Travis Kitchens
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And it's not that so much I'm scared, I'm simply trying to report when you have behavior scientists teaming up with venture capitalists in the Catholic Church, that's worth writing about. That's a story. The pews are empty out for a reason. You lied and covered up a scandal in which you destroyed people's lives. Now let's try to rebuild it with psychedelic drugs. This is an insane idea.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So that was my immediate reaction was to start looking into the origins of religion, into the literature of the psychology of religion, because I wanted to know what we could find out about the drug and what we could find out about these experiences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, what happened was in the 1990s, a guy named Bob Jesse, who's a computer engineer from Baltimore, he went to Hopkins, genius guy. He went out in the late 80s. He was an employee of Oracle, which is owned by Larry Ellison. It was a CIA contractor. Their first customer was the CIA. Bob Jesse was the vice president of marketing. He was very high up. He took MDMA to rave.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He said, this is going to fix the world. We have to do it. It will usher into utopia. And he started to raise money for studying psychedelics. He held a bunch of conferences. And what they needed, what they did not have, they said, let's restart this psychedelic movement. Timothy Leary, he had ruined it with all these political antics and was being reckless.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
What we need is a scientist with a conservative reputation that can get the application approved to study them because there was an embargo on them. And if me or you would have said to the FDA or in the DEA, hey, we want to study psychedelic drugs. Would you give us a little bit? And what do you think they're going to say?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
When Roland Griffiths, who had spent decades studying opioids and tobacco, he was giving opioids to apes. So he's a behavior scientist. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, so he was at Copkins his whole life. He was a very distinguished psychopharmacologist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He did. He studied caffeine, and he was on a jihad against the soft drink manufacturers, so they hate him, and they actually published hit pieces on him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But he was after them because a soft drink manufacturer said, we put it in there for flavor, but it has no flavor. So he accused them of putting it in there to addict the consumers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so he eventually became bored with studying opioids and tobacco.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Yeah. And so when this whole, a lot of the press around this came up, you remember when Four Loko, they were like demonizing it because it had alcohol and caffeine and maybe somebody died of it. He got in on that wave and there were articles about it where he was admonishing them saying, this is bad and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And coffee, he didn't even drink coffee.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They're saying, you know. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe at some point he started drinking coffee, but there was an interview with him during this and he said he didn't drink coffee. Yeah, so Bob Jesse, who wanted to start this psychedelic renaissance, the computer engineer from Baltimore, he's out in Silicon Valley. A mutual friend introduces him to Roland, and he went, wow. In the 90s.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And I thought, why not? I'll try it. He thought I was a writer, I think. And I didn't say anything. So I was like, you know what, I'll try it. And if it sucks, they'll just fire me. So I started doing that. And then every now and then they would send me a different assignment, you know, go to the museum and write this up or go to a concert and write the concert up or interview this person.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, and well, he started in 1993. Bob Jesse started the Council on Spiritual Practices, which was the working group that said, let's start a psychedelic renaissance. It was Bob Jesse, Jordan Peterson, before he was Jordan Peterson, right? Ralph hood, Walter Houston Clark, famous psychologist, Houston Smith. They brought Albert Hoffman over.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They published a bunch of books that I've written about in theogens, the future of religion. And a lot of this was trying to gather people to say, if we're going to start psychedelic research, we need to do it right. We don't want to be painted with the brush of Leary. We need to seem conservative. We need to seem serious and we need to have our together. This started in 1993. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He didn't meet Roland until 1999. Okay. So what they did is they invited Roland out to California, and they said, hey, we want to study psychedelics. Would you be interested in this? Now, before they asked Roland, they asked Rick Strassman. Oh, really? Yes, and he said no, because they didn't say we want to do psychedelic research. They said we want to research mystical and religious experiences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Strassman knows a lot about the history of psychedelic research, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He's got a book about DMT and the ancient Hebrew prophets, so he probably does. His books are great. I mean, Spirit Molecule is a big, massive classic that's translated into a dozen languages and sold a ton of copies and was sort of started. It didn't start the Joe Rogan podcast, but it was like a major feature of the early podcast, all the stuff about DMT.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And their goal was what? To launch the studies at Hopkins.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yes, they said, let's figure out a way to study this at Hopkins. And what altogether, Peterson, you know, of course, Peterson is a clinical psychologist who's in the Jungian tradition. So he's already into this shit and he's into psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I know. Right? Yeah. I mean, my personal feeling of him is when he talks, it's so confused and convoluted that I can never really figure out what he's saying.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, that it's the operating system of the human mind. He believes the mind is a myth generator and that religion and mythology is just the operating system of the mind. He's got a book about this big called Maps of Meaning that's the biggest convoluted mess you've ever seen in your life. And I actually read it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But that book in the late 90s, his course called Maps of Meaning was the most popular undergraduate course at Harvard. That's how he became famous. Oh, wow. So this was his grand thesis. He was having mystical experience. He was at McGill, I think. And he claims to be having these apocalyptic visions. The world's going to end. And he said, I have to stop it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so I started being like, man, this is fun. compared to film where you need a lot of money and four or five different people and all kinds of equipment. You need a pencil and a piece of paper or an iPhone and you're ready to go. So I happen to live in Highland Town in East Baltimore.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so he came up with this book, which he believed was going to guide humanity into the right way so that we wouldn't kill ourselves or something. It's quite strange, the book. You really only just read the intro.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No, he's really just following Carl Jung, and what he's saying is that the mind has to be oriented towards a fixed point, and that there's a mystery surrounding our lives, and that God is just kind of a fixed point, right? Okay. And that it orients society or the individual towards something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
right and so you know you his stuff has just rehashed carl jung and jung's if you read one of his later he wrote a book after world war ii called the undiscovered self like if you don't want to get into carl jung and wait because he's got so much stuff yeah this little book called the undiscovered self yeah and if you read it you'll understand all of the psychedelic literature okay uh because that's pretty much where all the ideas come from and there's an article in it called religion
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Yeah. Like in that book, one of the, I'd say the key quote in the little Jung book is he said, you can take away man's gods only to give him others in return. And the main point of the book is once you take away God and you deconstruct that and nobody believes in religion, they're going to replace it with a human figure. And that figure, he said, was Hitler and other dictators.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So he said the patterns of history will keep repeating themselves until you restore religion to its original integrity. And he believed you couldn't. restore the original integrity by reaching back into these ancient mystery cults and reviving them. And that this would restore Christianity because that's the real roots of Christianity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And if you understand Jung, you understand McKenna because it's just rehash Jung.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Or his archaic revival.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They absolutely do. That's the book we were talking about, Cosmic. Yeah, yeah, American Cosmic. They do. And there's tons of literature where, you know, St. Paul had a mystical experience on the road to Damascus. People go, well, he was taking mushrooms and then he had a mystical experience and he saw the light.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
and bayview hospital is the site of the johns hopkins psychedelic research center and so they advertised in the baltimore city paper and so it was there was like a novelty aspect when you write an article you want to see your byline to me it was like cool i wrote an article look my name's in the paper so i was down in fells point at bertha's muscles with my friend bernard who was the bartender down there for years and years
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Then there's people, you know, you have doctors who have written, I've read dozens of these papers. No, he had a temporal lobe lesion and he had a seizure. And then you have the alien people and they say, no, it was a UFO. And that's what the light was. So it's definitely become, and you know, Jung's the one who started this. UFO is a modern myth.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He wrote a little book that started people on this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And what did they want?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And he was taking pictures and uploading them to the internet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
and i was flipping through the paper looking for an article i wrote and i passed a page and it said have you done psychedelic drugs we will pay you to participate in a study looking into the effects of hallucinogens on mood and behavior something like that and so i immediately called and some you know i was thinking that you know the bureaucracy of hopkins you know will they ever get back or will it happen but somebody actually picked up
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I very much want to see it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And this was like a crystal ball type orb?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It was so far.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And what do you think it was?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, if it came out of the ocean, it wasn't an airplane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Oh, it came off the horizon. Look at this video. This is insane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
See, I was under the impression that he summoned it and then it just popped up. Cause I was saying, if that happened, that's really something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So he wrote this book, UFO of God. What's his idea? What does he say it is?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And he said, yeah, why don't you come up here next week and we'll talk. And so I was like, okay. So I went up there and they do a physical, they give you a drug test, and then they do essentially talk therapy before they let you know. They want to know about your background. They don't want somebody on a psychedelic study who has a history of mental illness.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So has anybody you know legitimately tried to debunk him?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Is that how, what's he got Limp Bizkit in there for? Is that really Limp Bizkit? Where's Limp Bizkit? It was Fred Durst. Where was Fred Durst? Right there. Oh, it is Fred Durst. All right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Really?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They don't want somebody who's a drug addict. A lot of the studies, they want people who are naive, meaning you've never taken a psychedelic drug. This study was the first one they had done to where they specifically wanted people with experience. And I'd already taken LSD, psilocybin, many other psychedelics. And so I got into the study.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Wow. I like this guy, man.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I don't think so. The video you showed before this one, it looked like one of those things you got at Spencer's to where you touch it and the ray goes over. Do you remember those? Well, there used to be a novelty shop in the mall called Spencer's, and it had all kind of, you know, shit novelty stuff. And it always had a ball and had a pink –
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
kind of uh electricity current going on you would touch the ball and it would come up to your finger that's what it looked like yeah that's what it looked like right i mean if that's legit that's the most bizarre thing i've ever seen yeah it's hard for me to believe that it is i don't know what it could be unless it's some rigged up drone he thinks they're angels he thinks they're angels he thinks they're biblical beings i like that he's this southern guy from i love that that's why i like it yeah and he's a slow has a slow southern draw yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, people in the backwoods place have been obsessed with the occult for a long time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That's amazing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I mean, of course the government's going to come and investigate if you have any kind of paranormal phenomenon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, I mean, does he is that documented anything? I mean, I hate to question people's integrity, but as a journalist, you got to look in and look for written documentation or go talk to these people who supposedly told them. Right. I mean, as you know, as well as I do, most of these things are hoaxes. Yeah. But that orb was I mean, that's pretty impressive. It's interesting shit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And the fact that you saw it, if you hadn't seen it, I would say this is a hoax, but that is weird.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The only explanation would be, and I don't know how realistic it is, is that somebody that he's in touch with through text message has got some rigged up drone flying it around. I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. It was on the beach. It doesn't make sense. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But see, if the government's interested in this, I can't imagine they didn't tell him to, you know, call your friends and then hit it with the butterfly net. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Can we use these things for the military? How many of these, how many friends would you say you got?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Interesting. Yeah. And what was your impression of his personality? Does he seem dumbfounded by this?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And that's how I really, I had already been interested in psychedelics for a long time. Terrence, you know, standard stuff. Terrence McKenna, John C. Lilly, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, just the standard stuff that you can buy at a New Age bookstore. That was my experience with psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Okay. Now we're getting into it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Wow. This is some old timey Southern shit. Oh my God, bro. You got, you got to read his book, man. I want to meet this guy. Now, did you have, you should have tell Pasolco to look into it. They know each other. They know each other. I knew it. Cause she loves eccentric people. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But what about could he call one and, like, go down in Tampa to Danny's house and pop in for a minute? Yeah. Or does he need to be within a mile of it? It doesn't have to be within a mile of him is what I'm saying.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
