TrueLife - Kevin Holt - Alternative States of Consciousness

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

Today we talk with Kevin Holt, Author, Leader, & Explorer about life’s mysteries. As well as, the almost universal prevalence in human culture of some form of alternative state of consciousness. Throughout History, there have been mystics, shamen, saints, & occult figures who have been able to see the world around them in ways which were damn near original. Most cite alternative states of consciousness as the key to such insight. https://www.kevinholt.me/ https://linktr.ee/TrueLifepodcast

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry Born from the blaze The poem is Angels with Rifles The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini Check out the entire song at the end of the cast Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back

to the True Life podcast. We are here with Friend of the show, author, explore, Mr. Kevin Holt, how are you, my friend? Hey, good morning or a good afternoon for you, I guess. I'm well. So wait, wait, where in California right? Northern California, up in Sonoma here. We drove like 20 minutes from my wife's house and there's like a little wine tasting place. You get a couple glasses of wine, some cheese, 50, 60 bucks. You know, it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty awesome. It is pretty awesome. I still never been to California. The closest I got was Vegas, which we talked recently. I was flying through Vegas. to come back home here to Bali.

I have to be honest, I hated Vegas. I thought it was the most absurd place I've ever been to. Because if you think about it from high level, it's the desert. You've got all these giant lights, gaudy things in the middle of the desert. It's like 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. And so you're just stuck inside in the AC, so you're using even more power. And it's like all powered by the Hoover. We use, I guess there's solar power now, but it was the Hoover Dam powering all this.

stuff and it just seemed like insane the amount of power consumption and it just made this artificial city in the middle of the desert yeah like how talk about something that's unsustainable you know it's yeah and then the lake mead lake mead which is what the powers of hoover dam is like almost bone dry because we went to the uber dam and you could actually see the stone where the water used to be and it's all bleached white where so you can see the water slowly going down. And they're saying that if it doesn't rain enough in the next couple of years, there will be enough water in the lake to actually spin the turbines at the dam.

And then you're like, all right, well, what happens to Vegas then? Because all these people are going to just melt in the heat because you can feel power AC anymore. Yeah, it's game over for those guys, I think. It becomes the new gold rush or it follows the path of the 49ers, you know, it's just going to be this empty town. Like, how can you live out there without power? There's no way.

No. And then I realized the Hoover Dam doesn't power just Vegas. It powers like seven, like across seven states. I'm like, holy crap. This is not sustainable at all. You know what I wonder? Sometimes I wonder, like, if you look at the way in which we've dammed up the rivers and change the course, the way the water runs to the United States, like that has to change the environment throughout the United States. If the Colorado River continued to flow the way it did, then you would continue to have the ecosystems along that river. And once you dam it up, you fundamentally change the environment below the river, up the river. It seems like maybe that is what climate change is, at least a factor of climate change, is us damning and changing the rivers. Yeah. And this human concept or the desire we have to control our nature, which has brought a lot of boons,

but maybe we're altering the course of things in critical ways, as you mentioned. We can't know. Yeah. We're control freaks, I suppose. We are control freaks. What do you think that is about us? What is it about us that allows us to want to fundamentally change or be in control? Do you think it's the fact that we know we're going to die,

so we're trying to control the time that we have? Yeah, I think it's just fear. I think it's just a way to make sense of the world, and the little bits of a control you can exert over your world, make you feel more secure, I suppose. Okay, so that leads me to a really great question I want to ask you. This idea of us wanting to control stuff. Do you think that that's how we came up with like the idea of science?

Like I've been running this idea in my head lately. Like, you know, it seems to me that science is the glass spheres that held the heavenly bodies in ancient Greece. Science is the vehicle used by bankers to transport trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities. science to me is becoming this word that is just false. It seems to me that we are seeing that science isn't true. I don't know how to square that. The more that I think about science, the more that I think about a handful of people controlling knowledge

that may or may not be true. Yeah, that's a big can of worms. I don't know, science, I think, in my opinion, we have to sort of put a dividing line somewhere across the disciplines, right? So it seems like there is a science that is concerned with the study of physical things and really just measuring and observing things, more like concrete, I suppose, like world-based. And then there's this other science that's, for example, the social sciences. To what extent can you say a social science is a science?

Because a lot of times you're not measuring physical things. you're measuring like behavior or evolution of culture and things like that. So it's a little less tangible. I don't know. I think initially science was nothing more than that was like observation of the natural world and just us trying to get an understanding of this weird subjective reality that we appear to be living in. But then at some point it became culty, I suppose is the word, where people are willing to die on the cross of sun.

just as, and my headphones keep falling out, dying the cross of science just as they were on the Christian cross, you know. And I'm not sure when that split happened. It's been more, more prevalent recently because people have sort of lost, you know, faith in faith or in established religions and there's a void there. And then that void's been now filled with politics and and almost irrational belief in certain science. Yeah, that's a great point. You're right. There should be a dividing line between the soft sciences

and people that are actually practicing, observing, and then trying to quantify things. Sometimes I just wondered if we really have the ability to understand our environment and make up, and make decisions about what we see. Like, how can it not be subjective? How can we really quantify what it means to be, to have the human experience.

I think we're just trying so hard to do this stuff. We end up pigeonholing ourselves and making things worse sometimes. Yeah, I didn't know how far down this rabbit hole you want to go. But yeah, if we're going to put further into what physical science is, I mean, it's also belief-based because, I mean, a little background. I tried to major in physics when I was 19. and I love physics. I'm terrible at the math of physics,

but I love the theoretical conceptual part. And early on, I kind of realized we don't know anything because they kept revising their view of the world. And then you look at the things that we have to measure the worlds and they're always suggesting, or they're more and more suggesting that we don't know what the fundamental particles of the world are. because they keep finding new things, like new smaller things.

