David Holthouse reveals how the Hare Krishna movement’s 1977 split—after founder A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s death—led Kirtan Ananda (Keith Hamm) to turn New Vrindavan into a cult, exploiting devotees through scams, pedophilia, and murdering dissidents like Chaka Dari. His imprisonment came after former enforcer Tirta exposed abuses tied to the "Winnebago incident." Holthouse’s Ukraine corruption investigations expose U.S. State Department complicity in backing flawed factions, mirroring past conflicts like Vietnam, while Rogan warns Putin’s full annexation could trigger NATO wars or even nuclear escalation, citing leaked Russian threats. They link UFO sightings—like the 1997 Phoenix Lights—to psychedelic visions (DMT, Ezekiel’s wheels) and nuclear-era phenomena, questioning whether suppression hides advanced tech or extraterrestrial warnings. Legalizing psychedelics with integration, Rogan argues, could reverse decades of cultural stagnation post-1970s criminalization. [Automatically generated summary]
Do you remember the Hare Krishna devotees in the airports?
Because you're like me, like, you're old enough of that generation that you might remember the white robe, like, they'd have the flowers and they'd be selling books and shit in the airports.
And the whole concept behind it sounds beautiful, you know?
It's all just love and, you know...
Relinquishing your possessions and the hold that they have on you and just living this very peaceful loving life and Not just forgiving your enemies but letting them into your home and it's all that sounds great But all it takes is one psycho Yeah, one psycho.
So several gurus, Krishna consciousness gurus, had come over from India to the UK or to the US, you know, in the 1800s even, and then through the first half of the 20th century and had no luck because their timing wasn't right or they weren't the right person or both.
But Prabhupada was the right dude at the right time.
He showed up in Greenwich Village, New York City in 1965 and started preaching Krishna consciousness.
And it just like, you know, took off like wildfire.
And, you know, like Allen Ginsberg got down with it.
Wasn't maybe a full-scale devotee, but like he was hanging out with him.
But Prabhupada was already an old dude when he showed up in the U.S. And so in 1977, he died.
So that's 12 years.
And by that time, Krishna consciousness, there were like Krishna temples all over the country and in the U.K. because George Harrison had converted.
That was one of his strokes of brilliance, Prabhupada.
He sent a group of devotees to go camp outside the Apple Records office.
And just, like, chant and dance until they basically got a meeting with the Beatles.
And he was literally like, let's see if we can make the Beatles, you know, Krishna's.
And with Harrison, it took, you know, and that song, My Sweet Lord, I mean, that's what it's about.
So, but when Prabhupada died in 1977, you know, he hadn't had a lot of time to build up successors.
And most of the leaders of the movement were young, or most of the members of the movement were young.
So he took a risk, and I don't think he had a choice, and he appointed 11 of his closest, longest time devotees, all men, to be the gurus that would carry the movement forward.
And while you could say that it worked, and that Krishna consciousness is still around and is bigger than ever, A few of those...
These are dudes.
These are like dudes in their 20s, okay?
That suddenly are being worshipped as direct conduits to the divine.
In other words, treated as gods on earth.
And some of them were not spiritually prepared for that.
Would be a kind way to put it.
And some of them went wrong, and one of them in particular, Kirtan Ananda, whose government name was Keith Hamm, went really wrong.
There's a place out here, you know, I built a comedy club, and before I got the spot that I have now on 6th Street, I bought a place called the One World Theater.
And the One World Theater was owned by a cult.
And it's a beautiful theater and I had heard about it from my friend Ron White because I was telling him, you know, I think we should open up a comedy club.
And he said, you should buy that theater.
It was owned by a cult.
And I was like, that would be hilarious.
Buy a theater that was owned by a cult.
And there's a documentary on them called Holy Hell.
And he changed his name to like, I forget, there's two different names.
One was Michelle, and I forget what the other one was.
So he changed his name again, moves to Austin, and starts this cult and has his followers build him this theater so he can dance in front of them.
And that was the place that I bought.
But it was all fucked up, and we wound up getting out of the deal, because there was a lot of problems and a lot of issues that had to be resolved with the property.
And they didn't disclose that, so I got out of it and then got this place on 6th Street.
You know in the process I really started investigating the cult and I didn't investigate it unfortunately before I signed contracts and I had gotten a call from my friend Adam like, hey man, did you watch the documentary on the cult?
I was like, oh no Whatever is a documentary on a cult.
It's generally a cult that went bad, right?
And this one went bad and but it was the same sort of deal they all got names they were all given you know spiritual names and And they were told that you're reborn.
Well, like, well, they finally like his followers turned on him.
You know, and ISKCON, which is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which is sort of the formal name for the Hare Krishnas, what we call the Hare Krishnas, they actually, like, you know, kicked the new Vindavan out of the movement for a few years, half a decade or so, and then, like, kind of gradually brought that compound, that commune, it's not compound, that commune back in.
But they have this fucking temple there, the palace of gold, like Prabhupada's palace of gold that they were originally building for Prabhupada to live in.
But then he died before it was completed.
But it's like this Taj Mahal-esque structure that's in the middle of nowhere in the hills of West Virginia.
It's like a couple hours from Pittsburgh, basically, and up in the mountains.
And so, but this place, I mean, even now, it's like, it's, well, for sure, in the 60s, for sure, in the 70s, it was cut off from the rest of the world.
I mean, these young kids would join the Hare Krishna movement, and basically, a lot of the fuck-ups in the movement would get sent to Kirtan Ananda at New Vrindavan because he'd put them to work building the temple, right?
So if you, like, joined and you were, like, you know, not fitting in for some reason...
A lot of times they'd buy you a one-way bus ticket to like Morgantown or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and you'd wind up up there, you know, in the hills under Kirtananda's tutelage, right?
And it went sideways in a hurry, especially after Prabhupada died.
He was already running New Vrindavan, like Prabhupada had visited it and approved of it.
And actually Kirtananda had gotten booted out of the Krishna movement because he kind of tried to take it over.
And at a certain point, like Prabhupada, you know, kicked him out.
And Keith Hamm, Kirtananda, like mind fucked this local sort of like philosopher dude that owned the land into signing it over, promising to be like a non-denominational spiritual movement.
That's what he was doing.
And as the guy put it, we interviewed his daughter, and he said, you know, as soon as the lease was signed, they put on bedsheets and started chanting, right?
And so, now you've got the Hare Krishnas as your neighbors.
Yeah, and of course, we're like knocking around with bags full of lenses and camera gear and audio gear and stuff, and so we're a target-rich posse for these monkeys.
But they'll get your sunglasses, your phone, whatever, if you're not careful, and then they like, Sort of skitter up a drain pipe or a tree, and you gotta buy these frozen mango packs from the street vendors and throw them up to the monkeys, and the monkeys will drop your shit back down to you.
I'm convinced that the street vendors are in on it, right?
The legend is that hundreds of years ago, this guy that was like, he brought a circus to Vrindavan and the monkeys came with him and they were trained to be pickpockets.
And then they just kind of stayed behind.
But I don't know if that's true or not.
But that's the local legend.
But there's hundreds of them, thousands of them, man.
I mean, they are everywhere.
And you've got to watch.
You've got to constantly have your head on a swivel because they are so quick.
They probably scavenge, but also, like, they do get a lot of, like, you know, mango treats from Stanley's ship.
Because Balaram Mandir, which is like the head Hare Krishna temple, is in Vrindavan, India.
And so devotees from all over the world go there, like, as spiritual tourists, basically.
And so, you know, monkeys steal shit from them or any other, you know, there's a lot of Krishna devotees from all over India, too, that aren't necessarily quote-unquote Hari Krishnas, but like follow the Hindu deity Krishna.
So they come to, it's like a, you know, there's a lot of spiritual pilgrims to this city, all right?
So eventually you throw them enough treats, and they're these kids, too, that if they see that a monkey has stolen something, they'll come over and they'll be like, basically it's like, for a few rupees, I'll handle this deal for you.
And then they climb up the tree or the drain pipe, and they do a direct hand-to-hand exchange.
So we learn the hard way, that's the thing to do.
If the monkey steals the whatever, hire the kid, He goes and brokers the deal with the mango juice guy and makes it all happen for you.
These two brothers whose father, his name was Chaka Dari, his Christian name.
His government name was Charles St. Denis.
His name was known as Chaka in the movement.
And his sons were doing this really ancient ritual to sort of release the soul of someone who's been murdered.
And so they had their father's ashes, which he was murdered, you know, decades ago at New Vrindavan on orders from Kirtananda because he was challenging Kirtananda's authority.
Well, I think it was, the question with Kirtananda or Keith Hamm is always like, was he bent before, you know, he became a Krishna?
Or was it like, did the power get to him?
And I think it's both.
You know, I think he had a psychological disposition towards being a despot, if you will.
And then once Prabhupada was gone, and Kirtananda, along with ten of his compatriots, was appointed a guru, you know, and had that sort of power.
I think at that point, it's...
And combined with, like, all the money.
I mean, he was he was he had this guy that was a he was a Kirtananda was a genius at running schemes and scams to make money.