This is insane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I'm telling you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I don't remember. I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Maybe that's what it was. Oh, well, no. You said that some people say that it's aliens, that St. Paul or whoever.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Absolutely. They just graph that mindset. And that's what Peter, that's what we were talking about. That's what Peterson and them say. You're going to, it's going to be UFOs. It's going to be God. It's going to be science. You have a philosophy or religion. The only thing is, do you know what it is or not? You know? And so, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I mean, that was Jung's idea that this is the modern myth. This is replacing a religion or this is just one cult that's popped up. That's about religion. And, you know, McKenna looked into these UFOs too. He would speak at the, Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That's right. That's right. But he also said of the UFO conference, he went to him and he said, what sort of connects these people is a predisposition to gullibility. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It sounds familiar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, and those I found convincing. Some writers that attributed that to mental, psychological phenomenon. Because what you notice, look during the late 19th century when spiritualism was huge. There was table tapping. The ghosts are here. You see? I mean, there's all this phenomenon, and then all of a sudden it just goes away. You know, this is what Casadega is about. I was up in Casadega.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I was probably 25.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
This place is chock full, a village full of people that are into every aspect of all of this. Really? Oh, absolutely. We could go up there right now. And, you know, they healed me with crystals. They did? They did everything. Does it even work? I got the full package. I don't know. I couldn't tell anything. There's a placebo. But it was fun. They're fun.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Well, when I finally entered the study, I probably was maybe 28.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But it's a camp to where you can be trained into the traditions of mediumship, psychic, healers, crystal healing, telepathy. I mean, you name it. Wow. You could go up there and do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Oh, stop. Go in there. It's really cool. Casadega. It's really cool. Yeah, there's been albums about it. It's very famous. Oh, really? How long has it been there? Oh, 150 years or something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Pull it up. It's cool. Yeah, that band Bright Eyes. I'm not a huge fan, but they- Bright Eyes? Yeah. The emo band? Yeah. They have an album called Casadega about Casadega. Oh, really? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No, no, no, no, no. What I'm saying is, well, let's do the math. It was in 2014, so I was 29 or 30 when I did the study.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. We're studying, yeah. We're studying the science of spirituality, the science of these experiences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
well he published many papers that what started the psychedelic renaissance is they started in 2000 six years later they published a paper 2006 they published a paper said psilocybin can induce or occasion missed reliably occasion mystical experiences this was a detonator it was the big bang of the psychedelic renaissance too because what what they knew would happen is once roland griffiths at johns hopkins published a study what do you think is going to happen it's a green light for everybody all over the world all they did is that paper they took it to their boss scientists
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Roland Griffiths said, we can do this. It exploded all over the world. They started studying it again.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It was his reputation that allowed it. Most people who want to study psychedelics are wacko birds. I mean, they're not going to be the people you want to do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And then you get the psychedelic renaissance, because I mean right when he published that paper. NYU, Berkeley, everywhere. So now they're everywhere, all over the world. Look, maybe it would have happened, but it would have happened much later. It was based on his reputation. And what the idea was, and in every paper, Michael Pollan did a thing in The New Yorker.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Michael Pollan wrote a book about him called How to Change Your Mind.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And the whole premise was, look, this ain't the old days. We've got a new guy and he's very conservative and he's not into this religious crap. He's going to just study it straight up and he's going to give us the answers. Well, it turned out that wasn't didn't seem to turn out to be true.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, he, I mean, if you look at, he was, but right before he died, he was on Oprah Winfrey, and he sounded a lot like Albert Hoffman and Timothy Leary. I'm not Leary, but like Albert Hoffman. Look, there's an ecological disaster enveloping the planet. Human beings are going to, he's saying this on Oprah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Instead of the UFO, it's the mushroom. It's a belief in the powers of the mushroom. Okay, push aside God, push aside the UFO. We keep changing out that spot. Something has to take that spot. So what it is, is I think I told you before, all of this— They're evangelists. Yeah, essentially. Now, evangelists was—they called that article about Roland the Psychedelic Evangelist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I was very surprised they did that. I wouldn't go as far as saying an evangelist. Some of them are. Leary is. Many of the other people were. You could even say Michael Pollan was. I mean, he was going around giving speeches saying— We need to do this. Sorry. So would I say he was an evangelist? No, but there's, I mean, when you make a statement, a scientist saying, if we don't get these drugs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Well, okay. So like I said, they interview you and make sure that you're a good fit and they say, okay, this is a guy we can have. These things are heavily screened, right? You can't be over 50. They want a particular kind of person because they want a particular kind of result, right? Yeah. So this study was, there was a whole list of psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Take some water. Good. Want another water? No, I'm good. I mean, he was saying, look, there's an ecological disaster. Human beings are going to kill themselves. The only interruption, the only thing we can do to stop this is we have to on a global level. See, this is where you start getting into dicey territory. It's not enough for certain people to do it. Everybody's got to do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's got to be a global thing. And that's something he told me himself. This can't be just a few people taking it. Everybody's got to do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, I wouldn't use mandatory because then you start sounding like Joseph Stalin. That's the problem. Because as Rick Strassman says, what about if everybody don't want to get spiritualized? There's a lot of ornery people in the world that don't want to do it. Are they going to have to do it? Because how else are you going to do it?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Because this is a fringe thing that not a lot of people are interested in. But once you have this belief that everybody's got to do it, the only question is what? Distribution. How do you get it out there? Then you have the medical system and Medicaid and you have religion. And so these become your two pipelines in which to introduce this drug into society on a global scale.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, because, I mean, think about it. If you want people to do this, you can't say, we're starting a new religion and it's based on the mushroom and everybody should take it. They're going to immediately write you off as a crank. So what you do is you need to give it scientific legitimacy. And so all the press during the psychedelic renaissance, based on...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
tiniest amounts of evidence in studies of very small heavily screened numbers of people are this does this it cures depression maybe it'll save the world so they had to give it a scientific validity and that's through psychiatry so the debates in psychedelics have always been which way do we go there's two paths Is it a religious sacrament or is it a medical cure?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Exactly. And if you go back to antiquity, it's wonderful. Why? Because medicine and religion are all intertwined in magic in a way that you can't tell anymore. So you can see the interest in reviving that because the Eleusinian mysteries and mystery cults and all of these things are a mixture of all these things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So there's a heavy interest in those because why? It kind of lays a foundation for whatever it is you're trying to start with them now. You see?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, we don't have to speculate because they've been using it in Israel-Palestine. We've been doing things like this before, so we know what psychedelics do. But do I think that would be a bad thing? No, I'm for it. Go ahead. Or people like them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They didn't say this is going to be psilocybin. They said it could be psilocybin, it could be LSD, it could be ketamine, it could be DXM, it could be any of these things because it's double blind. And so that was the onboarding process. And then they just tell you, show up at, I did it every Friday. You pick a day of the week. They run studies Monday through Friday.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
zero because what we stan groff who knows is he's what 90 something years old now he knows more about psychedelics than anybody who stan stanislav groff grof the way of the cycle not the movie he old time he's been studying psychedelics since the 50s he's out and i think he's in new mexico now he's too old he's the only person i've emailed and i got an email back auto reply that said i'm too old and retired from email i was like i was like dude this is the most bad i know
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He calls them non-specific. This is a definition a lot of people know. He calls them non-specific amplifiers of mental processes. They amplify what's already there. The idea that they're going to reduce conflict is complete and total nonsense. Interesting. Non-specific amplifiers of mental processes. If you give them to crazy people, they get more crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That's why they screen out people who are mentally ill. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
violent people makes them more violent it would be a very bad i don't know we don't know because you can't all you would know you can't do a systematic study get a bunch of piss or you know get some people in here and we'll poke them with a stick and then give them psychedelics how are you going to do a systematic study on that but we do know you can just look anecdotal evidence from around the country you had an alaskan airlines pilot he was trying to heal his depression took a bunch of mushrooms with his buddy got on the flight the next day got into a depressive trip tried to take the whole plane down got charged with 84 counts of attempted murder this happened recently
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It happened recently. Now, I think they're going to have some leniency. I just feel sorry for the guy. The other guy cut his penis off. The other guy in Oregon shot up a bunch of people at a mushroom fest or music festival. You don't know what it's going to do. The effects are essentially unpredictable. Okay, there's just no way around it. They're unpredictable.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The way you try to give it the veneer that you can predict it is you have very small studies of heavily screened people and you give them, you know, the way, think about it. How do you study psychedelics? I can tell you, if you're in a study, they give you drugs, you lay down on the couch, and when you wake up, they're all sitting there like, what happened?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And then they have a few questionnaires just like that. Well, now they're on an iPad and they hand you a questionnaire and it says, what happened during your experience? And then there's a, I wrote a long article about this. That's a questionnaire called a mystical experience questionnaires. And it has all the attributes of the experience that they believe these experiences have.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You know, did you enter a time that was, did you enter a space that was timeless and spaceless? Check. Did you, this happened, did this happen? Did you encounter God? Check. And if you check 32 out of 32 boxes, they determine that you've had a full-blown mystical experience. And the, if you have a mystical experience, they say you have, there's more therapeutic benefits.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
All of the science of this is very, very shaky. So returning to what you asked me before, I just became interested in it because I did it, and I wanted to figure out what happened. And the more I looked into it, like when I became interested in that questionnaire, I went, they made me fill out these questionnaires afterwards. Who wrote it?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So then I went and found him in Tennessee, and he's an expert on Appalachian serpent handling cults. Who? Ralph Hood, who wrote the questionnaire. So then I went, oh, wow, this is great. I mean, I'm a writer. So right then I went, this is fascinating. This is fascinating. There's something here. There's a story here and it's not the one that I thought it was. And so that's why I kept going.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And they said, you're going to start every Friday at 8 a.m. until it's over. And there's I think there were six sessions and you're going to get one placebo. And so I started one Friday. You show up at 8 a.m. There's very strict instructions. You can have like a banana for breakfast, but you can't go out to Denny's and get a Grand Slam or Uncle Herschel's at Cracker Barrel.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Because Roland Griffiths and the other people who started the Hopkins program have a belief that all religions share a common core. And they get this idea from perennialism. And so they wanted to test it out. So think about this. This is why I'm writing about it. Nobody else is writing about this. It's the most amazing thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
There's this esoteric literature concerning perennialism in books written by all of these most colorful people. And they have this theory that's been around for a long time. And at Johns Hopkins, our most prestigious medical institution, they're like, you know what? Let's test it out and see if it works. Let's get them in here. Let's give them the drugs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And let's see if they all check off all the boxes. And if they check off all the boxes, we can provide some empirical evidence proving that perennialism is true. And they see this as a way that we maybe could bring world peace and things and the type of things you were talking about. talking about.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No, they believe that the origin of religion is drug-induced mystical experience or mystical experience through isolation, sensory isolation, prayer, all the different ways you can conjure a mystical experience because these same experiences happen naturally.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