First it was an atom, then it was the electron, and then it was quarks, and then it's hadron's, they got the hadron collider, and I feel like every couple of years they find something else that they didn't know about before, and now you've got the string theory, which says everything is vibrating strings. And if you, it's so difficult to reconcile what science says with what we see, right? Because we see things as solid and tangible,

but science is exactly the opposite. There's nothing is solid or tangible at all, and there's nothing there. And it's all energy, like going around chaotically and combining to form things that we use our senses to get information from and interpret. So it's like everything is energy, but our senses give us certain information

to make it appear solid. So even that, like the physical science, like we're studying our world and the earth and all these things in your life, well, what are we actually even looking at? Because everything is filtered through our senses anyway. And it sounds crazy, but like I can't even say for sure that this thing really is this, right? It's just information from my eyes and my hands about it.

But I don't know if that information is accurate. Yeah. And not, and I could see the same thing, but I can see something totally different. Yeah. And not only physical things, but like also, were you talking? about reality also being subjective and you can see it for this might be over like over people's heads they might not be ready to like think about the world this way but like here's an example that I think everyone can relate to where information is now pretty much belief based because the way

social media works the algorithms filter out what you what you like so if you are on one political side or another or in a third one or whatever you're going to consume information that's going to meet what you enjoy and then that's going to be kind of like all you see so one event can be spun two or three different ways like there can be one event in the world you know so and so you know like we haven't we're in a recession and then another person will spin that exact same of circumstances saying oh we're actually in a in a controlled contraction done by our wonderful leaders so you don't even see the world the same way And that's just one example of it.

That's a great example. It makes me wonder, I think it opens up a third possibility. I think it opens up the possibility of being able to see it from a third person point of view. Because I bet you yourself and everybody listening to this knows somebody that's like, I love Donald Trump. It's like, I hate Donald. You know, I'm a hardcore Democrat. But if you can sit in the middle, you can see both sides of it, the same way that, you know,

you could see two different people and two different echo. chambers, watching the same event and coming up with a different idea of what that event is. On some level, might that give us a clearer picture of how to solve the problem, but the person can sit back, okay, I like this, the same way that you can see a friend in a relationship that's in a bad relationship because you're on the outside, that's never going to work with that girl, man. You guys are a mess together, but they can't see it because they're in it. The same way we can now look at society that, oh, well, these guys hate these people.

and these people hate these people. Shouldn't that at least give us guys like us or people watching from a third-person point of view a clearer perspective of what might help solve the problem? Yeah, that's a great point. And then, of course, raises a question, how do you get to that perspective? How do you extract yourself

from the complicated web of your belief systems and perceptions which have caused you to be in it, quote unquote, you're in it, how do you get out of it? And there are, I mean, there are a number of ways, which I'm sure we can talk about that I think help. You know, being the observer, meditation, yoga helps, breathwork kind of thing helps. Psychedelics can help.

Sometimes it's like life trauma. I mean, you write about it in your book where with the death of your son, it kind of just like took you out of things and you had this almost like divine oneness experience where you're sort of observing everything from on high. So those things can do that. But the only deliberate ways I know of are, like I said, meditation and psychedelics. They really help with that.

Yeah. And those two are their own form of tragedy, you know, whether they're self-inflicted or slipped into you or trauma-based. It is the tragic event or the trauma event. And you know what? This brings me, this kind of brings us full circle to like, the initiation rituals in any kind of, in the majority of cultures is an initiation ritual, especially like in the Native Americans or the South American shamanism or even some of the Eastern traditions where, you know, you go into a cave and it simulates the rebirth or you, you know,

you dance until you drop or you get beaten, even in modern-day gangs. Like you have to get jumped into a gang. You have to get beaten up. In some ways, that's getting beaten up or going to live in a cave is the same way as having the scales fall from your eyes, or it represents a new way to see the world the same way we were talking about. It's kind of interesting to think about it like that. Yeah, yeah. It's these shocks, it's almost like we're asleep.

And then there's some kind of external shock, either deliberate or accidental, that just kind of like jolts you out of it. And you go, oh, okay. and then you take this outside view and you go, what the hell am I doing? What have I been doing? What is this world? Is it even real?

Who knows? And then you might go insane. Maybe not. I don't know. But I'd say going insane is a good thing because the world is crazy. So if you go insane in a crazy world, it means you're sane, I suppose. Yeah, I saw a good video graphic one time and it was like,

in a world where everyone's crazy, the sane person is running towards the criminal or something along those lines. Yeah. It was really well done. It makes me. There's a fine line between a shamanic type person and an insane person. And I think that in old times, they used to almost revere the epileptics and the schizophrenics because they thought they had some divine power.

And sometimes I wonder about the schizophrenics, like that disease in itself. If it isn't, I don't know, I'm just talking out of my ass here right now, but I wonder if they're sometimes getting too much information where we have these conscious filters of our world. Maybe they're getting like everything. So they're hearing voices, but they're not making it up. They're just taking it in more. And that's probably like impossible to handle. Absolutely.

You know, they've done, I'm sure you've read about some of the studies where they, in epileptic people that have it bad, they'll cut the corpus callosum, which is the thin thread that. So you have two hemispheres in the brain. and there's like a long, twisted, it's not a tube, but it's like a huge piece of fiber that runs between those two hemispheres of the brain. And it sends information back and forth. And people that have epilepsy really bad, they've cut that corpus callosum, and it dramatically stops all the seizures and it somewhat cures the people. It doesn't really cure them, but it really helps the people that have had bad epilepsy and can't move through their days. they've done some interesting experiments.

Well, after they have severed the corpus callosum, they'll ask people to use their right hand to draw what they wanted to be when they were a kid. And the right hand will draw like a fireman. And then they'll ask them to use their left hand, the same question, and it'll draw like a race car driver. You know, and they'll ask them, like, why did you draw a race car driver if you want to be a fireman? And they'll be like, that is a fireman. So, yeah, they've done some incredible experiments on that.