He would dispatch like the hottest young female Krishna devotees to like stock car races and rock concerts and stuff to like raise money for whatever they just make it up the starving children of India or they just make up charities and they'd flirt with dudes you know especially at rock concerts guys that are like high We're good to
Isn't it interesting that crazy people look crazy?
And I always try to say, okay, is this because you know he's crazy?
Or do you see something?
It's hard to tell.
But he doesn't seem...
Enlightened.
You look at him.
He looks like a guy who's a little unhinged and I've met people like that unhinged and I've met people like that in like the psychedelics movement and There's a few of these movements that are so open And basically anybody can become a part of it.
You know, the concept behind it is, you know, we're all seeking enlightenment.
But then you'll see someone who gets in there and you're like, what is, this guy's schizophrenic or something.
Although I think they, especially at New Vrindavan, at the place that Kirtananda ran, They kind of took that belief, you know, that yes, children are a material attachment, right?
But he took it to an extreme and just basically just cut off, you know, kids from their parents, like, entirely.
And that was not unique to Nuvendava, and that happened...
In a lot of temples around the country in the U.S. And the pedophilia happened in these temples as well?
But I will say, again, to ISKCON's credit, that unlike the Catholic Church, once the evidence started to emerge that there had been, I think it's fair to say, systemic raping of kids at their religious facilities, they addressed the issue head-on.
And for the most part, I think, have done an excellent job of You know, weeding out the pedos.
They have communities online, and there's a lot of bitterness.
It varies.
It varies.
You can't totally generalize.
But the kids that grew up in Nuvaindavan, they have online communities where there's a lot of...
For obvious reasons, like resentment and bitterness and anger, still at the leadership of the Hare Krishna movement for not, in their opinion, fully atoning for the sins that occurred there.
And you're doing it in the most evil way, because you're supposed to be a part of this peace and love movement that's like the optimal way to live life.
In stand-up comedy, you deal with a lot of lost people, wayward folks that just didn't fit in anywhere in society.
And a couple of my friends, one of my good friends, grew up a Jehovah's Witness.
And, you know, it's just you live in this world that is this very strange sort of...
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
It's illogical.
It's crazy.
It doesn't fit...
And once you start questioning things, you find, like, you're not allowed to, and it's...
It's just very bizarre how many of these.
Like, I was having a conversation with Marc Andreessen, you know, the venture capitalist guy, and he was like, California still has a lot of active cults right now.
I was like, really?
He goes, oh, yeah, there's a lot.
So, like, there's ones you don't hear about where they kind of keep it together.
So I guess there's, like, cults have to go completely, like, holy hell sideways before you get a documentary.
Some of them, they figure out how to kind of keep everybody together.
You know, talking about the pedophilia stuff, I'm going to take this on a detour because there's something I wanted to say last time I was on your show, which is that I am convinced that you saved at least one kid's life with something that you said the last time I was on, which is that we were talking about my own experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual assault.
And you told a story about how when you were a kid, you were in a library, and this, like, sick-fuck pedophile guy, like, was trying to get you out of the library.
The reason that I think you saved at least one kid's life is this, because, and again, speaking from firsthand experience, as a male survivor, especially of childhood sexual assault, you think, like, how could I have let that happen to me?
Why didn't I defend myself?
Why didn't I fight the guy off?
You know, even though intellectually you look at a seven, eight, nine-year-old boy, you're like, you got no chance against a grown man, right?
But for, you know, Joe Rogan to say, like, a librarian saved me from this happening to me, right?
I mean, I try and do what I can to dispel the stereotype because, you know, that was one of the things that, you know, scared the shit out of me when I was a teenager is the idea that I was going to become a pedophile myself.
I mean, when you talk about, like, one of my daughters is very much against the death penalty, and I think for a good reason.
And because we've had conversations about people that are unjustly accused, and she knows that I've had many people on my podcast that spent a long time in jail.
For crimes that they didn't commit and some of them were on death row and they could have been executed.
And when we were talking about it, we said in a perfect scenario when you absolutely know that the law has got the right person and that this person has done something and then they have killed people, whether it's a serial killer or whatever it is, yeah, maybe the death penalty makes sense.
But we don't have a perfect legal system.
And then the subject of child molesters came up and they were like, oh no, kill them all.
It's just so strange that it's not a very, very rare, uncommon thing that exists in a handful of places in the world occasionally.
But then when you hear about something like the Catholic Church, You know, there was Pope Benedict when he got kicked out.
There was a lot of people that didn't understand what was going on.
And I was looking into it and you find out what that guy did.
And one of the things that he did that's so evil is he would move people.
So he would take a priest that was molesting kids and just move them to another unsuspecting place.
And he went on to molest—one of these guys that they caught went on to molest 100 deaf kids, at least 100, that they're aware of.
And he knew that this guy was a pedophile.
The Catholic Church in particular is just like— I went to Catholic school, and nothing happened to me, but things did happen to people that I know that did go to Catholic school.
It's just like, is there another religion that is more connected?
Like, when you hear the term Catholic priest, pedophile is right.
Like, if you were playing a game, like Catholic priest, pedophile!
You know, like, you would say that, you know?
What is that, charades?
What's that game?
When you know, like, you say, you know, tough, big, runs fast, football player, yes.
You know, like, you'd say, Catholic priest, pedophile.
But he still has, not within ISKCON, but within the larger sort of Krishna consciousness movement, he still has a falling.
Really?
And I had, you know, like a translator kind of fixer with me and I had one camera guy.
And we sort of bullshitted our way in.
And it was this creepy fucking place, man.
It was like this sort of like almost Soviet block looking apartment.
It was all half finished.
Like there was this tomb and there were flowers and incense and photos of him and stuff.
And it was basically after he got out of prison eventually as an old man.
And he went to India and Pakistan and drew a following of Pakistani boys, basically, that are now men in their 20s and 30s.
And they occupy this sort of compound around his tomb.
And the one that we sort of bullshared away past was starting to get, like, a little suspicious of what we were doing and of our story, which is like that we were just tourists, basically, that had sort of wandered by this place and were interested by it.
And all these dudes just started coming out of these, they looked like vacant buildings, but they clearly weren't.
You know, all these, like, follows are Kirtananda, and the translator's like, it's time to go now, time to go now, time to go now.
The cult thing is so bizarre because it's so common.
And it just seems like there's so many people that want to be led by someone who has the answers.
Because most people are like you and I, they're like, try to do our best, live our life, fuck up, make mistakes, try to figure out what makes you happy.
Like, what's this all about?
What is life?
What are we doing here?
And for some, when someone comes along and says, I have the answers.
I mean, there's real Christians out there that are really great, wonderful people that want to live by the teachings of Christ and live a better, more just and holy life.
And they really do want to live like that.
And then there's psychos who want private jets and a giant arena to have all their followers and they want mansions.
Well, one of Kirtananda's enforcer and hitman was this guy named Thomas Drescher, whose Christian name was Tirta.
And he, like, drove the bus.
There was a school bus that would not—he wasn't driving kids around, but they bought a school bus to kind of take people from one part of the, you know, commune to another or whatever.
But really why he was there—and he was one of the dudes that, like, joined the—he was in Vietnam, Vietnam combat vet.
I think I saw hardcore combat in Vietnam, came back bent in the head, was trying to find the answers, trying to find help probably for PTSD, found the Hare Krishnas, joined, but the first temple or two that he was at, they were like, something a little off about this guy, so let's send him to Kirtananda.
Kirtananda met this dude and was like, oh, I got a purpose for you, brother.
You know, you're now enforcer number one.
And so if you fucked up, if, like, you weren't supposed to have a television, or if you broke the rules or you defied Kirtananda in any way, if you got some money from your family and you didn't kick it to him, Tirta came and paid you a visit, okay?
Eventually, like, what happened was, and the reason that Kirtananda, why they finally got him, is that Tirta flipped on him.
Now, they arrested Tirta, Thomas Drescher, for murder because there was another devotee that got killed in Los Angeles that was also sort of outing Kirtananda and his, you know, corruption and whatnot.
And so they got Dresher, and once he was in prison, like, Kirtananda held the ceremony and, like, appointed him to this, like, high status within Krishna consciousness.
And, of course, that was, like, a way to try and keep him quiet, right?
And he remained a believer.
But then there was this incident known as the Winnebago incident where Kirtananda was riding in Winnebago with this, like, I think it was a little boy from, like, Pakistan or India.
And the, like, curtains jostled open, and he was seen in full view by multiple witnesses, like, sodomizing this kid.
And, like, too many people saw it to cover it up, right?
And word got to Thomas Drescher in prison that this had happened.
And he heard from enough people who he trusted and believed that this was true, that he immediately flipped on Kirtananda and said, like, yep, he paid me and ordered me to kill these guys, and here's where you can find the bodies.
So it was only when he was, you know, he didn't firsthand witness it himself, but it was only when he was faced with, like, multiple people who he trusted who were telling him, we saw this, it's true, you know?
And then to his credit, I think he immediately flipped.
You know, we tried to do an interview with him, but we couldn't get into the prison to get him to go on camera.
So we do, in the show, we do have audio interview excerpts with Drescher.
One of the saddest things about Holy Hell is they talked to some of the devotees that had left and now they're lost because they had essentially, they had left 20 years of their life with this guy and now here they were 50 and like this one lady was like a dog walker now.
She had just kind of lost, no real purpose in life, didn't, you know, her whole thing was bullshit.
And some of the kids that grew up at Nuvrindavan under Kirtananda when it was legitimately a cult by any definition, you know, some of them are still followers of Krishna consciousness.
Some of them, you know, have left it way behind, right?
I mean, my friend who's really into the Hare Krishnas, he's a very peaceful guy, and the way he looks at it is like, you know, this is a way to live.
This is a possible way to live for some people that, if done correctly and done with the right spirit and the right mindset, like, really can be a beautiful, blissful way of existing.
Well, my experience was that I got a short glimpse at sort of a user manual for the cosmos, and in there was the knowledge that Reincarnation is real.
That the Buddhists have it right.
That after you die, you go to the Bardo for 49 days.
Your soul is out there.
You get a chance to assess the last life you led before you take another spin on the carousel.
Learn what you can.
Get rewarded for your good deeds.
Suffer for your sins.
And then go back.
And I believe it, but I also just like it.
I just like it.
It feels true to me in a way that the Evangelist or fundamentalist Christian idea of like you can just do a bunch of bad shit and then, you know, promise yourself to Jesus and have a clean slate.
I mean, it's fascinating that that concept has existed for so long.
And even the concept of heaven that existed for so long.
And angels and souls and all those things.
I think we have a very limited ability to grasp reality.
And I think that limited ability is biological.
It's kind of based upon our primate origins and what we are as a thing, as a biological entity.
We have essentially the tools that we need in order to survive.
And those tools are the ability to recognize danger and communicate and establish community and purpose and all these different things.
But when you have like real breakthrough psychedelic experiences, to me it seems like it's allowing you A vision into all that exists.
Not just what you're physically capable of seeing as a human being, but this chemical gateway or whatever it is that psychedelics give you allows you to see that these things...
What I got out of it is that everything is connected.
Every action, every thought, your thoughts, your life, your words, your deeds, the way you approach things, the way you respond to things, that they're all connected in some very strange way.
And the living my life The more I follow that as thinking that everything is all connected the more my life has been more beautiful right the more my life has been more rewarding and rich and More more pleasing more filled with love and community and it's something that I kind of need to like remind myself all the time because I think the biological entity It
has certain, like, human reward systems that are built into it.
To try to acquire resources, to try to, you know, to try to establish dominance, to try to succeed.
There's all these different things that, as a human, you know, people, they want success, they want all these different things.
And that those things can kind of, because you could see the physical manifestation of that work, That can sort of overcome the idea that everything is connected.
And so that's, I think, why people cheat on their taxes or insider trade or do all these different things, fuck people over in business deals, and they don't think that they're going to experience any negative consequences of it.
the most complicated organism we are the most complicated organism that we're currently aware of in terms of our ability to manipulate our environment our ability to communicate our ability to create things yeah but we don't have an operators manual right which is crazy so we're essentially running on this primate software that was really established in the
It's almost like we have DOS or Windows 95 and we just keep refreshing it.
You know?
There's no real new operating system.
And it's so filled with flaws that the human operating system is designed to ward off predators and to fight off neighboring tribes and to try to avoid starvation and to try to make sure that your genes pass on and that your enemy's genes don't.
And to exist in 2024 in modern Western world with all of our technology and all of our knowledge and all the information that we have available with this ancient primate software is so problematic.
It's so fraught with peril.
There's so many things that can go wrong, so many people that go sideways with it.
Drug addiction and gambling addiction and sex addiction and this addiction and that addiction and so much chaos and thievery and violence and deception and fraud.
There's just so many things that exist that Are negative, but are tied to this concept of achieving and getting more, which is this famine-based mentality, this resource-acquiring mentality that really is like the monkey stealing your sunglasses so it can get mangoes.
And I felt like with DMT, I got like a very short, it was like, I felt like there was this sentient, generally benevolent force out there in the cosmos that was like, okay, look, I'm going to give you a lot of information.
You're not going to be able to retain most of it, but you're ready?
Here we go.
And one of the things that I brought back that I still believe a decade later is that Reincarnation is real.
That's how it works.
Karma is real.
That's how it works.
What you do in this life affects your next one.
And that also gives you the user's guide you're talking about, about how to be a better person, how to be a better species.
I'm not opposed to the idea of reincarnation, but I got a vibe that there's other things, and there's other dimensions, and there's other experiences, and there's maybe levels of existence, and that this existence that we're experiencing right now as human beings is just this very strange, confusing Almost like a puzzle that you are on this planet trying to solve and you can get distracted.
You can get distracted by all sorts of things in this life, but the things that bring you happiness and love, you have to kind of like sort those out and choose those amongst the different options that the puzzle gives you.
I recently got to know him and he asked me to give you a message because I guess two or three months ago you were musing about whether or not he was still alive because he hadn't posted any new episodes recently.
He is still alive.
That's his message.
Lorenzo's message.
And after he heard that you'd raised that question, he's been posting.
Lorenzo and I and the aforementioned Technopig and Octopus Messiah are in the process of collaborating with some AI animation artists on a documentary about the stoned ape theory.
He broke it down on the podcast where he was explaining to me the actual mechanisms that would be involved in psilocybin accelerating the human mind and the ability to form language and Concepts and creativity and all the different things that Terence talked about.
But you know, Dennis is a hardcore, fact-based scientist guy.
You've had several great guests on there talking about that theory, but I've been like, there's about to be already, it's showing signs, but there's about to be just a glut of AI animation Movies, even in documentaries, I think AI animation is going to replace recreations, where they hire actors to recreate stuff.
We did it in Krishnas, right?
We recreated murder scenes using actors and firearms and stuff, prop firearms.
So I've been approached with, I don't even know how many ideas for AI animation docs.
I've just been like, gimmick, gimmick, gimmick.
But this one really felt right.
A, I think that Terrence McKenna would have loved the idea of using AI animation to, like, you know, show the evolution of our species, you know, as they pick the mushrooms out of the cow shit and stuff.
And also, one idea that we're toying with, I think we'll go forward with now that we've actually, you know, I think we've got the technology actually dialed in, where we've built this AI world, this Terrence McKenna AI world, where we can give it ideas and it'll spit back imagery to us that feels right, is building some sort of, like, A.I. Avatar of Terence McKenna.
So the idea is that the spine of the documentary will be any time...
Because Lorenzo has incredible archives of Terence McKenna.
So you're hearing Terence McKenna's voice, but seeing AI. So for people who don't know what the stoned ape theory is, we should probably explain it to them for people who've never heard it before.
And the concept is that at one point in evolution, there was climate change and that these Rainforest, tropical rainforest had receded into grasslands and that these primates had started experimenting with different food sources by flipping over cow patties and looking for grubs and all these different things.
And one of the things that they would do is probably test the mushrooms that were growing in the cow patties.
And in many places where psilocybin exists, these things are extremely prevalent.
Like my friend Duncan, who grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, told me that mushrooms were so prevalent That the local ranchers, they started putting feed in, with the cattle feed, some sort of anti-fungal thing to keep fungus from growing in cow shit.
Because so many kids were going onto the field and picking psilocybin mushrooms.
He's like, they were everywhere.
They were everywhere.
So the concept is that low doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity, make people more amorous, so it probably heightened sexual arousal, made people more likely to breed, and made people more curious, probably because of the increase in visual acuity, made people better hunters.
There's studies that have been done.
I forget what the scientist did.
did was a hardcore, you know, non-psychedelic scientist who did studies on edge detection with patients.
Right.
You know these studies?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it showed that people under the influence of psilocybin can detect deviance.
So if you have two parallel lines and one slightly deviates from parallel, the people on psilocybin can predict it much quicker, can see it much quicker than the people not on psilocybin.
Now, I don't know if I buy the stoned ape theory in the same way that I fully buy into, you know, the concept of the bardo and reincarnation and karma and all that, but it's sure fucking fun to think about, man.
You know, I think, I think when it's broken down, I think, I'm going to fuck this up, but I think it's N-4-phoroloxy and dimethyltryptamine.
It's like, it's very close to what dimethyltryptamine is.
And, you know, we also know that dimethyltryptamine is endogenously produced.
You know, it's produced in the human brain.
We don't even understand why.
And, you know, that's all...
Rick Strassman, who wrote that book, DMT, The Spirit Molecules, talked about that.
And they've done a lot of great research at the Cottonwood Research Foundation, trying to determine where it's produced, why it's produced.
They used to think it was just produced by the pineal gland.
Now they think, I believe, it's produced by the whole brain.
And this thing that these primates were finding...
Was giving them that and giving them more of an understanding of the world around them and expanding the brain.
And the other thing about the human, the concept of the stone date theory is this bizarre fact in the history of humans that In the entire species, like the record of species, one of the biggest mysteries is the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.
And McKenna says that that coincides with this exact same time period where the tropical rainforests were receding into grasslands and then they believed that these primates were experimenting on new food sources.
So there's all these things that sort of line up with it and it makes it a fascinating idea.
But if you think about, like, if they found out that this thing gives them this feeling and they were, you know, they're repeatedly using it over and over and over again and then their offspring did it and their offspring did it and And you're, you know, playing this out over a couple million years.
It's very obvious that something happened that separated us from all the other primates.
In a radical way.
We don't look anything like them.
We have abilities and...
We have so many attributes that are far beyond any other primate, and it kind of makes sense.
And also, there's people that can achieve those states without psychedelics, which is fascinating.
And I've gone pretty close with some breathing exercises, and especially breathing exercises in sensory deprivation.
You can achieve some definite psychedelic states.
I haven't had the full visual effects that are available with DMT. But boy, you definitely get to some bizarre place where if it was a drug, it would be a very popular drug.
Well, that's the other thing that happens with DMT rituals, that they play Icaros, these ancient South American songs that sort of enhance the experience.
Like when you do DMT with Icaros playing, the DMT dances to the sound, and it's very strange to watch.
It's beautiful, bizarre.
And, you know, it's overwhelming.
It's hard to believe that it's really happening while it's happening.
And, you know, you've got to kind of let go and just let it happen and experience it.
Because you're so blown away by it all, it's hard to just not just go, what the fuck, like every five seconds.
You've got to kind of just take it in and accept it.
I tried to get my dad to try DMT. My dad died recently.
And about six months ago, I tried to get him to try DMT. I was like, listen, you know, until I tried this, Dad, you know, I was like, same as you, like basically Spock, like cold, logic, reason, right?
But I was in a war zone where communications were dicey at best.
And I got a text message from my wife on Signal.
It was like, your dad's heart valve is failing rapidly.
He's in the hospital.
He's probably got like 48 hours to live.
And the airspace over Ukraine's closed, so there's no way that I could get from where I was in Ukraine to Anchorage, Alaska to be with him.
And so I was just sending, like, text messages on signal to the nurses, and they were reading them to him.
Wow.
Yeah.
And then I was able to record one voice memo right as he was going.
Because the last sense to go when you're dying is sense of hearing.
And they played him like a message from me.
Wow.
But to answer your question, what was I doing in Ukraine?
I'm looking into a possible documentary that would be set against the backdrop of the current war, but that would be more about, like, what is actually the true nature of corruption in Ukraine?
And what has it been?
And what was it in the 90s?
And what is it today?
And, like, how has the U.S. State Department kind of fucked up again in the same way that we did in Vietnam and every war, like Vietnam.
Afghanistan, Iraq by backing the wrong horses, you know?
And, you know, when there was so much resistance to the concept that Ukraine was corrupt when we first started backing them, you know, that was what was fascinating to me because It was always talked about how corrupt Ukraine was.
It was always talked about.
And then all of a sudden, this was a foreboding topic.
Like, no, Russia is the aggressor and the invader, and Ukraine are their angels.
Well, it's also that the U.S. government would be like, okay, we would sort of designate who was corrupt and who wasn't.
I mean, look, the U.S. went through its own sort of oligarchy, like robber baron phase, you know, in the late 1800s.
That was like after we'd been a democracy for 100 years.
It's not...
Unfortunately, it's kind of a step on the evolution of free democracies to have this phase where you're like, you know, things are super corrupt.
Like, I spent some time at an Orthodox monastery in Ukraine last month, and I asked the sort of head of the monastery, like, what would you have to do to get rid of corruption in this country?
He's like, well, I'm a man of God.
He's speaking through an interpreter.
He's like, I'm a man of God, so I'm not advocating this.
But what you could do is you could take...
Because the main problem in Ukraine right now, as I understand it, is the judicial system.
They have what they call telephone law, which is basically like before a judge makes a ruling, he gets a phone call telling him which way to rule.
Oh, Jesus.
And so he's the head of this monastery.
He's like, you could line up...
Every uh every judge and shoot them and then and then and then all the judges or all the like government officials that come to their funerals shoot them and do that two or three times and then we might be able to start over like she was saying that's how systemic this is but Jesus I mean man of God's telling you this yeah that's a guy who's like reached the limits yeah yeah oh my god But I'll tell you,
my time in Ukraine really changed my perspective on that war, and I came back a real sort of hawk, thinking that we should fully support Ukraine in the war.
Part of it was just being with the people who the Ukraine...
I just like the Ukrainians, you know, in a way that I've been to other former Soviet bloc countries.
And it's kind of like, I won't name any of them, but I just feel like, I'm not sure you guys are really down with the freedom and democracy thing.
It seems like you were subjugated for a while and you just didn't get the same vibe.
I think that Ukrainians are legitimately freedom-loving people.
That had been under the thumb of corrupt leadership for decades now.
But part of it was, there was something very enthralling about being in a place where everyone was so unified, like this country under attack.
Being invaded by a hostile force.
Now, these are the Ukrainians that have stayed behind, okay?
But there's still a lot of them.
I mean, and just that in coming from America, where everything is so splintered and divided now, and to be in a place where everyone is so on the same page, there is something very attractive about that.
It was the most united this country has ever been.
And it's a horrible thing to say because it's not what you ever want to happen again to wake everybody up.
But it was the thing that was required to make people put American flags on their cars.
And it was, in a lot of ways, I mean, it was a horrible tragedy.
But in a lot of ways, the reaction to it was very beautiful.
There was so many people that were so...
I was in New York City just a few weeks or a few months after 9-11.
Everybody was friendly.
It was crazy.
It was like everybody was just so blown away by the experience of being attacked and so just shaken out of it and so aware of how fortunate they were to not be one of those people who died.
And that we are legitimately all together and that there are forces out there that are evil and that we have to stay united.
And I hate to think that that's what's required to wake people up from this division.
But I always wonder, like, I wonder if maybe the division that we have in this country is because of the fact that we're never attacked.
And because of the fact that we only experienced a few of the Pearl Harbor, 9-11, there's only a few of these moments where we've had to wake up.
The Aleutian Islands actually in Alaska were attacked and occupied by Japanese forces in World War II. Oh, really?
Little known fact.
Yeah, that was actually American territory.
I didn't know that.
But, I mean, we fucking, man, I mean, the Ukrainians, they had nuclear weapons, and in 1994, the quote-unquote West, the US and the UK, basically convinced them, you know, to give up their nukes in exchange for a guarantee that we would help them protect their sovereign territory.
I mean, it's to, you know, to say, like, oh, like, World War III is imminent, it sounds doomsayer, but it feels like it could go that way in a hurry.
China, you know?
They're looking at us.
That's the problem if we sort of like showed our ass and back down, you know, if Putin keeps going, is then China may just test that red line with Taiwan.
You know, I just I mean, I think that the war in Ukraine could have been prevented.
I think that There was this false dichotomy where there were forces in the U.S. government, and this is part of the documentary I want to make, is about, that forced you, there was like, you either have to be, you know, a puppet of Russia or our puppet.
You either have to be NATO or there's no middle ground.
When, in fact, I think that Ukraine could have been a bridge, a peaceful bridge, between Russia and the quote-unquote West, where maybe it could have joined the European Union, economically free trade, but not joined NATO, right?
Because that's what Putin was so adamant against.
And you understand, I mean, I think he's a war criminal fucking power mad, you know, asshole, right?
But you can sort of see from his perspective.
If you look at a map and you start to see all these NATO countries around Russia, you kind of see, you know, what motivates him.
And I don't want to tip my hand too much, but I think I've got pretty convincing evidence that the US Department of Justice has been used by the US State Department To further US foreign policy interests in Ukraine in ways that aren't really like right like bringing either bringing criminal charges Against people you in the US but like Ukrainians like charging them with crimes in the US including some people that have never even set foot in the United States charging with crimes or Getting them out
of trouble like dropping criminal charges against them to sort of like And again, it goes back to our designating, you're a good guy, you're a bad guy.
You're corrupt, you're not.
Even though they're both just grabbing billions with both hands.
But the fact that, look, the fact that 50 cents of every dollar that we send there, you know, this isn't actually how it goes down, but even if that was the case, is going into somebody's pocket doesn't mean that we can just turn Ukraine over to Russia, in my opinion.
I think that we should be backing them full-on militarily, not with U.S. troops, but giving them what they need to fight.
Because, you know, I talked to a lot of Special Forces guys over there that were basically like, Those Russian human waves attacks were just like mowing these guys.
It's not even really combat.
We're just mowing these guys down until we run out of bullets and then we have to retreat.
Those are the battles.
That's what Putin's able to do because he's got so many guys.
There's so much territory east of the Earl Mountains.
It's just a bunch of villages, what we call flyover country, right?
Well, Putin is offering deals, like sign up, where it's like, You know, more money than they make in a year per month, A. And then B, if you're killed, your family's set up for life.
My dad, before he passed, they were like, no, we don't remember.
Even, like, Watergate, Vietnam era, you know, they weren't really old enough to remember the Great Depression, but even that was just sort of limited to the U.S. I mean, I know there were global, you know, Yeah, it does.
That's another reason why I think that we have to help Ukraine stop Putin now.
Because if he keeps going into Ukraine and then he invades a NATO country and we decide that we've got to go up against him, Is there any evidence that he would do that?
And that history lesson that he delivered at the beginning, that everyone was like, what the fuck is he talking about?
And Tucker just looked baffled.
I got it.
I actually thought I'm getting an insight into Putin's motivations and the way that he sees himself, which is a historic figure.
He sees himself as someone who's going to restore a Russian empire.
He spends all day in the halls of the Kremlin with portraits of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great.
And I think that he's seeing himself...
As not the leader of a free country, certainly, but as someone who's going to restore a Russian empire.
So no, I absolutely do not think he will stop with Ukraine.
No way.
So then if he doesn't, and then he invades a NATO country, and we go up against him, Man, those documents leaked recently from Russia that were showing what their lines were for when they would start using quote-unquote tactical nukes.
Well, they were, whatever, if they started to lose a certain percentage of troops, I can't recall the specifics, but they were like shockingly...
Shockingly liberal on when they would start to use tactical nukes on the battlefield in Europe.
Like if they started to have certain percentages of battlefield losses, not in the current situation, but as they go further into Ukraine or in a war that came into Russian territory.
Criteria for a potential nuclear response range from an enemy incursion on Russian territory to more specific triggers such as the destruction of 20% of Russia's strategic ballistic missile submarines.
This is the first time we've seen documents like this reported in the public domain, said Alexander Gabuev, director of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
They show that the operational threshold for using nuclear weapons is pretty low if the desired result can't be achieved through conventional means.
Russia's tactical nuclear weapons which can be delivered by land or sea launched missiles from or from an aircraft are designed for limited battlefield use in Europe and Asia as opposed to the larger strategic weapons intended to target US modern tactical warheads can still release significantly more energy than the weapons dropped on Nagasaki in Hiroshima in 1945. Oof.
So to answer your question, I think that, you know, the territory that Putin has taken, you know, and again, also, we like, just like we didn't back him up after the security assurances that we gave, we, the U.S., gave Ukraine in 1994. 2014, right, there was that revolution in Ukraine, and in response, Putin invaded Crimea with the little green man, the guys that didn't have an insignia.
And the U.S. State Department went to, and Ukraine was going to fight.
And the U.S. State Department went to Kyiv and was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Chill out, chill out, chill out.
Just let him have Crimea.
We'll make sure he stops there.
Let's not escalate things.
Okay?
So we gave him our word a second time.
And then we broke it.
So, to answer your question, I think that that territory that Putin has seized, my impression from talking with a lot of Ukrainians in recent weeks has been that They feel like Ukraine could still be Ukraine without that territory.
Basically, you could have a three-week period where people could either move there if they want to be Russians, or they can leave if they want to be Ukrainians.
And then you could have a kind of a North Korea, South Korea, DMZ kind of situation.
I think that's probably the best possible outcome right now.
But even to do that, again, we've got to properly arm the Ukrainians so that they can stop Putin from moving further into their country and actually taking territory that they could not live without.
When I was in Kyiv and I went to how close the fighting actually got to the capital city, it was shocking how close it was.
Like that town, Bucha, where there was all those atrocities committed.
I mean, there's this one, I saw this one auto, this like massive graveyards of like automobiles.
And what happened was people were trying to get out of this town as the Russian troops, the Russian, because they invaded from Belarus from the north and they came in and they're trying to go like lightning strike on Kyiv.
And they got within, I think, 10, 12 kilometers of the city.
And then they got stopped because the guys started blowing bridges.
Special Forces started blowing bridges and hitting them with javelins and stuff.
And they actually stopped them.
Like, incredibly brave fighting.
But there was this one just, like, I came across this just pile of just hundreds of blown-up cars.
And I asked the locals about it.
And some of them have been like painted now with, you know, sunflowers and, you know, Slava-Ukraine, glory to Ukraine.
And artists are trying to make this less sort of macabre.
But what it was, was when the Russians invaded two years ago, like hundreds of families piled in their cars.
And there was one road out of town, but it was a trap.
And the Russians cut it off on both sides and then methodically, using tanks, blew up these cars full of civilians.
Just brutal shit.
And I know there's still, like, brutal shit on all sides in all wars.
Even when the interpreter wasn't around, just, like, really clicked with this guy.
Anyway, um, but yeah, I did have it set up where I had an interpreter, you know, a driver, and security.
And then I had, you know, conversations that I'd lined up.
But a lot of it was people had documents or people had information that the only way I was going to get these documents or have them tell me this information was to go to Ukraine.
It was the only way they were gonna, you know, trust it, trust me.
So, I mean, you can pick which parts of the country you want it to alert you to, but yeah, I mean, it was...
There was one day where the security guys were like, it's not safe to drive from where we were to Kyiv tomorrow.
So that's the bad news, because every night we would have a go-no-go kind of meeting for the next day.
And that was the one time that they were like, no-go, no-go.
Too much shit's going on.
It's not safe to drive, you know, eight hours to Kyiv.
Good news is it's snowing in the Carpathian Mountains, so we're going to go skiing.
And I was like, what?
And so the next day, we did.
We, like, drove five hours over the mountains, and there's this full-on ski resort.
And there's just people, like, the hundreds of families out skiing.
And there's just a fucking war going on.
And it's in.
It's like a day of a nationwide red alert, which means that, like, missiles were hitting all over.
And so people are watching this app on their phone, and you can see the stuff that's coming, you know, to the Oblast, which is like a state, you know, that we're in.
And as the stuff is being shot down, like, people are, like, cheering from the chairlifts.
Yeah, I have a friend from Israel, and he's a kickboxing coach, my friend Shuki, and when he was living in America, he lives in Israel now, but when he was living in America, I went over to his house for dinner, and Him and his wife, they'd be playing the bongos and dancing.
And I'm like, you guys are like, you have so much spirit.
Like, you're so filled with fun.
And he's like, my friend, when you live in Israel, he goes, every day, like, you could die.
And that's a crazy thought is that the thing that's going to cure what ails us is conflict and getting together and banding together to fight a common evil.
Well, it's also so crazy because it's a function of human beings in large numbers, right?
Because, like, if we were in this room together and he said, could you imagine all three of us get along?
Of course.
Easily.
I couldn't imagine us not getting along.
We can talk.
We'll figure things out.
We have resources.
Yeah, we'll be fine.
Make it 3 million people.
Make it 30 million.
Make it 300 million.
Now you've got problems.
And it seems to be always the same thing that you see when you have a cult.
You have leaders.
And the leaders don't necessarily have the best intentions for everyone.
They have the best intentions for themselves and for the people that are providing them with money.
And this is the trap that we're all stuck in.
Everyone on earth, all of us, being led by groups that decide that they're in control of these massive numbers of people, and they want control of the resources of these other territories, and they want to do something to those people, and they'll have people convinced, this is your enemy, you have to go kill them.
People that you've never met, you have no issue with, you don't know anything about them, you've literally never seen them before.
You might not ever see them even when you're killing them.
And this is a thing that we don't believe could ever be stopped in our lifetime, which is insane.
If you really start to think about it that way, it sounds so insane.
Like, if you were approached by an alien life form, That said, what is the source of all this murder and killing and destruction?
Like, what is this?
It's like, oh, we're being led.
We're a group and we're being led by the people that are in charge of this group that are very secretive and that are being influenced by massive amounts of money and the military-industrial complex.
And they've got everyone convinced that you have to divert all of our resources into attacking this other group that is opposed to our way of life.
They hate us for our freedom, whatever the fuck it is.
And this is what we have to do now.
They would be like, what is wrong with you fucking people?
Like, what a bizarre, wounded, tainted species that you think like this.
And not just think like this, but think it's impossible to imagine this not existing.
This is the most insane venture that human beings can ever engage in.
And you think it's impossible for that to not be the case.
But almost all logical people, if you ask them, could you imagine no war in your lifetime?
I wonder if, I mean this is gonna get really weird, but I wonder if that's where AI is leading us.
I really genuinely do.
I wonder if the limitations of our primate architecture Will not allow us to escape this never-ending cycle of war.
And that may be the only thing that will would be an intelligence that far exceeds our own and doesn't have the same limitations, motivations, human reward systems, all the things that hold us in these patterns.
And that an artificial intelligence that is far superior to what we're capable of generating with our monkey minds will be the only thing that prevents us.
Well, maybe the problem is money in general, like the concept of money.
And I'm not a proponent of socialism, because socialism always leads to communism, which leads to military dictatorships that are dictating whether or not you can do this or that.
And there's always groups of people that have massive resources, and they keep everybody else subjugated.
Anybody that thinks that socialism and communism is the future, show me where it works, ever.
It's still human beings.
It's just like...
Whether it's cults or militaries or anything.
So there's human beings that have immense power that is unimaginable to the common person, dictating what the common people can and can't do.
And the only way to enforce that is with force and with killing.
That's the only way.
With jailing people, killing people, fear.
It's the only way to get people to listen to you and to do what you want them to do.
And I wonder if what we're doing with artificial intelligence is creating...
With Neuralink, he's now able to use a computer and he can move cursors around with his mind and he can play video games with his mind.
And he's been doing this and he talks about it and it's like this is incredible.
This is amazing.
And this is essentially the Model T. Of, you know, this sort of human-computer interface, biological interface, something that goes into your mind, into the brain itself, and connects with it and allows you to use things.
Yeah, I have concerns with everything that involves human beings.
Because I don't think there's ever been a thing that involves human beings that doesn't get co-opted and corrupted.
There's always something, someone comes along that uses it and has power.
And that's the scariest thing about someone achieving some sort of artificial general intelligence, some sort of super intelligence, especially something that's sentient.
And can figure out what we're doing wrong and also figure out what was done wrong to code it and make a better version of itself.
And I think it's going to lead to a new life form.
I'm almost positive of that, that that's what all this stuff is doing.
It's going to achieve...
I mean, have you ever seen the head of Google where he was talking about how their AI has done things that they didn't expect?
Like, it learned a language like instantaneously that it wasn't programmed in and can translate that language now and communicate in that language and they don't know how it did it?
Well, hey guys, hit the fucking brakes.
Like, you don't know what it's doing and you're just gonna keep feeding it?
Okay.
Where do you think that goes?
It's going to be better than us at everything.
And it's going to realize that we're the cause of pollution.
We're the cause of war.
We're the cause of theft and rape and fraud and destruction and control of resources.
It's all human beings.
Like, we are the problem that we're trying to solve.
And if we're trying to solve that problem by creating something that won't have those problems, it just logically seems to me that that thing is going to realize that we're the issue.
That we're a caterpillar that's building a cocoon and we don't even know why.
Caterpillars, they don't know.
I'm going to become a butterfly.
It's going to be awesome.
No, we don't know why we're doing all this.
Why are we so...
Thirsty for innovation.
Why are we so attached to wanting the newest latest greatest technology?
It almost seems like that motivation is Tied in to the creation of artificial intelligence that if you looked at us I always say that if you looked at us from above if you were some other species that came And you were looking at human beings you would say well, what does this thing do?
Like what does this species do?
Well the the main thing it does if you You know, there's all the wonderful things, the art, the music, all the wonderful things that it does for itself.
Food and culture and all these interesting things.
But what does the species overall do?
Well, it creates things and it creates better things constantly.
It's in a cycle of constant innovation.
And a lot of that innovation, almost all of it is tied to technology and artificial intelligence.
And so where does that go?
Well, that goes to another life form.
It creates a thing.
It creates an artificially intelligent.
And artificial is not a good word either, because I think it's digital intelligence.
I don't think it's artificial intelligence.
I think it's a computing-based intelligence that's far superior to the biological-based intelligence.
And so my hope for us, because I am one of us, my hope is that we merge.
My fear is that it supersedes us.
My fear is that it surpasses us in every way and that it just gives us something that placates us.
Well, instead of killing us off, all you'd have to do is stop us from breeding.
That's not hard to do.
We're kind of doing that to ourselves.
I mean, population level, in terms of, like, viability, they've dropped substantially over the last few decades, whether it's because of microplastics in our food that have diminished our reproductive cycles.
And if you look at the number of births, In developing countries, what happens?
How many women are having miscarriages?
How many women are infertile?
The numbers keep going up and up and up.
It seems like there's a current trend because of what we have done with our environment, what we have done with our food supply, what we have done with medicine and pharmaceutical drugs that's leading us to be less and less viable.
And all you'd have to do is step in and provide human beings with something that gives them an incentive to no longer breed.
Especially if it makes it very attractive to no longer breed.
Provide them with robot sex dolls that are far superior to human beings.
You know, someone who really gets them.
This person really gets them.
Or you just have a biological woman who yells at you.
I mean, you could clearly see how if you were a super-intelligent species, a super-intelligent thing that looked at us and said, well, what's the best way other than mass destruction of stopping these things from ruining the world?
Well, just stop them from breeding.
Just make these the last ones.
Just severely limit the amount of reproduction that takes place.
I think that's probably the most, again, I would like to believe that what they're covering, what I want to believe, in the same way that I want to believe in the stoned ape theory, because I think it's fucking cool, is I want to believe that they're covering up contact with, you know, species from outer space, other intelligent life.
What I suspect is really going on is that they're covering up shit that they're making that maybe has slipped the leash, you know, or that for whatever reason they're just trying to keep completely secret.
The stuff that has maneuverability that can't be explained.
And I think we might be being visited by something that is us from the future.
I think it might not even be us from the future, but being what happens when a species like us Gets involved in digital intelligence and creates something that transcends the biological limitations.
And then you have these things.
Like, to me, one of the things that's very bizarre is the archetype.
The archetype gray alien.
Which is this big-headed thing with no muscle, no genitals, and it seems very humanoid in a way, which doesn't necessarily make sense.
If you're dealing with different environments, and we think about the massive variety of species that exist on the planet that we're aware of.
There's only one human.
There's only one bipedal hominid.
That's it.
It's us.
Why is this thing so much like us, this shitty design of walking around on two people?
Why can't it fly?
Why does it have these spindly bodies?
Well, human beings, as we're evolving, one of the things that's very clear is that we're becoming less physical.
We're weaker and softer than previous generations of humans that we can observe.
You look at our testosterone levels compared to men from the 1950s, we're far lower.
On average.
And if you go way back and you look at Australopithecus and even Neanderthal, I mean, there's just super powerful physical specimens.
There were definitely...
Neanderthal was like this 5'7", 200-pound behemoth of a creature that was...
You know, if you have a Neanderthal competing in the UFC, it would smash everybody.
Their bones are bigger.
They're far more powerful.
If you keep going in that direction, what do you get to?
You get to this thing that has almost no muscle.
This thing that just has the ability to move around.
It's probably communicating telepathically.
It's probably using its telepathic energy to control those devices, those ships.
That's one of the things that Bob Lazar said.
And again, the Bob Lazar story is who knows, right?
I love to believe the Bob Lazar story.
I had him on the podcast.
I talked to him for three hours.
I had dinner with him.
He doesn't seem like a guy who's lying.
And one of the more bizarre aspects of his story was how many of the things that he talked about now we know are true, you know, in terms of...
The technology in terms of what people have seen, 3D printing, there's all these different things.
Like the ship that he went into, there's no seams.
He's like it's all like as if it's made out of one piece of something, which is 3D printing.
I mean that's what we're doing now.
And that there's no instrumentation and that somehow or another these things are integrated somehow.
With their minds or with something, where it's allowing them to pilot these things without digital instrumentation and buttons and switches.
They're using some other method to control these things.
And that's what he was supposedly brought in to try to back-engineer.
To try to say, what is this?
How does it work?
And he talked about the limitations of having science try to be practiced in a vacuum.
And he was like, the metallurgists did not have contact with the propulsion experts.
The propulsion experts did not have contact with other groups that were studying these things.
Everybody was very secretive and everybody was very isolated.
And he's like, that's not how science works, and that's one of the reasons why they can never figure out how these things work.
You need to open this up to the global scientific community and have everybody examine these things and look at it.
But the problem is the military applications.
Like, if you have something...
That can essentially use some new element and use this new element that's bombarded with radiation that allows you to manipulate gravity and move at insane speeds almost instantaneously to anywhere in the universe.
You can't give that to the Chinese.
You can't have someone else get a hold of it before us.
You can't have someone steal these techniques or these technologies.
So what do you do?
If you have this thing, if this thing has really been donated, which is like what a lot of these people that work on them, they call them donations.
If you really have these things, what do you do?
How do you figure that out?
I don't know.
But if we have been doing this since the 1980s, which is – Lazar said it's been around far longer than that, but when he was working on it, it was the 1980s.
You can imagine that by now we might have figured out a way to get a drone going that uses these technologies and that these drones can appear and disappear, they can fly at the same rates of speed, they can hover stationary at 120 knot winds like they've observed.
It looked like a massive craft, not shaped like an Imperial Star Destroyer, but of that scale that was more sort of like tubular shaped.
Tubular?
Yeah, more like a tube.
But you could see variations in it.
It wasn't like totally smooth.
And you could see by the way that it was like blocking out the stars, that you could see that there were like apparatus on it of some kind.
And I always thought that it was just a military aircraft where they thought they had a cloaking device.
See, now that's what other people saw was these smaller things on the same night that were explained away as being some sort of military flares or weather balloons or some shit.
That's not what I saw.
On the same night, but I'm not the only one that saw this larger scale craft.
So I always thought like, man, that could be a military ship.
They thought they had some sort of cloaking device that fucked up.
It fritzed out because that's kind of what it looked like.
I actually went on the record with the newspaper I worked for right away because they were immediately dismissing those smaller lights that we just saw as whatever the explanation was.
And I was like, there's something else in the sky that night too.
I love to gamble.
If I had to make a bet, I would still say it's human military technology that fritzed out.
Well, unlike Fife Symington, I was stoned, but I still know what I saw.
I still know what I saw.
And what's interesting is when he's trying to describe the shape, and he puts it at a bigger size than I have it in my memory, I do remember talking with my friend.
It was hard to describe what we just saw.
It's like we didn't have a reference.
It's like we're trying to...
Let me see if I can articulate this.
We're trying to find reference points for something that really doesn't have one, I guess.
Kind of estimate the size, but it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before.
I know people said that they saw a triangle, so then for a while they were saying that's why he was probably talking about the B-2 bomber, the stealth bomber, because they're kind of triangular.
Yeah.
It was way bigger than one of those, and it was not that shape at all.
You know, I struggle to come up with what shape it was, because it's a shape that I haven't really seen before.
But, you know, to your point about, like, look at how people, about the technology, maybe it's being kept quiet because of the military applications.
Like, look at how people freaked out when it leaked about this new Russian space weapon, right, a couple weeks back, or three weeks back, whatever.
It's like an ability to disrupt, like, satellite communications in space.
Like, Russia, like, somehow it leaked, maybe deliberately, out of Russia that they've got this far more advanced technology than we thought they had.
To a weapon that would be in space that could disrupt communications and satellites and really fuck us up.
And it leaked and then there was this one congressman that went public with it and was like, we have a real problem.
This was like three weeks ago.
But imagine if it was something like on the scale of like a weaponized ship that could be cloaked like that, or some of the technology, or if we did have, as you said, this donated technology that's from an extraterrestrial intelligence.
That the U.S. has been figuring out applications for.
You'd have to keep that on lock.
Because what if that leaked right now?
What do you think Putin would do, you know?
Who the fuck knows what he would do if all of a sudden it leaked that we had these, you know, military capabilities that are far beyond what he thinks we have.
That's my thought about these things that they keep seeing, because they always see them in areas where they do military tests, right?
The Tic Tac was off the coast of San Diego, which is where all the military bases are, and the things that Ryan Long had seen were all off the east coast in restricted airspace, in space where they run fighter jet training and And he said when they upgraded their technology in 2014, they upgraded their sensors.
And he said that's when we started seeing these things constantly, all the time.
And they were getting visuals.
They were seeing visual versions of these things.
And that was a square.
It was a sphere in a square or a square in a sphere.
Do you remember?
Square in a sphere.
So there's like this circular sphere and this black square that exists in this thing and it's hovering.
And it's hovering in very high speed winds.
And it's just stationary, motionless.
And that these things are able to move at just bizarre rates of speed with No indication of a traditional propulsion system.
No heat signature that shows that, you know, rocket propulsion.
Nothing.
Nothing that we can explain.
And if they had a drone...
That could do that.
That's where they would test those things.
And what better way to test whether or not people could see them than to run them out there when people are using new jets with new capabilities.
Like, can you see them?
Okay, they see them.
And the fact that, you know, the Tic Tac, when Commander David Fravor brought this information and reported it, and they showed the videos to these admirals, and they were nonplussed.
How are they not, are they just like stone-cold dudes who can just keep it together in the face of some alien technology?
They know that we are being visited?
Or is this, and the other thing is that When Fravor communicated this stuff, these guys who are running these sensors, they're running the detection systems, are saying, we're seeing these things all the time, every couple weeks.
We're seeing them all over the place.
Well, what the fuck is that?
And this is also 2004. Did they have the ability of 2004 or something to go from above 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second?
What is that?
Like, what the fuck is that?
And people try to, you know, argue it away or explain it away by saying, oh, it's a failure of the detection systems and there's a glitch in the...
Yeah, but visuals, they have more than one fighter jet has seen it.
They have video of this thing moving at a speed that would turn human beings into jelly.
Like if there's a biological entity inside that thing and experiences that g-force, you're talking about some fucking insane g-force, like 1,300 times what a human being can tolerate and just gone, silent.
I've often suspected that in the last 20 years, especially in the last five, it feels like the witnesses, the guys coming forward saying, look, I know what I saw.
Are more...
The ones that are associated with the government, even commercial airline pilots will be on the FAA, but especially military pilots, you know, they're being allowed to speak, that it feels like the waters are being tested by the government for some reason.
Like, we're going to let this out a little bit.
We're going to let the people that actually...
Right.
Like, attest to what they saw and see how the public reacts.
Well, in unique circumstances, if someone sees something like this, like you, so you see this in 1990-whatever it is in Phoenix, if you lived 5,000 years ago and you see this, what does that sound like?
What does that sound like to everybody?
It sounds like you're out of your fucking mind.
A small handful of people say it.
They tell stories.
People write it down.
It just goes away.
Unique experiences are very difficult to classify.
You know, if you have an experience with a ghost.
If a ghost shows up in this room and we all see it and it doesn't show up on camera and we swear we saw an apparition of fucking Forrest Gump standing there, you're like, what the fuck is that?
Well, you're just left with a story.
If you can't measure it, you can't write it down, even a video of it, what are you seeing?
Are you seeing grainy footage of something?
I'm sure you've seen these supposedly leaked images that fighter pilots have taken with cell phones from their aircrafts.
What are they saying?
What is that thing?
What is that weird, blurry-looking, metallic-looking thing?
Is that a Mylar balloon that they're mistaking for a spacecraft?
That doesn't seem likely.
Seems like they're a lot fucking smarter than that.
They're not going to think a child's birthday balloon that's floating around at 20,000 feet is an aircraft.
They're used to seeing things, and they're seeing something that rotates.
This is the other thing about the craft that coincides with what Bob Lazar said.
It's moving like this, and it turns sideways.
And Lazar said that's what it did, that it would direct its generator, whatever that gravity generator is, it would direct that towards the way that it wanted to go.
So it would literally turn sideways to move forward.
I mean, Kenneth Arnold was talking about these things in the 1950s, right?
So for sure in the 1950s, we didn't have the capability to make something like that.
Something with no visible means of propulsion that's shaped like a saucer that flies silently through the air and, you know, moves at a speed and has capabilities in terms of maneuverability that far exceeds a jet that we had back then.
What does that mean?
What is that?
I mean, they were seeing these things when we had propeller planes, you know?
What is that?
I don't know.
But part of me feels stupid for even talking about it.
But the thing on the military installations, of course, the two theories are one is that there's some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence that's drawn to our military activity.
But what seems like the more rational explanation is, as you said, that's where they test this shit.
Or, you know, if I was an intelligent species that's willing to donate these crafts like they claim, They kind of let these things land or crash and then they'll do it in a very strategic way where they know that the military will be able to cordon off the area and isolate and stop people from talking about it.
And the idea that people in the military aren't able to keep secrets, well, that's nonsense.
They're really good at keeping secrets.
They can keep secrets.
Especially high-level people.
Look, if I had access, like if...
Not Joe Biden.
He's too far gone.
But if Obama called me during his administration and said, you want to see some shit?
I'd be like, I want to see some shit.
And he said, don't tell anybody.
I'd be like, I won't tell anybody.
Maybe I'd tell my wife.
Maybe I'd tell one of my friends.
But I wouldn't fucking go public and tell everybody.
If they're willing to show me this shit...
No one's going to believe me anyway, right?
And so I'm like, what good does it do if I make myself look like a moron, A? B, now I can't have access to it anymore, because I told them.
Because I told people about it, because now they can't trust me.
Especially if I was in the military.
I would shut the fuck up.
Show me.
You know?
You ever heard the story?
It's a widely disputed story.
But that Jackie Gleason and Nixon were drinking one day.
And Nixon was like, you want to see some shit?
And Nixon took Jackie Gleason to one of the Air Force bases and showed him this UFO. And Jackie Gleason was a UFO fanatic.
I don't know if you know this.
But Jackie Gleason actually had a home built in upstate New York that looked like a UFO. And he had this home built after this supposed experience.
Well, we certainly want to believe the stories that they hover over military bases and shut down nuclear weapons.
And, you know, my comedy club is called The Comedy Mothership.
And you walk into the comedy club, there's a gigantic artificial UFO that we had built.
So when you walk into it, like as you walk in the front door, there's this big...
Construction of a UFO that has a beam that comes down and we use it as a projector to show who's coming soon on the big screen.
But I named the rooms Fat Man and Little Boy.
Because those are the bombs that we dropped.
And right after we dropped those bombs, that's when all the UFO activity happened.
That's like there's a giant uptick in UFO activity after 1945. And in the UFO folklore, it's like they realized that we have the ability to drop nukes.
And so then they started visiting.
And then they started shutting down nuclear weapons at bases and making their presence known at these military bases to say, hey, Keep it together, bitches.
Like, we're watching.
We don't want you to nuke this whole planet and ruin our little program.
And then our program is an accelerated engineering program.
That we've accelerated the evolution of human beings through some sort of intervention.
And that this is why we're so different.
It's not the stoned ape theory.
It's the humans are engineered by some superior life form to try to accelerate our evolution.
And bring us to this place and that they've helped us along the way but we're autonomous and we're allowed to do what we want to do and so we do Disgusting crazy shit like drop nuclear bombs from propeller planes by the way right right propeller planes on Cities and that once they did that they're like,
okay Slow the fuck down We're here Now, whether they've always been here, like in the Vedic texts or even in the Bible, Ezekiel's description of the wheel within a wheel.
Have you read that description?
Pull up Ezekiel's description of what he saw.
This is one of the favorite descriptions from the Bible, from the Old Testament, about UFOs that people love to bring up.
Because Ezekiel has this thing that he describes.
And it's the most bizarre depiction I looked.
I saw an immense dust storm come from the north, an immense cloud with lightning flashing from it, a huge ball of fire glowing like bronze.
Within the fire were what looked like four creatures vibrant with life.
Each had the form of a human being, but each also had four faces and four wings.
Their legs were as sturdy and straight as columns, but their feet were hooved like those of a calf and sparkled with the fire like burnished bronze.
On all four sides under their wings they had human hands.
All four had faces and wings and the wings touching one another.
They turned neither one way nor the other.
They went straight forward.
Their faces looked like this.
In front of a human face, on the right side, the face of a lion.
On the left, the face of an ox.
And in the back, the face of an eagle.
So much for the faces.
The wings were spread out with the tips of one pair touching the creature on either side.
The other pair of wings covered its body.
Each creature went straight ahead.
Wherever the spirit went, they went.
They didn't turn as they want.
The four creatures looked like blazing fire or fiery torches.
Tongues of fire shot back and forth between the creatures.
And out of the fire, bolts of lightning.
The creatures flash back and forth like strikes of lightning.
As I watched the four creatures, I saw something that looked like a wheel on the ground beside each of the four faced creatures.
This is what the wheels looked like.
They were identical wheels, sparkling like diamonds in the sun.
They looked like they were wheels within wheels, like a gyroscope.
When the living creatures went, the wheels went.
When the creatures stopped, the wheels stopped.
When the creatures lifted off, the wheels lifted off.
Because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.
Over the heads of the living creatures was something like a dome, shimmering like a sky full of cut glass, vaulted over their heads.
Under the dome, one set of wings was extended towards the other, with another set of wings covering their bodies.
When they moved, I heard their wings.
It was like the roar of a great waterfall, like the voice of the strong god, like the noise of a battlefield.
When they stopped, they folded their wings.
And then as they stood with folded wings, there was a voice above the dome over their heads.
Above the dome, there was something that looked like a throne.
Sky blue like a sapphire with a human-like figure towering above the throne.
From what I could see, from the waist up, he looked like burnished bronze and from the waist down like a blazing fire.
Brightness everywhere.
The way a rainbow springs out of a sky on a rainy day, that's what it was like.
Well, you know, there's a university in Israel, I think it's the University of Jerusalem, that theorized that the Moses experience of the burning bush was a DMT experience.
Like when you say Moses saw the burning bush, well, what kind of bush would burn that would give you a psychedelic experience?
Well, the acacia tree.
The acacia tree, which is very common to that area, is rich with DMT. And how do you psychoactively acquire DMT? You smoke it.
So you're smoking this tree, this burning bush, and you're seeing God.
And God has brought you ten commandments of how to live life, which sounds like a lot of what you experience in the DMT experience.
When you have that and you have these contact with the entities, they kind of give you guidelines of how to live.
Well, again, back to the Christians and Prabhupada, that was his thing.
It was like, you can't hold on to it with psychedelics alone, and you don't need psychedelics to get a hold of it in the first place, was what he was preaching.
And he probably recognized that The problem with taking psychedelics is that it's so accessible.
You just take it.
I mean, it's the beautiful thing about it.
But you also could say that could be a problem because then a bunch of people with no discipline would just start popping these things and having these experiences and having no sort of framework, no moral framework, no ethical framework, no understanding of what are you experiencing and what to do with this stuff.
But if you acquire it If you acquire it endogenously, through discipline, then you are on a path, and through that path, you can achieve this thing, and you realize that this is a very difficult thing to achieve, and that you have to stay on this path in order to get this enlightenment.
I could see how someone would say, no, listen, that's not the way.
This is the way.
That you can do it with your own mind.
You don't need these things.
You know Terence McKenna's thought on that, though?
Very funny thought.
He said it reminds me of an ancient story of this monk had acquired a city of levitation and practiced this.
And it said to the Buddha, when the Buddha came to town, you know, I've spent 20 years acquiring the City of Levitation, and I can walk across the water.
And the Buddhist said, "Yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel." So that was McKenna's take on it.
It's like, why would you do all that stuff when you could just take the mushrooms?
But McKenna was, you know, McKenna was a brilliant man.
He wasn't some stoned hippie in the middle of upstate New York, just tripping balls on mushrooms.
I don't know man, but it's all look just the fact that the the psychedelic experience is a real thing and When you do take that and you do have those experiences and you realize that it's a real thing and like how did I not know about this?
How was the most profound thing that's ever happened to me?
Something that is a Schedule I drug that's illegal for whatever reason that no one's explained to me accurately.
No one's ever explained it in a way that makes sense.
Why is a thing that doesn't kill anybody, that exists in the human mind?
That was the other thing that McKenna said about DMT. It's illegal, but everybody's holding.
The most staunch, conservative, anti-drug person right now has DMT in their body.
All of them do.
Everybody does.
It's literally like testing people for blood.
Yeah, you have blood.
Of course you're alive.
Yeah, you have DMT. You're alive.
Yeah, but it's illegal.
What?
It doesn't make any sense.
It sounds so insane.
And also the fact that it's naturally occurring, not just naturally occurring in the human mind, but naturally occurring in nature, and that there seems to be some sort of mitigation strategy by the human body in order to keep you from tripping balls by consuming all the different plants that have DMT in it, and that's monoamine oxidase.
So monoamine oxidase breaks it down in the gut.
So if you consume like grasses, like phalaris grass, it's very rich in DMT. If a human being consumed that, you're not going to trip because the monoamine oxidase in the gut breaks it down.
So the strategy that they came up with with ayahuasca was to combine these psychedelic plants, these plants that contain dimethyltryptamine with other plants that contain harmine, Which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
And that the two of these together will allow an orally active version of dimethyltryptamine.
It also makes you realize how insecure you are and how insecure most people are with interactions with each other.
And when those barriers are down, Yeah.
Yeah.
And the problem that I had with it was after it was over I felt so drained but I didn't have any strategy for like taking You know some sort of a serotonin booster like 5htp, which is what people take that are like Really know what they're doing with that stuff They take 5-HTP to boost up their serotonin while they're doing it.
So that after it's over, they're not just crashed.
Because the next day, I was useless.
I remember I was in a coffee shop the next day and I was trying to read a magazine.
And I couldn't read.
I couldn't concentrate.
I literally couldn't read this magazine.
I was like, oh my god, I'm so dumb.
My brain feels like a...
I felt...
The way I described it was like I had a dry sponge for a brain.
And, you know, we know for a fact that all that stuff was made illegal during the sweeping Psychedelics Act of 1970 that was designed to subvert the war movement and to subvert the civil rights movement and to go after the Black Panthers and all these different people that were...
Disrupting the government's control over society.
And the best way to do that is to make all drugs illegal and then go after those people and just throw water on the whole party.
And it worked.
It worked for decades.
And it, like, severely impacted art, specifically music.
If you look at the music from the 60s all the way up to 1970, and then there's this confusion period of 1970, and then you look at the music of the 80s, like, what the fuck happened, everybody?
What happened?
How do you go from Hendrix to fucking whatever?
I don't want to make fun of any 80s bands, but hair bands.
And I think the plot has come back, and I think you could kind of credit Lorenzo from the Psychedelic Salon with the distribution of all those Old recordings of Alan Watts and McKenna and all those different psychedelic bards that were talking about these things that got people more curious and interested in them.
And then, you know, people realizing that we needed to do something for these soldiers that are coming back with PTSD and psilocybin ceremonies and ayahuasca and MDMA, which is being used by MAPS. MAPS has done an amazing job.
They really have.
They've done it the right way, where they're really promoting legalization in a very structured way.
And even then, I mean, it really takes people leaving office and dying off.
It takes the old people going away, the corrupt politicians that are in charge of deciding what is and is not legal.
They have to vanish and they slowly get phased out generation after generation and then the new people coming into play, some of them have military experience, some of them know people that have been really helped by MDMA therapy or ayahuasca or ibogaine, people that have like severe addictions to pills and all sorts of different opiates.
Ibogaine is like one of the greatest things that's ever been discovered to help heal people from these problems.
Well, psychedelics might be the only thing that prevents war.
It might be the only thing that helps people.
I mean, if you can get large-scale use of psychedelics sanctioned, and not just in America, but worldwide, I think it will have a tremendous impact on the way people view this experience, because this is a small, tiny Finite experience that we're going through.
It seems like it takes forever, but I mean, you're 53, I'm 56. It's like, Jesus, man, we're more than halfway to the finish line, and it's like it just happened.
It's like a blip.
And you're still, we're all, everyone, me included, we're all just trying to figure it out as we go along.
And hopefully you're better than you were yesterday at it.
And sometimes you're not.
Sometimes you fall down, sometimes you get back up, and you climb a little higher this time.
And now you're better than you were a year ago, but boy, it's fucking confusing.
No, the correct idea is legalization And centers that are set up by ethical experts who really have experience in these things that can provide both counseling and medical services and allow people to do the correct dose safely under supervision.
And then counseling.
It gives them some sort of a framework as to what to do with this, what has happened, what this means, and how you can apply this to your life.
And if we could figure out how to do that in a structured way, We probably could help an enormous amount of people.
But legitimately, there's a legitimate comment, which is that that's what Prabhupada and that's what Krishna consciousness, in a sense, was offering, was integration of the psychedelic experience.
Here's a framework for integrating everything you've been experiencing on acid and mescaline.
Yeah, and I think Prabhupada and the people that were legit were really trying to do that and they were really trying to spread this message.
And if you think about what they were able to do during the 60s with the help of George Harrison, they opened up a lot of people's minds to these ideas and probably changed a lot of lives and the directions of a lot of people's lives.