Rick Strassman

Before we started rolling, we were talking about the effects of DMT. I told you I was super afraid to try it again by myself. And people I've spoken with that know more about this than I do, which isn't saying much, said that there's not really any, there's not any documented cases of people having any like real adverse effects of using DMT or overusing DMT.

Behind the laser or whatever. I'm going to try it again, but it's, it's interesting because I don't know of anything else. Maybe you can elaborate on this, but I've never heard of any sort of psychedelic trip where people see like something that specific, all of them.

yeah yeah that's the one that's one of the questions I had too because of if you're talking about seeing matrix code and there's like hey you know take this and look at this thing tell me you can find the matrix code maybe you're kind of like pushing them in that direction already but there's an argument to be had that like you know you could tell them that a couple days before maybe they wouldn't be at the front of their mind anymore but I don't know I don't know how that works and how do you make that like a double blind sort of test to see if there's something there because you can't you can't take a picture of it

Yeah. I think he recently took, he tried to step it up a notch and he took magnets And he put it behind a wall so people couldn't see where the magnet was and then like move the magnet around and see if people could see if there was some sort of distortion in the code. And I think there was, he said that there was nothing, nothing significant that they could measure from that.

Right.

um i know i don't think he actually told me the percentage but he said basically upwards of a few hundred people have written him or messaged him or have called him and told them that they and he sent them all this you know the laser or whatever and they said they saw the same exact thing that he saw

But that's the same thing that, you know, you know, Gallimore was questioning that, like questioning, you know, how credible that could be, especially if you're telling people what to expect beforehand. But then, you know, he talked to Gallimore afterwards. I think Gallimore is going to try to help him with it.

Right. I don't know how you do that.

Right.

Yeah, that's interesting. Because that was part of this famous John Hopkins study on psilocybin with the religious leaders that was for some reason never published. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of it was to get religious leaders from different like Christianity, Judaism, Eastern religions and see if their religious worldview affected their experience on psychedelics.

Is that what the basic gist of it was?

I thought that was the famous one that was never published.

Oh, really?

What would you speculate would be the outcome of that?

Yeah, they're motivated to prove this idea called perennialism, I think it's called.

Yeah, that's the interesting thing about what that's like, as Travis pointed out to me, which blew my mind is that there I mean, there are so many different groups with different incentives that are looking into psychedelics and trying to use them to push forward their narrative. Yeah.

Yes, I saw that. I saw that. What was Alex? He was saying that there, first of all, he said he ate some DMT or something. Can you find that clip? It'd be great to watch that so we can get a refresh. Go to YouTube, type in Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, DMT. It's a short.

Yeah, it's like less than a minute.

There it is. That's it right there. Yeah, give us some volume on that.

Click on it.

Thoughts on that?

I mean, have you ever heard of anybody getting chased by demons the way he explains it? Chased by demons? Coming after them?

You were the first person in the United States to do human research on psychedelics. You are probably like one of the most legendary people in the psychedelic world. And one of the things that really blew my mind was that you were explaining on, I think it was Hamilton's podcast. I could be wrong. I think it was Hamilton's podcast. You were explaining how you had the idea

Right. Yeah. So this angels and demons worldview, which is very much, you know, I think Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones are like very devout Christians. They talk about it all the time on there.

on their programs so like if they're trying to fit this dmt experience into their worldview that would make sense and going back to that that john hopkins study where they're trying to prove some sort of common core to all religions um it's trying to basically paint the fact that like what what would the ultimate goal of that be?

Would the goal of that be to say that psychedelics created all religions?

Right.

Yeah. And how do you push people into a universal religion when people are already in their own unique religions that give them value to their life already? Like, how do you make how do you do that?

Right. And one of the even scarier ideas is that if you give the church access to psychedelic drugs or give them the license to bring psychedelic drugs into their spiritual practice, now you're making these people who are already subscribed to this idea that there's this – deacon that has direct communication with God who is giving these people the answers to their life problems.

Now you're putting these already vulnerable people on psychedelics. I can see where that can lead to problems.

Suggestible. That's what it was. Yes. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Because even people who, even people who are like, you know, huge psychedelic proponents who think that psychedelics are the panacea for everything in culture and society. I mean, even they kind of get pretty fanatical to some extent where psychedelics become their God, you know?

to get this funded when you were hanging out with Terrence McKenna And you guys decided that it would be the best way to get it funded through the war on drugs.

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Right, you try to put it into some sort of verbal context.

Right, right. That would have a huge effect on the person's experience.

And you've also talked about it being some sort of like a super placebo. And is that, when you say by that, you mean, does that have to do with like your intention when you do it?

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. It feels like you're kind of like drinking from a fire hose of information when it's happening. And then afterwards you're like, oh my God, how do I digest all of this stuff?

That's interesting. Yeah. He even showed me a bunch of photos afterwards of the Lord of the Rings, the ring, the kind of like engraving that's on that ring. He's like, it looks just like this. And no one else I've ever heard has said it looked like Sanskrit. They all said it looks like, I think Gallimore said that that stuff looked like some Japanese text.

I forget what it was called, but he said he thought it was like some, some, like some obscure Japanese type of like subtext that is used in that culture.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I did it and it was my first time doing DMT. First time, really? Yeah, it was my first time. So I kind of like, I did it. I did like the four or five experiments

hits of the pin and then I was kind of like on the couch and I kind of closed my eyes for a little bit that was the most intense part of it after the super intense part of it was over I was like okay I think I feel I'm back in my body now I can go check out this laser I really wanted to still a very stone though right Yes, still very stoned. Not anywhere near the peak of the experience, though.

Yes, exactly.

It couldn't be any more similar. It was crazy. I was explaining, it felt like, literally, I've talked about this ad nauseum, but it was my, the way I am such a lightweight when it comes to drugs, I was terrified, even when it comes to smoking pot. I, I can easily go over the edge. So I was super terrified that this was gonna like be that times a million. I don't know anything about this stuff.

What do I know? But it was like nothing like that. It was just my soul being ejected out of the top of my head and like leaving behind every attachment I have to my mortal being, like my wife, my kids, this podcast, like everything I've ever known, just being completely detached and just,

my soul being shuttled through like light arteries and and then you know i opened my eyes and depth was crazier like my depth perception was like on steroids and i could see like pockets of space floating around anyways after that ended i was like i want to check out this laser so he had it shined on the wall i walked over to it and i stared at it for a little bit like

And like I said, I could see these little speckles of light and gears. These, once I focused on these little specs of light, I could see gears connected and rotating together back behind the wall. So like, it was like a rip in the wall. The light was creating a tear in the wall and I could see this pocket of space back there where these gears were moving around.

Just spinning. As far as I can remember, they were just spinning and they were all connected. I never saw any sort of text or code or anything.

Very tiny. Very tiny. Very tiny gears, millions of them. And they were all connected.

Did they communicate?

Yeah. The five, the five methoxy DMT seems terrifying. It's a, is it, is it nothing like NN or is it similar just on steroids?

Is that the only time you had visions on the 5-methoxy?

You ever did it? Yeah. Oh, wow.

Because that was the basis of your latest book, right? The latest book that you published was the first time that you talked about all your personal experiences with psychedelics.

My Altered States, right.

Yeah, I just, I don't know. I can't imagine that somebody like you would have only done it one time.

How do you say no to that?

What was the background with your melatonin research?

Yeah, I learned recently that melatonin is created through this thing called melanopsin, which is a chemical or not a chemical, but it's a hormone that is created through your eyes. So like when you wake up early and you watch the sunrise, your eyes produce this chemical called melanopsin or a hormone called melanopsin, which is converted to melatonin, which regulates your circadian rhythm.

And I guess the melatonin kicks in really heavy 12 hours after that first light enters your eyes or your retina.

Can you find that, Steve? Find out the connection between melanopsin and melatonin. Because I might be getting that wrong, but I could have sworn that was the way Alexis explained it to us.

Yeah, yeah, sure. All right, we're back. So to clear up the melanopsin thing, it's a photopigment that belongs in the opsin family that basically... it suppresses melatonin for 12 hours after it's created in the eye. And I think it has something to do with sunlight. Oh, blue visible light, yeah. So the short wavelengths of blue light from the sun.

So what... made you decide to publish this book all about your personal experiences with psychedelics. Oh, right. My Altered States.

Yeah, I still find it so interesting that you never pursued DMT more than once. Because after I said I did it the first time, I haven't been able to stop thinking about doing it again. I don't think I went far enough. I never saw any sort of beings or had any communication like that.

Oh, you didn't vape it. How did you do it?