And it also makes me think that, you know, the right hemisphere of the brain tends to be the one that understands the different ideas and is not so much the analytical part, but more the one that gets the big picture of things. So someone that has epilepsy, they would be revered because they would be seeing the world differently. They would have a whole other view. So if you talk to somebody, it's possible that they may have had answers that the other people who didn't have. That could be another reason why. It's pretty fascinating to think about. Yeah, that's really interesting. I also think it's because it's so close to dying, I guess.

They suddenly have these attacks on the earth seizing up. So that's the shamanic way, right? The shaman is supposed to be someone who walks the line between life and death. And I think historically, most of the people that become shamans, they do so after some kind of near-death experience where they really go to the brink and they sort of bow see the spirit world to some degree, or at least claim to be able to. Yeah. And that brings me to another idea. I was just thinking about psychedelics the other day. And I was thinking that I think we've all seen the images of people. I'll just use psilocybin for this particular example. Have you seen the example of people that like take psychedelics and they go in the MRI and it shows their brain scan. And they take someone who doesn't take psychedelics and they show their brain scan and where it lights up. And the imagery is it shows the connections between the brain, but it's sparse. However, when someone, someone, you know, has taken a large amount of psilocybin they put them in the MFRI and the whole brain center is lit up and what they explained was when you take psychedelics what's happening is it overrides the default mode network and so it connects the brain in different types of ways and that would mean

that you are able to process visual information in Broca's area and you're able to process speech in the visual cortex and that's what would give you the form of synesthesia and stuff And if you do psychedelics long enough, we know from modern brain papers that people have written that once you build the connection between different brain centers, those connections tend to stay there. So if you do enough psychedelics, wouldn't it make sense that some residue of pathways are left between the visual cortex and the speech center? So even when you're stop taking them, you're still going to process a little bit of that information in different parts of the area. And that seems to me why people that take large amounts of psychedelics would probably be able to see or begin to see the world differently because they're still able to process regular information in different parts of the brain. What do you think about that? I think that's definitely, you know, one thing that could be going on.

There's, I forget who said this, but the way they explain, I think it was Rick Strassman potentially, who explained in a way that I liked. He compared the brain to a computer. and he says, he gives an example that when you're waiting consciousness can maybe process something like 4,000 bytes per second. And when you put that brain on psychedelics, it can go up to like millions. And so he's posturing that there is a, it kind of ties back into our discussion of the physical world and what it is and what it appears to be. So if the world is vastly different than what we see it, but we need to see it a certain way consciously in order to survive in it, perhaps there is some mechanism in our brain that filters out the quote unnecessary information that we don't need to survive. And then when you take a psychedelic, it removes that filter, similarly what you said about the default node network.

And you're now taking in way more information consciously. So the world appears very different. And anyone that's been on a psychedelic experience will know this. Like you start to see, I mean, time has a whole different relevance. Yeah. Time is like elastic, it contracts and expands in ways that you don't experience normally. You see there's a kind of telepathy that happens between people that I've experienced multiple times, which I can't explain any other way than the fact that we're sharing thoughts.

That's really the only way I can think of it. And then, of course, you have the synesthesia effect where you experience senses differently. Colors change. And you almost see, I don't know, the first time I did LSD, I would compare it to if you've never been to a 3D movie before and you put on those glasses for the first time and you just see these like extra layers to everything, that to me would be experienced. And that's a way I like to see. You're just taking in more information that you normally don't.

Yeah, that's awesome. But you don't see it consciously. It's another way I think of it. Can you repeat that? I didn't catch that. Like maybe you are always taken in all information, but maybe your subconscious is always taking it in, but it just filtered out in your conscious mind.

Yeah. Yeah. It leads me to another idea. I'm so enamored with language, and I think that so many of the secrets that seem profound are hidden in our daily language. Like, an example would be like, oh, if you take LSD or these psychedelics, it really opened your eyes, or that's really eye-opening, or, man, it made the scales fall from my eyes.

And every time you're on it, it seems to me every time you're on psychedelics, like your pupils are like super dilated. And like, what better, it's just so weird that we would use that terminology when in fact, that's exactly what it does. But what's behind the term it opens your eyes? That means that you see more. It means that you get more information that you understand more. At least it's kind of a connotation like that.

And it's just so weird that those drugs would come with that kind of explanation and also have that same sort of function. And it makes me start thinking like what other phrases are like that? Like, well, how about a stream of consciousness? Consciousness might be like a stream that flows through your daily life. It also flows through your brain the same way. It has all these different options, and that would explain why we don't focus on one thing so good. We're always daydreaming, and we're thinking about this, and there's all these things going through our mind that we think are not connected, but they are, in fact, part of the same river system.

You know what I mean? Isn't that how language works like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to expand on the consciousness thing, I guess there's one view of the world, which is interesting. I think it's Hindu. Oh, sorry, let me just spell. Uh-oh, you all right? Yeah, I'm good.

The term brahman, which is, I think, Hindu, which is, that's the universal consciousness. So in their model of things, everything is consciousness expressing itself. So you have Brahman, which is the godlike universal consciousness, and then Atman, which is us. like our we're like little individual packets of consciousness experiencing the rest of consciousness but we have the illusion that we're separate and that's where a lot of the troubles come in life where we think we are separate entities and we don't understand this connection to the overall brahm and greater consciousness and i suppose that's one way to think about as like when you open your eyes to these psychedelics or you see the stream of

consciousness is almost almost as if that barrier dissolves a little bit between the individual and the all. And yet I've had these, I don't know if we could talk about, I'd like to hear your experience with psychedelics, but I've had those, what the, it's the same thing that the spiritual writers of antiquity write about when they talk about samadhi, which is this idea of being part of the one consciousness, being part of everything, all is one, all these writings. I've the only time I've really felt that is on psychedelics I mean once or twice in meditation deeply and then in breathwork as well but like most clearly in psychedelics where I literally had these moments of no separation like my body is gone it just because I'm just perceiving and there's nothing else that's all that there is but I'm curious to hear about what you've tried and like what you've gotten yeah let's let's let's start trading some stories I um I'm a big fan of psychedelics and I started off, you know, probably 17.

