#2241 - Rick Strassman
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So he's got this place called the Boneyard, my friend John Reeves in Alaska, and he made this for me too. This is like a little skull. That's a woolly mammoth tooth, like a molar. Whoa. Yeah. So he has this incredible place, and he was a gold miner, right?

And still is. And they started finding, like, an extraordinary amount of tusks and bones and skulls from animals that aren't even supposed to have been there. Yeah. And it's kind of rewriting history, but it's all in his land. So he has complete control over it. And he has, like... See, there's John. He's this enormous dude. He's, like, 6'9", 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.

So they could study this stuff. And if you see outside in the lobby, there's actually a bison skull. It's like a 10,000-plus-year-old bison skull. A lot of bones. So this area is only a few acres. This is what's really crazy. He has one area that's like – I believe it's like four acres and another area that's about six acres. And there's also like a very heavy layer of carbon here.

So it appears there was some sort of a mass fire. And he thinks that this mass extinction event that all the people like...

Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson talk about with the end of the Younger Dryas, the Younger Dryas impact area. He thinks it's connected to this. And he thinks that site might have been hit and all these animals probably in the Great Flood, their carcasses were washed into this sort of valley in this one area where they were kind of trapped up against the side of this mountain.

And so he hoses the mountain down with the, 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, this is what they do all day.

Yeah, those hosers are what they used to use for mining gold, too. Yes, that's why he has them. Yeah, that's exactly why he has them. He's a gold miner. Yeah, so this is around the southeast coast? I don't know exactly what part of Alaska he's in, but it's really, really amazing stuff. And another thing that he's exposed is that it's the Smithsonian, right, in New York? No. No. I think it's American History.

Well, find out what... American Museum of Natural History. Museum of Natural History. So they had from the same property before he owned it, way back in like, I think it was the 30s. They had so many bones from this part of Alaska where the previous people had found them that they didn't have any room to store them. So they dumped them in the East River. Yeah. And so they denied that the previous people... Obviously, it's people that are long dead.

They denied that this happened, and so he sent a bunch of divers out there. And so they're recovering, like, these mammoth bones and all these, like, bison bones, step bison bones in the East River. Yeah, yeah. That are all from his property in Alaska. Yeah, it'd be hard to explain how they got there otherwise.

There's only one. I mean, it's the 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. And they still to this day have just crates of these bones. Yeah.

Yeah. Is that the reason he chose where he is living in Alaska is because of the bridge? I don't believe so. No, he was there for gold mining. I think it was something that came up along the way. Because he's a gold miner, he's got a lot of disposable income. So he's willing to just spend it on his own to do this. He doesn't trust the museums anymore because they screwed over the previous owner. And even though it's his property and his land, he's supposed to get that stuff and they don't want to give it to him.

And so he's got his own research facility that he built. He spent millions of dollars building this enormous research facility on his property so that they could study these bones. He's got warehouses full of them. Yeah. What's his background? Like archaeology or something? No. He was a swimmer, right? Yeah. He was a swimmer in college and became a gold miner.

I mean, he told me the whole story. I don't really totally remember it. But this is not something he wanted to get into. It's like right in the middle near Fairbanks.

It's near Fairbanks. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Let me take a look at that map. You know, I spent my first year after finishing my psychiatry training in Fairbanks. Oh, did you really? Yeah. That's an interesting psychiatry place. Yeah.

Because the psychology of people that live in Alaska is very different. They're resilient humans. Well, and they're there for a reason. Right. And their reason is to be at the end of the road. Right. Or their family's there and they've grown up there. Yeah. But you meet like – I felt like I was meeting people from another country. Like I only worked in Alaska once. I did a show in Anchorage. It was a lot of fun. Me and my friend Ari Shaffir. Yeah.

We said, let's just fly up there, just like an adventure trip. We'll do some salmon fishing, and then we'll go do a show. And that's what we did. And it's like the people feel different. They feel different. Like they're more, they're made out of harder things. They're like more durable. Right. When you were up there, did you get outside of Anchorage, like into the interior at all? We didn't do much traveling. We only kind of, I've been to Alaska a few times, but.

a couple times for hunting trips. And I always feel the same way. I always feel like it's another country. It's just like very interesting. It's a very strange atmosphere too, you know, the climate and the geology and the feeling, you know, because you're up so high on the planet. Right. You're close to the North Pole. Yeah, when we were doing shows, I believe it was July or August where we were doing shows and at night after the show, 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. It's a very strange feeling. Well, in the winter, too, you have maybe a couple hours of twilight. Yeah. And that's it. And then sometimes all dark for a long time, too. Well, that occurs above the Arctic Circle. Have you ever seen that movie, 30 Days of Night? It's a vampire movie. Oh, yeah, with Kiefer Sutherland. No. Is it? No, no, no. That is The Lost Boys. Oh, The Lost Boys, right. 30 Days of Night was cooler. Yeah.

Yeah. Not that there was anything wrong with The Lost Boys. It's a little dated. 30 Days of Night is more modern, and these vampires decide to descend upon this small town where it never turns light so they can just hunt all the time. Yeah, that's clever.

Yeah, vampires are smarter than they look. These are creepy vampires too. They've got horrifying teeth. It's interesting how vampires sort of – we decide that they look like Bela Lugosi. There's Dracula. That must be a vampire. And then some people – 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. And then as I got older, I was like, maybe there's a reason why. So like if I've never experienced something and then I do experience it, how am I ever going to explain this to people where it's going to make any sense?

to someone else that hasn't experienced it before? Well, you're reporting on your subjective experience, right? Right. And it's one that a lot of people share. And so you can compare notes. It's like dreaming. You can't really prove that you dreamed or that you were in a dream state. Right. Yeah. It's a personal experience. Yeah. But that's a common one. So you can compare notes. I think that's how it works.

Haven't there been studies done – there's been something done where they've taken people in altered states and had them go into a room where they experienced – they weren't connected, they weren't communicating, but they experienced incredibly similar environments.

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Craven the Hunter is exclusively in movie theaters this Thursday. Get your tickets now. I think that's in my big toe. You know that Theory of Everything book? Mm-hmm.

I'm not familiar with it. I think it's Thomas Campbell. Is that who wrote that? Yeah, it's really good. I'm in the middle of that right now. The Big Toe. Yeah. It's a very strange book. Yeah. That's the name of the book or the name of the experiment? Yeah, that's the name of the book. It's my big theory of everything. Toe is for theory of everything. Oh, I see. Okay. But it has a picture of a toe on the cover. Yeah. When you were doing the DMT studies-

It's kind of a similar thing, right? Like if you had never experienced that and someone was trying to describe it to you, it would sound completely like nonsense, just like a ghost would. Right. Or even a dream to somebody who had never dreamed. Right. Right. Because there are people who don't dream, right? Which is very strange. Yeah. Yeah. Like they're people with no imagination. They can't visualize things. That's so bizarre. Yeah. Yeah. And you give them psychedelics and they report that they can. But I mean, how do they know that they are?

Right. That's an uncomfortable reality that some people's brains don't work the same way. Right. Yeah. It's a fact, though. It has to be. Yeah. I mean, just just look at like cultural choices. Just look, look at the different kinds of music that people enjoy, the different kinds of food that people enjoy and the different kinds of climate that they enjoy. There is no way we're all seeing the same thing.

There's no way. If food that tastes horrible to you is like a sacred delicacy to them, you know? Yeah. One of the ideas I put out in that 2014 book on the prophetic state, the soul of prophecy, I proposed that people respond ethnically or culturally differently to different endogenous psychedelics.

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 wide-out experience. And with the other kind of religious experience, it's more DMT-like because it's full of angels and –

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

Just imagine being born in an atheist, secular environment, and you're raised by those people. And then you meet someone who's born in a fundamentalist Christian religion where it's like very strict. And then they both meet when they're 14 and compare notes. It'd be the most bizarre versions of the world, right? Well, I mean, one version is there is no God and the other version is that there is.

Right, but there's one version that God is not just a part of your life, but the only reason why anything was ever formed. It's God's plan for everything, that God has a plan for you, and that if you follow the teachings of God, you'll ultimately go to heaven. It's 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. You know, if you feel depressed, you should probably go to the doctor and get a pill. Yeah, yes. So you wonder if the atheist's biology is different than the believer's. 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? 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. Yeah. You know, 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, passed on to the following generations. Yeah, I was – we were just talking about that, like at what point does trauma end? At what point did the effects of trauma end? Right. Is it in the first generation or the second? Yeah.

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 Patrick has talked about this. It's really interesting. Yeah, that's one of the spinoffs of fasting and starvation.

You know, there were a lot, well, you know, speaking of starvation, you know, there are a lot of studies of enforced starvation, like the camps and in Africa at various times.

Yeah. So there are some advantages, but I mean obviously to a point. Yeah. Obviously we never want to ask someone to do that. But when people do it voluntarily, like when they go on these three and five day fasts, I've never met one person who said, I'll never do that again. That was fucking terrible and stupid. Yeah. And I felt really dumb and I didn't feel alive at all. No, they come back with like this very bizarre euphoric vision.

Their version of it when they're expressing themselves seems like they were like on mushrooms. Yeah. It's 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 deprived. I don't think – I think that's fine because espresso doesn't – I mean – No calories. Right. There's no calories. Yeah. Yeah.

I should do it. I should probably do like a three day. See what's up. Cause my friend Dana just did it. He did. I think he, Dana did a four, three or four day.

He said it was incredible. But everybody reports all this energy, which is really fascinating because I guess that's your body surviving off ketones. Right. You're in a ketotic state. Well, when people fast for three or four days, do they drink water or they? Yeah, they drink. Oh, you have to. I mean, there's a thing called a dry fast and people have done that. I've heard of people doing like 48 hour dry fasts and that is no water as well. Yeah. You can keep that. Yeah. I'm so not interested in that.

Well, you can go on a vision quest, like out in the desert, not drink or not eat, and you do start hallucinating. Yeah, I love McKenna's take on that. Do you know that? I don't remember. He told a story about how this monk, the Buddha was in town. This monk went to visit the Buddha, and he told the monk that he's practiced a city of levitation for the past 10 years, and now he can walk on water. And the Buddha goes, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel.

You know? Right. Yeah. Because here's my take on some of these things. Just because it's hard to do doesn't always mean it's good to do. Like there are things that are hard to do, but they're good to do. Like if you could run a marathon at the end of that marathon, you're like, wow, I really did something. And you feel good and like, wow, you're a little beat up, but you have a new faith in yourself. That's good to do. It's hard to do, but good to do. But if you run for like seven days and you almost die –

Maybe. Yeah. Maybe you've crossed that line. Well, I think a flip side of that is simple things can be good for you. They don't have to be hard.

Sure. Yeah. No, things don't have to be hard to be good for you. A puppy smiling or licking you and playing with you is good for you. It's like literally like good for your body. Like when people play with puppies, that happiness feeling that you get, like, what are you doing? What are you doing? I know. That's actually really good for you. All right. Well, this new neighborhood I moved into in May, there's a park, Altura Park.

You wouldn't believe the number of dogs that are being walked around there. There's these little tiny ones. You know, like I haven't lived in the city in a long time. I haven't seen tiny dogs. But, man, there's some tiny dogs out there. Yeah. Jamie's got a tiny one. He didn't bring him in today, but Carl's a little maniac. He's a little French poodle or French bulldog. He's like that big. Yeah, they're cute. He's adorable. But does he weigh?

I was 16 pounds now. He's jacked. Yeah, he sounds. He really is jacked. He's got a lot of muscles. He's super aggressive. Not with people like not like real aggressive, like playful. Just wants to play constantly. Yeah. So I bring my dog, who's a golden retriever, who's the opposite. He's just everybody's best friend. If he meets you, he's like, you're my best friend. He loves everybody. Yeah. And Carl just launches himself at him. Yeah. The one dog I had was a miniature dachshund.

Oh, that was a cute little dog. He was tough. Really? He bit children. That's not good. That's not tough. He's an asshole. Boy, that dog is an asshole. Yeah. That sucks. Well, he lived 25 years. Whoa. Yeah. Well, if I lived 25 years and I was a dog, I'd probably start biting kids, too. All right. Get me out of here. Well, toward the end, he was wearing a diaper.

I had a mastiff, and they unfortunately don't live very long. And towards the end, I used to have to carry him outside to go to the bathroom. He couldn't even walk. That's the real bummer is that you just love these creatures so much, and they only live 10 years, 12 years, 13 years. Well, do you replace it? No, you never replace it. You get another dog. You could always love other dogs. I don't think there's anything wrong. I don't think it's 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. 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. You should probably be sad for a long time. But if your dog dies...

Like, come on, man. Get another fucking dog. Right. Well, if it's your whole life, you know. I love dogs. I would never want to not have a dog. I just don't get it. Yeah, those mastiffs are big. He was a big fella. But they get a lot of, like, real problems with their joints because it's just so much weight. Yeah. Carrying a lot of weight. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we were talking about Alaska and up in Fairbanks. Yeah, I was a psychiatrist for the county for about a year. Boy. Yeah. Yeah, it was amazing. Well, it was interesting because I had kind of given up the idea of doing research. And I thought, oh, I'll just practice psychiatry. My girlfriend back then wanted to be a wildlife biologist.

Perfect place for that. Yeah, yeah. They've got a great department at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Yeah, 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. Cold.

The lowest it got down to was minus 49 one day in February. And you're from New Mexico? Well, Los Angeles, actually. Oh, at that time? Yeah. Wow. Well, it was snowing around Halloween, so I wasn't dressed for snow. I'd never really lived in snow. What was it like going from Los Angeles to minus 39? Well, I started to work on enjoying the dark.