right so when you're validating the scale they give it to people who've taken drugs but they also give it to people who can conjure these experience through prayer and through all kinds of different ways right like you could start fasting today and you could like uh you ever seen orthodox jews when they do this stuff start chanting prayer and they do this repetitive motions you can conjure these type of trance states all different kinds of ways without drugs
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You know Hillman. He studies people. You can read books, Galen, all these other people. They would go in caves. Why? Because it's dark. And you would cultivate a mystical experience in there. There's recipes. Next to recipes for drugged wine that you can make to trip, there are recipes for how to clear out a cave so that there's no snakes in there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You don't want to crawl into the cave trying to get Apollo or Zeus on the horn and...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
sinks its teeth into your ankle so you clear it out with smoke then you climb in there and you take a couple swigs and then enter into the other sensory deprivation tank exactly cave exactly wow all the stuff that's happening now there's ancient analogs to it of ways that people were doing it before yulia ustanova who's a researcher who writes about these things she's got one called caves in the ancient greek mind if you're interested in this thread she's in israel buy her books they're wonderful
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
caves in the ancient greek mind yeah she writes all about divine mania and plato and uh the the she goes through all of this literature much like hillman does and she finds uh these instances of people conjuring altered states of consciousness and she's written a ton about this it's it's really interesting wow yeah so do you think that these ancient mystery cults
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They want your stomach mainly empty so that the drug takes effect very quickly. If not, you may get there and then it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, I don't think there's any. There's no evidence that it spawned Christianity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
People that study this for a living don't think so. But what they do admit, which seems really significant, is that they did borrow language from it. They are mysteries. Jesus was, in some of this stuff, a hierophant. He was portrayed. You've got to remember what they're pulling from. They're pulling from a vast literature to where Jesus is portrayed in all different kinds of ways.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Early Christianity was in this larger context next to these things. Whenever you're trying to recruit people for a cult, so St. Paul, when you're trying to recruit people to your religion, and they say, look, we've got Asclepius. He heals people. He does all these things we like. Why would we come to your side? Of course they're going to say, well, our guy heals too. What does your guy do?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
you know 3 p.m they're like what you know you're still tripping they're trying to it's it's hard to do because as you well know it's hard to fit a psychedelic trip inside of strict lines of a business day like well you know right wrapped up kill the trip you know and so sometimes you know they you know one time i can tell you about they had to kind of help me out of there because they this was high doses of psychedelics so one friday
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, we can do all that too, so come here. And they absolutely were doing that. The last major pagan god to fall was Asclepius. He was the healer. There were temples all over the Roman Empire and ancient Greece to where they would come in and they would give incubation therapy, which were basically drug-induced mystical experiences. And there were also snakes in there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
There were labyrinth snakes, all kinds of stuff. And that was the last pagan god that Christianity had to kind of topple before it of total and complete triumph.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, but you can trace the foundations on which these ideas were built. So the idea of rising and dying gods is from James George Frazier's book, The Golden Bow, which is a very... Very famous book. But when you look back at books like this, like The Golden Bow, a lot of it doesn't stand up to modern historical standards.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
with Mando. The new James Frazier was Mircea Eliade, who was an extremely important person in all of this literature. So what you're talking about, the rising and dying gods.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, because he's drawing from this literature. He's drawing from the book you're talking about? Yes. You wouldn't have any of this stuff if it wasn't for Frazier's book. Everybody should go and buy it. It's very famous. The Golden Bow, B-O-U-G-H. And here's an interesting thing about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You can buy the Oxford edition now and there's a deleted chapter in it because when it came out, it caused a massive controversy. And the reason why is because there was a chapter that said, man, Jesus is just a generic dying and rying agricultural God. And people lost their minds within the academy. You know, you're still conservative Christianity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, not really, but they became very mad and they deleted it. He agreed to have it deleted. But then you can buy editions now to where they put it back in. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So what you have to do in order to make these structural comparisons, which you're talking about, well, this guy's kind of like this guy, this guy's kind of like this guy, is you have to take them out of their local context and saw off the edges of them to make it fit. So is there something to it? Probably. But...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Also, if you go back and look at where these ideas come from, you often find that these people have motivations to do it. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, but even Hillman and Ruck believe it, right? Sure, all kinds of people believe it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You can't just say, I'm only listening to the people who say what I like. The other people, I'll ignore. Sure. What you have to believe in is a conspiracy amongst academia, which Graham Hancock and other people's push, which is absurd. There is no conspiracy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
8 a.m., yeah, I ate my banana, and I lived so close I walked up to Bayview Research Center. Now, some people out there, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is the most prestigious medical institution in the country, and it's a university.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, that was great. Hancock was demolished.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It doesn't matter because he was absolutely demolished. And Graham Hancock, if you look at the implications of it, what Hancock said is, I believe all this stuff, but I don't have any proof, but you don't have any proof that it's not true. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The burden of proof is on the believer. I don't get to say, there's a teapot in the sky and it's there. Nobody else can see it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You've got to prove me wrong. Not the way it works. If you make claims, you have to prove them. And Hancock can't prove anything he says because he made it up, because he's a fantasy writer. The books that Hancock writes are in a long tradition of Victorian literature of the same shit. UFOs mixed with mystery cults. He's building on Erich von Däniken. You know his stuff? I know Erich von Däniken.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That doesn't make Hancock right. No, you're right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No, but I don't know enough about these topics in order to say he got it wrong, but I totally believe that he was wrong probably on multiple things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So downtown Baltimore, you've got the Homewood campus, and then by my house in East Baltimore, which is actually Greektown, which is ironic considering the context here, But Bayview Hospital has the National Institute to Drug Abuse. They have the Joseph V. Brady Behavioral Biology Center, which is where we were at. Because remember, people get confused. They think these are studies in drugs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I'm sure there's something to that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I know all that. And they do want to police their borders. As you say, look... What do you know? Get out of our business. This is our zone. Right, exactly. And they do want journalists who are going to pay deference to them and say, look, well, they're right about everything. But it still doesn't change the fact that Hancock is completely full of shit and that he knows it. He's a wind-up merchant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That would be my criticism of Dibble. It's whenever he turned it into a personal attack. Now look, he said that he didn't do that and I don't know and I'm not interested enough to go and look into it. But I think he was saying because of some of this Victorian literature has this romantic noble savage type of thing and there's racism in it, that makes him racist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They're not chopping up mushrooms and looking at them and putting under microscopes. They're studying religion and they're studying human behavior. They're interested in the intersection of religion. Religion and human behavior. That's what the studies are looking at. They're looking into religious experience and mystical experience, though it's sold as a study looking into the effects of drugs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I do not believe for a second that Graham Hancock is racist. Sorry, I don't. Do I think he's full of shit?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Is Dibble 100% right? No. And does he kind of have an annoying personality? Yes. I can see why people don't like him. It is an annoying personality of this guy. You know, Graham Hancock's got this cool thing going. It's kind of interesting. And well, you're wrong. And then, yeah, that's kind of annoying. It is kind of annoying, but it doesn't change.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's a red flag. Yeah. Yeah. It's a red flag.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Go ahead. Sorry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, you have to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They're professors of religious studies. Some of them. But you got to take this on a case-by-case basis because when you're creating a conspiracy theory, you like things that are very vague. So they say, well, this academia. My experience has been totally different. Every single person I've contacted from Patrick McGovern to Jan Bremer, Bart Ehrman, Name it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Dozens and dozens of scholars over the years. Ann Taves, Hugh Urban, all kinds of people who study these things. Everyone that I've reached out to, they're like, hey, how's it going? Sure, you can ask me questions. These people have no reason to talk to me. Why would, you know...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
they've they're always will everybody that i've talked to has been totally willing to answer what were probably stupid quite uninformed questions for me and were totally nice i never sensed there was any conspiracy at all but they they're working in a in a discipline in which you lead with evidence and then come up with theories you don't come up with a theory and then look for evidence and i'm not but let's be clear i'm not accusing hillman or ruck of doing this but
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Carl Ruck has made an enormous contribution to the humanities. Without him, as Chris Bennett told me, you wouldn't be able to write a PhD thesis on these things. He is a pioneer in this, and what he's done is enormously creative. But nobody's going to be right. Everybody now that may seem right in 50 years or a bunch of it will probably be wrong.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
As Richard Knowles says of this type of scholarship, we wash each other's diapers. They'll contribute a little bit. Then the next generation, that was a bunch of shit. You wash it off and you start again. It's a long process. What you have to be careful for is when people combine these things with political and theological agendas. I don't care that Graham Hancock's made a bunch of money. Great.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Wonderful. He's very industrious. He's very creative. There's a lot of good things you could say about him, but I do think that he's taken his readers on a ride. But so what? I mean, they're fantasy books where you have a problem is a lot of these people think that it's real. But I don't unlike Dibble.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I don't think there's some nefarious thing with Graham Hancock, you know, like, oh, he's had some secret agenda. He's a I don't believe any of that personally. That's just my opinion. Yeah. I think they're good fantasy books like Vondonik and Vondonik and stuff. You know, I just did magicians of the gods or something. Same thing. I saw you got Jason Georgiani.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
This is a genre of books that take aliens and mystery cults. And there are thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them. You go to inner traditions, bear and company. These books are unlimited. It's the same elements reworked and they're pretty much all the same and they make the same claims.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Once you read enough of the books, you start to see larger patterns, and you start to go, okay, I'm starting to understand this more. And, of course, it all comes from the breakdown of Christianity, which we should talk about. This tradition of book goes—I thought it was from the 1960s. You find these books going way back in the early 1800s and even in the late 1700s.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Whenever you have Christianity breaking down, like around the time of Isaac Newton, people start looking for more scientific explanations for things, okay? So then you get into the 1800s and you have what the birth of psychology, anthropology and religious studies. Right. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And what they're looking for is, well, initially, like anthropology was they were looking for evidence that Christianity was true. Right. But essentially what you have, you probably already understand this. What happened were explorers were going all around the world and they were finding other flood myths, other serpent myths. And they were going, hold on a second here. They got a flood myth?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, you can imagine what people in the church thought. Well, this came after ours. This is just a copy of Noah's flood. This is just a copy of the book of Genesis. It must be because our story, many people today have a hard time believing that many people for a long time believed the Old Testament was literally true. that everybody was related to Noah, everybody was related to Ham.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That was our ancient kinfolk. And if you could trace the lines on ancestry, it all goes back to them. Most people today, it's hard for them to believe that. Many, many people believe that for many, many years. That story started to break down when they started finding the other flood myths, the other serpent myths, and they went, uh-oh, we got a problem.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So the job of people in religious studies and all these different disciplines, and mythologists like Ruck and them are in now, was to try to figure out this relationship between the mystery cults and Christianity. Which came first? Did these primitive, what they thought of as primitive belief systems, Did they come first? Did we come first?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, I got out of the study, and like most people, you know, I had five very powerful experiences. Though I had done psychedelics before, I never had anything remotely close to what I would call a mystical, spiritual, or religious experience. Taking drugs in one of these studies with a particular playlist blindfolded Music playlist?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so you start this game of which is called mythography. And you have in Britain what are called the mythography wars. This was like contemporary debates over, say, like the 1619 Project or something. This is how hot this shit was in the 1800s. This was a major theme of intellectual life, maybe the primary theme of intellectual life, an obsession over the origins of religion, an obsession.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I thought before Nietzsche, God is dead, I thought that was kind of the beginning of it. That's the end of it. By that time, Christianity was basically dead.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