No, I never had any sort of issues. People I was with, my friends that I was with, they were having trouble coughing. I had no problem holding it in or anything like that or hitting it. I think it was the fact that I was just scared. I remember I did the first hit. I felt a little tingly. He's like, okay, go again. And I held it in for five seconds and then I exhaled.

Second hand, I was like, okay, now I'm feeling loopy. He's like, do a third. I did a third. And I'm like, holy crap. There's no, I can't do anymore. I'm like, I'm like really tripping now. I'm seeing the patterns. I'm seeing the fractals, all this stuff, geometry. He goes, okay, now you have to go again. I'm like, what? I'm like, I couldn't even.

Because it just sounds fun to meet an alien and communicate with an alien and find some profound, you know, I want to get, I'm interested in the idea of using it as a tool to improve my life or improve my thinking or.

a good question yeah i don't know would i even be able to ask a question in that state if you knew what was going on there yeah if you were able to cut you know keep your focus yeah that's a good question i don't know what i would ask it you know one of the one of the interesting things that i've noticed at least with marijuana is that whenever i get

Whenever I get really high and I always come out with at least one thing that I can use in my life out of that experience. Because usually it's kind of like, as I told you before we started, it's been, if I go too far, my world kind of caves in on me and I start to focus on all the negative things in my life. But at the end of it, I always take something positive out of it.

What do you think DMT in a healthy dose does to the human brain? not necessarily i'm i know it's speculative when you're talking about what it's doing to the brain when you're taking it when it's active right but like oh kind of like when it when it subsides like what do you think the after effect is

And one of the most recent things I've been taking out of it, one of the messages I've been getting from it is to basically just spend more time with my kids.

Right. So it's like a magnifier.

Yeah, I've never heard of it described that way before. That's super interesting, but it does make a ton of sense.

Have you ever heard stories of people describing because I know you've studied or are currently studying the idea of a tolerance being able to be built with DMT because there's like a tolerance with LSD. If you take LSD for X amount of days, it starts to have enough stops to have an effect.

yeah how could that come about yeah that's a very strange yeah this guy i just had on recently uh zoltan bathory was explaining to me and he's the guy who i was explaining has done this thousands of times yeah and he was saying that he went in thousands or maybe a little not maybe thousands maybe a thousand or more yeah that's what it was still still that's a lot

Um, he was explaining that he went somewhere, saw some being, he was in a room with a being, and then like the being became aware of him. He's like, like noticed him out of the corner of his eyes. Like, okay, what do you want to know? And then. His response was, I don't know. Like, what do you mean? What do I want to know? I don't, I have no idea.

He's like, and the being was sort of annoyed by this, that he showed up without any sort of intention or wanting to know anything. And then all of a sudden he was kicked back into reality. And then he kept trying to go back for weeks and months afterwards and he couldn't get it to work. And he thinks he was intentionally kicked out by these beings.

But what would be the, the chemical explanation for why this stuff would all of a sudden stop working? Has that ever been studied? Like, do we know for a fact like serotonin receptors can just be turned off?

So they just don't have it from birth. They never have the enzyme.

And then it just somehow comes back after it gets knocked out?

Yeah, I was asking him about this and Dave was explaining to me that it could have something more to do with endorphins.

I think I was specifically asking him about dreams and lucid dreams and things like this. And his idea was that the DMT in the brain is not enough to have any significant effect.

So it's hard to do the studies.

People just don't do it. There's no funding.

Well, not even just what is it doing, just base level, how much is there? Can't we just cut out some pineal glands and inspect them, measure the DMT? How hard is it to measure DMT in somebody's pineal gland or even their blood?

Yeah, because I guess I wonder if it's like after death, if somehow dissipates, you know, or if you could study people that are like close to death, because people say that there's these, these near death experiences people have are very similar to DMT. And even people that are like, even my grandmother who recently passed away,

I know she was explaining this, how she was seeing visions of dead relatives, speaking to her, communicating with her, and she had never done any psychedelics or anything like this. This was just like...

these voices and visions she was having like weeks before she passed away and i've read lots of other descriptions of this where people kind of have these deathbed visions and it is that one of the ideas people speculate is that that might have something to do with the dmt

Yeah. One of the things David Nichols was explaining to me was that there was a technical word he used to describe how it actually increases neural density. And there's this term, the scientific term for these neural branches, like the branches on trees that they grow and they become more connected and more full.

So they somehow were able to measure the brain levels of DMT in dying animals?

So for people who have suffered strokes.

And how would they administer the DMT to these people?

Yeah.

one of the most interesting things to me is this um how people recall this telepathic experiences on dmt and not only that there's telepathic experiences like within near-death experiences there's story i don't know if you ever heard stories of people who like been in a car accident together explaining they're in this having this near-death

dream hallucinate whatever you want to call it with the other person that they were in that accident with and in some cases that person being carried off if they died them being put back into their body and then you have like like Dennis when he talks about what they you know him and Terrence and La Charrera I think Dennis ate mushrooms like so many mushrooms that he was

in this other universe for like 10 days. And him and Terrence were communicating telepathically the whole time.

Are you sure this wheat wasn't laced with anything?

Oh, it was hash.

Yeah, the telepathy thing, how do you explain that?

Have you ever heard anybody ever say, engaging in any kind of trip like how Dennis describes what they did in La Charrera where he's basically gone for 10 days and he explained that like he had to eat the mushrooms that was just like their calories for the day And he couldn't even, he couldn't even like shit on his own. He explained, he literally explained like how he had to take a shit.

He had to like ask somebody to take a shit for him. And he was just like completely out of his body for 10 days communicating with Terrence. And like, I don't know if there's ever been anything like that done before. And I'd be curious like how many of those experiences where people are Sharing an experience like that and communicating telepathically, how many times has that been done or recorded?

Yeah, because every person I've ever talked to that does DMT, they're all super smart.

I always wonder if these experiences that we have are something that we were more attuned to centuries ago or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. If we had...

if we had these abilities to communicate telepathically or to, you know, even be in more of an altered state or have just more of an experience of reality in real life, similar to how people experience, how did people describe their experiences?

Like when they go to the Amazon for the first time, how they explain like all these dormant senses, just wake up being in the jungle, being disconnected from technology and all this and all these things, you know?

Right. I wonder if this telepathic... If just ancient humans were more... Our bodies were more technologically advanced and we had...

ways to communicate without verbal right and and just because we're so because we had our antennas were more in tune to something else yeah that now our antennas are kind of just they've gone dormant because of the evolution of technology and phones and the internet and all these things

I've heard of it. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard of the bicameral mind.

So she's saying the human mind operated in a non-conscious state until about 3,000 years ago. where individuals experienced auditory hallucinations as commands from God guiding their actions.

The right hemisphere of the brain interpreted sensory data, judged and decided informed language while the left hemisphere acted as acted on these commands without being aware of the decision-making process.

Well, it's not just in the brain, right? It's all throughout the body. Isn't that true?

The end of the prophetic stream? Yeah. So you wrote the whole book on the Hebrew Bible and prophets. And the idea of prophets and psychedelic hallucinations, there's a connection there?

Like Ezekiel?

Okay, so it's mostly in the brain. In the pineal gland or all throughout the brain?

is quite old it's you know the basis of christianity and is mentioned you know regularly by the quran all right so 10th century what it's like 10 000 years that's not true there's no way because the septuagint was when was the septuagint written around the turn of the era maybe 100 years so the septuagint was hellenistic i thought it was greek yeah right 10,000 B.C.

Okay, so this one is saying 12,000 to 100.

The crazy thing about the prophets, or the crazy thing to me about the Bible is that All these prophets that are written about that were like Moses, Ezekiel, all these people, there's, they're only written about in the Bible and there's no other historical writing about it.

You know, like even like Moses, I think, I think he, he existed like a thousand years before the first allegedly when, when the Bible says he existed was a thousand years before he was ever even written about.

Even Abraham.

Yeah. So it's like, to me, like, it's so fascinating how, like, you have in antiquity.

all this stuff that's going on you have you have all this philosophy all the science all the medical literature i think galen wrote like 10 of the classical literature um that exists today in greek um you have comedy you have legal documents that are written in antiquity but then you have this narrow lane of the bible where you have all these other stories but

none of those people are corroborated anywhere out of the Bible, right? Like there's no, like none of these people in the Bible, Ezekiel, Mahan, like none of them. Is there any historical texts about them? Is there any medical texts about them? Did any of these guys have physicians? Because that's usually how you corroborate things when you're studying classical history, right?

You look at like when even quoting people like Julius Caesar, when he quotes a historian, that's how you validate that historian and the things that he writes about.