As a rule, people don't like the dark. But there's forest all around town and it's dark. And especially in the winter, there's 18, 20 hours of pitch black. That's so crazy. Yeah, so I tried to imagine myself liking the dark. And it wasn't all that successful. I lasted about a year. Is there a thing that happens, like I lived in Boston when I was a kid, and one thing that it really does is

benefit you with bad weather is that when you have bad winters, you really love those summers. Those summers are so special. When me and my friends will go out on a summer night, it's like we were so happy. It was warm out. We're outside. We're listening to music, hanging out together. Boston, huh? Yeah. Yeah.

Is that because you have family there? Well, no. My family moved there when I was 13. So we moved. We lived in Jamaica Plain for a year, and then we lived in Newton, which is a suburb of Boston. It was a really nice, cool place to grow up. Yeah. Yeah.

I was in the Bronx for medical school. Oh. Yeah, the Bronx, New York. And I lived in the city for about a year. Yeah, it was great training. Yeah, when you get... Well, I'd imagine the characters you'd meet. Mm-hmm. And the characters you'd meet in Alaska. I bet you met a lot of people on the run. Um...

You know, I met a lot of Christians up in Alaska. Really? Yeah, yeah. Mostly? Well, my patient population, everybody, a lot of, the majority of people were pretty devout churchgoers and very strict about observance of the regulations in the Bible. So it was a fairly conservative type of city.

That's interesting. Like, did they impose it on other people? Like, did they have a gay community up there? They mostly imposed it on their kids. Yeah. The family dynamics up there were pretty stressful. You know, lots of cocaine, too, because it's so dark and people get so depressed. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, you know, Fairbanks had a boom when they built the oil pipeline between Prudhoe Bay and Anchorage.

And so Fairbanks exploded in population. And when I moved there, it had been shrinking a bit. It's got the university, which is pretty cool up there, and amazing countryside. Huge rivers, just enormous rivers. The one outside of town was a good half mile across. Wow. Yeah. I went skiing out there once at 25 below on the frozen river. It's like, oh, this is pretty nice. And I'm...

along the shore and there's a dark spot in the middle of the river. And I'm curious, I ski over to that dark spot, it's open water. Oh my God. In the middle of a quarter mile. And you're out there with your weight on skis. So I backed up, 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. Do you think that's what it was? Yeah, it was funny. I wasn't cold. I wasn't shivering or anything, but I just got really sleepy. They say before you die, you actually want to take your clothes off, which is really crazy. Yeah, yeah, that's what I've heard. Like in the snow when you're freezing. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of remember that. Oof.

And the bears up there are a force to contend with, the grizzly bears. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah. One of my friends up there was living in a cabin, and a bear just stuck its claws in the door, pulled the door out of the frame of the house. Jesus Christ. And went into the refrigerator, basically. Yeah.

It kind of cleared that out. So was he home? Up in his loft, yeah, sleeping. So he was awake while this was going on? Yeah. Oh, my God. So it just smelled food. It smelled food. It smelled him, yeah. And they don't abide by any rules. They don't really care about your door. Well, you know, when I was up there, I learned to shoot a shotgun. It's called a bear stopper. It's a shot off shotgun you can carry with you if you're in the backcountry.

Yeah. So they're just a – Like a 12-gauge? I think it was a 12-gauge. Do you have slugs in it or is it buckshot? Oh, no, no. It had buckshot. Okay. So does that make it a 12-gauge? No. It's all to pound the round. So a slug is like a chunk of lead and buckshot.

buckshot is like a bunch of pellets right so the buckshot is like it scatters into a pattern and the further it is from the rifle barrel like how far you're shooting it's like shooting 20 yards it scatters quite a bit and it makes a an area of impact about that big like a basketball sized yeah well maybe a little smaller than that but like a slug is a single object and it has a lot more force behind it so if you're shooting a bear i would want a slug all

I think it was a shot. It's a deterrent, though. I mean, you'll certainly deter them with buckshot. Yeah, if you have a wide spray, it will deter them. I kind of remember, although this may be a

That one barrel had a buckshot in it and the other had a slug. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, so you can slow it down. You probably shoot the first shot to try to slow them down or to try to discourage them. And if that doesn't work, the second one's lethal. Right, and they're much closer to you at that point. Jeez. Yeah, so it is a pretty fun place to live in some ways. I think just that alone is—

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. You have to help them. A person might be dying in there. And if you can get them out of there and get them to safety, you're supposed to do that. So people like bond together a little bit more up there. Well, and there's also the Northern Lights, which are just incredible.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, the reds and the greens. How often did you see those every year? Pretty much every night in the winter. And it was so quiet up there, you could actually listen to the northern lights. They'd hiss and crackle. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was pretty wild. They hiss and crackle. Yeah.

What exactly is going on with the Northern Lights? Like, what is that caused by? The magnetosphere and some solar rays. Like, what is what is might be cosmic. It wouldn't be a solar rays because it's dark. Right. Right. Yeah. Unless it's like something that like is coming around the Earth. Yeah. What are they, Jamie? Are they cosmic rays? Must be something. Yeah. Yeah.

Coronal mass ejections. So solar. And magnetic activity. I guess there's a few reasons why they could be created. I'm looking through this article. That alone might be worth living up there for. Well, in the winter. 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. There's these things called battery blankets that you put under your battery to keep it warm.

Do you heat it? Yeah. Plug it in? Yeah, it's plugged in to a parking meter or to the outside of a building. Yeah, everybody keeps their vehicles plugged in during the day when they're at work. You'd have to, right? You'd have to, yeah. And the other modification is an oil pan heater, which is the same basic principle. 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. They have to warm up? You have to drive them slow to get them warmed up again. Because otherwise they're, like, flattened down at the bottom where your car's been sitting? Right. Whoa. Yeah, cold. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Isn't it amazing they still have to fill tires with air? That seems like the stupidest thing. Like if you can get those people that are working on AI to just take a couple years off and figure out tires, just take all these people that are making computers and figure out something that you don't have to put air in. With my garden tools or my garden carts, I use solid tires. Yeah. But they're a lot heavier. They never –

Well, 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? They deflate their tires quite a bit to get more traction. Well, and it also will… Widen your footprint. It widens your footprint so you won't get stuck in sand. Yeah. I used to spend a lot of time in…

Death Valley. Oh, wow. Driving around in the sand. Yeah. And then the canyons to the east and to the west of the valley. So I guess that's the benefit of air is that you can air them down and do stuff with them. But it seems like the negative side of it, of getting a flat and getting stuck in the middle of nowhere because you don't have any air in your tire, that seems crazy. Yeah. It's so vulnerable. Yeah. Like the one thing of your car, someone could come by and go stab your tire, and now your car is useless. Right. So vulnerable. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, flat tires. So have you spent time in Death Valley? No, no. Is it great? Well, if you still like to take psychedelics, huh? Who doesn't like to take psychedelics? Yeah, the best place or one of the best places is Death Valley. That's what I've heard. Yeah. I've had friends that have had mushroom experiences out there.

Yeah, I've had some amazing experiences. It's huge, first of all, and it's really old. There's rocks out there that are 2 billion years old. Really? And you are tripping, for example, and you're touching these 2 billion years old rocks, and you really feel something that you don't feel anywhere else. Very slow moving. It's the wind, too. There's great wind. I learned to watch the wind there.

You can see like a shrub like 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. You know, mostly the movement of the bushes, the shrubs. Yeah, I had a lot of firsts in Death Valley.

Like in a lot of ways, I think I'm still working on some of those insights or those experiences, which I had in my late teens, early 20s. Isn't that kind of always the case, though? I think we come up with our best ideas from 19 to 21. Really? I think so. Oh, boy. I'm in trouble then because I don't have very many ideas. Well, you must have had some experiences that steered you in a particular direction, didn't you? Yeah, I guess I did. Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, until I was 21, my whole life was martial arts, just martial arts training. So...

My, you know, anything that I was interested in was interested in to make that better. So I'd read like the book of five rings, like Miyamoto Musashi. I'd read a lot of psychology books. I read books on discipline. I read a lot of different books on how to control your mind under stress and things along those lines. Yeah. Well, it was a formative time then, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely formative in that way. Yeah. And you absorbed a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

I definitely absorbed a lot out of that. It's just I didn't have hardly – I had almost zero ideas outside of martial arts. I didn't care what was going on in the world. I was not paying attention to politics. I was not paying attention to world events. As long as we didn't go to war with Russia, all I wanted to do was train. Yeah. Well, and? And look at you now. Well, it opened up the door for a lot of other stuff. But at the time, if you had asked me questions, I would have –

I would not have been a good person to talk to. Yeah. What kind of questions wouldn't you have been able to answer back then? 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 didn't know. I didn't have I had no interest in the economy. I didn't care at all. I didn't know how anything works. I don't know the rules to any sports. I didn't know what's happening when a basketball game is going on unless the ball goes in the net. I don't know the rules of football.

I didn't know anything, like most of my life, because all I was thinking about was martial arts when I was young. Yeah, it's like being a monk almost. In a lot of ways it was. Yeah. Because the way we 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. 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. We can't do anything here. It's like a church or a temple. Yeah. Like, I was 17, 18 years old, however I was. Like, kids are so horny. Like, anytime you're alone, you get a chance that she wants to do it. And I was like, we can't do it here. Right. This is not possible. We can't do it in the locker room. Right. We can't do it in the premises. Like, this is a church. The ground you stand on is holy ground. It was to me. Yeah. Because to me, it was like this –

This place is, this is where I, this is where I'm serious. This is like a different place. The rest of the world is the rest of the world. But in this place, I control myself. I control the environment. I control the environment.

I exist by the rules. There's very strict rules. You bow. Even if no one was around, I bowed to the flag every time I entered into the dojang. To the flag? Always. Yeah, what did that represent? It was a Korean flag. Yeah, so what did it represent? It just represented respect. Respect for the country? For the space that you're in. Like you're bowing before you enter the space.

Like, it didn't matter if it was a flag. I wasn't really bowing to South Korea. I was bowing to the idea that this is a very sacred space that I'm going into. Yeah. In my Zen training over the years, we did a lot of bowing to statues, to people, to images, to photographs. Mm-hmm.

before we ate, we would bow to the food. Yeah, so lots of bowing. It's an interesting experience to bow, to really kind of get yourself together and lower your head and be humble, be

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

I try to read this once a week. 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. Yeah. Like it's got the darkness where the binder is in the center. Yeah. Yeah. It's a serious thing. That's awesome. That's awesome. What a great quote. Yeah. It's like to not be humble. We like our sports stars to not be humble, and that's about it. Yeah.

Everybody else, we appreciate a little humility. Even sports stars, you know, praise Jesus or something. Well, I mean, can you be too humble? Sure. Which would look like what? Well, you can be too humble in the sense that you don't have confidence in your ability to do something that is sort of open, some open-ended. You don't know how it's going to turn out, something where it's dangerous. You're going to take a risk there.

You have to be bold. You have to have enough confidence in yourself that you can navigate a thing that very few people navigate. 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. And I think that would ultimately be bad. Yeah.

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, responding to things in your world, insults or harm being – Right. So you can get in a bad relationship and have someone yelling at you all the time and you're just humble. You handle it. Well, if you think you're humble, you might not be able to handle it, although you might pretend that you are. Yeah.

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. Like who do you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid? Pretend to be really interesting, really nice, really kind. Just wouldn't it be easier to just be that person? But there's like a success aspect of the courtship thing where you want to like show your success, which is anti-humble. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's one of the advantages of Zoom is there's no pressure when you first meet someone. Who's having Zoom dates? Are people doing that? I've done it. Oh, you freak. It's a good move. Yeah. It's like almost like a podcast. Well, and you wouldn't necessarily feel the pressure to, you know, go to bed right away. Of course. And you don't feel the pressure to like –

Have to get out of the situation if it doesn't go well, you can just kind of hang up. Bye Yeah, and you can meet somebody it's rough. You don't want to just abandon them. Well, you can keep it low-profile, too You could just be in your bathroom, you know sitting on the toilet, you know sure dear friend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah keeping it low-profile keeping it casual and

But if you look at the numbers, you're seeing the numbers of the way people met in the past versus today. - I think it's 25% meet online now and get married. - I think it's more than that. - Oh wow. - I think it's a really high percentage of people who meet today meet online.

But the thing is, this was a video. So it showed like 1900s where like everybody sort of met either through family or through church or that kind of deal. And then over time, it becomes women enter the workplace and then people are meeting people at work. And then the Internet comes along. Yeah. What do you think of arranged marriages?

Well, it sounds terrible. 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 and you're a lady that has a dad that 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. Okay.

Well, your parents would need to be straight shooters. You would want to trust them. If your parents are straight shooters, would they be doing an arranged marriage? 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 marriage's success rate nowadays. If you could leave a little pad of paper and a pen to slay it around so they could write you a note when no one knows about it, what's really going on, I bet it would be like a message in the bottle. Like, come save me.

How's Linda doing over there? 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, it's a very strict culture. I'm not saying it's negative, but it's very strict. And if you have great parents and they...

they're really wise in their choices and you're in a culture that has an arranged marriage and your parents are like super kind and generous and they trust you and they love you and they think you're amazing. And then they want to hook you up with an amazing person. Um,

Maybe it can work out. But generally, I think you give people the freedom to do whatever they want to do. And maybe that lady never wants to get married. Maybe she's decided, like, I don't like how this is. I want to throw myself into my work. I want to travel the world. I want to do this. Like, you could do whatever the fuck you want to do in your ride. Yeah. That wouldn't work in those kinds of cultures. 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...