By the time of William James, amongst intellectuals, by the time of William James in the late 19th century, the 1880s, he wrote his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, being contrary in saying, okay, amongst intellectuals, it's a fad to say religion is this primitive superstition. I'm going to look for something in psychology and biology that it may be inherent to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
to who we are as people maybe you can't get rid of it maybe it's not a tale from a from an earlier stage of evolution maybe there's something to it where you can't get rid of it that's the tradition that we're in the psychedelic literature and psychedelic studies are not a part of the history of science they're part now they are but they're part of the history of religious studies it comes out of these battles of which go back hundreds of years does that make sense
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Could be. Any kind of large-scale theory like that is probably going to be almost always wrong. People need to think on a much smaller scale because then you have a chance of it actually being true. When you're thinking of large scale, but what they are is sometimes a good starting point. Maybe this happened, and then you start working on other little elements of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But here's what I was talking about, what you're talking about. Here's a book you should read. It's by Colin Kidd, and it's called The World of Mr. Kazabon. And if you want to understand the tradition of literature this is in, this is the book you should read because it goes into Graham Hancock's forebears and where he got all of these ideas. Mr. Who, Kazabon? Kazabon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He's a character in the novel Middlemarch. C-A-U-S-A-B-O-N. Yeah, Colin Kidd. It's a hilarious book. It's a short book, and everybody should read it who's interested in these topics. Because what you get are the original Graham Hancocks. And you get also Carl Rucks, the people before him who were saying, you know, people even in the late 1800s were already saying, what if Jesus was a shaman?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Music playlist that's intended to drive a particular type of experience. They're trying to cultivate a very particular kind of experience. They're not going to let you pick the playlist or just hang out and take drugs. It's not like going to Grateful Dead. So they are masters at inducing a particular kind of experience that they believe is therapeutic and then studying the effects of the drugs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You started to get books like that. Really? Yes. And you started to get like there's a book, Cock Lane and Common Sense by Andrew Lang, who was a. I think he was British, but he was a paranormal researcher. And he had what was called a predecessor to the drug theory called the hallucination theory of religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so they were already starting to figure out like, hold on, the people in these books are all having visions. What's going on here? And at the same time, you had Havelock Ellis and other psychologists experimenting with drugs, and they started to put it together. They started to go, hold on a second. What if they were on drugs? Well, you can imagine how this went over. It was taboo then.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
it's taboo now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But, you know, Rick Strassman has said, what about if it just amplified pre-existing beliefs, the drugs? Because you can cultivate these experiences. People have them naturally all the time, but we don't know. Even the spirit molecule, it's like, well, maybe some of the DMT is leaking out of the third eye. Nobody knows. So people do have these experiences naturally.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
There's a record going back thousands of years of people cultivating them. In Christianity, you don't have to look much further than the New Testament. The origins of Christianity are in the Pentecost. You have all of these people who, were they on drugs? We don't know. There's probably no way to find out. But we know they were experimenting with altered states of consciousness.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And where I'm from, you have people doing the same thing now. They're called Pentecostals. Some of them, you know, you go to a serpent handling church down in eastern Kentucky, They're playing music. And it all starts. It's like jazz. It all starts impromptu. It's not like a concert. Somebody starts one thing. Then somebody starts another. You're almost on some like hillbilly John Coltrane stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Then somebody gets out the fire. You start burning. Then they pull out the snakes. And you're creating this disorientation that leads to altered states of consciousness. And if you walk into one of those churches, people are hopping in down and going buck wild.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And then you have Pentecostals that don't do serpents that run the holy rollers. Right. So many New Testament – well, New Testament scholars have argued that this is – the early Christian communities were doing this. Okay? So were some of them also using drugs? Probably.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Probably, but what this turns into amongst the public is they were all on drugs, Jesus was a mushroom, and I got called on. Jesus was a mushroom. Yeah, like the Allegro stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So when did I begin to question the aim of the study? Yeah, and first of all, how long did you do it?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, it is literally the sexual organ of the mycelium. It literally is the sexual organ of the mycelium. That's what it is. That's what the mushroom is. It looks like a sexual organ because it is one. Right. That's what it is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Right? A da or a da, whatever deer, eats the mushrooms. It goes a few miles. It takes a shit. The spores land. A few days later, a mushroom comes up. The cap explodes. Spores spread it by the wind, spread everywhere else. It's really bizarre. And so then you think about how bizarre these studies are at Hopkins. You have this mushroom. You give these people this mushroom.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And then scientists are like, hold on. Maybe this is the origins of religion. The whole thing is bizarre. And people are not covering it. I don't think people are really appreciating that fact of just how strange it is. It is very fucking strange, dude.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, it lasted several months because after one particularly powerful trip, it had weird effects on me. And Roland Griffiths said, let's wait a couple of weeks. And normally you do five in a row, five Fridays in a row. I ended up skipping a couple because of what happened in one session that was DXM.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Like, well, they come up. Okay. You know, one of the paradox, well, it's increases neuroplasticity. Yeah. They had this default mode network. That was the rage for a while. They discarded that. They put people in imaging machines, so you see colors. Okay, we don't know much. As Roland Griffiths said in my latest article, our ability to measure what's going on in the brain is incredibly primitive.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
We don't know. He told me all we can do is start guessing at it and throwing different frames of reference at it. And that's what they've done with this religious thing, because perhaps these psychologists like Jung and James, they've provided some of these. They pull in alchemy and all these other things to try to explain this process because we just have no idea.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So, no, there is no scientific explanation for it. None. That's insane to me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It is. And that's what drives my, even though I know, and Roland said, look, we're not going to figure it out anytime soon. In your lifetime, Travis, ain't going to happen.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yes. Well, in some of the criticism, you notice I put both sides. I put people who criticize this and I put boosters like Ralph Wood that says, the problem with psychedelic research is it's too conservative. We should, he believes, Ralph, who helped design the Hopkins studies, who's the expert on serpent handling, he says, we need to open up the possibility.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The scientists are going, well, that's obviously delusion or mental illness. You didn't come into contact with anything. He says, that's bullshit. That's anti-scientific. It's a bias against religion. We need to be open to the possibility that these are alternate dimensions. You can go and look at the shamans and they say, how'd you figure out how to make ayahuasca?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, the snake told me or the jaguar told me. And everybody laughs, but we don't know where they got it from.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It absolutely is. It absolutely is. And, you know, William James said, well, it's fruits, not roots. Who cares where it comes from? I mean, he didn't say if it helps people, you know, pragmatism says if they thought they talked to God and that made them want to be a better person, who gives a damn if it's a delusion or not? Right. They became a better person. The fruits of the experience.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
If it comes from drugs, good. But what I'm afraid, I think here's the major point with me and you. What I'm afraid is that novelty is being elevated above morality and that we're forgetting about the moral parts of this whenever, because it's so weird, because it's so new, because it's so like, wow. Wow, this is amazing. These experiences are amazing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
We have to be careful when people are making moral claims that these drugs, which is a claim that Roland made and what they were looking into. They believe that these experiences transform people morally and ethically. And that's the basis of all of these wild claims. newspaper claims and media claims, and it's the basis of the immortality key.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
DXM is the active ingredient in Robitussin. I used to live in San Diego with a bunch of Navy guys, my brothers in the Navy, and they would do what's called robo-tripping. You just drink a bunch of Robitussin. Oh, yeah, I'm familiar.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Whenever he puts in the introduction, he puts this conversion experience and says, look, these experiences change people for the better.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's the science. Most of it's anecdotal because a lot of the books are what? They're just collections of conversion experiences. They mirror early They mirror kind of evangelical tent revivals. If you go to an evangelical tent revival where I'm from, they get people on stage who have been transformed by the Holy Spirit and by God and totally changed their life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I was drinking, I got a DUI, I ran somebody over, but now I have God and I've changed. It's identical to what you see with these pharmaceutical advertisements with psilocybin. You see? What I mean by that is the advert... Are there pharmaceutical advertisements of psilocybin? Well, the press is doing it for free for them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, because they're using Bob, Jesse, other people. He's not going in the press, but they're pushing this narrative that it has a medical application. So absolutely, when you get people from clinical trials and you pay them to go out and say positive things...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
it was pointed out in the new york times these are the same methods as a pharmaceutical company prozac they did it with prozac they have a clinical trial participant i'm healed and then they pay a money and they go out and try to evangelize to other people to get on them they use it on they use it in advertising yeah and this is aware of that but i never i never once thought that that would be applied to the psychedelic stuff it absolutely is this is a lot of what i've been writing about and pushing back against
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So what about, are you aware of MAPS? Yeah, absolutely. So MAPS is? The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science. It's an organization started in the 80s by a guy named Rick Doblin. And actually it came out of Earth Metabolic Services, which was some company started by Buckminster Fuller and like Doblin bought it and then it became MAPS.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But Rick is, well, I think he's from Boston or maybe he's from Chicago, but he landed here in Sarasota, Florida and went to Newcastle. He was like 35, still a student at New College. But he has been doing studies on mostly MDMA for 40 years now. So he's not really pushing psilocybin.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He's an all-over psychedelic guy, promoter of psychedelics, and they hold the biggest conference in the world there in Denver. but he's mostly been into MDMA, which is a total different thing. The effects of MDMA are not correlated. They're not psychedelic. Well, they're psychedelic, but they're very different from psilocybin. It's not correlated. They don't provide this mystical experience.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You can get benefits from it without that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Absolutely. And what their main strategy has been is using veterans. All the veterans you see, Rick Perry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It is, yeah. It's popular everywhere. It's something kids can do, you know, go to the store and steal some Robitussin. Yeah, yeah, robo-tripping, baby. Robo-tripping. So... They gave me a really high dose. And it almost instantly after taking it, I laid down. I didn't feel good. And it just almost instantly popped me out of my body.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No, even though you see in the news the guy took psilocybin and went and shot the veterans, two of them, went and did a mass shooting on him. And I'm not saying that should be a scare tactic. And when was that one? One of them was in Oregon at some kind of music festival, and there's been several.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