I used to take like a split an eighth with a friend and go watch a laser show. And that was even on such a small dose, I remember, I think maybe one time, yeah, I think it was an eighth. And I just remember having this unbelievable sense of clarity. I don't know what I was clear about, but I remember the clarity. And I just was like, oh, I get it. And I could hold this concept in my mind for a minute. And then I had taken a lot of time off. And then throughout my life and my 20s and, you know, I would say from 18 to 20,

I tried a lot of LSD. I tried a lot of mushrooms. And then later in my life, when I turned about 40, I started experimenting again. And as of recently, I really moved towards, you know, I saw Terence McKenna's heroic dose, and I decided it wasn't heroic. enough for me. I did take the heart his idea. One thing that McKenna said that really strikes me is that he would always say that, you know, if you take mushrooms, the amount you should take, if you take mushrooms and you're not scared to death, you think you're going to die, then you

haven't taken enough. That's how you know what the dose is. And so I took that to heart. And I started off around 40. I started taking like seven grams. And then recently, my most recent one, I did like 18 grams. And it was like, yeah, yeah, it was fucking mind-blowing. And literally, it was, it started off, like, obviously, I'm, I want to say I'm a responsible person. I don't know if doing 18 grams is a responsible thing. So anyone listening to this, you should definitely be mindful if you're going to do it. You know, maintain your set and setting.

Tell your loved ones you're doing it, you know, I'm sure kids aren't around. And so I had all my bases covered. I told my wife, hey, I'm going big tonight. She's like, just leave me alone. Don't come in my room. Don't come in the room. You're going to be okay.

I'm like, I'll be fine. And so what I have found on this particular dose was something, let me tell you what the trip was. And then I'll tell you what I found different about large doses that is different than smaller doses. So this trip for me, I just laid, in darkness and I took the huge dose and about three or four hours in like it started coming on really strong and I began to like hear not so much like a voice outside of me but a voice

inside my head and I felt like I was talking to an alien and it was more like it was more I say alien not like a ET, but alien in that, it was something I had never felt before, like a true alien experience, like something you've never heard, never seen, or never can't even understand. I couldn't understand it because it was alien to me. But there was information I was getting about the world we live in, and it was all, it was a religious experience, because that's the best word I can use to describe it. It was this idea that we are in fact one with everything, that we came from a different plan. And this is going to sound crazy.

I don't know how true it is, but this is what I thought on the trip. I thought on the trip that specifically white people, and I don't know how, this is probably going to sound so crazy, but this is what I thought on that trip. Yeah, throw it out there. I love crazy shit. Okay. So during this trip, I came to the realization. I heard in my head that I, we, like specifically white people are. aliens to this planet. And we are supposed to be here not to run over everything or be at war

with everything, but we landed on this planet. When we landed on this planet, we began fighting each other because we didn't come here. We crashed here on this planet and there was two factions of us. And in my mind, it was in the Middle East somewhere where we crashed in this planet and we ended up killing ourselves and somewhere along the line in order to stop the war, that was happening on the planet, we decided to hide all evidence of us being from a different planet. That was the only way to bring the people of this planet together was to hide the true history of our world. And so at that point in time, I go, holy shit, that makes so much sense. Jesus wasn't alien. Yeah, of course Jesus wasn't alien, you know?

And then I'm like, okay, I should get my phone to start trying to call people, which is a horrible idea. I can't see stuff on my phone, you know. And at that point in time, I'm laying down to my living room in my library. I'm just looking up at all these books, like, all these books tell the same story. And just having these crazy thoughts of like, that which resides in me wrote all these books. Thus, I wrote all these books. I know all the stories in these books because I've lived them before. These are my lives.

And I, okay, and here's what's different about the big trip. for me is that on a regular trip, say three to seven grams, you come up through your cycles, it comes to waves, waves, bigger waves, you go to the sets, and then you back back down. And I felt like on a seven grand dose, it was almost, between seven and ten grams, it's almost impossible to bring back from the peak of the event, what you experience. It's all fuzzy and hate it. However, on a super high dose of psilocybin, I learned that there's a peak and then there's a second peak. And the clarity of that second peak is much more clear and tangible than the

peak of a regular or even a five gram heroic dose trip. Because I've had some trips before we're like, oh, I think there was really cool stuff, but I don't remember it. But this trip, like I can remember being there so clear. And I can remember laying on the ground and hearing the voice to this day tell me, we are the aliens. You are the aliens. Every species, You're here to protect every species on this planet because it's not ours and it's important. It should take care of everything. You know, and it just kind of gives me goosebumps thinking about it. But so that was one of the bigger trips that I've done and the rare thing on it was I found a double peak with extreme clarity.

And it makes sense if you go up higher, you should have a clearer view, right? Yeah. Yeah, they're saying you send the higher dimensions. It's even clear. Maybe that's where you went. You went 60 or some shit. Dude, it was wild, man. It was wild.

Thank you for letting me share that. I think I'm crazy, but that's what it was. No, no. It was beautiful in so many ways. I love this. I love it. It was a big mystery. I have a kind of alien experience as well.

That's why I enjoyed a story. Yeah, please. Would you share that for us? If we're talking about mushrooms, I've tried almost every psychedelic except for Ibegain. But if we're talking about mushrooms, I had two very memorable and profound experiences. The first one, I don't even know how much I ate. It could have been a high dose, but it was a huge bag.