Maybe I'm ignorant, I should say. Maybe an arranged marriage is a proposal. They propose it's an arranged marriage and they both agree on it. Maybe. If that's what you're into. I think that's the case, that if there's no chemistry at all and the woman or the guy says, forget it, I'm not interested, I think you're free to end it. I would hope so. 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...

follow completely different rules than the men that which is a you know a reality of the world we're living in today there's parts of the world where they think in our a very archaic way and women are second-class citizens i mean the mid-east i mean look at that place it's it's just it it's a blaze yeah it's a blaze well i um have a good friend of mine who um

came on the podcast recently and was talking about his experiences in Afghanistan and how crazy it is there. And he's like, it's like you're going back in time a thousand years. Like the way women are treated and children are treated, the amount of

pedophiles and open molestation of boys and just murder. Why do you think, at least in particular, that Jerusalem is just such a hotbed? It's a point of contact and conflict for all three major religions, Islam, Christianity, and Islam.

I mean, Judaism all claim that small bit of land. I wonder what it is about that part of the world. Well, it's got to be from the Bible, right? I mean, that's the significance of it as holy land, you know. The concept of holy land is always so...

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. Because what if Jesus comes back and they immediately snuff him out because they're Islamists? Right. Oh.

Well, it goes even further back than that. 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? How far does it go back? Well, Judaism began, what, maybe 4,000 years ago. And the first temple was built. Oh, gosh, I should know this. It stood for 400 years.

Then it was destroyed, and the second temple lasted around 400 years. It was destroyed in 70 CE, the second temple. When was the first temple in existence, Jamie? So even if that's the timeline, so we're looking at about 4,000 years? Like Abraham, the first of the Hebrews, lived around 18...

1800 BCE. So 2000 BCE, the first known mention of the city. So that's 2000, 2000 before current era in Middle Kingdom, Egyptian. How do you say that? Excretion? Excretion texts? What does that mean? Execration texts? Execration? Oh, curses.

Curses? Yeah, yeah. Really? Yeah, execrations are curses, extreme curses. Really? Yeah. If you execrate someone, you are really cursing them. Ancient Egyptian hieratic text listing the enemies of the pharaoh, most often the enemies of Egyptian state or troublesome foreign neighbors. The texts were most often written upon statuettes of bound foreigners. Yeah, yeah. Bulls or what was the other word it said there? It said bulls or...

it's blocked out execration texts yeah 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 the temples were there a long, long time ago. Yeah, and the location of the temples relates to dreams of Jacob, who was laying on the ground on a stone and made of a vow to the God of the Hebrews, who Jacob was commuting with, to build the house of the Lord there. And so there's a long history of that tradition.

part of the world being associated with the patriarchs and with the temple. You know, Christianity has an association to Jerusalem because of Jesus. I'm not sure what the connection between Islam and Jerusalem is. It's clearly more recent. Well, isn't it always a sort of situation where when someone really likes a thing, everybody wants it? Yeah. Well, there's things called greed, envy, and jealousy.

I've always liked the distinction among those three qualities. Here it says, Jerusalem is revered by Muslims as the third holiest place on earth, and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is viewed as an optimal, optional rather, complement to the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. Unlike the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem is undertaken individually at any time of the year. Interesting.

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 before. Yeah, you are like... You think you're a messiah when you get there. Right, right. I'm the messiah. Right. So, you know, that might be a problem. Yeah.

You could see how it would really be a problem if someone was inclined to that, headed in that direction. Well, I think one of the problems with the current psychedelic scene is this messianism. There's going to heal everything. There'll be world peace. It'll be a utopia. There's also, I think, a prevalence of this kind of spiritual narcissism.

Oh, good. I'm glad you see that. Yeah. It's important. It's a prevalence of it. It seems like there's a lot of people that...

They attach themselves to this thing and then use this to behave in a completely different way. They behave like they're the – instead of a person who's experiencing it like everybody else, they're like a leader, right? And I think there's a real danger in that, expressing these thoughts to other people as pure facts. The way to live your life. Like, listen, you don't know how –

Stop. Okay. 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 organizing people together, I think that's a symptom of this spiritual narcissism. That people, if you're attached to this, you're attached to something divine, which I think we would both agree it is.

you can imagine that you are divine or you can project that you are divine. I think there's a temptation to do that. Well, I think it strengthens preexisting beliefs.

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 and more convinced that what you think is true. That seems terrible. Yeah. Well, it's one of the dark sides of psychedelics. Well, that's weird, right? Because as you were saying before, like there's people that want to think it's like a cure-all.

It's not necessarily. It's a tool. And if it was a cure-all, it would have already cured us. We would have been cured like thousands of years ago. People would have worked out all this nonsense. 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. Well, how about the Vikings, right? What about the Vikings? 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. Yeah. And something you're already inclined to believe. Mm-hmm.

You believe that it's good to go slaughter people. Well, I think that's one of the interesting things about Brian Murawski'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. So if you're a Viking and you want to go out and kill people,

If you're living in a religious community with certain beliefs and you want to believe them even more firmly or practice more intensely, psychedelics could have that effect. That makes sense.

I mean, again, like we're talking about like the culture that you live in is that this is the view, whatever the constraints of that culture, this is the window in which you view the world. You view it through this culture and you view it through these belief systems that you have sort of adopted over time. Yeah, I think that's what's going on with the beings in the DMT world.

I don't think they are necessarily freestanding intelligences, but they're the way our culture, our personal culture and our larger culture, and wrap in a visible form certain information, certain kinds of input, either from the outside world or in your own mind.

So it's culture-specific, I think, the visions that you would see. I don't think they're like aliens from another planet, although I kind of thought that in the beginning. But as time has gone on and I've heard more and more stories, I'm more inclined to believe these are simply projections taking the garb of the personal milieu. Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

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. And we think of them as being independent, like they're just created by the human mind. But no, the human mind is probably tuning into these things and they can appear as entities. I think thoughts might be a living thing.

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. Well, one of the ideas in the medieval philosophers was that –

is that, you know, thoughts are intermediaries between you and God. You know, they're angels which are exchanged between you and some divine external source of information. You know, so if you're thinking of how thoughts have directed the world's, you know, growth, I mean, you could even extrapolate to, well, you know, maybe it's, you know, the divine external

You know plan you know for humanity well There's certainly something going on if you just if you objectively just step outside of human culture and just watch the world It's certainly moving in a very specific direction and that direction is tech very much technologically driven There's something really crazy going on in a technological direction and then all that stuff is coming from ideas and

So ideas are popping into people's heads. They're over the course of hundreds and thousands of years. These ideas are propagated and given to other people and they expand upon them. And then more ideas take place and then more execution of these ideas. And it changes the landscape and changes the ocean. It changes the seas. It's very, very weird. Well, I think it's a case of cause and effect.

certain causes produce certain effects. And the rules of nature, let's say, or the rules of thought, like how the brain creates thought, they are regulated in a particular manner. 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 regulate

Encourage certain behaviors, have certain ones, certain ideas form and other ones not form. 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. 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, 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. 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. Yeah. But it speaks like a larger phenomenon, which is how cause and effect has been set up. Well, it's how cause and effect has been set up, but it's also...

There's a very weird competitive drive towards technological innovation that exists with people because it's attached to monetary gain, right? And the companies that are involved in the most technological, sophisticated work, whether it's AI or whether it's social media, like when you're programming things in giant scale, it's incredibly profitable. Incredibly profitable. And the technology moves along with the profit, right?

And ultimately, it's going to make a being. It's pretty close to making a being. Yeah. Well, I think the future lies as much in genetic engineering as well.

Oh, yeah. It's not like it's binary. Right. It's not like it's one thing or nothing. Yeah. Yeah. I think the biological manipulation and the AI development is going to be – I think it's going to produce a hybrid. 100%. I think so too. I think that's the only way we live. I think we have to like accept the fact that they're here. Right. And join them. Mm-hmm.

Because I think as biological meat vehicles, we're just too limited. Our evolution is too slow. You know, it's like we're like if you decided to run your entire business on a laptop from 1995. Right.

Like, it's too slow. You can't do that anymore. Like, you have to catch up. If you want to be a part of this world today, and that's not that long. 1995 was 29 years ago, which is crazy. That's not that long ago. That laptop's useless. Yeah, so in what kind of ways has AI impacted you? It hasn't impacted me yet. Well, it has in visually. I've seen a lot of, like, really wild things online.

There's a bunch of them. Like there's one that I posted that some guy made. It's Donald Trump playing Credence Clearwater Revival on a guitar. Pull it off on my Instagram. You should see this. And Kamala Harris is in it. And Macron or Justin Trudeau is in it. But it's so realistic. Yeah.

I mean, it's obviously not. Like, you look at it, you're like, I know it's not really them. But it's so close. It's weird. Do you like Creedence? Love Creedence. Yeah. I love Creedence. And it's Fortunate Son. So it's a banger song. Yeah, yeah. That's a great song. It's Donald Trump. You see Donald Trump playing guitar. I ain't no Senator Son. It's pretty recent. Scroll down. Keep going. There it is. Give me some volume.

Look at Putin's on the drums. Kamala Harris is wearing a witch hat. Look at that. Come on, man. Give me volume. Oh, we can't. Boris Johnson. We get in trouble with the YouTube police. Look at that. Kim Jong-un. Biden. This is crazy. Look how good this is, though. Yeah. I mean, it's not quite good enough where you can't tell that it's AI generated, but it's unbelievably close. Yeah. Obama's the Joker. How bizarre. Yeah.

It's so weird, right? Isn't it weird? Yeah. It is hilarious. It's scary, though. It is. And Jamie was just talking about Sora, that there's a new version of Sora that was released. Was it today? Yeah. I'm waiting for it to show up on my account, but yeah, everybody who's got open AI can use Sora. 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 going to show him. So this Jap, or is there new stuff? There's all sorts of stuff, yeah. Okay. So the Japanese one was incredible. So it's like, show me a street in Japan where the snow is falling. And, you know, like a drone shot from overhead. So you see these people, and it looks entirely like a real scene. It looks absolutely like someone's filming. This is nine months old, so this is just older stuff. But this is like a prompt for puppies in snow. Look at this. All right.

Who doesn't like puppies? Who doesn't like puppies? But that's fake. This is what's crazy. This is all generated by AI, and it's pretty indistinguishable. Yeah. I mean, look at this. This is all AI. Whoa. Nuts. Good thing I'm not on drugs. I know. You'd be like, what? Look at this. This is AI. Incredible. That's insane. This is waves hitting the rocks. Yeah. A movie trailer. And, you know, actors are fucked. Like, they're in real trouble.

Because you can make movies like this now. Well, so are writers. Writers are fucked. Yeah. I don't think writers are as fucked as actors are, though. Because some writers, like, you know, there's the Quentin Tarantinos of the world that are just going to take turns because of just his own psychology that you're not going to take turns.

You know, like where 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. Yeah. Well, it touches upon creativity. Like, is creativity the difference between AI and humans? Well, maybe it's not. And that's what's really scary because we like to think that's the one thing that we have above AI is we're creative. Right.

Yeah, great. Get it to write a Beatles song. What if it writes a way better Beatles song than the Beatles could ever write? What if it knows what's really going to move you? What if it writes a Sheryl Crow song that makes you cry? Then you're fucked. Then it's Ex Machina. Did you ever see Ex Machina? Yeah, that was pretty great. It's one of my top ten all-time favorite movies because it so rang true.

Like there was not a moment in that movie where I was like, bullshit, get out of here. It's so rank true 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 who just happens to be a robot. Who cares if she's a robot? Yeah. Well, that's funny. The version of The Thing by John Carpenter is my, it was one of my favorite movies. Oh, that was great. Yeah. You know, they're both body horror in a way.

Yeah, sort of, right? Because... You know, the robot isn't human. You know, that's horrible. Right. It's pretending to be, though, and it's tricking you, just like the thing. Just like the thing did. Yeah. Yeah, the John Carpenter one is awesome. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, like 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. 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. It was pretty good. Yeah, it was the prequel apparently. Was it? Yeah, well they used a lot of CGI rather than practical effects like the Carpenter version did. Right, right. Which makes it

For whatever reason, the uncanny valley, you don't really think it's happening. It seems kind of fake. Yeah. When they use the visual effects, like I've had Rick Baker on the podcast. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. And things like the American Werewolf in London, he used a real physical thing, and it looks like a physical thing. This robot or whatever it is that 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. Whereas if you see the video, your brain registers, well, that looks cool, but I don't think it's really there. Yeah, it's a visual effect. It's not a practical effect. Right, exactly. And you have to – there's a suspension of disbelief. Do you ever see I Am Legend? No.

It's a good example of it. Yeah. I Am Legend was cool, but it was like 2000 what? When was that? When was I Am Legend? 2004? Is that about right? Seven. 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. Like they have lions out there because the civilizations collapsed. I've seen that scene. It looks so fake. Yeah. Well, yeah.

Can you see like an intersection between AI and psychedelics? Like, you know, could you give a robot LSD or something like it? Well, no. What I was going to say is I think AI can give you some. And McKenna actually talked about this as well. He believed that with virtual reality and computer simulations of trips, it will get to a point of sophistication where you can

visually simulate exactly what a psychedelic trip is. And then there becomes this real possibility within our lifetime of recording dreams. Now, if you can record a dream, can you record a psychedelic state? Sure. I mean, why not? Right. If they can, I mean, I don't know how far away they are. Let's say they're 50 years away from being able to do something like this. But if they can map out

all of the synapse in your brain and all of the different neurochemistry that's going on. If they can map that out and then attach it to some sort of a, some ability to visually record what you're experiencing and they can then have something like through a neuro implant, like 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 totally seems like, if we can send video through the sky and it lands on your phone, it looks perfect.

I think that's doable. I think that's doable within X amount of years. I mean, it's not a thing like cloning people through a printer. Like, that's too far away. But I think the idea of recording your thoughts and then figuring...