There's so much in the news that it's hard to keep track of because, of course, the people in the industry, and somewhat rightfully so. Look, if a thousand people do it and one person goes nuts, it's not fair to define it by the one person. Right. It's not. Right. But they're only highlighting the most positive experiences. And where you get into trouble is when these people are being paid.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And a lot of these organizations like Heroic Hearts and all of these other people, look, these people were genuinely probably healed by it. But then they become part of a larger plot by people who have financial interest in these things. Some of them just wanted to pass through the FDA, but other people, they've got nonprofit companies where they're making money and they're promoting themselves.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And it's a massive, intertangled landscape that we wouldn't know about if it weren't for a few people, including myself, that have reported on it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Oh, they absolutely are interested. Yeah, Johnson & Johnson, Spravato. What? They own ketamine. They're making billions. I don't know. You could look up how much money does Spravato make. They're absolutely studying psychedelics right now, compass pathways, Johnson & Johnson maps, and they want to patent particular variations of the drugs. Johnson & Johnson does? Johnson & Johnson.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Can you find this, Steve? They sell, just look up Spravato. It was just. Spravato. Yeah. Okay. That's a ketamine, I think it's a nose thing. Absolutely. I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to have prescriptions, but they, oh, of course. It's a massive gold rush to try to figure this out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Now, look, maybe they won't be able to make any money off of it because you can grow it naturally, but they obviously want to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They're making a fortune off of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Now, look, this is the only psychedelic that... What is in it? Ketamine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's just ketamine. I think it's a nose spray, isn't it? I thought you might have some. See if you can find anything juicy on Spravato, Steve. Well, you know, and here's the thing with ketamine. They start advertising this, giving it to people. And during the COVID, where people were staying at home, people were depressed, people got hooked on it. I mean, it's addictive. On ketamine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yes, on ketamine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, and people dying of alcoholism. It's horrible. It's almost criminal. But what it can do, because obviously you reach a tolerance and you've got to keep taking more and more. So what can happen is you can lose control of your bowel sometimes, and people wear diapers. So in the New York Times, you had people 25 years old, 28 years old. These are all people in New York City.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And I kind of floated around the room and was seeing myself from different perspectives. And I could see the guides of the study. And I felt like I could see them from outside of my body. And I could hear them talking about me as if I wasn't in my body. And so it made my body feel very heavy. And then it felt like my consciousness floated out of my body.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, this cures my depression, and I do have to wear a diaper forever now, but at least I'm not depressed. It was dystopian. What? From Spravato? No. Yeah, well, and other, I mean, you can buy, there's all kinds of telehealth companies to where they provide this shit and that you just Zoom with them and they say, okay, and then they send it to you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They have to have at least a rubber stamp of, yep, we talked to them and they seem depressed. So there you go. And people take it. So it's not very well regulated. But after this actor died, the guy from Friends, Matthew Perry? No, Matthew. Oh, I know who you're talking about. Well, when he died, now there's a huge backlash against it. Oh, because he was on it. Because he was on it. Oh, shit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Somebody gave him a big dose, and then I think he drowned in his hot tub.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Oh, yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So you've got to be careful of exaggerating the therapeutic benefits and downplaying the risk. But, you know, we need to be honest. Striking the right balance there is extremely hard because there is –
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
taboos against these drugs and people don't like you pointing out these type of things because hey we're just now improving their reputation let's get this stuff through and then we'll start talking about this
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Sure. They passed. If I remember correctly, the FDA approved Oxycontin and said there was less than 1% chance of addiction.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. I agree with you a hundred percent.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yes. And there's also a financial incentive. We're in America. You never forget about that. There's a financial incentive. They want to make money. The stocks are out there. Every time something bad happens, when the FDA approval happens, a stock slumped, something good happens, they go up. Yeah. I'm not against that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I'm not against making money, but I don't think you need to lie in service of it. And the medical industry here is so corrupt. It's terrible. It's horrible. And the FDA, yeah, I mean, some people say, see, the FDA said it's dangerous. Well, just like you, I don't give a damn what the FDA says. We know they're corrupt.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You know?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, yeah. I was living in Baltimore and... Sorry. I was living in Baltimore and my background is in engineering. So I was actually working at a local hospital installing and repairing medical equipment. And... I got into journalism because a friend of mine, Baynard Woods, he was an editor at the Baltimore City Paper, which is like an alt-weekly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And then what happened was at night when I went home, I was having sleep paralysis. That night I went home and laid down. And in the middle of the night – I lived in inner city Baltimore. It's pretty wild. And I heard somebody knocking at the door. I mean it was the middle of the night. And I – I couldn't get up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You could radicalize them even. And it's not that so much I'm scared. I'm simply trying to report when you have behavior scientists teaming up with venture capitalists in the Catholic church, that's worth writing about. That's a story. And so do I think it's a bad idea?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I don't sound like a good idea, but I'm just trying to keep people abreast of, hey, these are some extremely interesting things that are happening. And the response has been people are like, wow, I didn't even know this was happening. You know, the Catholic Church might be interested in psychedelics. So, yeah, I don't think it's a very good idea.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But, you know, I'm not a Catholic, so they're not going to give it to me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They're not going to have any control over me. But as someone, Matt Johnson, pointed out in my article, when you set up a situation where someone is claiming they have direct access to God or the sacred, and you put minors around them, just get prepared for what you – they didn't need psychedelics to – how many people? Millions of people?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And now we're going to – the church is failing for a reason. I'm not saying it's good. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm simply saying it's emptied out. The pews are empty out for a reason. You lied and covered up a scandal in which you destroyed people's lives. Now let's try to rebuild it with psychedelic drugs. This is an insane idea. This is an insane idea, a new reformation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so that's been the center of my inquiry of new reformation. Interesting. So, OK, so there's going to be nobody likes you looking into the origin of their religion. And if they're starting one, they're never going to say this is a new religion. They're going to say, no, this is an old one. We're starting it back up. Right. They like especially a startup religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They wanted to get down the road and already, you know. going before you start looking into its origins, right? People in Scientology would prefer you don't write books. And in fact, they, let's just say, discourage people from writing about them. We're in Florida.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I want to see it. But you can see they don't like people looking to the origins of the original. Why? Because they want the founder to be mythologized. So that you don't know much about them, right? Because if you look into L. Ron Hubbard, you're going to go, this guy's a crank. This is full of shit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So what I've been trying to do is look at all the intellectual cultural currents and all of the books that are tied up in this philosophy and these ideas and trying to pull them apart and illuminate them so that people can understand some of the figures involved with this. Even more so than saying, this is wrong, this isn't wrong. I've been more interested in the field itself.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Like, what does Rick Strassman think of the New Reformation? What does Karl Ruck think of the New Reformation? Karl told me, as people who read my new article in Reason will see, in his words, it's suspect and potentially dangerous for the Catholic Church to endorse psychedelics. Because what he said and what he believes is...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I tried to get up, but instead my, something like my consciousness or something went down to the door and I heard do, do, do. And I tried to get up, but my body wouldn't get up. This is a very common phenomenon, sleep paralysis. And so I told them, because they call you the next morning, like, hey, everything okay? And I was like, well, this thing happened.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That the church has been the cause of global conflict for millennia, in his words, and that they're going to try to indoctrinate people into the church to swell their ranks, and it could create more conflict. It could radicalize people into the religion even more, and it could intensify the conflict.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And this is what's – but what nobody talks about is that these drugs are being deployed on the battlefield.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
There you go.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That's an excellent book.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Oh, there's a book called The Immortality Key that's kind of a blueprint for the psychedelic renaissance of what's happening. In the first chapter, there's a foreword by Graham Hancock.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Then there's an introduction called A New Reformation, which lays out his vision, the author's vision, Brian Marescu, for what he calls a new reformation, which is to rebuild the Catholic Church by incorporating a psychedelic sacrament. And the idea is that this will revitalize Western culture because it's collapsing and dying of a spiritual crisis, etc., etc., etc., Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Do you see what I'm saying? I understand now. Yeah. And so what you see is this playing out in real life that you see psychedelics being deployed. I think I sent you those two articles. And The New Yorker had one article. Then Ryan Grimm at The Intercept had a really interesting article that was called Ibogaine versus Meth. And on the Russian side of the Ukraine war, they're all loaded on meth.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, and that's normal though because Syria, they were all on meth. Well, the Nazis were on meth too, right? And the Nazis were all on meth. Yeah. Well, you got to keep them going, you know?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And they said, okay, let me have Roland call you back. And then he said, you know what, let's take a week off just because that was kind of crazy. And it had other really interesting effects too. It made my vision better. It has really strange effects. There's not a lot known about it, but they were doing psilocybin and DXM head to head.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Just enter your email. Ukrainian military is experimenting with Ibogaine, a psychedelic drug banned in the U.S. Now, this is fascinating. Do you see this? To do so, it is partnering with founder of the Yippie movement, Irvin Dana Beal. Now, he got thrown in prison. Okay. Scroll up. Hang on. Scroll up real quick. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, to promote battle readiness, they said it increases spiritual resilience so that you, and it kind of puts you in this heightened.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I think it's Bell. It's Dana Beal. You should get him on here. Dana Beal? Oh, really? He's an old-timey, yippy guy. So they were like anti-war, you know, hippie, like Abbie Hoffman types. And he is convinced, he's a big marijuana activist who's been to prison a dozen times over this, but he's the one. Rick Doblin of MAPS got him the Ibogaine, and he brought it in because it's illegal.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And he brought it into Ukraine and provided it to the military. And when he got back, he was bringing marijuana somewhere in Oregon and got thrown in prison. And I contacted him after I read this article, and I wanted to ask him details about this to write an article. And about two weeks later, the phone rang from a prison, and it was him. And he's a wild dude. Is he in prison right now?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No, I think he's out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I think he's in New York. I'll give you his phone number. I've got to get him here now. He's an interesting guy. Wow. Yeah, so they're using this on... And if you look at the New Yorker article on the same thing, they think that... Remember Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory? Of course. Okay, you know how he said, okay, maybe it... Part of the theory is that it increases hand-eye coordination.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It makes you a better hunter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Edge detection. All of these attributes. Well, who do you think's interested in that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The military. So... What I'm trying to report on is that we're in this utopian mindset, oh, psychedelics, they'll do all these things, but they're always going to be used for the opposite thing, too, and we need to be prepared. Aldous Huxley says in Brave New World, the price of liberty and freedom is eternal vigilance. And so I've always took that to heart. You need to be vigilant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Don't get caught up in the sales business. Oh, we're all going to heal each other, and then there'll be a utopian cult, and all war will end. Bullshit. Bullshit. This is what's really happening. Is it all bad? Is this a condemnation of the whole movement? No. There are legitimate medical aspects, but we should also be asking, what else are they going to be used for?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
One reason is just because it's interesting, right? I never thought about using this on the battlefield. But there's a new article out called, it's on some religious website, and it's called Do Psychedelics Fix a Broken Brain or something. And part of it's about John Lubecki, who's an Iraq war veteran. And he's talking about using MDMA. And he said, I'm on the front lines.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He's an American GI who went over to Ukraine to try to help him because he hates the Russians and believes in this war. And he said a lot of the people, they have trouble sleeping because they have PTSD, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, man, I'm over here on the front lines sleeping like a baby because I've been healed through psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. So they have this usefulness. And if you think about it overall, this really could lead to an intensification of war. Because during the Iraq War, you can look up these numbers. There was a lot of articles during the Iraq War.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That's the active ingredient.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
of how much prozac in antidepressants they were sending to the front line because my brother was over there a long time they kept extending your service date well you'll go home in september well now it's going to be march well actually it's going to be the summer and people are naturally depressed because it was horrible because all the things that were happening so now they're thinking well that's ssris those didn't work that good what about if we can send them over there you can extend the length of time to which they're there the you know you don't have to worry about maybe not worry about shell shock so you're it's what one member of the military
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And this, you can find this too. He called it, we need to have sophisticated understanding of psychedelics on the battlefield to get a leg up on the enemy because it results in what he called increased lethality. It makes the fighting force more lethal. So what you see is, I was joking. How would it make it more lethal?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yep. And you can buy it if you go to, I hate to say this, but if you're an adult- And you want to try it, go to Amazon and you can buy pure DXM pills as many as you want for like a penny each. Oh, Jesus Christ. But don't do it because I will say. Do not do that, folks. Do not do that. Don't do it because at high doses, it can put lesions on your brain and turn you into essentially a vegetable.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
All of the things I just told you, increase in hand-eye coordination, edge detection. If you're in the jungle or in the desert, this is an advantage, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
That's why they're spending millions of dollars micro dosing or something. The government and DARPA is dumping 50, 60 million dollars into this. Of what we know, they're dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
In 2020, they put 23 million into it. That's in a Nature article, which is a very prestigious journal.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
23 million, so you know it's more than that now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Now, do you see this? DARPA's granted $27 million to UNC Chapel Hill. I think that's David Nichols, the chemist David Nichols, who made a lot of the psilocybin for Hopkins and made all of the MDMA for the MAPS trials. He makes a lot of these drugs, and he works for DARPA. Yeah, you should have him on, too. He's from Kentucky. He's another part of the— What's his name? Dave Nichols, N-I-C-H-O-L-S.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, really interesting guy. He's a chemist, and his son also does this, and he speaks a lot, and he knows a ton all about the chemistry side and everything else. I think he knew Albert Hoffman.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
If these things provide general optimization, of course you're going to want it for the military. Right. What about if the Russians get it or the Jihad gets it and they're all hyped up on Ibogaine and we don't have any? Well, they might get us, you know?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So... It's moving in all kinds. But imagine this is now when our understanding of it's very primitive. What about when the science keeps developing? Because they've got our best people are working on taking the trip out. Our best people are working on amplifying the good effects, getting rid of the bad effects. So we're moving in. Shayla Love wrote an article, psychedelic journalist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
She's at the Atlantic now, I think. She wrote an article called The Psychedelic Drugs of the Future are Ones You've Never Even Heard of. At some point, this stuff we think is going to be looked at as primitive. They're building novel compounds all the time that who knows what they might do. But you can see a Brave New World type scenario developing. It could go one way or it could go the other.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And very likely, like all other things, it'll be a mixture of good and bad.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But I think it's important to bring this up, not as a scare tactic, but simply to say, look, you may need to balance out or temper all of this utopian thinking with the realization that there are other things happening. Because a lot of... There's just too much. The coverage of psychedelic research has been extremely bad.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's dangerous. Don't do it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It has. And now it's entering, as many people point out. Nothing in this country can be balanced. It can't be balanced like we're talking about now. There's good and there's bad. It's either all the way good, and now it's in a negative cycle. So everybody's, it's bad, it doesn't work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, right, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. It can't just be balanced. So I think hopefully we're moving towards somewhere where it might be balanced. You know, people like Rick Strassman, I think Rick has been better than anybody as far as the major psychedelic researchers who has always been honest and candid about the dual nature of these substances and that we ought to be careful of conflating science and religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
holy okay so psilocybin and dxm are the two drugs that you were given yep but did they tell you before they gave you that no it's double blind so not even the people giving it to you know it it's extremely strict so they have the pharmacy come up and they have no idea what it's going to be so they give you something and they're your guys don't even know they don't even know it's double blind they have no idea what do you think the difference was between the dxm and the psilocybin
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You should be very weary or very leery when someone says, oh, we found the answer to all our problems. That's not what science is supposed to do. It doesn't pride itself on finding answers. Hey, can I walk out that door for a second and grab my phone? I want to show you one thing you'll find interesting. This was an accidental send from Roland right before he died.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Maybe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
By that? Well, I mean, didn't you read it as, it's signed at the bottom, right? You see? I will not pursue.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He said it was a personal note. So who was it to?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And why is he tracking a clinical trial participant and who's he sending notes to and why?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Isn't it weird?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yes. He said, oh, it's just a form of personal note.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Whatever you think. Okay. I'll leave it up to you. How about that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Yes, it will be the show.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He said it was just a form of personal note-taking. Now, do you want me to tell the story? Because what I just said, I would prefer not to be on the show.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Do you want me to talk about it again?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
What was the context of that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Because we had been emailing back and forth, and he was upset with me, and then he called me. He said, can I call you? And I said, sure. And so he called me and we had a rather emotionally potent conversation to where he was just, he did not want me reporting on the program. He didn't like what, he was simultaneously, he said, I'm astonished by your level of research. That was his word.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
At the same time, he thought that it was threatening their, objectives as you saw in the email his intentions are unclear i think he's well intentioned i think he's what to say he's well intentioned but his objectives are unclear and he may be prone to extreme positions i said thank you for my first book blurb Which I will now call extreme positions. I don't know. It's very weird.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I mean, science, I mean, you can, if you know of another example of scientists doing that, I don't know, except for maybe pharmaceutical companies to where they want to control what's said about the drug.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You know, they don't want you saying, but the funny thing is I've written a lot about this and I've never said anything bad about my experience because my experience was good. under the clinical trial. It didn't heal any ailment, but it was fascinating. But again, on the Groff thing, it just amplified the way I already was. I was just a more extreme version of the person I already was. Really?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Only when you were under the influence of it? No, long after.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It had a major perpetual effect. effect because for a year after you're still feeling the effects or six months to a year and you change the sales of your life i became obsessed with studying this which perpetuates and keeps determining the course of your life because even after the enthusiasm wore off hell i was knee deep into this research project
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I mean, if you go to my house now, there's thousands of books, many of them rare books on medicine and psychedelics. And I became obsessed because I thought, you know, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm an engineer by trade, right? That's what I went to school for. That's what I've mostly done in health care and IT networking. And so I in what I do, there's always an answer.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You can always reverse engineer something back in order to find the problem. I'm trained in troubleshooting medical devices. That's what I did. So I'm trying to reverse engineer it and look back where all of this came from to see what is this program? What are they doing? What is this all about? Where do these ideas come from? So I don't know what the text message, I mean the email, I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
A huge difference because like I told you, I thought it was ketamine. You know, I had done different psychedelics before and I thought this is ketamine because I fell down. I was on the bed and I felt like I was going to go under surgery. I thought it was an anesthetic. And it's unlike psilocybin. I mean, you know, the psilocybin experiences there followed a very kind of typical archetype.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I find it odd, but I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Oh, I think they are, but there's a recent article that talks about how now the CIA is mostly, it just came the other day, the head of the CIA said, we can't compete with Google, we can't compete with Palantir, we can't compete with Thiel and Musk and all these people. So they said, we're working now, the spy agencies work directly with these massive corporations who are hoovering
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
in data, and we now know data is worth more than oil. And so the way they're doing it is going to be different. They're not going to be like, okay, guys, it's MKUltra 2, let's start it back up. They're doing it in a different way. And this is what I've been looking into too. Who are these people? Some of them are very odd characters.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Sure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The psychedelic renaissance came out of Silicon Valley by a guy who worked at Oracle. Oracle was a CIA kind. That's what it is. Look up Larry Ellison's CIA and you'll see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Probably.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Probably. Yeah, he's extraordinarily rich.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So, of course, Roland Griffiths would compare psychedelics to nuclear power in how powerful they are. Do you think the government's going to just let, oh, we're just studying this over here, don't worry? No. Foreign governments are interested in this. You must... Be involved in what's happening. It only makes sense for national security.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And like you're talking about the birth of the Internet and the birth of psychedelic research are intertwined at Stanford, right? There's a great book about this. You should get him on. The book is called What the Dormouse Said. It's an incredible book about the entwined origins of the birth of the Internet and psychedelics. What the Dormouse said? Yeah, which is a line from Jefferson Airplane.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You know, feed your head. Who's Grace Slick? Is that Grace Slick? You know that song, Jefferson Airplane, feed your head.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, they're his competitor. Right. He wants his business to do all the work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
DXM doesn't do that. You won't get a mystical experience off of DXM. Okay. It's more like ketamine. And the DXM made your vision better, you said? The next day, I felt like my, you know, I've worn glasses my whole life since I was a little kid. I felt like my vision was so much clearer and so much better. If there's some link between that, I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Could be.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, right. What could go wrong? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's him. Yeah, that's crazy, man.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
psychedelics with religion or with the church and to try to revive christianity and catholicism by infusing it with psychedelics and getting these people that's what he argues in the introduction yes he said he premise the premise is this he says look the world is in chaos the united states we've got deaths of despair opioid addiction he paints a picture of armageddon yes and then like
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Let's say a medical ad. He says, we found the cure. Go to Roland Griffiths. They cut to Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins. He's discovered the origin of religion. He has a Johns Hopkins clinical trial participant saying, I was healed. There was this miraculous healing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And then he combines Roland's research with this search for the origins of religion and then also adds in a bunch of psychedelic scientists who are interested in pushing this through the medical system. So it's essentially selling psychedelics as a cure for not just medical problems, depression, mental illness, but also the same old utopian stuff that Albert Hoffman and other people were pushing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He's really kind of following Albert Hoffman. Albert Hoffman discovered LSD. He's a chemist from Switzerland.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
yeah fascinating guy and in that book he he he had a rap that he did different variations on his rap but he gave this kind of uh uh rap all the time the world's coming doing it he was what jonathan ott who translated you know jonathan ott psychedelic researcher i'm familiar with you should get him on here but he um yeah i think like a bunch of people have told us we need to get
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, I can't get his email address for the life of me, so I don't know how you get a hold of him. But he just popped up. There's a new lecture by him that's amazing. He's in Basel, actually, talking about Albert Hoffman. Anyway, Ott described Hoffman in this lecture as an ecological fanatic who didn't like people. He loved nature. He was very pagan.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
If you look at pictures of him, he owned this huge strip of land in the mountains of Switzerland, and he thought that industrial civilization was destroying the planet. Hmm. And so he saw his drug as something that could resolve this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He thought it would revive the ancient mysteries and that it would magically heal the world and fix the world by fixing the root of the problem, which he believed was human psychology. And so Murerescu, really, he's following in that tradition. And what he did is kind of dumb it down. And turn it into a commercial sort of Hardy Boys mystery. Overall, it's kind of like a drug advertisement.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I haven't really looked into it, but they want to know, look, you have to write a report after every session. And so I put that in there and everything else because there were a number of effects that I thought, this is really bizarre. Like I just didn't even have my glasses on and for a while, I just didn't even wear them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It is. And all the work on ancient... What it is, think about it this way. The book, the story that most people have clung on to is essentially a literature review. It's taking Ruck's work and Wasson, The Road to Eleusis, and it's looking at updated research using the work of mainly Patrick McGovern, who's the author. He's at University of Pennsylvania. He's a chemist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He's the one who pioneered this study of finding little objects like this, scraping them for residue and chemically analyzing them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
His work is the basis of the book. His books are Uncorking the Past, and his other book's called Ancient Wine. It's on Princeton University Press. Everybody should go out and buy it. You should have Patrick on. He's a fascinating dude. So Brian is writing this book. He tells Patrick what he's doing, and, you know—
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
mcgovern's mentioned in the book over 70 times it's largely based on the updated the updating of of ruck stuff is mainly using two things mcgovern's work on ancient wine mixed with the work of roland griffiths so you see he combined all of these things together right But yeah, so the middle of it's like a literature review.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's bookended by an introduction and an outro that are really trying to sell Hopkins research and psychedelics as some kind of medical cure. He says, look, let's revive Eleusis. Let's turn it into this chain of mental health clinics and let's get the government to pay for it. And it'll cure people of all these different diseases. That's what the book argues.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No, there's none. None, zero.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
None. And they would say, look, you don't – they would say it's a bias to demand this type of scientific evidence. That's what they say. This is a bias. We don't need that hard scientific evidence. There's just certain people who science has now become the standard of believability and evidence. And so people like McGovern and other people – I'm maybe biased in this way a little bit too.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I kind of want evidence. But if you read these texts – And if you read about the ancient mystery cults, even reading like Walter Burkert, who rejects the drug hypothesis, and you even read the people who reject the drug hypothesis. And I mean, it does, if you look at the descriptions, it does seem like it's psychedelic drugs. There's no doubt about it. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But they want to take it a step further. Hey, is there any physical evidence? Because you're finding these vessels all around the world, South America, here, there, Telluride, and Israel, and you're finding drugs everywhere. You're finding – Hillman was talking about there was this – what was that vessel that he found that had human bodily fluids mixed with drugs?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I sent him that article, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Fifth century.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, so morning, I think pogrom and homilar is morning glory seeds, right? I think that's what it is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So here you have scientific evidence of what Hillman's been talking about for a long time, right? That you have these strange concoctions that you find in these ancient medical books. Now you find a mug with it in it. And I'm sure this is going to keep happening. I think if you compare Hillman's work to The Immortality Key, you see something interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, it gave me an enormous amount of enthusiasm, which is what the drugs do. It gives you an enormous amount of enthusiasm. And the immediate thing that not everybody, but many, many people have is everybody else has to do this. Everybody. All we have to do is find a way to do it. And then you get religion because that's immediately what I thought. So I was writing articles.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
In Hillman's work, most people would find it absolutely revolting, wild and crazy. Disgusting. What you see in The Immortality Key, and I've talked with Hillman and all these rock and roll people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
about this, you see a kind of advertisement for a more modern new age sort of, you know, wellness, Michael Polonized, Oprah-fied wellness center that him and his associates are interested in making apparently.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They didn't know about a new reformation. They didn't know about the pharmaceutical stuff. All they knew about was, look, I'm going to diligence Ruck's theory. Is it true or not? I'm going to go out, and I'm going to look for evidence. And if there's no evidence, I'll say there's no evidence. If there is, I'm going to say there is. They didn't know about all of these other things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They didn't know about the New Reformation. And you can imagine Ruck and Hillman, with the way they are, whenever he found out, what, we're rebuilding the church? The thrust of the psychedelic literature from Hoffman to McKenna. I mean, look at McKenna's stuff. McKenna was very anti-Christian. All of them are.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The whole point of psychedelics was to debunk Christianity and to dissolve it and get rid of it. After we debunk it, get rid of it. They want to destroy it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So you can imagine his surprise whenever you open up the book, of which, as in his words, the immortality key is peppered with his research. And anybody who knows his research can read the book and see. He's only cited once. There's a short discussion of a paper. Of Amon? Of Amon that's called... Smashing the Victorian Lens. It's probably his best paper, Hillman's best paper. Really?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He talks about it in there for a paragraph or maybe two. But his research is much more prominent in the book than that would lead you to believe. The witches and all of this stuff. So, yeah, they were definitely surprised. Right when the book came out, I had already known Ruck. I had already known all this literature. And Ruck introduced me to Brian through an email.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so I was like, oh, cool, new book coming out. This is going to be amazing. Maybe this stuff will become more popular. This is great. And then when the book came out, I didn't read it at first, but Ruck and I wanted to interview them about it or talk to them about it. And they were like, you know. Kind of like, what?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, I wanted to talk to him about it. Hey, what's going on? Are you happy? Isn't this amazing? These subjects are getting out there. What do you think of the book? And they hem-hawed around about it. Where I expected to find jubilation, I found, I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You know, this is what we have to do. Everybody must do it. This is going to fix everything. I believed all of that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, the context is what really matters. And I want to be careful about painting with a broad brush of saying, well, Ruck and Hillman are anti-Christian. It does sound like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, and Ruck, I don't know if Carl would say he's anti... Maybe he would. I don't know. You could ask him. But I don't... Yeah, it's there. With Hillman, it's, let me just say this, with Hillman, it's much more overt. He's very clear about his motivations and how he feels about modern Christianity and the Catholic Church. I mean, he wrote a book on the Catholic Church called Ritual Childhood.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I mean, come on. Right. So when you have motivated, you know, yeah, that's what's motivated the literature. Then you have the Immortality Key come out and it's, hey, let's, you know, and then he's meeting with the Pope and handing him the book. This is extraordinary. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Because of the nature of the experience. The nature of the experience gave me the idea that. um the problems in the world didn't result from any external political things or structures in the world it had to do with uh a level of spiritual immaturity i guess maybe you could say but that the basic idea which i wrote in an article was um that whatever limits
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Good question. I'd love to hear Brian tell the story. It was referred to in documents that were leaked to me as the holy meeting. And so I'll go, wow, a holy meeting. And then somebody sent me a photograph of him handing the book to the Pope. And I went, wow, this isn't just talk that actually happened.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so all I know is that him and Richard Rohr, who I think is like a liberal Catholic theologian and popular writer who's – I don't know. He's old. I think he's in his 80s. They went and met with the pope, and they maybe discussed Thomas Merton, who's a Catholic mystic who – I think he was French, but he lived in Kentucky down around Maker's Mark, down around Loretto.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so what was discussed, I'd love to know. Maybe Brian will come on and tell you about the new Reformation and the Holy Meeting. I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, good Catholic boy. He was trained by the Jesuits. He gives the impression that he's a Jesuit, but he's not. He's never said, I'm a Jesuit, but he talks a lot about how his mentality and approach was shaped by his early Jesuit training. I guess he went to a Jesuit high school in Philadelphia. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, when people aren't forthcoming, you have to start gathering evidence and information and start putting together a coherent picture and saying, what's going on here? I mean, they put up a statue for the immortality key in Silicon Valley. That was Elon Musk's brother, Kimball Musk, and Steve Jurvetson, who's high up at Tesla and looks like Elon Musk's right-hand man.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I'm guessing your audience knows what an alt-weekly – before the internet, all over the country, you'd have like the Tampa City Paper, the Philadelphia City Paper, the Baltimore City Paper. And alt-weeklies were a place to where – uh, non-credential journalists could write about the local scene, local bands and all of this, you know, like the village voice is kind of the prototype.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They're very much enthusiasts of this book. They erected a statue at Burning Man celebrating Brian in the book. Really? Yes, and they're heavily invested in the money side of psychedelic medicine. They're funding a lot of it. They want to turn it into a medicine. So you already see there's theological entanglements, financial entanglements.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
You know, Brian's very involved in the marijuana business. Is he really? Yes. Yeah, he was the executive director of Doctors for Cannabis Legalization. Okay. And I was told that he's also financially invested in hedge funds in marijuana and cannabis. I don't know, Denver or California or something. I haven't looked closely into it. So we know there are financial motivations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
We know there are theological motivations with the new reformation. So the question is, yeah, what is going on? That's what I've been trying to figure out. Have you asked Brian directly? Yeah, he didn't want to talk that much. He didn't want to talk about it. He answered some of my questions and didn't answer others.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Well, as far as the New Reformation, he didn't give me any information on that. He just said, I'm a guy who wrote a book, and what you see is what you get. I didn't get any information from him. There was no information on what's going on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
He didn't say, this was before I knew about the Pope stuff, he didn't say, well, here's what I'm doing, and there's going to be a holy meeting, and then we're going to get it in there. He very much wanted to separate himself from psychedelic research, that he doesn't have anything to do with Johns Hopkins, He told me, I've never been to Johns Hopkins. I don't really know those people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Exactly. Exactly. And the religious studies paper that we were discussing earlier, that where Roland Griffiths and Bob Jesse and others got at Hopkins, all these religious leaders, Muslims and Christians and Jews, and gave them psychedelics. In the first paper, which Roland approved, they cite the immortality key. Later, after a big fight over this, he took it out. So we know they knew each other.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
We know they were involved. He uses his research in the book. I mean, Roland's research is a major plank in giving it scientific credibility. But no, I got the answer to your question is I didn't get really any information out of him. He didn't really want to talk about the things that we're talking about.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
whatever obstacles were in my way as far as success and doing the things that I wanted to do and to feeling better were internal, were features of my psychology that could be worked out through one of these processes, through these drugs. So I felt that I had achieved new insight into myself. And by achieving new insight into myself, I achieved new insight into the world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
No. No. Never. He didn't really want people writing about it in that way. He likes people that take it at face value because he's pushing himself as the representative, like the new Ruck, like the flame has been passed from Carl Ruck to me. He's trying to create that impression, which obviously isn't true. That's my interest in this. I'm talking to Carl and I'm looking at...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The Joe Rogan podcast and all this other stuff. And then you talk to them and you go, hold on, there's two different stories here. Which one's true?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And how is this entangled with the Hopkins project? Because the center of my investigation is the project at Johns Hopkins. Right? So when this research is being used for a new Reformation, I go, well, hell, I've got to look into this too. What's going on? And then I read the book and I go, wow, this is fascinating. Rebuild the Catholic Church.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And this, you know, I've had people tell me, oh, Travis, this is nothing. It's just self-promotion. Right? It seems to have gone a lot farther than self-promotion. If this is self-promotion, it's quite elaborate.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, let me tell you what happened. So Roland gets diagnosed with cancer. They're putting the finishing touches on this paper, which he believes is going to be the magnum opus proving that psychedelics are the common core of all religions. What happened was a controversy happened at Johns Hopkins. Okay. His protege, Matthew Johnson, was accused of a whole bunch of stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Bullying, yelling at colleagues, bullying at colleagues. And when Roland was dying, he had to appoint a new director. Well, he naturally appointed Matt because he was his protege. He'd been working with him for 20 years. He personally groomed him to be his replacement. Mm-hmm. He puts Matt in charge of the Hopkins Psychedelic Research Center.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Other people are mad who basically are mad that he got the job and that are jealous and that maybe they have some, you know, I don't know what their resentments were, but they were mad about it and didn't want him to be the director. So they made up a bunch of stuff. They enroll and said, Matt, we got to let you go. And it created this massive controversy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And that controversy led to the New York Times expose called the psychedelic evangelist, which exposed everything that was happening behind the scenes. If that would not have happened, the paper would have been released. And we would have said, wow, they've proven that psychedelics are the common core of all religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But because of this controversy that happened at Hopkins, all of these details, people started talking about what was going on. And they went, this is not what you think it is. Behind the scenes, this is a push to incorporate psychedelics into religion. They were taking clinical trial participants like me, paying them to go out and start religious organizations and try to recruit people into it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And this was being paid for by the heir to the UPS fortune. His name's T. Cody Swift. And he wasn't just funding it and funding all of these groups by clinical trial participants. He was also working on the study. So the funder of the study was working directly with the volunteers in the study. Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And if you believe Matt Johnson, they were shaping, trying to shape their beliefs and saying, well, you know, when you only rated the experience as a four, maybe could you bump it up? Wasn't it really a five? Could you maybe bump it up a little bit? They were giving them spiritual literature to more and more try to convince them that this joined the movement.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so if you read that times investigation, obviously these are major, major ethical transgressions. And so you start to get a picture of some of what really looks more like a religion than a scientific study.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It gives you a completely different perspective you might call a mythological perspective on the world. This is extremely common. And so this is why when you have these experiences, you start reading stuff like Jung. You start reading stuff like McKenna, who was really kind of an acolyte of Jung, because you go, oh, this is a totally different way of looking at the world. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. The reason why this information hasn't gone very far is because you can see it's convoluted. People who are doing these things, they're not just going to come out and say, we're starting a new religion. Who wants to join? You see, it's extremely complex. And Bob Jesse was clear from the beginning of starting these studies. Look, science is what has credibility these days.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
