like very strict.

00:13:21 Speaker_04
And then they both meet when they're 14 and compare notes. It'd be the most bizarre versions of the world, right?

00:13:28 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, one version is there is no God, and the other version is that there is.

00:13:33 Speaker_04
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, that's God's plan for everything, that God has, you know, a plan for you,

00:13:46 Speaker_04
And that if you follow the teachings of God, you'll ultimately go to heaven. It's like very structured. Where the other side, it's like death, life is suffering. There's, you know, who knows what happens when you die, but probably nothing.

00:13:59 Speaker_04
You know, if you feel depressed, you should probably go to the doctor and get a pill.

00:14:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, yes. So you wonder if the atheist's biology is different than the believers.

00:14:07 Speaker_04
I wonder if it becomes different, right? Because don't genes turn on and off expressions of genes based upon stress, based upon environments, a lot of things, right?

00:14:17 Speaker_01
Right. And those changes can be inherited, you know, like, you know, passed on to the next generation and the next generation. That's crazy.

00:14:24 Speaker_01
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.

00:14:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, we were just talking about that. At what point does trauma end? What point did the effects of trauma end? Is it in the first generation or the second?

00:14:56 Speaker_04
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. Dr. Rhonda Patricks talked about this.

00:15:10 Speaker_01
It's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's one of the spin-offs of fasting and starvation.

00:15:18 Speaker_01
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.

00:15:28 Speaker_01
Yeah, you know, so there are some advantages, but, I mean, obviously to a point.

00:15:33 Speaker_04
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.

00:15:42 Speaker_04
That was fucking terrible and stupid Yeah, and I felt really dumb and I didn't feel alive at all. No, they come back with like this very bizarre euphoric just like Their their version of it when they're expressing themselves.

00:15:55 Speaker_04
It seems like they were like on mushrooms.

00:15:57 Speaker_01
Yeah weird Is that 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.

00:16:06 Speaker_04
I think that's fine because this espresso doesn't, I mean... No calories. Right, there's no calories. Yeah, I should do it. I should probably do like a three day, see what's up. Because my friend Dana just did it. I think Dana did a three or four day.

00:16:22 Speaker_04
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.

00:16:30 Speaker_01
Oh, right. You're in a ketotic state. Well, when people fast for three or four days, do they drink water? Yeah, they drink. Oh, you have to.

00:16:37 Speaker_04
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 fasts, and that is no water as well. You can keep that. I'm so not interested in that.

00:16:49 Speaker_01
Well, you can go on a vision quest, like out in the desert, not drink or not eat, and you do start hallucinating.

00:16:55 Speaker_04
Yeah, I love McKenna's take on that. Do you know that? I don't remember.

00:17:00 Speaker_04
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.

00:17:20 Speaker_04
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

00:17:34 Speaker_04
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 you've crossed that line.

00:17:47 Speaker_01
Well, I think a flip side of that is simple things can be good for you that they don't have to be hard Sure. Yeah.

00:17:54 Speaker_04
No Pete things don't have to be hard to be good for you a puppy smiling or licking you and playing with you It's good for you.

00:18:00 Speaker_04
It's like literally like it's good for your body I can people play with puppies that happiness feeling that you get like what do you do?

00:18:08 Speaker_01
What are you doing? What are you doing? That's actually really good for you. Oh, 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.

00:18:19 Speaker_01
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.

00:18:27 Speaker_04
Yeah. Jamie's got a tiny one. He didn't bring him in today. Carl's a little maniac. He's a little French poodle or French bulldog. He's like that big.

00:18:35 Speaker_01
Yeah, they're cute. He's adorable. But does he weigh?

00:18:39 Speaker_04
I was 16 pounds now. He's jacked. Yeah, he sounds he really is Jack. He's got a lot of muscle He's super aggressive not with people like not like real aggressive like playful.

00:18:49 Speaker_04
Just want 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. Yeah, and Carl just launches himself at him. Oh

00:19:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, the one dog I had was a miniature dachshund. Oh, it was a cute little dog. He was tough. He barked. Really? He bit children. That's not good. That's not tough. He's an asshole. Boy, that dog is an asshole.

00:19:15 Speaker_04
Yeah. That sucks.

00:19:16 Speaker_01
Well, he lived 25 years.

00:19:18 Speaker_04
Whoa.

00:19:18 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:19:19 Speaker_04
Well, if I lived 25 years and I was a dog, I'd probably start biting kids, too.

00:19:22 Speaker_01
Right.

00:19:22 Speaker_04
Get me out of here.

00:19:23 Speaker_01
Well, toward the end, he was wearing a diaper.

00:19:26 Speaker_04
Oof. 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.

00:19:36 Speaker_04
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.

00:19:49 Speaker_04
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. This is needless suffering.

00:20:02 Speaker_04
Do you love dogs? Do you miss having a dog? Get another dog. This idea you have to mourn your dog for a specific period of time, it's not a wife. If your wife dies and then next Friday night you're on a date, that seems a little crazy.

00:20:16 Speaker_04
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.

00:20:29 Speaker_04
Yeah, those Mastiffs are big. He was a big fella. But they get a lot of, like, real problems with their joints, because it's just so much weight.

00:20:37 Speaker_01
Yeah. They carry a lot of weight. Yeah. Yeah, we were talking about Alaska and up in Fairbanks. Yeah, I was a psychiatrist for the county for about a year.

00:20:46 Speaker_03
Boy.

00:20:46 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah, it was amazing. Well, it was interesting because I had kind of given up the idea of doing research, and I thought, well, I'll just practice psychiatry. My girlfriend back then wanted to be a wildlife biologist. Perfect place for that.

00:21:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, they've got a great department at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Yes, so we spent two months driving up there from Sacramento, just had a great time. Wow. And then I started working up there for, it was for about a year. Cold.

00:21:16 Speaker_01
The cold, the lowest it got down to was minus 49 one day in February.

00:21:23 Speaker_04
And you're from New Mexico.

00:21:24 Speaker_01
Well, Los Angeles, actually. Oh, at that time? Yeah. Wow. Well, it was snowing around Halloween, so I wasn't, you know, dressed for snow. I'd never really lived in snow, so. What was it like going from Los Angeles to minus 39?

00:21:38 Speaker_01
Well, I started to work on enjoying the dark. Like, you know, as a rule, you know, 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. Yeah.

00:21:55 Speaker_01
So I tried to imagine myself liking the dark. And it wasn't all that successful.

00:22:03 Speaker_04
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.

00:22:19 Speaker_04
Those summers are so special. When me and my friends would, like, go out on a summer night, it was 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?

00:22:32 Speaker_01
Yeah. Is that because you have family there?

00:22:36 Speaker_04
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 was really, it was a really nice, cool place to grow up.

00:22:48 Speaker_01
Yeah. I was in the Bronx for medical school. Bronx, New York, and I lived in the city for about a year. Yeah, it was like it was a great training.

00:22:58 Speaker_04
Yeah, when you get what imagine those the characters you'd meet Mm-hmm and the characters you'd meet in Alaska.

00:23:04 Speaker_01
I bet you met a lot of people on the run You know, I met a lot of Christians up in Alaska and Yeah, yeah. Mostly?

00:23:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:23:33 Speaker_04
That's interesting. Did they impose it on other people? Did they have a gay community up there?

00:23:39 Speaker_01
They mostly imposed it on their kids. 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.

00:23:51 Speaker_01
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.

00:24:05 Speaker_01
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.

00:24:15 Speaker_05
Wow.

00:24:16 Speaker_01
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.

00:24:35 Speaker_01
Oh my God. In the middle of a quarter mile.

00:24:38 Speaker_04
And you're out there with your weight on skis.

00:24:41 Speaker_01
So I backed up, skied back to the shore, and I felt really tired all of a sudden. 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.

00:24:57 Speaker_01
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.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
That's what I've heard. Like in the snow when you're freezing. Yeah. I kind of remember that. And, you know, the bears up there are a force to contend with. You know, the grizzly bears. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah.

00:25:23 Speaker_01
One of my friends up there was living in a cabin and a bear just stuck his claws in the door, pulled the door out of the frame of the house and went into the refrigerator, basically, and kind of cleared that out. So was it was he home? Up in his loft?

00:25:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, sleeping. So he was awake while this was going on? Yeah. Yeah.

00:25:48 Speaker_04
Oh my God.

00:25:49 Speaker_01
So it just smelled food? It smelled food. It smelled him. And they don't abide by any rules?

00:25:54 Speaker_04
They don't really care about your door?

00:25:57 Speaker_01
Well, you know, when I was up there, I learned to shoot a shotgun. It's called a bear stopper. It's a sawed-off shotgun you can carry with you if you're in the backcountry. Yeah, you know, so they're just a... Like a 12-gauge? I think it was a 12-gauge.

00:26:13 Speaker_01
Do you have slugs in it, or is it buckshot? Slugs. Yeah. Oh, no, no, it had buckshot. Okay. So does that make it a 12-gauge?

00:26:20 Speaker_04
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. Right.

00:26:29 Speaker_04
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, so you're shooting 20 yards,

00:26:37 Speaker_04
It scatters quite a bit, and it makes an area of impact about that big, like a basketball-sized. Or maybe a little smaller than that. But a slug is a single object, and it has a lot more force behind it.

00:26:49 Speaker_04
So if you're shooting a bear, I would want a slug.

00:26:54 Speaker_01
I think it was a shot.

00:27:00 Speaker_04
It's a deterrent, though. I mean, you'll certainly deter them with buckshot.

00:27:04 Speaker_01
Yeah. If you have a wide spray, it will deter them. I kind of remember, although this may be wrong, that one barrel had buckshot in it and the other had a slug.

00:27:15 Speaker_04
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah You probably shoot the first shot to try to slow them down and or to try to discourage them And if that doesn't work you the second one's lethal.

00:27:26 Speaker_01
All right, then they're much closer to you at that Yeah, so it is a pretty fun place to live in some ways.

00:27:34 Speaker_04
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 stranded on the side of the road, you don't just pass them.

00:27:45 Speaker_04
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.

00:27:53 Speaker_01
Well, and there's also the Northern Lights, which are just incredible. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the reds and the greens.

00:27:58 Speaker_04
How often did you see those every year?

00:28:01 Speaker_01
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.

00:28:13 Speaker_04
Yeah. What exactly is going on with the Northern Lights? Like, what is that caused by? The magnetosphere and some- Solar rays?

00:28:22 Speaker_01
Like, what is, what is- Might be cosmic, might be, oh, it wouldn't be solar rays because it's dark, right?

00:28:29 Speaker_04
Right. Yeah. Unless it's like something that, like, is coming around the Earth.

00:28:34 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:28:34 Speaker_04
What are they, Jamie?

00:28:36 Speaker_01
Are they cosmic rays?

00:28:37 Speaker_04
Must be something. Yeah. Coronal mass ejects, so solar.

00:28:42 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah. And magnetic activity. I guess there's a few reasons why they could be created. I'm looking through this article.

00:28:48 Speaker_04
That alone might be worth living up there for.

00:28:50 Speaker_01
Well, in the winter. Or you could just spend a week up there in the winter. There are 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.

00:29:04 Speaker_01
There's these things called battery blankets that you put under your battery to keep it warm. Like you heat it, plug it in? Yeah, it's plugged into a parking meter or to the outside of a building.

00:29:19 Speaker_01
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.

00:29:35 Speaker_01
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.

00:29:48 Speaker_03
They have to warm up?

00:29:49 Speaker_01
You have to drive them slow to get them warmed up again.

00:29:52 Speaker_04
Because otherwise they're like flattened down at the bottom where your car's been sitting? Right. Whoa. Yeah, cold.

00:29:58 Speaker_03
That makes sense.

00:29:59 Speaker_04
Yeah. Isn't it amazing they still have to fill tires with air? That seems like the stupidest thing.

00:30:04 Speaker_04
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.

00:30:16 Speaker_01
With my garden tools or my garden carts, I use solid tires. But they're a lot heavier. They never puncture.

00:30:29 Speaker_04
But there's a give factor with tires that's important to handling. You know, 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 off-roading, right?

00:30:43 Speaker_04
They deflate their tires quite a bit to get more traction.

00:30:46 Speaker_01
Well, and it also will... Widens your footprint. It widens your footprint so you won't get stuck in sand, too. Yeah. Yeah. I used to spend a lot of time in Death Valley. Oh, wow, driving around in the sand? Yeah.

00:30:59 Speaker_01
And in, you know, the canyons, you know, to the east and to the west of the valley.

00:31:03 Speaker_04
So I guess that's the benefit of air, is that you can air them down and do stuff with them.

00:31:06 Speaker_04
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. It's so vulnerable.

00:31:17 Speaker_04
The one thing of your car, someone could come by and go, stab your tire, and now your car's useless. So vulnerable.

00:31:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, flat tires. So have you spent time in Death Valley?

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00:33:45 Speaker_01
No, no. Is it great? Well, if you still like you still like to take psychedelics, who doesn't like to take psychedelics? Yeah. The best place or one of the best places is Death Valley.

00:33:58 Speaker_04
That's what I've heard.

00:33:59 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:33:59 Speaker_04
I've had friends that have had mushroom experiences out there.

00:34:03 Speaker_01
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?

00:34:11 Speaker_01
And you are 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.

00:34:32 Speaker_01
You can see, like, a shrub, like, 100 yards away, and it's moving. And you can follow the wind as it goes up and down the canyon until it reaches you. You can see the particles it's carrying and stuff.