Figuring out what causes different reactions inside people's body, how your visual cortex interplays with all these different chemicals that are going on inside of your brain. Yeah, I think it could be a mass telepathic experience, like if everybody was sharing the same experience at the same time. Yeah. Well, I think that definitely. I think that definitely and definitely the possibility of a completely universal language.

Especially if we can enhance our brains. So if – what they're talking about with Neuralink is multiple steps of use, right? Multiple steps of –

The way they're going to have this, first, they're going to use it for people that are disabled. Like we had the guy in here was the very first Neuralink patient. Oh, very cool. It was very cool. He plays video games and he's like his eyes are like an aim bot. 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. So it's like instantaneous visuals on things. So he's like really good at video games with this.

And that's better than not having that. So he plays better with the Neuralink than a person like myself would with just hand-eye coordination. Yeah, yeah. So you would imagine that if he can do that better, the next thing it's going to be able to do is restore vision and vision.

If they can restore vision and then they can create artificial eyes, you can have things like night vision. You can have thermal imagery. You're going to be able to do things with your eyes that a biological eye can't do. And we might get to the point within our lifetime or our grandchildren's lifetime where people get rid of their eyes really quick because your eyes are bullshit. Your eyes don't even see through walls. Like what are these stupid fucking biological eyes? Yeah, 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. And then everybody gets together and says, listen, I would like to learn Swahili. I'd like to learn Portuguese and Chinese. I don't have the time. No one has the time to learn 190 languages or whatever there are out there. Why don't we all just create one universal language? Would you think people would want that?

I don't think leaders would want that. Yeah, because it would lead to everybody talking with everybody else. I don't think Russia would be down with that. They'd probably censor it. Well, there was a time back in the Tower of Babel. Everybody spoke one language, one tongue. And look what they did. They just built a big tower. And God looked down and said, they have one language and one tongue, and look at what they do.

Do you, what do you think, like when you think of biblical stories, what do, I mean, I've spent far too much time speculating about the origins, but I'd like to know, like, what do you think that was? Well, I think the stories could be seen as if they were real, you know, kind of like the DMT world. At a certain point, I had to look at the DMT world as if it were real. Otherwise, I would

suggest it was something else. It was psychoanalytic, psychodynamic stuff. It was Jungian archetypes. It was your brain on drugs. But if I took as an act of faith that it was a real world, I treated it as if it were real. And that's the way I approach the Bible, the Bible stories, as if they were real. If you read it carefully, it's a very coherent picture of

creation of history, of the relationship between the spiritual and human worlds. And if you just enter it rather than interpret it as something else, then it starts opening up in a way that is quite interesting. Like, for example, the flood. Or, well, for example, the Tower of Babel. Yeah.

You know, like if you look at the 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, the directive was just, you know, it was, was to repopulate the earth. Right. 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.

You know, the stories build upon each other. There's history. Certain things occurred because of the behavior of certain people, certain ideas, certain practices. Yeah, you know, so it isn't as if it were something else other than what you're reading. And that makes it important to understand the language it's written in, which is Hebrew.

So if you really want to understand at least the Hebrew Bible, what some call the Old Testament, you really need to know the Hebrew language because you can make the translation for yourself. They say all translation is interpretation. Right.

Right. So if you know the language directly, you can then make your own interpretation. Yeah, ancient Hebrew would be the most fascinating one to read it in. It's incredible. If you could understand it. Yeah. Do you read it? Yeah, I retaught myself biblical Hebrew. Wow. How long did that take? Oh, I don't know, 16 years maybe. Laughter

That's incredible. Well, you have these big old dictionaries, right? These concordances. 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. Right. And every time they appear for the first time, I would scribble in the margin of the text what this means. So you self-taught.

Yeah, yeah. Well, as a kid, I went to Hebrew school a few hours every week, and I learned conversational Hebrew and modern Hebrew. So that gave me a leg up when I started learning biblical Hebrew. How different is biblical Hebrew from conversational Hebrew? Very different. They're really Byzantine word forms and grammar and words that appear once and never again.

In the biblical version of Hebrew. Once. Right. One word appears once in the whole 22 books of text. What's the word? Well, there's a number of those words. Oh, wow. Yeah, they're called hapexes.

Whoa. H-A-P-A-X. Yeah, they appear only one time in the text. They have to figure out what that means. Whoa. Can you guess because of context? Yeah, you can guess because of context. You can also guess because of neighboring languages, like Hittite or Akkadian or Phoenician or Sumerian. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's an amazing language. I love the Hebrew language. That's one of the things that really got me hooked. It's very...

You know, it's extremely rational, but it's really telegraphic, too. You could write one word that may encapsulate the meaning of six or eight words. You could put together a biblical Hebrew word, for example, that might say found. Let's see. Boy, I'd really have to think that through. But you can combine a lot of ideas in one single word.

That's the gist of it. So when we're thinking about the world and we're using words, we're confined by the way the English language interprets the world. Exactly. Yeah, and that's one of the things I loved learning about biblical Hebrew is the grammatical forms open a window to parts of reality that just are ignored all of the time. There's a notion of the reflexive tense.

which means you're doing something to yourself. So, for example, you might say, I sat down, or I sat myself down. And I sat myself down is the reflexive. And I sat down is what's called the perfect. So the convolutions of grammar really open windows to views of relationships that were invisible before.

And if you're using this and you're reading these ancient, ancient stories and trying to interpret them and then trying to break it down into English or Greek or Latin or whatever they did. The first translation was Greek and after that Latin. Have you ever done any reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls? You know, I haven't really. I've read about them, but I haven't read any of the scrolls themselves yet.

You know, one of my longstanding projects is a translation and commentary on Genesis. Genesis is 1,200 pages so far. Whoa. Yeah. So I'm not sure how I'm going to ever get that published. 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? Like when you set out, what was your goal?

Well, it was an expedient kind of reaction. I was scribbling notes into the margins of my copy of the book of Genesis, and there was just no more room. So I said, I got to put this into a Word file. Yeah. So I put it into a Word file, and it was pretty big.

Yeah, so I'm still working through... Well, there's all these commentaries to the text. You can't, you know, know the score without a scorecard. Right. You know, without a program. Yeah, you know, so there's a lot of very interesting and intelligent commentators. So those would be a lot of the notes that I would write down. And I was compiling all of these interesting perspectives on the text. Wow. So are you reading it in ancient Hebrew? Yeah, yeah. And I'm...

both doing my own translation and collating the commentaries from 20 or 30 different commentators.

So when you're doing your own translating, are you comparing it to other translations and seeing how other people interpreted it? Mostly other Jewish translations. 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? Well, the first translation was to Aramaic.

and then to Greek, and then I think to either Arabic or to Latin. So the first translation was the Dead Sea Scrolls as far as we know? Well, the translation of the Bible itself, you know, the five books, the first five books, and then the intervening 17, the prophets and whatnot, you know, those translated into different languages, you know, book to book.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are both books of the Bible with slight modifications or completely independent kinds of text. How many of them are books of the Bible? How many of the stories? I think Isaiah was found in the Dead Sea Caves, maybe some Ezekiel, maybe some Leviticus, like a number, but not the whole story.

Was Ezekiel the same as it was in the Old Testament? Mostly. Mostly. 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. Yeah, the visions of Ezekiel, chapter 1. Yeah. I mean, there's...

There's this roaring sound and he falls down and Angel picks him up and there's blue ice above and a roaring sound. A wheel within a wheel. 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. The UFO community latches on to Ezekiel as well. Yeah. 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, right?

And these angels look like flying crafts. They look like flying geometric patterns. Yeah. I'm trying to remember. It was a German guy, I think, who was really into the visions. Yeah, that's not what I saw today, but it was something like that. It was something like that. That was what it was, Jamie. Yeah. That's exactly what it was. With a gyroscope. Yeah. Like this is angels as...

as described in the Bible. Yeah, the four faces, a lion, a bear, a man, and an eagle. Who is that drawing by? I don't know. The chariot vision of Ezekiel. Van Daniken or something? Oh, Eric Van Daniken, that guy? Yeah, I think. No, no, that can't be it. I think that that's just an old art piece. Ophanim?

Go to the Wikipedia again, Jamie, so we can get the description. It didn't have anything. It just said it was a typical traditional depiction. Okay. So it doesn't say who? Yeah, like a wood cutting of some sort. But that is 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, I would like you to come to this lunch we're going to do with Eric Von Daniken. 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 with this guy. It was very interesting.

He's like all in on the idea that UFOs created all this stuff and they're all flying spacemen. Well, who created the UFOs? That's a real good question. He doesn't have that information. Yeah, that's the first question I would ask him. 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? No. It's wonderful. It's from like 1976. It played in the movie theaters.

I remember when it came out. What year is Chariots of the Gods? It's pretty old. But in it, you know, he's all in on everything being evidence that UFOs were here and a lot of like real sketchy connections, in my opinion. I'm more inclined to go the Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson route. I think there was a very sophisticated civilization that existed. Like, yeah, what year? 70. Damn. Yeah.

But I saw it in the movie theater when I was a little kid. Yeah. But I think that there's real evidence that there was a sophisticated civilization. The Egyptian pyramids are enough. It's just like whatever the hell was going on there, there was an insanely sophisticated civilization that existed 4,500 years ago at least and probably went back quite a bit further than that.

According to their hieroglyphs, it went back 30,000 years. Whatever was going on there was pretty incredible. And I think to just say that the aliens did it, it seems a little...

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

Well, one would be physically manifest and the other would just be manifest in the mind. Well, I think a lot of people are starting to lean in this general direction of that, of that perhaps we're trying to measure something that cannot be measured. Perhaps we're trying to like put something on a scale that does not necessarily physically exist and

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. And the whole thing is kind of going on simultaneously, interdimensionally. And that this is why we struggle with our definitions and just our overall acceptance of even the possibility of it being real. I mean, people... I think most people...

When you talk to them about UFOs. If they don't have any skin in the game. They'll tell you they believe in UFOs. They'll tell you they think we've been visited. Because it's fun. But if you said to them. 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 the Palladi star system. And they've been here from the beginning of time. Or...

There's weird conscious experiences, weird doors, portals of consciousness that open up that allow you to see things that might not necessarily be physically measurable but are also real.

And that these things are what everybody's talking about in these ancient religious stories. These things are things that people are talking about when they claim they've been abducted by UFOs, then something landed. And even like the physical remnants of these crafts, that might, all of it might be just a part of this very bizarre psychic experiment that's going on.

That as the mind expands its ability to understand other realms and as the – like you have to think of – you don't have to, but the way I think of it is like –

we didn't used to be able to see. So it was an emerging trait of single-celled organisms, no sight. If you believe in evolution, it goes to multi-celled organisms, eventually goes to sight. So it's an emerging part of being a living thing, as you can see. Then language. We didn't used to be able to talk, now we talk freely. So there was an emerging thing, an ability that human beings had. And I think consciousness, psychic ability,

precognition, remote viewing, all this stuff. For most people, that's a nonsense thought. But I think the thought is so prevalent in so many different cultures. Psychic phenomena is discussed ubiquitously in every corner of the world. And I think it's probably an emerging part of being a human being. Well, do you think it's biologically based?

It would need to be if it were universal like that. Chemically based? Biologically based? I'm sure it probably has a lot to do with the diet of the creatures, right? I mean, if humans are consistently, if 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 and...

is stressed out because they work all day and is on SSRIs, you're probably not getting much of that at all. There's a lot of telepathy, I think, that occurs in those kinds of cultures. You know, they share dreams and they share visions. It's very interesting. Well, you know that that's what they tried to initially call harming when they discovered it. They tried to call it telepathy. Telepathy, exactly. Right. But it already existed under the nomenclature. They called it harming. So they had to like...

Okay. Well, it's already named. Too bad. It's cool to call it telepathy. Right. It was synthesized by somebody and got that name. But the people that were experiencing it –

And then when they wanted to name it telepathy, they wanted to name it that because they were experiencing telepathic – they were having these weird experiences where they were sharing moments. Shared visions. Yeah. Well, I think you can share visions just like you can share thoughts. You can – or you share feelings. I think just a little more complex. Yeah.

The thing about that is if it's local and there's other communication, right? If you're both in the same room and like your friend says, not the pyramid. I see the pyramid now. You know 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. 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. Do you know of Rupert Sheldrake's work? Yes. Yeah. I've had Rupert on. You have? Okay, great. So he's spoken to you about his – Morphic resonance. And these large-scale experiments with a lot of people from the public, they will make cold calls and people are expecting them.

You know, the dog knows it's going to come, the owner is going to come home much sooner or at a different time than it's normal. And they can sense it and they're ready. Yeah. So there is, you know, like awareness at a distance seems to be.

But, you know, I think it also must occur between people or things which have already got a strong relationship. Yeah. Like rats, when they teach them how to do a maze on the East Coast, they figure out how to do it quicker on the West Coast. You've seen those, right? 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 it stopped working.

And I called home and I said, how's the washer? And she said, it's broken. I spoke to Rupert and I said, can you explain that? And he said, you must have a strong relationship to your washing machine.

Well, you need it. Yeah. Kind of makes sense. 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? Or would we do something good for everyone? I think we have the potential now to...

Because if we can develop universal language, you have real communication with people globally that's never existed before. Instantaneous, real communication through devices. That's never existed. So that's a different factor when you consider a universal language. So if you have real communication with people, then you have universal language. And then here's the big one, the ability to detect deception.

So if we really are all communicating through some sort of neural implant and we really are doing this telepathically with a universal language and we're experiencing each other's consciousness in a way that eliminates all possibility of deception. You can see envy, greed, anger. You can see these things in people's thoughts, right?