Right. Well, I mean, I don't think, I think they're all fairy tales, but like that's, that's just one of the most obvious things to me. It's like the way I love to look at it, which is a way a friend of mine who's a classical philologist explained this to me. It's like, imagine in 2000 years from now, There's people that are saying Gandalf is real. And how do they know Gandalf is real?

It's because there's this divine trilogy that was written about Gandalf and how he lives in the middle of the earth. And it's called the Lord of the Rings. But there's no one, no one else is writing about Gandalf except for in this trilogy. It's like, it's the same, the same thing almost.

So do you think that – is the idea that DMT existing in the brain is sort of what's responsible for giving us our perception of the world for – which animates the world around us, gives us this depth and color and –

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, it's been a, it's been a huge influence, but like times are different right now, right? With like technology and, and everything else back then people were so different.

In certain ways, in certain ways.

Yeah, but it's not, is it the same way? Is it like the way people, the way people are Christian and Muslim and Jewish today, is that the same way that people thought about religions in antiquity? Like, did they live and die by their religions back then? Or were like, like, for example, like think about pagan religions. People would just, they just use religions. They could swap religions.

They could have five different religions they ascribe to, or they can believe in five different gods, 10 different gods. Now it's like the way it's,

fused into culture and how it's so black and white you know and how people and then when you add the internet into that and the way people communicate now you know it's become this just confusing cauldron of ideas and ways for people to argue and and it's become i think more divisive than ever yeah well do you think that's because of the invasion of demonic forces Speaking of. I don't know.

What do you call a demon? How do you define a demon?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yes.

Right.

Um, there's this, there's this other idea called the, um, which I think it was Andrew Gallimore who explained this to me, the, uh, the filter idea of the brain being a filter where it filters out all this other stuff that could exist in reality to what, so we can perceive only what we need to survive.

Huh. Where did the Antichrist first come from? Who was the first Antichrist?

Yeah, there's an idea that... Oh, the Antichrist, the Satan.

Have you ever heard of the idea of Christ being a drug term?

Oh, yes. John Allegro. Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, Ruck actually endorsed his book, Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

Yeah, no, his is different. I think there's a lot of gaping holes in his idea because he traces – He traces the Hebrew, I guess he was a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, right? He studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for a long time. For a long time, yeah.

He translated the Hebrew and one of his, he was making a lot of connections in that book to Sumerian roots. And I don't think Hebrew has any shared commonality or roots with Sumerian.

Right. So his idea of like the, I mean, the main connection I think he made was that like a mushroom isn't fertilized. It just comes from like the rain is the semen of God and then it hits the earth and then the mushroom is divine. Right.

But the idea I was talking about was there's the word Christ.

in antiquity in greek means to apply drugs to somebody to give somebody drugs and there's there's multiple different definitions of the word christ but um and that's the hard part about trying to define what this meant but according to um a classical philologist that i talked to and a bunch of other people that study this stuff the ancient greek His name's Amon. He's the guy who lives in Taos.

Dr. Amon Hillman. He's a classical philologist. There's different meanings to Christ. To put roofs on, to add, put roofs on houses, that's called Christing. But Basically, the idea, his idea of what christing was during Jesus' time was somebody who just did drugs and gave people drugs. It was kind of like a prophet in a drug sense.

We've looked it up on the Greek. There's a website where you can translate Greek, and it was one of the many definitions that are there.

Yeah, no, this is... I don't think it has anything to do with Allegro because this guy, he only translates Greek. So he reads all the ancient Greek. So what he does is he takes... He reads all the Greek from classical antiquity and... tries to figure out what words meant in certain time periods, like between like the word Christ had different meanings from 1000 BC than it did at 100 BC.

So he reads like the medical stuff. He mainly read, he mainly focused on the medical texts like Galen and, and other things. But he also read like comedies, philosophy, um, all kinds of different, because there was so much Greek literature. On Christ. It was unbelievable. No, no, not just on Christ, but everywhere. But lots of people were using the word Christ in random ways.

areas throughout all the literature, right? A lot of it was in medical literature. So he's like, okay, let's take the consensus on what people were, what the context was for the word Christ during this time from Julius Caesar to, you know, a couple hundred years AD. And, and his idea is that overwhelmingly it's used as a drug term to apply drugs.

Yeah, I want I always wondered, like, is the is the DMT in there? Is that breaking down some sort of filter in the brain, which is enabling us to see more or like temporarily making us see something like like overloading the brain with information? And that's maybe explains that. this stuff that we're seeing or these things that we're experiencing or communicating with.

I don't know, maybe. Maybe.

So his dissertation was on Galen, who's Marcus Aurelius' physician, which also happens to be like 10% of the literature we have from antiquity. And Galen just talks about all the drugs being used and everything he's prescribing Marcus Aurelius. And Marcus Aurelius gets hooked on opium. And he's writing in his journals all about all the opium he has to keep giving Arcus Aurelius.

He's like, he keeps having to increase the dose. And he's getting annoyed by how much more opium he has to give him. And, you know, they're using viper venoms. They're trying to create antidotes to viper venoms by, like, by using the human...

the human immune system so they're they're impregnating bandages with viper venom north african viper venoms basically you know putting a little bit of viper venom on the bandage cutting children wrapping their cut in viper venom so that because they have the most robust immune systems they're going to develop more antibodies so they can use the children's blood or their bodily fluids as an antidote to snake bites really

like all kinds of crazy stuff. He's this thing called the Theriac where they mix this concoction of like 12 different North African snakes into the flesh and the Viper and all this other crazy stuff. And he, they explained that as like a panacea and he was giving it to Marcus Aurelius.

And he's like in his notes, he's like, he's like, uh, the King is starting to look better after taking the Theriac. But you know, this could be just, you know, looking through the lens of somebody who was focused on ancient drugs and

No, he's focusing on the Greek.

The ancient Greek.

Which he explains was everywhere. The Library of Alexandria had over 150,000 copies in its height.

And it was all Greek. Yeah. All Greek. No Hebrew, no Latin, nothing else.

No, he was never into psychedelics, really, himself, I don't think.

Like modern day people?

No, he spent his whole life. He has a master's or has a PhD in Greek and classical philology, which is the translation of ancient Greek.

And, you know, once it fades, fades away, maybe those filters are coming back into, into place.

Wow. Yeah. Isn't it interesting that there's no, there's nothing in ancient Hebrew outside of the Bible. It's all, it's all canonical. There's no like ancient medical texts in Hebrew. There's no ancient philosophical texts in Hebrew. And it's 7,000 words, right?

Ancient Hebrew, yeah. I'm talking about ancient Hebrew, yeah.

So the Dead Sea Scrolls, as far as I understand, they're all religious texts.

There's no medical text. There might've been, you know what? I think there was a few receipts or something like from people, you know, borrowing a cow or buying a cow in exchange for something else or whatever. Yeah. But they were all religious texts and there was Greek in there too. Yeah. Yeah. And those were discovered when? 1947. 1940s, and they dated them to what?

They dated them to like 200 BC or something like that, 150 BC?

Right.

Yeah, I had a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar in here who was explaining to me all the crazy stuff. He was explaining to me how there's this huge market of people peddling fake tech, fake scrolls, like fake fragments of scrolls, selling them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yeah. I mean, they found him in some cave in the middle of the desert, some random caves.

In Qumran.

Dead Sea Scrolls, right, found it. Does it say the date? It was early. I think it was like 1 to 150 they tried to date him to.

Yeah, but this guy, this classical philologist, Amon, he was explaining to me like reading Greek, reading ancient Greek is almost like a mind expanding drug in itself.

Reticular activating system?

Oh, wow. Yeah. Ancient Greek has like over a million unique words.

Do you think that, do you believe that people in that time period around the time of Christ were experiencing mind-altering drugs?

Right. Yeah. Because like from one of his books was called the chemical muse. He was talking about how like in antiquity people were dying all the time from everything. And the infant mortality rate was like 50%. There was always combat going on. There was always plague, famine, people dying in the worst ways all the time.

And people were, one of the things he explained was people would walk through the town and basically fumigate the town with cannabis.

yeah and people were just always trying to get high just to get through the day oh really yeah according to according to his book yeah yeah but you know it's interesting yeah and then you have the eleusinian mysteries what was going on there that's crazy too

Kikion. Kikion, yeah.

Yeah, the road to Eleusis. Yeah. With Wasson and Hoffman.