And it was like I was at music festival for four days. It was the last day. And it was a last day. It was hot and sunny the whole time. I've been partying for three days, not really drinking water or whatever. And this bag of mushrooms falls into my lap. I didn't even really want it. that someone was leaving and they're like we have these mushrooms.

I was like, yeah, I got to take them. You know, I got to at least buy them. I could give them away. I was like, I really didn't want them. I was like, guys, who wants it? Nobody wanted. Everyone was tired and four days of partying. And then it was like, I don't know how much it was, but it was like a bag this big.

Oh, that's huge. So it's probably at least seven grams. Oh, it's probably closer to an ounce that big, man. Maybe. I don't know. But I just like, all right, well, we can't let these go to waste. So I just sat there and very slowly ate all of them. And then, and then I had.

a horrible experience at first because as soon as it kicked in, I realized how horribly dehydrated I was. Yeah. And I was like literally, I like laid in and the sun was still out. The sun was hot. So I was like crawling around the grass looking for shade, right, just to get away from the sun. And I couldn't like, I was too weak to get up.

And I actually had a friend. I was like, can you get me some water? And he brought me some water. And I was like, and the water was making me like feel nauseous almost. Because that's, I had, I realized later I had like heat stroke or sunstroke. Yeah. And it was, we kick in. And I was just feeling bad.

And I was like, I was laying in the grass and I laid down and looked at the sky. And it just started to watch the clouds and just feeling terrible. And I started having what you described, which happens to me a lot, is this kind of dialogue. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. But it's a thought form dialogue. So it's not in words, but I would think of thought, and that thought would be answered

either instantaneously. That thought would be answered either with another thought or some kind of event or something happening in the world. So I was sitting there like kind of playing with this thought communication, feeling horrible, right, feeling horrible. And thinking, God, I'm going to like, am I going to die? And I was like, I thought I was going to die because I was. I can't die here.

I can't get myself up. Like, I can't get home. It was like an hour and a half from home. So I started conversing with this thing. I don't know. We had this little conversation. And I said to it, am I going to die today?

And then it said no. And I said, okay. And I felt better. And then I asked it, I've curioused it. I was like, what happens when you die? And instantly,

I was filled with like this endless joy and like this the white light thing like just filled with this infinite joyous white light warmth thing where I was completely at peace like just no worry at all and like joy and like I'm shaking too like I'm just trying to remember this was like shit right and it was just like whoa and then after that it only lasted a couple of seconds but it's what the people talk about with the near death experience where they go through the tunnel they see the light they feel the joy and i thought oh well then there's really nothing to worry about is there and i just felt like fine and all the everything went away and i was like oh okay i'm good even if i die like it's right

that is awesome so i was sitting here and um you know eventually got better and was like drinking water and i'm i'm like man it's been hours and i look at my phone and it was like 20 minutes I was like, oh, shit, three hours of this trip left to enjoy, right? So, you know, then I drank water, it felt better. And it was like, it went in the woods or whatever. And I was, like, playing with the squirrels and birds and stuff. And it's just enjoying my time. And then I managed to get home.

And I needed, like, four liters of IV high duration. My mom's a nurse. She's like, she took one book at me. She's like, man, you're fucked up. And then she took up to the couch and gave me an IV drip to sort of get my, my energy back. And I was like, that just stuck with me. That was almost 10 years ago. And I still remember that.

Man. And so that was my major experience with what we described, this like something. Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe it's what happens to schizophrenics. I don't know. But it felt like I was speaking with something. And then I had another experience where it was,

I don't think it was as high a dose, but it was something like a horrific dose where I did what you did. I lay down in the dark at nighttime. And I was sort of staring at the ceiling and then through the, like, whatever I was looking at the ceiling, a shape coalesced out of something in the ceiling. And it was like a face of sorts. And I remember thinking, okay, this, maybe this is an entity of some sort because it looked like it was looking at me. And I started playing with it.

I was like, all right, I'm going to try to talk to this thing. And I asked it. It is all mental, of course. It's all platforms. And I said, I said, what are you? And then it showed me a series of images that meant architect. It was a symbol for. Okay, interesting.

And then I said, how do I know? So by the little context, I'm laying in my bed. It's pitch dark. I know that somewhere over to the left of my bed, there's a cup of water. I don't know where it is. It just, like what? And so I said, how do I know you are real? And then the next thing that happened is my lips got very dry and I needed to take a water.

And then I went and reached blindly for the cup. And my hand hit the cup exactly where it needed to be. It was like, it found it instantly. And then I'm like, okay, like, what do I do with that, right? Like, is that proof? for nine times out of ten when I'm looking for the cup to the side of my bed I've got to look around I've got to search for it maybe I'll get over or whatever this one time it's like okay it's exactly there right yeah so it's just one of those mysteries that you don't know what the

hell it is and it's just kind of amusing but yeah I wonder about that I wonder if there are these these other dimensions out there that are invisible and then we sort of interact with with energy like why wouldn't there be energy that's invisible that's maybe a being of pure consciousness that doesn't have a physical form. Like, it's possible. So I leave it open to possibility. Yeah, I would agree with you. I think it's naive to, like, in the beginning of the podcast,

we were already talking about the limitations of our knowledge. I think it'd be pretty, pretty hubristic to think that we know what happens. Like, we don't know anything. You know, we are, I think we're barely out of the trees in some ways. Like, and how many times, like, how many times you hear, hear people talk about a guardian angel or someone that saves them or like there's clearly something we're interacting with that changes the course of our life. You know, call it God or Buddha or

Allah or whatever spiritual being you believe it to be. Like there's something there. And when you ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist and make a conscious decision to ignore the signs in front of you that ends up being pretty bad or at least for some people i think you know i yeah there has to be some energy there i i think it's i think you could prove it i don't know how to prove it but i think it can be done me neither because everything is so subjective i'm not sure how to prove it but i think you said guardians and i think it was carl young or was somebody who was really prolific to that ascribed all of their creativity to some kind of guardian being that they encountered through maybe with psychedelics or whatever.