If this becomes a possibility, and I think it's within the realm of science, I think it's within the realm of technological possibility. When that does happen, it will mean a very different thing to be a human being. And I think it could be one of the greatest things that's ever happened because it would force us to only communicate at a higher level.

You you there would be no benefit in bullshitting anymore. It would be the opposite. It would actually be detrimental. You would be ostracized. No one would want to communicate with you anymore. Well, you'd be speaking the truth all the time. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. All the time. There'd be no more lying. No more lying. Impossible to lie, which I think is fascinating. I don't think that would work. Why not? Well, I mean, there are some lies that are told for the sake of peace.

Right, but what are the parameters? Like what are the confines of our society and of our just geopolitically, you know, in terms of environments we exist in? Like why? Why? What lies would be good for peace that wouldn't be better if everybody just knew exactly what was going on? Well, if everybody knew exactly what was going on, that would be something different. But I think, you know, in the meantime—

there are some benefits to white lies. Sure, as a human being. Right. With a limited ability to communicate and you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Sure, yeah. But if you're not a human being anymore, essentially, you're a cyborg. You're connected through a neural link to the whole world.

there's going to be zero benefit in lying. Right. Well, you're suggesting a new species of man. I am suggesting a new species of man. Yeah. One of my favorite books is called First and Last Men. It's by Olaf Stapledon. He's a British science fiction writer from the 1930s, 1940s. And he describes 19 species of man that extends over 2 billion years.

And the final species is living on one of the outer planets. They live 35,000 years because that's how long it takes to learn everything. And every so often they all communicate telepathically around the whole globe. And it's like this big event, obviously. It happens every, whatever, 20,000 years. Whoa. Yeah, and they work up to it. Yeah, it's an inspiring book, actually. It's one of my favorite. You know what? Another more controversial thought that I have about all this stuff

is that ultimately the big bottleneck with information is going to be money because money right now is just ones and zeros, right? Money is just information. 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. Right.

The trend with technology is we have more and more access to information, and ultimately we're going to have instantaneous access to information. But then we have this money thing. We have money, which is – and as people get better and better at cracking and coding –

Like, you're not going to have encrypted money. You're not going to have encrypted information. It's not going to be possible, especially when quantum computing becomes ubiquitous. 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. So then you have an even distribution of resources that's not based at all on capitalism. It's an abandonment of capitalism, but not in like a Marxist communist way, in sort of a practical utilitarian way to deal with the fact that everybody's communicating with everybody instantaneously. You can't have a guy who lives in a fucking castle and another guy who lives in a favela with a dirt floor and no food if we're all existing as one.

Well, it would require a change in human nature. Yeah. Well, human nature won't be human nature once this happens. Whatever you think of human nature as of now, it's like you can tell me something. I don't know if you're telling me the truth. I can kind of guess. I have a feeling, but I don't know. So that makes progress slow. Well, do you think that, you know, the...

That the technology will change human nature? Of course. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. 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 express your thoughts. Yeah. I have a feeling that won't be very popular.

Well, it won't be popular with the kind of humans that exist today. Right. So will the human nature have to change first before there's an agreement to undertake that? 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. And if you just...

optimize it. It no longer has these patterns. If everybody has like this increased level of dopamine. For example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like everybody just increased dopamine 300%. Well, and increased oxytocin. Yes. Everybody loves everybody. Everybody loves everybody. We're walking around in a state of tripping. We're all in ecstasy together. It's just a low level where you're functional. You're not going to crash your car.

Right. But you probably won't have cars anymore anyway. They'll be driving you around. Well, an interesting thought is maybe you can increase levels of endogenous DMT in everyone genetically. Sure. Or on cue. Like whenever you'd want it. Yeah. I think the rapture may have a biological basis in that regard. Like it's a timed event. Right. Which is worldwide that turns on the DMT synthesizing system.

Machinery. And everybody just— 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. Well, which would be non-material. You know, the DMT world is non-material. Right. It's visual.

So we might just transcend into some – like I think everybody – in this kind of scenario, everybody would drop dead. But isn't it more than visual? It's visual in the sense that you experience it with your eyes, but your brain is experiencing something too. You just don't know what to do with it. You don't know where it goes. So you say it's visual. I'm seeing it. But you're not just seeing it. You're experiencing it. Well, I think it's a world made of light.

I think that's the way, and we perceive light through the eyes. It's visually experienced. 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. Right. Well, you call it that after the fact. After you come down, you know, when you're drinking your Coke. But have you ever opened your eyes? On DMT, there was this video I was watching the other day online where these people, they put them on DMT and then they had lasers. Oh, yeah.

The red laser effect. Yes. Tell me about that. Yeah. I just found out about it a couple days ago. You? Yeah. You just found out about it? That's crazy. I just found out about it a couple days ago. Yeah. Yeah. A friend is putting together a piece on that phenomenon. He wanted my opinion. Could you explain it to people, what they're experiencing? Well, I think what happens, and this is just a very cursory assessment of the project, but

People smoke DMT, and then they project this white or this – 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. You see code in the laser. Yeah. Yeah. Can we take a bit of a break? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. 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. 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. And we all were a victim of it, everybody. You don't want to admit that he has any positive qualities. You get labeled a Nazi. Yeah. Well, and why do you think that happened?

Well, because he is an outsider and he is someone who did not come through the political system. So doesn't have all these relationships and all of these intertwined conflictions with corporations and.

all these different businesses that have paid for his campaign, the campaign self-financed, and then you have someone who didn't play the game to get in there. And you can't have that. You can't have that. If you have that and this guy doesn't want wars, he doesn't want us giving money to foreign companies and foreign countries and propping up dictators –

We can't have that. We need that. That's part of the American machine. That's how it all works. The military industrial complex. It's real. Yeah, it's been real for a long time. I mean, when Eisenhower talked about it on television at the end of his term, it's kind of a crazy moment in history that was just broadcast on television and wasn't really revisited until YouTube came around. It was ignored. Yeah. Yeah, it was conveniently ignored. Yeah. 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. They're the people we ask of the most, and there's been a lot of people that have had some pretty profound changes take place because of psychedelic experiences. I think it's going to need to be scaled up.

Yes. And what that scaling up looks like still isn't really worked out. Right. I think they should develop special clinics, you know, where you wouldn't actually be doing research and you wouldn't need incredibly strong data

to justify that kind of treatment. You would just need an indication that it was helpful. Right. And a specialized therapist, pure drug, it wouldn't be Schedule I kind of super restrictive research, but it wouldn't be just...

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

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

There's so much anecdotal story, so many of them, of guys going to Mexico, taking Ibogaine, taking DMT, psilocybin experiences, and coming back and just like sorted their life out. It's amazing. A couple of weeks ago, we were at a conference up in Denver, and I was doing some book signing. Some guy, my generation, came up to me.

And he told a story after he returned from Vietnam. He was using basically every drug in a bad way, bad drugs in a bad way. And he smoked DMT one day.

Stop using everything. He even moved to live across the street from a liquor store to be able to demonstrate that he had that willpower that had just changed with one DMT experience to assist any future drinking. Wow. Yeah. So those kinds of stories 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.

Sometimes people are just burdened by the stress of what they've experienced, especially war, which is the most horrific thing that people can experience. You're burdened by this. And sometimes they don't know how to shut those demons off. They don't know how to shut it off. And something can come along, whether it's a DMT experience, ayahuasca, ibogaine. There's a bunch of different anecdotal stories that I've heard of different things.

I was reading something about Colorado today. Colorado is doing some new psilocybin research thing.

They're opening up clinics now? Yeah, yeah. They're going to be opening up these healing clinics, which will be more or less based on the Oregon model. You license the therapists. You have to account for your supply of drugs and quality control, those kinds of things. I would worry about that. We're talking about control. That's where you would open up the door to potential...

spiritual narcissism. You could see someone starting a nice cult that way. Well, he controls the mushrooms. Who controls the mushrooms. Well, you know, it wouldn't be the first time that, you know, psychedelic, you know, cults, you know, emerged. Yeah. Well, do you, are you familiar with, you know, the Rajneesh story? Which one's that?

In Antelope, Oregon, there was this... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Wild, wild country. Wild, wild country. I love that one. Yeah. That's Osho. That's Osho. Osho. Osho? Osho. Yeah. Osho or Osho? I think Osho. You got me confused. I said Osho. Which one? Osho? Osho. Osho. He's my favorite. He's the... But the people... Bhagwan. Are retarded. Yeah. That's that guy. Yeah, that guy. Osho. I read his book.

Because I watched Wild Wild Country, I was so blown away by it that I read his book. 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. What's the main message that he's trying to get across? Well, it's just sort of like a guidebook for life. Pull up his books, I'll tell you which one it was. The Book of Secrets? Yeah.

He's got a Zen tarot. Can you show me what they look like so I can see the covers? He's got a bunch of books. One would always wonder if... It's one of the few books I have that's a physical copy, too. I'd have to go back and look at it. You kind of wonder if these are transcriptions of his talks or things that other people helped him write or even things that other people wrote for him. For the people. By the people. They did a dirty thing there.

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

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

Yeah, but then my depression cleared and I went back to school. But I stayed associated with them for over 20 years and went up there. What do you attribute your depression lifting to?

Well, I think it was a minor enlightenment experience. That's not to say that I'm enlightened or anything. But if you look at the phenomenology of the enlightenment experience, it's on a scale. There's gradations like the major one and then smaller little ones. Yeah, I was walking back from a work assignment. They asked, well...

One thing they liked doing was because I was a medical student back then, I thought I was hot shit. I was always given the worst assignments, the worst work assignments, like clean the toilets or

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. 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. Yeah, and

The end of the day came and I woke up the next morning and I was still feeling pretty good. Wow. And yeah, you know, so I was indebted to them for helping pull me out of that bad mood. It was a bad mood, too. I had to drop out of school. Was it directly after you had to move the hill? It was on the way back to the tool shed. Hmm. Yeah. Did you do anything before that physically? No.

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. Did you ever do any hard labor? Oh. Did you ever work out? Did you ever take a sport? Yeah, I ran track. You ran track. It was the sprints, though, so it was just a sudden burst of energy. It wasn't anything prolonged.

You know, I've done a lot of strenuous hiking and backpacking. The sprinting, when you were doing that, were you particularly happy or depressed when you were doing that? No. Well, you know, sprinting itself is great. I don't mean that. I mean during the time period where you were participating in sprinting, did you have any depression? No, no. Well, I suppose, you know—

Teen angst. Yeah, you know, teenager angst, you know, growing up in the San Antonio Valley. Right, that everybody has. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I had that while I was doing martial arts. It's not like it cures it. But I do know personally me, if I go long periods of time where I don't exercise, I get depressed. I don't feel good. I feel shitty. I feel off. I think our bodies, put vanity aside, because I think a lot of very intelligent people are

exercise with vanity but I think your body has a physical requirement to achieve like homeostasis to achieve balance to achieve like an ability to kind of like exist in a neutral place you're always affected by the world but the

more neutral you are the better like the more you're just you exist and you're not like constantly wound up about something or constantly upset about this or constantly fearing that or being overwhelmed with anxiety I think

Some of that is in response to a lack of physical movement. I think the body is designed to exist in a very primal world that doesn't exist anymore. And so because the body had a lot of requirements 10,000, 15,000 years ago, I think we're still programmed in that general way.

And that the only way to keep a balance of the mind and the body together for me is to constantly engage in exercise, rigorous exercise. Yeah. What kind of diet do you follow? Mostly I eat meat.

Mostly meat. Mostly meat. Beef? 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. No greens.

I mean, I'll eat greens every now and then. I'll have like a salad if I feel like having a salad. But I don't think I'm having a salad for health. You know, I think it's for taste. Yeah, it's for just I like eating stuff. Yeah. Do you like pretzels? I do. I try not to eat them. Yeah, I love pretzels. That's 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? Yeah.

Good? It's crack. I didn't eat one. But that smell, the smell in the air was like there was a giant-ass line, a huge line. There's no line for anything else in that food court. That pretzel line was big. There must be something in those pretzels. Deliciousness? Yeah, MDMA. They're so good. They're so good. No, there's no MDMA. It's just delicious. You feel terrible right after you ate it. Like, what did I do? That's like MDMA. Yeah.

Yeah, but there's no 5-HTP that you can take that's going to help you. Right. 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. Yeah. A month or two ago, I was at Union Station in Los Angeles, and there was a stand selling the encased hot dogs in pretzels. You have to apply a fair amount of mustard. They're so good, though, right? Yeah.

It's delicious. Terrible for you. So good, though. We took an Amtrak back from Union Station to Albuquerque. Like an overnight. How's that?

Well, it was quaint, but it wasn't efficient. It's too slow. It's pretty slow, pretty noisy. And you start thinking, I could have been on a plane. I would have already been there. Right. It would have been just two hours rather than whatever it was, 14 or so. Yeah, that's stupid. Well, I mean, look at European trains, though. You can really have fun on a European train. They're comfy. They're on time.

Good food, good coffee. What's the fastest train? Is it Japan? Do they have the bullet trains? I think the Chinese. Chinese? Or the Japanese. Yeah, really, really fast. Yeah. That's one of the things that Elon was trying to do with America. They were trying to put bullet trains that would take you from San Francisco to New York City in like a few hours. Yeah. I mean, there should be no reason not to do that. The only reason would... Other than the automobile industry. Well, also tracks. Like...

Who's watching those tracks? If you're going 1,000 miles an hour or whatever you're going, who's watching the tracks? Who's making sure someone doesn't put something on the tracks? Right, right. That's even a concern now. But, yeah, it would certainly be if people are going 1,000 miles an hour. Yeah. Like, I'm amazed at how few derailments there are. If you think about how many trains are flying back and forth. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I lived in Gallup, New Mexico, for years, and it's a train town, more or less. And, you know, there were, I think there were three trains came through every hour, you know, 24-7. Wow. So, you know, 70 trains, 75 trains every day would go through town. And there were very few derailments.