00:34:46 Speaker_01
You know, mostly the movement of the bushes, 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.

00:35:03 Speaker_04
Isn't that kind of always the case, though?

00:35:06 Speaker_01
I think we come up with our best ideas from 19 to 21. Really? I think so. Oh, boy.

00:35:11 Speaker_04
I'm in trouble, then, because I don't have very many ideas.

00:35:15 Speaker_01
Well, you must have had some experiences that steered you in a particular direction, didn't you?

00:35:20 Speaker_04
Yeah, I guess I did, yeah. But until I was 21, my whole life was martial arts, just martial arts training. So 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.

00:35:41 Speaker_04
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.

00:35:50 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, it was a formative time then, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:35:55 Speaker_04
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.

00:36:10 Speaker_04
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.

00:36:18 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:36:19 Speaker_04
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 not have been a good person to talk to.

00:36:31 Speaker_01
Yeah. What kind of questions wouldn't you have been able to answer back then?

00:36:35 Speaker_04
Well, I knew nothing about the world. Like, nothing. Like, 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.

00:36:51 Speaker_04
I don't know the rules to any sports. I didn't know what's happening when a basketball game's going on, unless the ball goes in the net. I don't know the rules of football.

00:37:00 Speaker_04
I didn't know anything, like most of my life, because all I was thinking about was martial arts when I was young.

00:37:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's like being a monk almost.

00:37:07 Speaker_04
In a lot of ways it was. Because 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 is what it's called.

00:37:20 Speaker_04
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.

00:37:30 Speaker_04
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 in the locker room, right?

00:37:44 Speaker_04
We can't do it in the premises. Like this is a church the ground you stand on is holy ground. I It was to me. Yeah. Because to me, it was like, this, this place is this is where I, this is where I'm serious. This is like a different place.

00:38:00 Speaker_04
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.

00:38:12 Speaker_04
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.

00:38:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, so what did it represent? It just represented respect.

00:38:25 Speaker_04
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.

00:38:32 Speaker_04
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

00:38:38 Speaker_01
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. Yeah. So lots of bowing.

00:38:56 Speaker_01
It's an interesting experience to bow, to really kind of get yourself together and lower your head and be humble, to be, you know, like in the presence of something greater.

00:39:07 Speaker_04
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.

00:39:19 Speaker_01
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. Oh, that is great. Yeah. Yeah. I try to read this once a week and

00:39:36 Speaker_01
That really is great. Yeah. And I'm going to be really humble. I might be the most humble person there ever was. I like how you got that. You actually photocopied that.

00:39:44 Speaker_04
It's got the darkness where the binder is in the center.

00:39:47 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. It's a serious thing.

00:39:49 Speaker_04
That's awesome. That's awesome. What a great quote. Yeah. It's like to not be humble. It's like it's we like our sports stars to not be humble. And that's about it. Everybody else. We appreciate a little humility.

00:40:01 Speaker_04
Even sports stars, you know, praise Jesus or something.

00:40:04 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, can you be too humble? Sure. Which would look like what?

00:40:09 Speaker_04
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, 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.

00:40:26 Speaker_04
You have to be bold. You have to have enough confidence in yourself that you can navigate a thing that very few people navigate.

00:40:33 Speaker_04
If you choose to start your own business, if you choose to quit what you're doing and go on a journey because you really feel compelled to have other life experiences, if you're too humble, you might not be willing to bet on yourself.

00:40:47 Speaker_04
And I think that would ultimately be bad.

00:40:51 Speaker_01
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.

00:41:05 Speaker_04
Right, so you can get in a bad relationship and have someone yelling at you all the time and you just, you're humble, you handle it.

00:41:12 Speaker_01
Well, if you think you're humble, you might not be able to handle it, although you might pretend that you are.

00:41:19 Speaker_04
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.

00:41:34 Speaker_04
Who do you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid? You pretend to be really interesting, really nice, really kind. Wouldn't it be easier to just be that person?

00:41:43 Speaker_04
But there's a success aspect of the courtship thing where you want to show your success, which is anti-humble. But you got to be careful with doing it because then you look braggy.

00:41:55 Speaker_04
But you want to 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.

00:42:07 Speaker_04
They pretend to be someone who they're not. I'm like, wouldn't it be better if you just become that person?

00:42:11 Speaker_01
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?

00:42:19 Speaker_04
Are people doing that? I've done it.

00:42:23 Speaker_01
Oh, you freak.

00:42:26 Speaker_04
It's a good move.

00:42:27 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:42:27 Speaker_04
It's like almost like a podcast.

00:42:29 Speaker_01
Well, and you wouldn't necessarily feel the pressure to, you know, go to bed right away. Of course.

00:42:35 Speaker_04
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. Bye. Yeah. And you can meet somebody. It's rough. You don't want to just abandon them.

00:42:46 Speaker_01
Well, you can keep it low profile, too. You could just be in your bathroom, you know, sitting on the toilet, you know, your friend. Yeah.

00:42:53 Speaker_04
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.

00:43:03 Speaker_01
I think it's 25% meet online now and get married. I think it's more than that. Oh, wow.

00:43:09 Speaker_04
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.

00:43:24 Speaker_04
And then over time, it becomes women enter the workplace. And then people are meeting people at work. And then the internet comes along and just,

00:43:34 Speaker_01
Yeah. What do you think of arranged marriages? Well, it sounds terrible.

00:43:40 Speaker_04
It sounds like you don't have any choice. And if you have domineering parents, then your parents are going to match you up with somebody else's kid because they're friends with this guy. And, you know, this guy's son is looking for a wife.

00:43:57 Speaker_04
And you're a lady that as a dad, it tells you what to do. And you're like, why? I don't want to marry this guy. I don't even know this guy.

00:44:04 Speaker_01
Well, your parents would need to be straight shooters. You would want to trust them.

00:44:07 Speaker_04
If your parents were straight shooters, would they be doing an arranged marriage?

00:44:11 Speaker_01
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 nowadays.

00:44:22 Speaker_04
If you could 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 save me. How's Linda doing over there?

00:44:34 Speaker_04
Oh, she loves it. She loves this arranged marriage. She can't go anywhere. Where's she going to go? If you're in the kind of controlling culture that even considers an arranged marriage, I mean, that's a very strict culture.

00:44:46 Speaker_04
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,

00:44:59 Speaker_04
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.

00:45:08 Speaker_04
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.

00:45:19 Speaker_04
I want to travel the world. I want to do this. Like, you can do whatever the fuck you want to do in your ride.

00:45:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, that wouldn't work in those kinds of cultures.

00:45:27 Speaker_04
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, I should say.

00:45:42 Speaker_04
Maybe an arranged marriage is a proposal. They propose this arranged marriage and they both agree on it. Maybe, if that's what you're into.

00:45:48 Speaker_01
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 end it. I would hope so.

00:45:58 Speaker_04
But I would guarantee you that's not always the case. Especially in some more restrictive parts of the world where women are forced to, like, follow completely different rules than the men, which is a reality of the world we're living in today.

00:46:15 Speaker_04
There's parts of the world where they think in a very archaic way, and women are second-class citizens.

00:46:22 Speaker_01
I mean the Mideast. I mean look at that place. It's just It's a blaze. Yeah, it's a blaze.

00:46:30 Speaker_04
Well, I have a good friend of mine who came on the podcast recently was talking about his experiences in Afghanistan 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

00:46:47 Speaker_04
pedophiles and open molestation of boys and just murder.

00:46:55 Speaker_01
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.

00:47:14 Speaker_01
I wonder what it is about that part of the world.

00:47:18 Speaker_04
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…

00:47:31 Speaker_04
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 going to be a place where people do battle over. Like, you can't let the enemy control the place where Jesus comes back to.

00:47:45 Speaker_04
Because what if Jesus comes back and they immediately snuff him out because they're Islamists?

00:47:48 Speaker_01
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?

00:48:02 Speaker_04
Like, how far does it go back?

00:48:04 Speaker_01
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.

00:48:20 Speaker_01
It was destroyed in 70 CE, the second temple. When was the first temple in existence, Jamie?

00:48:30 Speaker_04
So even if that's the timeline, so we're looking at about 4,000 years.

00:48:41 Speaker_01
You know, like Abraham, you know, the first of the Hebrews, lived around 1800 BCE.

00:48:49 Speaker_04
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? Excretion? Excretion texts? What does that mean? Execration texts?

00:49:06 Speaker_01
Oh, oh, curses. Curses? Yeah, yeah. Really? Yeah, execrations are curses, extreme curses. Really? Yeah. If you execrate someone, you are really cursing them.

00:49:19 Speaker_04
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. Yeah.

00:49:33 Speaker_04
Bulls or what was the other word it said there? Is it bulls or? It's blocked out.

00:49:40 Speaker_01
Execration texts.

00:49:41 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:49:43 Speaker_01
Oh, or blocks of clay or stone. Wow. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of an Egyptian execration text. Jesus. How wild. Yeah, so Jerusalem is an old city and, you know, the temples were there a long, long time ago.

00:50:01 Speaker_01
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, you know, made of a vow, you know, to God, you know, the God of the Hebrews who, you know, Jacob was commuting with to build the house of the Lord there.

00:50:20 Speaker_01
And so, you know, there's a long history of that part of the world being associated with the patriarchs and with the temple. You know, Christianity has an association to Jerusalem because of Jesus.

00:50:35 Speaker_01
I'm not sure what the connection between Islam and Jerusalem is. It's clearly more recent.

00:50:42 Speaker_04
Well, isn't it always this sort of situation where when someone really likes a thing, everybody wants it?

00:50:47 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, there's things called greed, envy, and jealousy. I've always liked the distinction among those three qualities.

00:51:00 Speaker_04
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.

00:51:14 Speaker_04
Unlike the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is undertaken individually at any time of the year.

00:51:23 Speaker_01
Well, you know, I've never been to Israel. Now's not a good time. No, no. And you know, there's this thing called the Jerusalem complex. Yeah, I've heard of that. Yeah. You are like, I think you're a messiah. Right. Right. I'm the messiah. Right.

00:51:38 Speaker_01
So, you know, that might be a problem.

00:51:43 Speaker_04
You could see how it really be a problem if someone was inclined to that, you know, headed in that direction.

00:51:48 Speaker_01
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.

00:52:00 Speaker_04
There's also, I think, a prevalence of this kind of spiritual narcissism.

00:52:07 Speaker_01
Oh, good. I'm glad you see that.

00:52:09 Speaker_04
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.

00:52:19 Speaker_04
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.

00:52:33 Speaker_04
You know the way to live your life like listen, you don't know how Stop.

00:52:37 Speaker_00
Okay.

00:52:38 Speaker_04
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 you know Organizing people together.

00:52:50 Speaker_04
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.

00:53:08 Speaker_04
I think there's a temptation to do that.

00:53:12 Speaker_01
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.

00:53:28 Speaker_01
That seems terrible. Yeah. Well, it's one of the dark sides of psychedelics.

00:53:32 Speaker_04
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.

00:53:44 Speaker_04
We would have been cured like thousands of years ago. People would have worked out all this nonsense.

00:53:50 Speaker_01
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 your psychedelics will shed light on what's already there.

00:54:00 Speaker_04
Well, how about the Vikings?

00:54:02 Speaker_01
Right? I mean, they would take mushrooms before they kill people. The berserkers? Yeah. Yeah, the berserkers. Well, see? I mean, you could do anything you already believe in.

00:54:13 Speaker_04
Yeah. And something you're already, you know, you're already inclined to believe. You believe that it's good to go slaughter people.

00:54:20 Speaker_01
Well, I think that's one of the interesting things about Brian Muir Rescue's book 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.

00:54:37 Speaker_01
So if you're a Viking and you want to 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, you know, psychedelics could have that effect.

00:54:52 Speaker_04
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.

00:55:08 Speaker_04
And you view it through these belief systems that you have sort of adopted over time.

00:55:13 Speaker_01
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 they're the way our culture, our personal culture and our larger culture,

00:55:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:55:46 Speaker_01
I don't think they're like aliens from another planet, although I kind of thought that in the beginning.

00:55:52 Speaker_01
But as time has gone on and I've heard more and more stories, I'm more inclined to believe these are simply projections taking the garb of the personal milieu.

00:56:03 Speaker_04
Yeah, maybe. That's the problem. The problem is, yeah, maybe. Because 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.

00:56:18 Speaker_04
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.

00:56:35 Speaker_04
It sounds stupid to say out loud, 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 because it's had so much of an impact, so much of an impact on the world.

00:56:54 Speaker_01
Well, one of the ideas in the medieval philosophers is that thoughts are intermediaries between you and God. They're angels which are exchanged between you and some divine external source of information.

00:57:16 Speaker_01
So if you're thinking of how thoughts have directed the world's growth, I mean, you could even extrapolate to, well, maybe it's the divine plan for humanity.

00:57:32 Speaker_04
Well, there's certainly something going on. 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 very much technologically driven.

00:57:48 Speaker_04
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.

00:58:02 Speaker_04
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, it changes the seas. It's very, very weird.

00:58:18 Speaker_01
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, like how the brain creates thought, they are regulated in a particular manner.

00:58:36 Speaker_01
There's an order to chemistry. Certain chemical reactions occur for this or that reason. So it's as if the system is already set up to encourage certain behaviors, have certain ones, certain ideas form, and other ones not form.