Yeah, one of the things Dave Nichols was explaining to me, or we were talking about, there was actually an ergot museum in the U.S. And this was tied to... One of the guys, his name's escaping me right now, who was trying to synthesize a lot of LSD.

and he got arrested yeah yeah yeah um i brought him up i brought him up to david he kind of rolled his eyes at me yeah but this was like this was like right before before or no i think he got money for mk ultra he got some sort of a grant as a part of mk ultra for like a couple hundred thousand dollars

yeah so how long ago was this to synthesize dmt oh god i want to say it was in the late 60s early 70s okay yeah a long time ago yeah yeah there's all kinds of monkey business going on back then yeah Yeah. No, it makes me wonder what's going on now.

Like, you know, I mean, because this is, you know, another thing I was explaining today, I'm like every single thing that gets them, every single technology or every single bit of research that gets the most amount of funding gets it from the United States military industrial complex.

They have the most money to throw it, just blue sky, anything just like throw, throw a billion and see what happens. I think that's the case. Yeah. Like, like even with the remote viewing program that we had in the seventies, like they threw millions and millions of dollars at that. And I think the excuse for that was we have no, we have, we can't prove this is real with a scientific method.

We can't measure this in a lab, but if there's even a 1% chance that this works and we can spy on the Soviet union using this remote viewing stuff, then it's worth, it's worth $10 million. Yeah.

Now, is this where the third ventricle is?

Right, right. And that was the whole story behind the whole MKUltra thing and trying to use LSD for mind control.

That was a weird time in history. That cold war history.

and you know Charles Manson yeah like you know he was the end result what do you think happened to him do you think he was do you think they were like because he was obviously I think Tom O'Neill proved beyond a shadow of doubt like with he has brought brings receipts in his book that that that hate Ashbury clinic was funded by a CIA cutout and they were doing experiments with LSD and amphetamines on people that were going there and he was going there him and his people him and his girls were documented being there even his probation officer admitted he was there

The water of life is in the third ventricle. That's what I've heard.

When did this come out? March. It just came out. Holy crap. That's crazy. I got to watch it. What's it on? Netflix? Errol Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers ever.

And I had never, I didn't even, I didn't even make the connection to him in Hamilton until like a couple of years ago. I was like, my mind was exploded when I figured that out.

No, but he's coming. He's coming next month. Yeah.

Yeah.

I just listened to it.

Yeah. He's fascinating guy. Super deep into this stuff. The chemistry of psychedelics. He's like a legend. I mean, he's kind of like a legend in this field. Yeah. Did you know that Errol Morris, he like invented this special camera where so he can because he he kind of he kind of pioneered this way of interviewing people where they talk directly into the camera. Right.

Right, right.

So when you watch a lot of his old films, when the interview subject is talking, they're looking straight down the barrel of the lens, right? And it's hard to do when you're conducting an interview. Usually the interviewer sits next to the camera and they're kind of looking off camera when they're talking.

So he created this like a mirror contraption where it reflects his face up through like a tube and then reflects his face, projects his face like on a mirror in front of the camera so that the person is looking directly down the barrel of the lens and seeing his face. So they're talking, that's it right there. So they're talking directly to his face and they're talking right into the camera.

It's fascinating. Super interesting guy.

Yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Okay, cool. We're back. We're back from our pee break.

Okay, yeah, it's right dead in the center.

We were talking about, you said, so you didn't do your first interview with Rogan until 2022, but you knew him for years before that. Like he was even a part of that documentary.

yeah he said hey man cool i've got the book i'm at the airport i'm reading it right now so yeah he's been really a very strong supporter isn't it crazy how he was like he's been hugely responsible for catapulting this stuff into the mainstream in the last 10 years yeah yeah it's interesting he's like created the whole meme there's a whole meme about him talking about dmt because i was like his first podcast it's like asking every guest yeah i think it blew i think it blew his mind

Yeah, and that's like the ongoing meme. Yeah, have you smoked DMT? And then he would just talk about it on every single podcast. Yeah. How could that not blow your mind?

What the hell was I going to ask you about before we stopped? I think I lost my mind somewhere around here. Oh God. Oh yes. We were watching the trailer for chaos for that new, uh, for, uh, on Tom O'Neill's book. Yeah. That the cold war, the cold war was so crazy. Who, uh, Jolly West, he gave an elephant a huge dose of LSD.

Oh, it's an antipsychotic. So it's supposed to be an antidote to the LSD?

Oh, wow.

God, Lord. And he was like... Tom was explaining how Jolly West, when he wrote about that, he was so proud of it.

Yeah, right now, you mean?

Yeah, I mean, like I said, I'm kind of new into this world, and I probably am not the best person to ask to get some sort of grounded vision on or idea on where it's going. It seems to me, though, like it's going in many different directions. I think, like I said, when Travis Kitchens came on here, he elucidated it to me in a way that made the most sense.

It just seems like there's so many different groups, whether it be commercial groups, like people trying to use it to monetize it in a commercial way. It seems like there's people that are trying to take it and use it in a religious way to revive Christianity. There's that one idea with Mayor Rescue's book.

Yeah. What do you make of these these new experiments that are going on with the what Andrew Gallimore is doing? They're trying to put people on extended state intravenous DMT to see to try to map this DMT world.

And then there, you know, obviously it seems like there's a huge interest in the government and DARPA with that $27 million fund to take the trip out of psychedelics for soldiers. So it seems like it's all over the place, but like, I don't know.

To try to revive it.

What is his last name?

In the early 1900s?

But we've never been able to prove, right? We've never been able to actually prove that there was any sort of ergot in any of those vases that we found in Athens.

So the idea is that if you look at the, if you take Ruck's book with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman.

Sounds wild.

They're looking at the Eleusinian mysteries and the experiences people are having with this wine that they were drinking that was infused with something. Barley?

Do we know for a fact, is there any literature that says anything about ergot being in that wine that you know of? No.

So the idea is that if they were doing that 800 BC, are these psychedelic experiences what created religion in the first place? Is that where they got the idea to create these religions or even have the idea of God created? And the idea of, you know, even these prophets or these crazy mystical experiences.

And if that is the ultimate creation state of religion and that, you know, say like, you know, even if back then in antiquity, there was all these, you know, these pagan gods and all these different religions that people described to eventually it got bottlenecked. Right. And then we kind of like lost control of it.

Yes, yes, which makes a lot of sense. But one of the huge...

motivations behind you know like we said there's multiple people with multiple groups with multiple motivations um to study psychedelics but like one of the big groups is the the uh the church right that's i mean that's that goes behind the immortality key book where he studies this stuff and he's trying to i guess in the like the beginning of it he kind of describes

Everything about the Eleusinian mysteries, talking to Karl Ruck and all this stuff. And it's sort of the end of it. It's kind of like, could this be something that could revive Christianity, right? Or is this like, is there this common core of religion that can bring about a new spiritual renaissance or a new religious renaissance?

Yeah, and Ruck's big thing is, I mean, so out of, from my understanding, which take it with a grain of salt, there's a lot of people who study classical times and they study ancient religions and study all this stuff. But Ruck's view, which I've heard through the telephone game and from reading his books, I would estimate his view to be that Christianity and religion in general is...

the source of just an immeasure more suffering and more human some more human suffering and death than anything else in the history of humanity right so he's not a huge proponent of the idea of of reviving any sort of world religion or any sort of christianity it seems like his view is more anti-christian than most i don't know this for a fact this is me speculating

Yeah. And yeah, also the Jesuits are like the most interesting sect of Christianity. There, they seem, there seems to be more Jesuits in like the top levels of society than anywhere else.

Oh really? Yeah. Yeah.

And the Jesuits are like, from what I understand, they're like anti-war. They want world peace. And they seem to like the idea of there being some sort of harmonious one world society that everyone gets along.

Yeah, definitely. But one of the most interesting things to me is what the hell is the government doing right now in their research into this stuff that we don't even know about? Because we didn't know about MKUltra until the church hearing, the stuff came out in 1975.

And that stuff was buried with Charles Manson and all that. No one knew about any of that until way later. I wonder, like, what could they be doing now that we won't find out until 15, 20 years from now? Yeah. If that if we even ever find out. Right.

$27 million to the University of North Carolina to study how to take the trip out of psychedelics to heal soldiers from PTSD and like combat fatigue.

Do you think that you can get, like, okay, it's a super placebo?

But do you think you can still get the effect that you get from psychedelics? Because I feel like the trip is the major component of it that gives you that effect. I feel like you can't have the psychedelic without the trip.

I can't imagine how that would look. Right. You have somebody on IV DMT all day long.

Have you ever heard of any sort of use of psychedelics on the battlefield and not being used sort of post combat PTSD? Like as far as like enhancing people with like visual acuity edge detection and more accuracy and stuff like this.

Travis sent me an article about this guy named Dana Beal.

Oh, really?