That's crazy. Yeah, they're pretty effective. But you're constantly waiting for trains then. There's always those things that come down, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You can't sit there and wait while the train flies by. Yeah, it was a point of controversy in that little town. Were they going to build a tunnel underneath or a bridge over? The business folks in the downtown area.

And it would be noisy, too, that trains would go by 35 miles an hour. And they're big trains. Some of the cargo trains are more than a mile long. And they can just take forever to cross 2nd and 3rd Street. And you're just stuck there. Yeah, fuck that.

Right. I just wouldn't want to be in a place that's that noisy, especially if you're in New Mexico. It's kind of quiet. Well, your bones rattle when the trains go by. And, you know, they honk their horns. Like they have to do three, then two, then three, then two. Well, there's some apartments in New York City where the apartment building's there and the train's going right in front of the apartment building. Exactly. That's crazy. Yeah. Like how cheap is that rent that you agree to that? Right.

Yeah. And the long-term effects on your mental and physical health. 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. I know. Well, you know, my mom's mom lived in a little town in western Pennsylvania. Yeah.

And, you know, the coal trains would pass through her backyard, basically. Like, you know, there's a little hill in her backyard and the train tracks. And I really enjoyed, you know, sitting there as the trains went by, you know, smelling the exhaust. That was something that was an early manifestation of my enjoyment. Look at this. Have you seen these in China? Whoa, that's crazy. It goes through the building. That's what they say. Yeah, that would be noisy. Imagine if you're above that trying to sleep.

fuck out of here. Yeah. That's nuts. That's not real. 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. Somebody would agree. It could be a jail or a prison too. Yeah, or just some crazy person that just thinks that's a good idea.

A lot of people like to live in different ways. They also have this. They're like their markets right on the train line. Whoa. And they have to like pick up the stuff when it comes through. What? Yeah. That's efficient. So they quickly grab their baskets and stuff and pull it out of the way? Yeah, because people are walking on the train track. That's nuts. That is crazy. And rather than move, they just figure it out. Wow. Eight times a day, seven days a week. Wow. Wow.

You have to put things away every three minutes. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. How many dogs do they lose every year? Well, suicides, too. I'm sure. Lots of people that, like the small town that I was living in, that would be like a regular thing if people would lay down on the tracks if they were having a bad day. Imagine if we can cure that with Elon Musk's Neuralink.

Everybody sign up. Yeah, on the reservation. It might be hard to get the word out there. Yeah, they probably don't want to listen to you anyway. They probably want you to take it so that you all go extinct and they'll take over again. Some crazy white man idea. I mean, these are people that were hesitant to agree to get photographed. They're going to be the last adopters of this stupid fucking brain implant these stupid white people are doing.

Well, you know, well, so Gallup is, you know, like on their reservation, you know, pretty much, you know, the Navajo reservation. Yeah. And most of the population is native. So it was pretty interesting, you know, living among the natives for 14 years. And, you know, their view of white people is they're noisy, they're superficial and they're kind of dumb.

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

The health care was rather poor. Yeah, like I came down with pneumonia. This is 2014. And 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. Oh, no. It's like a fatal diarrhea. I think 30,000 people in the country die every year from C. diff. Whoa. Yeah, and I was battling that.

You know, 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. And so that is the basis of that autobiographical novel I wrote a few years ago. You know, Joseph Levy Escapes Death. Yeah, it's an account of... I remember I was worried about you, but I didn't want to pry. Yeah.

Because we had gone back and forth in the email and you were just telling me your health was not well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We were talking about the possibility of me being on your show and just too sick. I can't travel. Yeah. Generally, people don't bounce back when they say they're that sick. I was really worried about you. But I didn't want to. I still know, like, how does one, you know.

I didn't want to pry. You know, I felt like if you want to tell me about what's going on, you would tell me about what's going on. Yeah. It was a really hard time. Yeah. And I bounced back. Like I swore. You look great. Yeah. 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. Well, it did strengthen my belief in God, speaking of God. Like I wasn't quite – well, that God was not quite ready to take me. And I wanted to become closer to that power that let me live. And did you feel like – because God was not –

God did not want to take you. Did you feel like you had work to do? Yeah, yeah. I had to get back to work. I had to continue being useful. Like I just couldn't rest on my laurels. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you had called and you said, how's it going? I'd say, bad.

Sounds like it was real bad. Yeah. That's why I was worried. Yeah. Because, you know, I'm just too used to getting those kind of emails and then you hear that someone passed away. Oh, yeah. I know. And, you know, in my generation, it's kind of accelerating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So when you did finally get out of this, how long was like the actual sick period? How long was the period where you were really hurting? Well, the pneumonia was about 10 days and the C. diff started about 10 days after that and went on for six weeks. Whoa. I lost 15 pounds.

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

so dire because I wasn't taking care of myself. So I had to kind of get to the bottom of that. Yeah, so it took another maybe seven months before I started to feel like my strength back and my brain functioning again. One turning point, this might interest some of your listeners, is I got vaccinated for the flu in January, which was nine months after this all started.

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

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

And it seemed to have done their trick. Just strange that you'd have like a local pain that's that intense. I generally don't hear about that. Yeah. Yeah. It was just at the vaccination site. Very interesting. Yeah. Weird. Do you get vaccinated? This might be a personal question. No, you can ask me anything. Yeah. Yeah. No. I almost got vaccinated for COVID. Right. I was wondering. I was totally willing to do it. It was the early days of the pandemic and the UFC had allocated about...

I think 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...

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

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

So during the time where I was going to get shot and then two weeks later, they pulled it. So the Johnson & Johnson vaccine got pulled because people were getting blood clots. And so then two people that I knew that did get it had strokes. I don't know if it was a coincidence, but it seemed rather odd. And then I started getting nervous. And so then I started –

reading different things by different scientists that are opposing perspectives on both the efficacy and the safety of the vaccine.

And then I got COVID. And then when I got COVID, I got over it really quickly. And then I got attacked on CNN. So I was like, okay, what's going on here? Like, why are you guys upset that I took a certain medicine and got better? I've never even heard of such a thing. And they started labeling it, this ivermectin, as a horse dewormer, which is crazy because it won the Nobel Prize for people. So it was like I was watching this bizarre thing take place in scale on mass media against me.

But against me in the most preposterous way possible because I was healthy. I got better quick.

Like in three days, I was better and I made a video. In six days, I was working out like full steam. I didn't get sick for long at all. 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 – they all in lockstep. MSNBC, CNN, newspapers, all of them making these –

ridiculous statements that I was taking veterinary medicine. I got medicine from a doctor, from a pharmacy, an actual human doctor, medication for humans, and more importantly, I got better, like really quick. Like,

What is happening here? This is the strangest thing I've ever seen in my life. It was like this mass psychosis that was propagated by the media who were only intent on keeping everyone terrified and offering only one solution. And that solution just coincidentally happened to be insanely profitable.

Yeah, that's hard to figure. It was weird to go through. It's very, very weird to go through. So needless to say, I have become very skeptical about a lot of narratives that are expressed constantly without any...

real examination. Well, do you think they're going after you or going after the ivermectin? Going after the ivermectin, 100%. I was a simple, easy to make fun of person who did a ridiculous thing. And that's why they were able to say horse dewormer, you know, 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. And when you're mocking a person for taking a drug that a human being won the Nobel Prize for in like 2015 for its use in humans, like that seems insane. Also, you're knocking people taking off-label medication under the advice of a trained physician. What? Like what's going on? And who are these people that are doing this? These talking heads on CNN? Why are they all agreeing? How come not one person is saying, hey –

What is the reason why ivermectin would be taken in the first place? Oh, it stops viral replication in vitro? Well, maybe there's some reason to use this. Maybe these doctors are correct. All these anecdotal stories about people taking it and then getting better quickly. 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. Yeah. What do you make of this story?

virus that's killing folks in the Congo. Jesus, who knows? Yeah. I don't know anything about it. Yeah. 170 people have died. They don't know what it is. Some weird African virus. Fun. Yeah. See if Bill Gates has been visiting there lately. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know. I'm terrified of pandemics for sure. I just – that one wasn't one to be terrified of and they made us terrified of it, which makes me terrified. Yeah.

And then CNN was mocking him, saying it's 3.4%, 3.4%. It was considerably less than 1%. He was right. But they had marching orders. And his marching orders was to scare the shit out of people and to tell them to get vaccinated.

It was a scary time. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. They closed down the town that I was living in back then. Gallup. It was closed down. You couldn't go into it if you didn't live there. God, so weird for nine days. Well, you know, nine days better than California, California. They did a whole year and a half of like complete restrictions. They were stopping outdoor dining.

Just arbitrarily. I had a friend and his brother works for the state. And he said to the lady who was in charge of it, he said, why are you stopping outdoor dining? There's no evidence that there's spread through outdoor dining.

And she said it's the optics. The optics. Like, we're going to shut businesses down for optics because they had to show that they're doing something because there's like a noticeable spread that's being reported in the media. That's called virtue signaling, right? Yeah. 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. 70% just went under. That's insane to continue a practice like that, especially where within six months of

They should have known that it wasn't as fatal as everybody said it was. When they already had the data in about how come all these people that are dying, they all have like significant amount of comorbidities. How come all these people that are dying are over the age of 80? It doesn't mean fuck those people. It means protect those people but let everybody else get back to work first.

Like you just have control of these people and you're continuing to enforce this control while their lives are destroyed. How many people turned to drugs? How many people committed suicide because they lost everything completely out of their power? How many lives were lost? How many kids had their childhood stripped away from them and have significant learning problems now?

not just because they didn't go to school, but because even when they went to school, they had to wear a mask. So the whole reading people's lips and hearing sounds come out, everything was weird. Reading faces was weird. If you're a toddler and your experience is going through the first couple of years of your schooling and your preschool with fucking masks on, like, what is that? What did we do to these people? Well, we'll find out. Yeah. Yeah. And the only good out of it

in my opinion, is that people realize that it was stupid and they won't be as quick to accept it in the future. You think if there's another pandemic? Right. I don't think people are 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 control

you know, a trip somewhere or you could visit your parents when they're in the hospital. Like, oh, that is crazy. Yeah. I wonder what impact RFK Jr. is going to have on the, you know, the delivery of health care now. Well, he's going to have so much of an impact that they're talking about preemptively pardoning Fauci. Like, how do you pardon someone that didn't do a crime? Preemptively. How are you pardoning someone where he's not

Not only is he not convicted of a crime, he's not even tried. He's not accused. He's not indicted. What do you – I guess that's called blanket immunity. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's never been done before. There's never been preemptive pardons for people. Yeah. That's interesting. That may have been committing crimes. It's weird. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, do you know much about the fluoride story? A lot of people wonder about the pineal gland and DMT synthesis if you have a calcified pineal, which is more likely if you're fluoridated. Have they ever done autopsy studies on people that are in high fluoride areas to check out their pineal glands? Or is this just like one of those things that people say?

Well, it's the case in lower animals that you feed them a high-fluoride diet and their pineal glands calcify more rapidly. I'm not sure what the human literature is. So when you say that, when they calcify more rapidly, like what animals are they serving them? Oh, you know, rats, mice.

And what have the results been? Like significant differences? Yeah. I mean, you know, these experimental animals, pineal glands anyway, yeah, they do calcify more rapidly. But whether or not that actually correlates to a reduction in melatonin production, for example, I'm not that familiar with the literature. Is the number –

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

Yeah, I'm just not that current on the literature. There's a couple of things that occurred that caused pineal calcification. One is aging. The older you get, the more calcification there is.

Back when I was current on the pineal physiology data, which was a long time ago, like 40 years ago, there wasn't a relationship between the degree of calcification in the human pineal and production of melatonin. So at least according to the data from the 80s, the degree of calcification wasn't functionally significant.

But I get an email here and there wondering if fluoridation of the pineal might reduce the production of endogenous DMT, which one might theorize takes place. Yeah, but we don't really know quite yet if the pineal even makes DMT, let alone if pineal calcification might reduce it.

Wouldn't it be interesting to measure different lifestyles and then also look at the age in which these people are and see if there's like when they die, if there's calcification? You know, give you one person who's a marathon runner and they're 65 versus one person who's sedentary, drinks a lot, and they're also 65. Yeah. You would think it would correlate with your overall general health. Right. Yeah. I mean, and if you're thinking that it's...

Age-related. It may be age-related, or is it exposure over long periods of time where it accumulates? Because the amount of fluoride that's in the water is very small. And this is one of the things that people point to when they say that it's not dangerous. It's very small. But the question is, where does it go? Does it actually leave the body, or does it accumulate somewhere? Yeah. Well, you'd have to compare –

You know, you'd have to compare autopsies in older folks from, you know, from areas that never had fluoride in their water versus those that did. And I am certain those studies have been done. Like I said, I'm just not that current. 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 sunburn. Right.

That doesn't seem logical. You could just brush your fucking teeth. Like you don't need to have this weird neurotoxic chemical in our water, even in low supplies. Yeah. Would you put fluoride in the toothpaste? No. I don't have fluoride in my toothpaste. I don't have cavities. Oh, I do. I've had a few cavities. Do you eat sugar? I love sugar. That's it. We found it.