00:58:56 Speaker_01
Cause and effect, if something bad happens to you, it's because of what happened before. If something good happens to you, it's because of what happened before.

00:59:06 Speaker_01
So you learn from your experience to do things that result in you feeling better, a positive outcome. So the system is developed that way. For example, if you get angry, you might stub your toe. That's how it works.

00:59:23 Speaker_01
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.

00:59:31 Speaker_01
So I think the world, I think existence is set up in a certain way to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. That's what's weird. I think the technological stuff is pretty interesting now.

00:59:50 Speaker_01
But it speaks like a larger phenomenon, which is how cause and effect has been set up.

00:59:58 Speaker_04
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?

01:00:13 Speaker_04
And the companies that are involved in the most technological, sophisticated work, whether it's AI or whether it's social media, when you're programming things in giant scale, it's incredibly profitable.

01:00:26 Speaker_04
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

01:00:47 Speaker_01
Oh yeah, it's not like it's binary. It's not like it's one thing or nothing. Yeah, I think the biological manipulation and the AI development is going to be, I think it's going to produce a hybrid.

01:01:03 Speaker_04
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, we're just too limited. Our evolution is too slow.

01:01:15 Speaker_04
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.

01:01:27 Speaker_04
If you want to be a part of this world today, and that's not that long, 1995 was 29 years ago. Which is crazy, that's not that long ago. That laptop's useless.

01:01:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, so in what kind of ways has AI impacted you? It hasn't impacted me. It hasn't yet. Yeah, it hasn't impacted me.

01:01:42 Speaker_04
Well, it has in, visually, I've seen a lot of really wild things online. There's a bunch of them. There's one that I posted that some guy made. It's Donald Trump playing Creedence Clearwater Revival on a guitar. Pull it off of my Instagram.

01:01:58 Speaker_04
You should see this. And Kamala Harris is in it. 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 he like I know it's not really them. Mm-hmm, but it's so close.

01:02:13 Speaker_04
It's weird Do you like Creedence love?

01:02:15 Speaker_03
Yes.

01:02:16 Speaker_04
Yeah, I love Creedence and It's a fortunate son, so it's a banger song.

01:02:23 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great song It's Donald Trump.

01:02:27 Speaker_04
You see Donald Trump playing guitar. I ain't no senator son. I 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 wearing a witch hat. Look at that guy. Come on, man. Give me volume.

01:02:52 Speaker_04
Oh, we can't?

01:02:53 Speaker_01
Boris Johnson.

01:02:54 Speaker_04
We're getting in trouble with the YouTube police. Look at that. Kim Jong-un, Biden. This is crazy. Look how good this is, though. I mean, it's not quite good enough where you can't tell that it's AI generated, but it's unbelievably close.

01:03:10 Speaker_04
Obama's the Joker, how bizarre. It's so weird, right? Isn't it weird? This episode is brought to you by Leaf Filter. You're busy enough this season without having to get on a ladder and clean out your gutters.

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01:05:17 Speaker_01
Yeah, it is hilarious.

01:05:20 Speaker_04
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?

01:05:28 Speaker_02
I'm waiting for it to show up on my account, but yeah, everybody who's got open AI can use Sora.

01:05:32 Speaker_04
Sora is, S-O-R-A is a new video generator through AI. So you put in prompts. So show him the Japanese one. I'm gonna show him. So this Jap, or what, is there new stuff?

01:05:46 Speaker_02
There's all sorts of stuff, yeah. Oh, okay.

01:05:48 Speaker_04
So the Japanese one was incredible. So it's like, show me a street in Japan where the snow is falling. You know like a drone shot from overhead so you see these people and it looks Entirely like a real scene.

01:06:01 Speaker_04
Yes, it looks absolutely like someone's nine months old So this is just older stuff, but it's like a prompt for puppies and snow look at this Who doesn't like puppies who doesn't like puppies, but that's fake this is what's crazy like this is all generated by AI and it's pretty Indistinguishable yeah

01:06:21 Speaker_04
I mean, look at this. This is all AI. Nuts.

01:06:25 Speaker_01
Good thing I'm not on drugs.

01:06:26 Speaker_04
I know you'd be like, what? Look at this. This is AI.

01:06:30 Speaker_01
Incredible.

01:06:31 Speaker_04
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 are writers. Writers are fucked. Yeah.

01:06:48 Speaker_04
I don't think writers are as fucked as actors are, though. Because some writers, like, you know, there's the Quentin Tarantino's of the world that are just going to take turns because of just his own psychology that you're not going to take.

01:06:59 Speaker_04
You know, like, or Stephen King when he was younger. Like, I don't think you're ever going to 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.

01:07:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, it touches upon creativity. Like, is creativity the difference between AI and humans?

01:07:21 Speaker_04
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.

01:07:31 Speaker_04
What if it writes a way better Beatles song than the Beatles could ever write? You know, what if it knows what's really gonna move you? You know, what if it writes a Sheryl Crow song that makes you cry, you know? Then you're fucked.

01:07:43 Speaker_04
Then it's ex machina. Then it knows. Did you ever see ex machina? Yeah, that was pretty good. I want a top 10 all-time favorite movies because it's it so rang true Like there was not a moment in that movie.

01:07:57 Speaker_04
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.

01:08:10 Speaker_04
It just happens to be a robot Yeah, who cares if she's a robot?

01:08:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, that's funny. The version of The Thing by John Carpenter is one of my favorite movies. Oh, that was great. Yeah, they're both body horror in a way.

01:08:25 Speaker_04
Yeah, sort of, right?

01:08:28 Speaker_01
The robot isn't human. That's horrible.

01:08:31 Speaker_04
Right. It's pretending to be, though, and it's tricking you, just like the thing. Just like the thing did. Yeah, the John Carpenter one is awesome.

01:08:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, I've watched that twice, and both times I regretted it, because every time I closed my eyes, there would be visions of these mutations happening.

01:08:49 Speaker_04
Yeah, and that was another one that was up in the freezing cold. Yeah. Trapped up there. There was a new one of that they did in I think the early 2000s.

01:08:58 Speaker_01
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.

01:09:07 Speaker_04
Yeah. Right. Which makes it for whatever reason not the uncanny valley. You don't really think it's happening.

01:09:15 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:09:15 Speaker_04
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.

01:09:28 Speaker_04
And it looks like a physical thing. This, you know, robot or whatever it is, it bites a person, this thing that he's pushing towards you. It looks real and you only see it for a brief second, but your brain registers that's a physical thing.

01:09:41 Speaker_04
Whereas if you see the video, your brain registers, well, that looks cool, but I don't think it's really there.

01:09:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's a visual effect. It's not a practical effect.

01:09:52 Speaker_04
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.

01:10:02 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:10:02 Speaker_04
I Am Legend was cool, but it was like 2000 what? When was that? When was I Am Legend? 2004? Is that about right? Seven? Okay. Back then they weren't that good. So there's a scene where the lions are in the park, like in the streets.

01:10:20 Speaker_04
Like they have lions out there because the civilization's collapsed.

01:10:24 Speaker_01
I've seen that scene.

01:10:25 Speaker_04
It looks so fake.

01:10:27 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well Can you see like an intersection between AI and psychedelics like, you know, could you give You know, could you give a robot LSD or you know something like it?

01:10:40 Speaker_04
Well, no what I was gonna say is I think AI can give you some and McKenna actually talked about this as well that he believed that

01:10:49 Speaker_04
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. And then there becomes this real possibility within our lifetime of recording dreams.

01:11:10 Speaker_04
Now, if you can record a dream, can you record a psychedelic state?

01:11:13 Speaker_01
Sure. I mean, why not?

01:11:16 Speaker_04
Right. 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.

01:11:22 Speaker_04
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.

01:11:44 Speaker_04
And they can then have something like through a neural implant, like Neuralink 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, that totally seems like,

01:12:02 Speaker_04
If we can send video through the sky and it lands on your phone and 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. That's too far away.

01:12:17 Speaker_04
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.

01:12:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think it could be a mass telepathic experience, like if everybody was sharing the same experience at the same time.

01:12:42 Speaker_04
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.

01:12:53 Speaker_04
So if what they're talking about with Neuralink is, you know, multiple steps of use, right, multiple steps of, the way they're going to have this. First, they're gonna use it for people that are disabled.

01:13:13 Speaker_04
Like, we had the guy in here, was the very first Neuralink patient.

01:13:16 Speaker_01
Oh, very cool.

01:13:17 Speaker_04
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. Because, like, he can move his eye. Instead of hand-eye coordination, it's just eye coordination. So he knows exactly.

01:13:31 Speaker_04
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 neural link than a person like myself would with just hand-eye coordination.

01:13:46 Speaker_04
So you would imagine that if it 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.

01:13:59 Speaker_04
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

01:14:12 Speaker_04
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 these stupid fucking biological eyes?

01:14:19 Speaker_04
Yeah, 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.

01:14:35 Speaker_04
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.

01:14:46 Speaker_04
Why don't we all just create one universal language?

01:14:50 Speaker_01
Would you think people would want that?

01:14:52 Speaker_04
I don't think leaders would want that.

01:14:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, because it would lead to everybody talking with everybody else.

01:14:58 Speaker_04
I don't think Russia would be down with that.

01:15:00 Speaker_01
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.

01:15:13 Speaker_01
And God looked down and said, they have one language and one tongue, and look at what they do.

01:15:18 Speaker_04
Do you what do you think like when you think of biblical stories? What do I mean? I've Spent far too much time speculating about the origins, but I'd like to know like what do you think that was?

01:15:32 Speaker_01
Well, I think the stories could be seen as if they were real and 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 something else.

01:15:49 Speaker_01
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.

01:16:03 Speaker_01
And that's the way I approach the Bible, the Bible stories, as if they were real. If you read it carefully, it's a very coherent picture of creation, of history, of the relationship between the spiritual and human worlds.

01:16:21 Speaker_01
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. Like yeah, for example the flood or well, you know, for example, you know the Tower of Babel.

01:16:36 Speaker_01
Yeah You know like if you look at your preceding chapters after the flood, you know God told man to spread out you know to populate the world because it was just Noah and his family after the flood and then they had children and you know, the You know, you know, the directive was just it was was to repopulate the earth, right?

01:16:59 Speaker_01
And instead, you know, 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, so it's a cohesive whole. The stories build upon each other.

01:17:24 Speaker_01
There's history. Certain things occurred because of the behavior of certain people, certain ideas, certain practices. Yeah, so it isn't as if it were something else other than what you're reading.

01:17:37 Speaker_01
And that makes it important to understand the language it's written in, which is Hebrew.

01:17:43 Speaker_01
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. You know, they say all translation is interpretation.

01:17:59 Speaker_01
Right. You know, so if you know the language directly, you can then make your own interpretation.

01:18:05 Speaker_04
Yeah. Ancient Hebrew would be the most fascinating one to read it in.

01:18:09 Speaker_01
It's incredible. If you could understand it. Yeah. Do you read it? Yeah. I re-taught 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.

01:18:29 Speaker_01
Yeah. And each of the words has a three-letter root. Right. Yeah. And just depending on context, they can mean a lot of different things.

01:18:38 Speaker_03
Right.

01:18:39 Speaker_01
And every time they appear for the first time, I would scribble in the margin of the text what this means.

01:18:46 Speaker_04
So you self-taught?

01:18:47 Speaker_01
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.

01:19:01 Speaker_04
How different is biblical Hebrew from conversational Hebrew?

01:19:05 Speaker_01
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?

01:19:28 Speaker_01
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.

01:19:39 Speaker_04
Whoa. Can you guess because of context?

01:19:43 Speaker_01
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.

01:19:59 Speaker_01
That's one of the things that really got me hooked. It's very, you know, it's extremely rational, but it's really telegraphic too. You could, write one word that may encapsulate the meaning of six or eight words.

01:20:15 Speaker_01
You could put together a biblical Hebrew word, for example, that might say, I found, let's see, but I'd really have to think that through. But you can combine a lot of ideas in one single word. That's the gist of it.

01:20:34 Speaker_04
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.

01:20:43 Speaker_01
Exactly. Yeah, and that's one of the things I loved learning about biblical Hebrew is, you know, 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.

01:21:00 Speaker_01
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 is what's called the perfect.

01:21:17 Speaker_01
Yeah, you know, so the convolutions of grammar really open windows to, you know, views of relationships that were invisible before.

01:21:29 Speaker_04
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 or whatever they did,

01:21:44 Speaker_01
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.

01:21:59 Speaker_01
You know, one of my long-standing projects is a translation and commentary on Genesis. The Genesis is 1,200 pages so far. Yeah, so I'm not sure how I'm going to ever get that published.

01:22:13 Speaker_01
But I think if I could condense it to something more manageable, it would be an interesting read for people. So what are you doing with it? What are you doing with this? When you sent out, what was your goal? Well, it was an expedient kind of reaction.

01:22:29 Speaker_01
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. So I put it into a Word file, and it was pretty big. So I'm still working through it.

01:22:46 Speaker_01
Well, there's all these commentaries to the text. You can't know the score without a program. 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.

01:23:03 Speaker_01
And I was compiling all of these interesting perspectives on the text. Wow. So are you reading it in ancient Hebrew? Yeah. And I'm both doing my own translation and collating the commentaries from 20 or 30 different commentators.

01:23:26 Speaker_04
So when you're doing your own translating, are you comparing it to other translations and seeing how other people interpreted it?

01:23:36 Speaker_01
Mostly other Jewish translations.