And I think in this article, it's explained how he was trying to take Iboga from Africa and fly it to Ukraine to use with soldiers fighting in the Ukrainian-Russian war. Right. To give to these Ukrainian soldiers, but they were using it as a way to...

get people back out there right like with their if they're experiencing combat fatigue or ptsd they can get them on this iboga or ibogaine and then like turn and burn like get them right back out into the battlefield Or even enhance their combat skills.

Have you ever heard of anybody smoking DMT and sort of like not coming back fully getting like stuck in like this weird, uh, slippery version of reality, like for forever. Cause I've had, I have friends that in high school that took a lot of LSD or smoked a lot of weed. And after a certain point, they were just never the same.

Yes, exactly.

Okay. Right. Still. Yeah. You got your arms out and fillet open. And like, what do you do? Do you have to pull them out to get the data? Like pull them out like, like briefly and say, tell me everything.

Oh, is this from the article? Cannabis activist and advocated for Ibogaine traveled to Ukraine to promote the use of Ibogaine for treating war veterans, right? This is all about the PTSD. Oh, he believes, Bill believes that you can use Ibogaine to turn soldiers into super soldiers and has been actively campaigning for its use in Ukraine despite facing legal challenges in the United States.

And then he was arrested. Yeah, he's been in and out of jail.

currently on bail so if i was the military industrial complex i would be trying to figure out how to i would be throwing the most money on how to weaponize psychedelics and they've been doing it i mean we know they did it all throughout the cold war because they used manson right to to basically stain the psychedelic movement right they tried to

See if you can find that, Steve. Jacob's Ladder.

I'm not even going to try to say that. Quinsaline. Benzalate, a glycosate anti-chlorinogenic.

Cholinergic that causes powerful hallucinations and altered behavior portrayed as chemical warfare agent that leads soldiers to experience nightmarish visions and lose control of their actions. This was like a nonfiction?

Oh, this was a, okay.

Yeah, what's the guarantee they're not just going to all drop their weapons and give each other hugs?

So with microdoses, you don't experience a psychedelic effect. I've never really microdosed. I've done it a couple times, but from what I hear from people who microdose all the time is that it's a stimulant, right?

It would be far better than using methamphetamines, which the Russian soldiers are taking. They're taking Captagon.

While they're talking to them and getting the data. Yeah.

Which is basically just a, it's not a methamphetamine, but it's a strong amphetamine, I think.

Yeah, super stimulant.

I think it was coming from Syria, right?

And Syria and Russia were close allies. So I think they're somehow exporting that Russia was buying the Captagon from Syria. Isn't that what Norman Oler was explaining to us?

I'm familiar with P.K. Dick, but I'm not familiar with that book.

Sorry.

Right, right. And Soma.

the amphetamines i mean basically the nazis proved that the amphetamines didn't work right because they wanted to do this blitz they thought that they could put their soldiers on which they did they put them all on these like super strong pervitin methamphetamine yeah yeah and then they uh they were awake for 20 days straight and then they were just burned out at the end of it well they're just burned out yeah it might help for a short period of time yeah yeah

it's bizarre how many people take meth and fed or not meth but amphetamines around like how many people are prescribed amphetamines for just things that could it seems like could be fixed with other like more healthy alternatives right because like every so many writers so many uh researchers and so many like especially kids in college are just like they've been on i know people like friends

who have been prescribed these amphetamines since they were you know in their early teens in school and they're like now they're in their late 20s early 30s some of them got pregnant like oh my god i have to stop taking this adderall now i've been taking it since i was fucking 12 yeah and they have this just insane withdrawal because they've been taking it their whole entire they've been prescribed it since the beginning of their lives

Is it the idea of it that it basically just like stimulates dopamine release?

Yeah, because I think I have some level of ADD or ADHD, but whenever I take Adderall, and I've taken it in the past, I hate the way I feel, and I hate the way I feel especially the next day.

really yeah but you know the following day i read what i wrote no good it just was terrible yeah wasn't stephen king doing just heaps of cocaine when he was writing cujo and some of his other books i think he writes i think he writes their stories about how stephen king was just doing drinking tons of alcohol and doing tons of coke when he was writing some of his novels his stories are pretty dark yeah yeah yeah my step kids used to buy stephen king novels for christmas for me

And P.K. Dick, too. Wasn't he taking stimulants when he was writing?

Just amphetamine.

Yeah, that's interesting. Some of the most prolific writers were just on heaps of drugs. And one of the other things that was interesting when we were learning about this stuff from Norman Oller the other day, he's a guy who wrote the history of drugs in the Third Reich. This company called Merck.

The pharmaceutical company that was alive and well in Nazi Germany. They were developing, I guess cocaine was developed in the 80s. And they had a cocaine or Merck had developed a cocaine that didn't have any sort of negative withdrawal effects to it. And there was actually an article I read, which was fascinating about one of the guys from the Rolling Stones.

was talking about how they would just have heaps of cocaine behind the speakers and the amplifiers on stage, and they would be able to do it all day. They had to do shows, do cocaine, and they would never have any withdrawal symptoms.

Because it was Merck cocaine. They were doing the actual pharmaceutical grade, Merck.

Right, like for brain surgeries and things like this, I think?

So like for cataract surgeries and things like this?

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, okay. Particularly for ear, nose, and throat procedures because it numbs it. Mm-hmm. And it comes in dark, dark colored glass bottles.

When was MDMA first synthesized?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, MDMA is another one that I've never tried, but I've heard lots of great stories.

And David made a bunch of MDMA.

Yeah, he said he made a ton of it. So how did you guys first meet and when he developed all the DMT for you?

yeah oh wow you um the interesting thing about that article that travis did which was um that trial that never got the publishing the one that never got released the findings the religious one with the psilocybin yeah yeah um was i guess a lot of the the big pushback to that stuff was a lot of the people that were doing these experiments were also engaging and using the drugs themselves right and that's frowned upon

So would the ideal situation to be have somebody conducting the study who had never done psychedelics? Is that the argument?

Well, my thing is like, how do you even have somebody interested in doing that study in the first place if they haven't experienced psychedelics, right? Like, like I don't, I can't conceive how somebody would dedicate so much of their life to studying these things unless they had experienced them themselves. It's like with that, with any discipline, I would think.

Right. And what even are the beings? Because you said that all this stuff is amplification of what's already in your mind. So how do you explain people seeing aliens that are talking to them? People like Andrew Huberman, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and even Joe Rogan have talked about a compound called epicatechin that's found in dark chocolate and green tea.

Right. And you knew John Lilly?

Really? Yeah. I had a guy in here, Richard O'Berry, who was a dolphin trainer for Flipper. Oh, really? And he made that documentary, The Cove, which won one of the top awards for documentaries. I forget what the awards are called, but they documented the slaughter of all the dolphins in Japan. And he said that he befriended John Lilly in Florida.

And John Lilly, and this was in, what year would that have been? That would have been, what, in the 60s? The 60s. That would have been in the 60s. Yeah. In Miami, when Rick O'Berry was working for the Seaquarium there, John Lilly had some crazy funding from NASA to do studies on dolphins with psychedelics. And he was like doing shit to their brains and putting them on LSD and things like this.

Oh, yeah.

Right. And I don't think he ever came up with anything. But the fact that NASA, why the hell was NASA funding that?

While they're in space. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, because, you know, I don't know how long it would take to get to Mars.

about three years three years so is the idea that when we do mars time travel that the astronauts would go to go to sleep for a large portion of that time i think a large portion of that time and so if you put the astronauts to sleep you could give them dmt infusions and they would somehow be able to telepathically communicate in these exactly in these states oh my god yeah That's crazy.

That's crazy. We haven't been able to get back to the moon since the moon landing. Elon wants to take us to Mars.

So like in far, far in the future, like hundreds of thousands of years from now, we would be able to, to develop the ability through, through normal evolution or would this be some sort of.

Genetically engineered.

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Accelerates it into this with some sort of AI or pharmacological stuff.

one of the themes uh what i've noticed about joe is that he seems to be fascinated of this idea of of humans integrating with machines and um people being able to communicate telepathically being able to read each other's incentives motives being able to detect detect lies and just know people's automatic intentions right well there'd be no privacy there'd be no privacy exactly

I mean, do you think that he thinks that's a good thing? If people were able to just read each other's minds and be able to detect lies, if people are being deceitful or dishonest?

It would force people to get that way, right? Or at least the people that decided to integrate.

I think for most people, though, like going back to the writing process, when you try to formulate ideas, it's not instantaneous, right? Like during the writing process, you have to like sit and just have this flow of consciousness through your pen and paper and from your pen to your paper. And it's like...