I don't hardly ever eat sugar. Yeah. 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. It's diet and it's brushing your teeth. Yeah. Well, and I think exercising your jaw too. Like, you know, chewing gum. Right. Xylitol gum is supposed to be really good for your jaw and good for your teeth. Yeah. If you have a healthy jaw, healthy chin, I mean, you breathe easier. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

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

or excuse me, high levels of fluoride in the water and low IQs. This has been established. So if that's true, that should be a fucking giant red flag for people. I mean, once you eliminate all the other environmental things that may be consistent with the people that have lower IQs and children, if you're just pointing only to fluoride, if this is one thing that varies, like this is a potential real problem. Like,

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

What percentage of a detriment is leaded gas to your IQ? Because they actually have done studies on people and like what happened once unleaded gas was introduced and how children's IQs went up. Oh, yeah. Super helpy. Yeah. Yeah. It was quite helpful.

It's still in the ground in some places. Well, it's still in a lot of pipes. Oh, really? Yeah. Lead pipes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the whole flint thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, they used lead pipes. How crazy. 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 plum. Plum.

You plumb them. That's crazy. Yeah, that's why the pipes were called plumbing. That's probably why the Coliseum got started. They're all fucked up on lead poisoning and just willing to throw their soldiers to the lions. Nearly half of U.S. population exposed to dangerously high lead levels. So what does this say about IQ? 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. Research also found that non-Hispanic black people, individuals with lower family income to poverty ratio and those with an older housing age were likely to have higher levels of lead in their blood. Well, probably because they lived in urban areas where there's more car traffic, right? Most likely. Most likely. Yeah. If they're inhaling- If they're in cities. Lead particles. People that live in very congested areas. Wow. Wow.

1973, Environmental Protection Agency issued its first call for manufacturers to begin a gradual reduction in the amount of lead in gasoline. 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. 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? 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 it actually – there is a correlation between IQ levels and fluoride. And at high levels, it's fucking dangerous for you.

But there's all these people trying to dismiss it. Oh, stop. What's the big deal? There's nothing to this. Look at the amount of fluoride. What about a cumulative? Do we know? Do you really know? Or why are you so willing to accept the fact that it's a good idea to throw neurotoxins in the water supply? Well, they may have just discovered it, you know.

Through serendipity. There may have been some – Well, they did discover it through that. There was an area in Texas, I believe, where they had high natural levels of fluoride in the water and there's a corresponding lower instance of cavities. Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's Texas. Google how did they start putting fluoride in the water. I'm pretty sure it's that. Some healing springs of some sort. Some mineral-rich fluoride water.

I don't know. But either way, just brush your teeth. Stop eating so much sweets and brush your teeth. Both those things are a good idea. Fluoride in the water, not a good idea. If you want to sell fluoride and tell people to add it to their water, fine. But put it into everybody's water? That's crazy. That seems crazy.

Yeah. Well, I mean, as a dentist or when I was a small kid, we used to get these fluoride treatments. Yeah. Yeah, with this like blue gun kind of gel that they would put in a splint and you put it on your upper and lower teeth for like five minutes or whatnot. Yeah, kill all those bad germs. A fluoride treatment. Well, yeah, thank goodness. Lower your curiosity. Yeah, lower your IQ, which is maybe not a bad idea. Yeah.

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. 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. That's very charitable. They might just be dull. They might be dull-minded. Yeah.

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? We were talking about it the other day, but I don't think we ever researched the actual number. But it's significant enough where you're like, whoa, you're running around the world with an 85 IQ.

It's hard. Well, you kind of wonder about the IQ test, right? I mean, it was – what was it called? The Stanford-Binet test. It was developed way long ago. It may not really measure all aspects of intelligence. That's true. So maybe someone with an 85-point IQ is smart in other ways, like emotionally intelligent, for example. Okay. So –

With a 70 IQ, you have like 2%, 2 point something percent of the people. When you get to 85, you have 13.6%. So 13.6% have an IQ at 85 or below. That's a lot. 34% is 100 to 85%.

All right. But you have to also factor in education, right? Like to take an IQ test, you have to be able to understand concepts. You have to be able to solve problems and –

You most likely would have to have been exposed to many problems when you were younger for you to understand how these work. And some people have had a very poor education, and they might be intelligent. They might be very emotionally intelligent. Right, right. Yeah, that was what I was thinking is that, yeah, it would be a different scale of intelligence than purely cognitive. Right, right.

Yeah, well, that's one of the interesting elements about genetic engineering of the humans. There is a big article in something I was reading. Oh, Ecstatic Integration. It's a newsletter put out by Jules Evans, a friend of mine.

And he, you know, dove into genetic engineering of fetuses. Like you can have a three DNA fetus or embryo, you know, like the mom, the dad and some super smart person or actually a super athletic person. You know, so you could do like a chimera almost in the human situation. Wow.

That's probably already happened. Yeah, it is happening offshore. Yeah. You know, that was, you know, the gist of, you know, this. China's probably creating a race of super people. Well, the first, you know, genetic engineering of, you know, the fetus occurred in China. Right. It was a fellow working to develop HIV. That's what he says. Yeah, yeah. But it accidentally made them higher IQ. Mm-hmm.

Accidentally. Yeah. Well, so that guy's back at work. Yeah. Well, he went to jail for a little bit. Right. He's got a big lab, lots of funding. It's kind of weird. It seems like they kind of made him a scapegoat a little bit, which they tend to do over there.

Well, you think that in a lot of ways that he would be celebrated. Like, for example, the Scottish scientists that cloned that sheep, Dolly. Yeah. They were heroes. Sure. But I think we think very differently about it when it's being done with people. We get super nervous, especially if you're going to be the first person that does it. There's going to be a lot of outrage there.

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. Right. They were scooped. Yeah. I wonder if there is that kind of reaction with the first heart transplant or the first kidney transplant, if the originators of the methodology were –

You're demonized because they were putting somebody else's heart in your place. It 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. In the 1500s, it said, okay, I know how to save you. This guy just got run over by a wagon. I'm going to take his heart out. I'm going to cut you open and put his heart into you. Like what?

Right. 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. So your immune system doesn't reject the organ. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I never was in a heart transplant operating theater. You know, once in an emergency room, actually, I was able to crack somebody's chest open and work on their heart. Whoa. You give it the massage. Well, the person was quite sick. He was dying. And we tried everything. You know, like everything. You know, like...

We used... I'm a defibrillator. We...

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

Did the guy last after that? No, no. 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? He never woke up. Oh, Jesus. 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. 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. And, you know, like, you know, there were lots of hippies in my class and, you know, the dress code was to wear a tie.

And, you know, the hippies were saying, oh, forget ties. And, you know, the teacher said, think what your mother would want to see her doctor wearing. And everybody got all kind of guilt ridden and, oh, yeah, okay, our mom would like to see us wear a tie. Right. Yeah. You know, so you work into a role. You know, like how you look and how you talk and how you carry yourself. Yeah. It's a very interesting thing.

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

Yeah, and they can do some wild things today. I mean, I'm...

living proof of it. I've had three knee operations, two knee reconstructions. Yeah, well, a couple of years ago when I was out here for the first time, you were having some bleeding into your knees, I remember. Bleeding? Swelling? Some bad swelling at least. Yeah. Maybe they withdrew some blood from that joint? Oh, you know what it was probably? I'd probably had what's called Regenikine.

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 a yellow liquid, which is like a super potent anti-inflammatory. And then they had injected it into my knees. Okay. Yeah. It's, it really helps heal things. I had it done on my back. I had it done on my knees. It's amazing stuff. Yeah. So you've,

gotten a bunch of knee surgery, huh? Yes. Yeah. My knees are pretty beat up. My back's pretty beat up and my knees are pretty beat up. That's from your martial arts stuff? Yeah. Most of it, yeah. Yeah, well, do you have a knee replacement or just work on it? No, no, I don't need that. No, it's not that bad. Yeah. Not nearly as bad, but...

Quite a few people I know have one. My friend Matt got one. He's a former UFC welterweight champion, Matt Serra. He's younger than me. He has a knee replacement. My friend Michael Bisping, he was a former UFC middleweight champion. He has both of his knees replaced. His two artificial knees. Yeah, and they're doing okay with their new knees. Yeah, I mean better.

Right. Like he was in severe. They're 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, you know, these titanium heads. Have you seen them? Yeah. Pretty incredible. Yeah. They lop off the end of your knee.

screwing this new one and it just functions. My feeling, the fear I have though, my fear is that it's only good for like 20 years or so. And then what do you got to do? You got to go back in there and lop off again and put a new one in? Yeah. Well, they may have some new development. That's what you would hope so. You would hope so. But I mean, you're banking on that. You're like essentially making a bet.

that, okay, you can chop off the end of my knee and in 20 years they're going to have some new thing. The thing that would give me pause today, and again, I'm not giving medical advice, but if

biologics are coming so far that they're able to regenerate both meniscus tissue and also cartilage. So they can do that now. And there was a study in Australia where they did that recently, and I think there's something else going on somewhere in the United States where they're showing promise in that regard. So I think if people could just hang in there for a little longer, according to my friend Brigham,

who owns Ways to Well, which is a stem cell clinic out here.

He is convinced that these kind of like super invasive surgeries are going to be a thing of the past. They're going to be able to regrow tissue and fix, like literally fix knee problems, back problems, things along those lines. Neck problems. Neck problems. Yeah, yeah. They're already doing a lot of that in Mexico where there's places like the CPI, the Cellular Performance Institute. I had a friend of mine, Shane Dorian. He's a big wave surfer.

You know, I can imagine 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 and you're supposed to like be very,

you know, real relaxed for the next like 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. Yeah. Is he back surfing? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Stem cells. Well, you know, psychedelics affect the formation of stem cells into new neurons. That's called neurogenesis. Yeah. Psilocybin in particular, right? Psilocybin, ketamine, DMT. Doesn't lion's mane do that as well, though? Like non-psychoactive mushrooms? I don't know.

See if lion's mane creates neurogenesis. I think it does. Yeah, Paul Stamets would know. I think that's one of the things that Paul Stamets talked about was doing it in a stack, like doing psilocybin along with, yeah, now exactly what it was. Lion's mane mushrooms can promote neurogenesis and enhance memory. Yeah, I take that stuff. I take lion's mane all the time.

And I always wonder, how shit would my memory be if I didn't take it? Yeah. When I was recovering, I spoke to Paul and said, help me. I need help. And he said, lines mean. 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. It's a huge one. I was wondering what that was. Yeah, that's a mushroom. That's Paul Stamets brought me a mushroom. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. His fascinating character. Yeah, I like Paul. Great guy. Yeah, really great guy. I think he just got something replaced.

Like a hip. A hip or a knee. Yeah. Something along those lines. Well, you know, my friends that have had knee replacements, they're out skiing, they're playing golf. Yeah, they've really had a miraculous turnaround. Yeah. You can do amazing things now. It's incredible. I just think that we're real close to not needing a fake one. Real close to being able to generate new ones.

new ones well you know the organ i would like to replace with my eyes i've i've been like as a kid i've been nearsighted and nearsighted and more nearsighted so yeah i would love to have artificial eyes if if you know they worked out well that's what we were talking about earlier that they're going to be able to do that someday yeah yeah i'd be happy with that i might wait around as long as i can to get some like i can see pretty well if it's if the environment is brightly lit

But if it gets dark or dim, it becomes difficult. Dude, you're going to be able to see through walls. 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.

In how many years? I don't know. And then on top of that, the possibility is enhanced vision. And that's what we're talking about, like being able to, you know, see like...

warm things like in Blindsight device being developed to restore vision and people have lost their sight No, there was one That was saying you're gonna be able to have infrared night vision a bunch of different possibilities on top of the fact they're gonna be able to restore a site that eventually I don't know how you'd Google this that

that it wasn't just restoring memory... Excuse me, restoring vision, but enhanced vision. And that it's going to be far...

I think they're promising vision far greater than what human beings are personally capable of. Blindsight enables superhuman vision beyond natural limits like infrared becomes cognitive process, not just biological. That's it. Yeah, that's what blindsight is. Cognitive process. Oh, okay. So that is the same Neuralink thing. And then on top of that, you're going to be able to like zoom out. So, you know, like you ever take like a Samsung phone, they have 100x zoom and you can just...

zoom in on something like way in the distance like wow that's crazy you can really zoom in on stuff you're going to be able to do that with your eyeballs yeah feature enhancement too yeah yeah you can be able to see people look way better than they really look just put a filter on everybody's beautiful that's what Elon said on a tweet about it yeah so there it is

Musk explained the blind sight device from Neuralink will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see. Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time. Here's the part that truly expands the horizons of what we think visions can be. At first, the vision will be low resolution like Atari graphics, but eventually it has the potential to be better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultraviolet, or even radar wavelengths.

Like Geordi La Forge. Who's Geordi La Forge? Star Trek. Oh. Well, I mean, that'd be a lot of information, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So what would you do with it all? Depends on what you're trying to do, you know? If you're trying to find people hiding in the woods, you could be able to see them. 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.

Do you think that enhancing the human body like this is what the future of humanity holds? I think it's a stage we'll go through. Yeah? Yeah. I'm not sure how far along it'll take us. It may just end in our demise. But I think it's a stage that we obviously are passing into now. Some people think that's the mark of the beast from the Bible. Right.

You know, the people who get the chip. 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. 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? 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. Too busy learning ancient Hebrew. Yeah, yeah. I have enough to study in the Hebrew Bible. 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 then everybody being forced to do it, some matrix-type situation. I could see why people wouldn't see that.

And it might be just the inevitable transition from biological to cyborg that we're probably going to have to go through anyway. Well, the end of the world will, at least according to certain traditions, is heralded by the Antichrist.