And they gave it a name too. They said this being called whatever appeared in my life. And that was a source of all my inspiration for all the work I've done in my life. So that's something considered, I guess. So like, voices in your head maybe don't drown them out right away. Yeah, I think Tesla too said that he was told all his inventions. He was told, he spoke to an entity. And I think it's pretty prolific through different mystics throughout the time about how ideas were given to him and passed on to them.

Some of them nefarious in some ways. But, yeah, I, you know, that's a good point. Why couldn't there be evil ones out there, trickster ones? If there are, you know, they're not all angels. And I guess be careful if you're a psychonaut and you go out on these journeys. You know what? Like speaking of nefarious energies and psychedelics, like I found too, I had a trip a while back that was maybe like five grams. And I found myself in a place about three hours in where, you know, I felt like I was communing with spirits.

I felt like I could try on different ideas. And what I mean by that is that I had ideas, like, I felt like ideas were given to me that I could use on my podcast. And some of them I would try on and be like, that is way too sinister. I would never do that. I would never say this about this group of people. But I could see how powerful that would be. Like, that would be pretty powerful. You would probably get a lot of stuff if you did that.

But that's a horrible thing to do. But in that, in that moment, like, I was just, I felt like I was in a store. and I had different people there that were like, hey, try this one on. Okay, oh, that sounds interesting, but I'm not a horrible person. Thanks, you can have that one back. Or, hey, how about this one?

Hey, I've never thought about it like that. But I was able to try on ideas and see through them the potential outcomes like I would see through a mask. And it was pretty liberating. And in some ways, like very fulfilling. filling to be there. I'm like, I can't believe I'm here getting to learn these things. And it made me realize that maybe the greatest information isn't something we learn. It's something that's revealed to us.

You know, you start thinking about all these people that have come up with ideas. It's like, oh, I was laying under the Buddha tree or I was just out here doing some things. And then I had this idea. But it seemed, once I was in that state, it like clicked. I'm like, oh, I see. these ideas are revealed to you. It's not that you've learned them and you've studied. Both of us probably do a lot of reading. However, I think the ideas can be revealed to you. And then you're like, oh, this is not my idea.

This is everybody's idea. I just tapped into it. I got an idea. I want to pitch it to you. Let me know what you think about this. I was curious about for a while, but never really gave much energy to. But let me lay a bit of a found.

foundation first. So the whole, we talked about psychedelics. We talked about what happens to the mind, and we talked about some sort of telepathy that may happen. And it's hard to know if it's happening when you're doing it by yourself, but I've had some experiences with others where I feel like there is a kind of telepathy or shared consciousness going on. So there's one story where, I think it was a few years ago. I had an older friend. He was probably, probably, you know, 50 at the time. And he had never done any psychedelic before. And he knew I had experience.

So he reached out. He's like, I want to try mushrooms. And I said, cool. Like, why don't you come over on Saturday and then we'll do mushrooms? So I didn't do as much as him because I wanted to stay somewhat like alert because I wanted to make sure he didn't have any major issues that I had to be alert for. So what we did was we just took the mushrooms. We laid on the couch.

We had this, like, day bed thing that we just, laid out on. Close her eyes did not say a word for three hours. We just lay down and close our eyes. I got up. My trip was over. I sat up, open my eyes. About two minutes later, he sat up and opened his eyes. And we recounted our trips. And it was like so much overlap. Like we all had, we had like the, we saw the same things. We experienced the same insights. It was like a shared experience. It was kind of weird. And then I gave him some to take home with him. I was like, hey, if you want to, like, you know, I had some extra.

So take this home, like, experiment with yourself if you want. He goes home. A few weeks later, I see him again. And he said he got his wife to try them because his wife was curious. And she was a devout Muslim at the time, I believe, like pretty strict. And she took them by herself in her bedroom. And my friend was watching TV or whatever. And they had two kids.

And the daughter was in his third room coloring. And so his wife had her experience. When she was done, she got up to go see what her daughter was doing. Her daughter was drawing the tree of life on a piece of paper, and she had seen that exact image during her trip. So this is a groundwork for, and I had other, like, minor things where I feel like I'm sharing someone's mind or we're thinking the same vibrational level or whatever. We're on the same wavelength.

So this is a groundwork for what I'm trying to post you. So we have this concept of shared to Lepathia psychedelics. The other concept of the mind as a transmitter of brainwaves and intentions and thoughts and the idea of a mastermind where when you get a bunch of people in a room together and you all focus on the same thing or integer goal, the amplification effect of that. Now, what if you had that combined with a psychedelic experience? What if you had something like a ritual? Like I mentioned before in the last podcast, I'm in the Freemasons where we have these rituals

and we have a meeting or a ceremony or something all under the influence of such a thing and all directed to one singular purpose, like what you could potentially create in the world with that kind of sustained intense energy. I'll just throw in that idea out there. I'd be fascinated to, I don't know, try it or I don't know, organize people to do this. I don't know how, but it would be interesting. Okay. You know, I'll blow your mind right now.

I was going to ask you, what do you think a new Elysinian mysteries would look like? I was just thinking about that little bit of a saying that. I've been thinking about it a lot. Like, talk about that for shared telepathy. Like I was up here in the wineries thinking like, okay, you know, can I find a winery that has a theater that you could invite people to and you would have like a sort of a Cirque de Soleil where people came in the crowd and like, you know, you would want to recreate. I know from reading a little bit about the Eucinian Mysteries that part of the play they did was when Demeter lost her daughter Persephone. So imagine a crowd of like-minded people. on sort of a, you know, three-gram psychedelic trip.