Through the process of editing, are you able to refine your ideas right into something that people can digest and understand? And in the mind, it's typically just like this chaotic nest or it's this chaotic hornet's nest of ideas happening all the time. And if people are able to see that, it seems like it's just going to be miscommunication. You know, sometimes and sometimes like.

I don't think it would be a good idea to have, say, for some reason, somebody has some dark thoughts going through their mind. That's not their intent, right?

I mean, also, yeah, self-incriminating, absolutely. But also, just because somebody has a million different ideas rattling around in their mind at one time... At one time, right. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's what they're... That's not... You can't convey their intention or what their ultimate ideas are based on that, on that soup of... chaos in their head.

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Totally rife with misinterpretation. I know. And if you compare, like, if you look at just the evolution of social media over the past decade and you look at, you know, how divisive that has been on our society and that's, that's sort of taken a, that's sort of broken down a barrier of communication at some level to where now people can just, you know,

spew out some sort of random thought that they had on twitter and people can argue about it all the time so if you just take that like i feel like the next technological level of that would be this neural link idea of telepathic communication where i don't know i can't imagine it being a good thing

Right.

And it almost goes against human nature to want to do that too. Right. To want to integrate with a machine. It's almost like you'd have to be forced to for that to become something that's ubiquitous.

Have you ever studied John Mack's work?

Oh really? Yeah.

What do you, what do you make of the experiences that he documented with all of his patients? Because all of those, a lot of those experiences of those abductions, they seem to be also super similar.

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Yeah, and a lot of, according to a lot of his people that he interviewed, and I think, I don't know if he hypnotized people when he put them, when he kind of documented their experiences.

Yeah, he put them in some sort of regression. A lot of them. So there's a chunk of them who explained these beings being from like another star system. I think Betty and Barney Hill said it was from like Zeta Reticuli or something.

And then there was also a vast majority of them that explained these beings communicating to them, saying that they were from the future, that they were us from the future.

There's one interesting story that stands out to me where there was these children that saw...

did i don't know if john mack interviewed these people i think this might have been earlier than john mack but there was this document of these two these two brothers that experienced seeing these beings that were outside of like some sort of craft or whatever and they brought them into the craft and they were asking them all these questions and they were these beings were answering all these questions that they had like what does this do what does that do how does this thing fly where are you from they said they were from the future

And there was only one question, allegedly, that these beings wouldn't answer. And they asked, what is God? Or they asked them something about religion, and they wouldn't answer that.

You mean the physical description of them?

They were created.

Yeah. One of the fascinating ideas to me is that like, because a lot of those experiences also, according to John Mack, is that a lot of them had like eggs and semen extracted from them during their experiences.

Very weird. I don't know what to... One of the most interesting theories I've heard about this is that if these are future humans and there was some sort of hypothesis, like just indulge me in the mind experiment that there was like some sort of...

cataclysm or bottlenecking event in humanity far in the future and they needed to in order to reproduce and not stagnate they would have to go into the past to diversify the human genetic gene pool in the future so that's why they would be coming back to our time to get our dna to repopulate themselves in the future if there was some sort of like uh i don't know global thermonuclear war or something like this i know we should be able to look into the future

Not that long ago, I started taking morning being to replace my second cup of coffee, and I feel way more energized, focused and less stressed. In fact, in the mornings, I don't look as forward to my cup of coffee as I do to my first cup of morning being. I might just cut out the coffee altogether, to be honest. And I also love how I get my daily dose of superfoods from it.

Yeah, no, neither do I. But, you know, those are, I've always been super curious to like, what, like how much does, does, um, like the endogenous DMT have to do? Like, what does that have to do with some of these experiences? Because also you have a lot of the people that experienced this stuff that seem to have had lots of trauma in their lives.

Like people that have had lots of childhood trauma report having these experiences.

Right. Yeah. And why do they look so much like us? Like anthropomorphologically, how are they bipedal upright hominids that look just like us?

Are they making themselves look like that? Or are they really from some other star system? Like how did they happen to evolve just like us?

Yeah, this idea of the portal, of this opening some sort of portal to something, a portal in the brain or a portal into the past seems like the most, or like a magnifier, like you explained it to be, like a magnifier of something that's already deep buried Inside the brain.

Right.

Didn't you talk about having an experience of like a previous life? Like having previous lives online?

In your new book, right?

A variant?

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Okay, so like a synthetically created modified version.

Anything you had ever heard of before?

How long do these experiences last for, do you know?

So do you think that the, so do you think that this can happen? Is there any documented accounts of this happening to other people where it somehow connects them to their ancestry or where they came from or anything like this?

Are you focused on just writing more stuff now or are you focused? Do you think that you'll ever participate in any more or get involved in any more of these experiments or studies on humans?

How do you think these people that wrote this stuff came up with these ideas of these people?

Like even the idea of Ezekiel and the wheel and all this stuff, like you're writing about something that happened a thousand years ago and where, and even like during that time, there's no record of even anybody being named Ezekiel.

Where is it coming from?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's super interesting, man. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know what to make of it, but there's lots of, uh, interesting theories on, on the Bible and, and what was going on and, you know, how do these people, these prophets come about and, and, and relay these experiences over centuries.

Yeah, I wonder, I sometimes think about what would society look like right now if they had never burned down the Temple of Eleusis and if we still would have lived in this world of all these monotheistic religions with multiple gods and not just been stuck to one.

Yeah. Which I think can also have some sort of a placebo effect.

During the Vietnam War, when that monk lit himself on fire, the burning monk, that was, I think at one point, one of the most like famous images on planet earth. It was like the most shared, more people saw that. And that was from what I understand recently, Zoltan was explaining to me that a lot of people think that that was like a political,

thing that he did but according to him it and according to other Buddhists is that monks absolutely wanted nothing to do with any sort of political ideas or movements at all. They were almost like the idea of their practice was the actual opposite of politics. So what he believes that Burning Monk was, it was a call, like a recruiting call.

Right, right. Is it coming from us or is it coming from our ancient past? Which could also be argued that that's kind of an external source because it's not really us now, maybe us in the past.

Because from what I understand is more people got interested in Buddhism and meditation after that.

Than ever in history.

Great story, huh? That's bizarre. Oh, my God. I don't even know what to think about that.

They wanted to understand how you can attain that level of self-control or enlightenment to where you can light yourself on fire and not even blink an eye.

heard lots of stories of um not that it really relates to buddhism in particular but um lots of people like high up in the defense department and like intelligence agencies and even um like uh people that are involved in like rocket launches like for with nasa and formerly or formerly for nasa and now for spacex that are really into this idea of rosicrucianism

Yeah, I don't know much about it either. But like the basic idea of it is you can sort of follow these specific protocols to be more tapped into. This is like a kind of a Jungian idea, but you can you can tap yourself into this like universal consciousness.

and sharpen your antenna or increase the signal of your antenna to some other consciousness and kind of like where you can download information.

One of these guys who's described in a book by Diana Pasolka, it's called American Cosmic. And he was, I think, a mission controller for NASA. And he explained it by like he would... Go outside and get out in the sun first thing in the morning. Spend a lot of time out in nature. Not drink caffeine. Drink lots of water.

And somehow the idea of having lots of water in your system and no caffeine or stimulants somehow...

tuned his antenna and this guy claims to be able to download now this guy has like patents to all kinds of like uh like crazy medical breakthrough patents where he's like made a lot of money doing it and he claims that he gets the this information from these downloads that just like come into his mind yeah

Or in the future.

Yeah.

Have you seen the, my buddy Danny Goeller was in here and he has this thing called the DMT laser experiment.

Yeah, what stood out to me about that is like, it seems like the more you get away from technology, if this is true, if you can tap into something by following these protocols, it seems like the general consensus of it is the farther away you get from technology and...

the diet, the, like the, the processed foods or energy drinks that we drink all the time or the fucking, uh, what are those things? Those caffeine pouches or nicotine pouches and all of this stuff. And the, the, the more you can tap into like this ancient antenna that we have buried in us to get information.

Yeah, I'm sure they do.

Yeah. The ketone stuff's interesting. Yeah. There's also, there's this crazy, crazy story I heard of this guy who was like a whistleblower who was talking about how he worked for some like secret company.

Aerospace was private aerospace company where they went to they were trying to recruit people for some sort of psychic program where they were trying to basically get psychics into the military and to intelligence to sort of control.