01:23:38 Speaker_04
But 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? How are they usually done? Or how were they originally done?

01:23:51 Speaker_01
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?

01:24:05 Speaker_01
Well, the translation of the Bible itself, you know, the five books, the first five books, and then the intervening 17, the prophets and whatnot, you know, those were translated into different languages, you know, book to book.

01:24:21 Speaker_01
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.

01:24:31 Speaker_04
How many of them are books of the Bible? How many of the stories?

01:24:35 Speaker_01
I think Isaiah was found in the Dead Sea Caves, maybe some Ezekiel, maybe some Leviticus, you know, like a number, but not the whole. Was Ezekiel the same as it was in the Old Testament? Mostly, mostly.

01:24:49 Speaker_01
There are modifications, though, with the Dead Sea translations 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.

01:25:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, 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 an angel picks him up and there's like, you know, blue ice above and a roaring sound. And a wheel within a wheel.

01:25:19 Speaker_01
The wheels and the angels with the wings and the eyes on their wings. It's completely DMT like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was really impressed with the overlap of the two sets of experiences.

01:25:32 Speaker_04
The UFO community latches onto Ezekiel as well.

01:25:35 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:25:36 Speaker_04
You know, the depictions. I saw an image today. I should have saved it and sent it to Jamie. But it was angels. It was a visual interpretation, like a drawing of angels as described in the Bible. And these angels look like flying crafts.

01:25:57 Speaker_04
They look like flying geometric patterns.

01:26:00 Speaker_01
Yeah. I'm trying to remember, is a German guy, I think, who was really into the visions.

01:26:07 Speaker_04
That's not what I saw today, but it was something like that. It was something like that. That was what it was, Jamie.

01:26:14 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:26:15 Speaker_04
That's exactly what it was. With a gyroscope. Yeah, like this is angels as described in the Bible.

01:26:23 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah, the four, you know, the four faces, a lion, a bear, a man, and an eagle. Who is that drawing by?

01:26:33 Speaker_04
The chariot vision of Ezekiel.

01:26:40 Speaker_01
Van Daniken or something?

01:26:42 Speaker_04
Oh, Eric Von Daniken, that guy? Yeah, I think. No, no, that can't be it. I think that that's just an old art piece. See, go to the Wikipedia again, Jamie, so we get the description.

01:26:57 Speaker_02
It didn't have anything. It just said it was a typical, traditional depiction. Okay, so it doesn't say who?

01:27:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, like a woodcutting of some sort.

01:27:06 Speaker_04
That's kind of how it was described. The Von Daniken thing is fascinating. I had lunch with him once. Where? Peter Thiel's house. Oh, cool. Yeah. So Eric Weinstein said, hey, we'd like you to come to this lunch we're going to do with Eric Von Daniken.

01:27:22 Speaker_04
You know a lot about that guy's stuff. I'm like, oh, I know everything about that guy's stuff. I've seen Chariots of the Gods like fucking 10 times. I've watched 100 interviews of this guy.

01:27:33 Speaker_04
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.

01:27:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's the first question I would ask him.

01:27:46 Speaker_04
But it's, you know, he's a very nice guy. I don't want to say anything bad about him. And I really enjoyed Chariots of the Gods. It's a fun movie. It's like, have you ever seen it?

01:27:58 Speaker_01
No.

01:27:59 Speaker_04
It's wonderful. It's from like 1976. It played in the movie theaters.

01:28:02 Speaker_01
I remember when it came out.

01:28:04 Speaker_04
What year is Chariots of the Gods? It's pretty old. But in it, he's all in on everything being evidence that UFOs were here and a lot of real sketchy connections, in my opinion. I'm more inclined to go the Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson route.

01:28:22 Speaker_04
I think there was a very sophisticated civilization that existed. Yeah, what year? 1970. But I saw it in the movie theater when I was a little kid. But I think that there's real evidence that there was a sophisticated civilization.

01:28:43 Speaker_04
The Egyptian pyramids are enough. It's just like whatever the hell was going on there, there was an insanely sophisticated civilization that existed 4,500 years ago at least and probably went back quite a bit further than that.

01:28:56 Speaker_04
you know, according to their hieroglyphs, it went back 30,000 years, you know, and whatever was going on there was pretty incredible.

01:29:04 Speaker_04
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.

01:29:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's a case of Occam's razor, you know, the most sensible explanation is probably the most likely.

01:29:22 Speaker_04
Yeah, but then there's also so many stories of us being visited in almost every ancient culture.

01:29:30 Speaker_01
Well, you know, is that like being visited or just the experience of being visited? Are they the same thing? Well, one would be physically manifest and the other would just be manifest in the mind.

01:29:46 Speaker_04
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.

01:30:00 Speaker_04
Perhaps we're trying to 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 it's kind of an illusion.

01:30:15 Speaker_04
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.

01:30:32 Speaker_04
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 they think we've been visited because it's fun. But if you said to them,

01:30:46 Speaker_04
If you had to bet everything you have, everything you have, on the government has recovered crashed UFOs and that they visit us and they come from, you know, the Palladius star system and they've been here from the beginning of time, or there's weird conscious experiences, weird

01:31:09 Speaker_04
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 and even like the physical remnants of these crafts are

01:31:38 Speaker_04
That might, all of it might be just a part of this very bizarre psychic experiment that's going on.

01:31:47 Speaker_04
That as the mind expands its ability to understand other realms, and as the mind, 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.

01:31:59 Speaker_04
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.

01:32:14 Speaker_04
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.

01:32:31 Speaker_04
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.

01:32:47 Speaker_04
And I think it's probably an emerging part of being a human being.

01:32:53 Speaker_01
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?

01:33:01 Speaker_04
I'm sure it probably has a lot to do with the diet of the creatures, right?

01:33:05 Speaker_04
I mean, if humans are consistently, if you'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.

01:33:23 Speaker_04
Is stressed out because they work all day and is on SSRIs. You're probably not getting much of that at all.

01:33:28 Speaker_01
There's a lot of telepathy I think that occurs in those kinds of cultures, you know, 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.

01:33:38 Speaker_04
They try to call it telepathy telepathy and exactly But it already existed under the definition of the nomenclature. They called it harming so they had to like Okay. Well, it's already named. Too bad. Cool to call it telepathine.

01:33:52 Speaker_01
Right. It was synthesized by somebody and got that name.

01:33:56 Speaker_04
But the people that were experiencing it then, when they wanted to name it telepathine, they wanted to name it that because they were experiencing telepathic... Right. They were having these weird experiences where they were sharing moments.

01:34:08 Speaker_04
Shared visions.

01:34:09 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you can share visions just like you can share thoughts, you know? Or you can share feelings. I think just a little bit.

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01:37:13 Speaker_04
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.

01:37:22 Speaker_03
Like, oh, so I see the pyramid now. You know?

01:37:24 Speaker_04
Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Or if you guys are nowhere near each other, you can't hear each other, and then you independently write down what you experienced. And then that person says, that's exact. And they have the exact same thing.

01:37:35 Speaker_04
So they have no interaction with you before they write down what they experienced or recorded or what have you. But they're the same. They're having the same thing. Yeah.

01:37:42 Speaker_01
Do you know of Rupert Sheldrake's work? Yes. Yeah. I've had Rupert on. You have? OK, great. Yeah. So 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.

01:38:00 Speaker_01
They will make cold calls, and people are expecting them. You know, the dog knows it's going to come, the owner's going to come home much sooner or at a different time than, you know, and they can sense it and they're ready. Yeah. Yeah.

01:38:14 Speaker_01
So there is, you know, like awareness at a distance, it seems to be. But I, you know, I think it also must occur between people or things which have already got a strong relationship.

01:38:28 Speaker_04
Yeah. Like rats, when they teach them how to do a maze on the East Coast, they figure out how to do it quicker on the West Coast. You've seen those, right?

01:38:35 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, crystal formation. I was thinking about a dream I had once of my washing machine. I was traveling and I had a dream about my washing machine that had stopped working. And I called home and I said, you know, how's the washer?

01:38:53 Speaker_01
And she said, it's 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. Oh, you need it. Yeah. Kind of makes sense.

01:39:07 Speaker_01
I mean, cross-species, 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?

01:39:23 Speaker_01
Or would we do something good for everyone?

01:39:27 Speaker_04
I think we have the potential now, because 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.

01:39:44 Speaker_04
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.

01:39:58 Speaker_04
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.

01:40:24 Speaker_04
You can see these things in people's thoughts.

01:40:27 Speaker_04
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.

01:40:41 Speaker_04
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. There would be no benefit in bullshitting anymore. It would be the opposite. It would actually be detrimental.

01:40:58 Speaker_04
You'd be ostracized. No one would want to communicate with you anymore.

01:41:02 Speaker_01
Well, you'd be speaking the truth all the time. All the time. Yeah. Yeah.

01:41:05 Speaker_04
All the time. There'd be no more lying. No more lying. Impossible to lie, which I think is fascinating.

01:41:10 Speaker_01
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.

01:41:18 Speaker_04
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? Why? Why?

01:41:32 Speaker_04
What lies would be good for peace that wouldn't be better if everybody just knew exactly what was going on?

01:41:39 Speaker_01
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 benefits, you know, to white lies.

01:41:50 Speaker_04
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.

01:41:59 Speaker_04
But if you're not a human being anymore, essentially, you're a cyborg, and you're connected through a neural link to the whole world, there's going to be zero benefit in lying.

01:42:10 Speaker_01
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.

01:42:26 Speaker_01
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.

01:42:45 Speaker_01
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. And they work up to it. It's an inspiring book, actually. It's one of my favorites.

01:43:01 Speaker_04
Um, you know, 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.

01:43:20 Speaker_04
It's just 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.

01:43:34 Speaker_04
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.

01:43:48 Speaker_04
We have money which is, and as people get better and better at cracking and coding, you're not gonna have encrypted money. You're not gonna have encrypted, it's not gonna be possible, especially when quantum computing becomes ubiquitous.

01:44:04 Speaker_04
We're all operating off, 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.

01:44:20 Speaker_04
So then you have an even distribution of resources that's not based at all on capitalism.

01:44:27 Speaker_04
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.

01:44:38 Speaker_04
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.

01:44:47 Speaker_01
Well, it would require a change in human nature.

01:44:49 Speaker_04
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.

01:45:02 Speaker_04
So that makes progress slow.

01:45:05 Speaker_01
Well, do you think that the technology will change human nature?

01:45:10 Speaker_04
Of course. Yeah, definitely.

01:45:13 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:45:14 Speaker_04
But just by design, 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.

01:45:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, I have a feeling that won't be very popular.

01:45:29 Speaker_04
Well, it won't be popular with the kind of humans that exist today.

01:45:32 Speaker_01
Right. So will human nature have to change first before there's an agreement to undertake that?

01:45:39 Speaker_04
I think it'll 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.

01:45:55 Speaker_04
And if you just Optimize it it no longer has these patterns If everybody has like this increased level of dopamine, for example, yeah.

01:46:04 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:46:04 Speaker_04
Yeah, like everybody just increased dopamine 300%

01:46:07 Speaker_01
Well, and increased oxytocin. Yes. Everybody loves everybody. Everybody loves everybody.

01:46:11 Speaker_04
We're walking around in a state of tripping. We're all in ecstasy together. This is a low level where you're functional. You're not going to crash your car.

01:46:18 Speaker_01
Right.

01:46:18 Speaker_04
But you probably won't have cars anymore anyway. They'll be driving you around.

01:46:22 Speaker_01
Well, an interesting thought is maybe you can increase levels of endogenous DMT in everyone genetically.

01:46:30 Speaker_04
Sure. Or on cue. Like whenever you'd want it.

01:46:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think the rapture may have a biological basis in that regard. Like it's a timed event, which is worldwide, that turns on the DMT synthesizing machinery.

01:46:49 Speaker_04
It connects all the minds together in a universal language. And it'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.

01:47:02 Speaker_01
Well, which would be non-material. You know, the DMT world is non-material.

01:47:07 Speaker_04
Right.

01:47:07 Speaker_01
It's visual. So we might just transcend into some... Like, I think everybody, you know, in this kind of scenario, everybody would drop dead.

01:47:17 Speaker_04
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.

01:47:29 Speaker_04
But you're not just seeing it, you're experiencing it.

01:47:32 Speaker_01
Well, I think it's a world made of light. I think that's the way, and we perceive light through the eyes. It's visually experienced.

01:47:42 Speaker_04
Right, but whenever you're having 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.

01:47:50 Speaker_01
Right. Well, you call it that after the fact, after you come down, you know, when you're drinking a Coke.

01:47:56 Speaker_04
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.

01:48:09 Speaker_01
Yes. Tell me about that. Yeah, I just found out about it a couple days ago. You?

01:48:15 Speaker_04
You just found out about it? That's crazy. I just found out about it a couple days ago.

01:48:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, a friend is putting together a piece on that phenomenon and he wanted my opinion. Can you explain it to people, what they're experiencing?

01:48:31 Speaker_01
Well, I think what happens, and this is just a very cursory assessment of the project, but people smoke DMT and then they project a red laser onto the wall. And if you look very carefully at it, from what I understand, you can see the matrix.

01:48:57 Speaker_01
You've seen code in real laser. Yeah. Yeah. Can we take a bit of a break? Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

01:49:04 Speaker_04
We'll take a 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.

01:49:12 Speaker_04
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.