And they take it and they're all sitting together in this theater and there's lights. And you watch this woman lose a child, be it through some sort of tragedy. Imagine what a felt tragedy under the influence of psychedelics would be like. It would be like all of us together losing that child because you would feel that experience. You would feel the connection with the people next to you. And then all of a sudden, the real. the reconnection, the daughter reappears. And so now you have this shared loss.

You have a shared sense of tragedy, which brings everybody together. And then you have a shared sense of gratitude that releases the negative energy. And it's like, do we did it, you know? And it's the same way that the brain builds better relationships by going back and forth through the synaptic gap, that kind of connection between people, when you have shared goals and shared sacrifices, potentially under the influence of a psychedelic, I think it's that sort of healing process that would help people. And if you want to break it down to like a fractal level, so above, so below, if that's the way the brain works to make better connections, why wouldn't

it work the same way between people? If two people can feel the exact same loss, see, I can't, I can explain the loss to you about my son, but you can't experience it. However, if you see someone lose their child and I see someone lose their child, we may not explain it the same way, but we feel it intense together. And that's the same way. That's better than any language. That is a true communication of feeling between one another. So I think that that's something that would happen.

If you found yourself in a ritualistic setting and used psychedelic. in that way. I think that the possibilities are endless. I mean, maybe you could argue Charles Manson did that though, too. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, what's different from this than? I thought, you know? I think

the intention maybe, you know, I mean, maybe the word cult gets a bad name. I mean, so much of the cult and maybe that's on purpose. You know, maybe the word cult gets a bad name because we don't want people divvying

too far from the productive nature of multinational corporations. I think that could be that. I like the analogy you have with the synapses. I was just visualizing how individual people would be those synapses. Or like we were talking about Brahman

being the universal consciousness. We have these points of consciousness of people. But then these points emerge and you have suddenly instead of this, you have like, say this of the greater whole. Yeah. And then what you could carve about of the greater whole with an expanded group of co-acting consciousness. That's interesting to me.

Yeah, well, I look at it like this. So think of George Monty or Kevin Holt as a thought in the mind of God. And all of a sudden, the more you focus, like, you have begun developing yourself as a thought into an idea, into an action. Like you are Kevin Holt who decided to travel and then write a book. And now you're doing these podcasts, you're traveling the world. So it's like you're gaining this momentum. You're growing as a thought to an idea and becoming an action. So if we are thoughts in the mind of God, then perhaps the main goal for each one of us should be to become an action of God. Yeah, I like that.

Right? Well, yeah, that's what they say. The way to experience the divine is to have it act through you and to have the, divine actor within you, right? Because we're, there's creation. We are, it's the same analogy again. Like if everything is God, everything is Brahman, and we're the Atman, we're the small piece of Brahman, then our task is to be the whole through the one.

And then our action would then, what's the word? Like we would export that into the world with our creation. Yeah. So by creating, we are the creator. As above so below. Yeah. Do you get that, like when you wrote your book, do you get the feeling like, like people read it and it helps them?

Like, how does that feel for you? I mean, it feels good. You know, like, if they enjoy it, then awesome. Yeah. Nobody reads it okay, but, you know, I hope people will read it and get a sense of what I'm trying to say. And I would love to be able, I wish you could, it goes back to where you're saying about shared feelings.

Sometimes I wish I could like just I think we stopped for a minute there. Oh, might have glitched a little bit, but I can hear you fine. Yeah, I'm here. Sometimes I wish I could just like touch someone and transfer that, like what I'm feeling. Like, I want you to have that. Yeah. And it's impossible right now. And so the book is the closest thing I can think of to that, like, try to give that feeling.

Yeah. That's a great way to. explain the act of creation and maybe even intention in there. Like when you, in some ways, what I'd like about your book and what, why I can see the transference is that the book you wrote has plenty of sections for people to do their own homework, for them to come up with, you provide a framework for people to experiment with their own consciousness, kind of give them a roadmap to do that, you know? And I think there is something,

brilliant and beautiful about being able to show people the way. And if you think about that terminology, like, it's pretty beautiful to show someone the way, whether they're a lost traveler or they're a lost soul. You know, if you can point them in the right direction, I think that you're doing the right thing. Sorry, we cut out again. Well, that's all right.

I was just saying that I think that being able to show someone the directions in life or being able to share with someone experiences is is just another reason of why we're here being the, you know, having. Right. And I don't have, I don't have the way, right? I'm not claiming to have the way at all, right? I don't think anyone does exactly. So maybe a road sign.

All you can do is, yeah, road sign. It's just like here's, here's a, what do you call the cairn, this pile of stones of a traveler that's been here before. And then you can maybe read the stones and maybe you take something and you discard something else. or use them in a whole other way. You know what I mean? Maybe it's a gift using a whole other way that you never even thought about. Yeah.

One second. I'm going to switch to the other Wi-Fi just to make sure it's not me. Yeah. Okay. The other Wi-Fi definitely works. Oh, nice. Okay, nice. Nice.

We're back. But yes, signposts. Yeah, I think that's really all we can hope to do for those of us. that decided to go into the dark forest, which is a choice. You can stay on the path if you want. And that is a little bit of what I talk about in the book where I was on that sort of easy, well-groomed path. And part of me wishes that I was just fine with that because, you know, that's easy. You know, it's set out for you. You just have to kind of walk through the motions. And I could have made more and more money,

it's security and so on. But some of us choose to go off course and go into the dark forest. And then we have people like yourself or whoever we meet on the road. And all they do is they say, you know, George was here. And this is what George said.

And then you can see, how much does it apply to me? Hopefully find a new path in the forest. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think, I think you told me a quote one time I know I've read it somewhere and probably a lot of people have heard it that says when you're ready to learn, someone shows up to help you.

