The Joe Rogan Experience - #308 - Steve Volk

Episode Date: January 7, 2013

Joe sits down with Steve Volk.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing my day, Joe Rogan Podcast, my night, all day. My man, thank you sir. Steve Voigt, thank you very much man. Hey, thank you for having me. Fringeology is your book and dude, when Matt Staggs, our publicist, requested you or uh suggested you i was so all over this because this is like so right in my wheelhouse of shit that i enjoy um bullshit and stuff that might not be bullshit you know and there's a lot of both going around right there's a lot of bullshit folks don't get

me wrong but it's not all bullshit there's. There's some weird shit out there in the world. And is that me? How dare I? I made a beep off my phone. But there's a lot of people that almost immediately discount anything fringe, whether it's psychics or whether it's – I've gotten angry people over the last couple of weeks, like angry emails and angry tweets because i suggested that something might be going on when you think about someone and the phone calls the phone rings and it's them and that people are like oh you're attaching that to it this is a person you think

about all day like sam harris had some very logical points and i agree with him absolutely for the most part but there are specific isolated instances where you feel something and then something happens, where you know someone's looking at you. Remember Sheldrake did a controlled study in which he had people list four people who were present in their lives, somebody who might in fact call them. And then for I forget how long a period. It was a week or two weeks, something like that. Um, they were supposed to, anytime the phone rang before they answered it, think of which of these four people it was. And, um, they thought of the correct person, uh, more at a rate higher than chance, significantly higher than chance. And I don't have all those, the, have all the numbers in my head right now, but it ended up being a statistically significant fact, right?

So instead of being right when it was one of those four people, one out of four times, they were right far more often. Wow, that's interesting. And, yeah. Well, is that because they knew that this one motherfucker just calls me all the time and he's money in the bank? I'm going to prove some psychics. What if one guy just fucking calls you all day?

Like I know it's Marty and you pick it up and it's Marty because Marty calls you all day. I suppose it could be. Could be. They had so many people involved in the study that it would seem to be what it was, a statistically significant effect. In writing a book though, do you start looking for fuckery in studies like that? Oh, of course. Because your purpose initially was kind of to disprove a lot of this stuff. Yeah, and I have to tell you, the chapter on telepathy in particular scared the hell out of me

because I had gotten so used to hearing the skeptical line, there's no evidence, there's no evidence, there's no evidence, that I really expected to find no evidence. Right. Yeah, and when I realized I was going to have to hang my ass out on the line and say, you know what, there's actually some evidence, it was scary. It was scary.

Was it scary because you thought, like, intellectually you'd be criticized and you'd be marginalized? Sure. I thought I'd be ostracized within the profession of journalism, you know, for saying this. But the fact is there's a really high-level debate going on between really smart people about the proper way to slice and dice these studies in terms of analyzing the statistics that are generated. And we can't at this point really be sure whether or not psi, as they put it, that's the whole field of telepathy, whether or not psi exists. But there's a lot of really strong evidence that would suggest it does.

And I mention this in my book. A couple of the leading skeptics, Chris French, Richard Wiseman, have both allowed that by the standards of any ordinary science, telepathy is proven, right? So if they were just judging kind of a pharmaceutical and looking at the same sorts of numbers that these guys are generating, they would say, OK, something's happening here, right? There's an effect. But because it's a, quote, extraordinary claim, we don't understand the physics of this, what the mechanism would be that would allow for telepathy. We need greater evidence.

Well, when you say that it's been proven, how so? Well, again, this is Wiseman in French who I'm quoting. But they would say something like the Gansfield test, if you're familiar with that. No, what is that? Okay, the Gansfield test, they'll have – there's many different ways to set it up, right? it up is you've got a person who is the, one of the test subjects has halved ping pong balls put over their eyes, right? They have white noise being pumped into their ears and they're put into a very comfortable chair where they're just sort of kind of suspended. So there's very, very little input into the system at that point.

And they're the receiver, right? And they're in a soundproof room, so they're getting no normal input whatsoever, but they're supposed to just kind of go within, right? Listen to themselves, what thoughts occur to them, and start reporting back on what it is that they're seeing in their mind's eye, hearing in their mind, that kind of thing. And in another room, the sender is actually, they're in a soundproof room too, locked away from the receiver. They're looking at some sort of stimulus.

They're looking at an image on a computer, perhaps, or photos in front of them, and they are trying to send that image to the person in the other room who they may or may not know, depending on the study. And then there are four target images that are then presented, usually in the best studies, then an impartial judge will look at a transcript of what the receiver said, right? And then they'll have four images in front of them, one of which was the target that the sender was actually trying to mentally send to the receiver. And you would expect that if the person with the ping-pong balls over their eyes got absolutely nothing, then the judge would select the correct image one out of four times.

But instead, you do enough trials, and the meta-analyses on these, when they crunch all the numbers from all the studies together, shows more like a 32% effect. Instead of being right one out of four times, they're right 32% of the time. And this, Wiseman and French would allow that these studies are generally well controlled enough that if this was an ordinary claim that was being presented, this is fine and we would accept this as evidence that something's up here, some kind of information transfer. The problem is, because we don't understand the physics of how this would work, they say we need greater evidence than this. need greater evidence than this. And they keep asking for greater and greater levels of scientific controls to be put on the studies and they keep just finding ways to kind of reject the result. I've never been skeptical of the potential for psychic phenomenon, but I've been very

skeptical about almost every story that I've ever heard. Unfortunately, I've met a lot of fakers. I've met a lot of fakers. I've met a lot of fake psychics. I've met a lot of crazy girls who want to tell you they're clairvoyant, and people who are channelers. There's so many loony tunes that are connected to it, but a 32% increase sounds to me

like probably what's real. It's that I think that human... Isn't that average, though? Wouldn't you think that would be about average if you were to do the same study without having somebody trying to, you know, just the person guessing? Yeah, but it's 25% without it. 25% to

32%. That's the idea. It's a small leap. It's a 7? Yeah. Whatever it is. It's a 30% jump. What's interesting in that 7%, I mean, if it's really statistically real, if the study hasn't been fucked with the um the idea is that it's just a little bit right it's just a little bit the idea is that there's this weak signal that we're not normally

picking up on especially look at the way we live now where we're constantly constantly being bombarded by information and input and just stimulus but when you shut all that out and you close your eyes and you don't have any sound that distracts you, what's there? Are you receiving any kind of accurate information? And I found the research really tantalizing. And I also, like I said, I found it scary because I thought, well, here I am now. I'm going to write that.

You know what? When they tell you there's no evidence, that's kind of bullshit, right? In fact, there is some evidence. And the question is whether or not it's risen to the level yet where we have to accept it. Right. Yeah, it's a fascinating possibility that I think is inevitable. I think it's inevitable either technologically or it's inevitable due to our own bodies advancing and changing and mutation. bodies advancing and changing and mutation. Because I feel like if you look at lower primates and they have a very rudimentary language,

they think that chimps repeat certain sounds and they might mean certain things, but it's nowhere near what we can do. I've got to assume that this isn't the end. This isn't the last version of the ape. If apes are going to continue to be successful, this model's not going to stick around forever. You could look at this one of two ways. One way, maybe we're evolving the ability. Another way, maybe we're

losing it. So, back in the day, when we were, you mentioned before the sense of being stared at. There's been some really good research on this. Again, one of the skeptics I mentioned, Richard Wiseman, did a study with a woman named Marilyn Schlitz where they collaborated and they did three separate studies trying to figure out whether or not somebody could sense that someone was staring at the back of their head.

And they had real nice controls on it. Wiseman was part of the experiment. Two out of the three times they did it, they got, again, a statistically significant effect where people were right far more often than chance would have suggested. And if you think of it in an evolutionary sense, which I do in the book, right, is that back in the day when we were being hunted all the time, right, when we didn't have the kinds of fortifications we have now against the angry packs of wolves that are out there and we would have needed to have this ability to know that

we're being stared at you know we would it would have helped us survive as a species yeah yeah it makes sense especially you know when you consider there's got to be like some pretty intense focus when a predator locks on you you know and that if there is some sort of a psychic bond out there between entities, like the feeling like this motherfucker is about to eat me. That's when it should freaking kick in, right? Yeah. I wonder if it does. You know, I wonder if they can feel it. You know, I think that there's probably a lot of senses that we lost in our separation from the natural world to here. Just intuitive senses. The Army has done some research on intuition, really, and who their most intuitive people

are. And these people are the ones that they'll sort of look at to notice when there's a hidden explosive device on the ground in Iraq. And they found that two groups in particular, I think there was a third, but there's two that I always remember, that are really good at this. Hunters and people from the inner city. Wow. So suburban milky people are fucking useless. Apparently.

I knew it. I knew that was the problem. Think about it from the point of view of the person in the inner city. They've got to be aware of their entire environment and the potential for danger, and they've got to get used to honoring that impulse that something's a little off here. I need to respect that, you know? In order to stay alive. Yeah, and so the people who are best at finding these hidden explosive devices

just can tell that something just feels off in this area, and then they start focusing in on what. Really? Well, I didn't know, first of all, that the Army actually used intuitive people to try to find bombs. Keep in mind, this is not about psychic ability, right? At least they're not talking about it in that context. The Army has done remote viewing research and all that stuff in the past, but this is

a very straightforward intuition. You can – somebody who can just very, very aware of their surroundings, very aware of what's around them and alert to something that just seems wrong in the environment. That's not necessarily psychic at all. But it's real and it – but it harkens back to that a little bit. That idea. What kind of is psychic though? The idea that you can just have some spidey sense.

Well I think that they're towing the line. I think they're towing the line. They're right up on that line where spidey sense and talk of spidey sense is right where we should be. But the language they're using is clearly very, you know, hardcore. This is something that I've always wanted to ask someone like you.

Have police really used psychics to find victims or any of that stuff? Has any of that stuff ever really panned out? I've actually done a lot of police reporting in my past as well as, you know, this book. I mean, it's kind of generally, I read about cops, crime, courts, politics, that kind of thing. I've spent a lot of time with cops. And there's one homicide detective I know, who absolutely just, and he's actually a religious guy, which is sort of interesting. He hates psychics. They have, they have led him on so many or tried to lead him on so many wild goose chases.

They screw with him when he's in the middle of a tough homicide investigation. He's getting phone calls. Sometimes one of his higher-ups will be, maybe you ought to listen. Maybe you ought to hear this out. You know, he cannot stand them. But I recently met, and I've really got to follow up with this guy, and I haven't yet. But I met a retired homicide detective who told me he wanted to talk to me because he has worked with a psychic who gave him good, actionable information on multiple occasions. Really?

And I haven't had a chance to sit down with that guy yet and investigate it. I bet he was boning her. I bet he was boning her, trying to promote her business. I know how that works. That's what he was doing, man. He's an old guy. I'm not sure he's boning anybody. He's got to do what he's got to do. Chick's got a her business. I know how that works. That's what he was doing, man. He's an old guy. I'm not sure he's bowing to anybody. Hey, he's got to do what he's got to do.

Yeah. You know, chick's got a psychic business. It's tough to keep the lights on in this day and age. I've always wanted to know. I've heard a lot of people talk about it, but everybody that I've heard talk about it hasn't researched it. Everybody wants to say they've used psychics to find bodies. Have they? Have they really?

I don't know if they have. You know what, Joe, there's a couple of cases that are still sort of tantalizing out there that maybe something happened. You know, maybe they did get actual information. But for the most part, if you even watch the psychic investigators show, what's really sort of funny about it is that even when they're saying, you know, that this information was so valuable, usually if you're really paying attention, it's not actually the information that broke the case. It's information that after the fact seemed to fit. And so I'm still, you know, I'm still skeptical of everything, but I'm skeptical of the psychics helping detectives.

But I'm really open to it because, again, if there is this sort of weak signal out there, you know, that occasionally we pick up on, well, then maybe sometimes it provides actionable information. Do you remember the Psychic Friends Network? Yep. Do you remember that shit? Was it Dionne Warwick?

Dionne Warwick, yeah. Then Dionne Warwick got caught with weed at the airport. That's what made her psychic. Yeah, that's what was making her psychic. It wasn't these assholes she was working with. I think when you smoke pot, you get a little more psychic. There you go. I do.

Make that a quote. Go ahead. I agree. Use that to discredit me. Take it in context, though. I think you become super sensitive. And in that, like, you become very aware if people are creepy, very aware if people are angry, very aware of weird tension. You know, it makes you, like, really sensitive. It makes you really aware of bad acting, too. It's tough to get high and watch some bad

acting like whoa you're fucking faking it and that is sort of like what what acting really is is the best actors can lock into a role so deeply that they almost must believe it in themselves because they're convincing you even though you know it's daniel day lewis you know you know he's not really an irish boxer you believe it because he's he's tricked you he's he's bypassed all of your psychic energy but when you're high and you watch someone faking the funk just going through the you're like oh what are you doing up there like you see them acting it's this it's disgusting it'd be interesting to watch early and later de niro in that context yeah you're so right.

Is there ever a guy who's fallen so far from grace? It's so sad. Yeah. Meet the fuckers. Really? Yeah. Two, fuck you two, whatever the number two was. Little fuckers.

We fucked you again. Those little fuckers are bad. I mean, I'm not even saying that's a bad movie, but it's just like, that's Robert motherfucking De Niro, you know, and he's doing some new movie now with Alan Arnaldo, where they get in a fight with each other, or Alan Arkin, rather. It's just like, he was in that movie

where he played like a wizard and shit. Yeah. Let's see this one. Oh my God. What was the movie where Robert De Niro played like a wizard? A wizard. It was like a really bad,

like The Hobbit type movie. It looked so stupid. I was like, The Hobbit-type movie. It looked so stupid. I was like, Robert, what is going on? I guess after a while you're like, fuck it. I did my time. I did my Goodfellas. I did my Raging Bulls. I'm just from here on.

Cashing in and have some fun. Yeah. Think about what he did for Cape Fear and the way he bulked up. Oh, my God. He was fucking incredible. Put on weight for Raging Bull. I mean, you know, too much sacrifice. He's a taxi driver.

He's just a fucking tremendous actor. Just in his prime, in his youth, he was just unstoppable. The Deer Hunter, I mean, my God, that was a fucking movie. He did some incredible, incredible shit. But the stuff he's doing now. Poor Robert. Poor, poor Robert. Poor son of a bitch.

Sad. Sad to see, man. It's fucked. I'm sure he's feeling really sad right now getting that triple blow job. I bet he is. I bet he's not nearly as happy as he was during the Raging Bull days

when he was just creating something fucking magnificent. You know what the tiff he got into with Jay-Z? What? Robert De Niro got in a tiff with Jay-Z? Yeah. Jesus Christ, how is that possible? He was apparently trying to phone Jay-Z to talk about some sort of entertainment event that was going on,

and Jay-Z didn't call him back. And so De Niro, in public, kind of dressed him down for it. What? Yeah, and I thought that's a little much, you know? I wonder if that was his one problem. Jay-Z's kind of busy too, you know? If Bobby De Niro calls you, you call him back.

Well, how about maybe he didn't really know it was you? You know? If it's Bobby, Bobby De Niro. Or what if he got the Ho-Phone number or something and he never checked it?

Or what if Jay-Z went to see that Wizard movie and was like, what the fuck, Bobby De Niro? What you doing, son? He owe me 20 bucks. Or what if just hanging out with Robert De Niro was just uncomfortable for a pot smoker? Like if he just wanted to hang out all the time.

Like, God, fucking Robert De Niro's coming over. Yeah, what if he's too intense? And what if he's like studying you? Yeah. You know? And he wants to drink wine with you and stuff. As a character actor, he's studying you. Thinking if he could play you in a movie.

He starts rubbing your feet. And Bobby De Niro as Brian Redband. Redband in the future. That would be him. Robert De Niro as Redband in the future. It's you in like 50 years. And you still... You would probably do that role.

Yeah. You're still partying it up. Still talking like you're 12. But now up still talking like you're 12 but now it's creepy because you're like almost 60 and everybody's like what the fuck is he gonna grow up nope he's not growing up it's bobby de niro as red band in his 60s that's a good idea for a movie it is no it's. Somebody don't make that. So what subject did you get started with? What led you to just pursue the storyline in this book or the ideal one in this book of just chasing down all things fringe?

There were a couple things that motivated me. One of them was a family ghost story I grew up with as a kid where supposedly our house... These are my Red Band notes, by the way. I notice you're noticing this. I'm an avid listener to the show, and I know he might say totally random shit that will totally distract me. And if he does, I want to be able to take a note on where I was.

That's a good move. Good call. I brought a pen and paper. We should have that. Prepared for you, you fuck. We should have that for the guests. Yeah. Captain Flow Wrecker.

So I grew up with a ghost story, a ghost that was supposedly in my house. This stuff happened when I was five or six years old, so I have very fragmented memories of it. But it was a – it really sort of starts with the cliché. It was a thing that went bump in the night. Only it bumped. It thudded. It boomed. It happened only at night. It would go thing that went bump in the night. Only it bumped, it thudded, it boomed. It happened only at night.

It would go on for tens of minutes at a time. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere upstairs. So my parents on the first floor thought it was on the roof of the house. My brother and I on one side of the house thought it was on the roof over our heads. My sisters in their room who did not share an adjoining wall with us thought it was on the roof and or in there up high in the walls and at first that's what it was it was this noise but it was so loud it would wake everybody up and it would go on for a while and my parents hunted for prosaic

explanations didn't fit with like a water hammer or anything with the plumbing, didn't fit with the house settling because of how long it went on. Did you have an attic or was it just a roof? No attic. No attic. And my sister started reporting stranger things. It's really movie shit, right? They started reporting that their bed frames would shake in the middle of the night and

wake them up. They claimed that they saw a woman walk right through the room, you know, literally a ghost, right? My parents, and I find this really important, my parents set that aside and discounted it for a couple of reasons. It was coming from kids, and who would want to believe that that's true? I mean, I think one of the things the skeptics always do is say, you know, it's sort of wishful thinking and superstition,

that people hear a noise and they leap to ghost. But my family didn't. And so they spent nine months or a year trying to recreate the noise in various ways, trying to figure out what it was. And when my sisters would tell these crazy stories, it was just kind of like, number one, they didn't want to believe it. Who wants to believe your daughters are being terrorized at night, right? There's something going on in their room. But finally, and I was raised Catholic. We hadn't fallen out of the church yet. That was still coming. But my dad went to the family priest and he told him what was going on because he had run out of other answers. And the priest said, you know, usually in cases like this, which I always find that language interesting as well, because it implies he does this on a fairly regular basis. find that language interesting as well because it implies he does this on a fairly regular basis usually in cases like this i come over and i bless the house so he came over and i remember this

vividly because to have father crowley come into the uh come into the the house with the vestments on and swinging um like the incense around and praying in lat was intense, right, as a kid. I was like six. He was God himself, you know, standing up on that pulpit. And he comes into our house. He's swinging the incense around. And he leaves and he says to my dad, so long, Jerry. I'm sure everything will be fine.

But that night, actually, things got worse. The booming went on longer and louder than ever before, and for the first time, it seemed to locate in a specific spot. So instead of coming from this sort of amorphous area somewhere up on the roof, it hits at the top of the stairs, the landing, and then it came downstairs, like one step at a time. My father said it sounded like a kid throwing a tantrum. And when it hit the bottom floor, they could feel the floor shake under their feet, my parents,

and we never heard it again. And so I grow up with this story, and I think of it as, you know, for a long time, all the way through adolescence, it was just sort of a, I don't know, man, an article of faith. Like, I didn't even question it. It just was. But, you know, you get into college then, and start meeting other people and you start getting familiar with critical thinking. You're like, what the hell was that?

You know, what the hell was that? That's not – How old were you when this was going on? I was about six. And so whatever memories I have of it are very fragmentary. But I got to tell you, Joe, when I asked my parents about it for the book, and I actually interviewed them, I knew someday I was going to write about this, right? I interviewed them many years before I really settled on

this is the book I'm going to write. And I actually sat them down and I recorded it. And I will never forget, when they were describing that last night, when it came down the stairs, they turned white, they held hands across the table, they were still frightened just by the memory of it. So for them, whatever it was,

was tremendously real. And I wanted to explore that and see, well, could there have been anything strange there? Could they have possibly somehow, and my brothers and sisters too, could we all have somehow imagined all this? And so that was part of my inspiration for the book. What is your conclusion on that? Do you look back? I mean, I don't remember anything that happened when I was six that I can tell you reliably what really happened. I have, you know, just a few images. Sure.

Sure. And that's true of generally of people. I mean, it's very hard to trust childhood memories. I'm not sure I should trust my own memories of that event. That's another thing that sort of kind of disassociates me from it. It makes it hard to... Now? Yeah.

43. Yeah, when you look back at six, I mean, how much do you really... How much do you remember of six? I actually have a creepy amount of memories from my childhood. Yeah? But are they legit? Well, that's the question. I've got a bunch, too, but I don't know how legit they are. Piaget did this great psychologist, child psychologist, did a lot of studies on this. And one of the things he pointed out is in his own life, he had this very vivid memory of being kidnapped because he was told he was kidnapped.

And then years later, the person who was supposedly the witness to the kidnapping admitted that they made the story up. later, the person who was supposedly the witness to the kidnapping admitted that they made the story up. Whoa. And so he had this really shocking, vivid memory through his whole life. I forget at what point it was revealed to him. Oh, my God. And it wasn't true. So that's how much we can be deceived by these things.

And you asked the conclusion I came to, and I think it's a very healthy conclusion. The conclusion I came to is I don't know what the fuck happened. Right? And there's still mystery there. None of the normal prosaic explanations work for me, right? It was not a water hammer. It's not a rat. It was not.

No, it was not a rat making a noise that big. It was not a plumbing problem. You know, it was not the house settling. And I've had skeptics. Do you remember it being really loud? Really loud. Like really loud. Like someone slamming a door or something like that?

Yeah, at its loudest, like a sledgehammer getting weld on the roof. At its loudest. And so you go outside and there's no one on the roof. Yeah, funny story there. My parents, because I was so young, and I remember this. This one I know. This memory is true. I remember them taking me outside at night because

we were scared to show me show me that there were raccoons jumping on the roof because it was nighttime and this was the story they gave their little kid oh honey it's just raccoons jumping up and down on the roof and i was young enough that i was like okay raccoons sometimes jump up down on the roof well they do though i mean if, especially if they're fucking. You know, girls will fight back and you get some gangster shit going on. Gangster raccoons. Yeah. Yeah. Throwing down on your roof.

Yeah. Not enough of them. It was that loud. Too many nights. Yeah. And too many nights, man. I mean, tens of minutes at a time, raccoons are just bouncing up and down on the roof. Imagine if your roof was like the octagon for the ultimate fighting championship for

raccoons. While you're sleeping. That would be noise duke it out in the middle sure then you open the door and they just get ghosts they just climb up the trees and hide they're crafty those fucking raccoons i would have set up cameras everywhere i would have figured that shit out a long time ago though yeah i would i'd be doing everything in 1975 for me in 1975 we weren't walking around with these hd cameras yeah vision i'd get courtroom sketch artists and just put them on every corner of the house In 1975, we weren't walking around with these HD cameras with night vision. Why does that happen?

I'd get courtroom sketch artists and just put them on every corner of the house. Courtroom sketch artists. Isn't that the dumbest thing ever that they still have to use someone to sketch what's happening? You can't take a picture? It's the beauty of it. What does that mean? It's like we're not supposed to be able to see inside the sacred courtroom where the decisions are being rendered. So instead, here's an artist's depiction of the action.

What the fuck are you showing me drawings for? You can show it to me or you can't. Is that a real guy at a table? That's what he looks like? That's the drawing? Represents what he looks like, right? Show me a fucking picture, stupid. What kind of game are we playing? A flash would be distracting.

Is that what it is? How about no flashes? It seems pretty easy to just do no flashes, you know? Sh just do no flashes you know shutter clicks even weirder someone's fucking staring at you and drawing you that's even weirder man imagine you know you're talking about your your experience and trying to tell the truth the whole truth and some fucking weirdos eyeballing you and drawing your face that's got to be a little mind fuck yeah it would be probably affects decision-making skills when you're in court. Actually, it's fucking true.

The cameras are a lot easier to handle than if somebody was sitting here drawing. Yeah. Some asshole using outdated technology. He could be taking license with my image, too. Yeah, he got there on a horse. All his books are written in script. We have courtroom sketch room artists for that show that I do. They draw during the whole live podcast,

the secret show thing. That's hilarious. See, like here's Ari. That's a good idea. Then we sell it and the artist gets all the money. That's a good idea. That's a way better idea than using it in court. See, we found a new use for those people.

We don't have to do that anymore. As the years went on and I would do that anymore. I love this too, though. So as the years went on and I would share that story, I stopped sharing it, right, because I was starting to run into more and more people who were totally adamantly opposed. Not only opposed to the idea of ghosts. I'm pretty suspicious about the idea of ghosts, right? They were adamantly opposed to the idea that there was even a mystery there. And so that's kind of what I hold out for in the book, that sometimes we just need to be able to admit, I just say the words, I don't know what happened.

People want to rush to some kind of conclusion, whether they have enough evidence or data or not. And I ran into people over the years who would insist it had to be a water hammer, even though it doesn't fit the story at all. What is a water hammer? That's when the water goes dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, like it has that crazy noise that it makes. When I used to live in an apartment building, you heard that a lot.

Yeah. Sudden flow of water stops and then you get that sound because the energy the water built up is converted to acoustic energy because it's got to go somewhere. Oh, that's what it is. Yeah. And it doesn't last that long and it doesn't make that kind of noise, and it doesn't sound like it's coming from your roof or last tens of minutes, and it certainly never locates on the steps.

But this is all when you were six. Yeah, so in the end, you kind of have to trust, or not, right? That's the question you're left with. Do I trust my mother and father's account, my sister's account, my brother's account? And, you know, on some level I do, but can I really buy into the idea that they're a ghost? I mean, so one of the things I explored, and I found this really interesting. I mean, there are people out there working with sort of other technologies to determine if maybe there's an abundance of electromagnetic energy in the air in certain areas. Then it works with your temporal lobe.

Earthquake? Then you have... Drilling? I mean, where was this at? It was in Pittsburgh. Maybe. And not a lot of fault lines, I don't think, there. Although there is occasional...

There was that one in Ohio that they just found out that we're making the earthquakes. It happens some. It happens some. And a guy working with infrasound, I mean, Vic Tandy did research on infrasound. It's a level of sound beneath even the range of human hearing, but it actually has an effect. It can create a sense of pressure and an easiness in your chest.

It actually can even impact sort of the eyeball, the actual vibration in the air, and cause you to see cloudy shapes when there aren't any. I don't think any of those can necessarily explain whatever happened in my house either. But what I like about it is at least here somebody is thinking creatively and not thinking so poorly of their fellow human that they just, yeah, you heard a creaking floorboard and you jumped to a fucking ghost because you're that stupid and that's superstitious. These sorts of explanations, I think, grant people the proper dignity to be – that they're reporting things at least somewhat accurately, right?

Something really unusual was happening. It's a very unfortunate reality that we live in that I can't trust anybody to tell me like what really happened. So when a legitimate event – if a legitimate event occurs, it's immediately happened. Sure. So when a legitimate event, if a legitimate event occurs, it's immediately dismissed. If you really looked at how many strange things exist, both in the natural world and in just the world of space, just the world of dark matter and supernovas, all those things are way crazier than ghosts okay a

ghost ain't shit compared to the sun you know what i mean the idea that we're living in a multiverse that there's an infinite number of us having this conversation right now the idea that life exists at all that you can see with eyeballs you know that is just as freaky as something that used to live but its essence in some form stays for some reason yeah i think the idea that this dimension that we live in is super concrete and you know just because you can hit it with a fucking bald fist and push it into a street and watch a car slam into it that you're dealing with real solid objects and that's all there is here i don't necessarily necessarily buy that. I don't believe in most of what I hear in terms of psychics and psychic readings and ghost stories. I think most of it's bullshit.

But I think it's very possible that something remains of you and that you're not just skin tissue and bone tissue and blood. More than me. Yeah. There might be something going on, and that something might leave your body and exist in some other state in almost an inaccessible environment. That parallels us. And that's not outside the realm of possibility. It sounds so woo-woo, but it's not. It's not because life itself.

woo, woo, but it's not. It's not because life itself, the whole idea that your body is just this big chemical reaction and electromagnetic impulses and all that's crazy. Neuroscientists can't yet answer the basic question of how consciousness is produced. So how we get from the physical stuff of the brain to non-physical subjective experience is a complete and total mystery, and yet it is the thing that really defines our lives,

our internal experience of the world. And there's no explanation for it. I like how scientists get to what part of the brain does what. Like this guy got an injury here, so that removes this part of the brain. That removes his ability to do this. He's got an injury here so well now we know that this this inhibits walking and this is where you know your eyesight is dealt with but what they can't figure out is where's the thinking person with morals and ethics and love where's he in

there is he just a crackling is he just the energy that makes all those cells fire? Where is she? Where is the girl who can enjoy the things that she enjoys and enjoy the food that she enjoys? Where is all that? And there's something else to consider too, Joe, is that, okay, so we get this damage to our brain and we'll lose certain faculties. Sometimes we only lose them for a certain time, right? Because of neuroplasticity, these things come back online. And where and or other parts of the brain simply pick up those functions. And this is easier to do when you're younger than when you're older. But the thing that fascinates me are people who will lose their memory for a certain time. And then those memories

begin to come back. And this is, again, a relatively common thing. How does that happen? Where were the memories stored? Where did they go when they were gone? It's a very good question. And it's one that happens when people get concussions. Concussions cause a great deal of short-term memory loss. I actually looked at this a little bit in the book. I mean, doctors will assess how severe a person's injury was by coming up with a degree of memory loss, like asking them, what's the last thing you remember before the injury? What's the first thing you remember after the injury? And the longer the blank period, the more hurt you are.

I looked at near-death experiences in the book, so that's one of the things that drew me in there because what's weird about these guys is that and girls is they oftentimes come back with a totally flowing memory of um an event that should have knocked their memory producing capabilities offline for a certain amount of time and and yet somehow didn't seem to um and i'm i'm okay with saying like like with a near-death experience i take a lot of flack, really, from both sides because believers will contact me and say they're upset that I won't come out and say that, you know, the near-death experience is smoking gun evidence that there's an afterlife.

You know, I don't think it is smoking gun evidence that there's an afterlife, but I also don't think it's yet been explained. And, again, we end up back in this place where everybody wants to act like they know everything. Everybody wants to push everything to a conclusion. I think the most rational thing to say is we don't fully understand that experience yet. The near-death experience, it has to be related to what your own brain can produce as far as psychedelic chemicals. It has to be.

Your own brain produces the most potent psychedelic drug known to man. And why wouldn't it produce that shit if you were going to die? If you're in high stress periods, if you're freaking, if this is the end, your body thinks, this is it, we're going to die, and then it comes back. You know, you very likely could have come back from a psychedelic trip as well. Let me tell you, I'm just going to cut straight to the chase, the best evidence that the NDE has to provide. This is the best.

Janice Minor Holden, a researcher, did a study where she went through all the medical literature and all the research that's been done on NDEs so far, and she tabulated veridical perceptions, so accurate and true perceptions that people got while, quote, out of body. And what she came up with is that out of 38 cases in the medical literature where people were able to recount what was going on in the room when they were flatlined. Like see themselves above the table. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. Right. When they were in this sort of severe physical distress, 35 of them were accurate in every detail they reported.

Two of them had minor errors, the sort of errors I'd have, you know, if I was trying to describe what I had for breakfast today. You know what I mean? I might miss something. And then one person was just totally off the freaking reservation, right? One person was just totally wrong about everything. But 35 of them. What was funny about his or her?

You know what? I haven't read all the details of what they said, but it was, I mean, they were just awful on everything. They had no idea what machines were used. They had no idea how many people were in the room. So some people were incredibly accurate. Thirty-five of them were accurate. Out of how many folks? Thirty-eight.

Oh my god. In their entirety. quote, would have suppressed information that wasn't accurate because they were so blown away by what they were hearing that they went ahead and only recorded sort of the positive responses because the negative ones weren't making any impact with them, weren't landing with them. And the other thing they'll propose is that, well, maybe... That's a pretty serious accusation. Why would they say that?

Did they have the questions and everything's been recorded, of course? We'd have to go back through every last study to figure out what research materials they had in every case. But that's just one objection they lodged. The other objection they lodged is that, well, maybe they had some sort of anesthesia awareness. If the person was on anesthesia, sometimes you're still aware of what's going on in the room. So they'll lob that one in there too. Or they'll say that they'll call it perfusion of blood to the brain. Maybe they were getting cardiac massage, and that does supply a certain amount of blood

to your brain. So maybe some part of the brain was still operating and able to retain a certain amount of information. But these are possibilities. These are ideas that maybe explain it. But 35 out of 38? It's remarkable. And it's enough to push it into that area where you have to say, you know, maybe something is going on here.

I mean, do you ever feel in a psychedelic experience that you get accurate information? Something is going on here. I mean, do you ever feel in a psychedelic experience that you get accurate information, not just stuff that your mind is coming up with, but some sort of signal or contact with something that's, quote, real? Well, you believe that. Whether or not it's happening is the big debate. Right. You know, there's people that absolutely believe that they're in contact with entities,

and there's other people that believe that you're just accessing the the imagination and the mind is interfacing with distortion of its visual abilities in massive form and you're putting context to that and trying to make make like rational understanding of it one of my favorite stories in the book, when I was researching the near-death experience, I looked pretty deeply into the story of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the book on death and dying, which kind of galvanized the whole hospice movement and made end-of-life care in this country and really around the world a lot more humane. And she is one of the first people ever to encounter the near-death experience. And she did it before that phrase was even coined. the near-death experience. And she did it before that phrase was even coined. I mean, it was Raymond Mooney wrote the book in 1975. She, in the 60s, was running across patients in a hospital ward.

She was a psychologist who were telling these same kinds of stories. And what I find really, there's a couple layers to this I'm going to get to, but what's really fascinating is she wanted to reject this stuff at first, completely. Her research partner, the Reverend Walamu Amara, who's a really terrific dude. I loved interviewing this guy. He's still around. He was a reverend, and he had been appointed to sort of go along on the hospital wards with her. What she was doing was very controversial. Nobody talked to the terminally ill at that point.

They were sort of shunted off to the side. And so the fact that she was doing this was really angering a lot of the hospital staff. So the administration put this reverend with her as a way of saying, kind of giving her their blessing as a way of saying, she's not her alone, right? There's somebody with her. And I would imagine Amara was pretty formidable. So nobody wanted to fuck with her for Amara. But anyway, because I met the guy. He's awesome. But anyway, one of the early stories they encountered before they started even researching this experience, because they'd hear these stories and kind of blow them off because they didn't know what to

do with them. Finally, he's out near the elevators one day. A woman goes into cardiac arrest. She's resuscitated right there in the hall. They went to work on her. They resuscitated her. He goes to see her later, and she starts describing the scene of what happened exactly. And she even describes that she was able, and this stuff sounds ridiculous, right, but she was able to float in at one point behind a resident who was taking notes. Because one of the things they did with, you know, if you've got an inexperienced doctor on the scene like that, and there's an emergency thing going on,

they generally just tell them to just take notes on what's going on. It's a way of giving them something to do and keeping them out of the way of the people who really know what he's done right now. And she was able to describe what he had previously doodled on the notepad that he was now taking notes on her resuscitation on. Now, Reverend Amara completely rejects this, right? He hears this and he thinks, I'm going to prove you wrong, because this doesn't fit his dogma. This is not what's supposed to happen when somebody dies. So he goes and he finds the med student, and he looks at the page of doodles, you know, or the page of notes, and it has some doodles on it, and the doodles match with what she described.

He asked the student if he never interfaced with this patient at all. They hadn't. And he asked the patient if they ever interfaced with the student. She hadn't. What we're left with now is we can say that Reverend Waluamara is lying, and I will never fucking say that because he wasn't. Or we have a genuine mystery here, and that's where I land or we have a genuine mystery here and that's where i land there's a genuine mystery here so where can one read about this is there obviously my book this

it's completely in your book oh yeah the story is it recorded anywhere else um you know intriguingly um kubler ross herself wrote about it not i don think, in as great a detail as I ended up doing it through Amara. You know, because she had, so what happens is they have this event happen. They're really shaken by it. But they also are noticing that the patients who are reporting these experiences are changing. They are no longer afraid to die. I mean, you've got to imagine the anxiety that you would confront a terminal diagnosis with. These people start losing that anxiety and start wanting to talk to her about, you know what,

I want to clean up my relationships before I go. They start talking about living hard in the time they have left rather than trembling at the fact that they're going to pass on. It's a huge dramatic effect. And that's when they decided to start taking notes. Like this whole idea that the near-death experience is merely wishful thinking is bullshit. And it's at least bullshit in her experience and Amara's experience of it. They rejected it until they really couldn't reject it anymore because here they are researching what happens when you're terminally ill. And one of the things that was coming up in dozens of cases were people who were losing their fear because of this event. And that's how they ended up justifying doing any research on it at all. So when she wrote her book, she had a lot of different stories to tell.

I don't think she hit that story as hard as she should have. Wow. The near-death experience being created or being facilitated, maybe is a better word, by a psychedelic experience, by the brain producing chemicals, it doesn't mean that there isn't something still going on. It might mean that that's a chemical gateway to whatever is going on and that's how the brain releases this stuff and it interfaces with whatever the fuck it does when you have these trips.

There's a researcher, are you familiar with, I remember their last name fuck it does when you have these trips. There's a researcher, are you familiar with, I remember their last name, it's a Carhartt Harris. No. He did a study on, well, mushrooms, the active ingredient in mushrooms with psilocybin. And he found that it seemed to suppress brain activity. The brain actually seemed less active, particularly the parts of the brain responsible for making connections and relaying information from one spot to another. What he thought was really interesting about that, and I would tend to agree with him, is that you would think at moments of heightened experience and heightened perception that we would see an excitement in the brain, right? Greater activity.

Well, here he was seeing diminished activity, less activity. And it calls me back anyway to the idea that a lot of what the brain does is filter our experience. A lot of our processing is unconscious. Information we're picking up from the environment all the time that doesn't rise into our awareness. Our brain is making the decision for us as to whether or not we need to be worried about that little noise behind us or the creaking the chair is making or whatever. We don't even register it necessarily consciously. And so the question becomes when you take this chemical, which I may or may not be interested in taking myself. I think you might be interested in it.

I think I might be. When you take this chemical, are you actually stopping the brain from filtering so much information? Are you actually accessing more of the raw data that's out there? Yeah, that's an interesting question. The thing about the mushroom experience is that the mushroom experience actually mirrors normal human neurochemistry. Part of what makes up a mushroom is dimethyltryptamine, the same stuff that your brain produces or your lungs and your liver. They know that the human body produces it, and it's been thought that the pineal gland a lot of people get very angry if you're not very specific about this because they it's just

anecdotal evidence that the pineal gland which is the third eye of eastern mysticism produces this whatever produces it whatever they find one day ultimately they believe it's the pineal gland but you gotta cut people's brains open within like a certain amount of time while they're dead and then extract it to see if it's like yeah it would have to be intense i think to find they're trying to find better ways to uh to measure but the most important thing is it's unquestionably produced in the body so the body is unquestionably producing this incredibly potent human neurotransmitter which is part of the ingredients of mushrooms. Psilocybin mushroom is something like 4-foxoriloxane NN dimethyltryptamine.

And I know I fucked up the first part, the way you say it, but it's NN dimethyltryptamine with something tagged on. And my point is that people that take mushrooms have the exact same sort of feeling when it comes to – without the near-death sort of connotation to it that they will die. But they have the feeling like they have to clean up relationships. They have the feeling like they want to live like right now with joy and happiness. It's a very religious experience for a lot of people and a lot of scholars actually believe it's the origin of religious experience. And you know about the death anxiety research going on there right now too, right?

Yes, I do. Yeah. It's fantastic. I mean this is the stuff – if I do a phringology too, which I intend to, I intend to look pretty deeply into – Deeply like you're saying you're going to take them? Yeah. You're going to have to. Yeah. I don't – Look, I do immersion journalism. I mean I debated like am I going to be coy or not, but like I do immersion journalism.

That's what I do. I get into what I'm reporting on as much as I can. I think psychedelic experiences are very, very helpful. They can certainly send you off a path into nutty land, but I think they're very helpful. And they're probably part of what's made us humans in the first place i mean every single religion has some sort of substance that they you know they talk about whether it's mana whether it's you know soma there's there's like so many of them throughout which are clearly some sort of psychedelic entheogen which they would take in

ritual form and it helped them i love the idea that it might have aided evolution in some way yeah that's yeah the terence mckenna stoned ape theory is a fascinating fascinating idea and it's you know it's really one of those who the fuck knows things it's tough to go back and try to figure out what the hell happened that turned us from you know some sort of monkey type creature an ape, a lower ape, to however it became a human being. I think in general we need to be willing to say who the fuck knows more often. Well, if you do mushrooms, you should say who the fuck knows all day.

Because if you do it, you're just going to go, how could I have known that that's there? How could you know? And that, DMT, is mushrooms times a million plus aliens. So it's impossible to even wrap a word around it. And all those things can change you just like a religious experience can change you. They can also freak you the fuck out and make you think you're haunted. Haunted?

Like afterward? You could lose. You could blow a fuse. It's possible for a lot of people. Just do too much. It's all about the situation you put yourself in. Well, do you find that – I mean I would take it with so much excitement at this point. Like just so much like –

You would. Let's do it. But you're not crazy. You're a successful author. You seem like a nice guy. If you're a nutty person and you ingestest that shit if you're barely hanging on to sanity i wouldn't i wouldn't recommend it what was this what um what was the most shocking find for you in uh the writing of this book what what what's the one thing that set you back and really made you go wow i might have started with the telepathy but but the other thing was meeting Ricky Sorrells in Stephenville, Texas.

He was one of the witnesses to what became known in UFO circles as the Stephenville Lights, this January 8th, I think, 2008 sighting. And Sorrells, so on January 8th, dozens of people, I like to say they had the misfortune of looking up because they faced a lot of heat after they reported what they saw. But it was some kind of series of lights in the sky that moved with such unity that it seemed to be one craft. Would have been very, very big. At one point it was actually trailed by F-16s that couldn't catch up to it. And these were the sorts of reports you were getting out of Stephenville at the time. And Ricky came forward to the newspaper and said that he had seen something many weeks before. I think it was shortly after Thanksgiving.

And it was a solo daytime sighting. And it was the wildest story of all the stories anyone ever told me, right? In relation to the book, this was probably the wildest. And part of it had to do with Ricky himself. He didn't want to tell me the story. I had to go through an intermediary who talked him into ultimately speaking to me. As far as I'm aware, he has not done another interview since. And we're now looking at three and a half years since I spoke to him. He made not a dime on this. If anything, he just faced a lot of ridicule locally in Stephenville at first, except, of course, from the people who had seen it or had a loved one see it.

So he has this sighting. He's out hunting, and this is one of the things that people use to sort of subtly undermine him in the same way that Monica Lewinsky was sort of framed for all of America by the fact that the dress that ended up with a semen stain came from The Gap. So now we know where she shops. She's this low-rent little girl. That's how people did her in. With Ricky, one of the things people like to report sort of demean him is that we call him a deer hunter. He's a father. He's a machinist. He's had his job for 15, 20 years. With Ricky, one of the things people like to report sort of demean him is that we call him a deer hunter, right? He's a father.

He's a machinist. He's had his job for 15, 20 years. I mean, he's a lot more than a deer hunter, but he was out hunting deer when this happened. Why did they think that that's somehow another – I think it located him as a hick. You know what I mean? He's in Stephenville, Texas, which is literally a cow town. You were talking before about the cowboy with kerosene games. These are cowboys.

These are people who are raising cattle right and um the cliche of of ufo sightings is that it's it's quote it's x who see them right uh one of the cliches anyway um ricky's out deer hunting and he trips over a branch and he doesn't fall down but he has to sort of steady himself. And he glances up, and he notices overhead now something. He ended up saying it was 300 feet over his head. He gauged this by the fact that there's a water tower in the community that is 300 feet high, and it seemed about the same height. He cannot see an edge to whatever it is that's floating above him. And it's not making any sound, but it is hanging over the trees.

And in it, there are this series of sort of inverted cones, which he intuitively suspected must be part of the propulsion system. So the narrow part is up further into the craft, and then it widens as it telescopes down, right? And so there's these series of inverted cones. And his first instinct, and I think people use this to sort of position him too, his first instinct was to put his gun on it, put his sight on it, right? Just instinct. What the fuck is that? I've got

to, you know, he points the gun at it and then quickly, within a second or two, realizes, you know, I'm not going to shoot at this thing. Whatever it is, I'm not going to shoot at it. And so he lowers his gun and I remember him telling me about this, that he just told himself, calm down. Remember as much of this as you can. Just look at it. Take it in. And then, poom.

I forget exactly how long he was looking at it, but for a little while, it just shot off. And it went so fast, he said, there's no word for this kind of speed. There's no word that can describe this kind of speed. It went from being blocking my entire field of vision because it was so big to just shooting up into the air like a lightning flash. And what was so convincing to you about his story? Well, here's what was, here was the convincing part. I mean I'm used to sitting across from people and having me – and having them tell me all kinds of information. And I have to look at various tales and just sort of see how I feel about them.

Are they telling the truth? Ricky just seemed utterly, completely truthful. He was getting nothing from them. That's the – obviously the skeptic's point of view, the cynic's going to come in and go, what if he was crazy? What if he was a good liar? You're basing your belief off this is the most shocking thing, an anecdotal story from a good liar.

Well, like I said, I would have started with the telepathy, actually, because I could look at that research myself and judge it. But, you know. But he freaked you out enough. He freaked me out in this sense, because here's the thing, Joe. To me, he's demonstrably not crazy. He's fully functional. He's still got the same job. He's still got the same job.

He's still got the same friends. Have you drunk? Did you go drinking with him? I actually met him for lunch and we did have a beer or two. Unless he's hammered. You don't know that dude. Unless you've seen him hammered, you don't know him. He's got a wife and kids and he's got a whole life.

And he's running that life. What's his name? The fucking Ted Haggard? The church guy who smokes meth and gets gay hookers? Look, that's what's so interesting to me about a story like that. What we're left with is the idea that what we have to say is, well, he must be crazy. Something must be off with him. What was it people saw several weeks later?

I mean, one of the things that interests me about that story is they were very near a military base. And again, this is all in the book. But one of the things that happened to him after he reported his sighting is he started getting calls from somebody who was identifying themselves as a member of the military who was advising him not to talk about this anymore and saying they wanted to meet with him. That was me. I was calling. I was just trying to get him to come on the podcast. It was Robert De Niro. It was De Niro rehearsing a new role.

I was rehearsing my role. the podcast it was robert it was de niro i was rehearsing my role in your role uh yeah you know i wish he just pulled out his phone took a picture of that would have been didn't have one motherfucker out there deer hunting without a phone actually you know a funny part about this one of the witnesses a constable um that's what they call their sheriff there um leroy gaten right had a camera nearby when he had his sighting. It was in his car and he was 10 feet from his car. And he had to make a choice. Do I take my eyes off this unbelievable sight and miss it? Or do I go grab the camera? And his choice was to stay rooted to the spot. And I think that that's another thing where I just sort of caution

the skeptics. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, what they saw in Stephenville is an unidentified flying object. And you end up with believers who hear that and say, we don't know what it was, therefore aliens. And that's ridiculous, right? But we also end up with skeptics who want to explain it away as flares. And you know what?

That's equally freaking ridiculous. It wasn't flares. I was with you until you said freaking and i'm like listen man we're grown adults here fucking thank you all right i'm with you you hurt brian i mean you know what man this is the first podcast i've been on where like swearing is just like cool really yeah every other one it's always don't swear maybe matt does on disinfo and i didn't realize it but the other ones they're clean you know if you listen to them they're clean oh god reporters we fucking swear our they're clean. And up to our reporters, we fucking

swear our asses off. You know what I mean? I swear all the fucking time. But I'm used to in this setting. That'd be cool if UFOs were Bigfoots. Instead of ships, they're just flying Bigfoots. Flying Bigfoots. I used to have a joke that if there was going to be UFOs, why would they

come in the form of a disk? If they can get here from another planet, they could make themselves look like a cloud. Yeah, right. Like that's something we've already figured out how to do with like those Japanese jackets that show you an image of what's behind you on you. Have you ever seen that? There are people who – Some new technology. There are people actually who do claim they come here as clouds.

I'm sure they do. Which I find, yeah. Oh, well, I have a problem. I have a friend who's got a problem, rather. I didn't know he was nutty. And we were in the improv one night, and he's like, check these out. And he starts showing me pictures of clouds. And I go, ah, it's beautiful.

He's on his iPhone showing me pictures of clouds. He goes, you know, they're out there all the time. They're following me all the time. Those fucking clouds. I go, what exactly are you saying? He goes, these are flying saucers. He goes, these are from another planet. He goes, they're out there. They're following all the time i go what is i go what exactly are you saying he goes these are flying saucers he goes these are from another planet because they're out there they're following all the time and i realized oh i thought this dude was just nutty i thought he was like a nutty comic yeah no no he's got something something's some a is connected to b and b is hanging down here

loose and sparking and we are smoking aliens jo. I totally met people who are so invested in this idea that they've been abducted or that they're visited by aliens. I met a guy who claimed to have an implant in his leg, and he didn't want it removed because the times that he's thought about it, he began to feel nauseous, and this made him think that the aliens don't want him to have it removed. And just this whole trip into lava land.

Crazy land. Because there's a lump under his skin, right? Right. And that could be glass that's been working its way up, you know what I mean, for decades. Or who knows what the fuck it is, right? Like some kind of growth. And so I definitely met people like that. I mean, I think that's one of the things that impressed me so much about ricky right is he's he didn't want to give the interview he hasn't done another interview since there's no

profit in it for him if anything he just faced embarrassment over this well i i wish a story was enough for me but i still will have an open mind i still have an open mind because even though i know that most people are full of shit, I still know that we can send a rover to Mars. If we can send a rover to Mars, if there was some sort of a civilization out there that wasn't just a thousand years advanced but millions of years advanced and perhaps they live in a solar system that doesn't get pelted by asteroids every couple hundred million years and wipes out everything on the planet.

And who knows what level of achievement they've had technologically. It's absolutely possible. One of the guys I write about in the book, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, NASA astronaut, his family in 100 years, if you sort of trace his bloodline, they moved west in horse-drawn wagons and then he was on the moon a hundred years later that that's technology advancing from horse-drawn wagons to the moon and um well he's a big ufo believer he's actually said that he saw some things when he was uh in space no he well no no not in relation to ufos all. He maintains that he saw nothing

in terms of UFOs when he was in space. Wow. Edgar Mitchell, why do I think that? He does believe in UFOs. He says he's talked to members of the military since he was short and that UFOs should be identified as alien craft in some cases, right? That we are being visited. But what happened in space was completely different. It was a religious or a spiritual, I'll say, spiritual experience. He had an epiphany where he had the same sort of experience that people report in meditation when they hit this kind of bliss or sometimes on psychedelics where it was like everything dropped away and he felt himself being at one with the entire universe, that everything was, you know, he rejected his parents' religion. He'd gone completely down the science path and it completely altered his

perspective and made him think that there's some way of uniting spirituality and science. He, he landed and started the Institute of Noetic Sciences to try and find some sort of connection between spiritual experiences and some scientific basis for them. Yeah, what Edgar Mitchell's deal is with aliens, rather, is that he has talked to quite a few people that were high-knowing people in Joint Chiefs of Staff, intelligence committees-type characters, and they told him there was a UFO crash,

that there was an alien spacecraft at Roswell, and that it's pretty fascinating stuff. Listening to him, reading, rather, this thing, and he had something to do with the disclosure project with dr stephen greer who one day we would like to get him on this podcast as well because he's another very highly credible person and uh his disclosure project included a lot of very high level former military people who talked about their experiences and they think that it's high time that we start being honest about what these people in high levels of the military have already experienced know about it and the fact that there's there's probably a high level of probability that uh we are consistently visited by some freaky dudes from another part of the world or another dimension or but they just can slip in

and out like that and we don't really know what the fuck is going on well that whole the you know when one of the arguments you get from the skeptics is that our planet um is you know one among so many how would they find us what kind of propulsion system could possibly carry them here um and they're basing this all off on what we know right now with our technology and our understanding at the moment. But as you said, like, if you've got a civilization that's been around for thousands or potentially even a million or more years, who the fuck knows what they could have? It's a silly sort of argument to me because it's based so much on this idea

that this is as advanced as we're ever going to get. Well, I always point out to the fact that 200 years ago when you wanted a picture of something, you had to draw it. If you wanted to get around, you had to ride a fucking animal. It was the dumbest time ever. You had to draw. 200 years ago, you had to draw things to let anybody else know what they looked like. And we're still doing that in the courtroom.

What the fuck? What the fuck? But it's really incredible if you stop and look at that, that we've gone from that in 200 years to making high-res videos with your cell phones, watching streaming videos, playing video games on a tablet. I mean, just that leap,

no one saw coming before photographs. No one would have imagined that this tiny blip in human time of 200 years could have that much innovation. You know, the only time I really get sad about dying now is when I think about the shit I'm going to miss. You know, the advances that are coming up.

Like, I'd like to experience that stuff. Like privacy. You're going to miss privacy. That shit's out the window, son. Yeah, that's the first thing that's going to go, I think. I think there really will be no privacy in about 100 years. In 100 years, I think everyone's going to know each other. It probably won't even take that long.

Don't people seem strangely disinterested in privacy now too? I mean I can't get over how raw people are in terms of the information they share about themselves on Facebook. You lose a phone, you lose your diary. Like you could get all your family photos or people's phone numbers your past texts your emails i mean they're that person's just gained a huge part of your privacy by just losing a phone yeah if you don't have a fucking password on it's stupid most people don't well that that's true um if you're like a person who wants to like peer into someone's text messages but i think um that that access ultimately will one day just be universal.

Everybody will be able to find out anything that anybody is doing. People are walking around with apps now that will automatically tweet where they are. Yeah, that's crazy. Geotagging. It's great if you want to stalk them though. If you really want to stalk somebody and they're geotagging all over the fucking place, you can narrow it down pretty good. Yeah, people are weird, man. The whole connection hasn't been figured out yet.

This whole connection between every human being on the planet through the internet really hasn't really been figured out yet. I thought you were going mystical with that for a second, this whole connection. Well, there's that as well. Because we're trying to figure that out too, right? Well, I think that, as we said, I don't think that the human body in this form is done. I think it's continuing to change and continuing to – a lot of people don't like to use the word evolve because real evolution involves mutation and adaptation to your natural surroundings and it might not just be that.

There might be a lot of things going on, a constant move towards improvement. Or we keep on losing senses. Are you familiar with the overview? Could be that. The overview? Overview effect. Are you familiar with that? No Could be that. The overview? Overview effect. Are you familiar with that? No, it's that.

So that's what Edgar Mitchell experienced, right? And he's very adamant about this, and it seems to be true. NASA allows that this happens now, that the people they send up into space are changed by the experience of seeing the Earth from space. It has a profound impact on them. And for Mitchell, it becomes a spiritual experience. For other people, it got them more involved in politics. They recognize how arbitrary the lines between countries are and the lines we draw culturally.

But they see just how fragile our little planet is hanging out there in space. And it changes them. fragile our little planet is hanging out there in space. And it changes them, and I think most of us would agree it's changing them for the better. They end up coming home and doing sort of more altruistic things with their lives. And now we're gonna have civilians being sent up into space, mostly wealthy civilians initially, because how much that ride's gonna cost, right, from Bigelow Aerospace or Virgin.

We're talking about $100,000, $150,000. I can't remember the price at this point, but I had researched it. And we're going to have general civilians getting shot up into space and having an experience of seeing the Earth from there. And it's going to begin to slowly change the culture, I would think, because if you look at how dramatically it changed the lives of all the people who've gone into space, it's going to change these people too, to some degree.

Yeah, Edgar Mitchell's take on it is very trippy, man. It's very trippy. When he was in the spacecraft coming home this is his word suddenly i realized that the molecules in my body were created in an ancient generation of stars and suddenly that became personal and visceral not intellectual and i had never had this experience it was accompanied by bliss and ecstasy i had never experienced. So he's calling it, it's calling it samadhi. I quote that in the book actually because it's a heavy quote. And he felt literally it was like his flesh dropped away.

His bones went away. Have you ever been to the Keck Observatory? No. The Keck Observatory in Hawaii is on the Big Island. And there's one island in Hawaii that's so big you get so high in the Big Island that you go through the clouds by Hilo yeah yeah well he loads just a city the Keck Observatory is it's I think it's on them it's on the Mauna Loa volcano which whatever one it is the biggest one and it's at there's a there's a like a visitor

station that's down at like 9 000 plus feet and then you go even higher they have the the telescopes there but you get out of the car and you're through the clouds and the way the big island is set up they have these diffused lights so that they don't create light pollution because of the observatory. So the fucking Milky Way was so stunning. It was so, that to this day, all I think about when we talk about going on vacation, it's like we've got to get back to that, I've got to see that again. I've just got to look up and see that again. Because it really did feel like you were flying through an impossibly filled galaxy. Whereas usually you see a few stars here and there,

up there with that high altitude and the really zero light pollution and clear skies. It was amazing. I studied lucid dreaming in Hilo on the Big Island. And one of the things I would do is, at night before I go to bed, I would lay out in the grass and just stare straight up because I'm in Philly, right?

Yeah. And you just don't get stars like that in Philadelphia. Yeah. Because there were really no lights. We were at this little retreat type center and it just, it set the scene real well to go upstairs and try and have a lucid dream. Yeah, I would imagine it would set the scene for freaking yourself out. I've never gotten over that image.

I mean, it was only a couple hours of just staring at the sky, but I couldn't believe how beautiful it looked. I've got to imagine it's probably 100 times more beautiful when you're in space orbiting the Earth. Have you seen those photos that they take when they're up there? It's like, oh, my God, you're orbiting the fucking planet. You're above it looking down at this the circular nature of it all and like it's something to consider there too

that's really interesting that fascinating about the overview effect you can show people these pictures and they don't have the reaction that you have from from being there of course you know yeah images never capture the the real emotion of the moment. You know, the connection of the moment when you're actually in space has got to be a real mindfuck.

It's like the connection of camping as opposed to actual camping. You know, most people go, why the fuck are you going camping?

What are you going to sleep in the woods, stupid? Don't you have a house? Yeah. But once you do it and you go, oh, I get it. This is crazy. You're out here in nature. This have a house but once you do it and you go oh i get it this is crazy like you're out here in nature i use a totally different feeling my wife is going to be really

glad that you're saying this because she wants me desperately to go tent camping with her and i and i my feeling always you know let's just get a cabin honey we'll walk out into the woods at night you know tell her you want to go deer hunting then you you can camp out. Make some sort of an agreement. We're back to De Niro. One shot. Yeah, De Niro's ridiculous. You've got to shoot him twice sometimes. You've got to execute him.

Trust me. Yeah, the thing that's weird about camping is that when you're away from electricity and a house and all that shit for long enough, you kind of get this real humble feeling like, oh, okay, I get this. We're just like another animal. We've just figured out some way to separate ourselves so we can do our work. We separate ourselves in our houses, and in there we create these computers and electrically hook things together and as long as we separate ourselves from the nature because we're out there in the nature you might get eaten you gotta go find some food yeah shit can go wrong yeah put

that purell on your hands bitch and go back to work so you get in your house and you're you know you hide from the connection with the outside world but when you're camping, it's inescapable. It's a weird feeling when you're out there for, I did it recently, five days with no cell phones, no electricity, no heat, no nothing. And we had to start a fire if we wanted to stay warm, and it was in Montana, it was freezing cold. But doing that, you really have a different sort of feeling

and appreciation for what nature actually is. Nature is, it's like, we're disconnected from one of the fucking coolest things ever for a human to experience. We're completely disconnected from it. There's a lot of people who live their whole lives in cities and in suburbs and they drive back and forth from work and they never get out there in the woods. I'll never forget a guy in college who went on this big, long tirade, and I thought he might be mentally unbalanced because he went on this big, long tirade.

It was in philosophy class, actually, too. I'm so sick of people talking about the outdoors and how the outdoors are so great. The outdoors suck. You get bit by bugs. You don't know what the fuck's going on. You don't know what's going to happen next. You get rained on. You're wet know what the fuck's going on. You don't know what's going to happen next. You get rained on. You're wet.

What the fuck's great about that? That was his take on the entire outdoors. He spent his entire life in a mall, I guess. That's the classic cynics approach, isn't it? Isn't it the classic cynics approach? The hipster, like, fucking everything sucks, man. That is our spoiled society's creation i have to tell you that's that's one of the biggest um pushbacks i've gotten on the from from that sort of crowd

on the book that like the whole idea that i was going to go study lucid dreaming and learn to meditate and and do all these things you know like why right like why would you put that kind of effort it was sort of just sort of like i i don't know i guess they feel so great in their skinny jeans that the idea of doing something to improve themselves further you know what i mean just seems like an admission of defeat right because they're supposed to be so cool right yeah exactly well that is that is the thing like why bother what are you doing out there with your stupid psychic bullshit it's not real it doesn't matter look at my jeans What if they have skinny jeans and they're sagging have you seen that that makes you fucking violent doesn't it?

Oh makes me want to throttle those little fucks. Oh, if you're so skinny that your skinny jeans are sagging There's a problem. They put this thing is they put them down low on purpose Like that's a move to have your skinny jeans kind of saggy Male cleave. Yeah a little bit. It's like you're just letting them know. Silly fucks. Yeah, that detachment thing is really disturbing. It's such a weak, fake sort of complacency. They're just terrified.

So they're just pretending to not give a fuck about anything. Don't care about anything. I'm a hipster. Well, I think there's a lot of that. Terrified, I think, is the operative word. And it's funny. I'm not going to be able to quote him exactly, but it was Martin Sheen. And that guy went through the shit, right?

I mean, look at the whole Apocalypse Now filming and that whole story, the whole arc he went through. The basic fact we need to understand about life is that it's terrifying. Yeah. You know, we are cauldrons of anxiety. understand about life is that it's terrifying. We are cauldrons of anxiety. We have a part of our brain, the amygdala, that whenever we're confronted by ambiguous information is immediately going to be like, check for danger.

Check for danger. And it sort of prohibits us from learning, growing, trying to find out new things if we give in to that. Yeah, I mean, we are animals and we have instincts to stay alive and those instincts are going to get fired up left and right all around especially if you're in a city and it's

constantly surrounded by people and packed into a place and i think your senses they they adapt your feelings and intuition sort of adapt to that environment that's why i really made sense when you were talking about people or hunters and people who were inner city people. Because when you're involved in an inner city situation, that's very primal. And you have to learn to slow it down. You have to learn that because there's so much happening around you, in a way, you kind of have to learn to slow it down to see what's important here. What do I really need to have my eye on? Because there's so many different things that could distract you.

Potentially fuck you up. Yeah. What other information or what other pieces of evidence about aliens have ever led you to believe conclusively one way or another that there is something out there? You know, that's another one where I conclusively believe that UFOs are unidentified flying objects, right? Right. And there are times when we just need to kind of – there are people who want to honor sort of like materialist science, and there are people who want to honor some sort of dogmatic religion. I want to honor that, like, gap in our knowledge to some degree, right, and just acknowledge that it's there.

And that's what we're working through. You know, we need more information, more data, not less. working through. We need more information, more data, not less. And so the UFO question, I mean, have we been visited? I'm not entirely sure. I mean, even that Stephenville sighting, I didn't get a chance to get into this, but that Stephenville sighting, there's a military base nearby. This guy claimed that he was harassed for weeks afterward by a member of the military. There's a story in the book about somebody showing up on his property and in the middle of the night making his dogs bark and just staring into his door and clearly wearing camo gear. And this was during the same period when he was getting these threatening phone calls from a guy who was identifying himself as

a member of the military. So is it possible that, you know, people are encountering at times some sort of advanced military technology? To me, no coincidence that people started reporting triangle-shaped UFOs shortly before the stealth bomber was ultimately revealed. So sometimes that's the explanation. But, you know, for me, simply the vastness of the universe, its age, the idea that we – the chances that we're the only, only planet that's evolved life like this seem so small that surely somebody out there has developed the kind of technology it would take to find us and get here. I mean, that's the kind of thinking that really opens me up to the possibility.

The numbers are just too crazy. A hundred billion stars with who knows how many planets, more than one per star in some of our binary systems. We don't know. That's just this galaxy i mean it's a joke yeah and there are enough of these cases where you know like greer's people the military people who come forward and say that something happened or whatever yeah enough of these people are are credible and and it's left in an unidentified category that you start to think

well you know maybe at some point some of these But so many people are full of shit and so many people have told lies that if you have any thoughts in your head that you're going to be able to tell people that you believe in UFOs and not have them ridicule you, good fucking luck. Good luck like being a serious person and being taken seriously. If we had Obama, if Obama was on TV and he started talking about UFOs and his experience and what he believes they are and that he

believes that we're being visited by intelligent beings from some other dimension or planet. He immediately is going to get, people will haul him off to crazy towns. Don't take him away! Look what happened to Dennis Kucinich when he told that story or sort of was dragged through that story during a debate. What was his story again?

What year did he run? He ran in recently. 2004? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had written – or I'm sorry, Shirley MacLaine, who I guess is like a great aunt or something to him, godmother. I can't remember the relationship. She had written a book.

Red flag. Well, she had written a book. She's in the family. came up with the relationship. She had written a book. Red flag. Well, she'd written a book. She'd written a book in which she claimed that he had seen a UFO. And Tim Russert asked him about it during a debate.

And people immediately, and this is, again, the language was UFO, not alien craft, but a UFO. People immediately burst into laughter. And you can hear it, you know, on the video. I write about this in the book, too. People immediately burst into laughter and you can hear it on the video. I write about this in the book too. People immediately start laughing and he starts saying, well, look, UFO. It's unidentified. And people are still sort of – now you hear people kind of gasping because instead of rejecting it out of hand, he's sort of trying to stick up for this.

Those are the press people that you root for to get killed by the aliens that were in that mars attacks movie they come down with the ray guns just start blasting them and killing them how undignified to be killed by cartoonish aliens that would be the perfect end it's the way to go yeah that movie that movie was fucking awesome that was that's one of my favorite all-time alien movies mars attacks it's much more likely how it's going to go down to these people that these knuckleheads think that the alien is going to come save us we're not saving chimps you know we're not going to the fucking the congo and giving them laptops you know then they're not they're not going to save us why would they save us get the fuck out of here edgar mitchell he knows he knows something he doesn't want to tell us. This guy, your guy, did he have drawings?

Did he ever... Sorrels? Yeah. Did he try to show you? He tried to take pictures later of another sighting he said he had using a cell phone camera. He had another sighting? Yeah. Same town? Same town, but at night.

And this is 2008. And it's a shitty fucking picture. What does it look like? Actually, it's a little bit of video, actually, too. I think he captured video. He stopped showing it because he realized it was embarrassingly bad. It's probably YouTube comments.

They got rude. Well, here's the issue. Like how good a picture is a cell phone camera going to take of a light in the sky? Not very fucking good. I mean think about how good of a picture is it to take of the moon. It looks like a tiny little dot. It's impossible to see with an iPhone. So that's another one of those sort of like misleading, you know, the red herrings thrown out there by the skeptics.

But we're all walking around with camera phones now. Yes, and those camera phones suck for the most part. They'd have a very hard time taking a picture of a light in a dark field, right? Did you look up Bigfoot? I did not. No Bigfoot research. I decided I was not going there. Maybe in book two after you take mushrooms, then you commune with Bigfoot.

Yeah, Bigfoot to me was not on the radar. Here's the thing. I was drawn to the idea that where the whole title of Fringology came from is these are subjects we push to the fringe. But if you look at near-death experiences, ghosts, UFOs, they speak to the big existential questions

that really plague us, the ones we don't have answers to. What happens when we die? Are we alone in the universe we don't have answers to. What happens when we die? Are we alone in the universe? What's it mean to be human? These sorts of questions. Bigfoot doesn't really get into that field. He's not something that's going to make me question the idea that there might be some undiscovered ape. It does not affect what happens when I die or whether or not we're alone in the universe. You say this.

Unless he got here on a fucking spaceship. See, you say this. But my friend called me up the other day. I swear to God, someone actually had a conversation with me about this the other day on the phone. He goes, do you think that Bigfoot could be like an interdimensional being? It comes up. People do throw that out there. But I didn't.

I decided to stay away. And I said, no, I don to stay away. And I said, no, I don't, I don't think that. I don't think that at all. Even after you said it, I refuse to think it,

you fuck. Who was that? I'm not telling you. It wasn't me. It wasn't you. It was not Brian Redman. Brian Redman could give a fuck about Bigfoot or UFOs. He is a silly boy,

but he's not a silly boy when it comes to ghosts and shit like that. My mom and my sister and my stepdad all say that their house is haunted. I've stayed at that house. I've screamed like ghosts are jerks, and that was the edited version. But I tried everything to see or hear this ghost that they all swear upon. Yeah, maybe they're haunted. Maybe their minds and their fucking dreams are haunted. Their life is haunted. Maybe their minds and their fucking dreams are haunted. That's right.

Their life is haunted. Maybe that. Maybe their life sucks a fat one so they manufacture ghosts to scare the shit out of them in the middle of the night. They hear it all the time too.

I went out with a ghost hunter for about, not dated, but went along with them for about nine months or a year. What? That seems like a long time.

That's part of the research for the book. Nine months for a year? How often did you do it? Oh, gosh. Once a month, off and on. That seems like a long time. That's part of the research for the book. Nine months for a year? How often did you do it? Oh, gosh. Once a month, probably, we went out. And then when he had, like, a, quote, hot case, I would go. There was one case I went out on, like, three, four nights in a couple-week time span.

And, look, there were times when the people didn't want to think anything was going on in their house and brought him in, hopefully, to debunk it. But there were a lot of times that people brought him in hoping that they had a ghost, excited about it, showing pictures of dust motes in the air and saying, look at these orbs. What are the orbs? Please explain to me what the orbs are. Usually they're dust motes, right?

It's just dust and stuff floating in the air near the camera lens. And so the light flashes off of that dust and creates this round image that's semi-transparent. You need to talk to Eddie Bravo because Eddie Bravo believes you manifest them with positive thinking. Oh. You know, it's fun. And you hold your hands out like he's got them gathered in his hands. What's going on there? Here's a test for Eddie Bravo. Get into a room as still as possible take some snaps right and and uh test

it you know be really really still in that room see if the amount of orbs seems to decrease uh the longer he stays there and i think what he'll find because i mean i know some people who did this is that they go the fuck away because you stopped stirring up the air you've now been really still for a while and you're and you're taking pictures because generally speaking i mean that's okay what about when you get them in outdoor shots you know there's bugs bugs i got you bitch bugs i got you bitch outdoor orbs remember those aliens that just happened to be the bugs you know oh well, that was a video artifact from filming those fucking cones, those rods, the Roswell rods, that whole thing. That's hilarious.

I bought that documentary. I was like, what are those things? This is crazy. I was like, maybe there's some part of the world where there's a bug that just flies really fast and looks really weird. I didn't even think it was that crazy. But then they're thinking they're travelers from another planet. That's why they're so fast.

They're always there. Yeah, but it turns out that it's just – and MonsterQuest broke this. It took MonsterQuest to debunk you. A show that never gets – they never haven't debunked shit. Except the rods. But the rods, they got you, bitch. It's just a video artifact of certain cameras that when they put a super high-speed camera on it, it didn't happen. They got the exact same area photographed. They lit a fire and bugs would fly around the fire.

And when the bugs would fly around the fire on one camera, they would come out like these rods because the camera couldn't compete with it. Or it couldn't rather pick up the image when it was moving too fast too close to it it didn't know what it was focusing on the front and the back you know digital imagery is kind of funky but on the high speed camera they got it loud and clear and it's like there it is stupid this fucking asshole dedicated like decades of his life to selling these dvds and telling everybody there's fucking rods flying around the air yeah i was trying to look for things that would help me answer the big questions if only for myself i got tired of like you know i don't want to listen to some right-wing dogmatic religious person tell me how it is i got tired of listening to richard dawkins telling me

that i'm just meat and i just thought you know what if if if it's knowable if it's observable that there's more to me than that, I should be able to find a way to experience this directly for myself and learn about it directly for myself. So I started looking into meditation and lucid dreaming and trying to find some way of experiencing myself in a sense disconnected from the meat, right? My problem with Dawkins is he doesn't seem happy i love it's not a great advertisement for it it's a terrible advertise he seems like a bitter old cunt yeah like i love the idea that he's standing up for science and he's standing up against religious ideology and brainwashing and he's but he's doing it in such an arrogant sort of aggressive way that it makes you go like you're kind of a bad spokesperson for the thing.

But I'm sure from the scientific community, like the encouragement is like so strong and profound and almost hero-like that it sort of encourages him to be this aggressive force of reason. I'm sure there's enough people like that that he gets the encouragement he needs. But Peter Higgs, the guy who first started us off looking for the Higgs boson, he recently even just came out and said that Dawkins is a fundamentalist. Well, he said he's embarrassing. He said that Dawkins' behavior against or about religion is embarrassing. Yeah, and he called him a fundamentalist. He said he's an atheist fundamentalist. And that's sort of the worst insult that you can level at an atheist because they are so – they're reacting to fundamentalism in their view. But if you adopt a point of view to that degree with that passion, if it walks like a fundamentalist and talks like a fundamentalist and quacks like a fucking fundamentalist, that's what it is. I guarantee you that if you could get Richard Dawkins to take place in at least one

mushroom trip, if not several, I think one, to find out what the fuck it is and then reset and revisit, go back in and sort of analyze what the fuck is happening, I bet he will have a completely different opinion as to the possibilities. Did you ever follow the god helmet?

That's that thing that they put on you and stimulated certain parts of your brain. Simulates the temporal lobe with electromagnetic energy makes religious experiences yeah yeah and on a lot of other kinds of experiences too i mean but but the thing is the atheist community that sort of fundamentalist materialist community came out and said this is an explanation for god and religious experience but people have all sorts of of strange experiences when they put that helmet on but guess who who didn't? Richard fucking Dawkins. And when they screened him before he put it on, because he wanted to take part in this, when they screened him and put him through sort of the questionnaire they put him through,

and I have not seen it, and so I'm not going to be able to describe this in great detail, but Persinger related this much of it to me. Persinger related this much of it to me. When they screened him, his temporal lobe was really, really inactive, right? It's not a normally active sort of temporal lobe, which is what they were trying to stimulate. So when he didn't have an experience, Persinger sort of dismissed it as saying, well, you know, this guy isn't built like the rest of us. And it's an intriguing thing to think

that is that part of what created his worldview, right? His atheistic worldview. Is that the case? Or is it just he rejects religion so strong that the area of his brain responsible for religion just gets shut down?

Totally. That's a great point because that's the other possibility, right? It could be if that's the source of all like unrealistic hope is in that area. You know what? Not even unrealistic hope, right? Maybe reality. The degree to which we feel if you pray or if you meditate and you feel like you're contacting something sort of outside yourself, this is the part of the brain that processes that information. Well, if you're never using that part of the brain, if you're never stimulating it, it will become less active. That's neuroplasticity in action.

That's just how it works. That totally makes sense. whatsoever the woo-woo part of your brain you know there's a big issue that i have with people that will say um that an experience whether it's an experience like edgar mitchell had or whether it's a psychedelic experience they'll say especially in terms of psychedelic experience to say that it's not real like it's you you had a hallucination but But the same effect, it has the same effect rather on you as a real experience. Like even if it's a hallucination, let's define a hallucination as you're seeing something that's not there. Even if it's that, from that, you benefit greatly. And you have a real thing is going on in your imagination or wherever it is

you really are receiving information you really are looking at yourself in the world in a totally different way it's actually happening so this event this experience whatever it is i mean we want to compartmentalize it because you're you're taking in some sort of a substance alien to the body that tricks the body into having this state and achieving this state and having this experience. But it's still an experience that you actually really have. Can we segue into lucid dreaming? Because I heard you mention that you were interested in it. And I really – maybe the most gratifying thing that's happened to me in writing the book is whenever I do a public appearance or a podcast with a big enough audience, I end up getting notes from people afterward that they had a lucid dream either after the interview or after they went and then read the book or whatever it is. And I love turning people on to it.

Are you a big – do you do this on a regular basis? I do it on a regular basis. Before we had our – my wife and I just had fraternal twin boys and they're're almost six months old so sleep has been hard to come by at home right but it's i'm so proud of this right before before they came along i was having a lucid dream every two or three weeks without even trying i mean just spontaneously because i'd trained at it long enough hard enough that i was having them every two or three weeks um since they were born, I actually recently, because they're starting to sleep a little bit now, I actually had a couple just in the last couple of weeks, and it's over three weeks, I had two.

And it's like, oh, great, it's coming back online. This function of Steve Volk is returning now that he's getting proper rest, you know, and it's pretty terrific. And one of the great things about it is that it changes your waking life as well as your dreaming life. I mean, it honestly wouldn't be worth the effort if you were only doing it to experience a change in your consciousness when you're dreaming. So lucid dreaming, for those that don't know, is the act of being aware you're dreaming while you're dreaming and then choosing accordingly, right? So think of it this way. One great way of introducing people to the idea is that –

are we going to talk about the pills? Take it four more hours right now while I'm saying this. One of the ways of introducing people to lucid dreaming to understand what it really is – and usually I'm asking this of like a crowded book reading or something. But I'll ask you guys here. Have any of you ever woken yourself up from a nightmare? Yes. Yeah.

You were this close to having a lucid dream because you were aware you were dreaming while you were dreaming. You were like, shit, this is a nightmare, right? I'm going to wake myself up. And you chose to wake yourself up. But the fact is since whatever was chasing you or whatever was happening that made it qualify as a nightmare had no external reality, you could have just walked away from it in your dream. You could have, because the laws of physics don't apply, flown away from it. You could have gone up to it and said, yo, what the fuck's up? Why are you chasing me?

You just completely control your dream. Well, no. You control you within your dream. And for some people, they find that they can begin to control other aspects of it and make things happen. I had one that was totally like I could stop time and rewind the tape and start it again. I had a dream that I was in a car accident and I got lucid. And I've actually already – I'm just really outing myself here. I always had a phobia about driving.

I do it. I've never enjoyed it, right? But lucid dreaming really helped me push past that. And one of the ways was I was having this recurring nightmare. This is not one that's in the book this is a bonus baby there's a different nightmare I dealt with in the book I had this recurring dream

that I would find myself outside the car but the car was but I was driving the car so there was like a me watching and then a me driving and I would wreck because I felt myself not in control of the car and so I finally had a lucid dream.

I got lucid and realized, oh, I'm in this freaking recurring dream. And I kept crashing the car from this distance. And I would just rewind it and try and get better control of it. But I kept trying to get better control of it from a distance. And so finally I just kind of zapped myself into the body that was driving the car, the me that was actually driving the car. It's like, well, shit, I just need to drive the car. I need to actually be behind the wheel, not in this disconnected way, but in this present way. I realized what the dream had been telling me. Now, how did you, you purposely got involved in

the idea of lucid dreaming for the book. Yeah. So how did you go about manifesting a lucid dream? Okay, so I started researching the main guy who has studied lucid dreaming and proved it was real and all this other things, Dr. Stephen LaBerge. Started reading his book and planning to go to Hawaii for his 10-day workshop. How convenient. He has a 10-day workshop in Hawaii.

It's pretty cool. I highly recommend it. It's pretty cool. I highly recommend it. It's a vacation. It's an incredible vacation. And it's a vacation that tapped me into a whole new wing of my life. And so it's the act of being aware of your dreaming while you're dreaming and choosing accordingly. And I realized once I read that that I had woken myself up from nightmares for years. And so it's like, okay, I have an opportunity to do something different here.

So there's different ways you can train for it. One of them is you take the time to remember, for instance, a recurring dream or the dream you had last night. I really recommend doing it with a recurring dream. You remember it, particularly a nightmare, because those are so vivid. You remember it. It's like a meditation. You meditate on it, and you choose the point in the dream where you wish you had become lucid, where you wish you had gained control. And so the dream in the book that I had worked with was a dream where this creepy fucking dude shows up outside my house,

and he's peeking in through the window. And eventually I ended up getting angry that he's trying to terrorize me. And I opened the door and we would fight, we would clash. And I would wake up literally at times punching the air just because I am going after this guy. So I decided to meditate on that dream and look for the spot within that dream where I could get lucid. And gosh, I'm not sure how long I, at this point, it's in the book, but it was probably a couple of weeks of work where maybe 10 minutes one day, five minutes the next, maybe the 15 minutes before I fell asleep one night. And finally the dream happened. And when the guy showed up in my uh my window i i realized shit this is i'm in this is

the dream i'm dreaming and to feel yourself like to feel this you don't realize until you've had a lucid dream but this you've there's a sense of disconnect between you and the person you and the dream right until you lose a dream and suddenly find yourself in this dream body, you're no longer watching it like a movie. You are in it. And it's like the fucking Matrix. It just, you get to be Neo. Suddenly, as I said before,

the laws of physics play no part. And most people find when they really begin, when they first have a lucid dream, there's this exhilarating sort of feeling flying and dream sex. Those are the first things that people usually do. Yeah, that's all anybody wants to do, fly and fuck. Yeah. They bang some honey or they take off.

They just let you know what is best in life. Conan was right. He was right. Everybody running around, oh, it's most important to have friends. Get the fuck out of here. What do you do when you're in your dream? Do you make some friends? No.

You fuck and you fly. I have found that when I – We're doomed. When I don't have a plan and a lucid dream, I spontaneously – the first thing I think to do – because you can plan activities. You can say I want to have a conversation with so-and-so. I've had a fair amount of deaths in my family. My mom is dead. My oldest brother is dead. A brother-in-law who's very much like a brother to me, was in the family since I was 12. We shared a room together. He's

dead. I had two friends die of cancer right around the time of the book, when I was working on the book. And I wanted to see my mother again. So I had a lucid dream in which I remembered that that's what I wanted. And I called out into the dream, show me my mother again. So I had a lucid dream in which, you know, I remembered that that's what I wanted. And I called out into the dream, show me my mother. Show me, you know, show me my brother. Show me my brother-in-law. And suddenly I was in kind of like a, when the dream started, I was in kind of like a mall. And I got lucid because Leonardo DiCaprio showed up and shoved me.

And I realized, that's fucking weird. Leonardo DiCaprio, oh, I'm in a dream, right? That's how I gained lucidity. And I remembered what it was that I wanted to be there for and so when I called out show me my mother it was like the mall disappeared and I was just in this black space and then my mom was there and this is years after she died I got to hug her and it felt every bit as real as really doing it. I could feel her warm, soft skin. I could feel the bones under the skin.

I could smell her shampoo that she used on her hair, that shit I had not even thought of. You know what I mean? Like there were memories of hugging my mother. It was just a beautiful, beautiful experience. And I called for my brother and my brother-in-law. They were there. We ended up doing like kind of a group hug.

It was really awesome. So what do you think is going on when you're having to lose a dream? I think you're dreaming, right? But what is that? What is allowing you to piece together this artificial reality? You know, they're not entirely, well, what's allowing you to dream or what's... Here's the thing. People think of being asleep as losing consciousness. The fact is what you lose is awareness. You're conscious because you're able to report what happened afterward, or at least most of us have some memory of our dreams.

Well, you're essentially entering into another dimension. So dreaming is what happens in the absence of external input, right? We're not getting any external input anymore. This is just our mind. Can we call that another dimension? The dimension of imagination, whatever the fuck that is, however it exists in, whatever theater it plays out in, it's going on somewhere. I mean whether it's just a bunch of shit firing inside your head that's not really real, at least inside your head, there's a whole fake world. Like, what is that? That's a trip. Well, that's the mystery of consciousness, right? That's the mystery of consciousness.

Where does this experience really come from? How could the neurons, this three-pound gelatinous mass secreting and emitting chemicals and electrical firings create this. And the truth of this is that we don't fucking know. And yet we're inundated with people telling us what we should consider important and telling us at this point, too, just drilling us with this kind of materialist paradigm that we are meat computers, that we have no free will, all this sort of, to me, just sort of, I don't buy that,

the no free will thing. And I think if they don't know how to explain it, how we have free will, it's because we don't know yet enough about the brain and consciousness. And I love Sam Harris. Sam Harris really turned me on

to meditation through reading his book. And I consider him like sort of among the new atheists. He is a breed apart. I love the interview you did with him because he admits that the paranormal's been unfairly stigmatized and all this sort of stuff. But he's one of the guys out there trumpeting

that we have no free will. And I'm really happy for the opportunity to talk about this because, you know, and he says rightly that dogmatic religion has an unhealthy effect on the psyche. And it certainly does for a lot of people. It has a healthy effect on people in society because, you know, they're fearful and they're judgmental of other people and all this sort of stuff. But when you tell people they have no free will, they are more likely to cheat. And this has been researched, right? When you expose people to the idea that they have no free will and then you give them an opportunity to cheat at something, they'll do it.

And if you tell people – what was the other one? Oh, they did – Is this games, anything? Or are you talking about romantic cheating? It was a test. It was an academic test Oh, they did it. Is this games, anything? Or are you talking about romantic? It was a test. It was an academic test. And they cheated on it. They would cheat on an academic test

because they were told they have no free will. So they were more likely to cheat. They were exposed to the idea that they most likely had no free will. Wow. And the control group who was not exposed to that information didn't cheat as much as the people who,

anywhere near as much as the people who had been exposed to the idea that we have no free will. And when you say that Sam Harris believes that we have no free will, we should kind of, it's a very comprehensive sort of a take on things that has to do with not just natural selection, but the human organism itself and all the reward systems that are put in place to motivate behavior, it's not like he believes that there's an architect that's guiding your life. No, no, no. I just want to let everybody else know. When you say you have no free will.

A lot of people equate that with a religious idea. Exactly. Right. A fundamental idea. You can't create that with a religious idea. Exactly. A fundamental idea. And he's looking at it completely the opposite.

From a scientific perspective, the idea is that you're motivated constantly by a series of factors that are beyond your control. Theoretically, if this is a completely just sort of a naturalistic material universe, if we could measure all the variables from the Big Bang until now, we could predict everything you're going to do your entire life, every choice you're going to make because it's all the result of the conditions that led up to it. Yeah, I had a crazy idea once of taking a computer that's so powerful that you could input in all of the data of everything in the state that it exists right now in the world, everything that exists in the world in the state that it exists right now in the world, everything that exists in the world in the state that it exists right now. And from that, you could extrapolate and go back through time and get a full detailed depiction of every single event that took place.

It sounds completely ridiculous right now, but I don't think that's ridiculous in the future. I think we're going to be able to get data from – I'm like whoever thought like a million years ago you'd be able to get ice samples and that that was going to tell you climate change from thousands and thousands of years. And that's how we know what the fuck was going on 6,000 years ago. You drill a gigantic chunk of ice and go, well, shit was different here. And look at it a foot higher. It's different here. Can I fucking take this back to lucid dreaming? Yeah, please. So

another way of, and this is the part that really gets beneficial for your daily life, the part that was most powerful for me in that sense. The other way you can train yourself to have a lucid dream, first of all, you have to ask yourself the question, how do you know when you're awake or when you're dreaming? Right. How do you know? What's different? And what LaBerge found and what everybody else subsequently has found is that there's this kind of state test you can do to see which state you're in. And the idea is to start doing it when you're awake. Do it all the time. It should probably come from some cue in the environment. If something odd happens where you just think, oh, that's strange, If something odd happens where you just think, oh, that's strange, lock into that, right?

And here's how you would do a state test. Print changes in a dream. If you look at it, something printed, and then look away and then look back, sometimes you have to do it a couple times, it will change. And the reason is because that print doesn't have any external reality. It's something that your mind is producing for you. So I had a print at one point. Usually I've just been able to figure out – I just kind of lock into it and get, okay, this is a dream. Like Leonardo DiCaprio pushed me.

What if he did push you and it was out in real life and all of a sudden you thought you had a dream so you started fucking random people? Steve Volk, what the fuck, man? I thought I was lucid dreaming. Well, this is why you might want to do a state test as well, right? Yes. And so you check print and you see if the print changed. And I had print change into just like symbols at one point. A book just changed into a series of incomprehensible symbols.

Digital clocks will really malfunction and machinery in general will malfunction because you flick that light switch over there and it's actually connected to the light bulbs. Um, but in a dream it's not fucking connected to anything. Right. Right. Right. You flick the light switch and maybe the light goes on the first time. Then when you turn it off, it doesn't go off because it's not actually connected to anything.

Yeah. I've had that happen in dreams for where I realized it was lucid because I couldn't turn the light switches on and off. I've had that. And so I realized, oh, this is a lucid dream like this is a dream and did you do anything with that um you know when I started taking nootropics I had much more success with lucid dreaming I found that my lucid dreams before were were so fragile they were like a bubble like a child's bubble you know and they blow with those things. But then once I started taking nootropics, they were like a fucking volleyball.

You know, it was like hard. You can kick it around. Like it was different. You couldn't pop it. I can't wait to take my Onnit. Yeah. Any nootropics, you know, obviously we sell Onnit products because they're the best that we can possibly sell. We sell the best that we can possibly sell.

We sell the best shit we can sell. But if you're not into it for whatever reason, if you're skeptical, there's a lot of ingredients. The ingredients are available online. Take any of those, whether in conjunction or individually. There's a lot of different companies that have them. I've always talked about NeuroOne, which is Bill Romanowski's stuff. It's all fascinating stuff. And you will have an increase in brain function.

So when you're doing a state test when you're awake, right, one of the other things you do is you look for the behavior, strange behavior in the people that are around you. That's my whole life, though. Yeah. Well, you're a comedian. I'm in a dream. And you'll find that initially when you first start trying to do state tests when you're awake, maybe the first day it feels really awkward. I'm in a day.

I found that my state tests were actually making me more aware and more mindful of everything that was going on around me all the time. And it seemed to have that effect of slowing my life down, making me more considerate of what's happening, making me more present to the person that I'm with. considerate of what's happening, making me more present to the person that I'm with. And suddenly, and I realized, right, when Sam or somebody says we have no free will, you know, a lot of times we are just on autopilot. We're just reacting. How often do you eat a meal and don't really taste it because you were busy and you were thinking about something else? When I started practicing lucid dreaming, it was really, it's a mindfulness practice. I mean, it harkens back to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. You're just more aware of what's going on all the time.

I saw a movie that gave me a great technique. I forget what it was. I think it was Through the Rabbit Hole or one of those, what the bleep movies, which are just overrun with fuckery. There's a lot of fuckery in those movies. However, even amongst fuckery, You can sometimes get some good things Get something you can use And one of them is, in one of the videos

A guy said, when you come to a doorway Knock on the door Knock on the side of the door and say, am I dreaming? And do that during your waking hours Do that and go, am I dreaming? And I did it I walked up to a door And I said, am I dreaming?

And there was nothing there. I went, oh, shit, I'm fucking dreaming. And then I went into the lucid dream. But it was amazing how quickly it shifted over from just this random sleep and dream state to just that one action of, am I dreaming? Holy fuck, I am dreaming. And then the conscious mind completely arose inside of the dream.

I didn't maintain it for very long. I've still never been able to maintain it for very long. I don't get laid at all in my dreams. It helps to have a plan. I get no pussy in my dreams. It helps to have a plan. So when you're thinking about, you will. You'll get there.

You think so? Yeah, you'll get there. I've never had that. I have fucking faith. You will get there. If anybody will, it, you'll get there. I've never had that. I have fucking faith. You will get there if anybody will. It's you. Maybe I jerk off too much. But if you have a plan before you go to sleep, if you've mentally rehearsed, just take 30 seconds to do it two or three times a day.

If I have a lucid dream, this is what I want to do. You will remember, like I did with my mom. I remembered. Because at first I was like, oh, shit, okay, I'm in this mall and what am I going to do? And I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. I came – tonight I had a mission. I want to see my mother. And so if you train for that, you will be able to –

What if you have nefarious intentions? Go for it. Really? Well, go for it but maybe not because here's what's interesting, right? There's no laws, right, you know in a dream right but you still have to deal with yourself in the morning and i know that sounds funny but like i had a chance in one of my very very early lucid dreams to bang this dream hottie it was great this is the first one lucid dream i had you tell me that you feel guilty when you woke up in the morning. I didn't even do it.

Because here's what happened. I ended up, so I climb up into this building and I gained lucidity. And there was this woman in the room and I said to her, and this happens a lot of times with dream characters. I said, I'm having a lucid dream. I'm dreaming. She said, no, you're not. And they won't, dream characters will invariably tell you, if you say to them, this is not a dream, they will invari dreaming. She says, no, you're not. And dream characters will invariably tell you,

if you say to them, this is not a dream, they will invariably say to you, no, it's not. And this is one of the weirdest, coolest parts of lucid dreaming because even LeBurge, right, eminent sort of scientist, just kind of shrugs his shoulders. Like somehow the dream world wants to maintain its status as real for you, right? so the dream characters will say this is not a dream yeah and so i said to her no i'll prove it to you it's a dream and so i i turned and it was like you know you're talking before about when you have a subjective experience you still had the experience

right so i know totally what it's like to be fucking x-man because i said i'm going to prove it to you and i turned and there were these big double doors like you know 30 feet away or something and i just went like this with a wave of my hand and the doors i said i'm going to close these doors from here i went like this with my hand and the door slammed shut and i was like holy shit it worked because it was like one of my first lucid dreams it was awesome and then i turned to her and i was like so now now I'm going to have you, right? And so I grabbed her and I went to kiss her

and then I remembered because at that point I was engaged to my wife, right? And I was like, oh, but, you know, I'm engaged and it felt so real. Again, her skin

or the smell of her, her, it just, I was really... This story just got really gay. I know. You got to fuck that ghost pussy. Yeah, man. Get that ghost pussy.

Sorry, fellas. Three buttholes. I am who I am. You're getting dream pussy. I am who I am. Well, you know got to fuck that ghost pussy. Yeah, man. Get that ghost pussy. Sorry, fellas. Three buttholes. I am who I am. You're getting dream pussy. I am who I am. Well, you know what? Maybe now. Even in your dreams, I want you to be faithful.

Can you do that? Wait, let me tell you something about my wife. I've got to get my wife's back on this because when I told her about it later, she's like, you could have done it. Oh. Did you immediately just fucking take some choline and go right back in? Well, I'll just say this. I've been doing other lucid dreaming since. So, lots of lucid dreaming. Oh, okay you immediately just fucking take some choline and go right back in? Well, I'll just say this. I've been doing other lucid dreaming since.

Oh, okay. Good cover. I've been experimenting with dark clouds. Wait, though. There's something to think about here because one of the guys in the workshop who attended the workshop before brought this up in Hawaii. He said he went to have sex with a dream character and the dream character refused him. And his first thought, and this is just awful, right? Was to commit dream rape, right? And so he was going to force himself on this dream character. And as he started to do it,

he realized this is not something he wanted because again, Joe, remember it feels real afterward. It feels as real as anything you've ever done. I mean, you sound like you're having these very fragile dreams to begin with. That happens. I mean, sometimes it takes a while to get it built up so that your lucid dreams feel at least as real, right, as this reality. Do you want to carry around the memory of raping somebody? No. Did I want to carry around the memory of cheating on my wife?

No. Well, he's got shitty dreams because in my dream, I'm a pimp. I just get pussy left and right. I'm beating it off with a stick. My problem is I wake up right before I put it in. I get alone. Oh, yeah, let's do this. Huh?

What? I'm awake? Fuck. Damn it. That's bad news. I mean, I have shot loads in my sleep, so I'm sure it's happened. I just haven't been lucid. I never get lucid sex.

But the girls are always nice to me. No one's ever angry at me. And I never have a lucid dream. And this bitch is like, you never get lucid. This is my dream. Why are you so mean to me in my dream? That's never happened, luckily. But yeah, I mean, I've never wanted to do anything creepy in my dreams either i've never wanted to do anything evil right but i have fought crime really i've

fought dragons and shit my dream in a lucid dream yeah yeah yeah okay my lucid dreams are really boring i'm like getting shit done like errands and like i remember yeah like it's pretty cool like knowing i've done a few lucid dreams before I always feel it's the level of your sleep Because it always seems to happen You're right, it's definitely the level of your sleep If you're fucking exhausted You're not going to really put out a good one But we should do an experiment with the show

We should all of us try We should try to have Someone who's going to come on again Like Ari All of us try to have a loser dream. Just force it and then see what kind of progress we can make. You're having them, but you're not trying to have them. I use a dreidel.

Number one, I'm flattered that you already know I won't be back. What? I said, number one, I'm already flattered that you know I won't be back. No, that's not what I meant. I mean, someone who's here all the time, like Ari. You live in Philadelphia, sir. I'm getting in the spirit of this. You can come back in again.

I'm getting in the spirit of this. That's not the spirit. Do you fucking with you. You live in Philadelphia, sir. I'm getting in the spirit of this. I'm getting in the spirit of this. That's not the spirit. Did it fuck with you a little bit? Brian, real quick. Honestly, so you've been in a lucid dream and have chosen to just carry out errands? He just gets raped. Yeah. Every way he goes outside, he gets tackled and raped by big giant women that look like

they're in R. Crumb comic books. You've never thought. Big giant thighs and giant asses. They just hold them down and they just or women like those chicks from boston and the fighter shove his face into their big meaty snatch big fucking roast beef snatch big gigantic rump roast big bullet wound snatch and they just shove it in his face and then so he doesn't leave the house much in his dreams right isn't that what you told me yeah sure i i fuck i i have sex with a lot of

ex-girlfriends in my dreams i noticed like i'll be like okay next come in come on in the room wouldn't that be beautiful elusive yeah yeah that'd be beautiful if you could just call it up like if you had like a girl that like you just were not compatible with but god damn you guys had some awesome sex like couldn't you just like like Honestly, you can though. Yeah? It's the thing. If you train at this long enough, I mean I was able to quote manifest my mom, right? I mean you could manifest Britney Spears or whoever it might be. Britney Spears? Not now.

I understand. Don't you know? I think that idea of being able to do that is fascinating and it's even more fascinating how few people pursue it. Well, yeah, this is one of the sad parts of Steven LaBerge's story is that he discovered this thing that you can really use to defeat nightmares. If you're one of those people who has night terrors where you wake up with like – you suffer from sleep paralysis or you have recurring nightmares or anxiety around an event, right? You know, you're going to be doing public speaking or something and maybe that's not your bag. You can rehearse, right, in the dream.

So he's discovered – and look, it's enriched my daily life. I mean today I was doing – I was just trying to train it again because now I'm finally getting some sleep. The boys are letting me sleep. And so I'm starting to do state tests again and stuff. And I just – look, man, it just locks – it locked me into my environment in such a cool way. I could suddenly really pick out the sound of the leaves blowing in the wind and the, you know, it was, uh, That's really interesting.

It was, it was fantastic. Do you detail how to do that in this? I do. Or how someone can do it if they want to follow it? Yep. Yep. And I use the, I use the rehearsing a dream scenario and I use the state tests. I get both those methods. And don't forget the door knock, folks, because that shit worked for me. Just say, am I in a dream?

Well, that's it. You have to do that during the day or the daytime also, though, don't you? Yeah, you just do that during the day. That would be so hilarious to see you walking around fucking knocking on doors and every time you do it, you go, am I dreaming? Okay, then I'll do it. Then I'll do it. I just go, if I have a dreidel dreidel then i'm dreaming there's no reason that's a good that's a good one as well and also dreidels pop up or chinese people right didn't you say asians appear in your dreams there's actually been really good research that um what we dream tends to be stuff we've been thinking about a lot in the last 24 to 48 hours so the whole principle of state

testing and asking that question is is this a dream, right? Or the way I always present, am I awake or am I dreaming? The whole point of that is that when you do that regularly, you're more likely to have that thought then arise while you are fucking dreaming. Yes.

When you're really dreaming. And it works. Yeah, that was the idea of the habit of knocking on the door. That you'll transfer that habit to your dreams. Yeah. The idea the idea of the habit of knocking on the door that you'll, they'll transfer that habit to your dreams. Yeah. The idea of dreams are so fucking fascinating. There's so little we know about what the fuck is really happening and what

kind of weird imaginary world you're creating inside your mind. And I love when people try to say, well, this means that, you know, the dragon represents, you know, like,

you don't know what the fuck is talk. I am in the Lord of the Rings and I'm fighting a dragon. It doesn't represent shit. It represents I like watching wacky movies. So I got high and watched Game of Thrones, took five alpha brains, went to sleep, and had a fucking dragon war. Sometimes the cigar really is just a fucking cigar. But there are definitely times when you can say to yourself, okay, why this content, right? Why these images? Why these sounds?

Is there some message for me here? Something my subconscious is gnawing on that I should be aware of and work with in some way? Well, I'm sure there's a lot of things that occur in a dream are things that you're fixated on and things that are constantly in your mind and that your imagination will turn them into a dragon or a witch or a demon or you know a vampire right you know or or a disease you know there's there's all sorts of things that you're terrified of in real life that you fixate on and much like the knocking on the door they just follow you in your dreams yep and it this gives you a chance to deal with them i mean if you approach something that's in a nightmare more like a friend, and that's weird to say, but LaBerge did this with this really ugly ogre that showed up in one of his dreams that he would always recoil from.

He decided to, well, confront it's the wrong word because it sounds adversarial, but he decided to approach it in a spirit of curiosity and compassion and figure out what's going on with it. And I can't remember what exactly he said to it, but he accepted it, right? He didn't recoil from it. And it actually, if I remember correctly, it became a part of him, right? The ogre became a part of him?

Yeah, it just kind of blended into him. And he took that as a sign of mr comedian take this on for size right dreams about integration there are things we deny about ourselves and about our experience and they come up in your dream because this is something you need to deal with and need to look at and so if you do accept it in that way you end up feeling more empowered because instead of rejecting this thing, you're – You're dealing with it in a dream.

You're accepting it. Yeah. Well, I always thought that was fascinating when people give the very good advice of sleep on it. If you have – if something is bothering you, sleep on it. Yeah. Because that – there is something that happens to you during the dream state where you have a better perspective in the morning. I don't know what it is but i i am a big proponent in sleeping on it i'm also a big permanent and jerking off before you make any decisions that's also very important i have to tell you man i had an experience writing the book with a lucid dream where you can't imagine the anxiety i had before

writing it it was my first book um i've been writing for years and years and years but like you know 5 000 word stories maybe a 7,000-word story. Now I'm going to have to write – This is a fucking legit book in hardcover form. I'm going to have to write 90,000 words in 10 weeks, and it was right before I was supposed to go get married. And so there was no fucking with that deadline, right? I was going to have to write this thing um and have a full good working draft of it done in a 10-week period and i was having all sorts of anxiety over it

and i ended up approaching a dream character in um a store and i said to them i i need help and she's like we need help with and i said well i'm i'm writing a book and she said to me with like the utmost sort of compassion and sincerity she said the book is already written and I had from that the feeling of you know there's just not well you you work on creative projects all the time there's nothing like having finished and knowing it's it's right and it's good. And I had that feeling just sort of flood into me when she said this. So real and so vividly that when I woke up, I started thinking about all the vagaries of how time works and all this sort of stuff. And then, you know, in a sense, the book is already written. I'm just going to live through the period of writing it.

And it just totally reframed the experience of writing that book for me. And in a strange sort of way, I mean, to say that I wrote the book in an altered state is a big, powerful statement. In a way I did. I never had less anxiety about writing anything in my life. I would wake up 7, 7.30 in the morning. I was completely on leave from work. I would get a cup of coffee. I'd be writing within 15 minutes of waking up. Instead of producing what my goal was, which is around 1,500 words a day, I was regularly writing 3,000, 5,000, 8,000. There were days I wrote over 10,000 words in one day. I would finish at 2.30 or 3.00. I would eclipse my fucking goal by miles.

I would finish at 2.30 or 3.00. I would go out and buy fresh my life, like rocking balls. It was awesome. And it was lucid dreaming that did that. And it was that experience of having that anxiety taken away from me in this really vivid, real way. That was really fascinating. It was awesome. I wonder if we could get people in on this.

I wonder if we could get people to just start trying to lucid dream. Is there resources online besides your book where you recommend people checking out? You can go to Stephen LaBerge's website. How do you say his name? LaBerge, L-A-B-E-R-G-E. And he has a website, Stephen LaBerge. Yeah, just search. I

can't remember what the address is for it. His book is really phenomenal. It's very scientific, but it's for the, you know, anybody can read it and pick it up. So, I mean, it's become the Bible for what they call themselves onironauts, for people who lucid dream regularly. I want to say something about my book, by the way. Yes. It is right now. It's backlisted, which means they're not completely ignoring it, but it's been out for a couple of years, so they're not pushing it. it. And one of the things they do with a backlisted book is they'll price it down to $1.99 on Kindle for a couple of weeks and jack up the sales figures, right? And so I asked them

in advance of the show, could you please leave it? Because they just did it recently. I was like, please leave it at $1.99 for the show. And they said, no. But I woke up this morning and Brian, I guess, has got up now. It's still $1.99. Please, I don't... So they fucked up. What's it supposed to be they fucked up but good because my my it's $9.99 normally but my feeling is let's just get it into people's hands and so right now let's all engage in an act of piracy Harper Collins fucked up get out there and get the book for a buck ninety nine I love it and I hope they look I hope they change their minds it's possible that the person I talked

to ended up running up the flagpole and decided, you know what? We should leave it at this price. I don't really know, but I know what they told me was an unequivocal no, but here it is, still $1.99. But he's found it also for $11. That's the hardcover. Oh, the hardcover. Yeah. Oh, OK.

Well, that's great, man. $1.99 is very reasonable, and I get all my books through – I have one of those. I have a Kindle, and I have a – I love it. The Nook, too. I love it. The – I have one of those. I have a Kindle and I have a – I love it. The Nook too, the Barnes & Noble version of it. Any book, any magazine, I suddenly feel the impulse to read. It's there on my tablet. It's fucking real.

Yeah. We live in strange times, man. The ability to get those – you get a book like that off of Wi-Fi and some of them even have 3G connections. It's like wacky fucking times for publishing. Yeah. So I think a lot of people are getting their books that way now, right? Do you know what the percentage of e-book to regular book is that you're selling? I know this book is outselling, from the time it was released,

it's way more electronic and more more than the general industry so when this first came out a year and a half two years ago or whatever it is it was I think they told me the figure was like 50 low 50% higher for electronic books this book was over 60% electronic books it's not sure what that says but well it's the the fringe subjects are really supported by the internet like internet websites and all the nuttiness. There's a bent spoon on the cover. Can people bend spoons with their brain?

You know, I wanted to get to the bottom of that. And as an immersion journalist, I actually was waking up in the morning and trying to bend a fucking spoon. Really? With my head. And I did it, I think, three days in a row where I think the first day I wanted to go 15 minutes. And I just started feeling so silly after seven or eight that I stopped. And then on day two, I think I did three or four minutes. On day three, I'm like staring at the spoon for like 45 seconds and I was like, I can't do this.

I cannot do this. Maybe if you're like one of those monks on a mountain, dude, you have to stare at that spoon for days and days and days. It goes like this. Just imperceptibly. I've had some people I respect tell me they think it's real and that I couldn't do it because I couldn't do it because I wasn't taking it. People you respect.

Didn't really believe in it. Why do you respect them? Because they can kick your ass? That's one reason to respect somebody. That's one reason to respect somebody. They have a lot of money. No, you know what? There were some parapsychologists I met along the way

who haven't stuck their neck out on this publicly because it's really fraught, man. I mean the guy who popularized it, Uri Geller, is, in my First Amendment protected opinion because he's very litigious, a magician. And so it's a very controversial subject. This is one of the places that James Randi kind of made his bones, the skeptic and the debunker, was going after Uri Geller. And so a lot of people just don't want to be publicly linked to this subject, even if they believe in it. Right. And so I met some people like that who have never publicly spoken about it, but they're doing incredible stuff in the world, and they claim that they were able to do it or they you know they were at a quote spoon bending party there's uh some people who throw spoon parties

fuck out of here i'm gonna have my spoon right up your ass ain't no spoon bending party you know what that's a really all those party i gotta say all those guys would pass on on the million dollar prize that he's offering you know i the million dollar prize is randy's million dollar prize that he's offering? You know, the million dollar prize is... Randy's million dollar prize is bullshit? I'm not into it. I mean, I think that it... You're not into his idea? Well, here's the thing.

The idea of the prize? The people who are doing credible parapsychology don't fit in to the way the prize works. So people like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake, and I remember when Sam was on here, he talked about Rupert and said that there's something very fishy about not going after the million. There's really not.

And I love Sam, but I just think that maybe he, again, we all come at this with a worldview, and he's probably a little more predisposed to be on the materialist side of things, right? But Sheldrake or Dean Radin or any of these guys, Daryl Bem, they're going to construct a study that requires dozens, if not a hundred subjects that will take an hour and a half for each individual session conducted over weeks, months, or a year

to get this Gansfeld effect at 32% versus 25% that we started this whole thing with. And James Randi needs an event that will take place with a very small sample size where you'll get like 10 bites at the apple, right, that we started this whole thing with. Right. And James Randi needs an event that will take place with a very small sample size where you'll get like 10 bites at the apple, basically, 10 chances to guess something or 12 in an afternoon or an evening. It is apples to oranges.

It is completely inapplicable to what credible parapsychologists are doing. So the idea that Rupert Sheldrake hasn't taken it up is not only not very fishy, it tells you that he has some fucking sense. So in order to get Randy's money, you have to do something like make the Empire State Building disappear. You have to do something.

Yeah, and you have to do it in a small – the big thing is you have to do it in a small sample size. I mean statistical significance is generated by sheer repetition, right? And so when you're – And Randy requires a small sample size to prove – He doesn't specifically require a small sample size, but whenever you look at any of the studies they're doing, they're doing stuff that takes, again, an afternoon or an evening and it's a kind of a public event. Right. And I – again, I mean there are some parapsychologists. I think his name is Dick Bierman,

who said he approached him and couldn't work anything out. Super Gertl approached him and couldn't work anything out. Daryl Bem apparently thought about it and realized that within these parameters, the kind of research he's doing, the kind of effect size he's trying to get, the time it would take him to generate that, just doesn't really fit

into what they're doing over there. Well, it seems to me that that statistical 32% is, that's a real number. The 7% difference is legit, right? I mean, it seems like that's something that has to kind of be looked at, no? It should be. I would agree with you. It should be. But I think that this sort of the professionals, and look, there are professional skeptics

like French and Wiseman, the guys I mentioned before, who will engage in a reasonable conversation about this. But then there are skeptics to me like the J-Roth, the James Rainey Educational Foundation, those guys who are just kind of rejecting it out of hand. But there's really something – there is something to look at here. There's something to wonder about. really something, there is something to look at here. There's something to wonder about. And I find that, you know, number one, a more accurate way of looking at it, which is great, right? And it's also a far more interesting world. Yeah, it's fascinating. That tiny percentage bump is really fascinating because it really,

you know, makes you go, maybe it is an emerging skill or maybe it is an emerging sense or, as you said before, a declining one because we don't use it in the natural world anymore. Yeah, and don't cultivate it at all. And look, it's a figure. When you look at that, like the Ganselt effect, 32 versus 25, whatever an individual study might show, right? an individual study might show, right? One of the things that's powerful about that figure, and it speaks to one of the things that skeptics do well, right, is they warn you away from those people who really are con artists. I mean, the idea of the super psychic, John Edwards, Sylvia Brown,

there is threadbare evidence for that. It's not something that I would put my name on and reputation on as saying there's something we really need to look at this, right? But the Gansfeld effect, there's so many studies, dozens and dozens of studies that go into these, what they call these meta-analyses when they crunch all the numbers together, that I will put my name on and say, you know, we should fucking look at that. And so it's not that the skeptics are all wrong or all wet, right? But they paint with far too broad a brush. And I think at the end of the day, my own guess and their motivation is the fact that that mechanism would be unexplained, the fact that that mechanism would suggest there is more to us than meat,

is not something I want to acknowledge. Because when you really look at these people, when you look at Randy, he's also a dogmatic atheist. The idea that we're more than meat starts to introduce the idea of a soul, right? Something that will transcend this bodily death and the idea that we have to worry about that to some degree and govern our behavior based on what we're going to become later or what we're going to have to deal with later potentially. And so I think that they're kind of keeping the barn door shut, right? They've taken on this tack in life that they're going to hold this shit down. that they're going to hold this shit down. The fringe ideas, the unexplained anything, a cult, what have you, all those things are just not to be given any power. But it's kind of unscientific to block out anything, isn't it?

Yes. The idea of science is to observe everything, even very infrequent but possibly real events. Yes. Yeah. So you're a fucking scientist, Steve Volk. science is to observe everything even very infrequent but possibly real events yes yeah yeah so you're a fucking scientist steve oak you're a scientist god damn it and the book is uh fringe ology and it sounds fucking awesome man um i'm i'm gonna get into this dude thank you very much for uh coming on the podcast thanks for getting the book and thanks for telling them to keep it at $1.99 which you you can get right now on Amazon.com.

I just want to say one more thing. I just want to say this. All the interviews I've done now, and I've done a ton of them, this was the biggest honor. And the reason is because I've been listening to this podcast for the last couple of years now, like a year and a half or more. And I find – so it's funny. I'm not sure how many guests you've had on in this position where this show has become part of the way I reinforce my own good habits. Like I find that it just keeps me motivated. It keeps me focused on – I think of this podcast ultimately, secretly, it's kind of

a cloak and dagger enterprise to get people to live their best possible life. And that's the function it performs for me. And so being on your show, totally fucking jacked to be here. Oh, well, thank you, brother. I really appreciate that, man. It means the world to me. And I really appreciate you coming on here to share your thoughts and have a cool conversation with us and enhance the podcast become a part of podcast history you dirty fucks all right ladies

and gentlemen we got a lot going on this week we got uh tomorrow we got bringing on adam hunter we got duncan trussell this week we got ari shafir. And this Friday I am at the Ice House in the big room at 8.30 and 10.30. Two shows this Friday at the Ice House. And there's also a show going on in the little room at the same time. Right? You don't have a show

going on over there? Okay. Well, Brian will be on my show too. Unless you've got something to do. Are you doing something? Next week Steve Rinello is coming back on the podcast as well as Jimmy Smith. We moved Jimmy to next week. Jimmy, who is the – he does what I do for Bellator. Very cool guy. We're going to have some – so all you people going, why don't you talk more MMA?

Stop all this queer ghost shit. Those people will be fulfilled next tuesday um so tomorrow is adam hunter and uh if you want to follow steve volk on twitter it's steve v-o-l-k and uh the book is fringe ology and it is available as we said right now on amazon.com you fuckheads and uh i say that with all love thank you to um thank you to kerosene games for uh sponsoring the podcast go pick up blade slinger it is available right now for two dollars and 99 cents how do you go wrong there you don't you fucks okay you don't go to on it.com o-n-n-i-t use the code name rogan and save 10 off any and all supplements all right anything more to say to the nice kids before we get out of here brian uh we're gonna be

at i'm gonna be at avn with uh sam tripoli and it's about to be announced uh later you're not supposed to tell anybody you're supposed you just fucking you just blew your own press release how dare you? That's how much he loves you, folks. He violated all of his confidentiality agreements and just went nutty. Well, I've been talking about doing a show in Vegas for the last week or month. But you weren't supposed to tell people about this one. I didn't tell you what it is yet.

You just fucking threw a goddamn monkey wrench. Sam Tripoli is about to announce it on tonight's naughty show, I think. Oh, well, there you go, you fucking beautiful humans. We'll see you guys tomorrow, maybe. I don't know what you're doing. I mean, you don't have to listen every time. I'm not needy or nothing. All right, see you.

Love you. Love the fuck out of all of you.