01:49:20 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:49:20 Speaker_04
You know, and we all were a victim of it. Everybody like you don't want to admit that he has any positive qualities. You get labeled a Nazi.

01:49:28 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, and why do you think that happened?

01:49:31 Speaker_04
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

01:49:47 Speaker_04
all these different businesses that have paid for his campaign, the campaign's 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.

01:49:57 Speaker_04
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.

01:50:10 Speaker_01
The military-industrial complex.

01:50:12 Speaker_04
It's real.

01:50:13 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's been real for a long time.

01:50:15 Speaker_04
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.

01:50:27 Speaker_01
It was ignored.

01:50:28 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:50:29 Speaker_01
It was conveniently ignored.

01:50:33 Speaker_04
Yeah. Yeah. 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.

01:50:51 Speaker_04
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.

01:51:01 Speaker_01
I think it's going to need to be scaled up. And what that scaling up looks like still isn't really worked out.

01:51:08 Speaker_01
I think they should develop special clinics 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.

01:51:25 Speaker_04
Right.

01:51:26 Speaker_01
And have specialized therapists, 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 ground.

01:51:42 Speaker_01
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.

01:51:55 Speaker_01
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.

01:52:03 Speaker_04
No. No, they're not. It's not like this idea of not having robust clinical research to show efficacy on a physiological level. That doesn't really exist with SSRIs anyway. And they're already prescribing them.

01:52:21 Speaker_04
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 sorting their life out.

01:52:33 Speaker_01
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.

01:52:50 Speaker_01
He was using basically every drug in a bad way, bad drugs in a bad way, and he smoked DMT one day. stop using everything.

01:53:00 Speaker_01
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.

01:53:13 Speaker_04
So those kinds of stories you 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.

01:53:25 Speaker_04
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.

01:53:38 Speaker_04
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.

01:53:55 Speaker_04
Colorado is doing some new psilocybin research thing, where they're opening up clinics now?

01:54:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, they're going to be opening up these healing clinics, which will be more or less, you know, based on the Oregon model.

01:54:10 Speaker_01
You license the therapists, you, you know, have to account for your supply of drugs and, you know, quality control, those kinds of things.

01:54:19 Speaker_04
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. Like you could see someone starting a nice cult that way.

01:54:32 Speaker_01
Well, he who controls the mushrooms. who controls the mushrooms, well, it wouldn't be the first time that psychedelic cults emerged. Well, are you familiar with the Rajneesh story? Which one's that?

01:54:51 Speaker_01
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.

01:55:02 Speaker_04
Osho or Oso?

01:55:04 Speaker_01
I think Osho.

01:55:05 Speaker_04
He got me confused. I said Osho. Which one? Osho? Osho. He's my favorite. But the people are retarded. Yeah. That's that guy. Yeah, that guy. Osho. I read his book. Because I watched Wild Wild Country and I was so blown away by it that I read his book.

01:55:23 Speaker_04
And it's actually 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. He doesn't seem like a cult leader.

01:55:37 Speaker_01
What's the main message that he's trying to get across?

01:55:40 Speaker_04
Well, it's just sort of like a guidebook for life. Pull up his books. I'll tell you which one it was.

01:55:45 Speaker_02
He's got a book of secrets.

01:55:47 Speaker_04
He's got a Zen tarot. Can you show me what they look like so I can see the covers?

01:55:54 Speaker_02
He's got a bunch of books.

01:55:55 Speaker_04
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.

01:56:01 Speaker_01
You kind of wonder if these are transcriptions of his talks or things that other people helped him write or even things that other people wrote for him.

01:56:10 Speaker_04
For the people.

01:56:10 Speaker_01
Or by the Buddha.

01:56:12 Speaker_04
By the people. Um, they did a dirty thing there where they took all those homeless people and they brought them to the, so they could count as voters and then they kicked them out.

01:56:25 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah.

01:56:25 Speaker_04
Weren't they trying to poison the city council or something? They poisoned everybody. They, the, yeah, they, they poisoned people when, uh, they were trying to take over, uh, politically, but that was that one woman. What was her name? Rita.

01:56:37 Speaker_04
Was that her name? The one woman who got in trouble. She, she was kind of running the cult. She was, she was pretty brutal.

01:56:47 Speaker_01
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.

01:56:59 Speaker_01
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 in a cloister, more or less. Yeah, but then my depression cleared and I went back to school.

01:57:14 Speaker_01
But I stayed associated with them for over 20 years and went up there.

01:57:18 Speaker_04
What do you attribute your depression lifting to?

01:57:22 Speaker_01
Well, 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.

01:57:36 Speaker_01
There's gradations like the major one and then smaller little ones. Yeah, I was walking back from a work assignment. One thing they liked doing was because I was a medical student back then, I thought I was hot shit.

01:57:56 Speaker_01
I was always given the worst assignments, the worst work assignments, like clean the toilets. you know, knock down this hill. You know, so one day they said, you know, can you move that hill? So I had my shovel and my pick.

01:58:08 Speaker_01
I was 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 damnedest thing. It was about 15, you know, 30 seconds or so. I thought, oh, that's pretty interesting.

01:58:24 Speaker_01
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.

01:58:41 Speaker_04
Was it directly after you had to move the hill?

01:58:44 Speaker_01
It was on the way back to the tool shed.

01:58:46 Speaker_05
Hmm.

01:58:47 Speaker_01
Yeah. Did you do anything before that physically? You know, I don't remember what my other work assignment was. It was an afternoon work assignment, as I remember. I mean in your life.

01:59:02 Speaker_04
Did you ever do any hard labor? Oh. Ever work out? Ever take a sport? Yeah, I ran track.

01:59:08 Speaker_01
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.

01:59:20 Speaker_04
The sprinting, when you were doing that, were you particularly happy or depressed when you were doing that?

01:59:26 Speaker_01
No. Well, sprinting itself is great.

01:59:29 Speaker_04
I don't mean that. I mean during the time period where you were participating in sprinting, did you have any depression?

01:59:35 Speaker_01
No, no. Well, I suppose, you know Teen angst. Yeah, you know teenager angst, you know growing up in the valley right that everybody has right?

01:59:44 Speaker_04
Yeah. 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.

01:59:59 Speaker_04
I think our bodies put vanity aside because I think a lot of very intelligent people associate exercise with vanity. But I think your body has a physical requirement to achieve

02:00:13 Speaker_04
like homeostasis, to achieve balance, to achieve an ability to kind of exist in a neutral place. You're always affected by the world. But the more neutral you are, the better.

02:00:26 Speaker_04
The more you exist, and you're not constantly wound up about something, or constantly upset about this, or constantly fearing that, or being overwhelmed with anxiety. I think some of that is in response to a lack of physical movement.

02:00:43 Speaker_04
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.

02:00:59 Speaker_04
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.

02:01:09 Speaker_01
Yeah. What kind of diet do you follow? Mostly, I eat meat. Mostly meat. Mostly meat. Beef?

02:01:16 Speaker_04
Yeah, I eat beef. 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.

02:01:34 Speaker_04
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.

02:01:45 Speaker_04
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.

02:01:59 Speaker_04
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. There must be there must be something in those pretzels deliciousness.

02:02:12 Speaker_04
Yeah So good so good now. There's no MDMA. It's just delicious you feel terrible right after you ate it like what did I do?

02:02:19 Speaker_01
That's like MDMA Yeah, but there's no 5-HTP that you can take.

02:02:24 Speaker_04
It's gonna help you. The down you feel off of a pretzel sometimes is worth it, though, because they're so delicious, especially the ones that wrap a hot dog in the pretzel.

02:02:35 Speaker_01
Yeah. A month or two ago, I was at Union Station in Los Angeles, and there was a stand selling You know, the encased hot dogs in pretzels, you have to apply a fair amount of mustard.

02:02:48 Speaker_04
They're so good, though, right? It's delicious. Terrible for you. So good, though.

02:02:53 Speaker_01
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've been on a plane.

02:03:08 Speaker_01
I would already been there, right? It would have been just you know, two hours rather than whatever it was 14 or so. Yeah Well, I mean look at European trains though. You can really have fun on a European train. They're comfy.

02:03:21 Speaker_01
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.

02:03:31 Speaker_04
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.

02:03:42 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, there should be no reason not to do that. The only reason would... Other than the automobile industry.

02:03:48 Speaker_04
Well, also, tracks. Like, who's watching those tracks? You're going, 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?

02:04:01 Speaker_01
Right, right. That's even a concern now, but yeah, it would certainly be if people are going 1,000 miles an hour.

02:04:07 Speaker_04
Yeah, like, I'm amazed at how few derailments there are. If you think about how many trains are flying back and forth.

02:04:13 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, I lived in Gallup, New Mexico, for years. And it's a train town, more or less. And I think there were three trains came through every hour, 24-7. Wow. So 70 trains, 75 trains every day would go through town.

02:04:34 Speaker_01
And there were very few derailments. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah, they're pretty effective.

02:04:38 Speaker_04
But you're constantly waiting for trains then. Like, there's always those things that come down, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, sit there and wait while the train flies by.

02:04:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, it was a point of controversy in that little town. Like, were they going to build a tunnel underneath or a bridge over? You know, the business folks in the downtown area. And it would be noisy, too, that trains would go by at 35 miles an hour.

02:05:03 Speaker_01
And they're big trains. Some of the cargo trains are more than a mile long. And they can just take forever to cross 2nd and 3rd Street. And you're just stuck there.

02:05:15 Speaker_03
Yeah, fuck that.

02:05:17 Speaker_04
Right. Well, I just wouldn't want to be in a place that's that noisy, especially if you're you're in New Mexico. It's kind of quiet.

02:05:25 Speaker_01
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.

02:05:35 Speaker_04
Well, there's some apartments in New York City where the apartment building's there and the train's going right in front of the apartment building. That's crazy. How cheap is that rent that you agree to that?

02:05:45 Speaker_01
Yeah, and the long-term effects on your mental and physical health.

02:05:50 Speaker_04
Yeah, well, whenever someone's crazy in a movie, they always live there. They just live, like, right where the train is. You know? It just kind of accentuates their craziness, right? They get no rest.

02:06:01 Speaker_01
I know. Well, you know, my mom's mom lived in a little town in western Pennsylvania. And, you know, the coal trains would Would you pass through her backyard basically like you know there's a little hill in her backyard and the train tracks?

02:06:17 Speaker_01
And I really enjoyed you sitting there as the trains went by you know smelling the exhaust that was something That's an early manifestation of my look at this.

02:06:28 Speaker_02
He's in China. Whoa that's crazy.

02:06:30 Speaker_04
It goes through the building Imagine if you're above that trying to sleep fuck out of here. Yeah, that's nuts

02:06:42 Speaker_02
That's not real.

02:06:43 Speaker_01
Whoa. That can't be real. That can't be real. Yeah. They couldn't find anybody to live there. You could. Well, I guess prisoners maybe.

02:06:53 Speaker_04
Somebody would agree.

02:06:55 Speaker_01
It could be a jail or a prison too.

02:06:57 Speaker_04
Yeah. Or just some crazy person.

02:07:00 Speaker_02
They just think that's a good idea.

02:07:02 Speaker_03
You know?

02:07:03 Speaker_02
A lot of people like to live different ways. I also have this. Their market's right on the train line.

02:07:09 Speaker_04
Whoa.

02:07:09 Speaker_02
And they have to pick up the stuff when it comes through.

02:07:12 Speaker_04
What? Yeah. That's efficient. So they quickly grab their baskets and stuff and pull it out of the way?

02:07:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, because people are walking on the train track. That's nuts.

02:07:22 Speaker_04
That is crazy.

02:07:24 Speaker_02
And rather than move, they just figure it out.

02:07:28 Speaker_04
Wow. Eight times a day, seven days a week. Wow.

02:07:33 Speaker_02
You have to put things away. You have three minutes.

02:07:35 Speaker_04
Oh, really? Wow.

02:07:39 Speaker_02
How many dogs do they lose every year?

02:07:42 Speaker_01
Well, suicides, too. I'm sure lots of people that like this, the small town that I was I was living in. Yeah, you know, that would be like a regular thing if people would lay down on the tracks and we're having a bad day.

02:07:58 Speaker_04
Imagine if we can cure that with Elon Musk's Neuralink.

02:08:02 Speaker_01
Everybody sign up on the reservation might be hard to, you know, get the word out there.

02:08:08 Speaker_04
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.

02:08:14 Speaker_01
Some crazy white man idea.

02:08:18 Speaker_04
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.

02:08:28 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:08:29 Speaker_04
These stupid white people are doing.

02:08:31 Speaker_01
Well, you know, well, so Gallup is like on their reservation, pretty much the Navajo reservation. And most of the population is Native. So it was pretty interesting living among the Natives for 14 years.

02:08:49 Speaker_01
And their view of white people is they're noisy, they're superficial, and they're kind of dumb.

02:08:56 Speaker_04
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.

02:09:09 Speaker_01
Well, I learned to be quiet there because there isn't anything to do and there aren't that many people.

02:09:17 Speaker_04
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?

02:09:27 Speaker_01
The health care was rather poor. 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? It's this horrible diarrhea. It's like a fatal diarrhea.

02:09:45 Speaker_01
I think 30,000 people in the country die every year from C. diff. Yeah, and I was battling that. The quality of the care was just so poor that I was taking notes. And I thought, if I live through this, I'm going to write about it.

02:10:03 Speaker_01
And so that is the basis of that autobiographical novel I wrote a few years ago. You know Joseph Levy escapes death.