And the Antichrist is the master of the lie. So I think it's interesting to kind of use that perspective as a way of seeing where the future is heading. So the Antichrist is mass media. It's the master of the lie. Yeah, mass media is the master of the lie. Corporate media is the master of the lie. Corporate media is the Antichrist. Corporate media leads us into wars, justifies all kinds of crazy things.

things that we do. We take over foreign governments and install our own puppet dictators and have everybody convinced it's a good thing. Well, the concept of the Antichrist is very old, you know, 2,000 years. Like, you have Christ, you've got the Antichrist. So, you know, there's a God and there's a, you know, demiurge.

Yeah, so it's a notion that has carried a lot of weight for a long time. Yeah, yeah, so you think that the media is the Antichrist? Well, I think – Or could be seen as. Well, you could see corporations as being in sort of a demonic state. So if you have an obligation to your shareholders to consistently provide higher and higher profits every quarter –

And in order to do that, you have to do things that will cost people lives and destroy people's lives. Like, for instance, the Sackler family that got everybody hooked on opioids. Is that not demonic? That seems very demonic. And if I was under the throes of its spell, if I had gotten caught up in opioids, it would be very similar to being possessed by demons, having your life ruined by devils.

Very similar, at least in result, right? Especially if you wind up committing crimes because you want to get your drugs. You wind up in jail. Your life is over. Maybe you destroyed other people's lives. It's very demonic in that way and like in the result, in the end result. The end result is evil.

Well, you know, look at the opium wars in China. 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. And in its result, it is demonic.

It's just we're hung up on pitchfork, forked tail, horns, demon. But in action, it's clearly demonstrably demonic. Well, demonic in what way? Okay. If you can lie about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and you can justify an invasion of Iraq based on these clear lies, and then through that invasion –

500,000 children starve to death because of embargoes. Countless people are killed that didn't have to be killed. Loss of at least a million lives over the course of the entire war and then the starving people afterwards. That's demonic, isn't it, for those people? Well, does that mean that you believe in the devil or Satan?

I don't know what I believe in and what I don't believe in because I haven't experienced it. Maybe if I experienced Satan, I'd be like, wow, Satan's real. But you're allowed to believe in God. But as soon as you start saying you believe in the devil, people look at you sideways. You know, like you could be the president and you can say, God bless our troops. Nobody bats an eye. But if you say the problem with America is the devil and we will find the devil and we will root him out of our world.

And that's what we're going to spend all your tax dollars on now. Yeah, I mean, like you could. I think good and evil are real things. You can pray for God to bless their troops and you could pray for protection from Satan's influence on the troops. If you were able to put the two like on. 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. 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. Mm hmm.

Well, you believe in good and evil. Like I think what occurs is the more people do good, the stronger the force of good is. And the more that do evil, the stronger the force of evil is. And then you have the Holocaust. Well, you know, like, you know, how do you perceive that force? Is it just energy or do you anthropomorphize it into like a being that you can recognize and think about? Right.

But there's kind of no denying, at least from a recognizable... If you had to, like, look... How do you quantify it? How do you measure it? There's no denying that evil takes place. You know? Like, the...

You can come up with any number of massacres throughout history and you say that's an evil act. There's no question. Right. So evil is a thing that's real. If there's good, there's evil. Right. And then there have been many, many things that people have done. You're like, wow, good exists in the world. There is still good.

So we know both those things are real things. We just don't know what's the root of them all. And are there really angels and demons? Or are those the scapegoats for this bizarre dance of good and evil that just exists in the world? 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. It would just be true or false. Right.

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. Right. 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. And they no longer were fit inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, a paradise. What's your take on Lilith? Yeah, Lilith. Well, there's no mention of her in the Bible per se, but there's a lot of mention of her in the rabbinic literature that sprung up after the Bible. Yeah, the story is that I think after Cain killed Abel,

You know, that Adam, no, no, was it after that? No, I think it was after Adam and Eve were expelled from their garden, you know, that they stopped having sex.

So Adam, you know, then was just sleeping with Lilith and they spawned innumerable demons as a result of their relationship. Yeah. And after a while, Adam and Eve reconciled and they got things together again. Yeah. Yeah. But Lilith plays a role in the understanding of evil in the world. Like it's the result of the spawn of Lilith. What do you think Lilith was originally? If it was a thing. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. Well, that's called midrash. It's the explication of the Bible by the rabbis. So this was called extra-biblical. And I've only looked into extra-biblical stuff to a certain extent. What's the source of that stuff? The imagination. And I think the surrounding environment, societies, culture, influenced by the Greeks,

the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Hittites. There's a lot of accumulation of other cultures onto interpreting the stories that occur in the text. A lot of fanciful things and entertaining things like, for example, Lilith is the source of the demonic entities out there. Yeah, I found out about Lilith like six months ago.

Oh, really? Yeah, I'd never even heard about it. Do you remember when we found out about Lilith? Somebody brought it up on a show, right? Yeah, who brought it up, I'm wondering. I don't remember, but I was like, what? Who's Lilith? Yeah, was it Jordan Peterson? It could have been. Yeah, but very possibly. Because he's a keen student of the Bible. Yes, very possibly. I do not remember, though. But I remember thinking, like, wow. And then the original story. So when you're talking about

The biblical translations of the Adam and Eve story that we're all accustomed to, it's all a watered-down sort of 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? 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 is very accurate.

Yeah, it's a bit stilted. Is anything missing in the translation from when you read it in ancient Hebrew, or do you think it's pretty clear? It's fairly one-to-one correspondence between the Hebrew words and the English translation. Certain things are interpreted through a Christian lens because the Christians wrote the King James Bible translation. Right. Yeah, but the words and the grammar and the narratives, they're pretty much accurate.

Yeah, you know, they spent a lot of time working on painstaking translations, you know, so, you know, there was a responsibility, you know, to do it accurately. Imagine that story, like trying to like...

passed that one down for a thousand years yeah like yeah so there was only two people and then there was an apple right and a snake talked eve into eating that apple and everything got fucked yeah yeah it's a 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 uh as if they were real hmm what do you mean by that

Well, if you imagine that there was an Adam and Eve and you visualize the garden they were in and the snake and their interactions, you know, there you have it. So you think the biblical interpretation is a literal recalling of actual events that took place? No. 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 real.

Overwhelmingly convincing. It's got its own laws, its own system. Things are regular, like certain things happen, certain interactions take place. Yeah, and you're there. You're convinced it's real and you interact with it to the best of your ability. So I think that's the case with the narratives in the text. It's not...

It isn't a matter of interpreting what they mean as much as understanding what happened. Boy, that's obscure. So it's not interpreting what they mean but understanding what happened. Yeah. Like, you know, what did the snake say to Eve? So a snake really talked to Eve, though. It was as if a snake talked to Eve. As if. Yeah. So perhaps—

A psychedelic experience? Perhaps an altered state of consciousness? No, I think it was a case of a woman standing near a tree and a snake coming up to her and saying certain things. And they have a conversation. For real? For real? As if it were real. Well, you know, the stories have been told so many times. Right. That's the problem. And...

Seems like they're blaming everything on Eve, too, which is a little suspect. I like to hear her side of it. Well, the one who got punished without even having a chance to explain himself was the snake.

So God asks Adam what happened, and he asks Eve what happened, and he just lays it on the snake. Right. And the snake's like, I didn't tell her anything. I can't even talk. This lady wanted to eat that apple. She blamed me. Well, back then snakes could talk, or in that world snakes talk.

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

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.

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 on the tower, there was Nimrod, there was Abraham, there was Isaac and Jacob. So it's this world which...

seems to be quite coherent, quite consistent at all, you know, ties together. It's quite consistent from book to book.

you know, from narrative to narrative. You know, it is a different way of looking at the Bible. It isn't, you know, dogma, like you have to do this or you have to do that. Or it isn't like a Jungian archetype or a psychodynamic, you know, wish fulfillment. It's this world that, you know, that is articulated, spelled out in a very ancient, very influential text. So...

Is it also possible that something completely different took place, but that over time and over a oral tradition of who knows how many hundreds of years before they actually wrote it down, and then writing it down, that you're getting a version of the actual event that's very different than what really took place, but you think about it like the version in the Scripture? Yeah.

And if you think about it in the version of the scripture, are you thinking about it like as if this was an event as recorded? Or are you thinking this is a representation of an archetype or some sort of moment in human history that they're trying to recollect and pass down? Well, if you consider the text to be prophetically received...

Prophecy is communication between the divine and man. And the text was prophetically received. In fact, Philo of Alexandria, one of Terence McKenna's heroes, used to say the most accurate historians were the prophets because they heard it directly from the initiator of the event, the witness of the event, the one who could understand the event in the huge context.

So it's a prophetically received text, which means it contains information received from a spiritual sort of level, which you would think is a universal field of sorts. How much have you ever paid attention, if at all, to any of that ancient Sumerian stuff, like the Anunnaki? Some, some. Yeah, I watched this really great –

documentary a few years back. Yeah, but I wouldn't consider myself as knowing much about it. Right.

That, to me, is one of the weirder origin stories. Yeah, yeah. So what is that origin story? Am I recalling it quite fascinated, but not the details? Well, there's multiple versions of it. First of all, the story of this, the fantastic story is told by Zechariah Sitchin. So Zechariah Sitchin, who wrote The Twelfth Planet, and he wrote several other books,

He was a biblical scholar and a linguist, and he spent a lot of time studying the ancient Sumerian text, the cuneiform. And what he believes is that it tells a story of an ancient

between a race of beings on a far distant planet that's in an elliptical orbit and it comes near Earth every 3,600 years and that they had engineered human beings out of lower primates. They had 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...

These detailed, I don't see the ancient tablets that have a detailed map of the solar system from 6,000 years ago. Right, okay. 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. Uh-huh. 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. Yeah.

Yeah. It brings to mind, you know, the sons of God, you know, the B'nai Elohim, which occur in the story of the flood and Noah. The Nephilim, too. Yeah. Yeah. The Nephilim, the Rephaim, they were huge. They were giants. Yeah. Men of renown. Yeah.

Yeah. And they intermarried or they had sex with the daughters of man. And from them came a race. Yeah. So that story is interpreted or perceived through the lens of the Hebrew Bible too. Really? Yeah. Well, that is a story in the text before the flood happened.

The B'nai Elohim come down to earth. They have intercourse with the daughters of man. And out of those relationships comes this race of giants. That's the most fun one. Yeah, yeah. Isn't it? Well, they all got swept away in the flood.

So that's an interesting turn of events. Well, if you interpret the flood as the Younger Drives Impact Theory, which created the flood, it lines up. Right, right. That does line up. Yeah. It lines up time-wise. It lines up with how it would go down. Yeah. Just no evidence of giants. That's the only thing we're missing. If they found some giants –

Well, in the meantime, you can assume that the giants were real and understand their origin, what they were like, what they did, why they did it, what their results were. Yeah, the bizarre thing is they've isolated this area outside of the Kuiper Belt where they believe there's a large planetary body that might be multiple times larger than Earth and

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. Yeah, I think I've heard of that actually. It gets fun. Those get fun. Those I put away rational thought just to pay attention to that stuff. Well, and if it were true, then what?

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

Maybe. Maybe they realize that people need trouble in order to get things done, in order to join the Galactic Federation. We have to figure out a way to get off the planet. The best way to get off the planet is to develop superior weapons.

Yeah, you know, kind of withdraw from the brink of the precipice. Right. That's the story of humanity basically, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Well, that's what's interesting about origin stories, right? And that's what's interesting about the biblical texts is that there are these stories about things that have gone horribly wrong and influences different things that happened to humanity and different cataclysms and disasters. And these stories are shared often.

through different cultures, which is really interesting. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, there's a flood story. It's real similar. Yeah, yeah. Most of the Middle East has got a flood story, an origin story. Yeah. It just makes you wonder. Well, it makes you wonder if it's true. Yeah. Yeah, so that's why I think studying one particular...

um your tradition in great detail can you kind of you know help you you kind of resonate with ones that are more universal yeah well that one is so common which is really interesting when you see the ev like the younger drives impact theory evidence like of course 11 000 plus years ago this is probably what happened the story gets passed around forever and ever and everyone sort of remembers it and

Yeah. Well, do you like Graham's documentaries? Yeah, I do. Yeah. The other Netflix ones. They're fascinating. I don't like all the anger that comes out of it. All the people that get mad at him and the disparaging remarks and how some archaeologists have like severely overreacted to it as if it's some horrific threat. But it's fascinating. Just the raw data. Yeah.

about the size of these stones, their alignment with constellations, the fact that these things have been there for at the very, at least 4,500 years, some of them. And some of them even further than that when you get to like go Beckley, Tapia. To me, it's just incredible

incredible to imagine people living 11,000 years ago. Like, what is life like? What is that experience like? What is it like talking to people? Yeah. Well, those footprints around, you know, white sands are super cool. Yeah. That's not far from where I live. That's 22,000 years. Yeah. You know, kids running around in the mud. Yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's very interesting. Altered States, 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 author. Yes. Yeah. Beautiful. I'm so happy when people do that. That came out this year. December 10th, My Altered States.

And it is going to be available everywhere? Yeah. Inner Traditions publishes it. Yeah, it's on all the usual resources. And you can go to rickstrossman.com and you can see this and everything else. Oh, and you can preorder it. You can order it for me. I will inscribe it and I will sign it. Oh, beautiful. Oh, that's awesome. That's very cool. That's only $20. All right, man.

Yeah, the book is illustrated as well. There's some pretty funny stories in there, and each of them has got at least one illustration. Oh, cool. Oh, look at that. Who drew it? A friend from Birmingham, Alabama named Merrilee Chalice.

That's crazy. That's crazy. There's some – well, there's one called Steak on Acid. You ever eat steak on acid? No, I have not. This is great. These are cool drawings. They're great drawings, yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Rick, thank you so much. It's always great to see you. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for coming. Same here. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. All right. Okay. Go buy the books, folks. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye.