American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - CIA Chief Breaks Silence on Time Travel Abilities

Starting point is 00:00:00 Our next guest worked for the CIA for over two decades. He goes, if you are storm, die in your separate foxholes. His name is Rolf Moat Larson. He served in various roles all over the world, some of which he can't even speak about today. What's the most on the brink the world has been that you can talk about? Well, he's been shoulder to shoulder with Putin. He describes working directly

Starting point is 00:00:29 with NSA director Michael Hayden, CIA director George Tenet, and even briefing former president George W. Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. But while he's worked at the highest, most illustrious levels of international diplomacy, that is the least interesting thing about our next guest. In 1991, I went on a pilgrimage to Montothos Greece, and I'm sitting at this, I fell asleep, sort of napping on this, stone chair facing the church.

Starting point is 00:01:02 And with every step I'm taking, the time is going back in time. It was as if time was evaporating. But I wasn't aware if I could wake up or get back to my old world because I was going back in time. He claims to be a time traveler. He says that he left his 20th century identity behind in 1991 to go live as a monk

Starting point is 00:01:26 in Mount Athos Greece in the 14th century. I became a recluse up there. I burned my hut up there like all the things a recluse does. You know, I learned to fly. And when you're flying, you're spiritually open. He time traveled back to the medieval era for months, Eden, walking around, socializing, and sleeping in his physical body in medieval Mount Athos Greece.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Now I'm sure you're wondering if I mean time travel in the metaphorical sense. Our guest stated multiple times to me that the reality he experienced in medieval times was indistinguishable from his current waking reality, according to him not remote viewing or astrally projecting himself there. Does all of this feel as real as this interview feels? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If senior CIA time travel whistleblower was not on your bingo card this year, it wasn't on mine either.

Starting point is 00:02:29 But here we are. But if it can't get any more interesting than that, it does. Our next guest ran intelligence and counterintelligence for the Department of Energy. I learned some of this nation's most important secrets at DOE, not CIA. DOE does stuff that, man. And if you know anything about this show, we are obsessed with UFOs and think and kind of know that the Department of Energy has a lot to do with managing UFO secrecy and crash retrievals. So you better believe I threw literally every single UFO program-related question at our guest today.

Starting point is 00:03:06 I even coordinated on the questions with my friend and UFO whistleblower David Grush, fellow YouTuber UAP Gerb, an author of UFOs and nukes, Robert Hastings. Do you think that we have propulsion modalities that transcend chemical combustion? Do you think nothing happened at Roswell? Have you ever seen a one-of-one material? I'll let you assess our guest's answers. yourself. And whether you come out of this interview thinking he's just a savvy former CIA case officer running circles around us, or whether you think he's being genuine, is up to you. I will

Starting point is 00:03:40 say that for me, this was hands down one of the most thoughtful and mind-blowing conversations on metaphysics, fringe science, and the nature of reality that I've had on this show. So without further ado, here is all four hours of it. Former CIA and Department of Energy intelligence officer, Moscow station chief, time traveler, and religious mystic, Rolf Moa Larson. Before we continue, I want to take a second to thank one of my favorite products in the world, Ketone IQ, for sponsoring today's episode. I've mentioned this before, but I don't really drink a lot of caffeine, I don't use nicotine, and I don't really do super well with stimulants. Most of these things give me jitters, spikes, or a crash later on. It feels like you're taking credit out on your future energy.

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Starting point is 00:06:05 I use ketone IQ regularly. It's like a mental cheat code, and it's genuinely one. of the cleanest energy sources I've ever found. So before we get back into the episode, please visit ketone.com slash alchemy for 30% off your subscription order, plus receive a free gift with your second shipment. Again, that's ketone.com slash alchemy for 30% off your order. Or you can find ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide and get your first shot free. Seriously, this stuff works.

Starting point is 00:06:34 Thanks so much to Ketone IQ for sponsoring today's episode. I'm here with Rolf Moat Larson. I am so grateful for this interview. I've read your book, A State of Mind, Faith in the CIA. One of the most remarkable books I've ever read. It's really fascinating because interspersed with stories of real-life espionage of kind of moments where, you know, the world pivoted and you literally see like timelines shift. You're in the, you know, Oval Office talking to Bush and Cheney and that sort of thing.

Starting point is 00:07:06 interspersed with that are some very profound mystical experiences. So why don't we start off with just why did you write the book to begin with? All right. Thank you, Jesse. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm an admirer of your work. And I look forward to telling my story in the context of all the stories you present of people who have things to offer that really expand our understanding of reality and of faith. And I wrote the book because I wanted people to benefit from my story, which is really my relationship with God.

Starting point is 00:07:42 And I like people to think of it more as a relationship than as a religious book. And it's not in fact about that. I don't proselytize or try to convert people to a specific religion. My story started as a little boy where I was aware of the presence of God. And the presence of God that I was aware of was something I felt. need to develop. And I saw God as even a child as a creator God and a personal God, which meant I could communicate. So we opened with a little prayer. And I like to try to keep a continuous prayer idea with God, we're always interacting. And there's an arena. The reason I entitled my book,

Starting point is 00:08:24 A State of Mind of Faith in the CIA, was a state of mind refers to a desire to be close to God. John Paul II. It's a paraphrase of him saying, the hell is not a place, which is an interesting concept. Dantes Inferno, it's a state of mind. It's a state of mind of being separated from God. And throughout my life, I had sort of a fear of being distant from God or not being close enough to God. But it wasn't a traditional thing of go to church and give money.

Starting point is 00:08:53 It was more of like in my personal relationship with God, since God knows all things, God would be aware. And when I would pray in the way we started, I got responses. and ultimately evolved into a destiny I felt. My destiny became tied to my relationship with God. My destiny was to fulfill God's wishes through my life and my experiences. And that set up certain conflicts with, I call my secular world of CIA, which I devoted my whole career to, started the military,

Starting point is 00:09:24 went to West Point, and spent six years in the Army at an auspicious time in 70s on the Czech border, and then transferred over to CIA. So that whole story, all those experiences had their own role in national security, et cetera, but also in my relationship with God. And the faith part was understanding my faith as that relationship with God, not as what I called myself or what people thought of me in religious terms, but in my relationship with God, how was it developing? And was I fulfilling God's will through my actions and thoughts?

Starting point is 00:10:00 And what did you end up doing at the C. CIA and throughout your intelligence career, I think a lot of people, what we try to do on the show is kind of marry some of the most out there experiences or claims people have with, you know, kind of rigorous credentials. Yeah, I think that's really important. So in my CIA career, I started as a, in Europe, just what we call it, a European officer. We had different areas of the world we were in. That was where I started. But I got quickly in arms control. And then over the years, I seemed to gravitate. I didn't think of this as things went on as being coincidental. It began to converge with my spiritual developments more and more towards war and nuclear war, collapse of the Soviet Union. I did two tours in Moscow. In the old days, in the Soviet days, I came back.

Starting point is 00:10:53 I was what we call our chiefest station in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, I hope that gives me some credibility on my religious, or my religious, spiritual experiences, but they were, my credibility as an intelligence officer that I was always seemed to be at the threshold of history like many. I'm not unique in that, by the way. There are so many of us that have been observers of history, helping to make history in some small way. And I was extremely fortunate in my career. Moscow ended my, we did nine tours overseas, each two, three years under cover, sometimes deep cover through the whole experience. and ended the whole thing, which I don't think was a coincidence in the Middle East between 2011 and 16

Starting point is 00:11:39 when we served in the Middle East for the last five years. So between Europe, Soviet Union, Middle East, we sort of saw the whole world, served as CIA officers. My wife also worked most of that time in CIA. She's written her own book called Story of a CIA wife. I'll close with one thing. I mean, people have different reactions. The first day I walked in CIA headquarters, you see the stars on the wall. It makes a huge...

Starting point is 00:12:07 The stars on the wall are CIA officers who fall in the line of duty. They can't put their names to the star. There's a book that has that code book that tells you this star here and is this person. There are people who lost their lives serving their country overseas. And, of course, I never wanted to be on that wall, like any of us. But right next to that, the stars on the wall was this... large, bold imprint into the marble walls of the CIA atrium when you walk inside the big building, the old headquarters in Virginia. And it says, John, 832, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you

Starting point is 00:12:45 free. And I thought, wow, this is really quite extraordinary that CIA, you know, secular organization, has this New Testament verse on the wall. And I wondered at the time when I walked in the building, whether I would be satisfied that that's what CIA was all about. Were we truth seekers or not truth seekers? And that's the ultimate limitless test. When we don't seek truth and we have another agenda, we do bad things as CIA or intelligence officer or army officers or anything in life. Do you find that at times the CIA has not sought truth in the past? Oh, of course, of course.

Starting point is 00:13:22 I mean, people are people, organizations or organizations. The problem with giving organizations such powers the CIA has is, you know, On the positive side, you can accomplish great things. On the negative sides, you can do very bad things, and especially when you're doing them in secret. You have some interesting stories that you talk about in the book of being in the Oval Office, you know, giving Bush advice, giving Cheney advice. Do you want to give, you know, a couple of examples there of just stories where you kind

Starting point is 00:13:52 of helped out or, you know, advised in kind of very high up American national security context? Right. My career breaks down into three phases, really. The first phase was between when I started 1983 to 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's what we sometimes refer to as the good old days, which was espionage in the shadows. Like the books you always read, the classic espionage books of running spies and great stuff. And I became really good at that.

Starting point is 00:14:23 Then suddenly, boom, almost 10 years into my career, almost exactly, we get hit with 9-11. And after 9-11, I was actually in language training to go to Asia to become as chief of station of a large Asian country when I saw on TV that the Twin Towers got hit by terrorists. I had been on the director, director of CIA staff the year before preceding 9-11 as an associate director of Central Intelligence for military support. So I was a staffer supporting the director, a good friend of mine, wonderful director of my mind, George Tenet. And we knew that we were going to be hit at 9-11. We didn't know where. And I'm not in the school of belief, and I know that it's a valid way to think of it, that we failed. Well, we failed because we allowed the attack to happen.

Starting point is 00:15:14 But could we have prevented it? I think that's in a problematic way to think of it because I don't think we could have prevented 9-11. We just have to give the credit to the terrorist, to Sama bin Laden, the terrorists. But it changed everyone's lives and future of the world. And that was the intent of the terrorists, including my little life. So they pulled me from my language training, and George Tenet made me head of what they called the Weapons of Mass Destruction Department in the Counterterrorism Center, which was to stop terrorists from acquiring biological or nuclear weapons. I mean, that's a, yeah, it's if the, you know, future of the world hinges on any job, that's the job. I did say to George Tenet, who I already knew well because I'd been on his senior staff, I said, George.

Starting point is 00:15:59 Isn't there anybody better than me for this? How did he respond when he said, you know, hey, can't you find anybody better than me? Oh, classic George Tenet respond. Like I said, great leader, a great leader of men and women. He said, hey, I got worse news for you. You don't have any people yet. I went from three people at that meeting that had been assigned to me to 150 over the next weeks. And then he said, but you were behind the eight ball.

Starting point is 00:16:25 And he explained why, which is still classified, which meant there was a plausible reason to be worried that al-Qaeda might obtain a nuclear weapon, which was, I can say the basics, which was they were negotiating with Pakistani nuclear scientists to try to acquire a nuclear weapon that could use in the United States. This was something, as George said to me, we can't fail on this. We're going to fail. We're like athletes playing in sports, team sports. Sometimes we fumble, sometimes with the other team scores. We can't let them score on this. We can't let them do this one time and take out the White House or Congress or something. And so you're just going to have to make sure the president knows everything we know when we know it. We met as a group,

Starting point is 00:17:10 and a lot of this is in my book, of course. We met every day at 5 o'clock. And we just pulled everything together raw. Nothing was going through the normal formats. All our information, we briefed the director. And when we had the meeting at 5, it usually lasts until 8 or 9 at night. And just going around the table, everybody's sharing everything they know with everybody. And everybody included usually the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who, of course, I also got to know very well. The NSA director, Mike Hayden, was part of the group. And just a number of people around the Washington area who needed to know, somebody would pop in from the National Security Council. Stephen Hadley part of it.

Starting point is 00:17:49 Stephen Hadley was often, you know, involved. And everything was brief raw. The president was told everything that night. First thing in the morning, he was briefed by Bob Mueller and George Tenet together, the FBI and CIA directors. And then we would come in ad hoc. And I would go in and I outlined some of the most important, you know, moments of briefing the president when there was something extraordinary from my area. And I felt an immense responsibility. So the short answer to your question is I would brief the president when there was a possibility we were going to get hit with a biological or nuclear attack because something was debil me.

Starting point is 00:18:24 because something was developing. And he needed to know because usually it was something that we couldn't, we didn't know exactly the timing and we weren't entirely sure of the, the accuracy or the providence of the threat, but we knew he needed to know because we don't want him to read about it with us when it happens. And, for example, probably the most important of my whole experience with the president was when I briefed him that three weeks, before we invaded Iraq. So now we're talking 2003. We obtained information that a notorious terrorist

Starting point is 00:19:03 that my people were tracking, his name was Abu Musabal's Harkawi. He's a famous jihadist. He was head of al-Qaeda in Iraq once we later. But this is before the invasion. So this information is very privileged at the time. And I briefed the president several times on him and his network and how they were trying to obtain these weapons. And I came in, I said, Ms. President, I had bad news. The only people in the Oval office were me, George Tennant, and George Bush, George H.W. Bush. He was in a wheelchair at the time. So I was an amazing sight for me as a citizen. I have to say to your listeners, you know, So W and his father and his father and George and me, that was in the whole office for an hour. Wow.

Starting point is 00:19:49 And I have to tell you, as an American eye, goosebumps. Yeah. And everything I briefed the president, you know, all I had from dealing with everybody I dealt with at that level was they were incredibly dedicated to serving this country. They're incredibly dedicated to doing the right thing. All the things you hear. The president is very smart. He remembered everything from the previous. I didn't even know how he did it, frankly. He would recall the facts of the previous time I talked to him if it was a month earlier or two months or whatever he'd remember. So this time I told him, we know where he is. He's in this case. He's in this camp in northeast Iraq. Now remember, this is three weeks before we invaded Iraq. So I said to the

Starting point is 00:20:27 president, he's here, and I had the overhead imagery of the camp. And I had a nominated board with all the jihadist terrorists that were working with him. Him on the top. His picture is mug. And the president who already knew him while he said, Ralph, what would you do if you were me? Now, when I briefed the president, I hope this is reassuring to your listeners is like trying to make it. I did it as a citizen like I'm not putting any of my spin or influence on anything. I'm telling the president. There's no Rolf agenda. That was my key test.

Starting point is 00:21:02 I had facts. I had things to say. I never went beyond the. And that day, we had had an internal discussion on exactly what I should say to the president about what I'm describing, including that we shouldn't do anything. We should let this play out. and I was too close to the invasion. But when he looked at me, he said that I started to say what I was told to say. And he knew me too well.

Starting point is 00:21:24 So he said, look, I don't want to know what they are telling you to tell me. What do you think I should do? What were you told to say? I was told to say we shouldn't bomb it. We shouldn't attack it. Yeah. Because it could, you know, the invasion. And I was, because I was obsessed with this terrorist.

Starting point is 00:21:40 I was obsessed. And I knew that it was an unhealthy obsession. I have been known to be slightly obsessive in work, you know, hopefully not other things. But it turned out that, you know, my look betrayed because I was so zealously telling him, here he is, here they are. He is, no, I mean, what would you do if you were me?

Starting point is 00:21:59 You're telling me not to do anything, but you're saying that something else. I think you're thinking something else. So I looked at the director, and he just gave me the, like, he asked you the question. He didn't ask me the question. He asked you the question. You answered the question.

Starting point is 00:22:13 and I looked at the director, looked back at the president, I said, Mr. President, I had vomit. So nobody said anything. He went on the meeting. He didn't seem, you know, non-plused by the whole thing. We were driving back in the director's car to this agency headquarters, and he says, well, oh, I said to him, well, should I have said that? He goes, he asked you, you told him, I have no problem with it.

Starting point is 00:22:39 He goes, typical. Now when you get back to our building, you make sure you tell. everybody what you said. And of course, there's no, one thing I like to, I think I emphasized in my book, the right and the wrong and who's to blame is so much less on our minds when we're doing things than people think it is. Like we're just trying to make, do the right thing. And sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't. Yes. Speaking of this pivotal moment and at least from the kind of public perception, you know, intelligence failure or wrongdoing.

Starting point is 00:23:17 People think of the overall invasion of Iraq, which is not, you know, for the audience at all what you're talking about with this targeted bombing of Zarqawi. They think of that as an intelligence failure because they think of us as having tagged Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction when he never had any.

Starting point is 00:23:36 And, you know, maybe at most he used, you know, biological weapons in Kuwait, which is horrible. And he was, you know, very bad. guy. Right. But, you know, maybe this was this kind of, you know, huge waste of money, you know, lives and, you know, created this kind of void or vacuum for which ISIS, you know, ironically, to actually like take root and, you know, which kind of ended up radicalizing the region even more. So, yeah, I'm sure you were thinking deeply about this at the time. What do you think happened there? I struggled with whether I should include this, but I consider

Starting point is 00:24:12 resigning when we invaded Iraq. Really? I noted that briefly. I didn't get into it in any... So you were against it? I was against the war philosophically, but some of my colleagues were also feeling it was going to be a disaster. The idea that we didn't know that it would turn out badly, I think most people had the most

Starting point is 00:24:33 experience knew this was going to turn out badly. Now, the decision to do it, at least I believe, and I can't say, there's a lot of... It's a split decision of views on this. I don't see any intent for the administration to deceive anybody that by saying Saddam had WMD and he didn't. It was a failure, a massive failure, to conclude that it was based on bad sources, which is usually the origin of all bad decisions and intelligences when you have dubious sources or bad sources. these were both sources that didn't know much and were overrepresenting information we call it when you're making up information and on that basis we made a terrible decision is my view but it was exacerbated by the idea that even

Starting point is 00:25:22 if it had been the right decision it the result probably would have been the same because we couldn't control Iraq like we couldn't control Afghanistan and it didn't take and I have a chapter in my book where I'm talking to the vice president Dick Cheney or I got them exceptionally well also where he just called me in a weekend from the White House. I came in on a Sunday to talk to him about why are we losing the war by the summer of 2003. This is six months after our invasion. But I didn't say what I was really thinking was, you know, sorry, Dick, but if you don't know what's going on here, I can't help you.

Starting point is 00:25:57 And then I was really worried that we didn't seem to know what we were up against. And that was the real shocker to me of Iraq. Wasn't that we made a mistake in the invasion side, as bad as that was. Yeah. Is that we didn't know what we were getting into. What's the most on the brink the world has been that you can talk about? Well, you know, the Soviet Union had collapsed. And the biggest worry in Congress and in Washington's mind, which we had almost no inkling of in Moscow, where we're actually doing the work, was that one of these nukes would end up.

Starting point is 00:26:36 in rogue states or terrorists. And the U.S. government at that time launched a heroic, really heroic effort with the Russians to try to account for every nuclear weapon. The so-called suitcase nukes. Nukes aren't just missiles that come in and destroy the world.

Starting point is 00:26:52 That's really the answer to question. My biggest word was the world will blow up, literally. There's nothing fun about trying to stop terrorists with nukes. There's certainly nothing fun about trying to recover nukes in a country that's just lost control of its entire empire like Russia had in 1991, two and three. So I'd say that answers two things. It answers

Starting point is 00:27:12 kind of what the big, there are a lot of things to worry about in the world. You know, there's biotechnology, there's AI, there's nuclear, but nuclear weapons are still, for me, the king of the the king of the hill, because it can happen that fast and we won't even be aware if we're not really serious about stopping it from happening. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're in a scary world right now, you have all these kind of, you know, this asymmetric warfare and all these capabilities. And then all this ability for if you're China or Russia or some sort of larger adversary to gain plausible deniability and act through sort of rogue actors. But I want to back up and just talk about you've had these kind of mystical downloads. And I want to talk about the first one.

Starting point is 00:28:00 You were kind of a nihilistic youth at West Point. Yeah. What happened? Well, you know, there was a point in my life when I was, I combined my interest in knowing truth to an extreme where I was receptive to whatever input I would get to the point I'd pushed myself to an extreme. I had had experiences where I had dreams that came true. And I realized that I started thinking about consciousness and subconscious. And these were things that were affecting me in terms of being receptive to the idea that there's way more out there than we see in logic and reason or even if you add intuition to that, right?

Starting point is 00:28:45 And so at West Point, I did these dream experiences. I talk a little bit on the book. They were kind of childish in a way and not very scientific. But then when I graduated, I went to Fort Knox as an armor officer. I was going to go to the check border as an arm guy. and they started to become much more vivid. And the first briefing I got actually in the Army, a secret briefing was on the Russian nuclear threat in Europe at that time

Starting point is 00:29:14 because I'm going to go out and be what they call the covering force. We were literally the closest American forces on the border to confront the Soviet hordes. Now, this was in 1976. So we're talking eight years after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. So everything is very real and palpable. And the Germans were depending on us to defend them and the whole world, in a sense. And part of that briefing was the idea that we had tactical nuclear weapons.

Starting point is 00:29:42 We would fire on them if they invaded. And I was a shock to me. That was my first introduction to nuclear weapons in a context of war, which nowadays when we listen to where this has gone full circle, we listened to Vladimir Putin talking about using nukes in Ukraine. We have to think about this idea of nuclear weapons. The tables have been reversed. Back then, we needed them because we were afraid of being invaded. And he's using him now what he regards to be if Russia's existence is threatened by NATO in the West.

Starting point is 00:30:13 He would use them too, which is really what he said. So the point being at the time, I'm in this kind of mode. And my friends and I are all going through this together, the ones that are four of us, kind of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And so I had this incredibly vivid dream in the midst of all this at Fort Knox, where I dreamt that I was in a battle, like a Battle of Armageddon. It's the first time the mystical things turned, I would call turned religious or religious history. What I became a big advocate or hobbyist in eschatology,

Starting point is 00:30:50 which means the theology of the end of days, which I kind of now I hobbyist. in it because it started then the roots of it. I didn't understand that at the time. And it was just such a vivid dream. And in the dream, these numbers appeared. So there were no voices. I couldn't hear anything. And the whole, everything was black.

Starting point is 00:31:10 So I'm in a dream state or escape in which I can't see. I could sort of smell like, you know, the acrid smoke and things like that that was around me. and I was aware of these forces gathering for great confrontation. And in that sort of context of, I would say, an apocalypse, it didn't necessarily have to be at the time, but I saw these numbers roll out in cubes. And it all was around 747. So the number 747 becomes a lifelong number for me,

Starting point is 00:31:52 like a mystical number. What does it mean to you? To me, well, I don't know, actually, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book. I don't know. But my, I think it has to be a divine number. It has to be something related to what I later became, which was a watchman for terrorism and, you know, these kinds of things. In my professional life, in my religious life, I was getting more and more interested in understanding what these numbers would mean. So I've done everything from Reed.

Starting point is 00:32:22 Nikola Tesla's obsession, because the numbers were. to 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 27, and 40. So these are cubes. So first you get 747. First I get 7, 4, 7.7. Then these cubes kind of are circling in the smoke. They were cubes. And the cubes were these numbers, 3, 6.

Starting point is 00:32:44 Well, the 3 and the 6 were 1 cube, but they kept spinning. So it could be 3 or 6 or 9 or both, right? Because they turn, right? I would never realize that if I hadn't had seen. it. You know, it sounds silly because, of course, they could, but it was not a, and then the rest of the, well, all, of course, except for 40, a variation or a multiple of three, three cubed, 27, you know, three, nine, 12, 12 tribes, 40 days and 49. I started to ascribe what had to be religious meanings to the numbers. But I didn't understand why I was receiving them. Like,

Starting point is 00:33:21 what was the point, you know, I began to think as, As I lay it out, I tried to do in a very systematic way in the course of my book when I would see the numbers and why subsequent. But you asked me the first time. And I have to say a word of my wife before I'll say how the numbers get completed. Because that wouldn't be until I was in Germany after the course. When I met my wife, she was a German. Just girlfriend were carousing. She was as nihilistic as I was for lots of reasons.

Starting point is 00:33:51 And we were just party animals. like, we had no interest in like long-term hookup or what became three kids and nine grandkids in our life, 54 years up to now. And she's in many ways the opposite of me, just practical, get stuff done to this day. I mean, we're like real opposites. I'm philosophical, kind of all over the place. She's like on the feet on the ground, get you through the, you know, with our kids. Everything was always that way. And it served me great because she, I had a tethered. She'd always reel me back in. And we went, but that night, she was really disjointed and she woke up. Because she's always joked.

Starting point is 00:34:26 She said, never, and I never told her this dream. I didn't want my girlfriend to think I was completely nuts, right? Yeah. Logical thought when you're 19, 20. Of course. And, but she wakes up. She goes, I just had a really strange dream. I said, what?

Starting point is 00:34:43 She said, well, we were at the Schwandorf, which is the town next to the town, I was Garrison, was his, umber, Germany. and Schwendorf was less than half higher away. And there was a large church on a hill there, Catholic Church. And she said, how was in by the church? Now, we had gone, that was our favorite discotheque was in that town. We met all our friends there three, four nights a week. It was like a rural carousing party time, as I'm saying.

Starting point is 00:35:10 And she said, it was night, I was alone. You weren't with me. I'm never there without you. She was never in that town without me. And she said, but I was going down an alleyway along the church. I knew what we knew that the geography of it, you know, was coming down a big hill. And I went to the end of this alleyway. And as I came, approached the end, dim light, just some lights on the church on the side, I saw your desk.

Starting point is 00:35:34 And I approached a desk and there was a chair behind it. And the desk was facing me. And there were numbers cubes on your desk with numbers on them. Whoa. And I said, I started almost hyperventilate, but I didn't want to say anything. I said, do you remember what the numbers were by any chance? She said, well, how could I forget? Of course.

Starting point is 00:35:53 It was like I woke up and all the numbers. That's why I just woke up because I remember it was three, six, nine, two. No way. Yeah, yeah. It was the same numbers. Same numbers. One additional number, 49. So now, just to say one last thing on my wife as a witness, like for me, for no one else, for me, I needed this.

Starting point is 00:36:15 It's almost like a sanity check. I said, well, I told her. that, of course, about my dreams. I'd never told her that before that. To this day, 54 years later, oh, 55, 56, whatever it is, 1978 is when that started. She said, well, I don't want to read your book. I don't want to talk about this anymore. She had that kind of a reaction to it. But it doesn't in any way diminish, she knows the truth of it. She knows the truth of all of it, because she was a witness to all of it. Everything in my book, those were the earliest mystical experiences were around numbers and war and the final sort of bearing testimony to the truth, because you have to,

Starting point is 00:37:02 again, I stressed everybody, don't start thinking you're having these things, like, these things, like, you need very deep authentication, very deep testing of your own mind. Are things like this true or not true? I just want to assure anybody listening to any of this that I put myself through all that in great detail, at great detail. depth, test, test, test, test. You know, in the end, you start to know, is this of God? Is this of God? That's the essence of

Starting point is 00:37:28 it. If it's of you, if it's of your imagination, if it's of someone else putting it in your mind, it could be anybody. Did she have any prior knowledge of the numbers that you received in your download before she had her dream? No, no. None. Wow. And the other part, you know, and I had to actually test my mind, because remember,

Starting point is 00:37:45 all this is happening in the non-internet, I couldn't look anything up. But right, right after my, I, you know, in the same time I'm having these dreams, two other things that now inform me. That's all they were there informing. A perfect stranger walked up to me in a fish restaurant. It was Long John Silver's, I don't think they're around anymore. There's a fish restaurant, like a fast food restaurant called Long John Silvers. But you go there for fish, which I rarely did.

Starting point is 00:38:08 I go McDonald's. But one of our friends says, so the four of us were gathered at the four musketeers or my friends at the West Point graduates who all went to Germany together and all experienced all these things, I'm saying, and partied together. We're sitting in a restaurant, this guy walks right up to me, who I describe in the book, and says, read Ezekiel Daniel Revelations and walked away. We all looked at each, like, okay, I mean, there's nothing you do with that. It's just like, that's very strange. But it's coming at the same time all this other stuff, which he knew nothing about, obviously.

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Starting point is 00:40:50 It's just $1 a month to try Shopify, the state-of-the-art solution in e-commerce. And the final experience, which is just the basis, this is just the foundation for things in the future, was when I was at the course getting a lecture on assembly and disassembly of the M-60 tank engine. Now, you have to understand at the time,

Starting point is 00:41:17 I'm very nihilistic or whatever, but I'm also very, I've always been very creative and always wanted to be a writer, even at that time. So I'm imagining, and I was so bored in the class. I was like, that's what I realized, I'm not very good at tank stuff, you know. I mean, I ended up being, you know, I learned forced learning. I was good at my profession as a tank commander of the troops and in the army while I was in it. But, you know, I didn't really like it. And this was the worst of all, which was learning about maintenance-related things on tanks. So I'm writing.

Starting point is 00:41:51 I'm doodling. So I decided, oh, I'd come up with a name for myself as a author. I'll be Frederick Wolf. So I wrote Frederick Wolf. Now, that was in honor of two things I admired at the time. You know, you're getting young. This is like typical of the way I was thinking of the time. Nietzsche, who was my favorite, Frederick Nietzsche, but, you know, Frederick, an adaptation of Nietzsche, who I'm obsessed.

Starting point is 00:42:15 was obsessed with, even at West Point, I go through some stories of Nietzsche. And maybe because he fit this idea of, you know, to know yourself, you have to free yourself. You have to free yourself of God. You have to free yourself of all constraints on who you are and confront yourself as to who you are. Which was also a theme at that time of a lot of the novels fiction I like to read, particularly Herman Hess at the Hesse at the time in Steppenwolf. So the wolf came from that. Frederick, well, the man searching for his true nature, his true character.

Starting point is 00:42:44 I'm willing to lay it all out there as, you know, again, brask, a brash guy. And so then I said, what will be my first short story. I'll write it here in this class. I called it on suicides, suicide note. Why did you choose that? Well, I thought it'd be, I chose it because it seemed like a really dark, deep theme to write about it. So I imagine the note was the note I would leave if I actually committed suicide. So it was like, like if I left a note now,

Starting point is 00:43:14 because I don't, you know, I don't want to encourage this thinking anybody out there. And it came to my senses, so to speak, but I was getting into the novelistic. In fact, the irony was I've never in my life felt in the slightest bit suicidal ever, ever. And I attribute a lot of that to my faith and belief because I'm also an inveterate optimist, even in the future of the world, even with all the dark things I've talked about, war and apocalypse and Armageddon. And I'm actually very optimistic about it because it's all top. tied to this God I know is a loving God.

Starting point is 00:43:47 This God is the creator God. It means everything around you in nature. You can see God and how wonderful it is. It's this personal God you can talk and interact with who loves you, who wants you to love him. So how can you not be an optimist if that's your perspective? So I had that perspective, even that, because I hadn't forgotten the childhood things in my life that made me feel that way.

Starting point is 00:44:10 But I'm going to go down this dark road because it's interesting. And one of my inspirations was, Samu, the philosopher, who was obsessed by the question and mused that maybe the only really relevant question to think about was, is life worth living? Because you have complete control of your life from that very basic way of looking at it. And so I wrote this thing, and that's when I had these dreams, you know, and at that same time, this is all happening concurrent with what I've talked about. So I realized I was getting in a way to. too dark. We're way too deep. And then the dreams were exacerbating my thinking. Again, never got

Starting point is 00:44:51 negative or self-destructed. That's the funny part. And I'm convinced I could have kept plowing down that deeper, deep, that tunnel deeper and deeper without ever hurting myself or anybody or anything, but that's not necessarily for other people, something I would advise, right? But it all culminated in the next day, I said, oh, got to clear my head. Let's go play. golf. So we were all terrible golfers, but we like to go hacking at golf at Fort Knox. They have military golf course right on the base. So we went golfing. And you can look this up if you need to, because I couldn't for years, had to actually look up on the internet what I experienced. As we're golfing, it was going to be a stormy day. You know, of course, that fits. It has to be a

Starting point is 00:45:34 stormy day with thunder and stuff. But we went anyway, you know, being irreverent. And at one point, we reached, I'm trying to get, shoot to the hole straight over this cemetery. And, of course, the ball hooks, there's an iron, hooks into the cemetery. And, you know, I'm feeling very not respectful. Just been in a bad mood, let's just put that way. So I remember climbing over the wall. I go over, wondering where the grave is with the ball. And I saw it sitting right centered on this very, very small gray oval grave in the ground.

Starting point is 00:46:09 You know, and I walk up to the ball. It's right centered on the ball. I said, I wonder who's trapped my ball kind of. literally was what I was thinking, like, again, really tempting fate, you know. I was really tempting fate. And it says, Frederick Wolf, German soldier died November 5, 1944. I had no idea who this guy was, but I know that my birthday is on November 5, 1954. Whoa.

Starting point is 00:46:39 And I just dropped my club and completely freaked out by the experience at the time. because I realized there's no way that could be, you know, coincidence. That's the night where I had the 747 dreams. That's fascinating. Did you try to find anything out about the historical Frederick? And I did. And he was a German soldier who, after World War II, was sent to Fort Knox as a prisoner war. And he was involved in like a little mini German uprising over conditions there.

Starting point is 00:47:12 And he was shot by the guards, you know, and killed. And then he was, of course, buried there. I don't know why his body wasn't sent back to Germany. I never found that level of detail. But it became also kind of this like very interesting connectivity because I was going to Germany. What do you, do you think there's something apocalyptic going on? Because you, this guy goes up to you, he says read Daniel, Ezekiel Revelations. All of those books are kind of notably apocalyptic.

Starting point is 00:47:42 Right. You're dreaming of this sort of Armageddon like thing happened. Well, yes. And the ways I would tie that together would be so the first apocalyptic, well, future dream. Now, we're talking to Zechial Daniel Revelation. I mentioned the person who walked up to me. At that time, that's another thing I did. I filed that away and I didn't think about it much more. But it was always there. You know, I kept it there. It's going to serve a purpose later. I didn't think that at the time, actually, but it did. And one of the purposes was after 9-11, I realized. oh, I get it. I'm Ezekiel's watchman. It's my duty to warn the people, which is really the quintessential CIA officer's role.

Starting point is 00:48:28 I mean, it is in a very modest way. I don't want to make this sound too huge, humongous. It's just, that's what we should do. If we don't do that, there's not much purpose for what we do. And I realize it was much more specific in my case because my first dream, which I chronicle in the book,

Starting point is 00:48:44 was Sadat's assassination in September 6, 1981, where I was there. I was on the scene when he was gunned down in a parade field. The interesting thing about it, I wasn't thinking about Assad.

Starting point is 00:48:57 I didn't even know the event was taking place the day he was assassinated. And, of course, given the time change between where I was at Fort Bliss, Texas, at the time as an army officer,

Starting point is 00:49:07 this was right before I joined the agency and where he was killed in Cairo. It was the exact timing. woke up in the middle of night, having had the dream, and I remembered it in every detail, watching in slow motion while gunmen pulled machine guns out of their cloaks and, you know, shot him dead and a number of others. And I pictured this thing. So I couldn't verify any of that until the next day. Again, no internet, no. And it was reading it in the papers. Did all the details line up of what happened?

Starting point is 00:49:38 Every detail, including the timing, it was just impeccable. And I did do one additional thing. I woke. Was there an example of like a small detail that you dreamt of that was corroborated the next day reading the news? Well, the main, the most important detail, which I was tying into 9-11, was among the, it's never been entirely established, but it certainly was in my mind that Zahua, Aiman Zahiri, who was, of course, deputy head of Al-Qaeda, later the chief of al-Qaeda, was bin Laden's lieutenant, right? he was one of the conspirators that pulled it out. And I mean, weirdly remember him and another guy named Seifal Adel, who was the number three guy in Al-Qaeda. Now he's the head of Al-Qaeda.

Starting point is 00:50:21 So two of the people I pictured in my dream became the heads of Al-Qaeda after bin Laden was killed. And you know they were implicated in Sadat's assassination. Well, it's not 100 percent, but I did in my dream. But if you Google it, you'll see. they probably were. So it's like you remote viewed the event or something. It felt like,

Starting point is 00:50:43 well, it felt like that. And it felt like it because it happened at the same time. And the more important thing is. Or bi-located or something. Yeah. Well, I had no reason to be thinking of this. This is the other, I think, compelling thing.

Starting point is 00:50:58 Many experiences, particularly as you get into the Virgin Marian things that had later happened to me later, there was no logical explanation why I went in that direction except for the warning theme. You know, the idea that was building up to a series of serve as a watchman, serve as a messenger. Let's try. I want to go through the numbers themselves because I think they're fascinating. And, you know, I think of 747, you know, we were talking earlier, actually, before we started rolling. You have the seven-story mountainous by Thomas Burton.

Starting point is 00:51:33 And he is one of many mystics where the number seven is this extremely important number. I just had this guy on Peter Levenda, and he wrote a book called Stairway to Heaven, which is a book about celestial ascent traditions across history, the Mercahaba, the, you know, the Ziggurat, the Heckelot, the Arete, you know, all of these things contain seven levels. Even esoteric orders like Rosicrucianism, you have to go through seven levels and leave a garment at each level or whatever. It's always discarding or passing a test at each level. And so, you know, I think of seven as sort of, you know, something celestial. Right. And then four is the ascent or conversion into matter or something. And then seven is like the, you know, the re-assent into the celestial.

Starting point is 00:52:19 And so maybe there's something around fallen angels or fallen celestial beings, you know, the fall of man or something. That seems really important with that, that first number. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's entirely, you know, not only plausible, but I think the track you're on is probably true. I mean, it's hard to, you just have to continue to explore it and see what insights it renders. That's the bigger challenge is never to think of it as reached a conclusion, a continual journey and almost a non-ending journey to infinity on these subjects. Yeah. But to understand, to see the.

Starting point is 00:53:00 associations may be more important than being able to analyze the association completely, thoroughly. Because if you, the moment you can thoroughly analyze it and you're sort of done with it, it means you've closed your mind to other possible interpretation. And since we're in such a broad vista of reality, it's really what it is, exploring a reality as very broad. the world, it's not a lot of evidence we have through our normal application of language, logic and reason, which is why, again, numbers help because they take communication on a far

Starting point is 00:53:35 more objective level. But most people, including me, we're not that facile at using numbers in the ways that the real geniuses can with numbers and the people who have defined for us what the numbers mean just for physics. I marvel at what some of the great mathematicians have produced. And the insight they've gotten from just looking into things that's seem to have no purpose, much less something with a purpose. So I think you're onto something there. Well, let's keep going. So then you have three, six or nine is three maybe, I mean,

Starting point is 00:54:07 have you thought of the Holy Trinity? Of course. Father's son, the Holy Ghost. Six or nine, six, you know, the amount of days, you know, before the earth was, was created, maybe in Genesis or something. Is nine mean anything to you? Well, it's three threes, you know, it just continues a pattern of where there's a emphasis of three, you know, 12 being lots of things like 12 tribes and 12 tribes, yeah. How about 40 days and 40 nights, of course, the temptation of Christ among 40 years for the exodus from the Jewish people under Moses. I mean, there's just lots of religious significance, but I hesitate that like you've done well.

Starting point is 00:54:53 I mean, you know far more than I do about the way it ties into other fields and other potential explanations that broaden really from religion. One thing I've done with ongoing satisfaction, I have no conclusion, is reach out to physicists that I've had a number of physicists contact me, who read my book, and those are very interesting, or I've given my book to some other physicists. And through my time at Department of Energy, I spent three years as a head of intelligence and counterintelligence at Department of Energy. between 2005 and 8, and then beyond that, especially when I continue to the nuclear stuff, but expanded it a great deal. The OE is an incredible organization. We have what they call the America's National Laboratories Hall based in Department of Energy. So it's been an amazing ride for me to get connected to all these incredibly smart people who could probably be doing anything. Don't have to work at lower pay in most cases for, for, for,

Starting point is 00:55:53 for the U.S. government doing things, but do it because they want to serve the country, too. So there's all those kinds of people out there that I get to know. But the physicist that I've given them a challenge, which is kind of what you're doing with the numbers, I said, look, you know, read my book or you read my book, I now want to know more than ever. What's the physics behind mysticism? Exema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with ebbglis. A once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking ebbglis,

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Starting point is 00:57:13 Or call 1800 LilyRX or 1-800 545-979. There have to be physics behind it. It's not something that belongs to a digital. different reality. It's part of our reality. It happens in this world. Therefore, there has to be an E equals MCD. It has to be a quantum or relativity, space time, all have to be taken an account as to what happened and how to explain it. Do you ever gotten a satisfactory answer? Nothing that I would describe is answering the question, but I have gotten the kind of encouragement I need that it's not a silly question.

Starting point is 00:57:53 That's kind of what I'm looking for. It's not, I mean, the most interesting scientists, whether it be Einstein or, you know, Heisenberg has an apocryphal quote that's often attributed to him where it's like the first sip of the science, you know, the bottle or whatever leaves you an atheist. But when you get to the bottom, you know, there lies God. Yeah. And, you know, so, okay, so that's good. So they don't think it's all, you know, that's like a bad, that's a bad framing, at least for inquiry. And you know what Einstein said. What did he said?

Starting point is 00:58:22 I want to know God's thoughts. The rest are details. Wow. That's a great quote from Einstein. That's a really great quote for somebody who's, you know, theory has basically become the modern scientific paradigm. Right, right. And I think almost all the great physicists or I would say were great ones that I certainly

Starting point is 00:58:41 have become hobbyists of. I'll never quite grasp the full math and science aspects of it, of course. But like Paul Dirac, you know, people like that. I encourage people to, which I used to do when I, you imagine a lay person like me, not a scientist, or taking on weapons of mass destruction and trying to stop terrorists from getting bombs and biological weapons. And one of the biggest skeptics, you know, skepticism I encountered was the Russians were really good. I went to Moscow to lecture them and brought a bunch of people.

Starting point is 00:59:14 So they could stop the stuff in Russia and other places. And it's one of the old Russians I knew from way back when we were. catching and recruiting and catching spies. Hey, you know, Ralph, we know, you know you. You don't know anything about this stuff. So why, you know, I said, that's why I brought all these other people. Listen to them. Don't listen to me.

Starting point is 00:59:31 I'm not, if you notice, I'm not telling you the science. They are. Yeah. I'm pulling it together because you have to, you have to establish science is irrelevant without the consequence, understanding the consequence of science. And I used to say that the DOE scientists quite often. If you can't explain this in a layman's term and make it relevant to real people. Like everybody listening to this, if we make it irrelevant to them in their lives, then we've lost our sense of mission.

Starting point is 00:59:57 So the idea with the idea of the physicist, I asked them, I tasked them, I would call it, jokingly, come back to me with some plausible explanation. The biggest roadblock I've encountered from talking to real men of science on this or women of science is they say, well, the problem we need. have is you almost have to create alternative, not universes per se, but space in dimensions in the universe in which things occur that we can't experimentally measure. Right. And that becomes our problem because good physicists will say anything I can't experimentally confirm or measure is not. And I would say this is me talking so I may anybody listening could easily contradict me on this if they know more. But I've reconciled quantum and relativity, you know, as a problem of scale, nothing else. It's just to me, it's the idea that you're measuring things

Starting point is 01:00:58 at two different extremes, but the underlying reality, there's no conflict. Yeah. It's the same reality, measured in different scales. So we have to start thinking of when we have these mystical experiences, thinking of them as things that happen at scale, but maybe there is no time and maybe there's not even motion, maybe the idea of an angel of going between two different places. That's why we put wings on angels, right? It's a tradition. Is this medium of coming from a world at rest into a world in motion and needing to somehow cross over that divide and that barrier?

Starting point is 01:01:31 That's just the way I think of it. So I haven't solved any of these things, but you asked the question of how do you think of them? And all I can say is you open your mind to all kinds of potential. explanations. And the truth is probably, you know, everybody, you know, I come from UFO world. You talked about your history at the DOE and we will get into some questions there. But, you know, I think a lot of people in, you know, in that world think of the truth as something to be disclosed. Like you can say it prosaically. And I don't think that's the case at all. Right.

Starting point is 01:02:04 Like, you know, I always find it interesting, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas was like working on a sumo theologica, this like rational explanation of God. And I think he had this conversion, you know, kind of moment while he was in mass. And it was like this mystical experience. And then he like stopped speaking after that. There's a, there's a scientist. I think his name is Mishka, Gregory Perlman. And he's like in Siberia right now.

Starting point is 01:02:32 And he's like known in like theoretical physics world is like one of the top like best guys. And I've even talked to some people who are like, you know, if anybody's like sitting on like a, you know, theory of everything that like Mary's, you know, general relativity and quantum mechanics. It's probably this guy. And like he, I think he claims that he has like a unified theory and he just won't talk. And so there's there's there's there is this some something very interesting about, you know, it's so on, you know, maybe the truth is just so hard to like grapple with. And there's there's a translation function between like what a what a person knows and then what they can even describe to, you know, the world. Like that's a that's a really hard thing. to do, you know, to, there isn't some Archimedean point where, like, everybody

Starting point is 01:03:19 instantaneously gets it all at once, and it's just the, it's a semantic truth. But, yeah, anyways. Well, the only thing I'd add to that, because I think that's so important, too, is, as you approach unification of, like, understanding the nature of all reality in some equation form or something that could be expressed through physics or mathematics, you are, in fact, getting closer to what I would describe as what I think of God as, which isn't the head of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church. It's the entity of the Creator God and the personal God.

Starting point is 01:03:53 On the Creator God level, I mean, if you know on the religious side of that, the idea of God, Yawa, you couldn't even say it. So you develop a term that you couldn't even pronounce. So it gets a little bit backward like a Perlman, if he is at some level where you can no longer talk about it, that I tend that, I think that tends to happen when you reach a point of insight that just, you're overwhelmed by the profundity, if that makes sense. Yes.

Starting point is 01:04:19 Of what you're looking into. I want to switch gears. Yeah. We talk forever on all this stuff. But, um, you have had direct experiences with the Virgin Mary. Yeah. And that is a really rare thing for somebody with your background and in your position to say, can you go into those experiences?

Starting point is 01:04:40 and describe them as sort of viscerally as you can. Yes. For me, it's the most important part of the book. This episode is sponsored by Superpower. On this show, we spend all of our time trying to understand reality. But most of us are simply guessing when it comes to our own health. With conventional health care, you're firing totally blindly. You go to the doctor, you get a few basic labs, and you're told everything looks normal.

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Starting point is 01:06:40 this podcast to support the show. So what the story was when in 1991, when I was in Greece, I was, I went on a pilgrimage to Monothos Greece, which is an Orthodox mountain. That's something akin to the Vatican in Greek Orthodoxy, Orthodox world. It's 20 monasteries on this amazing Peninsula that juts out by Thessaloniki up in northern Greece, right? And I got a three-day diplomatic visa to go with diplomat, the diplomats club. But I did it with a calculation in mind, a work-related pretext, which was I had been given a tip by a Greek very close to the president, Prime Minister of Greece, about a monk at Monathos, who was actually a Russian intelligence officer, who was being cover and changing his identity to go on a mission to the U.S. on behalf of Russian

Starting point is 01:07:42 intelligence and would be undercover at a Russian Orthodox Church in the U.S. to do God knows what, but he would have, you know, just wonderful cover to be in the U.S. So it was an amazing tip. I didn't solicit it or it came to me. They came to me with the tip and handed me the file so I could read it. Then I resolved to go up there and investigate through direct, you know, direct contact. So you're looking for this spy who's going undercover as a monk in Mount Athos. And then you go to Mount Athos and then what happens?

Starting point is 01:08:14 I'm going through an all-night, experiencing an all-night service at the small Catholican of monastery Dionysio, which is one of the monasteries on a huge cliff. And I was just, they were very relaxed on, you know, I wasn't Orthodox to begin with, which the monks all knew. I was just a visitor. I just described myself as a Christian. And so I go out and I'm sitting at this, and I fell asleep, sort of napping on this stone chair facing the church, little church on the hill. It is stone courtyard, all stone courtyard, very severe, very severe looking.

Starting point is 01:08:53 A thousand-year stones, thousand-year walls, a thousand-year throne. There was the only chair, I'd call it, carved in the stone. stone wall. I'm sitting at it. It reminded me of the scene out of like Conan the Barbarian or something. It really was that kind of a feeling. And with the waves rushing, crashing

Starting point is 01:09:16 against the sea crashing against the walls way below, hundreds of feet below me, you know, and beautiful, which is absolutely gorgeous. You know, I'm mesmerizing, balmy day, so I'm just relaxed, sitting there, fall asleep. That's when I immediately went into this dream state. I realized this is one of those. Like, that's

Starting point is 01:09:48 what had started to happen to me. I knew when one of those meant it was not a usual dream. So your description of, was it time travel? I mean, I would say that's a possibility. I mean, I don't know. I can't. But I felt like it was something happening. And first you go to 1800s Paris.