02:10:12 Speaker_04
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.

02:10:23 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah Yeah, we were talking about the possibility of me being on your show. Yeah, just too sick. I can't travel.

02:10:29 Speaker_04
Yeah Yeah, generally people don't bounce back when they say they're that sick. I was really worried about you and But I didn't want to, I just didn't know, like, how does one, you know, I didn't want to pry.

02:10:42 Speaker_04
I felt like if you want to tell me about what's going on, you would tell me about what's going on.

02:10:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, it was a really hard time. And I bounced back. You look great. You look better than ever, actually. Oh, thanks. You really do. You too. Yeah, I swore I would bounce back and feel even better than I did before I got sick. But it was a chore.

02:11:05 Speaker_01
Well, it did strengthen my belief in God, speaking of God. Like, 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.

02:11:23 Speaker_04
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?

02:11:30 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. I had to get back to work. I had to continue being useful. Like I just couldn't rest on my laurels.

02:11:39 Speaker_03
Yeah.

02:11:42 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, if you had called and you said, how's it going? I'd say bad.

02:11:48 Speaker_04
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.

02:11:57 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah, I know. And, you know, in my generation, it's kind of accelerating.

02:12:03 Speaker_04
Yeah. Yeah. So when you did finally get out of this, how long was like the the actual sick period? How long was the period where you're really hurting?

02:12:18 Speaker_01
Well, the pneumonia was about 10 days, and the C. diff started about 10 days after that, and went on for six weeks. Whoa. Yeah, I lost 15 pounds.

02:12:29 Speaker_04
Whoa, and you're a thin guy to begin with.

02:12:31 Speaker_01
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.

02:12:51 Speaker_01
Because obviously, things had gotten so dire because I wasn't taking care of myself. So I had to kind of get to the bottom of that.

02:13:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, so it took another maybe seven months before I started to feel like my strength back and my brain functioning again.

02:13:09 Speaker_01
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.

02:13:28 Speaker_01
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?

02:13:41 Speaker_01
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.

02:13:51 Speaker_01
I guess my immune system just really needed to just get socked or something. Yeah. And it seemed to have done the trick.

02:13:59 Speaker_04
Just strange that you'd have a local pain that's that intense. We generally don't hear about that.

02:14:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah, it was just at the vaccination site. Very interesting.

02:14:08 Speaker_04
Yeah, weird.

02:14:10 Speaker_01
Do you get vaccinated? This might be a personal question. No, you can ask me anything. Yeah.

02:14:14 Speaker_04
Yeah. Yeah. No. I almost got vaccinated for COVID. Right. I was wondering. I was totally willing to do it.

02:14:22 Speaker_04
It was the early days of the pandemic and the UFC had allocated about, I think it was 150 or so doses for all their employees because they were running shows during the pandemic when everyone was terrified of it. So.

02:14:38 Speaker_04
I go to Vegas to do this UFC event, and I had a test before I leave, and 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.

02:14:50 Speaker_04
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.

02:15:01 Speaker_01
Oh, okay.

02:15:01 Speaker_04
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?

02:15:12 Speaker_04
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.

02:15:27 Speaker_04
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.

02:15:39 Speaker_04
So the Johnson & 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.

02:15:55 Speaker_04
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.

02:16:11 Speaker_04
And then I got attacked on CNN. So I was like, OK, 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.

02:16:21 Speaker_04
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.

02:16:35 Speaker_04
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.

02:16:48 Speaker_04
And I listed a bunch of different medications that I took, but for one, for whatever reason, They labeled ivermectin as the thing that needed to be attacked. And it was all in lockstep.

02:16:59 Speaker_04
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.

02:17:17 Speaker_04
And more importantly, I got better, like really quick. What is happening here? This is the strangest thing I've ever seen in my life.

02:17:24 Speaker_04
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.

02:17:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's hard to figure.

02:17:44 Speaker_04
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.

02:18:00 Speaker_01
Well, do you think they're going after you or going after the ivermectin?

02:18:03 Speaker_04
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.

02:18:13 Speaker_04
But it's such a dumb thing to say because this, we have, 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.

02:18:30 Speaker_04
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.

02:18:41 Speaker_04
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?

02:18:54 Speaker_04
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.

02:19:09 Speaker_04
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 pharmaceutical drug companies who clearly had marching orders.

02:19:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, what do you make of this virus that's killing folks in the Congo? Jesus, who knows? I don't know anything about it. 170 people have died. They don't know what it is. Some weird African virus. Fun.

02:19:39 Speaker_04
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.

02:19:51 Speaker_04
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%, 3.4%.

02:20:03 Speaker_04
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.

02:20:15 Speaker_01
It was a scary time, that's for sure. Yeah, they closed down the town that I was living in back then, Gallup. It was closed down. You couldn't go into it if you didn't live there. God, so weird. For nine days.

02:20:26 Speaker_04
Well, you know, nine days is better than California. California, they did a whole year and a half of complete restrictions. They were stopping outdoor dining just arbitrarily. I had a friend and his brother works for the state.

02:20:40 Speaker_04
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.

02:20:50 Speaker_04
And she said, it's the optics, the optics, like we're 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.

02:21:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's called virtue signaling, right? Yeah.

02:21:05 Speaker_04
Yeah. Well, it's also your, the real problem is their jobs are not dependent upon their society functioning. They get paid no matter what. So society crumbles and all these businesses, they lost 70% of their restaurants at one point in time.

02:21:20 Speaker_04
70% just went under. That's insane to continue a practice like that.

02:21:25 Speaker_04
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 how come it doesn't mean fuck those people it means protect those people but let everybody else

02:21:47 Speaker_04
get back to work, 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?

02:21:58 Speaker_04
How many people committed suicide because they lost everything, completely out of their power? How many lives were lost?

02:22:03 Speaker_04
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?

02:22:14 Speaker_04
So the whole reading people's lips and hearing sounds come out, everything was weird. Reading faces was weird.

02:22:20 Speaker_04
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 did we do to these people? Well, we'll find out. Yeah.

02:22:34 Speaker_04
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.

02:22:45 Speaker_01
You think if there's another pandemic?

02:22:47 Speaker_04
Right.

02:22:47 Speaker_04
I don't think people are going to 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 a trip somewhere, or you could visit your parents when they're in the hospital.

02:23:06 Speaker_04
All that is crazy.

02:23:07 Speaker_01
Yeah. I wonder what impact RFK Jr. is going to have on the delivery of healthcare now.

02:23:15 Speaker_04
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.

02:23:27 Speaker_04
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?

02:23:36 Speaker_01
I guess that's called blanket immunity.

02:23:40 Speaker_04
Yeah. Well, it's never been done before. There's never been preemptive pardons for people that may have been committing crimes.

02:23:48 Speaker_01
It's weird. Yeah Well, do you know much about the fluoride story?

02:23:52 Speaker_01
A lot of people wonder about the pineal gland and DMT synthesis if you have a calcified pineal which is more likely in you know, if you're fluoridated have they ever done autopsy studies on people that are in high fluoride areas check out their pineal glands or is this just like one of those things that people say

02:24:12 Speaker_01
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.

02:24:22 Speaker_04
So when you say that When they calcify more rapidly like what animals are they serving them?

02:24:29 Speaker_01
Oh fluoride, um, you know rats mice and what are the results been like significant differences between Yeah, I mean, these experimental animals, pineal glands anyway, they do calcify more rapidly.

02:24:46 Speaker_01
But whether or not that actually correlates to a reduction in melatonin production, for example, I'm not that familiar with the literature.

02:24:55 Speaker_04
Is the number commensurate with what would even be possible through fluoride and water, or would it have to be some other form of poisoning? Is it like a very high level of fluoride that they're giving them?

02:25:07 Speaker_01
With the experimental animals, yeah, this fluoride-rich kind of diet.

02:25:11 Speaker_04
So then the question would be, what about the accumulation of fluoride in small doses over the course of a long lifetime?

02:25:18 Speaker_01
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.

02:25:35 Speaker_01
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.

02:25:51 Speaker_01
So at least according to the data from the 80s, the degree of calcification wasn't functionally significant.

02:26:04 Speaker_01
But I get an email here and there wondering if fluoridation of the pineal might reduce the production of endogenous DMT, which might theorize takes place.

02:26:15 Speaker_01
But we don't really know quite yet if the pineal even makes DMT, let alone if pineal calcification might reduce it.

02:26:26 Speaker_04
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?

02:26:39 Speaker_04
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.

02:26:47 Speaker_01
Yeah. You would think it would correlate with your overall general health. Right. Yeah.

02:26:52 Speaker_04
I mean, 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? Right. Because the amount of fluoride that's in the water is very small.

02:27:06 Speaker_04
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, where does it go? Like, does it actually leave the body, or does it accumulate somewhere?

02:27:16 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, you'd have to compare autopsies in older folks from areas that never had fluoride in their water versus those that did. And I am certain those studies have been done. Like I said, I'm just not that current on that.

02:27:34 Speaker_04
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 it, I said it's like putting sunscreen in the apples because some people get sunburned.

02:27:48 Speaker_04
That doesn't seem logical. You could just brush your fucking teeth. You don't need to have this weird neurotoxic chemical in our water, even in low supplies.

02:27:57 Speaker_01
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.

02:28:05 Speaker_04
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. I mean, occasionally I'll have a cookie or something like that, but it's not a normal thing for me. I think it's diet.

02:28:19 Speaker_04
It's diet and it's brushing your teeth.

02:28:21 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, and I think exercising your jaw, too. Chewing gum.

02:28:26 Speaker_04
Right. Xylitol gum is supposed to be really good for your jaw and good for your teeth.

02:28:30 Speaker_01
Yeah. If you have a healthy jaw, healthy chin, I mean, you breathe easier.

02:28:36 Speaker_04
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.

02:28:51 Speaker_04
That's the only thing that makes sense to me. It doesn't make any sense that people would be willing to potentially sacrifice They're children's IQ.

02:28:59 Speaker_04
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.

02:29:12 Speaker_04
I mean, once you eliminate all the other environmental things that may be consistent with the people that have lower IQs and children, If you're just pointing only to fluoride, if this is one thing that varies, this is a potential real problem.

02:29:26 Speaker_04
We know that leaded gas reduced people's IQ. You know that, right? When they used to have leaded gas, people like me and you who grew up at a time with leaded gas, you probably would have a 10 point higher IQ if you didn't grow up with leaded gas.

02:29:43 Speaker_04
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 what percentage of a detriment is leaded gas to your IQ.

02:30:00 Speaker_04
Because they actually have done studies on people and what happened once unleaded gas was introduced and how children's IQs went up.

02:30:09 Speaker_01
Oh yeah, super helpy. Yeah, it was quite helpful.

02:30:13 Speaker_04
It's still in the ground in some places. Well, it's still in a lot of pipes. Oh, really? Yeah. Lead pipes. Oh, yeah.

02:30:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, the whole Flint thing.

02:30:20 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah.

02:30:21 Speaker_01
Yeah. Oh, right, right, right.

02:30:22 Speaker_04
Yeah, they used to use lead pipes. How crazy.

02:30:25 Speaker_01
You're drinking water going through lead pipes. Well, the Romans used lead pipes. I know. Yeah, for their plumbing. You know, the Latin name for lead is plumbum. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. That's why the pipes were called plumbing.

02:30:40 Speaker_04
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 U.S. population exposed to dangerously high lead levels. So what does this say about IQ?

02:30:54 Speaker_04
Here it goes. Exposure to car exhaust. Estimate childhood lead exposure has on average led to a reduction of 2.6 IQ points per person. That's nuts.

02:31:06 Speaker_04
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.

02:31:16 Speaker_04
Well, probably because they lived in urban areas where there's more car traffic. Right?

02:31:21 Speaker_01
Most likely. Most likely. Yeah. If they're inhaling lead.

02:31:24 Speaker_04
If they're in cities.

02:31:26 Speaker_01
Lead particles.

02:31:27 Speaker_04
People that live in very congested areas. Wow. 1973, Environmental Protection Agency issued its first call for manufacturers to begin a gradual reduction in the amount of lead in gasoline.

02:31:39 Speaker_04
I bet they're going to look back at fluoride the same way we look back at lead in gas. Yeah. We're going to go, what the hell were we doing? It doesn't even make any sense. Oh, it's for your teeth. It's for your teeth. Brush your fucking teeth.

02:31:52 Speaker_04
And if you use fluoride in your toothpaste, great. Just spit it out. Don't swallow that shit, right? You don't swallow tooth. My friend Eddie said it best. He said, If fluoride wasn't a problem, why would they want to sell you toothpaste without fluoride?

02:32:07 Speaker_04
And why does it say fluoride-free in the toothpaste? Why do people gravitate towards fluoride-free toothpaste? Well, because of studies like this, where they've found that actually there is a correlation between IQ levels and fluoride.

02:32:19 Speaker_04
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's nothing to this. Look at the amount of fluoride. What about a cumulative? Do we know? Do you really know?

02:32:31 Speaker_04
Or why are you so willing to accept the fact that it's a good idea to throw neurotoxins in the water supply?

02:32:42 Speaker_01
Well, they may have just discovered it through serendipity.

02:32:49 Speaker_04
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, that makes sense.

02:33:04 Speaker_04
I think it's Texas. Google, how did they start putting fluoride in the water? I'm pretty sure it's that.

02:33:11 Speaker_01
There's some healing springs of some sort.