We have to push this through science. But he said, he said in a lecture, he said, it's inevitable that it will turn into a new religion. centered on psychedelics. So you've asked me before, but isn't that a good thing? I don't know. I'm simply saying it's happening. I don't know whether it's good or bad.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Now, it is odd that the people that are demonizing the old religions are also starting their own.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. You know, some people have called it Scientology with drugs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, a lot of this information came out because one of these organizations that they started called Laguerre, which is a Christian missionary organization, one of the people that worked for it, his name's Joe Welker, he became unsettled by what was happening and he left the organization and leaked a bunch of emails and told what he knew and said,
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
There's something going on here that people need to know about. And he published a series on Substack called The Psychedelic Religion of Johns Hopkins. I can't remember the title, but Brian was involved in that. And the interesting thing about that is all the stuff about Brian, a couple of weeks after it was published, all those parts disappeared. But I'd already printed them out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
What do you mean they disappeared? They disappeared from the internet. They're no longer there. If you go look at it now, he doesn't mention him. But Substack has this nice feature that it's a newsletter service, meaning when you hit publish, it sends the email to your mailbox. Oh, it goes to your inbox. So you have an original record of the original documents.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So I looked and I go, hold on, there's a bunch of pieces missing now. What happened? I went back to look at it. This is interesting. All of the references disappeared. So I went back to the original emails. A bunch of it had been deleted.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. People don't want you talking about this. They do not want you, hence my little message over there. They don't want you talking about it. And most people you can dismiss, but I did the trial. I know more about this than most people do. I've been studying it for 10 years really intensely, the scholar literature.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And I not only did the clinical trial, and I've met most of these people and talked to them. So it wasn't so easy for them to dismiss me and say that, well, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Well, I do know what I'm talking about. I did the trial. You didn't. And it also came out, we should say, that Roland himself was using psychedelics during these trials.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
While he was studying them, he had also been taking them himself at his house, which he even admitted on the Tim Ferriss podcast, convinced him that it was true, that this must be true. All of these ideas are true. Perennialism, psychedelic theory of religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
archetypal stories are all the same just like it like presented in different packaging yes and you know how they came to these conclusions i'll give you a very very short summary the literature that they're reading what happened danny is people like mercha elliot and yung what they did is take all of this information on old mystery cults and old religions from all around the world all the different pagan religions all the different primitive religions and they synthesized them
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's the left hand path. It's the esoteric path. So, yeah, I definitely felt different. I had an enormous amount of enthusiasm and I immediately said, this must be what's behind religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They took reports of mystical experiences from all over the world. They synthesized them into one generic and said, these are the basic features. These are the basic features of this mystical, religious, psychedelic experience. They synthesized them. Do you see what I'm saying? Mm-hmm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yes. What they're doing is using all of this literature on religions essentially to create a new religion that they believe is a universal religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And the way that they've done that is by citing literature in which we know that those people, rather than providing accurate information about all these different religions, were leaving out the parts, and they said it themselves, the parts that don't fit and that don't share religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
The common core, we just kind of push that to the side and take an eraser and take that off in order to create this universal religion, which they believe couldn't replace all of these other religions. So what you see is the buildup to a new universal religion. And here's what I think your audience should impress upon them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
One of the books that has influenced them is a book called Global Mind Change by Willis Harmon at Stanford, one of the early psychedelic researchers. Much of this stuff was funded by the CIA. Really? Yes. He was an electrical engineer and a teacher at Stanford. And he was involved early, early on with psychedelic drugs, and he was a major enthusiast. Really interesting guy, really good guy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
But he wrote a book called Global Mind Change. And so really, I think the worrisome part about this, because some aspects, like you say, but that kind of sounds good. Some of it is interesting. Some of it does sound good. But the scale is a serious problem. Anytime you're talking about a global mind change, I don't want that. I'm not interested in that. Change to what? What are we changing to?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Because everything is very vague. Well, Rick Doblin says we're all going to get spiritualized. What does that mean? What about if you don't want to get spiritualized?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Good intentions. You know the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? This is why Huxley said the price of liberty and freedom is eternal vigilance. You see, you can't just believe what, you know, I was taught early on. You don't allow institutions to self-define themselves. All of them. Oh, you know, name a corporation. Well, we're just trying to help. No, they're not.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They're trying to make money. Right. That's what they're trying to do. And you've got to also know that though they may have very good intentions, what about if there's things they're not thinking of? So when we all participate and we all give our part of the conversation, they may say, hey, we never thought of that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And then it becomes a more constructive thing rather than they're bad, they're evil, let's demonize them. I don't want to be a part of that. I want to illuminate the ideas that are driving them. And so in my latest article, in many of my articles, what you see is just little profiles of the different figures and their ideas. I try to focus on who are the people that came up with these ideas?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
What are the ideas? And how is that playing out in the world today? Who are the people like Brian that are acting on these ideas? Because that's fascinating because this is esoteric and magical literature that you have people with enormous amounts of money like Elon Musk. They're the ones funding all of this. They're the ones funding all of the psychedelic research. Really?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Silicon Valley is the one. Elon is? Well, his brother, Kimball Musk, and the people around him, yes, absolutely. One of the biggest ones is the Psychedelic Science Collaborative Funders, or PSFC or something. It's in Silicon Valley. They're the main ones that are pushing this and funding the projects. They get together and they say –
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Jervitson. You see Genevieve Jervitson. She's been very involved in trying to push MDMA through the FDA process. But her husband, Steve Jervitson, very nice guy. I emailed with him a little bit. He was always very polite. They were the ones who erected the Statute of the Immortality Key at Burning Man. But they're also heavily involved with this. And this is all about funding psychedelic research.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And there's obviously a for-profit thing in mind, which is not, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just, yeah, that's who's funding it. These are the people who's funding it. This is just some of the people. There's more people, but.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
oh yeah it was burning man 2023 or and you said there's one erected in silicon valley no it was just the silicon valley people who put it up of this top article go to the top article yeah they're the ones who designed it oh it's a big chalice yeah and there were drones spelling out you must die before you die to die if you want to live forever whatever that's incredible man yeah with the key in the side of it that is awesome
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, and there's pictures of Jurvetson and Musk and Murerescu all in front of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah. Yeah. You can see all of this is part of this new reformation. I'm sold, brother. Bring on the new reformation. Bring it on, baby. What are we reforming? We need reform. Bring it on. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, and behavior scientists trying to engineer all of this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I don't want to live in it. Because, look, in one sense, it's a rather banal point. There's a common core to all religions. Well, there's a common core to all music, the human mind, and somebody had a rock or a guitar, blah, blah, blah. There's a common core to Led Zeppelin. And Tupac, it's called blues. Big deal. So what? I like the differences, personally. I like those little differences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I like little, small, local places. So I don't like their global mind change. I don't like their new reformation. I don't like things that are big. Large-scale ideas often have large-scale bad results. That's called the Soviet Union, the Nazi Party. It's not a good idea.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
When you're mixing futurism with occultism, brain scientists, billionaires who want a global mind change, this is ripe for journalistic inquiry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And you know, unfortunately, one of my weaknesses is the money thing, because I have no interest in business. So I hope somebody else gets on this. It's better at tracing money, because when I start looking into it, you talk about a ball of yarn. It is the most convoluted shell game you've ever seen in your life. If you're trying to figure out who's funding...
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
A lot of these studies, you look into USONA, the Hefter Institute. There are people who are doing this. And I've interviewed some of these people. It's like trying to get something out of a mob boss. You ask them a question, they just sit there like this. They don't want to talk about it. They don't, you know, it's very, it's odd.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Oftentimes I'll do it on Zoom, sometimes on phone if they don't want to do Zoom, but I prefer to do it in person, but it's not, you know, it's not always possible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, I'm going to put together—so I draw the parameters of the psychedelic renaissance, 1993 to 2023. So the start of the Council on Spiritual Practices to the death of Roland Griffiths. So I'm going to eventually put together a kind of alternative history, an alternative to the Michael Pollan book of what I've found out. So eventually I'll put that together.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I mean, it's 10 years of research, and it's now— you know, well over a hundred, maybe a couple hundred interviews. So eventually I'll put all of these articles together and try to iron them into a book and then I'll be out of it. I've spent a lot of time looking into this stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And so I'm interested in a lot of other things and I'm involved in a lot of other things, but that's probably what I'll do. But I am going to keep chasing this because what happened, Danny, was every time I thought the story, I had gotten a book contract, a book contract here was... And it just kept, the story kept going. Every time I'm like, well, it's over. Something would happen.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I thought it was over last year. Then you got the Pope thing. And I'm like, wow, what this story it's in. We're witnessing. I think the birth of a new religion. I really believe that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
It's a secret. Well, I'm not going to say it's a secret, but he hasn't talked about it. I don't know. I think it was a secret, but I don't know. I mean, again, you could ask him about the holy meeting, but no, he was never anything published about it. And I didn't publish everything that I had. That was just part of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah, Reason.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
There's two. One's called The Strange Case of the Immortality Key. And the other one's called The Most Controversial Research Paper in Psychedelic History May Never See the Light of Day. Okay. Yeah. Well, you will find something if you look on reason. Okay. Go to magazine, go to the magazine tab on the top. Okay. Go to current issue. Okay. Go down a little bit, just a tiny bit. Okay.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
A little bit more. Okay. Right there. There it is. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
This is it. Now, this will go to, I think next week, this will be, by the time this airs, I think it will be pushed out to the general public and there won't be a paywall. Okay. But I would ask people to read these articles. Go back and just read all my reporting on the psychedelic renaissance.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And I think you, cumulatively, you will see a completely different picture from that which the media has presented. And it's all, it's not speculation. It's just reporting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
They could email me, but other than that, I don't use social media. It's kitchens.travis at gmail.com. Email me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Thank you, sir.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
Thank you. Yeah, it's been fun. See you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
And I went to, I asked Roland Griffiths, who was in the room. Roland Griffiths started the psychedelic renaissance. No Roland Griffiths, no psychedelic renaissance. He's a psychologist, was at Johns Hopkins. He died in 2023. But of course, you're at Johns Hopkins. You got Roland Griffiths, who's, you know, and so I immediately said, what's behind this? You know, what do these drugs do?
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
I thought for sure he knew. And he said, we don't know. And I'm a OCD type researcher, reader. And I thought there must be an answer for this somewhere. Somewhere must know this sort of what it does from a scientific standpoint. And I did tell him and Matt Johnson, hey, I think this is what's behind religion. No, I thought this was some great insight. And I'm sure everybody says that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So the Baltimore city papers, like legendary alt weekly, I met Baynard woods and he said, Hey, I've been writing this column on country and bluegrass music, but I, you know, they gave me a bunch of other work. Do you want to do it? Uh, I was not a writer at all. In fact, I was making films at the time. And I said, you know what, to hell with it. I love country and bluegrass.
Danny Jones Podcast
#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens
So Roland, you know, he didn't have much to say about it. Matt said, I don't think so. You should read Andy Letcher's book, Shroom. But I was convinced. Because I'm from Kentucky, so I was around people who were religious, but I've never been religious. In this experience, I was convinced that, wow, this is totally supernatural. It's totally real. We don't understand it. What is this?