Starting point is 01:10:05 Yes. I go to 1800 Paris and I just walking down these 18th century Paris streets and I'm walking to a bravo. Yeah. I just want to see what's going on. That's kind of a typical me thing. And that's when I encounter. what turned out to be the Virgin Mary didn't call herself that,

Starting point is 01:10:22 but I just felt, I just felt that without an introduction. And this one open door was, door was open. And it was like all the others. It had like a waist packet with soiled condoms and things, you know, and it looked awful with blood on the heats. And I was thinking, oh, this is awful. And I looked at the woman and she just looked at me with these imploring eyes,

Starting point is 01:10:41 just like the suffering of the world was on her weight on her shoulder. What better place to be to feel that with the exploitation and things of, this place. And it's just, the gravity of that hit me, because I'd also seen a scene or like a rotun priest is, of course, this is coming unbeknownst to me, you know, kind of at the height of the sex scandals in the Catholic Church and things, too. So I don't, I'm not tying these things together, but it's just very depraved. And I felt, I felt depravity.

Starting point is 01:11:09 I felt nauseous in my own dream. And then, yeah, I walk outside the bravel and this guy meet this guy outside. Uh-huh. And he says, basically, you're always. And go, go atone from your sins kind of conversation I have with this guy, Harry Hiller, which was one of the characters from Herman Hess's Steppenwolf. And Harry Hiller basically encourages me to go to Montathos to sponge myself or find clarity or salvation or whatever I could find.

Starting point is 01:11:42 So, okay, so you're in 1800s Paris. You meet Harry Hiller. Yeah. You see this scene. And you're confident that this is the Virgin Mary and the sprawl because of... It was a conclusion I reached not at the time, but only after it became a pattern, if that makes sense. So at the time, I wasn't entirely sure who this old woman one other than she didn't fit. And I could feel the suffering, which became a common, every encounter with the Virgin Mary.

Starting point is 01:12:12 It was an element of the weight of her suffering for the world, for the physical. fate of the world, in particular for the fate of people who are suffering, for the pain and the agony of others. This is the common feeling I had each of the experiences. But I didn't know that at the moment. I just knew that, wow, this is certainly disruptive. Yeah. You know, so when I continued the dream. Did you feel love coming from her? Or she, did you? I didn't particularly feel love. I felt more pathos. Mm. Like, like, like her ultimate. empathy for everything and all suffering, all of all beings or something. Nothing so much directed towards me.

Starting point is 01:12:53 What I think I put in my mind more than something she, a vibe she gave, was the idea that, man, I shouldn't be here. Did she say anything to you? No. Do you, have you thought of the symbolism of her being in a brothel where all this kind of, you know, corrupt, you know, horrible deeds are being done or whatever? Like, do you think of that as somehow significant? Well, yes.

Starting point is 01:13:20 I mean, certainly not at that time again, but certainly looking back, I realize how it fits so well into the subsequent encounters. And the pattern being, okay, you want, you want an image, you want images of what I'm, what I mean by suffering. This is the, this is the image, right? What can be worse? There's very few things that are worse than that. Certainly the Holocaust.

Starting point is 01:13:42 There are things that are worse than what I, what she, she, she showed. showed me the reaction everyone should have to this or her reaction to this reality of the world that I was seeing with her at that moment and sort of stumbled upon. So then when I went back in time, it became kind of a, then it became kind of a disappearance of time to put me in the right state of mind to do the exploration I needed to do at Montalto. So the rest of the dream sequence that I outlined in, it's called the bizarre world of odious maximus in my book, because it's how bizarre I felt when I knew it was still me, but I'm going now into this,

Starting point is 01:14:21 I have to adopt this cover of a character, so to speak, which is a CIA thing anyway. But it was so unusual and unique to me that it was really scary. I wasn't sure I could not be that car. I wasn't sure that it would be Ralph again. So then I'm going back in time as I'm traveling, as you would in those days, to Athens,

Starting point is 01:14:39 and then from Athens to, and with every step I'm taking, the time is going back in time. And by the time I get to Monathos at the capital city, which I'd sort of landed in when I came off the boat in real life now and to where I'd had the dream a couple days ago getting there, I saw that town again, but back in the 1500s, you know. And I go there and I present my credentials, so to speak, at the Capitol to say, if you will, the governance people there, including this guy, monk Gabriel, who was the head. So Harry Hiller is this character that's in 19th century Paris-ish. I leave him. You leave him. He said, but he says, you are odious maximus.

Starting point is 01:15:23 You must go to Mount Athos. You go to Mount Athos. And then all of a sudden, you're like a few hundred years earlier in history. So like 1400s, 1500s. Correct. And you-trapped up there, essentially. Trapped up there. Was there a gradient of time moving backwards from the 1800s to the 14- or 15-100s?

Starting point is 01:15:42 to the 14 or 1500s or like all of a sudden you're in Mount, like when you get to Manhattan. It was a gradient. It was a, it was as if time was evaporating. It's a way, like with each step. You could like it got, that was what was so,

Starting point is 01:15:56 uh, say very unnerving was going back in time, but feeling it happening as it's happening. And it's getting, and I was trying to adjust, but it was getting too difficult to go. So I tried to limit any contact with anybody, like on a ship or on a coach or,

Starting point is 01:16:12 as I'm going back because I didn't want anybody say anything that would think I was some insane person and throw me in some... You also don't want to alter the future forever with changing a variable or something. I did not think that, but that's a good thought. I remember not thinking anything profound. It was like pure survival.

Starting point is 01:16:30 I remember being in pure survival mode, including, I would say, my mind. I hoped I wasn't losing my mind to the point where, you know, whatever the, say, inspiration was to adopt. this way of thinking of myself as being a very onerous, bad person that I would overdo that again. I mean, that wasn't really the point. I kept reassuring myself, but I would have to play this out.

Starting point is 01:16:52 So I get up there and I describe this, and long and the short end that the monks take me in, even though they argued against it, but this Gabriel, he saw something in me. And he said, we're here to open, like Peter said, open our house to those who need it. This man needs it. So I get assigned to the monastery at Dona, Deonisio, which is where I happened to be when I was having the dream. Do all of this feel as real as this interview feels? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:17 So it feels like any sort of real experience that you've had. It's indistinguishable. Pretty much. There are things that occasionally, in all the dreams, like the Sadat dream and I had had other, you know, dreams also, which I lay out pretty much all of them that I can remember in the book. I had a dream of basketball game dream even like when I was at, a teenager. And when I did, I knew immediately a qualitative reality in those dreams was close to reality,

Starting point is 01:17:48 but I could usually still understand it was a dream, if that makes sense. So in this dream, I still knew I was in a dream. And I could still distinguish the Rolf I was from the character going back in time. But otherwise, outside of that, it seemed totally real to the point where I don't think there were historical, like you've seen movies where there, things in movies that shouldn't be there at a historical time. You know, I didn't see telephones in the 16th century or things. You shouldn't see, you know. Were you wearing your clothing from?

Starting point is 01:18:18 And it changed. It was changing. It was going back. So your clothing was becoming more and more appropriate for the time. Well, I also found myself, and I don't remember specifics on this, trying to find more appropriate stuff. So I wouldn't look like a space traveler back in the 17th century. You know, I was trying to, like a person would do to try to fit in.

Starting point is 01:18:39 I was trying to alter my look and things like that. I was getting a beard because I didn't shave. I remember those kinds of details. So when I'm at the monastery, then it got deeper and deeper into what monks do, which I learned a lot about through the dream, but also through what turned out to be two trips there, spending a grand total of a month in Monathos. That's at the end of the story.

Starting point is 01:19:00 That's what it consisted of because I got, of course, very into this understanding, not just a dream, but then the encounter that followed, which was the idea that you live a life in a monastery, a lot of people just sort of quickly jump to the conclusion. That's world evasion. You just want to avoid the world. You want to go off in yourself. It's very selfish.

Starting point is 01:19:23 So I understand people when they say that about monastic lifestyles. I don't feel that happen in large measure because I had this dream where I experienced it on such an intense level. Because for some people, it's the only way they can pursue God. It's the only way they can be close to God. It's the only way they can get themselves closer to God. God. They don't give up on the world in most cases. They're not doing it to avoid the world

Starting point is 01:19:42 most. They're doing it to get close to God. Sometimes there's a consequence of those other things when you do that. So I felt that. And so when I experienced the life up there was not experiences I had felt spiritually before, which made, again, this was a new reality I was learning from. It wasn't just adapting what I already knew and living it vicariously as a monk. It was something very different. I became in the monastery, I was growing, I was developing. I became a recluse up there. You know, I learned to fly, you know, and I remember that, and I thought to other people have had the flying experience.

Starting point is 01:20:20 That's a different conversation we can have one day because I've had reactions from people who read that part of my book and said, oh, I've done that. I've been able to fly, you know. For me, flying was a manifestation. The more I think about it. I see it as a reward almost in a way. A reward you're not asking for, but it's a tribute to opening your mind.

Starting point is 01:20:45 And when you're flying, you're spiritually open. You're just in a different state of consciousness than you are when you're just praying, if that makes sense. And what we talked about even right before the interview is what I didn't expect to find was, as I went through the whole experience here, as the flying monk, and I burned my hut up there, like all the things a reckless does. Were you doing, you were burning your hut there? Yes, I, yes.

Starting point is 01:21:12 And so this is happening across months or weeks or? In the dream, it's months. In reality, it's the course of the dream, which I, that's easy for me to do years in a dream. But this, in my dream stay, it was weeks, days went to weeks, went to months. And so you are aware that your reality has drastically shifted from 20th century, Rolf, CIA case officer, to, it was trying to catch the spy on Mount Athos, to, it's like you entered a portal and you are here for days upon days. And you are going to sleep and waking up within this. Yes, within a dream. That is fascinating.

Starting point is 01:21:56 Well, the biggest thing about it was I knew at the time I had the dream, as I was dreaming, that I was dreaming and I might not be able to get back. That was the scariest thing was I felt trapped. And I wasn't sure I was going to wake up. And at one point, I told one of the emissaries, so this father, Gabriel, who I got the kind of note, sent this other young monk called Evagrius, and he would come and meet me. And I remember my encounters with him. and he was encouraging me and we were talking all the time. And I remember some of those,

Starting point is 01:22:30 I just put a snippets of them in the dream. And I frankly forgot some of them. But I just knew that it was really alive. It was my only contact with a human being when I was in a recluse stage, which was one I was doing the flying about. And he told me, yeah, the other monks had seen me

Starting point is 01:22:43 and wondered if it was real. So I remember that stuff. It was just so palpable. But then I, of course, had three dreams within a dream. And now we're reaching the culmination of the, I would call, the fruition of the dream.

Starting point is 01:22:53 Yeah. Point of the dream was what followed. follows, the farther I'm getting away from myself, the farther I'm detaching my, my faith in God from a selfish interest in me, that's when I start flying. That's when I start, my spiritual growth is happening when I'm being less selfish. When I'm joining, sort of I call the general universal salvation idea of mankind, if I'd call it that. And the more intense my spiritual experiences were getting it within my dream. The point then I had three dreams within a dream.

Starting point is 01:23:28 And very quickly, because one, and they're very intense. One night I go to sleep in my dream. And I have a dream where I'm in a middle of a big room. And we all have to go pick numbers from what looks like a barbershop, number thing. You pull the number. And I got my number, two-digit number. Oh, I don't remember the number. It's too bad.

Starting point is 01:23:45 It could have been great to add to the number collection. I was so frustrated I forgot the number. But it was a two-digit number. And everybody got a two-digit number. I thought, well, that's very strange. They're way more than 20 or 99 of us here. What's the number? Didn't, nobody explained anything.

Starting point is 01:24:04 Nobody talked. It was just murmuring, walking around. Then I woke up. The barber shop clang with the number. I pulled the number up. I woke up from the dream and within a dream. It startled me. So then in my dream the next day, I go to bed,

Starting point is 01:24:19 I go to sleep in my hut. And I have another dream. It's a second dream. Now in that dream, now I'm standing in the room again. It's a big round room with seven doors. And I'm looking at my number and I just had this wild thought, which I had never thought religiously like until the dream. I thought, man, what a bummer.

Starting point is 01:24:41 I mean, we're all going to go through these doors, I guess, and these numbers must be, and we were wearing clothes. They issued clothes. And I had fine clothes. I remember with brown suede shoes. Yeah. And some people were with rags. And I saw an old woman in the corner who, again, I thought, is this the Virgin Mary, the same woman I met in Paris?

Starting point is 01:25:03 I didn't know. So I don't want to overstate it. But I thought, is that her? And I said, oh, I don't see what happened. I kept my eye on her, but I didn't want to go up to anybody or say anything. It was like everything in this, I was just like trying to survive. It was really, I was trying to survive, even in my dream within a dream. And then the doors open.

Starting point is 01:25:22 Seven doors open. and we had to walk through the doors. And I remember thinking the heretical thought, like in a way of doubting God again, what if my number's like right under the ones that are going to heaven, I'm going to hell? I mean, imagine missing by one number. But it's kind of stupid thought.

Starting point is 01:25:38 Like, if the situation were real, that's a real thing. If there's such a thing as heaven and hell, right? Which I've never believed after this and other things, that there's such a literal thing as that I think heaven and hell is in your mind. but partially because of this. So then the, boom, wake up again, startled by this. The door is groaning and having to walk through them. And then the third dream is walking through the door.

Starting point is 01:26:03 And I remember it very carefully, particularly, particularly, I reread it, you know, last night, actually, where I'm standing at the beach and it brought it all back to me really clearly. There was a dark, dark night, not a star in the sky. I remember that. But the sun, it was bright light. I thought, well, the sun's not up, But it was a bright light on the other side of the...

Starting point is 01:26:24 And I remember thinking of the contradiction that the sun's not out. What's that light? It wasn't the moon. There's something very bright on the other side of the seashore. And it was like a river kind of thing, a river, like a wide river. And it was turning dark. And I could tell, well, we were all being encouraged. We knew.

Starting point is 01:26:44 No one was saying anything, announcing. You had to walk across the river to the other side. Which I took... At that time, this must... be salvation, the test of salvation for all of us. And I'm walking on the top of the water like Christ, you know, in Galilee, you know, and I'm thinking, oh, this can't hold me with my brown suede shoes. And I, but it started to work.

Starting point is 01:27:10 And I said, well, if I put all my effort into my faith, maybe I'll make it to the other side. And then people are, I heard plunk, like it was a terrible sound, like somebody going, into the water and being swept away in the depths. You couldn't see below, except like an inch below your shoes. And I was worried, stupidly thinking my shoes are getting wet. I remember thinking that. I was looking, oh, these shoes are going to get ruined. They're going to be stained.

Starting point is 01:27:34 I really did. And then, you know, sure enough, I get halfway across and I think, I can do this. I can make this. And then the old woman is right next to me. And she stumbles and loses her step. And I instinctively just tried to grab her arm to hold her up. And we both went swept away and I woke up. The Virgin Mary.

Starting point is 01:27:52 Well, I don't. What you interpret. What I interpret, probably. Because it tied into the, but then here, the final scene is that I wake up. This is the, I'm done with the dream. That was getting swept away was the final part of the dream. So I wake up at the throne sitting there and, and I realized, I saw a light in the church. This was like this from distance, maybe we're going to say six, six, seven,

Starting point is 01:28:18 or whatever it is, 15 feet to your windows over there, right? That's where the wall of the church was with the windows, stained glass kind of windows I had. And I saw this red light moving along the thing. And I got up out of the chair and moved toward the window and it'd gone all the way up to the front, you know, of the church, the altar, and was sitting there burning, you know, red. And now I think,

Starting point is 01:28:48 but the lights were related, the light and the red light, of course, of the model and the red light of Mary. So I attached all the Mary's together in the dream. This must be this. But to be clear, I had never seen the Virgin Mary. So I saw the dream image of her, and then I saw the light, which I took to be. I took that light immediately when I saw it.

Starting point is 01:29:10 I talked to a monk the next day. I said, I saw this mysterious light in the church after it was closed and it moved from here to here. I thought he would just say, oh, were you dreaming something? I said, well, I was awake, I said, but he said, no, he said this. It was like, the name was monk Demetheus, and I ended up going back to Oathus, seek him out, and he ended up taking me back to his cell that they call it where they live, their little, like, bunk in a stone place, really, really austere, you know, rugged,

Starting point is 01:29:39 kind of living conditions. And he had like 10 books on his shelf. He gave me three of them about Athos, because he said, I just want you to read more about this, because this seemed like you saw that for a reason. He goes, there are monks who have said they've seen the, this is the light of the Virgin Mary going down the thing. And it just seems like you might have seen that. I don't understand it. He was very confused by it because he said, he even, he even tested me. He said, you're not even Orthodox. He said, no, no, he went through that. He said, well, I don't know, but I'm not going to doubt it. And that's when he gave,

Starting point is 01:30:08 and I kept those books for, I still have those books. When you wake up and you're at the church and you see the red light, and maybe that's somewhat symbolic of the Virgin Mary. Is that in 1990s or is that? Yes, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, okay. Okay. So you, basically, you go back to 1800s, Paris, then you go to Mount Athos. Mount Athos is days turned into months. You are odious maximus, this monk, right, who goes through all these kind of eschetic protocols,

Starting point is 01:30:41 and, you know, you're fasting and, you say you're burning your huts and stuff. Then I finally requested permission to go away from the monastery and just be a recluse in the wild in the wilderness. You know, like there's a tradition there. Some monks go out and they just separate themselves from everybody, even their fellow monks. And the only time they see there are anybody as they come in to get provisions or medical emergency or something, I mean, they don't completely abandon all ties to civilization, if you call that civilization. They just limit it as much as possible to get even closer and closer. And in fact, I ended up meeting a recluse who I feel was a kind of full circle of experience that I actually met a real recluse the second time I went to Montathos and who gave me a book and tremendous conversation we had about the apocalypse. I mean, normal people get together, I'm sitting on a curb with this guy and talking about things and he's asking me who I was and where I worked and I have a family back on this day.

Starting point is 01:31:39 And he said, I haven't seen anybody in a few weeks. This is kind of nice. He was carrying bags of, he's carrying some lettuce and one bag, plastic bag, and the other bag, he's carrying a baguette. You know, he's going back to the wild window the woods. But anyway, he stopped and chatted me up. And the next thing, you know, we're talking for a couple hours on, turned down into the apocalypse and everything else. It was amazing.

Starting point is 01:32:00 It was like we both had studied the same books about this. But that's a side. That's just the idea of what it meant when I went into this. It was almost like I needed this full circle, which is so much of the story. for me where things are explained later. So when I, at the time I saw the light of the Virgin Mary, I mean, I honestly didn't think that much of it. It was a light.

Starting point is 01:32:22 Maybe it was a light. Even the image of the old woman, maybe it was her, maybe it was not her. So I had all those things. You know, the dream itself is the way you describe and that has its own, it's its own story in a way. But it wasn't until two more things that happened with the Virgin Mary that it all came together. It's fascinating. And you also then come to realize that there had been Virgin Mary apparitions all over Mount Athas?

Starting point is 01:32:51 Not at this point. Okay, that was so, but later you read. I had talked to people there later, everything was later, including the story of Virgin Mary being on the mountain that I'd learned and wasn't until 2006 or seven, 2007, that I heard some of the back story of. the history and lore that included the site. And so I'll save that because at this point, I don't know any of this, including I wasn't ready at that point prepared in the sense of thinking it would happen to me. So there was no predisposition, for example, to actually meet the Virgin Mary or understand what, you know, like what has happened historically with the Virgin Mary.

Starting point is 01:33:31 Some people have asked me that. Well, when you started to have your Virgin Mary experiences, were they in any way because you read about, you know, lords or Fatima and all this? I said, well, I honestly knew nothing about any of that at this point. And this was 1991. What did you find out later in 2006 and 7 about the Virgin Mary showing up at Mount Athos? Because I think it's very fascinating that there's some historical corroboration on other people are experiencing what you're experiencing spiritually in this specific location. Well, I find out that there's at Lisa Legend lore that they have at Montathos that.

Starting point is 01:34:09 The Virgin Mary, after Christ was crucified and rose from the dead, was traveling along with other Christians at the time or apostles around in ships. And, of course, they were all based in Corinth and places like that. So she was on a ship on its way to sea, of all things, John at Potmos, and also to go to Cyprus because Lazarus supposedly fled Israel. when the Romans started looking for him because they wanted to execute him as being this person who rose from the dead, a very disruptive idea that Jesus was going around raising people from the dead, right? It was the reason why both the Jews and the Romans saw the early Christians. They called the way at that point. They weren't called Christians as being the saboteurs, disruptive to order in society. So they were hunting them down, actually. So he fled, apparently. And I didn't

Starting point is 01:35:08 believe that story either until I believe. I didn't like, maybe it's true, maybe it's not. And there's actually, if anybody of listeners goes to Nicosia, Cyprus, I urge you to take a look at the Lazarus's tomb, which is supposedly in Cyprus, where he went and became the first bishop starting the church in there. So Mary was supposedly traveling on a ship, and there was a big storm, which that part of the Aegean is famous for that, going all the way back to the Spartans and the Athens, having huge summer store that ruined fleets and everything, shipwrecked sheet fleets. And she got blown on the island of Monothos. And there's a monastery placed on the site where she supposedly landed,

Starting point is 01:35:50 went ashore, called Ivaran. It's on the west coast of this peninsula at that monastery in the south part of the monastery. And I've been to that monastery, but it wasn't until this 2005-6 period. when a monk told me the whole story about this little icon in a hut right on the shore, that this is hut, this is supposedly the spot where she landed at that time. Wow. Wow, this has got way more. And, of course, I've sent my book and gotten letters back from the Vatican

Starting point is 01:36:22 and also from the Orthodox Church hierarchy in Istanbul, Turkey. And the letter I got from the Orthodox Church was really priceless. It said basically, You know, we wish you had become one of us and still joined the Catholics, but we still consider you, you know, a friend of ours. And your book is in our library and his eminence is Reddit and all that because I really appreciated that. Because I've said to many people, the accident of me being Catholic Orthodox is not what any of this is about. Right? And I think they appreciated that.

Starting point is 01:36:56 Mary belongs to the world, not to Catholics or Orthodox. Orthodox, in Monothos, they consider her the whole object of the. the veneration that the mountain is dedicated to, which is why women to this day can't go, and I think this is misguided, just to put that out there, but women to this day cannot go on monathos, step foot on monathos, because it's dedicated completely to marry at the exclusion of all women. As I said, I think this is veneration that goes too far, but the point of it is to emphasize how fundamental Mary's history and role is. Have other visitors or pilgrims experienced marry that explicitly,

Starting point is 01:37:41 just like you there at Mount Athos specifically? Yes, yes. And I can't like enumerate, you know, their examples, but I know it's not a unique phenomenon, so much so that I would say what's like I'm having with you, Jesse. This is highly unusual to have an easy conversation on these subjects, right? You can do that. Most people can't. What's been very gratifying is that I never bring it up the subjects, any of these subjects almost, except the just, you know, obviously the intelligence and all history

Starting point is 01:38:14 and all that I do, but any of the religious or focus on God with anybody who doesn't bring it up. And then I usually bring it up and I found some very fascinating takes or or additions that people have to make on what I've said that they've experienced. Like, a really close friend of mine would never expect this came to me, especially to say he's had very vivid dreams of flying after reading about that part of my book. And it's very gratifying to hear. I've also had more basic things of people saying, you know, why would you join a church with all this that you describe yourself in your book

Starting point is 01:38:50 as having all this sex abuse and this and that? And I said, well, I said, I never give up on the church like I never give up on your faith. but those kinds of conversations have been the great gifts of writing writing the book. So while you're at Mount Athos and you're this character, Odeus Maximus, what do you feel like it is? So you feel like it's your mission to get closer to God by sort of detaching yourself from the contemporary world in some ways? So what are you doing on a day-to-day basis? You're fasting and you're praying or what's your, What's your day-to-day life like?

Starting point is 01:39:28 And again, this feels as real as you waking up, you know, and, you know, Maryland where you live, right? Yeah, well, I remember feeling a bit of a contradiction of feelings. On the one hand, being there and doing things like tending to the grapes and cleaning the dishes, you know, until I become a recluse, then it's just trying to survive in the wild and, you know, that kind of thing, doing a like continual prayer or that kind of thing. But up until that point, I'm thinking, man, I'm also miserable.

Starting point is 01:40:02 I want to go home. So I never lost a feeling I wanted out. Do you feel stuck? I felt stuck. Yeah, as I said that a few times. But I felt very stuck when I was in the reckless phase. But I understood without any, like, there was no messaging or voicing or, which I've never heard, by the way, with mystical experiences, any, like, audio.

Starting point is 01:40:23 It's interesting. Real audio, real talk. talking words. But it was the idea that I needed to do this to go home. I needed to go through these different levels of this experience and the dream before I could. No one said that, but as I knew it, I knew that until I had gone through the different levels of what was expected, I couldn't go. It was almost like it was a spiritual training. I mean, the Jesuits call it their spiritual exercises that they go through is this was much more intense than the dream.

Starting point is 01:40:54 How old were you as Rolf when you went back, when you time traveled as Odeus Maximus? How old were you? In my real life? Yeah, in your real life. So it's 1991 and I'm born in 54. So it's what? 37. Yeah, 37.

Starting point is 01:41:11 Yeah. And so you're communing with Gabriel and the other monks as well. Did you ever tell them, hey, like, I'm kind of trapped here. Oh, I actually exist. No, it actually exists in the future. No, no, it was like a cover. I was living my cover until at the very end, near the end, after, you know, in one of the times I wore the brown, the brown suede shoes in my dream within a dream, and then they were suddenly under my hut. So they're in the dream now.

Starting point is 01:41:41 They had gone from the dream within the dream to somehow peering in my dream. And that was very discombobulating, right? And at that point, when Evagrius came back on another to check on me, make sure I was plunged off a cliff or something, I told him. I told him who I really was. And I remember the reaction. By the way, I never knew exactly all some of the things I said, but I knew that all of it was consistent. So when I had to create dialogue with Evagrius on this scene in my book that I don't remember exactly what the dialogue was. As with waking memory.

Starting point is 01:42:20 Right. So I did with my best. So I don't want anybody out there to think I've got this photographic memory or anything, but it's very close. So what did you roughly? The main thing I remember that I based the dialogue I created on was to be true to that was the idea that Avagrius was wise beyond his years. He was a young spry, little monk, wise beyond his ears. And when I told him the reality, I did it because I knew he was wise. And I needed somebody to tell, and it was him.

Starting point is 01:42:54 He was as someone I could trust. And he reacted in a way that redeemed my idea that this was a good time to do it by basically reacting as I would have hoped, which is, I hope you get back to your family. And keep praying to God and God will take care of you in a way that I suddenly felt a sense of peace knowing this wasn't going to go without somebody knowing what had happened to me. And maybe I will get back because I think this guy wouldn't offer me some wisdom and insight into that. And he did.

Starting point is 01:43:31 Did he freak out at all and say, what? You exist in the future? No. No. Did you say, there's this place, it's called America or the United States and it ends up breaking off from, you know, England at 1776. Did you have to, like, go through any of that? Or he just kind of took it on its more spiritual dimension or something and kind of ran with it. Well, Jesse, there was one thing.

Starting point is 01:43:53 No, I didn't do any of that. But I made a big slip up early on that I realized and nobody called me on. I think they knew there was something really wrong. Going back to my presentation of my credentials, so to speak, to Gabriel, when I said I was odious maximus and all this stuff and not who I was. But I did say something really absurd. where I said, you know, I'm an American mystic. Because I knew I had to present myself as a mystic because I wouldn't be able to go through any grilling

Starting point is 01:44:25 on doctrine or theology or stuff they might expect. So I had to play the mystic card. And then you maybe don't, or you can grunt or I was going to fake it in a way that I knew I couldn't if I had to actually explain my knowledge of liturgy or anything else. And they saw through it and he did, but he had pity, right? That was the earlier description. But I said at that time, I'm an American mystic thinking I came from this continent.

Starting point is 01:44:49 I called him that didn't exist, right? At least in their minds, nobody said anything. And so when I presented the story at the end, my real name and future, I'm from the future to this monk, he seemed to take it all in stride. And it's really interesting because if there are people, I think, who understand the notion of future time travel, there's no super religious no super spiritual person in the least in the Christianity I think all of them honestly and the monotheistic religions who aren't able to separate time from discussion in a way where they're comfortable with the idea of past

Starting point is 01:45:35 future because for one thing the most credible witnesses to what's going to come and what the past means are the prophets. Right? It's Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations, John. It's Christ who talked about the raising of Jerusalem. It's the history of the church is in question when people... In fact, but even Christ himself said he can't predict when the future ends or that's up to God. So there are limits.

Starting point is 01:46:06 And I don't look at prophets as suites. in the, you know, sort of Shakespearean tradition of Iads of March or, no, prophets are those who concede into the future what happens. They don't influence it, if that makes sense. Do you think right now, as we speak, Rolf is also odious Maximus living in 15th century Mount Athos, Greece, trying to, you know, commune with God? Oh, wow. That's those, is he now, we're getting into fun stuff. But everything I've said is a product of... You could speculate, you know? And I will. I'll just say as a preface that everything I say on this subject is not, is really philosophical science. It's drawn from my greatest love

Starting point is 01:46:56 intellectually in the world, which is philosophy, which is what the love of wisdom, the love of knowledge. And so in that spirit, I think that it's possible. And my experiences bear this out for me, that the dreams we create are as real as physical reality we're in, which means the answer to your question would be yes. Because if I dreamt it and I created it. And it felt real. It didn't feel it. And it felt real and I created it.

Starting point is 01:47:25 Now, the more you get into whether you're taking a trip, taking a trip, so to speak, in reality versus, like, I make this great distinction, which I'm not sure is as great a distinction as bright lines as I'm. I make it between when I met the Virgin Mary and when I've had interactions, just like when you pray to God, you think you're getting responses and telling versus actually, like, meeting God. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But let's go a little deeper into this odious Maximus example. Do you think that that is a real historical figure? Yeah, I know he is.

Starting point is 01:47:59 That was one of the ironies. So to my great shock, great shock. This was like a wonderful shock. I went when I went back to Athos in. So one of the things Mary said to me at the end of the experience in Paris in 1998, I neglected to mention at the first iteration. She said, we will meet again, like a reassurance, we will meet again. So I said, oh, this is so great, you know, because this is like, so this is a highlight of my life kind of thing.

Starting point is 01:48:25 And part of that would be come back and visit me at Montaupos again where it all started. So it took me a long time between 1998. It took me about seven years. to go back. I said, seven years, and that interesting, and I went back to Monothos,

Starting point is 01:48:42 and back at the Holy Mount only because I felt the Virgin Mary would now be my tour guide. So I did something kind of extraordinary. I got the Greeks to allow me. I knew the, I was still like with CIA, like associate with CIA.

Starting point is 01:48:54 I was at Department of Energy at that time, by the way, head of intelligence there, but I still had all my contacts and friends at CIA, including the guy who was head of our office in Athens, right? and I lined it up with him.

Starting point is 01:49:08 He's a close friend of mine, and he's also, interestingly enough, a religious scholar as CIA officer. But he lined me up with a month-long visa. Normally, someone like me, I could only get three days. And I'd gotten one, and I'd never get another one. But he had his contacts, and he explained my past, and they were like, oh, this good stuff.

Starting point is 01:49:25 And I got a month. So I knock on the door at Carias. I feel a little about, like, Allison Wonderland or something, and sort of my mentality. right, I'm going back and just like, I'm just going to soak it all in and I feel guided the whole time. And unlike most people, I didn't have to register what monastery I went to, what nights. I just go one other 20 to monasteries, and they have a number of what they call skeets.

Starting point is 01:49:50 Skeets are like minors. They're not considered monasteries. They're one or two monks there and they're safeguarding a specific tradition or history of monothos. So for example, and I wandered and ran these things. It's a huge peninsula if you look on a map. But I was wandering around and running these things like I was being. guided and I felt like I was going from place to place, showing up unannounced, spending a night, going off into the woods. By the way, just as a hiker adventure, it's like one of the most wonderful

Starting point is 01:50:16 places on the planet. So I end up at St. Ansky, which is where St. Anne's named an honor of Mary's mother. Anne. I didn't even know that historical fact at that time. Now later, I would, many things, so I got into biblical archaeology and lived in the Middle East. I got into all of this stuff. And just as an aside, when I didn't, I didn't just do biblical archaeology of meaning Christian. I did Old Testament, Judaism, Islam. Did you try to find certain? Oh, I tried to find. I tried to find all kinds of things. But anyway, at St. Anske, they, you know, claim to have her bones, some of her bones or whatever. So, I mean, I'm kind of fascinated with that stuff, too. So I, and then the next day I take off from there, I said, well, I've been introduced to Mary's mother. That would be

Starting point is 01:51:00 something she would want. So I take off from there and I go down the coastline, I catch a boat, go around the corner, the horn of Monothos, and I end up at this bottom of this pier with a big walk up a side of a mountain. And coincidence, right? Coincidence is this monk walks by with the donkey who's going to go up there, a little monk and I got my big backpack and stuff. I'm there a month. I got a big pack back, one backpack for the month, but that's, you know, I got everything in it. and he goes, hey, why don't you take my donkey to the top of the mountain? I said, this poor donkey, you're sure you want to do it? He goes, who he's used to it.

Starting point is 01:51:37 So the guy just slaps him in the rear and off we go and I'm sitting straddling this donkey up this cliff, afraid, like I wouldn't want to let the monk down. I was afraid I was going to go off the side and off the, into a cliff and abyss. You know, there's that kind of a thing. And then it starts raining and it's getting a very steady donkey just up up the mountain. Get to the top of the mountain. There's nobody there. There's nobody there.

Starting point is 01:51:59 there, I walk into the entrance of the skeet, and this guy comes out, greets me, young monk, probably, you know, the 30s. He's the guy, caretaker there, and he goes, let me tell you this history of this ski is called the Skit Kavlovakia, Kasa-Sovacia. I said, oh, that's hard to say. It's a mouthful. He goes, yeah, this is named in the honor of one of the saints we have here, Saint Kaffalo, known as Maximostamon. He was not odious.

Starting point is 01:52:29 And he was known as a flying monk. And he burned his huts. And he had these miracles. And there were sightings of him flying. I almost lost. I mean, not lost, it's not the right expression. But I was had a like gasping for air. Just at the thought, I had made this up.

Starting point is 01:52:51 So crazy. This had a historical connection. And I was there. Now, normally you could go a month and a monotheos. You never run into this. place. But here I was, standing right at the front door, so to speak. Well, you were, you were meant to have that run in. Well, by now, I'm not doubting things like that. You can take, by the way, I don't want to people go now, think everything that happens to them is not by chance.

Starting point is 01:53:13 But you also have to be attune of the possibility. Things aren't coincidence. It's not believing everything is not a coincidence. It's getting the right, being able to make a right judgment of when things aren't just coincidence. Yeah, I think discernment is viewing patterns and synchronicities as possibly very meaningful and being attuned to them, but not always like, taking them at face value. But I mean, yeah, you could literally right now, Google Maximus Katsikovia, and this is this flying monk from Mount Athos, and he was known for burning his huts. And so it is fascinating that you went back in time, not having any, you had no context.

Starting point is 01:53:55 No idea. Yeah. And then you, you find real historical corroboration for this through happenstance. And this is just online. Like, people can search this open sort. That's pretty remarkable and interesting. Do you think this was, you know, people talk about like past life regressions? Do you think this was like a past life for you?

Starting point is 01:54:17 Well, I don't, I haven't really thought of that. I don't think of, I don't, I don't say, I don't believe in reincarnation, but nor do I reject it. I just, I mean, I don't know. I don't have, I do, I do have a fairly strong, uh, discipline in submitting everything we've talked about to a high degree of scrutiny. Mm. To the point where, and we, you know, I've talked about this, where sometime I'm reticent to say the full, to provide the full effect of what I think I've learned or what I experienced because I don't, I don't want to, the one thing I can't do is misstate. any of this.

Starting point is 01:54:58 Because that judgment comes down on me from God. Yeah. And God knows. So you go through all this trouble to tell a story about your devotion to God and how you fulfill your destiny as being to fulfill God's will and do the right thing and do right by people, which is what it all blows down to, really does. I can't misspeak on that. So I'm not going to inflate or add to an experience.

Starting point is 01:55:22 So the idea of like I love exploring with you, I'm just being careful for your listeners and others. We could talk about that over a beer or something. I go way farther. I don't know. I think there's evidence out there that's like all the things, all the phenomena you research, Jesse. It should all be researched. We should be very cherry of drawing conclusions to things that we don't have really solid evidence for,

Starting point is 01:55:51 but nor should we be so respectful of conventional wisdom. science that we don't explore it. And you should also give yourself the grace to speculate. A, you know, everybody has a game of telephone they're playing in their mind where they don't remember anything accurately that's ever happened to them one-to-one perfectly. But also the ability to speculate, which I know you do. Oh, I do. And the thing about these experiences that I've described is that they do form a pattern. And the pattern becomes a major part of their authentication.

Starting point is 01:56:26 you know, as being genuine, truth-related things, not truth-seeking rather than self-focused or self-fulfilling. I think part of the dreams at Monathos that I experienced was a necessary part of my own faith-based development that I would, the more you discuss or try to convey a belief in God, the more you have to remove. yourself as the object of your intentions. This is one of the most important things I can say. If you're, you know, one of the apostles who followed, and I'm not, I'm not putting myself on any level with the people I'll describe. You have to be willing to be a martyr to pull that truth forward and become part of human history because God needed, Christ needed them to go out as they did all over the world in the way they did.

Starting point is 01:57:24 and they needed in a way that one of the proofs they were willing to do is lay down their own lives for the truth. And it's easy to say, lay down your life for the truth, but, you know, it's a harder thing to do it. And the other thing is to not do it for their own benefit because you can even lay your life down for the truth because you think it's to your benefit, but it's not even your goal.

Starting point is 01:57:43 At some point, you try to eliminate yourself. The object, the paragraphs I wrote of my time at Monothos in my dream, I tried to be very, very careful to describe the essence, of what I was experiencing in the dream, which was this process of shedding myself. It's the reason when I read Meister Eckhart or somebody like that, he talks about looking down at God, not up.

Starting point is 01:58:07 It's a psychological thing, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The more you can remove yourself from any honor or glory in faith, the closer, the more responsibility God will give you, if that makes sense, to promote the faith. Because it can't be about you. And there's a, yeah, well said, there's a Yale professor. It's very well respected,

Starting point is 01:58:31 religious studies professor named Carlos Ayr. He wrote a book called They Flew. And it's all about flying saints and monks. And St. Joseph, the divine, St. Joseph of Cupertino is probably the most famous example. I think he was 16th century. You have Teresa Vila, who also seemed to experience, you know, by location and all these sort of other paranormal things. Even St. Francis of Assisi, by some accounts, might have levitated. And so this is actually, and this guy went into this research thinking, oh, you know, this must have been written about sort of historically in this sort of metaphorical way. And he came out of it being like, no, there are enough, there's enough eyewitness testimony around these flying saints to call it history. And it's well

Starting point is 01:59:20 beyond the threshold of evidence we'd need to say that like the war of 1812 was fought or whatever and and he i think he truly believes that and i you know i have a friend named diana pesulka is a religious studies professor at un c wilmington she's gone very deep on st joseph of cooper tino and she has gone through a lot of his files and she agrees with that so and it's it's a cross like you said it's across different religions so maybe this is a real phenomenon where you do shed the baggage of individual ego and you you become one with God and you fly. There's even in fact Jeffrey Criple who's a religious studies professor at

Starting point is 02:00:00 Rice University in Houston he was giving a lecture on flying saints at MIT. Oh wow. And a guy who I've met actually who runs revolutionary technologies at Skunk Works. It's their most advanced R&D division obviously of Lockheed Martin and he's running their most advanced R&D division of Skunk Works, he attended the lecture and was very interested in flying saints. That's so great. It's interesting. It's so great. Yeah. Well, I don't think there's any question that once you start believing in certain mystical experiences, either because you've experienced them yourselves or you've heard such compelling

Starting point is 02:00:40 tales. Like, I read Virgin Mary, which I didn't know as I stress a lot, really the history of those appearances until now, of course, I sort of study them, to look at the similarities, to hear the different descriptions, see how close they were to mind. And then it was very reassuring as I see as sort of so many similarities and commonalities. But the point is to your explaining, yeah, you've got to be willing to believe all kinds of manifestations, what I would call the holy, meaning things that are not of human construction, whether it's our minds or even what we call the laws of physics. They come from something else. What's the physics of that or where is that? The where might even be, you know, not a not a real question because it may not be anywhere in that

Starting point is 02:01:28 sense. We understand location, right? Because what's location outside of distance and move, motion and it's really nothing, right? So is it over, under or side? I'm not sure it's relevant. But then you're getting closer to all the mystics. Because when they get together, I've read, you know, some really cool stuff. And I'd love to be. in one of those gatherings. When Merton used to have them in Asia and you had Buddhist mystics and you had Islamic mystics and poets,

Starting point is 02:01:57 Hafiz, for example, one of my favorite talking about is love of God. And the heretics who were burned and things for going too far with things that were mystical, they couldn't help themselves because they were just devoted to the truth. Their crime, as always,

Starting point is 02:02:12 was why Elijah was sought in half or is speaking truth to people don't want to hear it. Or sounding enigmatic because their prophecies or what they see in the future don't accord with the conventional wisdom of the day. That's usually the problem. Is there some version of that you think you have, some truth that from all of these mystical experiences

Starting point is 02:02:39 you've come back with that the average person might have kind of an allergic reaction to who might not want to hear, it might be an uncomfortable truth. Well, I think, I think, frankly, an average person is probably uncomfortable,

Starting point is 02:02:49 all of this. Yeah. Right? I mean, let's be honest. Right. And it's the idea, well, who do you think you are? It starts with things like that.

Starting point is 02:02:56 And it's, the mistake, of course, is over, over interpretation or look, because I've realized also, this is just something I've learned because I continue to occasionally have enigmatic dreams.

Starting point is 02:03:11 I don't have anything as vivid as in the past. fact with age, it's less, fewer and fewer, which I, when I was living in the Middle East, I once went to my Jesuit priest friend, friend more than any, more than a spiritual advisor, and said, yeah, I just don't know what my purpose is anymore. Now I'm not meeting the Virgin Mary. I said, I don't want to sound like I should be meeting Virgin Mary, but I sure miss it. And he goes, well, have you tried praying to her? I said, well, I don't really pray to the Virgin Mary. I feel her presence. But I pray to God. I pray to, you know, Christ, that's it. I don't pray to other people or other things.

Starting point is 02:03:44 But he said, well, you can pray, but don't get hung up on the word. You can interact. You can talk. And so I asked, I said, well, you know, Mary, what, what's my, why am I here? Like, why I'm in the Middle East? I have the sense I was praying or thinking that there's a reason I'm here. And then you brought me here because why will be here? And I was spending all my time in five years in the Middle East, 2011 to 16.

Starting point is 02:04:12 Spending all my time on the road, going, I did biblical archaeology. I did, you know, went on tour. I went all over everywhere many times over. Then later on, you know, in Saudi Arabia, et cetera. And I said, there's got to be a reason for this. So I just say, just tell me so I know what I should expect kind of thing. And got back kind of a, again, nothing verbal or just an answer, which was, you're here to be here. And it put me at ease.

Starting point is 02:04:41 It was the idea, okay. almost like, I don't need to overthink this. I think in other messages she says to you, don't strive, don't try, don't reach. This was in, well, 1998 was when I, seven years after I met her at Monothos, I met her in Paris, met the Virgin Mary. So that none of this discussion would be occurring if I hadn't actually met the Virgin Mary. And we call the apparitioner, I mean the Virgin Mary. So I was in Paris on a work trip for CIA. I was doing actually Russian things.

Starting point is 02:05:18 I was heading up a lot of our CIA's Russian activity at the time in 1998. And so I'm in Paris for those discussions with one other colleague. And we both went, you know, we signed up at a boutique hotel, five-minute walk from Arc de Triomp kind of, you know, place. No, not from the American Embassy down in the southern part of the. that lane, HercTrianf, down there, Hotel Crayon area. And we're in the, I'm in the hotel. It's a nice little room. And it had a bed with a old-fashioned hotel, really old.

Starting point is 02:05:53 And it had a table in front of me and had a light switch on the wall. But small room, typical French style. And as I went to bed, thinking nothing in particular except maybe my last thoughts before going to sleep was going through my notes and my mind of what we were going to raise the next day. and as I like to joke, I didn't have any weird food or anything else, and went to sleep and immediately was there like in one of those dreams again. And I knew it right away, but it was a dream. I knew I was dreaming. So I'm by a riverbank.

Starting point is 02:06:28 So I'm thinking of the river dream from way back, which was a more raging river. This is a nice, gentle, almost stream type river. And I'm sitting at a riverbank of grass, lush grass. It's a beautiful day. Gambalmi, nice weather. I'm sitting on the top of the little mound that goes down into the stream. And there's nobody around.

Starting point is 02:06:51 And I'm just thinking, just relaxing. And then an old woman comes, dressed in a brown cloak with a hood up, and sits almost within touching distance, but just outside my reach, and sits there. And stairs, looks ahead too, and I didn't want to disturb her, so I didn't, like, introduce myself or say anything.

Starting point is 02:07:13 I just thought, well, maybe wait for her to say hi or something. I won't do it. And so we're just sitting there, and then it starts sprinkling. And the sun stayed up. The sun didn't go away. So I thought, oh, it's just a little sprinkle when the sun's out. And as it's hitting my skin, I remember hitting my arm and hands first, I see brown, like oozing brown dirt. and I thought, wow, this is really kind of strange.

Starting point is 02:07:42 And then I looked at see what reaction the woman was having to this strange reign. And at that time, she turned towards me, and I felt this kind of ease. I felt really at ease, and I fell kind of backwards, like almost like, whoa, into her arms. And then I realized it was a Virgin Mary. And I thought, at the moment, I thought, okay, it's a dream. And I think this rain is like, I don't know, purifying me or something. I just had that weird thought. So then I wake up.

Starting point is 02:08:21 So I wake up in my room and I get up to turn on the light because I need to clear my head. You know, it was very jarring. It was very jarring in a nice way, but very jarring. How did you know it was the Virgin Mary in the dream? I just knew it then. You just knew. I just knew that was virgin Mary. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:36 Unlike the other. things I said. Where you weren't as sure. Where I wasn't as sure. This I knew right away. This was a Virgin Mary. Because I had had the one experience, too, in Portugal, where I met the Virgin Mary, but not in flesh and in the mind kind of thing. So this was like completely normal to me now. The dream, that I would have a dream like this. It was not no longer some, maybe what all this was was preparation, right? Because all along the way, I was getting more and more used to the idea this wasn't strange. None of this was strange. This was all part of the sort of a process in a way. So I get up from the chair.

Starting point is 02:09:11 I hit my shin. I forget it. I hurt my shin bone as I got up. And that's how I kind of knew I was awake. And then I saw this like we're sitting in a room here. It was in that corner coming from the top of the corner, a light coming down like this. Radiant light.

Starting point is 02:09:27 And Thomas Merton described the light better than I could when I read it in one of his books because he had some of these experience. It was a light so bright. that it bore no resemblance to visible light, if that makes sense. So it didn't shy, you'd have to look away from it. It was very bright. And it came and sat straight in front of me

Starting point is 02:09:50 when I was standing up. I was still standing up where the curtains are, like right across from me when I'm standing there. And off the ground was the full image of the Virgin Mary. Wow. And you're in my room. In my room. Wow. So she was in the dream and then she comes into your room.

Starting point is 02:10:10 Yeah. And I knew as I was standing there, I specifically had the realization, clear, absolute realization. This is not a dream. In fact, I kind of pinch my, this is reality as opposed to it. And the dream must be preparation. What happens next? So she's in your room? She's in my room. And then I don't have any conversations, but I can read her mind or she can read my mind or vice versa. There's an exchange. There's communication going on at a nonverbal level. And it's very intense. I'm feeling combination, you know, at the one time a rushing sense of grief that she's feeling at the same time, the hope of the message she's conveying that in the end it will all come out fine, but there's just tremendous pain and suffering.

Starting point is 02:11:05 She said it when, like said, I knew the message clearly, got the message, write a letter to the Pope. No instructions what to write or what you're seeing, seeing me, but no other specific instructions what to say or why. No explanation, but write a letter to the Pope. Then I was looking for some form of greater understanding, I'd say, and she sensed that. And I think she sensed I was like still shocked. shock, right? But I went into a state of ecstasy. So I've never had that. Only time on my life, 71 years old, that I was in a state of ecstasy. I remember my teeth chattering. I remember that. I remember the sound of them and my head going back. Like it was like, and it was incredible.

Starting point is 02:12:01 It was like an incredible orgasm of like beyond that without a real orgasm, obviously, but it was like more than it was a, it was just an incredible feeling. The bona fides of the moment, so to speak, were right there. I'm just to know this is absolutely what it was. And then I saw it like more of a, if I'm so graced to be here in your presence, you know, I've sent, you know, then there must be something specific. you want me to do other than the letter to the Pope and I've been sort of thing and then little things came out like for example a sense of tying together I won't there was no numbers or

Starting point is 02:12:42 but I sensed that it was all related I just sensed that it was all related this plus my encounter I'd had whether in Portugal where I hadn't met her but I felt her mind and thoughts she was explaining when she told me there deliver the message right what you see whatever you do you do in sin that was specific i wrote that down after portugal which was a few years earlier said keep all that in mind as you go forth on this mission or you go forth to fulfill god's will and she made it clear everything is god's will not her will there was a major distinction this was i wasn't doing anything for her this was all in accordance with her serving god the same way she was asking me to or anybody else now you have you had

Starting point is 02:13:30 earlier, at this point, I had never read anything about her, you know, encounters with the Virgin Mary, but I became, of course, a student of that as well, great detail. But the thing as you mentioned earlier, I think she sensed that I was not losing it, but, like, needed further reassurance in some way that I could do this, because the first thing anybody has was an expectation of getting any mystical experience that's genuine is, well, why me? There's no reason.

Starting point is 02:14:03 The answer to that is there is no reason. It's you. I wasn't being single out because I was noble or worthy or no such reason. When Paul was on the road to Damascus and he was struck down by the light of Jesus standing over him, the light. The divine light of Jesus saying, Paul, why are you persecuting me? He turns from a person going to kill members of this Jewish sect to the leader of that sect because of the mystical experience with Christ. Without that, none of that would have happened.

Starting point is 02:14:35 So, you know, I'm very well aware that these aren't only real, but they're incredible important moments in human history every time they happen to anybody to continue to gather them up. And as you're saying, tell, relate to story. So at the very end of the encounter, it was, you know, it's funny, time kind of like I got lost in time. I don't remember.

Starting point is 02:14:58 It was just minutes, the whole thing. I know that, where she said, like, encouragement again, this was the important part. Don't reach. God lies within you. Don't want. You have no needs. Don't strive. There is no purpose.

Starting point is 02:15:21 And it was incredibly important guidance because it reminded me of things I thought I knew, but then I got to get lost, right? particularly the one of the reach don't go out and try you know it's all there it's all inside you in the end and even the experiences going on the mountain with the monks and going back in time all that was a way

Starting point is 02:15:43 of intensifying that it's here and being confident in that did your life change after that did that fundamentally change each person it was the it was a

Starting point is 02:15:59 culminating moment. It was a culmination of all the dreams in a way. Because in her, the images I associated with her presence in the room, the idea of war and conflict and apocalyptic things. I could sense the wars and things of previous dreams all being present with her as well. So it was her great suffering, you know, particularly of women and children in war and conflict, lives being lost that kind of level of concern and need to get people do things to minimize it or to end it or to be part of God's will in writing the course of human history. She visited you every seven years three times. Is that right? So 1991, 1998, and then again, 2005. Well, then she didn't visit me in 2005, but it's one of the coincidences that ties the connections

Starting point is 02:16:56 together. In 2005, I didn't have an experience with the Virgin Mary, but I found myself through the chief of Europe at CIA. I was back in Paris, probably the first time since seven years, maybe. I don't know. I didn't go there that often. But I'm back in the same hotel, Creon, which is two blocks from the one I was in. I remember thinking this is autumn so close to where all this happened, because I, by now, intensely aware and thinking and looking into what all that was meant for me and what should I do more from a practical I didn't need evidence I just needed to know practically what to do now that I had these experiences so on that particular seven years fulfillment of things was the night that John Paul II died and it was the idea that this is

Starting point is 02:17:47 related to that her the explicit idea of course I had to write a letter to the pope and I sent that letter to the Vatican and, you know, I got a response from the Vatican, actually. What was the response? Well, it said His Holiness had, you know, appreciated the gift and I suppose they sent some of these things. But it seemed like it seemed like it had a personal touch to his. What did you say to the Pope? Well, I put the letter in the book. So the letter I sent to the Pope, I put in the book. And I want everybody to read what I said because. Go check it out. Did you say just high level? Did you say the Virgin Mary told me to write to you. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:26 Wow. Yeah. And I put the experience, I put all the numbers in it. I mean, all the numbers are in the book. Because, again, the idea is. The numbers from the original download you got at West Point. 747 and all the numbers, I've seen the numbers. Yeah, so if you read the letter in two pages, two and a half pages, it's a whole story in a way.

Starting point is 02:18:43 Whoa. I met her in Portugal. I met her in Monathos. And it's the same letter I shared with the Orthodox Church. Because it's not about me. Yeah. I mean, it is my story, but to the extent the story serves a purpose or is relevant. So you were just relaying your experience mostly to the Vatican. So it's 2005, Pope John Paul the second dies. You're in Paris. Ironically, at the same spot that it's almost this like

Starting point is 02:19:10 Nietzschean eternal recurrence or something. Well, that satisfies your sevens. You know, we have three sevens here. Three sevens. Exactly. So that seems significant maybe for the numerology aspect. So you're there. You're in Paris. And then what happens as far as your just your third experience with the Virgin Mary? Well, the third experience preceded the first Paris. It was the one in Portugal. Okay. In, no, wait a minute. No. Gosh, I'm losing the date on that. But it, yeah, it was before the Virgin Mary appearance because it was in Portugal where I was encountered her in, I already told you what that conversation was all about and what she relayed more guidance at that meeting.

Starting point is 02:19:54 So there again, it was idea of a presence, not seeing anything, but I realized this presence is continuing. And it's, I'm getting more, if you will, aware of what I should and shouldn't be doing related to, to all this. And in between all this, you know, there's. But in Paris, you see her again. Yeah. Yeah. And what's, what's that experience like? Well, there's only, the only one time I've seen the Virgin Mary. It was a night. 1998 in Paris. Yep. But in 2005, you see her again?

Starting point is 02:20:23 No. Oh, you don't see her again? Okay. Got it, got it. No, as I've got down there, there were only one. Only one. It tied everything up where she appeared in a way that, you know, you examine phenomena, right? And I like to present this in various ways.

Starting point is 02:20:42 One is, as phenomena, I have to know for my own satisfaction. I want to know, I should say. I'm not supposed to want, but I do want to know the explanation of the, you know, physiology or the reality aspect of what was she? Where did she come from? There has to be somewhere she came and went when she retreated back into the, because at the end she went back into the top corner of the wall and she was gone. So that's an event.

Starting point is 02:21:19 That's a real thing. So I have talked, we talked some about it, Jesse, because you do a lot of inquiring research into these subjects. There's an explanation for it based in physics. Just like there has to be an explanation of what heaven and hell are in physics. Do you have a best explanation in physics for kind of metaphysical or spiritual experience? Well, I have one that I favor. I'm hesitant to share it, but I want to give a direct answer to a direct question because I don't know. I mean, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:21:47 Sure. But to me, the most sensible explanation is that things we describe as divine or part of permanent things that aren't prone to being affected by time anymore, meaning they're not in the physical universe in motion because time is a function of motion and matter, right, mass and motion. So without those things, if you had a universe at rest, then what we call heaven and hell, God presupport. dives over everything, including our universe, including where angels might come to give us messages or how prophets get their insights. Because it doesn't come from our universe. It doesn't come from the Big Bang universe. It can't come. The idea, I think if the great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and you pick your favorite pondering the theological basis of God, even someone like Leibniz, the mathematician who said, God has to create the best of all possible worlds, which is one I love,

Starting point is 02:22:44 because I think he's absolutely right. But that's because God isn't in our world. God, to be perfect, to be great, to be everything we ascribe, including indivisible. So massive, we can't even contemplate it. It can't be rooted in the Big Bang universe in motion because everything in our universe is relative. So it's like there's an alternative universe

Starting point is 02:23:03 that's at rest that's more primordial. Or a universe that, I don't know I use a word of alternative. Well, that perfectly valid. I'd say a universe that lies beyond or above or in which our universe is just a small part. And you're saying the Big Bang universe because that is the proverbial kind of, you know, first prime mover event that scientists now harold as, you know, definitely true. That then kind of deterministically kind of, you know, you get this entropy from there and then you end up with this, you know, what a lot of scientists would now say, this happy accident of, you know, our earth and the world and the universe as it is. And you're saying that there is something next to that or outside of that?

Starting point is 02:23:50 Well, the only explanation I can come up with, which is, you know, I'm embarrassed almost to say these profound things when there are so many scientists and physicists and philosopher. But, I mean, the simplest way I think of it, it came to me kind of as an insight as a possibility was sitting in my porch with screens all around my porch and picturing the big bang for the first time. I'm God. I'm sitting in my chair. And picturing the Big Bang as being a ripple in that space, time, in that room, in the corner of the room, just a little ripple. It starts with a little tear in the corner. And just spans out. And you're God, you're looking over that, but to you, it's just a ripple. Everything we take is the ultimate reality and the accumulation of all things is just possibly a very small sideshow occurring in a big room.

Starting point is 02:24:40 Is the implication of the title of your book, a state of mind, that your mind can get to this universe at rest, this timeless universe? Yes, and so the clues, because it's not completely just a stab in the dark of the big room, as much as to say you have to have an explanation

Starting point is 02:24:59 of how people can reliably, this doesn't just happen to a few people, this has happened throughout human history, being able to see into the future and sometimes claim to go into the past, So there must be a way of, if you will, overcoming time, which means time can't be an absolute in our equation. And you have people like Einstein saying time is but an illusion,

Starting point is 02:25:20 which Harry Hiller said to me in my book when I went to Monothos, and sure enough, he proved it was an illusion because I kept going back in time. So in a way, the dream was a manifestation of a very basic potential truth, which is time is just an aspect of space time that we create in the Big Bang, because we're all in motion. There's nothing not in motion. But who is to say that there's not a universe at rest? Because I don't know how you can have something called everlasting life.

Starting point is 02:25:51 If Christ went somewhere, he didn't go somewhere in a big bang after crucifixion and resurrection. He didn't stay in our earthly realm, even if we extend that meaning to the whole universe as we understand the universe. you know, it stands to reason then that every species, intelligence species in the universe would be beholden to this rule, not just humans. Yeah, I, you know, question a lot of people who are more fundamentalist in their beliefs on these things. If Christ is, you know, immortal, like, where is he now? Right, right.

Starting point is 02:26:25 Like, he should be on earth. And they often talk about, like, an ascension body, you know, that they exist. And maybe the ascension body is where this other sort of universe lies or something. I don't know. I'm speculating here. Well, I mean, I think you got another clue that's a really fascinating one. I don't want to overstate any of these, but they're just things that come to mind. The transfiguration of Christ, which for many people, they don't know what that is. There was a period after crucifixion where he appeared to the disciples in a form where he wasn't yet in heaven or wasn't at Earth.

Starting point is 02:26:57 And that's where he had the famous doubting Thomas putting Jesus saying, if you doubt that it's me, because you're not supposed to be here. put your finger in my wounds, and it is, and he's called Doubting Thomas. But if you look at that beyond as a religious kind of story, you know, it has to be true again. If they witnessed Christ in some form, then what is that? How would you explain that in physics? I think you can. I think it's a deliberate staging of before reaching the next period.

Starting point is 02:27:29 I absolutely believe as a result of my religious experiences and growth and that we don't die when we die. We just go pass. This better word would be a passage. There's a passage from this state. I think if you believe, truly believe in Christ and really, you have to believe that. And this I always say, it doesn't matter how often you go to church and how much you donate to this or that. What matters is do you really believe the heart and soul of what the faith is about, which is there's life after death.

Starting point is 02:27:58 So once you posit there is life after death, you're not really trying to determine. like what is that like Dante's stages of hell, which is kind of like fun to think about, people deserve the different levels of hell. That kind of explains why you're a little sinner, you go here, you're a big sinner, you go down here, but it's all silly, right? It's silly.

Starting point is 02:28:20 The idea of hell is a place is silly. Now the idea of hell is being the absence of God, being separated from God. Ah, now we're getting somewhere, because God doesn't exist in the Big Bang world. God exists beyond it. So the closer you get beyond the Big Bang world to a world not in motion. So maybe when we die, we pass to a world at rest.

Starting point is 02:28:43 We pass to a world where time no longer exists, which then creates consequences of what you've done in your life because you're suddenly aware of them. We can't even accurately go back and recreate any moment of our time, much less replicated again. It happens. We have memories of it. and all our memories are fading, all of them.

Starting point is 02:29:07 But there is a place where all the memories are the events themselves, if that makes sense. All the events are occurring always as they occurred in what we would describe as this year, this place, this time, because in that world, none of the time exists. That's all. It's a very simple concept. And all it presupposes is that physicists have told me where we've discussed this.

Starting point is 02:29:31 And I've learned a lot from good friends. physicists, especially young ones I find, they were really into this subject like you are. They're really interested in constructing ways of thinking of metaphysics in ways that aren't just traditional physics, where if you can't prove it experimentally, forget it. Yeah. No, of course not. Yeah, that's, that can't be true. Like, if something is phenomenologically real or experientially real, it's not fake because

Starting point is 02:29:58 you can't experimentally reproduce it in a lab. Right, right. That's an absolutely ridiculous thing to say that is the epitome of the kind of the hubris of enlightenment. But time in physics is also extremely weird. You know, general relativity is a theory of gravity. But even in general relativity, you have time dilation. You know, you have, you know, time moves based on, you know, the speed of the observer, which is really weird. Gravity, you know, itself is really weird, you know, on a macroscopic scale.

Starting point is 02:30:29 you know, you basically are justifying the weakness of gravity with dark matter, which seems like this undetectable mathematical placeholder. And time and gravity are kind of super linked. You know, the more you get closer to kind of a dense gravitational source, like a black hole, time seems to slow. And so, you know, if gravity is kind of weird, you know, and then gravity is obviously weird on a, you know, it's irreconcilable with the other forces on a quantum level. and then time is also on a quantum level it's taken as this sort of classical axiom and something like

Starting point is 02:31:03 Frodenger's equation. So it's just time seems like this not super well understood thing. Like at most, maybe you can think of it vis-a-vis the movement of bodies on a macroscopic scale and on a microscopic scale maybe the oscillations of an electromagnetic

Starting point is 02:31:19 wave or something. But it's, you know, it's the most commonly used noun in the English language. But it always has to be defined with respect to other things. Right. And so it seems a little bit like the eye, seeing the eye or like that David Foster Wallace, you know, a Kenyan commencement speech where he's, you know, this is water.

Starting point is 02:31:40 And it's like if you're a fish talking to another fish and you're in water, we're all in Zeno's arrow of time. You can't really get out of that sort of epistemological framework. But simultaneous to that, you have all these interesting thinkers in physics, like you Kiraeranof or Kramer, where there's like a, the present is a handshake between the future and the past, which is, that's a legitimate interpretation of kind of quantum mechanics. And, you know, you have ideas of retro causality and the future sort of causing the past or the, the, present being constricted and the, there being probable futures and probable fast,

Starting point is 02:32:17 probable past, Schrodinger talked about, you know, if you measure a particle in its present, you might affect its past. You know, they're all, it's, it's just, it's way trippier than sort of meets the eye. I even think, you know, even position momentum, superpositionality, spooky action at a distance, which Einstein grappled with till the end of his life, you have spooky action over time as well, where, you know,

Starting point is 02:32:40 looks if a double slit experiment is performed in the future, it looks like the measurement of that double slit experiment is affecting someone that's done in the present or the past, which is crazy. Right. And so, you know, it's almost like quantum mechanics implies, you know, people say it implies, you know, there's an issue with position and momentum measurements. That's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Starting point is 02:33:01 But there's also level of energy and time quantum indeterminacy as well. And what if the Schroenger's equation, which is more position and momentum based, what if time superpositionality is causing the position and momentum superpositionality? And just like, you know, you can place Newton within Einstein, but Einstein better describes Newton than Newton. What if you could place shrews Schrodinger within some time agnostic modality equation that describes Schrodinger better than Schrodinger. You know, we don't know the answer to these questions. No, and the hardest part of exploring them is separating the influence of scale from the actual reality. So because we are at the scale we are, everything we measure is measured proportional to our scale.

Starting point is 02:33:56 So, and that's not, we can obviously go beyond visual and we have lots of ways to measure things other than our senses, but we can't avoid is our scale. So if you go up and scale to cosmic level or down to subatomic levels, you've got the same problem. Your ability to measure anything gets less and less. And then your worst ability to measure anything is when time changes on you, you get into black hole physics or whatever. where suddenly you realize mass, you know, it goes infinite and time stops. But that's a clue. It's another clue. The idea, again, of time being a variable that we take is, in a way, an absolute reality,

Starting point is 02:34:41 even though it changes, but the existence of time I'm talking about isn't necessarily real. It's real for us in the Big Bang world. But if you stop everything, which we don't contemplate because we can't, at least in science, contemplate a world arrest. So why don't we, we'll kind of, you know, take a page from the book, so to speak, and can weave in and out of some of these more mystical experiences and your more prosaic life. What were some of your early missions?

Starting point is 02:35:10 So I would say in the early years, there was no mission there other than basic conclusions I drew. Like, okay, I'm drawn to Russia because it's the action. There's no better place. to be in the CIA than the belly of the beast. So I had those kinds of connotations early on, but nothing explicitly, you know, linked to religion or faith or apocalypse or nuclear weapons or any of that. It was very just a kind of basic career until the things I described that happened later. Yeah. And so, and you talk, you have a lot of story. I mean, you were almost overrun,

Starting point is 02:35:47 right, in the Yeltsin coup. So there's this attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin. 1993, correct? 1993. And I came back. You're the Moscow station chief for the CIA. And it just seems like you're kind of, you know, in this very dire situation. They end up having, they end up helping you, right? Is that right? That's correct.

Starting point is 02:36:07 I mean, it's one of those things where the idea of a liaison, we call a liaison relationship when we cooperate with other countries' intelligence. On the face of it, there was nothing really to cooperate between the CIA and the KGB. You read all the story. They're all true. As we say, there's a lot of blood in the water. We kill, you know, not kill, but their agents, our agents end up dead, killed, executed sometimes, imprisoned. So it's a very ugly history, and we weren't going to be friends.

Starting point is 02:36:37 But the idea was when I laid out the first CIA directors that ever went to Moscow to even visit Moscow, much less deal with the Russians as partners. It was Bob Gates was the first when he was CIA director. And I'll never forget that trip in 19, except the fall of 1992. he came there and laid the groundwork by giving a great toast. We had a dinner. Russians love toast. They love dinners. And you got to win.

Starting point is 02:37:04 You got to be good at the whole heart of toasting. And so I learned a lot about that. But his essentially was around the theme of, we're not friends. We're not here because we're ever going to love each other and be real partners. We're here because our country's demand that we put aside some of our differences in cooperating meaningful ways for the security of our countries. That was when Yeltsin had just emerged. There was the hope then, right?

Starting point is 02:37:29 But it was a realism attached to it that was very important, needed, to make it real. Because otherwise, you would have been pretending and playing games, which there's no point to play games if you're arch enemies. You just do what you need to do. So a year later, it all culminated in this coup in Moscow when hardliners tried to overthrow Yeltsin. But the one thing it showed is that at a time of extreme need, we could work with the Russians because we had a common interest to keep Yeltsin in power.

Starting point is 02:37:59 Russian intelligence decided they weren't ready to overthrow Yeltsin through force and violence. They ended up doing that. This is 93. It was eight years later, of course, when Vladimir Putin came to power legally, the right way, if you want to call it that. And the Russians don't like coups and violence any more than we would like in our own country. So we worked together. And it was astonishing. I didn't know when I first called Russian intelligence chief and said, hey, we need help.

Starting point is 02:38:28 We need you to protect us. It looks like we're going to be taken hostage when I was leading a detachment of people outside the embassy and coming under fire from coup plotters, snipers and things. I called them for help, and I didn't expect any help. In fact, it was the ambassador at the time. Ambassador Tom Pickering, he's the one who I called him in desperation and said, there's no way you can help us, is there? because I, because of embassy, all, everybody in the embassy was underground in the, in the embassy compound, except for us. We're out doing reporting and things like that to tell Washington what was going on. Otherwise, they wouldn't have known anything going on at the time. All the news networks had shut down and- And you end up like hold up in an abandoned building or something? Well, we hold up, everything was abandoned, but we were in the ambassador's residence. Okay. Which we opened up and used just as a command post. I think that started as five of us. I think we ended up with seven or eight long. I put, the whole, like all the details in that.

Starting point is 02:39:24 I was a little surprised. Again, it was nice to see they, they had no problem with telling that story. I think it's important. The purpose of the story and the purpose of me describing it is that, you know, intelligence is almost always unexpected. And its greatest value is proven in the most difficult times, pro-ancon. And you can't fear or avoid the difficult search.

Starting point is 02:39:51 You have to kind of run into them and embrace the difficulty. So they ended up sending a team to protect us from being taken hostage. And the only rules we had, I'll never forget the phone call from the director. He said, okay, Ralph, there's very extraordinary circumstances. We're going to send you a team of heavily armed guys to try to keep you from getting captured. But here's the deal. One is do not commingle. Our guys and your guys are separate.

Starting point is 02:40:20 are separate. We'll do our work outside your perimeter or whatever, so don't mix. And he goes, if you are stormed or they take, get in a firefight or whatever happens, die in your separate foxholes. And he didn't have to explain why. He, because however that day turned out in Russian history, didn't want to leave any evidence of who would work with whom along the way. Because it was in doubt. The one thing I learned personally in a way that helped me even with the spiritual stuff later, mystical experiences is history is not inevitable. History comes together because of the decisions people make. And when you're experiencing it live, like in a war or in a coup or in a change of government,

Starting point is 02:41:06 you realize it could go that way if these things are done and goes that way if another thing has done. You've been in the room with Vladimir Putin. What's your impression of him? Well, it wasn't as extensive as so many of the people, you know, obviously in the U.S. government who have had a lot of interaction with them, so I don't want to put it on. So I just happened to have a fairly unique one-time thing where we met in his first foreign trip. I was in Norway.

Starting point is 02:41:34 I'm Norwegian America, as I said, so it was a great honor for me to go back to Norway. And I happened to be there. Again, one of these things I thank God a little bit for the privilege of to be there during the last meeting of what was called the Oslo, Peace of course. court process was started in Oslo, Norway, and now was culminating. So this was in the November 1993. 93. No, no, 1998. The last meeting. Oh, okay. And the last meeting was one amazing, no, I had no role of any appreciable, nothing. I was there as literally a appreciation gift. I knew the prime minister and other people in the Norwegian government. They said invite me and my wife to the dinner.

Starting point is 02:42:22 But at the dinner was President Clinton. I came, of course, Vladimir Putin's first foreign trip as prime minister. And then, of course, the main ones, Yasser Arafat, and Ehud Barak, who was the prime minister of Israel at the time. Now, I had never met Arafat, Ehud Barak. I met Clinton just, you know, kind of like formalistically. But, and Putin. And I got to see them all in this kind of as an observer vantage point where, if anything, anybody would say, well, who's this guy? Because everybody there was more important than me, literally everybody at the dinner.

Starting point is 02:43:00 But that was great. There was no pressure. I could literally just observe Putin and others. And it was just amazing. There was a moment when, after dinner, when everybody got up and mingled went to the king's life. to visit the castle in his library to have cognac and chocolates and everybody's walking there and I'm going to catch everything on the way and I see Clinton literally grab Arafat in the middle of the room. And Clinton was, whenever one thinks of him politically, that's not what I'm talking about here.

Starting point is 02:43:28 He had a presence, right? Oh, well, everybody says that. Everybody says the most charismatic guy. He just had a natural charisma. He doesn't do anything. He just stands there, right? So he grabs Arafat. Who also in his weird way had a charisma too, a presence, right? because he's the iconic headwrap and et cetera. And he says to Arafat, take the deal, yes, sir. Take the deal. It's your last best chance for peace.

Starting point is 02:43:54 And I remember listening to that thing, wow, so, like, important. But I just heard I thought it's very important. Yeah. And I just felt so depressed. And so I knew it was no, no, you know, foreshadowing or future. I just, like, instinctively, my gut was, all this is not going to turn out well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:44:11 And, of course, it's turned out terribly. Well, it's turned out terribly, I mean, partially, Yasser Arafat would speak out of both sides of his mouth, and he would speak to his own population, say certain things, and then speak to the West and say other things. But also, Yatak Rabin also, you know, taken out by his own, you know, people and Haredi, you know, Jews who were just really extremists and wanted, you know, to cede nothing at all costs. And, you know, I think in many ways that whole, the Middle East, you know, conundrum, quagmire, has been, has been so stuck for so long and maybe we, you know, maybe we've made a little bit of progress in the last year, but it's been so, so stuck because of kind of extremists on, on both sides and because in many ways the incentives of the leaders are to, like, actually maintain the conflict. Yeah. So unfortunate. It is. It is. It's a factory of, yeah. Well, my, my, my, my, but then watching Putin, just to the point of your, your question was, I already had the impression that he would be more consequential than I thought

Starting point is 02:45:17 he might at the time by any standard of reasoning or what I knew about him. But I just had, he had the presence too. He was boring, like gray man on the corner, but that in itself impressed me because he wasn't trying to fit in. He wasn't trying to like speak aloudly to be heard. He was way too self-assured, you know, for that kind of a reaction to the situation. And I respected that. I thought, okay, this guy could end up being way more of his own man than we think he might be going into that time period.

Starting point is 02:45:49 One last thing on the – because it ties to the Russian Middle East again five years earlier, 1993 again, after the coup and all that. I was meeting with the Russians. Yugenie Primakov is his name. He was the head of Russian intelligence. I got to know him very, very well. We meet almost every week and had all kinds of discussions about everything. We talked almost like we are, Jesse, about all kinds of big subjects. And he was a guy I felt very comfortable.

Starting point is 02:46:13 I thought he was a brilliant, brilliant man, actually. And he probably would have been a prime minister before, instead of Putin in the mid-90s, after Yeltsin left, had he not passed away from health problems and old age, et cetera. But at the time, he was always musing with me about what can we do to be serious people? There's a Russian expression. Siriosni Chilovac. It's the most important thing to Russian. It can love you or hate you, but you've got to be a serious Nijlvaq, a serious person. Serious professional.

Starting point is 02:46:47 Serious about what you do. Don't give me bullshit. And he says, you know, we got to do something, but I can think of one thing that would be unbelievable if we could find a way to do it. I said, what's that? He said, well, you have your means, meaning CIA. We have our means, meaning the SVR, which is the foreign intelligence component of Russian intelligence.

Starting point is 02:47:08 And we have them in the Middle East. So let's apply all our efforts in the Middle East where we really need something happen to break this long-standing stalemate problem. Our goal will be to keep Arafat alive. Your goal will be to keep Rabin alive. And I thought it was genius. Of course, I sent it in.

Starting point is 02:47:32 Everybody thought I was insane. And I never got a good, explanation as to why it really wasn't even considered. Maybe you just offered it. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, I mean, we've talked about this, you know, two in our last interview, you know, where, you know, people always talk about a deep state. And, you know, it's, I think clearly there is no sort of cabal in a back room smoking cigars or something. But there are, there is, that only is conspiracy to say that there are all sorts of misaligned incentives when it comes to big bureaucracies. And that's any institution. And so, yeah, no, just going back to, like, you know, why would somebody senselessly say no to a thing like that? Or, you know, I am sympathetic to a lot of the John Mearsheimer arguments as well that, like, you know, we've totally reneged on Putin a million different times. And, you know, we've encroached a lot on, on, you know, their territory and, you know, not to at all, you know, apologize for a lot of his wrongdoings, which are very real. But, yeah, there's, the incentives are often wrong. organizations. Well, when you talk about people like Mearsheimer or others who try to express a

Starting point is 02:48:42 different way of thinking of our policies and their impact, I mean, there's, there's a utility in those points of views. I don't agree with him in a lot of things, but I think he should be saying some of the things he's saying, and it's helpful. The biggest thing we habitually do wrong in terms of follow-through on policy. Some of our policy ideas aren't so bad, but it's usually the huge flaws in the implementation usually. And it's not so much the underlining motives that line up with as much as people think they do with sort of deep state agendas. It's just either a mixture of incompetence or I'd say more the idea that we mirror image too much. So our biggest problem in understanding, for example, the Russians.

Starting point is 02:49:25 Now, what I'm saying is not acceptable. It's not accepted thinking, but it's widely accepted, but some people understand it. is our biggest mistake is not seeing things through their eyes. And it doesn't justify what they're doing or thinking, but it's understanding it. And if you want to know why we are where we are with the Russians, you have to understand, see the world through their eyes. It doesn't mean you accept that view, or more importantly, what they do is a consequence of what they feel, but at least understand why you're there and don't be surprised about it.

Starting point is 02:49:59 Isn't there a canon quote about understanding the Russian? or something. It's like once you ascend to the top of the mountain, you know, you end up equally confused as to the Russian motivation or something. I'm totally paraphrasing and botching this, but says there's something like that. I don't remember that, but I suspect, yeah. It's like they're always mystical, confusing. There's no way to ultimately understand what they're up to or something, which feels somewhat right. You like, you know, the idea of a Polet Borough is like this, you know, concealed, sealed off, hermetically, you know, enclosed. sort of organization that you know you can never fully sort of understand and Putin's always

Starting point is 02:50:38 keeping the people around him on his on their toes and there's this really hard kind of hermeneutic game of reading the tea leaves at all times with you know I think you read I think you read tea leaves and see everything as being unscruitable when you don't have any real depth in either living in the country or having enough experience with the people of the country where you can understand where they're coming from. One of the biggest mistake we make with Russia or Xi Jinping and China or anybody for that matter, all the leaders, even some of our friendly countries, is not understanding that the country's not the leader.

Starting point is 02:51:17 So the thing I'll never do is think of Russia as Vladimir Putin. I've read too much Russian history, philosophy, gotten into Russia. I've known too many Russians. I lived in Russia for enough years where I think of Russia first as the people, right? And then you can assess what Putin's doing in the most important way you need to assess it. It's not what impact it has on the U.S., but what impact is what he's doing having on the Russian people. Now, I would make an argument that what's happening now is very damaging to the future interests of ordinary Russians. the same way I might assess what different president's impact has on America.

Starting point is 02:52:01 I don't care so much about how the president's policies affect the stock market as I do how the president's policies affect ordinary Americans. So I think we have to look at foreign countries the same way. If you look at China's meteoric rise in the 20th century, you're not compelled to think of China as an enemy or deep rival and everything that's progress in China as being antithetical to our interests, look what they've done for the Chinese people in a remarkable period of time. That's not all good, obviously, but start from a more solid basis to understand why the leaders do what they do in their own history, traditions, culture,

Starting point is 02:52:43 environments, and religion. If you look at the reason I've always said, and a lot of Russia experts disagree with me on this. I've always said, Russia can't embrace cannot be a democracy like the United States. The Yeltsin years were a mirage. They weren't a missed opportunity.

Starting point is 02:53:01 There was never an opportunity for Russia to go west. Even when famously, Peter the Great talked about Western orientation, it had nothing to do in the context we would like to ascribe it to,

Starting point is 02:53:14 like he wanted to be more connected culturally, et cetera, with the U.S. Russia is, what Russia is, which is a deeply orthodox, homogeneous country with a very rich history and very rich. They're very smart people. They're very educated people. And they want what they want. They don't want what we want. Yeah. And I think that's a big mistake of what we try to impose, not so much our any way of controlling countries, but our idea of imposing our culture.

Starting point is 02:53:43 For sure. Well, they had, you know, under Gorbachev, you know, last leader of the USSR that disbanded it. You had glass-nostic, you had perestroika, and you had, you know, open minds make open markets or whatever. And or open markets make open minds, right? And I think what a lot of neoliberal sort of like miscalculated is that you'd inevitably, you'd get this like opening up of markets, and then, you know, you'd end up with all of the amazing things about liberal democracy in the West, you know, in both China and Russia. And that's just not happened at all. And like it took us a long time to, I think, update on that. You're right.

Starting point is 02:54:23 There's this neo-conservative sort of hubris of like, you know, this would just happen on its own. And that's just not. You also have things like, you know, with Putin, I think there's this guy Vladislav Serkhov. Oh, Sarkov, of course. You know, is this advisor who wrote this book almost zero. And it's like all about like performance art and how that has to play into like your, you know, how you do politics. And so I find it so fascinating, you know, that whole, that whole world. It's just so different. Or even like, I think this is to a true, you know, Alexander Dugin who I don't think he's, I don't think he's, I think he's that close with Putin actually. Like, I think people think he is. But, I mean, Putin is, I mean, that whole world is definitely trippier than we, than we, you know, realize. Like, some of these guys are like, they're more esoteric than, you know, we might realize. And so it's like, how do you really understand how they make. decisions at all.

Starting point is 02:55:18 Right, right, right. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, I think it's a little like our previous discussions on faith and mysticism and analyzing other countries and understanding what, more importantly than analyzing it is understanding what's happening. Yeah. What, what track are they on? What road are they on?

Starting point is 02:55:37 Especially in a world where our notions of individual identity are changing through, of course, social media and the internet, our ideas of technology or, you know, you know, it's blowing up around us in ways we don't really understand. Now, that's affecting all of us. The cultural reaction to it is different everywhere. The thing it's testing most, in my view, is the idea of individuality and identity. So in a country like ours, which started at the point of our creation as a nation, the idea of very unique, historically, completely unique ideas of individual freedom

Starting point is 02:56:14 and the role of individual liberty identity in a collective society where the collective part was put way down. I mean, the idea of a right, an intrinsic right to life, liberty, and not property like John Locke wrote in his second treatise of government, but pursuit of happiness. Yeah. What a weird idea. Franklin came up with that, I understand, when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence. It was a change made edit to Jefferson's original. that's only something Americans can come up with. It's a very Western concept.

Starting point is 02:56:47 It's not even European Western. So when we're decrying and criticizing all the Europeans for being socialists, I would maintain, we have no idea what we're talking about. I've lived in most of those countries. Whatever they, I call that socialism, I want those pensions. We make fun of the French because I got a four-day work week. Okay, well, you know, I like the idea of universal health care. Okay, you got to wait.

Starting point is 02:57:10 First thing I always American will say about talking about Danish health care. or Norwegian. I believe, you know, he's, oh, you got to wait in line. Well, you got some health care, right? We're striving to try to create some normalcy around the idea that citizens also have a right to maybe some form of universal health care. We can't even agree on that, really. So that's there.

Starting point is 02:57:33 Then you go further. You go to the Russians or the Chinese or pretty much anywhere in Asia. Just the notion of the individual's place in society is far more collective. They're part of something. The idea of the culture, the societal framework is that your individual rights only go so far. And then you're part. And most people feel that. And it's not a religious-based thing where they're members of the same church because particularly in Europe or Asia, there's those organized religions don't hold as much a hold on people as even they might in the United States today.

Starting point is 02:58:08 But it's the idea the society itself was constructed with this idea of collective responsibility. So when the Russians drew up their, the philosophers, the great Russian philosophers, I call the religious philosophers working with the political scientist after the breakup of the Russian Empire, the Tsar, who first yielded the Soviet Union and the Bolshevism, they were drawing up a system of government that would resolve the question of how can you have a true democracy that wouldn't be corrupted by special interests and foolish leaders who would be. not up for you need more of a Plato's Republic, a republic that was based on people having roles, which we all have collective responsibilities. And you have distinct classes like Plato's guardian class that manage the government, et cetera. Responsibility is conferred to individuals within their collective obligations. And we really struggle with that. We've struggled that for decades, but it's really coming to a head, I think, in a way where every country is sorting through that. But the bias in most country is much more towards limiting individual freedom for the collective good.

Starting point is 02:59:19 Yeah. Yeah. Does that make sense? No, it makes total sense. Well, if you look at like Marxist dialectical materialism, the individual has very little place at all. It's very, you know, the individual can go through a meat grinder. And as long as the byproduct is social progress on the other side, whether it's, you know, Mao's great leap forward or, you know, any of the Stalin's initiative. you know, send people to the gulag, like, that's, that's okay in their, in their model.

Starting point is 02:59:45 Right. And so, you know, I think human suffering is inevitable in that, in that model. And there are no individual rights, and it's all about this sort of collective sense of progress. And I think that is very alien and foreign to somebody thinking about Western liberal democracy. I also, you brought a Plato. Plato himself, you could think of him as, you know, he's really, obviously, deep, interesting thinker. I think he had all these kind of interesting ideas about ontological truth and metaphysics,

Starting point is 03:00:15 which maybe modern scholars would disagree with me on or something. But also, if you read The Republic, like, it's sort of like this proto-fascist book. It's like you're separating the kids from the adults and, like, you know, you have this guardian class that's, like, pretty hierarchical and stratified.

Starting point is 03:00:31 And, you know, it's not at all, like, a non-violent, you know, like, egalitarian, like, you know, book at all. But 40 was one of the numbers that you got in your download as well. And something very interesting happened to you at the age of 40, another sort of metaphysical experience. Do you want to talk about what happened to you on the train? Yeah. So I've been, this is between some of the Virgin Mary things and, of course, many years after the introduction to not only mystical experiences, but what they might mean in terms of my work, my role in life, and trying to reconcile the sacred.

Starting point is 03:01:11 So I was just on a normal, I'd say everyday espionage, a travel trip in Europe from Zurich to Vienna on the night train. And I'm sitting on the train. I carried my Bible with me, which was engraved and glossy, my name, full name on the cover. We all got this Bible when we were in a Bible. our first year at West Point.

Starting point is 03:01:36 And I'd kept it over the years. But I have a superstition. I have to carry it with me everywhere I travel. So I stick it in my box. Then I have to have a cover story for it. Because many of the times I traveled over the years, I'm an alias person. I've got a cover story.

Starting point is 03:01:51 I've got even phony passports and things that the agency provided. So I may have to explain who this Ralph Malt-Larsin friend of mine. It's almost a little bit like the, Odius Maximus story, you know, I have to come up with a reason why I'd have this guy's Bible with me. So I opened the Bible and I had a pencil there that I just used to mark, you know, something. And I just usually just pick out something random, read most times 10, 15 minutes. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't someone who spent pouring. I don't pour over biblical texts or Bibles or things and never did then and now.

Starting point is 03:02:28 Plus I'm very distracted by my mission. I'm going to Vienna Exchange documents and going on the next. day. And so I look up at the clock. There are very few people on this particular train in my car. So I'm not paying attention to them. I look up at the clock that's in the center, Swiss train, right? Everything's clockwork. And I look at the clock and the hands, the second hand is starting to like get heavy. It's like, and I'm feeling like a weight. My body's feeling heavier and heavier. I feel like something's like overreward. overwhelming me, almost like I'm experiencing some sort of thing, but it's like space and time

Starting point is 03:03:10 are slowing down around me. And I remember thinking that even, but I didn't, I say, wow, this is very strange. Is it like having an epileptic fit or something? I mean, I was really kind of worried for a minute. And then, you know, as it slowed down, my pencil I was holding, I dropped it and just crashed onto the Bible. Like, then I wrote, oh, and then I just, and then I just, And then it was, okay, I had always said I was aware of God's presence, but I didn't really know what, not in this way. God was like there. Didn't see anything, you know, like I said, it's not a visual thing. I just was aware God was that close.

Starting point is 03:03:50 Do you get a message? Well, it was, yes. But the thing about the presence that time that was different from just being aware is it was scary. It was really scary because it was like the almighty. creator who's also personal. I mean, great minds like Thomas Jefferson could never reconcile that. He had to be one or the other, you know, I wasn't going to reconcile it on the train, but it was the idea that it was not good to be in God's presence. That was my reaction to the intrusion was, whoa. I already knew he could hear, understand, interpret everything I'm

Starting point is 03:04:28 thinking or will do or might do because he's way ahead of me, you know. But this was kind of different, Right. So then I did here, it was a very definite short. This was all very short. But this started with I am, have. The verb was interesting. I never know. It was one church.

Starting point is 03:04:48 One church. So I grained that my mind. Do not criticize my church. The old and the new are one. Just old and new. I interpreted that to be a testament, but I was old and the newer one. Swallow them whole.

Starting point is 03:05:12 And finally, read it as a child. So I know that's exactly what it was because I wrote it down exactly like that. I still had that original note somewhere. Exactly that way. Because I said, that's it. And that was it. What does that mean to you? Well, it's pretty, I think it's pretty obvious.

Starting point is 03:05:29 I didn't think it was obvious. And it really did, has taken years to just kind of like, in a way, it's my Sunday school. in a way because I never left as a child because I learned more from this what I think it is. But the one church means don't think of a church is the various churches, Protestant, Catholic, even Buddhist.

Starting point is 03:05:49 My church is the church of believers, whatever they call themselves. Even people consider themselves atheists or agnostic. I mean, labels are labels, even what you label yourself. What does God see? God sees way beyond that. So that's how I interpret that. Do not criticize my church is make a distinction between criticizing the sins or the crime of organized religion, which we have every right to do from dating from the Inquisition to the Crusades to anything you want to take your hand on.

Starting point is 03:06:19 And you can get so obsessed by it. I don't know so many people do that you're incapable of loving God anymore, being part of this community of believers because you associate everything with the fallen angel, right? And then the really cool ones for me, because I immediately reread the whole Bible cover to cover after I heard about the old and the newer one, the inspiration that gave me was to, for the first time of my life, I was 40 years old on the train,

Starting point is 03:06:46 was to go reread the Bible from cover to cover just as a history. No longer, you know, is Jonah's whale, really a whale? Is it a metaphor? You know, red sea parting? No, just read the damn thing. but read it as a child, meaning have that same receptivity to me. I've had the most, my own grandkids, like I said, I got nine of them,

Starting point is 03:07:10 but they're all, have asked me the hardest questions on religion, because they just asked the most important, obvious ones. Where's God? Why did Jesus die for our sins? My daughter said that that means when she was, first time she went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and watched Jesus' cross, and she was just standing there for a long time. She was like nine years old.

Starting point is 03:07:31 I said, honey, what are you thinking? She says, why did Jesus have to die for us? That's a kid reaction, but you need to re-kind of like recharge completely on the Bible that way. To think of it in that kind of a room, we're given this document is what it is. There's nothing holy about the thing itself, and there are things in there undoubtedly that are wrong. And it's a language. As soon as you got a language, you get misinterpretations, reinterpretations, everything else. but don't think about all that.

Starting point is 03:08:02 It's like a lot of the other things we've talked about, Jesse. Don't overanalyze it, just let it go and think, read it. And so I did. And do you think it's a coincidence that this happened at the age of 40 and that you received 40 in your dream and that, you know, 40 days of Jesus? I don't think it is. I don't think it's a coincidence.

Starting point is 03:08:24 I'm 40 days of the desert, or 40 years in the desert for the Israelites as well. There's almost 40 years of being away from God before you experience a communion with God. And in your case, 40 years of maybe more nihilistic, less believing youth or something, and then you experience this Gnostic direct connection or something. Right. That's a good explanation. I can't say it's definitive. But, I mean, I love your fascination with numbers.

Starting point is 03:08:53 I think the really interesting thing you do is not just my numbers, but the idea of tying numbers. numbers into a deeper understanding of reality itself and how that can help us tie together disparate kind of fields that we think of as separate. One of the problems we have is human beings is when you get too deep into the specialization of different, you know, faculties, you tend to think of them all as standing alone and needing to justify themselves. So the number of people I've run into who can speak across very, very, very, you know, disciplines in that way to tie them together in a meaningful way. That's pretty unusual itself.

Starting point is 03:09:35 You also, you have another dream, final dream we'll talk about, but you have a dream about the order of the broken cross, which is this apocalyptic cult in Jerusalem. And you have to sort of fly in there behind enemy lines, be a CIA case officer and recruit some spy. And then you kind of infiltrate this order and systematically, you know, figure out what's going on with them. And then you give their information coordinates or something to the west. And then they end up getting, getting bombed. And they, you know, the apocalypse is sort of saved or whatever. Is that symbolic? Like now after having led a long life of trying to, you know, being anti-pluriferation of WMDs and, you know, going after people like Zarcov. and stuff. So do you think that in some ways you are like this like almost like biblical prophet like character who is your, like your mandate or your mission in life is to stave off the apocalypse and that the instantiation of the apocalypse in the modern day is in fact just the

Starting point is 03:10:46 proliferation of biological weapons and and you know WMDs and that sort of thing? And that that's your kind of divine purpose, if you will. Yeah, I think I can say this in a way that doesn't sound too grandiose, but it's certainly not a personal mission that I feel I'm on that if I don't do this, somehow we fail as a species. I'm just very aware that all the work I've done, particularly in nuclear and proliferation, I've gotten into trying to stop networks from trafficking in nuclear materials and doing it, which by the way, a lot of people do. And that's a lot of my solace or I take comfort in. In fact, there are a lot of really great people working on this with or without a sense of divine purpose. I mean, and I never expressed or carried into my work, the divine notion of purpose that I feel because I do keep that separate. I'm a very strong believer in separation of church and state, not just as a way we think of ourselves as a country and a society, but as a principle of keeping that separate.

Starting point is 03:11:51 I have to unite them in my mind, though. I have to reconcile them when there was conflict. I learned at West Point, duty, honor, country, which is a very high-minded principle and difficult to, I say it's the greatest thing West Point gave me. It was a sense of principle of having honor, doing your duty, and doing it with integrity, and understanding country, not being the president, but country being the people in our history and what we represent. So that's almost religious, right, to do it right. And so there's not that big of a gap. But when it comes to the apocalypse and those ideas, yeah, I'm very aware of. I became very aware of it.

Starting point is 03:12:30 I didn't start aware of it except through my dreams. Typically all my dreams and the sequence of things I've described here today, Jesse, are ways of saying I was conditioned, preconditioned, prepared for both my work and my spiritual growth and growth and faith the same way. They were assets to me to have some ideas what this was all about. And I had to connect it still. And I was sometimes reluctant to do that. It took me a long time to write the letter to the Pope that Virgin Mary told me to write,

Starting point is 03:13:06 and it should have done it the next day. And there's a whole story there that I think could guide a lot of people. We're always reluctant maybe to do the things we know we should do. I'm a little different. Yeah. You know, I'm certainly no warrior, you know, that's out in the lead of everybody in stopping the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons and proliferation. But I'm one of them. I'm there. And fortunately, there are a lot of people like me. And I think people should take great comfort that I have found that most people in public service, which is a counterintuitive conclusion to come to in today's world, are amazing people and do great things. And the best people, including a lot of the scientists in the Department of Energy in our nuclear labs, things like that, could get a lot more money not working for the government or working on the outside. So for them, it's like for me, it was never about money or fame or recognition, a reward.

Starting point is 03:14:05 And you mentioned the Department of Energy. What was your exact title there? I was the director of intelligence and counterintelligence of the Department of Energy. And you gave me this department. Department of Energy, Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, and it says, we keep the real secrets. And it's a little gray alien. Now, you know, as you know, and we've spoken about this, you know, I've run into all these connections between UFOs and aliens and or I don't know if they're aliens, but some sort of like non-human presence and the DOE. And you, you, you, you, you. You mentioned actually, like in your book, that there was some sort of like hazing ritual brief that you got. Is that right? Yeah, because it's such an obvious thing to pull a thread on, we like to do a thing, which I was introduced to. I didn't create it, which we took a director level.

Starting point is 03:15:03 So deputy director, secretary of energy was involved and several other bigwigs and me as the director of intelligence. And we take a newbie. The newbie would be a political appointee, very high level, maybe, you know, deputy secretary or assistant secretary. Terry or some level, who had just signed up and gotten their clearances and were taking their jobs. And we bring them down to the bowels of the Department of Energy where some of the most secretive things are guarded and you know where those are kind of everybody whispers when they come by. And you pull them into this back room like Maxwell Smart and the old TV shows going back through layer and layers of secrets back into the vault. And you get back into the deepest vault in the DOE and you bring them back.

Starting point is 03:15:43 And so the person's back there and they're already and you have a briefer and you have about six seven people, seniors sitting around a table looking very grim. And the hazing ritual is to explain to them that we really did have aliens. We covered aliens. One was injured. One was not. We got the alien space technology through Roswell, you know, et cetera. And it was a real thing. And the briefing is so good. It's got all the real DOE, what we call tickets, you know, we call secret access program saps, they're called, and things on this to make it seem as real as possible. And then the briefer goes through and says a very convincing story that he's now, this person that's come in, is being brought into this ultimate secret access program, SAP, ultimate one as a member of a very rare team that transcends all the different presidencies and parties. Because you can't obviously brief every president coming in on this.

Starting point is 03:16:39 You've got to be very discerning and only bring in people when they can contribute. And you're going to be part of the expedition that goes to. We hired you, in fact, you were hired for this job, but you're really going to go on this expedition or this planet. They've helped us develop the technology to travel to their location and greet us when we get there. So it's got all this. And there's, you know, obviously there's corpses on tables and stuff to make this all look. At what point do you tell them it's a joke? Well, somebody cracks up and somebody can't keep it in any longer.

Starting point is 03:17:12 We betray our own. And the secretary of energy. We're not that good actor. The Secretary of Energy is literally in on this. It's a deputy secretary who in my case was in the room. Oh, my God. Yeah. So we raise it to the highest level.

Starting point is 03:17:26 And what's funny is there are, but there is a serious side of that chapter I put in the book. I wanted to first take a lot. I wanted to take a break from some of the subjects. It was a writing, a writing technique involved. But part of it also was to raise a bigger point that is something you are doing a lot of inquiries into and others. I don't know what secret that I don't know myself. I don't know everything, obviously. I used to know in CIA, it got so paranoid at one point.

Starting point is 03:17:54 I got so paranoid. I couldn't pass a polygraph anymore. They actually let me publish a chapter on that, which I was really surprised when I was failing the polis because I knew too much. And I was one of the few people that knew everything about a certain subject that I couldn't even tell a polygrapher. I didn't trust a polygrapher. Let's put it that way. So you get to this wilderness of mirrors.

Starting point is 03:18:20 It's a famous poem, but there's a famous book on it too about espionage where you start looking at everybody and everybody being knowing something you don't. And the fact is I used to marvel at people walking around the halls of CIA that thought they were so smart on everything. They used to talk smack.

Starting point is 03:18:37 And they don't know what I know. And then I thought, well, there's probably stuff that this guy over there knows that I don't know. So you start looking that way. And DOE's even worse because I tease my CIA colleagues and friends. I said, you know, I learned some of this nation's most important secrets at DOE, not CIA. DEOE does stuff that, man. Do you feel like that is true? Oh, I know it's true. You know it's true. What years were you, DOE? 2005 to 8. 2005 to 8. Now, the point in the story, though, is it's a valid thing to wonder, does the president know? This has come up a lot in, and you. UFO history, it started with really Reagan and Gorbachev musing about they need to get together. So when the aliens come, the U.S. and a Russian, Reagan mentioned that. He was joking, but it was on his mind, right?

Starting point is 03:19:27 And then later it was President Clinton, I know, was interviewed by somebody and said, do you believe that we have signs of alien life and we're hiding here? There's a program or something. And he basically said, I don't think they tell me, even though I'm the president. He said that. So it speaks to both the dangers of secrecy, really, because you can't get to that point. You can't get to the point both of this, that you don't want to share secrets because you just, they're secret. Or you're thinking you've got to withhold this from the president. I don't think you can go there and have a small group of people. That's when you could get into your deep state. If groups form around, subgroups form around the real government and start to do things, the real government's not aware of, well, that's kind of the textbook.

Starting point is 03:20:16 I don't believe in the deep state. I've been since I was 17 years old and I'm 71 now and I'm still very connected. If there's a deep state, I want to know who's in it and where it's operating from and what they're doing because I have no idea. But when you get to something like this, somebody would say, and I told you it would be me, if I knew that we had, we had, we had, evidence of extraterrestrial visits to Earth, I'd go to the press. What about if we just had evidence of some sort of anomalous phenomenon around our nuclear sites that we can't explain? Well, see, that's intriguing.

Starting point is 03:20:51 You've talked a little with me about that, and that's the first I heard of it. Yeah. Interesting. Because if you Google or even chat GPT, like UFO incursions to around like, you know, National Labs and nuclear sites, even in that time range, 2005 to 2008, you'll see stuff. You'll see. Right. I believe you.

Starting point is 03:21:14 F.E. Warren. You'll see Malmstrom base. And you'll see literally people, missile security officers who've signed affidavits saying that they've seen incursions. And this is a great journalist who's a friend of mine named Robert Hastings. And he's written a book called UFOs and nukes. And it is ubiquitous. He has 167, you know, T.S, you know, secret clear. you know, missile security officers, radar operators, guys on the PRP program, which I'm sure

Starting point is 03:21:42 you're familiar with, where you have to report if you're on ibuprofen, you know, because you're guarding the crown jewel secrets of American defense. And they just see saucers, tick-tacks, orbs everywhere around our nuclear sites. And in some cases, these sites are getting shut down. There's a 2010 case in Effie Warren where literally Obama gets briefed because it was down for, you know, they say it was 59. minutes, but I think, so this Bob Hastings back channeled with this retired missile technician, and he was in touch with some missile technicians on site, and they attribute it to this cigar-shaped object that literally, you know, this sort of tick-tac thing that shut down the base.

Starting point is 03:22:26 And so did you not hear of anything like that? Well, I can say completely openly and transparently when I was in DOE and I was the director of intelligence, I never was briefed on any of that. So it doesn't mean it didn't occur. And I take very seriously what you said. I think in all likelihood, a lot of those reports are true, or at least being truthfully reported. And I don't know if it's because they're handled somewhere else, which gets to kind of some of the big questions, or whether because they're individual things that never get resolved, they're, they don't go anywhere. but we can never resolve it because we don't know what's going on. I would believe that because I guess I would worry if the head of intelligence and counterintelligence for the OE isn't hearing about these encourages.

Starting point is 03:23:15 Like that seems so fundamental to this, you know, the safety of, and maybe that's why it's impossible to talk about on the kind of the civil side, on the open side or something, because how can you say, you know, these things are flying with impunity over our sites? but I don't know. I wish there was some better way to talk about it or something. I think, you know, I'm not, obviously, I'm not the president or, you know, anybody who would be in that decision making. But I think it would be a strategic mistake of historical proportions for a body of government at any given time to conceal that truth from the American people thinking we can't handle it or somehow it compromises. If our security is being, or national security is being compromised that way, I can't think of a scenario where it's better that the people don't know it than if they do know it.

Starting point is 03:24:07 Because if there's a problem, we need everyone to know, kind of have some things to go on. And I don't believe in like the mass panic sort of things and stuff like that. So it's really a question of trust. And when you get to trust, the government has very little trust. The whole deep state phenomenon is rooted in mistrust of government. Right. And the assumption that if we don't know what the government's going on, we don't believe what we're being told, there must be something really bad going on. My experience is really kind of the polar opposite. It's been, you'd be very disappointed at times if you knew what we're doing because it's not always very good. Sometimes it's malicious and just bad, wrong, illegal. Because you again, if you're doing a certain amount of things, some people are going to do illegal things. Like it's just inevitable. I think the public on this issue is probably so confused by the government's messaging because you have people like James Clapper, Jim Semivand, guys who are like, you know, James Clapper's DNI overseas all the, yeah, you know them. Exactly. Yeah, Jim Semivant, very high up at the CIA. So like, have you, if you, if you know, they're out in this movie Age of Disclosure saying, you know, this is non-human intelligence is real. We're in an arms race with China and Russia on this stuff. We have a. reverse engineering program with UFOs? Like, have you called them up? Hey, guys, like, what are you

Starting point is 03:25:30 talking about? Like, this isn't really like, well, it, no, I haven't called them up specifically, but I certainly, and you've helped not only wet my appetite, but give me some things to work with in terms of broadening my, I'm open-minded on it. I truly am. I'm not dismissing it at all. I think that's a big mistake. I was more going to the idea of that we got it in our hazing ritual is how do we handle these things? And are we actually prepared for the reality that could come to us at any time? You talk about your ultimate. We intelligence, the thing we worry about most as intelligence community is the fear of surprise, strategic surprise. 9-11, flak collapse of the Soviet Union, Arab Spring, aliens coming to Earth and we're not being a clue. I mean, every time there's an

Starting point is 03:26:24 interstellar object coming now and you've got this astronomer saying it's nothing and this one's saying, I don't know, don't, not so fast. I mean, I pay a lot of attention to that as a reader because I think one day one of those things won't be just a comet. Do you think nothing happened at Roswell or do you have it, do you have a take to what happened? Well, what we know has happened at Roswell, maybe then or certainly over the years, is I suspect something happened, right? And so the question is, is something we, created and contain like experimental flights or development of new aircraft. I mean, the whole history of, which is a lot of CIA's history is on the technical side of the SR 71 and all these

Starting point is 03:27:07 different aircraft, secret aircraft. The whole, the key to that is secret, you know, to be ahead of everything on that so we can fly them around the world and not be seen. So the idea that we're doing exotic testing and there are accidents and crashes and things. That much, I'm, I'm, I'd be surprised if there's not more of them, any of us know. But, and again, I wouldn't know that at CIA because I wasn't in those, you know, those saps or whatever you call them. The thing that did surprise me at DOE, for all the incredible secrets, many, some of which were nuclear-related things, is just how few of them related to this. So, again, that could suggest two explanations. One is it's done somewhere else, and even I.

Starting point is 03:27:52 Yeah. was hazed by night by or or you know there's less to it for the more banal reason or i'd call it that that no one's pulling it together you know you talk to someone like jim simi van good call by the way the people you mention i have immense respect for yeah so why would they because yeah i i wouldn't imagine they would want to lie about this topic no no i don't think i don't think they're lying okay they have no motivation to lie about it yeah so i think it's well i think it's sincere and well-intended statements, you take it. But you wouldn't put your money on them being right?

Starting point is 03:28:28 I don't know what being right is. See, one thing I haven't been able to get from, we had congressional testimony, we've had this movie, which I haven't seen yet. So I'll defer judgment on the movie. But one thing we haven't heard from any of them, and the question I would ask Jim Clapper or Jim Sammy Van or anybody, if I called them up as old friends, is to say, okay, you say this and that. I never heard that before.

Starting point is 03:28:50 say that before. Like, why don't you then say exactly what you mean? If you have that as a statement, you've say a summary of what you think, you're not going to provide any like specifics of what you mean by that. Right. When, where, how, where is it now? What does it migrate? I understand it might be deeply classified. They provide some specifics. They talk about this is Roswell as a real event. There were beings that came out of, I think they say four beings that came out of this craft. You know, I think they even mentioned one surviving or something. So they do mention some specific details. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:29:27 So, you know, I don't know. Those are real claims. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I see no reason to discount the people you mentioned among some of the other people I've heard are in it just because they don't have the proof. Again, I'd implore the government to think hard about what they're trying to. to do here? What's what's the purpose of not disclosing? Yeah. Of non-disclosure. Secrecy, one of the things I've always felt strongly about is there's too much secrecy in the government. Yeah. And it's this kind of insidious secrecy that's disruptive. It's because of corrosive to democracy. Yeah. And this is coming from me in my community. There's too much.

Starting point is 03:30:15 there are damn good reasons not to talk about certain nuclear data or who's a spy when you have evidence, you know, you're starting to pick up evidence of a spy in your ranks, or you're going to compromise the thing and lose it. But other things we just keep secret way beyond its time for no reason. I won't even say a parent, which is a qualifier. I just say I could state categorically. We just keep things. Do you think the UFO thing could be an example of that?

Starting point is 03:30:43 Well, I think it. is not by virtue that it wouldn't be revelatory, therefore somebody would say, keep it secret because it's like huge, going to change our whole impression of life in the universe, okay? Yeah. But that's the reason I would say they've got to declassify it. Yeah. You can't keep something like that secret. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:31:03 You know, you can't. You've got to share that. Everybody in this country ought to know if the U.S. government has concluded that there's life on other planets because we have evidence. not because we've seen, you know, ticktacks or I get all that, you know, and there's still a, the big joke, of course,

Starting point is 03:31:22 which you know all this better than I is, you know, why are all these images always fuzzy. But it's the idea that, but they even have explanations for that. I know. They say it's like, you know,

Starting point is 03:31:31 gravitational lensing and blue shifts and redshut. The guy who talks about that is this guy, Hal put off, who's at University of Institute of Advanced Study, Austin. and he, you know, is I think a longtime CIA guy as well. And he talks about Stephen Hadley in the Bush administration is going through this whole exercise of should we disclose

Starting point is 03:31:53 or should we not disclose and them reading the three-body problem as part of this exercise to figure out whether, you know, this is this Chinese science fiction novel that involves this, you know, tricelarian alien race or whatever. And the aliens having a lot to do with frontier physics. as well, clamping down on our physics because that's our tip of the spear ability to defend ourselves as the human race. And he says they go through this whole exercise and they come out saying, you know, it's actually, it's not worth it to disclose. And how put off said this on,

Starting point is 03:32:29 you know, Joe Rogan on like the biggest podcast in the world. And I'm like, what's going on? You have on the one, you have this indetectable, undetectable dark matter. You have on the one hand, people like Elon Musk, like yourself, who like, you know, super, like amazing Bonafide is extremely respectable, like highly intelligent, you know, know a lot of stuff. And then you have Jim Semmy Van Hal put off, Jim Clapper, and they're all like so pro UFO and they have like discrete stories of these things. And I'm like, what's like how do I make sense of this? You know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's so confused. Well, I think, I think the way you make sense of it is to keep pushing it and keep interviewing.

Starting point is 03:33:09 and keep. Do you think Hadley ever went through an exercise like that? I mean, there's really no, I'd put no value in my judgment except to say, you know, I know Steve Hadley and I respect him too. Yeah. I've never heard anything like that. Never heard anything. No. I mean, I said, you know, I just want you to know one thing.

Starting point is 03:33:30 Yeah. I don't know. And if I knew I probably would. I can't say categorically I know I would, but I can't see why I would keep that a secret even at risk to myself. of being punished in some way. Yeah. I just, I feel that fervently. No, I appreciate that.

Starting point is 03:33:45 And I also, you know, I think if that weren't the case, you probably wouldn't come on the show because I, I can throw, I mean, like, I mean, and I, and I, you know, I'm not, I won't belabor this too long. But like, there's so much, it's like a whole ontology that has, basically you can, you can create around the DOE being like holding the crown jewels of US faux stuff. there's transclassified foreign material and, you know, special nuclear material from the, you know, 1954 atomic energy act, where you have restricted data, anything that could be radiological in nature is immediately born secret upon sort of retrieving it. I know that. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you're familiar. So, like, there's this idea that that is sort of this Trojan horse for UFO material. And that, you know, nest nuclear emergency support teams. Like, you know, I spoke to my buddy's UAP Gerb and then this other guy, David Grush, who's this whistleblower before this, and they were

Starting point is 03:34:41 talking, you know, about those two things. And so there's nothing that you know about any of that stuff. No. And I, you know, hasten to add, when I think back up myself, in all modesty, some guy coming in from CIA to head up intelligence for three years. Obviously, the intelligence shop is not the place to go for this information or having access to it. Now, there might be one person they trust with it there. And it is an organization, Dewey, that you could easily imagine, because I described going in through the multiple vaults back deeper and deeper into the recesses of the building to the point where there's not a sound coming in out of there other than the people talking

Starting point is 03:35:27 in the room. So you have a culture where this is all very possible. Yeah. And I have known other subjects, a few, that I've got roped into where there was a very exclusive group of people looking at it. And to the point where this was even at CIA where we didn't put anything, well, very specific thing, not generally done and very highly unusual, irregular, I'd call it, where nothing pertaining to that was even put into any kind of a record. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So anything's imaginable.

Starting point is 03:36:04 Yeah, it's possible. Yeah, I mean, at the Seoul Foundation, there's just a Stanford organization that's dedicated UFO research. These NNSA guys, National Nuclear Security Administration guys showed up. And so it's like, why are you interested in this stuff? And then there's this news nation, which just covers UFOs a lot. There's this slide that was like advanced gravity propulsion research. And it was a guy who had incurred some sort of Havana syndrome like, you know, biological effects.

Starting point is 03:36:37 But it was, you know, it was like that was his title. And so I'm like, okay, DOE's doing this exotic gravity research. Well, that doesn't surprise me at all. Okay. No, no. But the UFO stuff surprises. Well, there's a major distinction here, you know, looking into, I would call all forms of materials and advanced propulsion techniques and energy-related. When people think of Department of Energy, just for a very quick, very quick explanation of what it is, which most people don't know, is Department of Energy consists of really three main components that are, it's a hybrid that shouldn't exist together, but it's a product of a lot of politics that created DOE.

Starting point is 03:37:19 The one side, there's the energy part, which contrary to a lot of common belief is not just gas and oil and fossil fuels. It's also advanced form of renewables. It's for nuclear power. And, of course, it's for looking into advanced energy forms, some of which we don't gravity magnets. So all that's in the energy department. And there's an overwhelming thought. It's just, you know, Jimmy Carter created it during the crisis with the Middle East over gas

Starting point is 03:37:48 and oil. So that's no. But it's all this other stuff. That's strengthened by the second major component of DOE, which is the science part of D.O.E., which a lot of which does pure science. So the pure science part of DOE is some of its research for ongoing needs of the U.S. government, some of it's just advanced things. I've met some of the most fascinating people who do things like chaos theory and look

Starting point is 03:38:18 for numbers. They're looking for the equation, you know, the equation of chaos. It got me on a whole track of thinking of my philosophy and my beloved philosophy, in a totally different way, which is, wow, what if every human decision, like in history is just permutations of choices we make freely, but no matter what we do, it's to determine outcome because all those choices inevitably, because they're driven by an equation of human nature. So they all drive you to the same result.

Starting point is 03:38:45 Well, I got some of those ideas from DOE scientists, so who are doing, and some of them are into that esoteric, those esoteric kind of aspects of their work. And again, wonderful people to talk to, some of them, you know, very eccentric or whatever you want to call it. And then the third part is the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is almost like I describe as an autonomous republic within the DOE because it's got some independent status because for a time the NNSA was seen as not getting the attention and freedom of action it needed within a dysfunctional DOE. It's not dysfunctional anymore. DOE is quite functional, but there was a period. That's why I referred to the politics. So you had those three many ways complementaries, but in some ways, independent.

Starting point is 03:39:32 And then the national nuclear security, national laboratory complex, serves those three things, energy, nukes, and pure science. Yeah. And they're proportioned in their work in what's required, what the basic priorities are. Have you ever seen a one-of-one material, like a super unique material that's never, you've never seen elsewhere? No. Okay. I would remember that. Okay.

Starting point is 03:40:05 The other, you know, common attribute is you realize how vast what I just described is. So the probability that I know a lot of it is small, and it's prescribed. So by that I mean, I'll be kind of vague, but everything that's exceptional. Yeah. Typically, you get read into individually. Yeah. It's not just yours as a result of the job you hold. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:40:29 If it's important enough, then you get, like, someone will tap you on the shoulder and you have, you know, specials. Things happen. Things happen. They're different. So it's entirely possible that there are very few people that know a lot about all the most important things, if that makes sense, because they're divided. Yeah. And I could easily see things like we're talking about. about being in a separate category, which is even curtailed further by people who really need to know.

Starting point is 03:40:56 Because the ultimate, the need of the chapter that I have in my book for this is called need to know. So the other, I'm trying to also illustrate a principle. I've never been entirely comfortable about intelligence and government secrecy is the idea that need to know governs it all. Well, that's fine if need to know is perfectly interpreted. Well, I think the public needs is has a need to know for the ontological truth. The basic, you know, it's just like nuclear science is taught at every university, but nuclear trade secrets should be classified. I think that should be applied to this if it's at all real. And to me, when people ask about, you know, my conviction in UFOs, I always say you have to view everything probabilistically. The idea that we're in some reverse engineering arms race, I would probability weight much lower. than I am sure that there are these objects showing up around nuclear assets all over the world. Not even, there's a town in Japan. We have our American Alchemy Japanese shirts here.

Starting point is 03:41:59 There's a town in Japan next to the Fukushima Prefecture, which is their civilian energy grid that has a museum. It's this mountain Sengon Mori. They have a whole museum dedicated to UFOs and all these geomagnetic anomalies and they're obsessed with UFOs. So I do think that is this ubiquitous, you know, comment. And that is the thing I think you can be most high conviction in the UFO world. Well, then I can also see that the tie, there's just such an obvious tie-in with other than worldly life forms or intelligence and our highest forms of intelligence are most destructive, things like nuclear.

Starting point is 03:42:41 I mean, because there again, the whole idea of, I've tried to get accustomed or adapted to the reality of nuclear. nuclear weapons and nuclear secrets my whole life. Even having spent by accident as I unfolded, it unfolded as a big accident. But when I look back on it, yeah, it's like nuclear here, nuclear here. And it's a little about like your appearances are all the nuclear sites. It's like it keeps coming to me. And you could even make a case if you wanted to write that script that some of these

Starting point is 03:43:12 appearances were a divine awareness in sense of messages and of, the need to warn in the, because the essence of the Zechio warning as a watchman, the watchman is a specific type of, you know, it's not a messenger, it's not a prophet, it's a watchman, only responsibility is to warn. So specifically in biblical terms, the idea of the watchman warning the people will be held accountable, not for if it's true or stops whatever's going to happen from happening. That's not the accountability. The explicit accountability of being a watchman is to warn.

Starting point is 03:43:48 your job is to warn. So when you ask me, did you prevent or you have to banish that idea from your mind that you are going to prevent the apocalypse or shape it in some form? Because I don't think any human being is going to have that responsibility. But it's pretty hard just to do the warning part. Yeah. Because like you said, if people genuinely believe that this is part of it, and maybe you're a watchman for, you know, shining a light on so much on

Starting point is 03:44:18 this factor, particularly depending how things turn out. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I'm curious to see where this whole topic goes. You know, in this kind of hazing ritual brief that you had on UFOs, do you remember the date of Roswell that they gave you? No, not off the top of my head. I think I had it in the, I think I wrote it in the book.

Starting point is 03:44:40 It is in the book, and it's July 7, 1947. Yeah. Do you think that connects with your download 747? Oh, my goodness. good you know that's the first time i've ever thought that that it might are you are you trying to tell the audience in coated fashion that you might know i'm i'm being as what i've tried to be throughout the i'm in complete and it's even better in complete honesty which didn't even cross my mind so i couldn't possibly have yeah fabricated that to make it more compelling there's one other one

Starting point is 03:45:13 that's a really interesting there was a this will fit you're you need to look this up if you don't already know it. Yeah. So one of the scientists of DOE kind of knew my stuff with numbers and this may even have been read, explain to me the famous Vela. I've heard the Vela incident, nuclear explosion. It's called the seven, they labeled it at the 747 incident. Whoa.

Starting point is 03:45:35 And it's a nuclear test that South Africa made, right? But the suspicion is they did it on behalf of the Israelis. So suspicion. I'm not saying to your view. viewers, you know, this is, but this is into the murky secrets of the development of the Israeli bomb, which, of course, the U.S. kind of gave the big thumbs up, handshake deal to, you know, you know you need this kind of thing. At least that's what I've heard. So the point being there is, boy, that's a very, Vela 747. Look it up. Fascinating. Yeah. I don't know. I think there's

Starting point is 03:46:10 something very ontologically interesting about nuclear and it's some sort of energy unlocked. that if I were some sort of concurrent civilization, whether it's extraterrestrial, you know, which the people who deny UFOs at the highest levels often say extraterrestrial because I think it's a, we don't have evidence that's extraterrestrial. You know, I think it could be like, you know, some sort of non-human or even ultra-terrestrial, some past civilization on Earth or something. But it seems like they would want to monitor nuclear. Like that just seems like this really important unlock. And that seems to be corroborated by all the evidence.

Starting point is 03:46:50 But as to what that means, I just don't know. Now, you're thinking of other people looking at us, maybe way past this point. There's some secret we may bump into. I don't know that there is worried about us blowing ourselves up as we, you know, they probably have no reason to worry too much about that. But what if they're worried we're going to cross a threshold of knowledge that they're already aware of? And that has grave implications for them. That's really interesting.

Starting point is 03:47:16 I mean, it's like the building blocks of, life or if life is, if you think about the universe as like information theoretic, like maybe you're getting into the root access or something. Well, you know, but it adds another element to this that isn't, I don't think, well enough understood or absorbed by the public is we take for granted the kind of the expression of this incredible God's secrets, I call it, as manifested in our discoveries of those secrets. And yet in every domain, whether it's AI or nuclear or biological life sciences, in every one of those domains, our knowledge is so limited. Yes.

Starting point is 03:47:57 Of what we're dealing with. And if you go to, we think a little about the implications of AI, and I've heard some in various places I've heard talks, and even by some of the top guys on this. And it scares the hell out of me. Yeah, it does. They don't know what they're doing. Well, it's that you could call it a process of like umvel tacking or something. So like um, this is my old colleague Eric Weinstein talks about this, where it's like you get to deeper layers of ontological truth, the more the better your measurement instruments are. Or there's even a physicist who's at CERN for a while.

Starting point is 03:48:30 Ken Wilson talks about, um, uh, phase transitions and materials. And the more you put them under duress, you know, that you get these whole new properties. Like, you know, as you put them under duress. And so I wonder if, you know, it's kind of what we were talking about before. It's quantum indeterminacy between level of energy and time. If you have particle accelerators or nuclear blasts, you might get weird, ontological weirdness around those events. Particularly as little as we know the physics, you know. And especially since the people at the top of the...

Starting point is 03:49:11 fields are guiding all of us. And it's the same with these other fields, right? And that's the, I mean, cloning. Yeah. What, stunning. Yeah. I never, I never thought, I had a dream once on cloning. Yeah, very interesting. And I thought, oh, that's never going to happen in my lifetime. Well, you know, pets are being cloned, brought back to life. And that in itself, we're playing God. So we're at the point where we're, in a way, we've earned this as the only, in biblical terms, again, we created in the image of God. Yes. I was always seized by that.

Starting point is 03:49:45 At an early age, even, I recognize this is special. Image of God means, really, it's a two-way thing, means God has a responsibility for us in a way that I'm sure God will fulfill. And that's been the essence of everything we've talked about. God's going to send messengers. God's going to send his own son. God's going to do X and Y. Send a prophet mom.

Starting point is 03:50:04 But all the things that, and with the typical characters behind, I'm always the same people, Angel Gabriel. and they're always the same people, always the same entities, right, behind all. And then all that's going to be his way of guiding us, making sure we don't screw up entirely before, in the end, okay, I'm going to give some summary assurance, which sounds awful, but judgment day and apocalypse, that things are going to turn out, because that's really what it's about. It's not about punishing us. We punish ourselves. It's about reconciliation. It's about judgment, meaning there is a reward and a penalty for what you do in your life.

Starting point is 03:50:38 You're not here anonymously. Like that was the thing on the train. It was like, I'm not, God's aware. He's there right now. He's like standing there. That's why that's in the book because I never had that feeling before or after. It was the one time it was just that deep.

Starting point is 03:50:55 And so the same thing applies with handling God's gift. So we're entitled, we're given access to things that we, in a way, have no right to. But we're not, there's no point to give us freedom in the whole Garden of Eden story. unless it's full freedom, which because of the way we're wired, we're going to screw that up for the most part. And so that's all known.

Starting point is 03:51:19 Yes. You can write your equations now. Yeah. God is. God knows. Yeah. It'll play out how many Hegelian dialectical histories you want to write. They all might be different, but guess what?

Starting point is 03:51:29 They're all going to end the same way. But when it comes to how the handling of the power of God turns out, that's the unique test. And that's what, so I never get into prophecies. I don't prophesize anything, but predict when's the apocalypse? When's the start? One of the things about my dream that I specifically remember was 2060 in the chameleon dream of the future where I was trying with UFOs and going out and trying.

Starting point is 03:51:54 I was already in an apocalypse. I'm going back and forth. Part of the world had been destroyed with the great nuclear war of 2034. And I was going back and forth trying to find people trying to make bombs. This is way before I did the terrorist bomb stuff, by the way. Whoa. Yeah. You had a dream about that.

Starting point is 03:52:10 This is the dream that I hadn't, that you talked to, you asked me about in 1981. And you said you were flying on what the DOE would call UFOs. Yeah. And it was, I had the dream in 1982. And, and, but this was, these were our like crafts, like American crafts. Our craft sent from CIA. Yeah. From all managed and all connected to a massive supercomputer.

Starting point is 03:52:34 We would call a quantum. I didn't know that back then. In the bowels of CIA underground. Do you think that we have propulsion modalities that transcend chemical combustion? I don't know. Yeah. No idea.

Starting point is 03:52:48 Yeah. But in the dream, certainly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the dream, certainly. I didn't know what it was. I just was flying around like it was all known, but my dream didn't reveal to me how, but it was a manifestation of Reagan's Star Wars thing,

Starting point is 03:53:03 Star Wars, which before Star Wars. So he gave the great Star Wars speech, I think in 84, and my dream was in 82. So I was already anticipating, I'll call it that, this idea of a shield. So my dream was basically the world had been divided into, the world in the shield, the world out of the shield.

Starting point is 03:53:20 And the whole point was to keep, of the UFOs and intelligence was a global intelligence service that would keep out the people trying to break through the shield. Well, yeah, that's fascinating. So now we're into what? We're into exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, and that, in fact, Blue-Gill triple prime thing was it was a high-altitude nuclear test, but it was a defense against

Starting point is 03:53:42 Russian ICBMs, and Soviet ICBMs, and there's even a Rand Corporation paper a couple years before it was pulled off around speculating as to how that would be done. And Malmgren was at the Institute for Defense Analysis at the time, and they've been involved in every missile defense system since then. And he directly ties Blue-Gill Triple Prime to Star Wars and to you know a strategic defense initiative and so then there's again there's this

Starting point is 03:54:14 weird question of like is there some dual use around UFOs for that or something and like I don't know and you have the Golden Dome now you know and well I think one of the questions I know people are asking but just like when you're hearing us talk muse about this is

Starting point is 03:54:30 we're sort of due for another big transformational change. I mean, we've had, of course, the industrial age, and then we had more recently the internet age. And it just strikes me that we're due for something

Starting point is 03:54:46 like this, this idea of something propelling us into a future we really haven't anticipated as over, in a way, overwritten on everything, every possible permutation of our future, something that's going to change on that. We're going to say, well,

Starting point is 03:55:02 it's not that future after all. It feels like we're on the verge of a paradigm shift. for sure. It does. And it feels like, at least for the stuff I'm investigating, feels like the dam is going to break, because there are, if the kind of incumbent, you know, current paradigm is like, you know,

Starting point is 03:55:21 inside of the dam or whatever, there are like 15 different vectors of like holes in the dam. And that thing is just, it's about to burst. Like it would think. When I hear you, you know, talk about all these different things, that you're working on too, that's the immediate reaction I had is what we just said there with one another.

Starting point is 03:55:45 It's just, we're ready for a big paradigm shift. It's probably going to be something we've never anticipated based on something we didn't see coming. And the most important thing of that is it's happening at a time. And I think very few people understand this. I don't want to be condescending, but I just, I myself struggle with this a lot. where time and scale is, time is rapidly shrinking on us. Everything is more accessible so fast we can't process it, much like make good.

Starting point is 03:56:16 Back in the day when you mailed things and you set cables and you imagine how easier you could contemplate things. You could make that. Even then, it was rough making good decisions. And at a certain point, we reached a happy medium where this, where speed increased to the point, we'd get better decisions faster. But now we're at the point, I'm sure, of this, in government or, or even maybe the private sector, I think, where the amount of things we have to decide,

Starting point is 03:56:40 at the speed we have to decide it is overwhelming us. At the scale it applies because of population growth and how everything is interacting and the way the Internet is tied everything together. Well, that's what that movie, Age of Disclosure, felt like, it felt like the government trying to get in front of all these kind of truths coming out and figuring out a way to frame it or something.

Starting point is 03:57:03 I hope so. Proactively. good sure yeah but you know it feels it does feel like that is inevitable like this stuff is is sort of uh coming out and i wonder in some ways like you believe in angels right yes i do yeah of course so these all these things have literally happened to you and i wonder if like it's like the age of disclosure has their veneer of like extraterrestrials your veneer might be angels demons eschatology the bible if i were like would you believe that that angels might show up around nuclear sites, that might seem more plausible to you.

Starting point is 03:57:40 Well, in a way, in a way, and I'm, you know, I told you, I'm so hesitant to link UFOs to faith and mysticism. Sure, sure, sure, sure. So with that gigantic caveat. Yeah, yeah, and I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, don't apologize. It's fun. It's fun, right? I don't, I don't think it discredits religion or faith or in any way insults. Well, it's trying to figure out some underlying truth between, you know, the way you're describing what's happened to you personally.

Starting point is 03:58:05 and then these, you know, all these other intelligence officials who are saying, we are not alone, you know. Right. Well, I think we're at ties. I was getting to my big however, you know, is if you believe the one, like you said, I'm utterly, there's not even any doubt in my mind about all these things and also the existence of angels like Gabriel. And now how you describe that or what that reality is, whether, you know, obviously the wing figure

Starting point is 03:58:29 coming from is, I think, symbolic of a messenger from a different. state of reality. But now we're getting very close to being visited by life forms in our own universe that technically shouldn't be much intersection with us. I've never really doubted the sort of actuarial realities that intelligent life must exist in the universe. I've really never questioned that. What I want to see is the evidence of it and begin to understand what that means for us.

Starting point is 03:59:01 But I've also wanted to understand how space-time, makes that work because everything is so distant from us that even with advanced forms of Star Trek forms of travel, which I loved that show when I was growing up, it's hard to imagine we're going to intersect at precisely that moment of advanced development of our civilizations in this place and our place. That would be a very low odds. Not impossible. But then when you introduce something that we just talked about as being some breakthrough of true. somewhere that changes entirely our notions of reality. We already know we haven't unified physics.

Starting point is 03:59:43 Well, that's a big one right there. Yeah. There's a reason for that. And I don't think Einstein just got lazy after, you know, his earliest part of his life when he was at his greatest. I will sort of reinforce one idea, though, is I have a much greater belief in younger people like you and others pushing us into the future than I do my generation. And not so much because we've done an achievement.

Starting point is 04:00:05 what we want to do. But, you know, your mind's changed. You don't, you know, I don't deserve to be the person I was getting all the insights and things to guide my life and my work now that I had then. So if I want them now, it's more for my own, you know, satisfaction. And that's not good enough, right? But the idea behind this is that we need people who don't consider themselves, experienced or informed through advanced degrees.

Starting point is 04:00:37 all this to think like you and others think and to push us. That's where the inspiration is going to come. I mean, Einstein was a clerk when he was doing his greatest work. And there's so many scientists who were like that. Now, yeah, maybe he's a genius, but, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Starting point is 04:00:59 It feels like there are all these kind of heterodox threads of science that weren't taken seriously at all, you know, for the last 30, 40 years. and increasingly they're kind of in vogue and being taken seriously. And in certain cases, I think they've been behind, you know, walls of secrecy or stigma, you know, things like, like documented is, you know, the CIA's efforts in remote viewing and parapsychology. And, you know, that's, I think, a well-respected intelligence modality and, you know, at Langley. But, you know, only until the last few years, you know, that was kind of rested out of the government with the Freedom of Information Act requests in 2017,

Starting point is 04:01:39 and only in the last few years are people saying, there's something clearly here. And I think the problem I have with the super anti-UFO people are like, they, you know, say, oh, this can't be possible, this observable thing that you've seen a million different times with all these credible people coming out and saying it, can't be real because of our current physical model of the universe. But if you were to bet on the anomaly historically

Starting point is 04:02:04 and against the physical model of the universe, you would always be right. You know, you're always wrong if you bet on the physical model of the universe. So I do think we're on the precipice of something exciting. Yeah, I agree with you, totally. And I hope it's very positive. I worry on one aspect that I think as we learn more about the reality we're creating, rather than the reality that exists,

Starting point is 04:02:30 we need to make sure we continue to make that distinction. And that can take the smallest form of, knowing when you're a virtual reality figure in an app you're playing on your iPad or if you're a kid, making sure that kids, you know, don't lose their minds in a fantasy reality. And this is coming from someone who's had these very vexing, disturbing, disorienting, dreams that I've had. And who am I to talk? But it was a problem for me in some respects, too, that I've outlined. And then it goes up one level from that where you have people, you know,

Starting point is 04:03:06 relying on chat GPT to be their girlfriend or boyfriend or give them life advice. I'm saying, wow, this is this is more than dangerous. People are, you know, the idea, I said at one point we talked about identity a little bit and how culturally that was different from people who are more individualistic societies versus, say, common bond societies that depend on one another, have a perception, they're more involved with one another. But think about it from the standpoint of, how that changes when you can create a reality that doesn't exist and replace your reality,

Starting point is 04:03:43 because it's not a very good life you're leading. Right now you might go buy opiates or do something because you see no hope in your future and you don't have a good health care, you don't have a good job, you don't really have any hope you're going to break out of this terrible cycle. We put, we, I think that's a we thing personally. Yeah, some people bring it on themselves. But we, as a country, owe more to people than we've given them. This isn't a now problem that we've created.

Starting point is 04:04:08 This has been a growing problem for decades. And into that environment comes the temptation to create alternative lives and realities. I wouldn't want watching Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg and others trying to create this idea of having people. Why do they want to do this? They want people to come on these virtual reality so they can buy imaginary plots of land. So they can make money off it. I mean, wow. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:04:33 No, it's dystopian. That's part of the reason I'm into the U.S. a faux thing because I think it's if our life is if this is somewhat of a simulation I think there's a life affirming version of the simulation where we're in a platonic cave and you can ascend outside and see the light that's lighter than light and and you know um witness great things in this reality and so why would you go into this sort of bit compressed reality and so that that's what motivates me when I'm trying to close this gap between well super well respected people like yourself and then these other people like you know Chris Mellon deputy assistant director of intelligence

Starting point is 04:05:11 for you know under bush and clinton he even he just said he was like you know um we want to put the cia's director of science and technology i think it was the one of the last ones he was like we need to figure out what she knows about UFOs and so i'm like i'm like it's maddening to me like how would how would you advise that i figure out what's going on well i I think you're doing a good job. The best thing you can do is what you're doing is interview credible witnesses. Avoid drawing conclusions until you have to. But by the same token, I think most of the mind-shut phenomenon, whether it's UFOs or, frankly, a lot of traditional things.

Starting point is 04:05:53 There's a whole massive number of people I can name any, but I won't embarrass people who just flat won't deal with terrorists having nukes or big biological weapons simply because they want to think that, And, you know, men wearing rags, you know, you can't do it. But it's the idea, though, that you dismiss something because, you know, you underestimate them. And that's what you're not doing. And you can't underestimate. And the people who tend to do that and dismissive, dismissive people on anything I've ever dealt with, there's a group of dismissive people. Yeah. Because you're usually placing your bed on probability basis.

Starting point is 04:06:27 Yes. Not impact basis. Yep. And the real risk equation for any good national security person or someone doing what you're doing, is to assess risk as intent times capability times consequences. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:06:42 So we sometimes assume intent that's typical, that's done a lot, assume a tent. They can, they don't. Part of our failure on 9-11, frankly, as an intelligence community, was we didn't assume

Starting point is 04:06:53 they had the intent to do that. And then the capability you don't even really look into, you don't see it because you haven't really ascribed that intent to them that they do something that audacious. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:07:03 And then, of course, the consequences is all they're really looking for. So, yeah, you multiply those things out. But it's the same thing with UFOs. You see, it's like your best bet as an observer trying to maintain some credibility. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:07:18 Like astronomers who cast judgment on every new visitor to our solar system is to dismiss it as anything. And then if the day comes at some point when it's a real thing, oh, they're nowhere to be found. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:07:35 Yeah, exactly. No, exactly. Yeah. Did, did you know Glenn Gapney at all? Yeah, I did. Because he, this guy. I like him a lot. He's a nice, he's a good guy. He was, he's, I think currently on the Board of Arrow, the All Domain Anomalies Research Resolution Office. Okay, I didn't know what he's doing. He was the director of science and technology. Technology at the CIA. And there's a couple of people, one of which was under oath in front of Congress, said he blocked the transfer of UFO material. from Lockheed Martin to Bigelow Aerospace. Do you know anything about that? No, but it's pretty specific. It is specific. It's a specific, yeah. Anyways, well, okay.

Starting point is 04:08:16 Well, I appreciate you indulging my crazy question. No, I'm not indulging. I'm learning it. It's fascinating. I will say one more thing about, wasn't when Glenn was the head of director at science technology, but I've had a lot of interactions with them

Starting point is 04:08:29 over, you know, the decades. And one thing I did learn from the interactions is that most, of what they do, most of what they do, I wasn't privy to. I had no, no reason to be brought into from a need of perspective. So there's all kinds of things I probably don't know. So you, and you swear to God, you know nothing about you. Oh, yeah, yeah, I swear to God. Okay. Wow. I'd hedge and I know that means a lot to you because you're, you know, it's, it's a whole different conversation, but I try never to be deceptive or lie. That's what it would be. Even when I'd

Starting point is 04:09:05 reason. Like you're given an alibi because, oh, yeah, you're told not to tell so you can lie. No, I'll find a different way to not say it than lie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've learned that actually, it's extremely important. Being in a manipulative business, which you can't deny intelligence can be, it's even more important to maintain your personal integrity and ability to be credible with people. So if I'm dealing with the Russians, we've had some stories about that. I actually, there's a chapter, in my book where I'm dealing with Syrian intelligence or any other intelligence service in the world

Starting point is 04:09:40 or country, my credibility lies and not lying to them. Yep. And because then what I tell them is suspect, so then I've contaminated whatever CIA has to offer. So I make it a, not only a habit, but my personal integrity.

Starting point is 04:09:57 I also believe, and I've given lectures on this, there's no contradiction or conflict between recruiting agents and running them and we obviously use aliases and things. That's not deceptive if your goal is to protect the agent. The agent knowing your real name is bad for the agent.

Starting point is 04:10:15 Sure, yeah, yeah. Those kinds of things. Yeah, of course. But when it comes down to a real litmus test, how far am I willing to go for the agent versus what the agency tells me to do with the agent? I will defer to the agent's welfare because this is a human being. So ultimately, I'll find a way to reconcile the two. I don't like to flat out defy headquarters if I can help it.

Starting point is 04:10:42 But I have done it. And then the test is a different test when I flat out say no or defy them and don't do what I've been told to do, which I don't recommend to everybody out there. But in those cases, I'll own up to it. Usually before, I'll say, no, I'm not going to do what you just told me to do. then there'll be a discussion. Yeah. And this is, again, the test of the integrity of your organization, whether it's CIA or any other in the U.S. government.

Starting point is 04:11:15 How does an organization react when you've done something you think is either you're told to do something that's either illegal or immoral or both? How do you handle it? And it's a test of the organization whether you're asked to do that. Now, what I personally, I've said to myself personally over all my careers, and I've never had to go to the mat on it to the point I quit, but I would have. If I can't reconcile that, I will do what I know is the right thing to do. Yeah. So we've done some bad things, but I understood the reasons for it,

Starting point is 04:11:46 and we did it for not doing the wrong thing, but just because things, sometimes you're faced with a terrible choice. Yeah. You don't have an option. But I just wanted to stress that because it's come up again in recent times, you know. You just be very careful about work through the whole, for example, forgetting his name, Edward Snowden defected China and the Russians. And he's been described by people as a whistleblower.

Starting point is 04:12:12 And there was a whistleblowing aspect to his motivations and tensions and actions. But it was far exceeded by the damage he set out to cause to the U.S. government for no whistleblowing reason. so you have all this. It's complicated with him because on the one hand, I do think it's important that the public know that the NSA is a backdoor and every big tech company. They have these programs like Prism and Bull Run and they can just spy on you through your smart TV and your phone.

Starting point is 04:12:44 And like, that's a, that's messed up. That's not cool. Well, it's not that simple. Okay. No, it's not that simple. Okay. But the other part of the answer to that question is, um, the government should, in fact, have done maybe some,

Starting point is 04:12:57 things different than he alleged. And so he had, there was a, but he went far. Well, he definitely, you know, compromised. Yeah, sure. Sure. And things that had nothing to did, just pure immense damage to national security with no whistleblower benefit. So he knew exactly what he's doing. And then you look into the whole background. Now, why do I single him out? I'm not trying to make him a particular, you know, target of my wrath or ire. He said, this is, this is the problem in a nutshell. Is citizens, individual officers integrity, everybody comes together

Starting point is 04:13:31 on trying to maintain the integrity of what we're doing and the more it's secret, the more it's dark and deep, the more we have to do it and the more disclosure is necessary at the right level. And we've talked so many ways

Starting point is 04:13:43 about how we limit it, where we limit it, you know, this kind of thing. Do you think anything's going to happen further on the UFO front? Do you think more is going to come out? Yeah, I can't imagine

Starting point is 04:13:55 it's the end of the story, right? It's just almost in a way. way feels like it's just beginning. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that would be my expectation as well. I mean, like in the world in which we have reverse engineering programs, material, all that stuff, it is actually like a serious national security issue. If the left hand's not talking to the right, you have these bigoted special access programs that are like unquareable, not answering to any sort of civilian organization. There's zero congressional oversight. And then you're, competing against Russia and China who have these central bases where they can just, you know,

Starting point is 04:14:32 pluck scientists from wherever and place them there and get them to work on whatever they want. Like if in the world where that's real, it's, it would seem like a dire issue just for the U.S. And like I always say that as a dog whistle to the national security people. All I care about is the truth. I care about the truth coming out. There you go. There you go. The watchman.

Starting point is 04:14:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, one, you know, more thing on that, I think it's. can't reach a conclusion, but when you start thinking Area 51 and the crash, and you've said this, I haven't done that research and I haven't looked into, aside from... And you've been to Area 51, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you've never seen any UFO, alien UFO type of things. No, no, I'm sure that, yeah.

Starting point is 04:15:16 But, I mean, there's kind of two explanations. One is it's our testing and we're covering that up. And two is it intelligent life was there. watching what we're doing. And that's an area which you would be in at that point with all the nuclear testing. I think it's that. Yeah. Because they're over, you think maybe it was that? No, it's plausible. I don't dismiss it. Because in 1945, over Hanford plutonium base, you have this guy, this pilot Bud Clem following this like, you know, ball of light around. You had, you had stuff happening super early. In 47, I mean, Robert Goddard, who was a rocket pioneer in the U.S., had just been testing V2, rockets right at Roswell. So it's like, I don't think we were testing super advanced propulsion.

Starting point is 04:16:06 You know, there was some interesting stuff happening in Nazi Germany to that effect, but you know, you had Kamlerstab and you had these interesting scientists doing some stuff in that in that world. But I think what happened at Roswell was was otherworldly. I do. Yeah. And that's why I wanted to reinforce the possibility. I don't see how you, you can dismiss it. Yeah. Unless you know it's not. In other words, if someone, this is another reason to declassify, because if there was an internal experiment or, you know, something, maybe it's the problem with that, even if you then declassify and put it out there, then there's this possibility we've continued over the decades to work on whatever we were working on it.

Starting point is 04:16:50 And it was an early miserable failure. There's always that explanation why we won't release. Yeah. Well, that's also maybe my take. I don't think we've done much with what we've recovered. I think it's like, you know, caveman with a USB drive. Caveman doesn't understand, you know, information theory. They have nothing to plug it into.

Starting point is 04:17:10 There's no interface. It's not like an iPhone, you know. That would be my guess. Well, when you consider the fact that probably one of the most, at least plausible continuations of our species over the next 100 years is that we evolve to the point where the AI create doesn't want us around anymore, per all the movie. But that seems so plausible.

Starting point is 04:17:34 The problem with being so clever as we are on artificial intelligence is, it's easy to imagine us out programming the reality of our lives in ways. They will lose control aspect of is just one thing. But I could easily see humans deciding that the perpetuation, of the species and the continued evolution of human beings will no longer follow the script of what might have started as a biblical kind of idea.

Starting point is 04:18:06 And to the point where the one thing God would have wanted to preserve in the evolution of not just human species, but all life on Earth, if it's a God plan, is the idea of mutation and the idea of the weak moving on. to take over the earth as it goes in a definition we wouldn't think of as the stronger and the superior and even the idea Darwin laid out of survival the fittest I kind of because of my faith look entirely the opposite now which is really that it's it's the idea of sacrifice drives everything and certainly if there's truth to the idea behind Christ it's the idea he came to sacrifice and therefore the way forward is sacrifice and then all the truly great people almost all of them we would call great people, who we don't emulate, by the way. Nobody emulates Christ, mainly.

Starting point is 04:18:58 But also people like Gandhi or Mandela or people we admire, you know, who took the path. Tolstoy was one of the greatest pacifists in of world history, the way he wrote and thought. We don't really follow that lead. We kind of respect it. But we're in a completely different path. Yeah. On that note, yeah, I think it should, you know, every, out there should try to imitate, you know, sacrifice and be Christ-like. And yeah, I mean,

Starting point is 04:19:30 it's a fascinating model of human evolution is, you know, your upward path through natural selection is actually selflessness. And it's not, it's not the, it's not the Richard Dawkins' selfish gene. It's the selfless gene or something. Yeah, well, I mean, you think about it, human beings are at this point at the apex of, of the global domination on the basis of what's our conquering aspects, our animalistic side. And we have this other side we're aware of that's more charitable and sacrificial, but we have a choice whether to obey one or the other, and the way forward looks like its domination, looks like its control.

Starting point is 04:20:09 And in fact, I've always felt, but even more so as faith developed, that I don't look at world history as sort of Marxist-Leninism versus capitalism and all the rest of that at all anymore. I look at it as even people who are, whose life's committed and dedicated to making money is for control. It's all about control. And the opposite of what God gave us all was to let control go and allow us to explore creation on our terms.

Starting point is 04:20:40 And we spend human endeavors to enslave everybody again. That's it. That's an upshot. It's almost like that's my sermon on the Mount. Right. Well, that's a beautiful note to end on for Rothmore, Larsen. And thank you for taking the time and sharing your remarkable mystical experiences and indulging my UFO questions and for being here. I really appreciate you.

Starting point is 04:21:03 Thank you, Jesse. It's been a great, great session for me. I appreciate it. It's been an honor. All right.

American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - CIA Chief Breaks Silence on Time Travel Abilities

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