Travis Kitchens exposes how billionaire funding and figures like Roland Griffiths are weaponizing psychedelics to engineer a global "holy war" disguised as science. The episode details the Johns Hopkins study's ethical failures, the CIA's historical manipulation of consciousness, and the dangerous convergence of Silicon Valley capital with ancient mystery cult theories in books like The Immortality Key. Ultimately, this narrative reveals a coordinated effort by elites to replace traditional religion with a state-sanctioned, drug-fueled spiritual uniformity that threatens individual autonomy. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Reporting From Baltimore Alt Weekly00:02:02
And it's not 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.
What's up, Travis?
What's happening?
Thanks for coming, brother.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
Of course.
Dude, your background is fascinating how you got into journalism and how you got into this crazy, weird, long investigation on religion and psychedelic research and the psychedelic renaissance and this stuff with the immortality key.
For people who don't know who you are, just can you give us a background on how you got into journalism and what happened with you being involved in that John Hopkins psychedelic study?
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.
I'm guessing your audience knows what an alt weekly is.
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 where non credentialed journalists could write about.
the local scene, local bands and all of this, you know, like the Village Voice is kind of the prototype.
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.
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.
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 Highlandtown in East Baltimore.
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.
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 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 did a, you know, 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.
They don't want somebody who's a drug addict.
A lot of the studies are not, 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.
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.
How old were you at the time?
I was probably 25.
You were 25?
Yeah.
Well, when I finally entered the study, I probably was maybe 28.
Oh, really?
It took three years for the time you saw it?
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.
And what was it like when you, so you applied for it and they brought you in and like, what was the process of being introduced into this?
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?
So this study was, there was a whole list. of psychedelics.
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.
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.
They want your stomach mainly empty so that the drug takes effect very quickly.
If not, you may get there and then at, you know, 3 p.m., they're like, well, you know, you're still tripping.
They're trying to, 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, it's 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 this was high doses of psychedelics.
So one Friday, 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.
The main, and it's a university.
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, these are people who get confused.
They think these are studies in drugs.
They're not chopping up mushrooms and looking at them and putting them under microscopes.
They're studying religion and they're studying human behavior.
They're interested in the intersection of 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.
Okay.
Was there a point, like, what, at what point did you start to question the drive behind the study and the intention behind the study?
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, blindfold music playlist?
Music playlist.
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.
So when did I begin to question the aim of the study?
Yeah.
And first of all, how long did you do?
You did it for how long?
Well, it lasted several months because after one particularly powerful trip, it had weird effects on me.
And Roland Griffith 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.
What happened?
DXM is the active ingredient in Robitussin.
I used to live in San Diego with a bunch of Navy guys.
My brother was in the Navy.
And they would do what's called robo-tripping.
You just drink a bunch of Robitussin.
Familiar.
Yeah, it gives you like a strobing effect and shit.
I've never done it, but I heard stories.
Yeah, it's popular down here in Florida.
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, yeah.
Robo-tripping, baby.
Robo-tripping.
So they gave me a really high dose and it almost.
Instantly after taking it, I laid down and I didn't feel good.
And it just almost instantly popped me out of my body.
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 they were, I could, 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.
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, you know, 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 couldn't get up.
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.
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.
Really?
It has really strange effects.
There's not a lot known about it.
But they were doing psilocybin and DXM head to head.
So you're saying, so what about the DXM is so similar to Robotussin?
That's the active ingredient.
That's the ingredient in Robotussin.
That's what causes the trip.
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.
It's dangerous.
Don't do it.
Holy shit.
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 your guys are.
They 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?
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.
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.
I haven't really looked into it.
Mistaking Ketamine For Anesthetic00:03:16
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.
Yeah.
Like I just didn't even have my glasses on.
And for a while, I just didn't even wear them.
The whole thing combined, was there any sort of change you noticed in yourself after the full experiment was completed?
Like, was there any sort of different outlook or any sort of different insight that you took from it?
Well, it put me in a, 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, you know, this is what we have to do.
Everybody must do it.
This is going to fix everything.
I believed all of that.
Why did you believe that, though?
Why do you think you believed that?
Because of the nature of the experience.
The nature of the experience gave me the idea that the problems in the world didn't result from any external political things or structures in the world.
It had to do with a level of spiritual immaturity, I guess maybe you could say.
But that basic idea, which I wrote in an article, was that.
Whatever limits, 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 achieve new insight into the world.
It gives you a completely different perspective, you might call a mythological perspective on the world.
This is extremely common.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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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, woohoo.
And so I immediately said, what's behind this?
You know, what do these drugs do?
I thought for sure he knew.
And he said, We don't know.
And I'm an 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.
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 not from a religion.
I'm from Kentucky.
So I was around people who are 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?
So that was my immediate reaction 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.
So, for people who may not know who Roland Griffith is, you said he was the guy who spearheaded the whole psychedelic revolution.
Can you explain for people how that happened and how he became to be?
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.
He said, This is going to fix the world.
We have to do it.
It will usher in a 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.
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?
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 Hopkins his whole life.
He was a very distinguished psychopharmacist.
Didn't he criticize soda companies?
For putting caffeine in there.
He did.
He studied caffeine and he was on like a jihad against the soft drink manufacturers.
So they hate him and they actually published like hit pieces on him.
Wow.
But he was after them because the soft drink manufacturers said, we put it in there for flavor, but it has no flavor.
So they were put, he accused them of putting it in there to addict the consumers.
Right.
And so he eventually became bored with studying opioids and tobacco.
That's interesting though.
Like, how did caffeine become.
Such a common theme of soft drinks?
Good question.
Because the only reason I drink sodas is for the caffeine.
Absolutely.
Like, I don't drink a soda for the taste.
That's what Roland's in, right?
If I'm drinking a Mountain Dew, like, obviously it tastes great, but I'm drinking a Mountain Dew because I'm going to get fucking jacked.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so when this whole four, a lot of the press around this came out, you remember when Four Loco, 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, And coffee.
He didn't even drink coffee.
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.
Um, yeah, so, 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, 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.
Ralph Hood, Walter Houston Clark, famous psychologist, Houston Smith, they brought Albert Hoffman over.
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.
He didn't meet Roland until 1999.
But they 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.
Strassman knows a lot about the history of psychedelic research.
Strassman reads Hebrew, right?
I think he reads ancient Hebrew.
He's got a book, DMT, about DMT and the ancient Hebrew prophets, so he probably does.
Yeah.
His books are great.
I mean, the spirit molecule is a big, massive book.
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.
Right, right, right, right.
Yeah.
So, what was the spiritual practices organization?
Council on Spiritual Practice.
The Council on Spiritual Practices.
Jordan Peterson was a part of this.
Yeah.
Yep.
And their goal was what?
To launch the studies at Hopkins.
They said, launch the studies at Hopkins.
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.
See, every time I hear him talk about this stuff on podcasts, I mean, I know he's done podcasts with Ruck and Marirescu and he seems interested in stuff, but he seems to be more ignorant of it.
I know.
Well, he's right.
Yeah.
I don't, 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.
I agree.
I feel the same way.
I don't know what he's talking about, but I think his main message is that religion is a framework for society, right?
Yeah, that it's the operating system of the human mind.
He believes the mind is a myth generator and that the mind is, 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.
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 experiences.
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.
And so, he came up with this book, which he believed was going to guide humanity into the right way so that they wouldn't all, you know, we wouldn't kill ourselves or something.
It's quite strange, the book, especially.
You really only just read the intro, the rest of it is.
So, are you saying.
So, we're saying like the human mind, the mystical mind, we like to fill in the gaps of shit we don't understand with things like God?
No, I think what 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 if you have God is just kind of a fixed point, right?
Okay.
And that it orients society or the individual towards something, right?
And so, you know, his stuff is just rehashed by Carl Jung.
And Jung's, if you read one of his later books, 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, buy this little book called The Undiscovered Self.
It's a book.
The Undiscovered Self.
Yeah.
And if you read it, you'll understand all of the psychedelic literature.
Okay.
Because that's pretty much where all the ideas come from.
And there's an article in it called Religion as a.
It's called Religion.
It's about five or six essays, and it's called Religion as a Countervailing Force to Mass Mindedness or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was something I was talking about with Dennis McKenna a couple of weeks ago when he was in here.
And I think it was a.
It was.
This was a Jungian idea where he said that the human consciousness is.
It's like a giant archipelago where there is above the water.
Right.
You see a bunch of little islands of individual people.
Yeah.
And then below that, there's this giant, you know, volcano that's, it's all connected.
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.
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.
And if you understand Jung, you understand McKenna because it's just rehash Jung.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or his archaic revival.
I think people, a lot of people replace God with aliens.
They absolutely do.
That's the book we were talking about, Cosmic.
Cosmic.
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.
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.
Yeah.
So it's definitely become, and you know, Jung's the one who started this.
UFO is a modern myth.
Right.
He wrote a little book that started people on this.
I had this dude in here, or this gentleman in here, older man, by the name of Chris Bledsoe.
You ever heard of him?
No.
He's a guy who lives in North Carolina.
I forget which part of North Carolina.
I want to say it's near Goldsboro, maybe.
No, maybe I'm wrong.
Anyways, he lives in North Carolina and he was seeing these crazy orbs all around the sky and he was filming them all the time.
And he was like showing, posting these videos on these.
What is the UFO, like the American UFO organization?
MUFON.
MUFON.
That's what it was.
Thanks, Steve.
So he was reporting on MUFON and showing these pictures.
And all of a sudden he gets visited by like the CIA.
And people that are in NASA, like legitimate people that work for NASA and the CIA, like this is documented.
Wow.
CIA Visits And UFO Investigators00:02:36
And they're becoming friends with him.
They're befriending him.
And then he gets John Alexander and these legendary remote viewing people that were in the remote viewing program to visit him.
He has photos with all these people.
They're inviting him to NASA.
And what did they want?
According to him, they wanted to understand why he was seeing these things because they wanted to study them.
They knew these people believed they were aliens or religion.
They wanted to understand why they were showing themselves to Chris.
And he was taking pictures and uploading them to the internet.
Yeah, oh, they're all over.
He has them all over his Instagram.
And you've seen them.
He literally came here to do a podcast with us.
And he goes to me and Steven, he goes, he goes, me and you, we can go out, we'll go to the beach, and I can summon these things.
He takes us out to the beach.
Bro, he took us to the beach the night before we did the podcast, him and his daughter.
And he's like praying to the heavens, like praying to God.
To bring these angels down to show us, right?
Like, please show yourself to Danny.
We're going to do this podcast tomorrow.
And I want him to be a believer and understand this.
And he brought us a video camera.
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Planes Over The Beach Horizon00:02:24
And literally, I shit you not, this fucking orb came out of the ocean and like moved sideways, moved back the other way, and then disappeared again back into the ocean.
And we got it all on video.
I don't know what the fuck it was.
I very much want to see it.
We've got the video.
He's going to pull it up for you.
You haven't thought, did you, you thought through all the angles of it was some kind of magic trick?
Unless he hired somebody on a boat, I didn't, he didn't know where I was going to take him.
Yeah.
I just took him to a random restaurant on the beach over here.
He did, he had no idea what restaurant I was going to take him to.
And unless he planted somebody with a boat with a drone with a lantern on it, like 500 yards off the beach.
And this was like a crystal ball type orb?
I don't know if you would call it a crystal ball.
It was just a light.
It was so far.
It was beyond the horizon.
And what do you think it was?
I have no.
I have no clue.
I don't know what to think it was.
It was definitely, I know what it wasn't.
It was not an airplane.
Well, if it came out of the ocean, it wasn't an airplane.
Right.
It came off the horizon.
Oh, it came off the horizon.
Look at this video.
This is insane.
So we've got a few of them.
One of these is the best one.
I can't remember.
I think it's this one.
One more time.
Oh.
See that thing flashing?
That's an airplane.
Right on the water.
Right on the water.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's what we're looking for.
If you could flash.
For us.
So the contrast right there is the ocean that stops.
You can see.
Right there.
It's still in the camera.
It's still in here.
Wait, there's another one going.
Look, it goes out.
Yeah, it fades out.
It fades out to nothing.
And look at this one getting brighter.
Oh.
Up there is a third one.
Here, someone needs to look through this.
It's very bright.
Thank you.
Oh, you see it?
It's right there.
You see it?
That is an orb.
Now, watch.
Now, that one's going to go out.
I'm tracking it here.
Do you want to look?
Yeah, can you see it?
Let me find it.
I lost it.
So we saw air traffic coming in to go to Tampa Airport, right?
There's planes.
There were planes coming over the beach, like landing on the airport.
We knew what the planes were.
These were nothing like the planes.
They literally came up off the horizon, went one way, sometimes changed directions, went the other way, and then just fizzled out to nothing.
What was the distance since you can't tell from the video?
It was way out past the horizon.
It was like way far.
I would say.
Three miles?
Yeah, maybe three miles.
And you hurt.
Bigfoot Festival And Ancient Myths00:15:17
Before that happened, you sat there and watched him summon it.
We watched him.
He was like saying, please.
I even saw a shooting star go right above my head.
And how long from him summoning it till it appeared?
I would say about an hour and a half, maybe.
Holy shit.
Maybe even two hours.
So, this is how I explain it.
I'm like, yeah, something crazy.
I saw something crazy I've never seen before.
But at the same time, I've never sat and stared at the sky for two hours in my life.
Right.
So, how often do you stare at the sky and see like this?
Yeah, right.
If you stare at the sky all night long, maybe you'll always see this.
Okay.
See, I was under the impression that he summoned it and then it just popped up.
Because I was saying, if that happened, that's really something.
Yeah.
But go to his Instagram, Steve.
Yeah, so he wrote this book, UFO of God.
What's his idea?
What does he say it is?
So his idea is he's been through his life, his life has been like he's been through the most traumatic experiences that I've ever heard of.
Like, he's been through so much shit in his life.
He was shot in the back by a shotgun hunting.
He literally, there was a point in the book where when he was younger, his wife or his girlfriend and him were at a party.
Or he was supposed to meet, he was working and he was supposed to meet his girlfriend at a party.
And he was on his way there, he was late.
And on his way to the party or whatever, he was like really, really late.
He saw a car that was completely rolled over on the side of the road by this like curve or whatever.
He went to go rescue the person.
The person was covered in blood.
The person died in his arms.
And he like called, like was yelling people to call the ambulance to come save this person.
He couldn't even recognize this human being because it was like so destroyed.
Wife that died in his arms, but he had no clue and he was late to the party.
Um, the guy like went through he's been through so much trauma in his life, he thinks that the trauma that he's been through is what opened up some portal in his head to see aliens.
And now he and he also reports in his book seeing this lady, this angel lady that like floats and shit and talks to him.
But, anyways, this is what the orbs are.
This is the guy.
Oh, man, these are the orbs.
I wonder if there's audio.
Yeah, there's audio.
Click the bottom right.
There's a little micro, a little there you go.
You can hear him like fang the whole time.
He's got a tripod now.
Fast focused.
According to what I can see.
The 18th anniversary today, January 8th.
Look at another one, Steve, so you can show one that's not as clear as that.
Try that one.
Yeah, try that one.
Look at this.
This is the Bigfoot Festival.
This is underneath.
The clouds.
Did he say Bigfoot Festival?
Oh my god, did he really say Bigfoot Festival?
Keep an eye on it.
It's gonna get brighter, I think.
What color are you getting off of it?
Bright white?
Look at the bridge.
This is the IR.
I can't keep it in frame.
So, has anybody you know legitimately tried to debunk it?
No, I've never heard anyone.
I mean, the most legitimate thing I've heard, and I don't know if you would even call this legitimate, but the.
Is that now.
What's he got Limp Biscuit in there for?
Is that really Limp Biscuit?
Where's Limp Biscuit?
It's Fred Durst.
Where was Fred Durst?
Right there.
Oh, it is Fred Durst.
He's forgetting about it.
I want it for sure.
All right.
And you tell Chris Jr., I said, What's up?
I'll do that for sure.
Oh, so his son.
His son's in a metal band.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
So his son, I think it's his son or his son in law, is in a really big metal band, and they'd Tour.
I think they might have been on tour with them or something.
Wow.
I like this guy, man.
Yeah, he's a funny guy.
He's a fun guy.
But, like, I don't know.
I mean, could it be satellites, maybe?
Like low orbit satellites?
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 that.
Do you ever 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 kind of electricity current going.
And you would touch the ball and it would come up to your finger.
That's what it looked like.
That's what it looked like.
I mean, if that's legit, that's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.
Yeah, these things.
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 beasts.
I like that he's this southern guy from the Bible.
I love that too.
I like it.
And he's a slow, has a slow southern draw.
Yeah.
Well, people in the backwards place have been obsessed with the occult for a long time.
If this was just some random guy posting videos, I wouldn't even think twice about it.
But the fact that he's got literal CIA people and NASA people visiting him, taking photos with him, letting him publish his book with photos of them, talking about them.
There's secret aerospace engineers that had to remain silent that come and visit him and say crazy shit to him.
He's been through all kinds of weird, top secret shit.
That's amazing.
So, why?
I don't understand.
That's just one of the most perplexing things to me about this story.
Any kind of paranormal phenomenon.
Yeah, but they also reinforce his beliefs.
Tell him that they're telling him what he's seeing is real.
Well, I mean, 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.
Because, 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.
And the fact that you saw it, if you hadn't seen it, I would say this is a hoax.
But, right.
That is weird.
Yeah, that video that Steven showed you in the beginning, we shot that the night before the podcast.
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.
It was the ocean, though.
Yeah.
It was on the beach.
That doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
It came from below the horizon.
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.
You know, can we use these things for the military?
How many of these, how many friends would you say you got?
Interesting.
Yeah.
Anyway.
And what was your impression of his personality?
Does he seem dumbfounded by this?
He.
He seems very level headed.
He didn't seem like he was, he definitely wasn't like trying to convince me of anything.
He was just telling me like what he's been through.
And I think for him, those people in the government and the military confirming all this shit for him and like befriending him, I think makes him feel like, I mean, he's got some other stories where he was, he's literally at this party, this government party where the head of the CIA is there.
And there's pictures with him and the head of the CIA.
And some guy apparently had like a, Like, passed out, and then Chris went to like heal him, like, touched him and healed him back to life.
Okay, now we're getting into this.
So, he's got healing powers too, yeah, right?
Wow, this is some old timey southern shit.
Oh my god, bro, you gotta read his book, man.
I want to meet this guy.
Now, did you have you should tell Pesalco to look into it?
They know each other, they know each other, I knew it because she loves eccentric people like this, yeah, yeah, yeah, man.
She beat me to the punch because I want to meet him, yeah, he's an interesting dude, that's incredible.
So, I don't know.
I don't know what those orbs are, but there's a.
I don't know.
I would love to talk to some of these people, these folks in the military and the CIA.
What's the range on this thing?
Is it like Bluetooth?
Could he call one over?
What about if he wanted to send one through the window?
He said they've come up.
Yeah.
He said they come up like within 10 feet of him before.
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 does have to be within a mile of him, is what I'm saying.
No, his kids have done it without him.
What the fuck?
Yeah.
This is insane.
It's crazy.
I've got to read this book.
It's crazy.
I've got to get you in touch with this fellow.
I'm telling you.
Maybe you guys could collaborate.
Yeah.
How did we get on this topic in the first place?
I don't remember.
We're talking about God and UFOs and aliens.
Maybe that's what it was.
Oh, well, no.
You said that some people say that it's aliens, that St. Paul or whoever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not only that, I think some people replace their God, like the mystery of God, with extraterrestrials.
coming here.
Absolutely.
They just graph that mindset.
And that's what Peters, 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 a religion.
The only thing is, do you know what it is or not?
You know, and so, yeah, yeah, definitely.
I mean, that was Jung's idea that this is the modern myth.
This is replacing, 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 conferences.
Yeah, he said he saw a UFO in Luxurera when he was tripping on mushrooms.
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.
So I don't know.
I'm not.
Are you familiar with John Mack, the Harvard psychologist?
He sounds familiar.
Yeah.
He interviewed hundreds of people who had abduction experiences.
Oh, really?
And he interviewed them and hypnotized some of them, I think, and tried to figure out what was going on with the abduction experience.
Yeah.
Because they were also similar.
Yeah.
And those I found convincing.
Some writers that attributed that to.
You know, 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.
This place is chock full, a village full of people that are into every aspect of all of this shit.
Really?
Oh, absolutely.
We could go up there right now, and they healed me with crystals.
They did everything.
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.
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.
Man, I got to hit that place up.
I go up to that part of Florida often, New Smyrna.
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.
Steve, pull up Casadega.
I need to see this shit.
Pull it up.
It's cool.
Yeah, that band Bride Eyes, who I'm not a huge fan, but they.
Bride Eyes?
Yeah, they have a.
The chemo band?
Yeah, they have an album called Casadega about Casadega.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it's cool.
Yeah.
Okay, so this study, this John Hopkins study, was supposed to be like an empirical, conservative, straight laced scientific study into what psychedelics were actually chemically or mechanically doing to the brain.
Like, how, what is actually happening?
When you enter these psychedelic states, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're studying, yeah.
We're studying the science of spirituality, the science of these experiences.
Roland died before this thing got published.
Well, he published many papers.
What started the psychedelic renaissance is they started in 2000.
Six years later, they published a paper.
In 2006, they published a paper that said psilocybin can induce or occasion reliably mystical experiences.
This was a detonator.
It was the big bang of the psychedelic renaissance, too, because 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, scientist.
Roland Griffiths said, We can do this.
It exploded all over the world.
They started studying it again.
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 study.
So people in different universities across the world or institutions can say, Look, this legitimate guy, this scholar published a paper, so that gives us.
Licensed to do it basically, absolutely.
So we don't look like cuckoos, 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.
Without Roland, it 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 New Yorker.
Michael Pollan wrote a book about him called How to Change Your Mind.
Uh, 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 didn't seem to turn out to be true.
So he was into the religious crowd.
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 hope.
So when you say religious bullshit with these guys, what you're saying is they have a fundamental belief that psychedelics can change the world.
Yes.
And that everyone needs to take psychedelics to, to, To fix the ales of you.
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, evangelist was, they called that article about Roland the psychedelic evangelist.
I was very surprised they did that.
I wouldn't go as far as saying an evangelist.
Okay.
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 that 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 take some water.
Good.
Want another water?
No, I'm good.
Okay.
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.
Global Spiritual Commonalities Explained00:10:08
It's not enough for certain people to do it.
Everybody's got to do it.
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.
It should be mandatory for people.
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?
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.
Medical religion or the medical side and the religious side.
So medical and the spiritual.
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 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?
And they're so tightly entangled, it's almost impossible to separate them.
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.
Right.
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?
Yeah.
So do you think it would be a bad thing if psychedelics became ubiquitous and more people used them?
Like, let me give you just a crazy hypothetical example.
So, say if Trump and Putin and Xi Jinping all sat and went together and did some ayahuasca retreat together.
Yeah.
You think that would be a bad thing?
Well, we are, we can, we don't have to speculate because they've been using it in Israel, Palestine.
They've done, 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.
I mean, do you think, what was it, is a probability, what's the probability of it de escalating?
Zero, a, a, a, a global nuclear war.
Zero, because what we, Stan Groff, who knows his, he's what, 90 something years old now.
He knows more about psychedelics than anybody.
Stanislav Groff, G R O F, the way of the psycho, not the movie.
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, dude, this is the most bad.
I know.
He calls them non specific.
This is a definition a lot of people know.
He calls them nonspecific 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.
Nonspecific amplifiers of mental processes.
If you give them to crazy people, they get more crazy.
That's why they screen out people who are mentally ill.
Right.
What about violent people?
Violent people?
Makes them more violent?
It would be a very bad idea.
I don't know.
We don't know because you can't do a systematic study get a bunch of piss or 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, right?
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.
The way you try to give it the veneer of 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?
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 the Mystical Experience Questionnaire.
And it has all the attributes of the experience that they believe these experiences have.
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 if you have a mystical experience, they say you have, there's more therapeutic benefits.
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?
So then I went and found him in Tennessee and he's an expert on Appalachian serpent handling cults.
Who?
Ralph Hood.
Who wrote it?
Ralph Hood.
He 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.
And why did these people bring in all of these religious leaders from different places?
Like they brought in a Christian preacher, a Jewish guy, a Muslim.
What was going on with that?
And what were they looking for with those people?
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.
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.
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 this 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.
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.
So they're trying to find commonalities between all of these people's experiences from different religions and different spiritual backgrounds.
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, 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 experiences through prayer and through all kinds of different ways, right?
Like you could start fasting today and you could, like, you ever seen Orthodox Jews when they do this stuff start chanting prayer and they do this?
Repetitive motions.
You can conjure these types of trance states all different kinds of ways without drugs, right?
In the old, you know, you know, Hillman, he studies people.
You can read books, Galen, all these other people.
They're, they would go in caves.
Why?
Because it's dark.
And you would cultivate a mystical experience in there.
You know, there's recipes next to recipes for drug, 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.
You don't want to, you don't want to crawl into the cave trying to get, Apollo or Zeus on the horn and 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.
In a 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.
Caves in the ancient Greek mind.
Yeah.
She writes all about divine mania and Plato, and she goes through all of this literature, much like Hillman does, and she finds these instances of people conjuring altered states of consciousness.
And she's written a ton about this.
It's really interesting.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, do you think that these ancient mystery cults had anything to do with the foundation of Christianity?
Or do you think, I mean, do you think there Is a link to some of these pagan drug cults and the shit they were practicing before Christianity came on the scene that spawned Christianity in a way?
Well, I don't think there's any, there's no evidence that it spawned Christianity, but there's.
Of course, Christianity was a spin off of those.
Like they borrow shit from those drug cults.
Yeah, 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, you know?
Uh, he was portrayed.
You 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.
So, early Christianity was in this larger context next to these things.
Whenever you're trying to recruit people for a cult, so Saint 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.
He, what does your guy do?
Christianity Borrowing From Drug Cults00:02:24
Well, we can do all that too, so come here.
And they were, they absolutely were doing that when it like.
The last major pagan god to fall was Asclepius, right?
He was the healer, right?
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.
There were labyrinths, 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.
Right.
But it seems like Christianity, like, cherry picked a bunch of things from all these ancient myths and mysteries, like, for their, like, like, The idea of Jesus, like the God that dies and then rises again, right?
Yeah, but a lot of the foundation on which 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 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.
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Archaeology And Absurd Comparisons00:07:24
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The new James Frazier was Mircea Eliot, who was an extremely important person in all of this literature.
So, what you're talking about, the rising and dying gods.
Yeah, like Persephone.
Yeah.
So, that's what.
Because this is in Ruck's book.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because he's drawing from this literature.
He's drawing from the book you're talking about?
Yes.
No, 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.
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, Matt, Jesus is just a generic dying and rioting agricultural God.
And people lost their minds within the academy.
You know, you still conservative Christianity.
Well, that just means it's true if they got rid of it.
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.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So what you start to, 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 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 mean?
Yeah, but even Hillman and Ruck believe it, right?
And these are the people who believe it.
These guys read these languages, right?
Like, rough.
But there's a lot of other people who read these languages.
You can't just say, I'm only listening to the people who say what I like.
Right.
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.
It's not that absurd.
Yes, it is.
I don't think it's that absurd.
Because I haven't had Graham Hancock on here, but I don't know if you're familiar with the debate he did with Flint Dibble.
Yeah, that was great.
Hancock was demolished.
I agree with you.
I agree with you, but I also had Dibble in here.
Yeah.
And he specializes in Athens and archaeology in Athens.
And he has a little bit of classical Greek in his background.
And we were talking about Atlantis, and he perfectly, systematically dismantled the Atlantis theory for me.
Like, made perfect sense.
I was completely on board with him.
I thought it made perfect sense.
As well, when he was debating Graham on his lost ancient civilization, that was ugly.
Although he did get a lot of shit wrong in that debate, there were some shit that where Flint.
He probably exaggerated shit with 250,000 ships.
There were, or there's a million ships.
That was way the off.
Doesn't matter because he was absolutely demolished.
And Graham Hancock's, if you look at the out 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, 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, but no, nobody else can see it.
You 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 Eric von Donigen.
You know his stuff?
I know Eric von Donigen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, again, there are things in that podcast where Flint acts like what he does is clever, right?
He got 90% of it spot on.
I agree with him on it.
But there were, to be fair, there were points in that podcast where he took things and said it as if it was gospel when he was completely wrong about it.
But that doesn't make Hancock right.
He's still a good guy.
No, no, you're right.
It doesn't make Hancock right.
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 issues.
So I think there's a psychological thing that happens with people like Flint who have spent their entire lives, as well as him and his father, and probably his grandfather, who knows, in archaeology, in the academic part of this stuff, drinking and eating the gruel, sludging through the mud, doing all the boring shit, reading all the boring shit.
And then, like, you know, next thing you know, you're 40 years old.
No one knows who the f you are.
And you've been in the mud doing this archaeology your whole life.
Then you have people like Graham Hancock who go on Joe Rogan.
They make documentaries.
They write all these books.
They're making millions of dollars.
Everybody knows who they are.
And you're a fing Flint devil.
Nobody knows you from Adam.
Exactly.
Right?
So you're saying he's bitter?
Absolutely, he's bitter.
I'm sure there's something to that.
But to us.
I'm not saying, I'm not giving him a pass.
I'm not giving Graham a pass.
because of that.
I'm just saying you have to understand the whole dynamic of this thing.
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.
I think he believes a lot of the stuff he says.
He might.
I think that there's legitimate questions in some of this stuff.
And also, Flint gave him credit.
He goes, A lot of the people I know in archaeology that are legit archaeologists, they only got into archaeology because of Graham.
Because of him.
Because of Graham.
I think it's the same thing with Hillman.
I think the shit that Hillman says, I think he's inspiring people to prove him wrong and to learn Greek and to read these ancient languages and revive this shit.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think there's something to that.
But so in that Flint podcast, like he was really, really, I was following him and I was agreeing with him and he was really laying it out in a very cohesive manner with all the stuff about Greek and Atlantis and how it's probably completely bullshit.
And going back to Eric Von Dan again.
Yeah.
But then I showed him these things.
These ancient vase, I don't know if you're familiar with these.
Are like dynastic Egyptian.
That's a 3D print of an Egyptian vase that was, according to the academics and the Egyptologists, created around the same time as the dynastic Egyptians, which was about 4,500 to 5,000 years ago.
Yeah.
When they only had copper chisels and pounding stones to create things, right?
And there's even depictions, there's like, there's depictions, drawings, and stuff on caves and tablets where they show how they made these.
They show them like going like this on wheels and stuff.
But this guy who lives down the street from here, Matt Bell, yeah, here they are.
That's how the Egyptologists believe that these were made, right?
So these are made out of granite, some of the hardest, like rose granite and red granite, right?
Some of the hardest stones on earth.
And he had these measured on a laser light scanner thing at some big aerospace company.
And this vessel is the ones that he purchased, the real ones from ancient Egypt, are perfectly symmetrical within like one thousandth of a human hair.
Like impossible.
It would have to have been made on a CNC machine today.
Right.
Like on a computer.
And there's, it's impossible.
Like, how the f did they make these?
And these handles are made out of granite.
And I asked Flint this.
And like, he creates this.
Flood Myths And Red Granite00:09:06
It's like this, to me, it's like a cop out where he says, oh, it's bullshit.
People like him don't deserve to talk about this stuff or question this stuff because he's buying these vessels that are contributing to cartels.
That are selling them, and it's this underground black market.
I don't want to be associated, I don't even want to be in the same room with one of these ancient relics.
This is what Dibble told me.
This is what Dibble told me.
And it's the same thing he's doing with Graham trying to call him a right, oh, a Nazi.
I see, I don't, that's what would be my criticism of Dibble.
It's whenever he turned it into a personal attack that Nazi rights of person.
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, is, you know, has this romantic, noble, savage type of thing, and there's racism in it, that makes him racist.
I do not believe for a second that Graham Hancock is racist.
Sorry, I don't.
Do I think he's full of shit?
Yes.
Is Dibble 100% right?
No.
And is 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 Dibble, well, you're wrong.
And yeah, that's kind of annoying.
It is kind of annoying.
But it doesn't change.
And when people come in here and they're unwilling or unable to say the words, I don't know, it's always a red flag.
It's a red flag.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a red flag.
So.
So, yeah, going back to Hillman and Ruck.
So, I mean, these guys, you're saying because just because Hillman and Ruck believed that drugs were everywhere in antiquity and probably had something to do with Christianity.
No, go ahead.
Sorry.
You interviewed a lot of people who think otherwise, right?
I mean, well, you have to.
You have to, right?
And most of these people that are saying otherwise are in universities and have some of them, they're professors of religious studies.
Some of them.
Okay.
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.
Dozens and dozens of scholars over the year, 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, They've they're always willing.
Everybody that I've talked to has been totally willing to answer what were probably stupid, uninformed questions from me, and were totally nice.
I never sensed there was any conspiracy at all, but they're working 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.
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 gonna be right.
Everybody now that may seem right in 50 years, a bunch of it will probably be wrong.
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, 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, 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 race.
I don't believe any of that personally.
That's just my opinion.
Yeah.
I think they're good fantasy books like Von Donnekin.
Von Donnekin stuff, you know, I just did Magicians of the Gods or something.
Same thing.
I saw you got Jason Giorgiani.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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, come first?
Did we come first?
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.
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.
By the time of William James, 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.
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?
Yeah, kind of, yeah.
So the flood yeah, the flood myths that I mean that's, and that's something that Graham Hancock talks about too.
That's, one of his biggest questions is like, why are the flood myths everywhere, You know?
And his hypothesis is that there was a cosmic impact at the end of the ice age that was the younger dry, right?
Which, yeah, I think that's pretty legit, man.
I like that theory, I'm a believer.
Oh, hey, look, and then that you know, it melted the ice caps.
I mean, and that created a big flood that took out a lot of the megafauna in the North American continent, yeah, not so much in Africa, which is why there's a lot of big megafauna there still, yeah, and none in here.
Um, could be, and then that maybe that was something that was around the world, which.
Which inspired those flood myths could be any kind of large scale theory like that is probably going to be almost always wrong.
Uh, you need to think, people need to think on a much smaller scale because then you have a chance of it being actually true.
Uh, when you're thinking of large scale, but what they are is a good, sometimes a good starting point.
Maybe this happened, and then you start working on other little elements of it.
But here's what I would, 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. Kazaban.
And if you want to understand the tradition of literature this is in, this is the book you should read because it.
It goes into Graham Hancock's forebears and where he got all of these ideas.
Mr. Who?
Casabon?
Casabon.
He's a character in the novel Middle March.
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.
Alternate Dimensions And Flying Universes00:13:36
And you get also Carl Rux, the people before him who were sent.
The late 1800s were already saying, What if Jesus was a shaman?
You started to get books like that.
Brilliant.
Yes.
And you started to get, like, there's a book, Cochlean 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.
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 about if they were on drugs?
Well, you can imagine how this went over.
It was taboo then.
It's taboo now.
Right.
You see.
But it does make a lot of sense, though.
Like, the, like, sure.
A DMT experience is like dying.
Like, there's definitely clear.
I don't, I wouldn't have to read literature on it or hear other people's experience first to have that myself.
Like, I didn't experience that just because I read about it first.
You know what I mean?
Like, it didn't influence the way I, the way I experienced it.
Like, it was definitely like a, Dying and being born again experience for sure.
And it was definitely like seeing God or meeting God or understanding like the creation.
Like you're flying through this universe, this like you're flying, like having the universe ripped open and flying through light arteries.
You know what I mean?
And seeing like the foundational creation of what we are.
And it's like down to the very fiber of your being.
Yeah.
It seemed, it is to me at least, it seemed like a very, To a lot of people it is.
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.
We don't know.
Remember in 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.
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.
Maybe, I don't see, there's probably no way to find out.
But we know they were experimenting with altered states of consciousness.
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.
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.
And then you have Pentecostals that don't do serpents that run at the holy rollers.
So many New Testament scholars have argued that this is for the early Christian communities were doing this.
So were some of them also using drugs?
Probably.
But what this turns into amongst the public is they were all on drugs.
Jesus was a mushroom and I got cold on all that.
Jesus was a mushroom.
Like the Allegro stuff.
Allegro.
Yeah, I'm familiar with it.
The Legro stuff.
And he ties the connection of the mushroom, basically how it's not pollinated like a normal plant is.
It comes out of the ground through the mycelia from the rain, and the rain is the sperm of God, and the mushroom is like the virgin.
Well, the mushroom is or not the virgin, but like the immaculate conception.
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.
Oh, wow.
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.
Yeah.
And so then you think about how bizarre these studies are at Hopkins.
You have this mushroom.
You give these people this mushroom.
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.
Strange, dude.
So, we have no idea.
No scientists have any idea of what, like, chemically or mechanically is actually happening.
Like, what are these pathways?
Well, they come up, okay, you know, one of the paradoxes, well, it increases neuroplasticity.
They had this default mode network.
That was the rage for a while.
They discarded that.
They've put people in imaging machines so you see colors.
Okay, we don't know much.
As Roland Griffith said in my latest article, Our ability to measure what's going on in the brain is incredibly primitive.
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, 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.
So, no, there is no scientific explanation for it.
None.
That's insane to me.
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, it ain't going to happen.
Not going to figure it out.
So, yeah, that's built into what's built into the human psyche.
If we can't even understand it with science, it has to be something that we don't.
It's some like, like, what if it is we, what if we are contacting some other realm or some other like beings that are from a different plane of existence, right?
Like, what if that's true?
Yes.
Well, in some of the criticism, you noticed I put both sides.
I put people who criticize this and I put boosters like Ralph Hood 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.
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?
Well, the snake told me or the jaguar told me.
And everybody laughs, but we don't know where they got it from.
To automatically dismiss that is anti scientific.
It absolutely is.
It absolutely is.
It's, and, 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, 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, this is amazing, these experiences are amazing, 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 newspaper claims and media claims.
And it's the basis of the immortality key.
Whenever he puts in the introduction, he puts this conversion experience and says, look, these experiences change people for the better.
And that's only anecdotal, is your point.
That's not with everybody.
It's the side.
Yeah, it's 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.
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 advertisements.
Are there pharmaceutical.
Advertisements of suicide?
Well, the press is doing it for free for them.
Yeah.
Right, the press.
Yeah, because they're using their pub, Bob, Jesse, other people, they're going in, but 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, 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, I was aware of that, but 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.
So what about, are you aware of MAPS?
Yeah, absolutely.
So what, so MAPS is the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic science.
It was a, it's a, it's an organization started in the eighties 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.
But Rick is, is, well, I think he's from Boston or maybe he's from Chicago, but he landed here in Sarasota, Florida.
And he went to New College.
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.
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 with the psychedelics.
Well, they're psychedelic, but they're very different from psilocybin.
It's not.
They don't provide this mystical experience.
You can get benefits from it without that.
So, is MAPS doing the same thing?
Absolutely.
And they're all, they also have been in what their main strategy has been is using veterans.
All the veterans you see, Rick Perry.
I've never heard a veteran talk about a negative experience with MDMA or some pillage.
No, no, 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 them.
And I'm not saying that would, that should be a scare tactic.
When was that one?
One of them was in Oregon at some kind of music festival, and there's been several.
It's, there's so much in the news.
Mm.
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.
It's not.
But they're only highlighting the most positive experiences, and where you get into trouble is when these people are being paid.
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're become part of a larger plot by people who have financial interest in these things to some of them just want it to pass through the FDA, but other people, they've gotten on.
Profit companies where they're making money and they're promoting themselves, 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.
Who, how much money could there possibly be to make from pushing psilocybin, right?
Well, if you can, like all the big pharmaceutical companies, they don't do any of that stuff.
They've all, oh, they absolutely are interested.
Yeah, Johnson Johnson's, Spravado is their own ketamine, they're making billions.
I don't know.
You could look up how much money does Spravado make.
They're absolutely studying psychedelics right now.
Compass pathways, Johnson Johnson maps, and they want to patent particular variations of the drug.
Johnson Johnson does?
Johnson Johnson.
Can you find this, Steve?
They sell, just look up Spravado.
It was just Spravado.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's a ketamine, I think it's a nose thing.
Oh, my God.
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.
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.
Hmm.
Specific revenue figures for Spravado are not publicly disclosed, but its high cost suggests significant earnings.
They're making a fortune off of it.
Wholesale cost of Spravado can range from $590 to $880 per dose, with each treatment costing around $1,000 to $1,500 without insurance.
Given its high price, okay.
There's no generic alternative.
Spravado likely generates substantial revenue from its manufacturer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
A subsidiary of Johnson Johnson.
Now, look, this is the only psychedelic that.
What is in it?
Ketamine.
It's just ketamine.
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 Spravado, 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.
Yes, on ketamine.
And there was this amazing New York Times story to where.
There was more drug overdoses, I think, in human history than during the pandemic.
There was more than ever.
Yeah, and people dying of alcoholism and stuff.
Meth Addiction And Battlefield Risks00:15:11
It's horrible, almost criminal.
But.
What it can do if you keep taking, 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.
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.
Yeah.
What?
From Spravano?
Yeah.
Well, and other, I mean, you can buy, there's all kinds of telehealth companies to where that provide this shit.
And, That you just zoom with them and they say, okay, and then they send it to you.
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?
Matthew.
Oh, I know who you're talking about.
Well, when he died, now there's a huge backlash against it because he died in Florida.
Because he was on it.
Because he was on it.
Oh, shit.
Somebody gave him a big dose and then I think he drowned in his house.
I think it was in Orlando, wasn't it?
No, he was in LA.
Oh, okay.
Oh, yes.
Yes, I remember that now.
Yeah.
It was a different guy who died.
So you got to be careful of exaggerating the therapeutic benefits and downplaying the risk.
But, and, you know, we need to be honest.
Striking the right balance there is extremely hard because there are taboos against these drugs and people don't like you pointing out these types of things because they, hey, we're just now improving their reputation.
Let's get this stuff through and then we'll start talking about this.
I think the pushback comes from this being like federally illegal.
Right.
When there's so much other shit these pharmaceutical companies push that are way more dangerous.
Sure.
They passed, if I remember correctly, the FDA approved Oxycontin and said there was less than 1% chance of addiction.
Yeah.
Then how many million people did it?
Right.
That's what the Sackler family said.
Like they're like that.
Yeah.
Some of this stuff is sinister compared to psychedelics or marijuana or even like DMT, which there's like literally, if you want to really get scientific, there's DMT in a plant.
Right, there's DMT in every living animal on earth, so like the fact that you can make this illegal when it's if you want to put it on a scale of how dangerous it is, it's way lower than some of the that's federally legal and prescribed by doctors on the regular.
Yeah, I agree with you 100%.
So I think that's where most of these people kind of get jihad about it, right?
And they want to push it, and it becomes like the it becomes their identity, 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, the stock slumped, something good happens, they go up.
I'm not against that.
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.
Right.
Right.
You know?
Yeah, there's definitely, you know, there's nuance and everything.
You can't broad brush this stuff by saying it's just good for everyone.
And you know, everyone needs to take it.
And then another thing that is scary, which I didn't even realize because we had this conversation on the phone the other day.
And, you know, one of the things that you're afraid of is that if churches or preachers are given or whoever they are, the heads of these religious institutions are federally licensed to handle and distribute these drugs.
I thought initially, I'm like, okay, that sounds great, right?
Maybe give these people drugs and, you know, it's going to make everything better.
But you pointed out that when you make these people who are already, like, you're having these people that are going to church and, And being preached on by these, you know, the are connected to God.
And now you inject hallucinogens to them and psychedelics to these people who are able to put you on psychedelics, which you're already probably vulnerable if you're there in the first place.
But now, if you're on psychedelics, you're becoming way more vulnerable.
And imagine the control that these people would have if not only these people are subscribing to this religion and believing that you are connected to God, but now you put them under the state, a trance.
Right?
Like, I can see how that would be a very slippery slope.
You could radicalize them even.
Yeah.
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?
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.
What the Catholic, you know, the Catholic Church might be interested in psychedelics.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I don't think it's a very good idea, but you know, I'm not a Catholic, so they're not going to give it to me.
Right.
They're not going to have any control over me.
But as someone pointed out, 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 need.
They didn't need psychedelics to how many people?
Millions of people.
Right.
And now we're going to reap.
The church is failing for a reason.
I'm not saying it's good.
I'm not saying it's bad.
Right.
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.
And so that's been the center of my inquiry of new reformation.
Interesting.
It's okay.
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.
They want it 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, so that's right.
They're 10 minutes from here.
Are they really?
Yeah, the flag building is like 10 minutes from here.
Wow, I want to see it.
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 him, right?
Because if you look into L. Ron Hubbard, you're going to go, this guy's a crank.
This is full of shit.
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, 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.
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.
And this is what's happened, but what nobody talks about is that these drugs are being deployed on the battlefield.
And they're being weaponized.
That's the thing we haven't even talked about yet.
There you go.
Since the Cold War, they've been weaponized with shit like MKUltra and all this other shit.
Yes.
You can absolutely, there's been.
Studies on how you can break down the human mind and mind control somebody, create a Manchurian candidate or whatever.
I mean, Charles Manson.
Have you read Chaos, that book, Chaos?
Excellent book.
Like, yeah.
They've been studying this stuff in the context of war, right?
So imagine if you, holy shit, man.
So this is what's happening, Danny, is if you read their literature, you don't have to make anything up.
Just read their book and they say Western civilization is failing.
Whose book?
What are you talking about?
Well, by the way, what is the new Reformation?
Oh, this is.
By definition.
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.
Then there's an introduction called A New Reformation, which lays out his vision, the author's vision, Brian Morescu, 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay.
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 on the.
I think I sent you those two articles.
In 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.
On the Ukraine side, they're all taking Ibogaine, which is a very powerful psychedelic.
And he was chronicling this right now?
Yes.
Yes.
And the New Yorker article is about the same thing because they believe that psychedelics in.
Steven, pull this up, bro.
Yeah.
Put.
Put intercept Ibogaine and it'll pull up.
It's amazing.
What?
They believe that it increased.
All the Russians are on meth?
The casualties are way higher on the Russian side.
Well, and that's normal, though, because Syria, they were all on meth.
Well, the Nazis were on meth.
And the Nazis were all on meth.
Yeah.
Well, you got to keep them going, you know?
Right, right.
And so were the Pearl Harbor, the kamikazes.
Go down a little bit to where the real article's at.
There it is.
There you go.
There's right down there.
There it is.
Oh, that's it?
Okay.
Oh, it's behind a paywall.
No, it's not.
You just got to close that.
Right?
Enter your email.
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.
Okay, let me see the headline.
The Ukrainian military is experimenting with psychedelic drug Ibogaine to treat traumatic brain injury.
Okay, Ukraine is working with the founder of the Yippie movement to provide Ibogaine to soldiers on and off the battlefield.
Scroll down.
Okay, what were you pointing out?
Well, to promote battle readiness, they said it increases spiritual resilience so that you, and it kind of puts you in this heightened.
Ibogaine's most famous American patient may well be Hunter Biden, who has battled his own drug addiction with help of Ibogaine treatment at a Mexican clinic at low doses.
Bell, Beal, whatever, how you spell it.
You got to get it.
It's Dana Beal.
You should get him on here.
Dana Beal?
Oh, really?
Old timey yippie guy.
So they were like anti war.
You know, hippie like Abby 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 got of MAPS, got him the Ibogaine, and he brought it in because it's illegal.
And he brought it into Ukraine and provided it to the military.
And when he got back, he was doing a 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 it, 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?
No, I think he's out.
Where is this guy?
I think he's in New York.
I'll give you his phone.
I got to get him here now.
Oh, 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.
You remember Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory?
Of course.
Okay, you know how he said, okay, maybe it's part of the theory is that it increases hand eye coordination.
It makes you a better hunter.
Edge detection.
Edge detection, all of these attributes.
Well, who do you think is interested in that?
Oh, 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 cost of liberty is eternal.
The price of liberty and freedom is eternal vigilance.
And so, I've always taken that to heart.
You need to be vigilant.
Don't get caught up in the sales promotion.
Oh, we're all going to heal each other, and then there'll be a utopian cult, and all war will end.
Bullshit.
Bullshit.
Right.
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 it?
One reason is just because it's interesting.
Right.
Yeah.
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 it's about, 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.
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.
Wow.
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.
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 of 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.
You don't have to worry about maybe not worry about shell shock.
So it's what one member of the military, 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 him more lethal if you're.
By all of the things I just told you, increase in hand-eye coordination.
So you have.
If you're in the jungle or in the desert, this is an advantage.
Right.
But there would have to be like a very fine line you can't cross, right?
If you're taking psychedelics to where you don't want to be like tripping too hard.
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 in order to.
Type in DARPA and psychedelics, see what comes up.
In 2020, they put 23 million into it.
DARPA Funding Psychedelic Research00:02:43
That's in a Nature article, which is a very prestigious journal.
In 2020, they put 23 million.
23 million.
So you know it's more than that now.
DARPA is exploring ways to remove hallucinatory side effects from psychedelic medicines while retaining their therapeutic benefits.
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.
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.
Yeah, why wouldn't DARPA and the military?
That's such a silly thing to overlook.
Why wouldn't they be dropping millions of dollars into this stuff?
If you can chemically enhance cognition and effectiveness on the battlefield with drugs, why wouldn't you spend a ton of money on it?
If these things provide general opportunities, Optimization.
Yeah.
Of course you're going to want it for the military.
Right.
What about if the other, you know, 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?
Right.
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, 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 of 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, and very likely, like all other things, it'll be a mixture of good and bad.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, that makes a lot of sense.
But this, 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, you know, there's just too much.
The coverage of psychedelic research has been extremely bad.
And one-sided.
Yes.
Well, not necessarily one-sided, but it's been like a one-front thing.
It has.
And now it's entering, as many people point out, it's now it's in the, it can't, nothing in this country can be balanced.
It can't be balanced like we're talking about now.
Unbalanced Coverage Of Studies00:04:18
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.
Right, right.
So that's Twitter for you.
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.
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.
Yeah.
Hey, can I walk out that door for a second, grab my phone?
Yeah.
I want to show you one thing you'll find interesting.
This was an accidental send from Roland right before he died.
Oh, is this what you sent me?
I think you sent me this, didn't you?
Did I?
Correspondence with, can this be on the show or no?
Maybe.
Correspondence with Travis after a 70 minute call.
He's well intentioned, but his objectives are unclear and he may be prone to take extreme positions.
I will not pursue Roland.
Isn't that an odd text?
He accidentally sent it and then he sent back.
Saying, oh, I was just taking personal notes over our phone call.
That was nothing.
What did he mean by that?
By that?
Well, I mean, didn't you read it as it's signed at the bottom, right?
You see?
I will not pursue.
Well, obviously, it was meant for somebody else.
It was meant for somebody else, right?
He said it was a personal note.
So who was it to?
Bullshit.
And why is he tracking a clinical trial participant?
Who's he sending notes to and why?
That's weird.
That is weird.
Isn't it weird?
Did you ask him what he meant by that?
Yes.
He said, Oh, it's just a form of personal.
Come into the money.
We can talk about something that doesn't mean the show or no?
Whatever you think.
Okay.
I'll leave it up to you.
How about that?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yes, it will be the show.
Okay.
So you asked him about it.
What did he say?
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.
Yeah.
Do you want me to talk about it again?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What was the context of that?
Why did he say that?
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.
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 did it 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.
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.
Yeah.
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?
Yeah.
I mean, my how I had only when you were under the influence of it, or do you think it had a perpetual effect?
It had a major perpetual 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.
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.
AI In Early Cancer Detection00:05:00
I'm an engineer by trade, right?
That's what I went to school for.
That's what I've mostly done in healthcare and IT, networking.
And so I, in what I do, there's always an answer.
You can always trace some reverse engineer something back in order to find the problem.
I'm trained in troubleshooting medical devices.
That's what I did.
Okay.
Okay.
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?
You know, what is this all about?
Where do these ideas come from?
So, you know, so I don't know what the text message, I don't, I mean, the email, I don't know.
I find it odd, but I don't know.
Based on everything we know about MKUltra in the 60s, the 50s, and 60s, and 70s, do you, I mean, do you think it's unreasonable to suggest that they're still doing something that we don't know about today?
Oh, I think they are, but there's a recent article that talks about how now the CIA is mostly, it was just came the other day.
This head of the CIA said, we can't compete with Google.
We can't compete with, Palantir, we can't compete with Teal and Musk and all these people.
So they said, they're going to recruit them.
We're working now, the spy agencies work directly with these massive corporations who are hoovering 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 another, this is what I've been looking into too.
Who are these people?
Some of them are very odd characters.
Yeah, well, you know, Google was literally created and incubated under. the umbrella of the CIA and the NSA.
Sure.
Like Sergey Brand, there's a great article on this on Substack.
I forget the name of them guys, the guy who did it.
He did a series on it, on basically how Sergey was being visited at Stanford by multiple CIA people and NSA people.
And he was getting his funding from them directly for their search engine, whatever it was called, the name of the software that made the search engine work and some of the other fundamental mechanisms of Google itself.
Sure.
So if they were involved in funding it and creating it, why wouldn't they have just full control over it?
Like, this is a big difference between.
Sure.
And Oracle.
No, this isn't it.
The psychedelic renaissance came out of Silicon Valley by a guy who worked at Oracle.
Oracle was a CIA kind of thing.
That's what it is.
Look up Larry Ellison's CIA, and you'll see.
Larry Ellison was the guy who was just talking.
There was just a huge thing that came out with him recently where he was talking about AI, right?
Probably.
Him and Sam Altman together.
Probably.
Yeah, he's extraordinarily rich.
What was that recent news about Larry Ellison?
He was standing right there next to Trump giving a speech.
Can you find that, Steve?
Anyways.
So, of course, you have, you know, 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.
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.
You know, feed your head.
Who's Grace Slick?
Is that Grace Slick?
You know that song, Jefferson Airplane, Feed Your Head.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know what it is.
Yeah, I know what song you're talking about.
Trump's AI deal fueling early cancer detection from Oracle's Larry Ellison.
Trump said this project is the largest AI infrastructure by far in history.
And Elon hates these guys.
Well, they're his competitor.
Right.
He wants his business to do all the work.
Well, Elon's doing it open source.
These guys want to make it.
And then they also, OpenAI, Sam Altman's trying to take it private, trying to make it from.
Being an open source nonprofit to a private company.
So they're trying to do one of the most exciting things we're working on, again, using these tools that Sam and Massa are providing, is our cancer vaccine.
Ellison said during a news conference with Trump in the Roosevelt room, Ellison said early cancer detection can be provided with simple blood tests.
Artificial intelligence can leverage and look at the blood test to find out cancers that are seriously threatening.
So they can take your blood and they can process it through DNA sequencing and find out what cancers you're predisposed to and then create a custom tailored vaccine for you to avoid cancer.
Yeah.
That sounds promising.
Could be.
It might be like old Elizabeth Holmes.
What could go wrong?
Yeah, right.
What could go wrong?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Scientific Evidence For Ruck Hillman00:15:29
Yeah, that's him.
Yeah, that's crazy, man.
Yeah.
Okay, going back to the immortality key and what we were talking about with this new reformation.
Yeah.
So I reread the immortality key again over the last couple of days, trying to get a good gist of what it was about.
And I've only got about halfway through it, so I probably missed some of the key parts where you're basically saying that the goal behind.
That book, The Immortality Key by Brian Mararescu, is to merge 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.
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.
Let's say a medical ad.
He says, We found the cure.
Go to Roland Griffiths, 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.
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.
This, you know, the same old utopian stuff that, uh, you know, Albert Hoffman and other people were pushing.
You know, Albert Hoffman was really, he's really kind of following Albert Hoffman.
If you, Albert Hoffman discovered LSD, yeah, right?
He's a chemist from somewhere, I'm familiar with him from, um, the Road to Elusis book.
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 him.
You should get him on here, but he, um, Yeah, I think like a bunch of people have told us we need to get him.
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.
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.
And so he saw his drug.
As something that could resolve this, he thought it would revive the ancient mysteries and that it would magically, you know, heal the world and fix the world by fixing the root of the problem, which he believed was human psychology.
And so, Murescu really is following in that tradition.
And what he did is kind of dumb it down and turn it into a commercial sort of hardy boy's mystery.
If you overall, it's kind of like a drug addict.
It's like the Da Vinci Code for trying to uncover this ancient chemical evidence of the ergot fungus that's grown on wheat or barley that in these.
vessels that were found in Eleusis.
Yeah.
To say, to support his hypothesis that basically it's confirming and kind of building off of Ruck's Road to Eleusis with Hoffman and Wasson.
Trying to just do a deeper dive on what the actual science is behind that.
Can we evaluate, can we confirm that they were mixing psychedelics with this wine that they were drinking and finding God this way?
Yeah.
Which is fucking fascinating.
I mean, it is fascinating.
It is.
And all the work on ancient, what it is, think about it this way.
The story that most people have clung on to is essentially a literature review.
It's taking Ruck's work and Wasson's 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 the University of Pennsylvania.
He's a chemist.
He's the one who pioneered this study of finding little objects like this, scraping them for residue, and chemically analyzing them.
Okay.
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, McGovern's mentioned in the book over 70 times.
It's largely based on the updating of Ruck's stuff, it's 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.
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.
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.
Now, is there any, and I can't remember from the book, but did we ever find any sort of hard evidence of psychedelics in these vessels?
Is there any hard evidence that there were psychedelics used in Eleusis?
No.
There's none.
None.
Zero.
Other than the texts, like Hillman would claim and that Rock would claim.
Yes.
Right.
There's no hard evidence, though.
None.
And they would say, look, you don't, they would say it's a bias to demand this type of scientific evidence.
They would, that's what they say.
This is a bias.
We don't need, we don't need that hard scientific evidence.
That's, 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.
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.
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, Tel Aret in 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?
Oh, it was in Tampa, the University of Tampa.
It was an Egyptian mug from the God of. best or something like that.
I sent him that article.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they actually, um, they found like vaginal mucus.
Yes.
In this mug.
Yes.
And when was that mug from Stephen?
Did they date it?
I think they dated it in that article.
Oh, here it is.
That's the mug right there.
That's the God of Best.
And go down and tell it.
Let's see when they say it was from.
Mm-hmm.
Fifth century.
16th.
Uh, okay.
The vessels in the shape of best played an important part of the cult as a way.
From the 16th century BCE to the 5th century CE.
This particular example dates the Polemaic Roman period from which the third century BCE to the third century CE when produced such objects peaked, when the production of such objects peaked.
And then go down to where it says what was actually found in it psychoactive drugs, human blood, and other things.
There you go.
There you go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They found evidence of human blood, bodily fluids such as oral or vaginal mucus, and breast milk.
Yeah, so mourning, you had, I think.
Pogarman Hummler is morning glory seeds, right?
I think that's what it is.
Yeah.
Traces.
Okay.
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 am, I think if you compare Hillman's work to the immortality key, you see something interesting.
Yes.
In Hillman's work, it's most people would find absolutely revolting, wild, and crazy.
Disgusting.
What you see in the immortality key, and I've talked with Hillman and all these, and Ruck and Yeah.
About this, you see a kind of advertisement for a more modern new age sort of, you know, wellness, Michael Pollanized, Oprah fied wellness center that they're that him and his associates are interested in making, apparently.
And in your in your reason article, you claim that some of the people that Brian interviewed and used for the research behind the immortality key is people like Ruck or like Hillman.
They were not.
Brian did not explain to them his hypothesis or his.
Wasn't his hypothesis, his motivation or his spin on the book.
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.
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, it was all the thrust of the psychedelic literature from Hoffman to McKenna.
I mean, look at McKenna's stuff.
He wrote on I sent you that.
McKenna was very anti Christian.
All of them are.
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.
You can tell by talking to Hillman that he very much has a disdain for religion and Christianity.
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, Smashing the Victorian Lens.
I haven't even seen that one.
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.
Okay.
And Ruck introduced me to Brian through an email.
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.
Yeah.
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?
You wanted to interview Ruck and Hillman about it?
Well, I wanted to talk to them about it.
Hey, what's going on?
Are you happy?
You know, isn't this amazing?
These subjects are getting out there.
What do you think of the book?
And they hem-hawed around about it and about, you know, where I expected to find jubilation, I found, I don't know.
That's interesting too, right?
Like the foundational beliefs and values and ideologies of the people like Ruck and Hillman, you know, and it goes to even like biblical scholars.
Like lots of biblical scholars are religious and are Christian.
And they're kind of like, they're going to school and studying this stuff.
And it's supposed to be scientific, but they're also looking at stuff that only bolsters their beliefs they already have.
And on the opposite side, you have people like Ruck and Amon who are like very.
Anti Christian and anti religious, but they're both looking at the same texts and both coming up with their own.
Amon, to his credit, he says he's not trying to get to the intention of the author.
He says that he's only trying to say what the texts say.
When I asked him about it, he's like, no, I don't care what the intention of the author was.
I don't care what their ideas were.
All I want to understand is what the texts say and what the context of it was.
Yeah, the context is what really matters.
And I want to be careful about painting with a broad brush of saying, well, Rock and Hillman are anti Christianite.
It does sound like that.
There obviously is a whole group of classical scholars that are anti Christian.
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.
But yeah, it's there.
With Hillman, 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 Child.
I mean, come on.
Right.
So when you have motivate, 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.
Can you explain that part of it?
Like, how did he, how did Brian get into meeting the Pope and who was involved in going to meet the Pope and what were the motivations behind that?
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.
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.
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.
So Brian claims that he's Catholic.
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.
Okay.
So that would explain that then.
But he's never tried psychedelics.
I understand why he would lie.
I mean, if that's a lie, I understand that lie because he wants to maintain credibility and not have to be yeah.
When people aren't forthcoming about it, it's unfortunate.
Yeah.
When people aren't forthcoming, you have to start, you have to use other, 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.
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.
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, I don't know, Denver or California or something.
I haven't looked closely into it.
So we know there are financial motivations.
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.
Financial Entanglements In Medicine00:16:24
Have you asked Brian directly?
Yeah, he didn't want to talk that much.
He didn't yeah, he didn't want to talk about it.
He answered some of my questions and didn't answer others.
What did he say?
Well, what was his reaction?
To what?
To all this stuff.
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, you know, what you see is what you get.
I didn't get any information from him.
There was no information on what's going on.
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.
Very much wanted to separate himself from psychedelic research, that he didn't have anything, 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.
Which is obviously not true because you find out he does know those people.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And the religious studies paper that we were discussing earlier, 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.
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.
And he never said anything, never reached out after the articles were published or anything like that?
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 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?
Right.
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 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.
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.
What is that paper that you were citing that has never been released or is never going to see the light of day?
That was the religious studies.
That was the one with all the religious folks.
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.
His protege, Matthew Johnson, was accused of a whole bunch of stuff.
Bullying is 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.
He puts Matt in charge of the Hopkins Psychedelic Research Center.
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 enrolled and said, Matt, we got to let you go.
And it created this massive controversy.
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.
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.
Wow.
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.
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, you 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.
And so, if you read that Times investigation, obviously these are major ethical transgressions.
And so, you start to get a picture of what really looks more like a religion than a scientific study.
Wow.
Right?
That's so crazy, man.
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.
We have to push this through science.
But he said, he said in a lecture, he said it's inevitable that it'll turn into a new religion centered on psychedelics.
So you've asked me before, but isn't that the good thing?
I don't know.
I'm simply saying it's happening.
I don't know whether it's good or bad.
Now, it is odd that the people that are demonizing the old religions are also starting their own.
That is odd, right?
Yeah.
You know, some people have called it Scientology with drugs.
That's a funny way of putting it.
Yeah, a lot of this information came out because one of these organizations that they started called Ligare, 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, 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.
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.
So you have an original record of the original documents.
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.
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 it's 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 scholarly literature.
And I 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.
You know, and it also came out, we should say that Roland was himself using psychedelics during these trials.
Right.
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.
The perennialism idea is very interesting.
It is, isn't it?
How, like, I think the way you described it, how, like, everyone speaks a different language, but the fundamental.
Archetypal stories are all the same, just like it 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 Mircea Eliot and Jung, 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.
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 synthesize them.
Do you see what I'm saying?
And then.
But they cherry picked certain things.
Yes.
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.
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 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.
You see?
So what you see is the buildup to a new universal religion.
And here's what I think your audience should impress upon them.
You know, one of the books that has influenced them is a book called Global Mind Change by Willis Harmon, who was 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.
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, well, 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?
Right.
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?
Right.
So.
I can see how.
I mean, it's easy to see the goodness of it all.
I mean, from an.
Good intentions.
Well, 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 people.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Silicon Valley is doing it.
You mean a lot of this?
Well, his brother, Kimball Musk, and the people around him?
Yes, absolutely.
One of the biggest ones is the psychedelic science.
Of found 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 um, you know, what should we fund?
What's the strategy to push this through, you see?
So yeah, it's all Silicon Valley money, no question.
There you go.
What is this Steve?
That's it, man.
Good Psychedelic Science Funders?
Uh collaborative.
Look at the team.
PSFC is a community of philanthropists dedicated to supporting psychedelic medicine and science.
Oh, wow.
Who is there like a?
Oh, yeah.
Let's see the team.
The board.
There you go.
You got Bronner, the soap man.
David Bronner, Graham Boyd, and yeah.
Michael Cotton, Joe Green.
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 Statue of the Immortality key at Burning Man.
But they're also heavily involved with this.
And this is all about funding psychedelic research.
And there's obviously a for profit thing in mind, which is not, there's nothing wrong with that.
Yeah.
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.
What is that?
Can I see the statue?
Let's see what the immortality key statue looks like.
Oh, yeah.
It was Burning Man 2023 or 20.
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, 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.
Oh, that's incredible, man!
Yeah, with the key in the side of it.
That is awesome, yeah.
That is pretty insane, man.
Yeah, and then there's pictures of Jurvetson and Musk and Murorescu all in front of it.
Oh, with the gris that Greek on the bottom of it.
Wow, the chalice to Eleusis, yeah.
Yeah.
You can say all of this is part of this new.
I'm sold, brother.
Bring on the new Reformation.
Bring it on, baby.
What are we reforming?
We need reform.
Bring it on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then like, you know, what happens when the government gets control of it?
You know, the government, like, yeah, these are, it's one thing making it just legal.
And it's another thing when the government gets its hands on it.
Yeah.
And behavior scientists trying to engineer all of this.
You got to be, what does the world look like with one religion?
A one world religion.
I don't want to live in it.
Because, you know, in one sense, it's a rather banal point.
There's a common core to all religions.
Well, you could also, 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.
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.
When you're mixing futurism with occultism, Brain scientists, billionaires who want a global mind change.
This is ripe for journalistic inquiry.
Yeah.
You see?
Yeah.
I like what you're doing, following the money, because usually following the money is going to lead you to the intentions behind this stuff and the truth of what's going on.
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 that'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, A lot of these studies, you look into USONA, the Hefter Institute.
There are people who are doing this.
Mixing Futurism With Occultism00:02:08
I mean, you can never, and I've interviewed some of these people.
Oh, you talk, it's like a talk, 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.
When you interview people for this stuff, do you usually meet them in person or do you often just do it over the phone or email or?
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.
Yeah.
Wow, man.
This has been crazy.
This has been a mind fuck of a conversation and it's super interesting stuff.
So thanks for doing this.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's an honor.
What else do you have like in the pipeline that you're interested in looking at?
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.
I mean, it's 10 years of research and it's now, you know, well over 100, 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.
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 store, I had gotten a book contract, a book contract here.
And it just kept the story kept going.
Every time I'm like, well, it's over.
Something would happen.
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.
Yeah, that reminds me.
Has Brian ever publicly talked about his meeting with the Pope or is he trying to, has that been a secret?
It's a secret.
Well, I'm not going to say it's a secret.
He, 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 that was, I didn't publish everything that I had.
Chasing The Never Ending Story00:01:27
That was just part of it.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And it's all in that article on Reason.
Can you bring up that article?
It's on the Reason website.
Yeah, Reason.
What's the name of the article?
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.
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, a little bit more.
Okay, there it is.
Yeah.
The most controversial paper of psychedelic research may never see the light.
Can you click on it?
There you go.
That's it.
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.
And I think you, cumulatively, you all see a completely different picture from that which the media has presented.
And it's all, it's not speculation, it's just reporting.
It's beautiful, man.
And how can people get in touch with you?
They could email me, but other than that, I don't use social media.