02:33:14 Speaker_04
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.

02:33:26 Speaker_04
If you want to sell fluoride and tell people to add it to their water, fine. But put it into everybody's water? That's crazy. That seems crazy.

02:33:36 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, I mean, as a dentist or when I was a small kid, we used to get these fluoride treatments. Yeah. Yeah.

02:33:43 Speaker_01
With this like blue gun, you know, kind of gel that they would put in a splint and you put it on your upper and lower teeth for like five minutes or what not to kill all those bad germs. A fluoride treatment.

02:33:58 Speaker_04
and lower your curiosity.

02:33:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, lower your IQ, which is maybe not a bad idea.

02:34:03 Speaker_04
Well, you've got to wonder with the thing you were talking about before about some people just don't have imagination, which is really crazy to think that some people are just, they just got a bad hand.

02:34:18 Speaker_01
Well, they can't make stuff up. Well, they must be quite practical, right? I mean, what you see is what you get. There's no abstracting.

02:34:26 Speaker_04
That's very charitable. They might just be dull. They might be dull minded. I mean, there's a certain percentage of our population that has an IQ below 85. What is it, like 15% or something like that? Was it higher than that?

02:34:40 Speaker_04
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.

02:34:51 Speaker_01
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. It may not really measure all aspects of intelligence. That's true.

02:35:06 Speaker_01
Maybe someone with an 85-point IQ is smart in other ways, like emotionally intelligent, for example.

02:35:14 Speaker_04
Okay. 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. All right. But you have to also factor in education, right?

02:35:44 Speaker_04
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.

02:35:59 Speaker_04
And some people have had a very poor education. And they might be intelligent. They might be very emotionally intelligent.

02:36:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, that was what I was thinking is that, yeah, it would be a different scale of intelligence than purely cognitive. Yeah. Well, that's one of the interesting elements about genetic engineering of the humans.

02:36:21 Speaker_01
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 on the fetuses.

02:36:37 Speaker_01
Like you can have a three DNA fetus or embryo, like the mom, the dad, and some super smart person or actually a super athletic person. So you could do like a chimera almost in the human situation.

02:36:54 Speaker_03
Whoa.

02:36:57 Speaker_04
That's probably already happened.

02:36:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, it is happening offshore. Yeah, that was the gist of it.

02:37:03 Speaker_04
China's probably creating a race of super people.

02:37:05 Speaker_01
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.

02:37:16 Speaker_04
But it accidentally made them higher IQ.

02:37:19 Speaker_01
Accidentally.

02:37:20 Speaker_04
Yeah.

02:37:22 Speaker_01
Well, so that guy's back at work. Yeah.

02:37:24 Speaker_04
Well, he went to jail for a little bit.

02:37:26 Speaker_01
Right. He's got a big lab, lots of funding.

02:37:29 Speaker_04
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.

02:37:36 Speaker_01
Well, you'd think that in a lot of ways that he would be celebrated. Like, you know, for example, the Scottish scientists that, you know, cloned that sheep, Dolly. Yeah. You know, they were heroes.

02:37:47 Speaker_04
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 going to be the first person that does it. There's going to be a lot of outrage.

02:37:56 Speaker_04
And I think some of that outrage is going to be by people that wish they did it first. So they're going to be pretending that this is horrible that you've done this. All right, they were scooped. Yeah.

02:38:06 Speaker_01
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 they were putting somebody else's heart in your place.

02:38:21 Speaker_04
Has to be, right? Well, we're lucky that it was done in the 20th century. Imagine if it had been done in the 18th century or the 16th century. You know, if you in the 1500s said, OK, I know how to save you. This guy just got run over by a wagon.

02:38:34 Speaker_04
I'm going to take his heart out. I'm going to cut you open, put his heart into you. Like what? Right.

02:38:39 Speaker_04
And that wouldn't have even worked because your body would have rejected it back then because they didn't have the proper drugs that allowed people to accept other people's organs and suppress your immune system.

02:38:49 Speaker_04
So your immune system doesn't reject the organ.

02:38:51 Speaker_01
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I never was in a heart transplant operating theater. You know, once in an emergency room, actually, I was able to crack somebody's chest open and work on their heart. Whoa. You give it the massage.

02:39:11 Speaker_01
Well, the person, you know, was quite sick. He was dying and we, you know, tried everything. Well, 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.

02:39:29 Speaker_01
Didn't help. And, you know, the last thing that we could do was do open heart massage. Wow. Yeah. Open chest massage. Yo, that's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah.

02:39:40 Speaker_01
And you know, like, you know, there were a bunch of like a number of students around and we each took turns, you know, like squeezing it and feel it was pretty. Did the guy last after that? No, no.

02:39:51 Speaker_01
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 no, I mean, never woke up. Oh, Jesus.

02:40:03 Speaker_01
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.

02:40:22 Speaker_01
You know, like, for example, when we first started working in the hospitals, you know, there's a dress code. You know, this was 1976 or so.

02:40:31 Speaker_01
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.

02:40:41 Speaker_01
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, okay, our mom would like to see us wear a tie.

02:40:53 Speaker_00
Yeah.

02:40:53 Speaker_01
You know, so you work into a role. You know, like, you know, how you look and how you talk and how you carry yourself. Yeah, it's a very interesting, you know, conditioning, you know, social conditioning. And you have an extreme position of authority.

02:41:11 Speaker_01
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.

02:41:24 Speaker_01
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.

02:41:34 Speaker_03
Yeah, and they can do some wild things today.

02:41:36 Speaker_04
I mean, I'm living proof of it. I've had three knee operations, two knee reconstructions.

02:41:42 Speaker_01
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? Some bad swelling at least. Yeah. Maybe they withdrew some blood from that joint?

02:42:00 Speaker_04
Oh, you know what it was probably? I probably had what's called Regenikine.

02:42:05 Speaker_04
So Regenikine 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.

02:42:20 Speaker_04
Yeah, it's it really helps heal things. I had it done on my back. I had it done on my knees.

02:42:25 Speaker_01
It's amazing stuff Yeah, so you've gotten a bunch of knee surgery. Yes.

02:42:30 Speaker_04
Yeah, my knees are pretty beat up My back's pretty beat up and my knees are pretty beat up.

02:42:34 Speaker_01
That's from your martial arts. Yeah.

02:42:36 Speaker_04
Yeah most of it. Yeah, I

02:42:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, do you have a knee replacement?

02:42:39 Speaker_04
No, no, I don't need that. No, it's not that bad. 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.

02:42:52 Speaker_04
My friend Michael Bisping, he was a former UFC middleweight champion. He has both of his knees replaced. He has two artificial knees.

02:42:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, and they're doing OK with their new knees.

02:43:01 Speaker_04
Yeah, I mean better, right? Like he was in severe pain. 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.

02:43:11 Speaker_04
You know, these titanium heads, have you seen them?

02:43:14 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:43:14 Speaker_04
Pretty incredible.

02:43:15 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:43:15 Speaker_04
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?

02:43:29 Speaker_04
You got to go back in there and lop off again and put a new one in?

02:43:33 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, they may have some new development. That's what you would hope so. Yeah. You would hope so.

02:43:37 Speaker_04
But I mean, you're banking on that. You're like essentially making a bet that, OK, you could chop off the end of my knee. And in 20 years, they're going to have some new thing.

02:43:47 Speaker_04
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.

02:44:07 Speaker_04
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.

02:44:16 Speaker_04
So I think if people could just hang in there for a little longer, according to my friend Brigham, who owns ways to well, which is a stem cell clinic out here, he is convinced that these kind of

02:44:30 Speaker_04
Like super invasive surgeries are gonna be a thing in 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 problems.

02:44:42 Speaker_04
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.

02:44:54 Speaker_04
You know, I can imagine it's 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.

02:45:10 Speaker_04
And you're supposed to be real relaxed for the next six weeks. No heavy exercise at all. You can just kind of go walking. And after a while, it starts to kick in. And now he has no back pain anymore.

02:45:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, is he back surfing? 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.

02:45:36 Speaker_04
So 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.

02:45:50 Speaker_01
Yeah, pulse damage would know.

02:45:52 Speaker_04
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.

02:46:07 Speaker_04
I take lion's mane all the time. And I always wonder, how shit would my memory be if I didn't take it?

02:46:15 Speaker_01
Yeah. When I was recovering, I spoke to Paul and said, help me. I need help. He said, lines mean.

02:46:20 Speaker_04
He gave me that giant mushroom, that thing on the desk over there. That's what that is. That big log-looking thing. Oh, that's a mushroom? That's a mushroom.

02:46:29 Speaker_01
It's a huge one. I was wondering what that was. Yeah, that's a mushroom.

02:46:31 Speaker_04
That's Paul Stamets brought me a mushroom. Yeah, nice. Yeah. He's a fascinating character. Yeah, I like Paul. Great guy.

02:46:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, really great guy.

02:46:38 Speaker_04
I think he just got something replaced. Like a hip. A hip or a knee.

02:46:43 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:46:44 Speaker_04
Something along those lines.

02:46:45 Speaker_01
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.

02:46:55 Speaker_04
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.

02:47:06 Speaker_01
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.

02:47:18 Speaker_01
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 you know, but if it gets in a darker dim, it's it becomes difficult, dude You're gonna be able to see through walls

02:47:37 Speaker_04
See if you can find that article about potential, because 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're going to be able to restore sight.

02:47:50 Speaker_04
In how many years?

02:47:52 Speaker_03
I don't know.

02:47:53 Speaker_04
And then on top of that, the possibility is enhanced vision. And that's what we're talking about, like being able to see warm things. blindsight device being developed to restore vision and people have lost their sight.

02:48:10 Speaker_04
No, there was one that was saying you're going to be able to have infrared, night vision, a bunch of different possibilities on top of the fact they're going to be able to restore sight that eventually, I don't know how you'd Google this, that wasn't just restoring memory, excuse me, restoring vision, but enhanced vision.

02:48:33 Speaker_04
And that it's going to be far I think they're promising vision far greater than what human beings are personally capable of.

02:48:40 Speaker_02
Blindsight enables superhuman vision, beyond natural limits, like infrared, becomes cognitive process, not just biological. So yeah, that's what blindsight is. Cognitive process. OK, so that is the same neural link thing.

02:48:50 Speaker_04
And then on top of that, you're going to be able to zoom out. So you ever take a Samsung phone? They have 100x zoom. And you can just zoom in on something way in the distance. Like, wow, that's crazy. You can really zoom in on stuff.

02:49:03 Speaker_04
You're going to be able to do that with your eyeballs.

02:49:04 Speaker_01
Yeah. A feature enhancement, too. Yeah.

02:49:08 Speaker_04
Yeah, you're going to be able to see people look way better than they really look. Just put a filter on.

02:49:12 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:49:12 Speaker_04
Everybody's beautiful.

02:49:13 Speaker_01
Yeah.

02:49:14 Speaker_02
That's what Elon said on a tweet about it.

02:49:16 Speaker_04
Yeah, so there it is. Musk explained, the BlindSight device from Neuralink will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see.

02:49:25 Speaker_04
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.

02:49:35 Speaker_04
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, ultraviolet, or even radar wavelengths, like Geordi La Forge.

02:49:49 Speaker_04
Who's Geordi La Forge?

02:49:50 Speaker_01
Star Trek.

02:49:51 Speaker_04
Oh.

02:49:53 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, that'd be a lot of information, wouldn't it?

02:49:56 Speaker_04
Yeah.

02:49:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. So what would you do with it all?

02:49:59 Speaker_04
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.

02:50:05 Speaker_01
Yeah. Or even become a philosopher. I mean, with those enhanced processes, I mean, you could kind of direct it in any way that you'd like.

02:50:19 Speaker_04
Do you think that enhancing the human body like this is what the future of humanity holds?

02:50:27 Speaker_01
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.

02:50:45 Speaker_04
You know, the people who get the chip.

02:50:48 Speaker_01
The Mark of the Beast. Isn't that on the forehead? Maybe that's the best spot for it. 666 is the Mark of the Beast.

02:50:54 Speaker_04
Right. Yeah. But isn't that like open to interpretation? What is it saying? You've read the original one. What is the Mark of the Beast in the Hebrew Bible, the ancient?

02:51:04 Speaker_01
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. You're too busy learning ancient Hebrew. Yeah, yeah.

02:51:17 Speaker_01
I have enough to study in the Hebrew Bible.

02:51:20 Speaker_04
Yeah. 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.

02:51:37 Speaker_04
I could see why people wouldn't see. And it might be just the inevitable transition from biological to cyborg that we're probably going to have to go through anyway?

02:51:51 Speaker_01
Well, the end of the world will, at least according to certain traditions, is heralded by the Antichrist. And the Antichrist is the master of the lie.

02:52:04 Speaker_01
So I think, you know, it's interesting to kind of use that perspective as a way of seeing, you know, where the future is heading.

02:52:15 Speaker_04
So the Antichrist is mass media.

02:52:17 Speaker_01
It's the master of the lie.

02:52:19 Speaker_04
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.

02:52:31 Speaker_04
We take over foreign governments and install our own puppet dictators and have everybody convinced it's a good thing.

02:52:37 Speaker_01
Well, the concept of the Antichrist is very old, 2,000 years. You have Christ, you've got the Antichrist. So there's a God and there's a demi-urge. So it's a notion that has carried a lot of weight for a long time.

02:52:57 Speaker_01
So you think that the media is the Antichrist? Or could be seen as?