You've seen that?

aircraft or to spy or whatever and they found that the people with the most psychic abilities were people that were in third world countries that weren't connected to western civilization at all and also young people so like there was a story that this guy told and he was a whistleblower and it was a count of like two people that corroborated it

That's crazy.

that they went to indonesia after there was like an earthquake and they went there to rescue a bunch of people and they were trying to find young people who were left-handed and homosexual and those were the people with those traits that specifically had the highest psychic or they called it psionic abilities right

I did it. I didn't see the code, but I might not have gone deep enough. So I saw, I saw kind of like, I had the laser here. Actually, he shined it on the wall. And I looked at it and I could see the depth through the wall. And I saw like at first it was like tiny little particles like you would see if you really stared at a laser beam on the wall.

Yeah, I think there's definitely something to that. But Rick, man, thank you for doing this. Yeah. This has been a fascinating conversation. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. I'm glad we met. And also for people that are listening, they can find your books on your website. Is that right?

rickstrossman.com.

The Cheshire cat?

Oh, a real cat. And the cactuses?

And your next one is going to be about Genesis.

What is the best protocol for you to write? Is there a state you have to be in a certain time of day? Certain drugs you like to mix in with it?

Yeah.

Pretty straight, pretty sober when you're editing. Yeah.

Oh, really? While you're writing? Yeah. Interesting.

When you write, do you use a computer or do you write with pen and paper?

Awesome, man. Well, thanks again. Well, yeah, great. Thanks. Yeah, this has been fun. Really enjoyed it. All right. Yeah, great. Good night, everybody.

And then those particles turned into gears all spinning. Yeah. All interconnected. But I've talked to a few other people that have done it. And they all I mean, my friend Neil came here and he did it. He said he saw like Sanskrit.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day!

Well, does that mean that you believe in the devil or Satan?

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

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.

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

There's no question.

If there's good, there's evil. Right.

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, 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. 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.

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

What are you doing? What are you doing?

So Adam, you know, then was just sleeping with Lilith and they spawned innumerable demons as a result of their relationship. And after a while, Adam and Eve reconciled and they got things together again.

That's actually really good for you. Oh, right. Well, this new neighborhood I moved into in May, there's a park, Altura Park. You wouldn't believe the number of dogs that are being walked around there. 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 but Lilith plays a role in the understanding of evil in the world like it's the result of the spawn of Lilith what do you think Lilith was originally if it was a thing yeah I don't know well that's called Midrash it's the explication of the Bible by the rabbis so it's what's called extra biblical and I've only looked into extra biblical stuff to a certain extent what's the source of that stuff

The imagination. 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 it. 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, was it Jordan Peterson? It could have been. Yeah, because he's a keen student of the Bible.

Well, you know, most of the translations of the Hebrew Bible are quite good. Like, you know, the King James Version. It's. Very accurate. Yeah, it's a bit stilted.

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. But the words and the grammar and the narratives, they're pretty much accurate. They spent a lot of time working on painstaking translations.

So there was a responsibility to do it accurately.

Yeah, yeah. It's a very strange story, isn't it? Very strange story. What do you think it really was all about? I think there were two people named Adam and Eve.

As if they were real. 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, there you have it.

No, no, I don't think that. Well, you know, it's like if you smoke DMT and you enter into this world, it's true. It's overwhelmingly convincing. It's got its own laws, its own system. You know, things are you know, things are regular, like certain things happen, certain interactions take place. Yeah, and you're there.

You're convinced it's real and you interact with it to the best of your ability. So I think that's the case with the narratives in the text. It isn't a matter of interpreting what they mean as much as understanding what happened.

Yeah. Like, you know, what did the snake say to Eve? So a snake really talked to Eve, though.

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.

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.

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.

Well, it's a bit of a paradox. Yeah. You know, like if if let me ask you this, you know, so if you treat those stories as if they were real. So 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 a tower there. There is Nimrod. There is Abraham. There is Isaac and Jacob. So it's this world which seems to be quite coherent, quite consistent. It all ties together. It's quite consistent from book to book, 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.

Well, if you consider the text to be prophetically received, Prophecy is communication between the divine and man. And the text was prophetically received.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, yeah. So what is that origin story? Am I recalling it quite fascinated, but not the details?

Boy, that dog is an asshole.

Yeah, it brings to mind the sons of God, the Bene Elohim, which occur in the story of the flood and Noah.

Yeah, the Nephilim, the Rephaim, they were huge. They were giants. Yeah. Men of renown.

Well, he lived 25 years.

And they intermarried or they had sex with the daughters of man. And from them came a race. So that story is interpreted or perceived through the lens of the Hebrew Bible, too. Really? Yeah. Well, that is a story in the text. Before the flood, the B'nai Elohim come down to earth. They have intercourse with God. 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, in the meantime, you can assume that the giants were real and understand their origin, what they were like, what they did, why they did it, what the results were.

Yeah, I think I've heard of that, actually.

Well, and if it were true, then what?

Or they could be just doing the opposite. They may be stirring up trouble.

Yeah. Kind of withdraw from the brink of the precipice.

That's the story of humanity basically, isn't it?

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. So that's why I think studying one particular tradition in great detail can kind of help you kind of resonate with ones that are more universal.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah. The Netflix ones. They're fascinating.

Yeah. Well, those footprints around white sands are super cool. Yeah. That's not far from where I live. That's 22,000 years. Yeah. 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 audience.

Yeah. Inner Traditions publishes it. Yeah, it's on all the usual resources.

I will inscribe it and I will sign it.

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. Yeah. Oh, look at that. Who drew it? A friend from Birmingham, Alabama named Merrily Chalice. That's crazy.

There's some – well, there's one called Steak on Acid. You ever eat steak on acid?

Oh, these are cool drawings. Oh, they're great drawings, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We were talking about Alaska and up in Fairbanks. Yeah. I was a psychiatrist for the county for about a year.

Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah. 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.

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. The cold, the lowest it got down to was minus 49 one day in February.

Well, Los Angeles, actually.

Yeah. Wow. Well, it was snowing around Halloween, so I wasn't dressed for snow. I'd never really lived in snow. What was that like, going from Los Angeles to minus 39?

Well, I started to work on enjoying the dark. Like, you know, as a rule, you know, people don't like the dark. But there's forest all around town and it's dark. 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.

Yeah. Is that because you have family there?

Yeah. I was in the Bronx for medical school. Bronx, New York. And I lived in the city for about a year. Yeah, it was like it was great training.

You know, I met a lot of Christians up in Alaska. Really? Yeah, yeah.

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.

They mostly imposed it on their kids. The family dynamics up there were pretty stressful. Lots of cocaine, too, because it's so dark and people get so depressed. Oh, man. Well, 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 a mile across.

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.

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.

Yeah, those hosers are what they used to use for mining gold, too.

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

And went into the refrigerator, basically, and kind of cleared that out. So was he home? Up in his loft, yeah, sleeping. So he was awake while this was going on? Yeah, yeah.

So it just smelled food. It smelled food. It smelled him. And they don't abide by any rules.

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

I think it was a shot.

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

All 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.

Well, and there's also the northern lights, which are just incredible.

Yeah, the reds and the greens.

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.

Like what is what is might be cosmic.

Are they cosmic rays?

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, it's plugged in to a parking meter or to the outside of a building. 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. You know, when it gets really cold, your tires are square. What?

And it's really hard to drive around in for the first couple of miles.

You have to drive them slow to get them warmed up again.

With my garden tools or my garden carts, I use solid tires.

But they're a lot heavier. They never puncture.

It widens your footprint. It widens your footprint so you won't get stuck in sand.

I used to spend a lot of time in Death Valley.

And in the canyons to the east and to the west of the valley.

Yeah. Yeah, flat tires. So have you spent time in Death Valley? 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.

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. Wow. Very slow moving. It's the wind, too. There's great wind. I learned to watch the wind there.

You can see like a shrub like 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. 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.

I think we come up with our best ideas from 19 to 21. Really? I think so.

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. Well, it was a formative time then, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. What kind of questions wouldn't you have been able to answer back then?

Yeah, it's like being a monk almost.

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

Yeah, it'd be hard to explain how they got there otherwise.

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 and 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.

It's a serious thing.

Well, I mean, can you be too humble? Sure. Which would look like what?

Yeah. I think one of the things, too, about being too humble is you just suppress all of your feelings. You think you should have no feelings at all. In other words, you know, responding to things in your world, insults or harm being, you know.

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

Yeah, is that the reason he chose where he is living in Alaska?

Well, I think that's one of the advantages of Zoom is there's no pressure when you first meet someone.

Well, and you wouldn't necessarily feel the pressure to go to bed right away. Of course.

Well, you can keep it low profile too. You could just be in your bathroom, you know, sitting on the toilet, you know, talking to your friend. Yeah.

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

Yeah. What do you think of arranged marriages?

Well, your parents would need to be straight shooters. You would want to trust them.

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.

Help me.

Yeah.

Yeah. That wouldn't work in those kinds of cultures.

Maybe.

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 mean, the Mideast. I mean, look at that place. It's just a blaze. Yeah.

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 Christianity. I mean, Judaism all claim that small bit of land. I wonder what it is about that part of the world.

Right. 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?

Yeah. Yeah. What's his background like archaeology or something?

Well, you know, 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?

Like Abraham, the first of the Hebrews, lived around 1800 BCE.

Oh, curses. Curses.

Yeah, yeah. Really? Yeah, execrations are curses, extreme curses.

Yeah. If you execrate someone, you are really cursing them.

Execration texts.

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 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 part of the world being associated with the patriarchs and with the temple. Christianity has an association to Jerusalem because of Jesus.

I'm not sure what the connection between Islam and Jerusalem is. It's clearly more recent.

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

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, 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.

It's near Fairbanks. Yeah.

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.

Oh, good. I'm glad you see that.

Well, I think it strengthens preexisting, 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.

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.

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

The berserkers. Yeah. Yeah. The berserkers. Well, see, I mean, you could do anything you already believe in.

Well, I think that's one of the interesting things about Brian Murescu'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, 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.

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 is. 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.

Well, one of the ideas in the medieval philosophers is that thoughts are intermediaries between you and God. They're angels which are exchanged between you and some divine external source of information. So if you're thinking of how thoughts have directed the world's growth, I mean you could even extrapolate to, well, maybe it's the divine plan for humanity.

They're resilient humans. Well, and they're there for a reason.

And their reason is to be at the end of the road. Right.

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.

Yeah.

So it's as if the system is already set up to encourage certain behaviors, have certain ones, certain ideas form, and other ones not form. 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.

So I think the world, I think existence is set up in a certain way to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. That's what's weird. I think the technological stuff is pretty interesting now. But it speaks like a larger phenomenon, which is how cause and effect has been set up.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the future lies as much in genetic engineering as well. Oh, yeah. It's not like it's binary. Right.

Yeah. I think the biological manipulation and the AI development is going to be – I think it's going to produce a hybrid. 100 percent.

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

Yeah, yeah. That's a great song.

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

Yeah.

It is hilarious.

Whoa.

Good thing I'm not on drugs.

Incredible.

Yeah, well, it touches upon creativity. Like, is creativity the difference between AI and humans?

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

You know, the robot isn't human. You know, that's horrible.

Yeah. 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.

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

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.

Yeah, it's a visual effect. It's not a practical effect.

2004? 2004?

Well, can you see like an intersection between AI and psychedelics? Like could you give a robot LSD or something like it?

Sure, I mean, why not?

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

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

Oh, very cool.

Well, that occurs above the Arctic Circle.

Would you think people would want that?

Yeah, because it would lead to everybody talking with everybody else.

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.

Well, I think the stories could be seen as if they were real, 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,

Oh, The Lost Boys, right.

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. If you look at the preceding chapters, after the flood, God told man to spread out, to populate the world, because it was just Noah and his family after the flood. And then they had children, and, you know, the directive was to repopulate the earth. Right.

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

Certain things occurred because of the behavior of certain people, certain ideas, certain practices. It isn't as if it were something else other than what you're reading. 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. So if you know the language directly, you can then make your own interpretations.

Do you read it? Yeah, I retaught myself biblical Hebrew. Wow. How long did that take? Oh, I don't know, 16 years maybe. That's incredible. Well, you have these big old dictionaries, right? These concordances. Yeah, and each of the words has a three-letter root. Right. Yeah, and just depending on context, they can mean a lot of different things.

Yeah, that's clever. Yeah, vampires are smarter than they look.

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

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.

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

H-A-P-A-X. Yeah, they appear only one time in the text. They have to figure out what that means.

You can guess because of context. You can guess because of neighboring languages, like Hittite or Akkadian or Phoenician or Sumerian. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's an amazing language. I love the Hebrew language. That's one of the things that really got me hooked. It's 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, I found, let's see, boy, I'd really have to think that through. But you can combine a lot of ideas in one single word. That's the gist of it.

Exactly, yeah, and that's one of the things I loved learning about in Biblical Hebrew is, you know, the grammatical forms open a window to parts of reality that just are ignored all of the time. You know, there's a notion of the reflexive tense, right? 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 reflexive. Yeah, so the convolutions of grammar really open windows to views of relationships that were invisible before.

The first translation was Greek, and after that, Latin. Have you ever done any reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls? You know, I haven't really. I've read about them, but I haven't read any of the scrolls themselves. You know, one of my longstanding projects is a translation and commentary on Genesis. 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.

What are you doing with this? When you set out, what was your goal? Well, it was an expedient kind of reaction. I was scribbling notes into the margins of my copy of the book of Genesis, and there was just no more room. So I said, I've got to put this into a Word file. So I'm going to put it into a Word file, and it was pretty big. So I'm still working through it.

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

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

Mostly other Jewish translations.

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 were translated into different languages, you know, book to book. You know, the Dead Sea Scrolls are both books of the Bible with slight modifications or completely independent kinds of text.

I think Isaiah was found in the Dead Sea Caves, maybe some Ezekiel, maybe some Leviticus, you know, like a number, but not the whole. Was Ezekiel the same as it was in the Old Testament? Mostly, mostly. There are modifications, though, with the Dead Sea translations versus the ones we read today. Ezekiel is the wildest one.

Ezekiel really got me hooked on the whole DMT, endogenous spiritual experience kind of motif. Yeah, the visions of Ezekiel chapter one.

I mean, there's this roaring sound and he falls down and an angel picks him up and there's like blue ice above and a roaring sound.

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.

Yeah. I'm trying to remember. It was a German guy, I think, who was really into the visions.

With a gyroscope.

Yeah, the four faces, a lion, a bear, a man, and an eagle. Who is that drawing by? I don't know.

Van Daniken or something?

Well, you're reporting on your subjective experience, right?

Yeah, like a wood cutting of some sort.

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 it's a common one, so you can compare notes. I think that's how it works.

Yeah, that's the first question I would ask him.

No.

I remember when it came out.

1970.

Yeah. It's a case of Occam's razor. You know, the most sensible explanation is probably the most likely.

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, do you think it's biologically based? It would need to be if it were universal like that. Chemically based?

There's a lot of telepathy, I think, that occurs in those kinds of cultures. They share dreams and they share visions. It's very interesting.

Telepathy, exactly, right.

Right. It was synthesized by somebody and got that name.

Do you know of Rupert Sheldrake's work?

Yeah. I've had Rupert on.

Okay, great. Yeah. So he's spoken to you about his... Morphic resonance. His morphic resonance. And these large scale experiments with a lot of people from the public, they will make cold calls and people are expecting them. The dog knows it's going to come, the owner is going to come home much sooner or at a different time than... Yeah. And they can sense it and they're ready. Yeah. 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, yeah, and crystal formation. I was thinking about a dream I had once of my washing machine. I was traveling, and I had a dream about my washing machine that had stopped working. And I called home, and I said, how's the washer? And she said, it's broken. 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. Kind of makes sense. I mean, across species, across 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?

Well, you'd be speaking the truth all the time. All the time.

I don't think that would work. Why not? Well, I mean, there are some lies that are told for the sake of peace.

Well, if everybody knew exactly what was going on, that would be something different. But I think in the meantime, there are some benefits to white lies.

Right. Well, you're suggesting a new species of man. I am suggesting a new species of man.

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. It's an inspiring book, actually. It's one of my favorites.

Well, it would require a change in human nature.

Well, do you think that the technology will change human nature?

Yeah, I have a feeling that won't be very popular.

Yeah. That's the name of the book or the name of the experiment?

Right. So will human nature have to change first before there's an agreement to undertake that?

Well, and increased oxytocin.

Everybody loves everybody.

Right.

Well, an interesting thought is maybe you can increase levels of endogenous DMT in everyone genetically.

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

Oh, I see. Okay. But it has a picture of a toe on the cover.

Well, which would be non-material. You know, the DMT world is non-material.

It's visual. So we might just transcend into some, like I think everybody, you know, in this kind of scenario, everybody would drop dead.

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. Well, you call it that after the fact. After you come down when you're drinking a Coke.

Yes. Tell me about that. Yeah, I just found out about it a couple days ago.

Yeah. Yeah, a friend is putting together a piece on that phenomenon. He wanted my opinion. Can you explain it to people, what they're experiencing? Well, I think what happens, and this is just a very cursory assessment of the project, but people smoke DMT, and then they project a red laser onto the wall. And if you look very carefully at it, from what I understand, you can see the matrix.