02:53:04 Speaker_04
Well, you could see corporations as being in sort of a demonic state.

02:53:09 Speaker_04
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.

02:53:24 Speaker_04
Like, for instance, the Sackler family. that got everybody hooked on opioids. Is that not demonic? That seems very demonic.

02:53:33 Speaker_04
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?

02:53:51 Speaker_04
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.

02:54:00 Speaker_04
And like in the result, in the end result, the end result is evil.

02:54:05 Speaker_01
Well, you look at the opium wars in China. You know, the British imported opium and there was a huge opium addiction problem in China. And yeah, it was seen as a demonic scourge, you know, like a diabolical affliction.

02:54:22 Speaker_04
And in its result, it is demonic. It's just we're hung up on pitchfork, forktail, horns, demon. But in action, it's clearly demonstrably demonic.

02:54:39 Speaker_01
Well, demonic in what way?

02:54:42 Speaker_04
Okay.

02:54:42 Speaker_04
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 starve to death because of embargoes, countless people are killed that didn't have to be killed,

02:55:05 Speaker_04
Loss of at least a million lives over the course of the entire war and then the starving people afterwards.

02:55:12 Speaker_05
Mm-hmm.

02:55:12 Speaker_04
Well, that's demonic Isn't it for those people?

02:55:16 Speaker_01
Well, does that mean that you believe in the devil or Satan?

02:55:22 Speaker_04
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 wow Satan's real But you're allowed to believe in God.

02:55:31 Speaker_04
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 bats an eye.

02:55:41 Speaker_04
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 going to spend all your tax dollars on now.

02:55:51 Speaker_01
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 a level.

02:56:08 Speaker_04
But 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 oh it's in the fucking steps, you know pledge of allegiance It's normal, whatever.

02:56:21 Speaker_04
Yeah, but it wasn't even until what was it like teddy roosevelt Like who put pledge of allegiance and it was when we were battling the communists And that's when God got put into the Pledge of Allegiance.

02:56:34 Speaker_01
Well, you believe in good and evil. 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.

02:56:48 Speaker_01
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 recognize and think about?

02:57:00 Speaker_04
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,

02:57:19 Speaker_04
You can come up with any number of massacres throughout history and you say that's an evil act.

02:57:25 Speaker_01
There's no question.

02:57:26 Speaker_04
Right. So evil is a thing that's real.

02:57:29 Speaker_01
If there's good, there's evil. Right.

02:57:31 Speaker_04
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.

02:57:42 Speaker_04
And are there really angels and demons? Or are those the scapegoats for this bizarre dance of good and evil that just exists in the world?

02:57:52 Speaker_01
Mm-hmm. Well, if it weren't 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.

02:58:04 Speaker_01
It'd just be true or false, which is 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.

02:58:18 Speaker_03
Right.

02:58:19 Speaker_01
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 the issue of true or false got became muddled. Yeah.

02:58:34 Speaker_01
And they no longer were fit inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, a paradise.

02:58:40 Speaker_03
What's your take on Lilith?

02:58:43 Speaker_01
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 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.

02:59:01 Speaker_01
Was it after that? No, I think it was after Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden that they stopped having sex. So Adam then was just sleeping with Lilith and they spawned innumerable demons as a result of their relationship.

02:59:21 Speaker_01
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.

02:59:34 Speaker_03
What do you think Lilith was originally? If it was a thing?

02:59:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, I don't know. Well, that's called Midrash. It's the explication of the Bible by the rabbis. So it's what's 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.

02:59:57 Speaker_01
And I think, you know, the surrounding environment, societies, culture, influenced by the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Hittites, you know, there's a lot of, you know, accumulation of other cultures onto

03:00:16 Speaker_01
interpreting the stories that occur in the text. A lot of fanciful things and entertaining things like, for example, Lilith is the source of the demonic entities out there.

03:00:31 Speaker_04
Mmm. 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.

03:00:42 Speaker_04
I don't remember, but I was like, what?

03:00:43 Speaker_01
Who's Lilith? Yeah, was it Jordan Peterson? It could have been. Yeah, very possibly. Because he's a keen student of the Bible. Yes, very possibly.

03:00:51 Speaker_04
I do not remember, though. But I remember thinking, like, wow. Like, and then the original story, like, so when you're talking about the biblical translations of the Adam and Eve story that we're all accustomed to,

03:01:04 Speaker_04
It's all the watered-down, sort of, or a 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?

03:01:13 Speaker_01
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. You know, very accurate. Yeah, it's a bit, you know, stilted.

03:01:25 Speaker_04
Is anything missing in the translation from when you read it in ancient Hebrew, or do you think it's pretty clear?

03:01:30 Speaker_01
It's, you know, fairly one-to-one correspondence between the Hebrew words and the English translation. You know, certain things are interpreted through a Christian lens because the Christians wrote the King James Bible translation.

03:01:44 Speaker_01
But the words and the grammar and the narratives, they're pretty much accurate. They spent a lot of time working on painstaking translations, so there was a responsibility to do it accurately.

03:02:03 Speaker_01
Imagine that story, trying to pass that one down for a thousand years. Yeah.

03:02:09 Speaker_04
Like, yeah, so there was only two people. And then there was an apple.

03:02:13 Speaker_03
Right. And a snake talked Eve into eating that apple and everything got fucked.

03:02:18 Speaker_01
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?

03:02:32 Speaker_01
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.

03:02:42 Speaker_04
So you think the biblical interpretation is a literal recalling of actual events that took place?

03:02:50 Speaker_01
No. 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, you know, laws, its own system.

03:03:05 Speaker_01
You know, things are, 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.

03:03:18 Speaker_01
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.

03:03:32 Speaker_04
Boy, that's obscure. So, it's not interpreting what they mean, but understanding what happened.

03:03:38 Speaker_01
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.

03:03:46 Speaker_04
As if. Yeah. So, perhaps a psychedelic experience, perhaps an altered state of consciousness?

03:03:54 Speaker_01
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. As if it were real. Well, you know the stories have been told so many times, right?

03:04:09 Speaker_01
That's the problem and You know, they they seem Well, if if you seems like they're blaming everything on Eve too, which is like a little suspect no her side of it well the one who got punished without even having a chance to explain himself was the snake and

03:04:29 Speaker_01
So God asks Adam what happened, and he asks Eve what happened, and he just lays it on the snake. Right.

03:04:36 Speaker_04
And the snake's like, I didn't tell her anything. I can't even talk. This lady wanted to eat that apple, and she blamed me.

03:04:42 Speaker_01
Well, back then, snakes could talk. Or in that world, snakes talk. How so? Well, you know, they were the wisest of all the animals in the garden. So, you know, they could speak.

03:04:56 Speaker_04
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.

03:05:06 Speaker_01
Well, it's a bit of a paradox. Yeah. Let me ask you this. 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.

03:05:27 Speaker_01
Cain killed Abel, then Cain had children, and his children begot the 70 nations, and then there was a flood because mankind was bad. Noah and his family survived. They all spoke one language afterwards. There was a tower.

03:05:43 Speaker_01
There's 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. It's quite consistent from book to book, from narrative to narrative.

03:06:00 Speaker_01
You know, 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 wish fulfillment.

03:06:12 Speaker_01
It's this world that is articulated, spelled out in a very ancient, very influential text.

03:06:24 Speaker_04
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, 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.

03:06:52 Speaker_04
And if you think about it in the version of 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

03:07:07 Speaker_04
moment in human history that they're trying to recollect and pass down?

03:07:14 Speaker_01
If that makes sense. Yeah, kind of. Well, if you consider the text to be prophetically received, Prophecy is communication between the divine and man, and the text was prophetically received.

03:07:30 Speaker_01
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.

03:07:51 Speaker_01
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.

03:08:07 Speaker_04
How much have you ever paid attention, if at all, to any of that ancient Sumerian stuff, like the Anunnaki?

03:08:15 Speaker_01
Some, some. Yeah, I watched this really great documentary a few years back. Yeah, but I wouldn't consider myself as knowing much about it.

03:08:30 Speaker_04
Right. That, to me, is one of the weirder origin stories.

03:08:35 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. So what is that origin story? I recall it quite fascinating, but not the details.

03:08:43 Speaker_04
Well, there's multiple versions of it. First of all, the story, the fantastic story is told by Zacharias Hitchin.

03:08:53 Speaker_04
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.

03:09:08 Speaker_04
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.

03:09:23 Speaker_04
And that they had engineered human beings out of lower primates. They had like accelerated our evolution. And that all of what we know about the cosmos, all of what we know about, you know, like they have,

03:09:42 Speaker_04
These detailed I don't see the ancient tablets that have a detailed map of the solar system from 6,000 years ago, right?

03:09:49 Speaker_04
The Sun in the center and all the moon 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.

03:10:01 Speaker_04
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 most fun one

03:10:11 Speaker_01
Yeah, it brings to mind the sons of God, the B'nai Elohim, which occur in the story of the flood and Noah.

03:10:24 Speaker_04
The Nephilim, too.

03:10:25 Speaker_01
Yeah, the Nephilim, the Rephaim, 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.

03:10:38 Speaker_01
Yeah, you know, so that story is interpreted or perceived, you know, through the lens of the Hebrew Bible, too. Really? Yeah.

03:10:46 Speaker_01
Well, there are, you know, that is a story in the text, you know, before the flood is, you know, the B'nai Elohim, you know, come down to earth, they have intercourse with the daughters of man. And out of those relationships comes this race of giants.

03:11:11 Speaker_01
That's the most fun one. Yeah, yeah. Isn't it? Well, they all got swept away in the flood. So that's an interesting turn of events.

03:11:21 Speaker_04
Well, if you interpret the flood as the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, which created the flood, which 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.

03:11:35 Speaker_04
That's the only thing we're missing. If they found some giants...

03:11:38 Speaker_01
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.

03:11:51 Speaker_04
Yeah, the bizarre thing is they've isolated this area outside of the Kuiper Belt where they believe there's a large planetary body.

03:11:59 Speaker_04
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 that comes close to us with these super advanced beings.

03:12:12 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think I've heard of that, actually.

03:12:14 Speaker_04
Yeah. It gets fun. Those get fun. Those I put away, rational thought, just to pay attention to that stuff.

03:12:22 Speaker_01
Well, and if it were true, then what?

03:12:29 Speaker_04
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.

03:12:38 Speaker_04
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.

03:12:54 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. Or they could be just doing the opposite, that they may be stirring up trouble.

03:13:01 Speaker_04
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.

03:13:14 Speaker_01
Yeah. You know, kind of withdraw from the brink of the precipice. Right. That's the story of humanity, basically, isn't it?

03:13:21 Speaker_04
Yeah, it is. Well, that's what's interesting about origin stories, right?

03:13:24 Speaker_04
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 happen to humanity and different cataclysms and disasters.

03:13:38 Speaker_04
And these stories are shared through different cultures, which is really interesting. Like in the Epic of Gilgamesh, there's a flood story. It's real similar.

03:13:49 Speaker_01
Yeah. Most of the Middle East has got a flood story, an origin story. Yeah. Yeah. It just makes you wonder. Well, it makes you wonder if it's true. Yeah. Yeah.

03:14:03 Speaker_01
So that's why I think studying one particular tradition in great detail can help you resonate with ones that are more universal.

03:14:18 Speaker_04
Yeah. Well, that one is so common, which is really interesting when you see the younger drives impact theory evidence. Like, of course, 11,000 plus years ago, this is probably what happened.

03:14:32 Speaker_04
The story gets passed around forever and ever, and everyone sort of remembers it.

03:14:37 Speaker_01
Yeah. Well, do you like Graham's documentaries? Yeah, I do. Yeah. The other Netflix ones. They're fascinating.

03:14:43 Speaker_04
I don't like all the anger that comes out of it, all the people that get mad at him and disparaging remarks and how some archaeologists have like severely overreacted to it as if it's some horrific threat. But it's fascinating, just the raw data.

03:15:01 Speaker_04
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 Gobekli Tepe.

03:15:16 Speaker_04
To me, it's just incredible to imagine people living 11,000 years ago. What is life like? What is that experience like? What is it like talking to people?

03:15:27 Speaker_01
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, it's crazy. Yeah, it's very interesting. Walter States.

03:15:42 Speaker_01
This is your book. New book came out. Well, it's going to be coming out tomorrow. Oh, and I took your advice and I narrated the audience. Yes. Yeah. Beautiful.

03:15:50 Speaker_04
I'm so happy when people do that. That came out. December 10th. My Altered States. And it is going to be available everywhere.

03:16:00 Speaker_01
Yeah. Intertraditions publishes it. Yeah. It's on all the usual resources.

03:16:06 Speaker_04
And you can go to rickstrossman.com and you can see this and everything else. Oh, and you can preorder it. You can order it for me.

03:16:15 Speaker_01
I will inscribe it and I will sign it. Oh, beautiful. Oh, that's awesome.

03:16:19 Speaker_04
That's very cool. That's only 20 bucks.

03:16:21 Speaker_01
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. Look at that. Who drew it?

03:16:32 Speaker_01
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?

03:16:45 Speaker_04
No, I have not.

03:16:46 Speaker_01
This is great. These are cool drawings. They're great drawings. Yeah.

03:16:50 Speaker_04
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Rick, thank you so much. It's always great to see you. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for coming.

03:16:55 Speaker_01
Same here.

03:16:56 Speaker_04
I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. All right. Go buy the book, folks. Bye, everybody.