And I look back at that in my life. And throughout my life, I've had a couple mentors that one guy was my neighbor. I didn't even know him. This guy, Rick, from New Jersey. I moved in and there was this old guy. I can't tell you how much this guy changed my life just by throwing some darts and talking some stories about life and how to live life. It's amazing how along the way people just show up in your life to kind of help you.

yeah, could be a stranger. I mean, there was a woman in Japan I didn't know for very long, had a huge impact on me. I only knew it for a few weeks, but yeah. Yeah, it's amazing to think about it. I got, I was thinking today, too, about altered states of consciousness. Since we were talking about, like, the mushroom experience, LSD, these different things, how much do you think, like, today's world,

of education stops us from experiencing alternate states of consciousness? Or do you think that the world we live in today kind of frowns upon alternate states of consciousness? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you touched on this before where we're talking about cults and maybe cult that all those things in some cases are a sci-up because they want to keep you in the producer state of consciousness, where you go through the motions. You don't question anything, and you don't really step out of that. Because, I mean, the thing that I got from pretty much every single psychedelic experience

is that we don't need, like, I don't need someone to tell me what to do. I hate that. Nobody knows anything. So, like, who are you to tell me what to do? You don't know anything. Right. I don't know anything. So the only authority is really inner.

authority. And people, unfortunately, because of fear of conditioning or whatever, their program, like, let's think about it this way. Everyone's alone in the wilderness, ultimately. Like, we're all in this rock and chaos in the dark forest, afraid, don't know what the hell is going on, don't know what happens after we die, don't know what life means. So people are looking for someone to just swoop in and go, I know what's going on. I know what's up. Just follow me and everything is going to be fine. All right. That guy's full of shit or that girl's full of shit. Because we need that or people need that, you know, I was just writing about this yesterday about how I was saying something. And I like, I intentionally use the words I think or it seems to me

or in my opinion because I acknowledge that of the one thing I know for sure is I don't know, I don't know much for sure. So I always leave that open. I might be full of shit. I might be completely wrong about everything. But this is what it appears to me. However, my friend was telling me that I was trying to do it. I don't know what I was trying to do, but I was trying to speak with knowledge on something.

And she's like, you shouldn't use those words because it makes you seem like you're not an authority. I'm like, but I'm not authority. Like, there is no authority. It's an illusion to the fact that there even could be an authority. But that reality doesn't resonate with what normal most people need to hear from someone because they need to be reassured. They need to be told that they're going the right way or that they're following the right person. So I forget where we're, what do we start talking about?

I went on this tangent. I don't remember when we initially started. We were just talking about the way in which society conditions us to. So yeah, so we're conditioned. People have that as a basic. They have the basis of, I'm afraid, I don't know what's going on. So then that's an opportunity for people or negative energies to swoop in and sort of capture your consciousness and capture your energy and direct it toward a certain direction that benefits those people that captured it. So anything that's taking you out of that is going to be frowned upon.

So a psychedelic is number one. I mean, everyone's done LSD and remembers the flower child days. All we need is community and love and self-determination. We don't need structures. We don't need people to, you know, tell us what to do. So, yeah, that's probably one of the reasons why they vigorously attacked the psychedelic world in the 70s with the anti-war movement that happened in the U.S. Because before that, it was very deeply researched, heavily researched in psychological settings. And then it just turned off overnight because the people were getting uppity, right?

So then they took all these supplements and they didn't schedule one prohibited substances. And only now do we have this renaissance of people starting to look into it again, at least therapeutically. So yeah, I think there's huge interest in them, they or whoever is ruling over us to keep us down by not making us realize that we have all the authority. They actually don't have anything. And we're just relinquishing it constantly to other people. And education systems also kind of do that. So the main task, I guess, for if you want to be a spiritual adult, we can talk about different lines of maturity. We've got the age, matured, emotional maturity.

We've also got spiritual maturity. So most people, unfortunately, remain in a spiritually childlike state. You know, if you can imagine this spiritually frightened child lost in the forest waiting for someone to show up. hold their hand and take them somewhere. But if we want to be a spiritual adult, then one of the first things we have to do is, is uneducate ourselves of our education, like unlearn so much.

So it's almost like required that we do school for society, but once you hit a certain age, it's like, okay, now it's time to unlearn 90% of it. And that's going to take some time. I mean, you know, it took probably most of my, 20s to really try to peel all that stuff back and just see what served me and what I could drop. And psychedelics were a huge part of that. So if, yeah, if you want to keep people in line,

then, you know, ban them and label what we're talking about as nonsense and crazy talk and just a talk of a bunch of, you know, drugies, man, you know, it's nothing. You guys aren't upstanding people of society or just a bunch of, you're doing the dope, whatever. It's easy. It's so you dismiss it. And so it's up to us to really own it, I think. Yeah, that's really well put. Like, I've been reading this book. It's called Altered States of Consciousness,

and it's this series of lectures from like 1977. And it's so amazing to me. It's beautiful, but it's also a little frightening. It's beautiful because they were beginning to answer the questions that we're beginning now. But it's also scary because it's the exact same questions, which means they were never answered. And some of the questions are like, you know,

some of the questions are the language we have used from Freud on to define science to use like this. Let me just, can I just read you a little passage here of it? Yeah, please. Okay. Okay, in this section it says, lacking the artist freedom from the constraints of scientific method. Behavioral scientists have focused much more on the products of specific directed thinking

or on the study of isolated features of thought, such as the vividness of images, the effectiveness of imagery, impaired associate learning, and other forms of problem solution. By their very nature, the methods of the experimental psychologist have led perhaps to an overweighing of the structured, directed, rational aspects of thought. Studies of concept learning or of abstraction abilities of various forms of categorical thinking and of arithmetic or spatial problem solution have predominated because they are easy to conduct and control. And let me just read this other section right here. Indeed, it might be argued that Freud overplayed the logical and rational quality of mature waking thought

and underestimated the adaptive and directed quality of wishful image-related thinking. Like, if you just think about that for a minute, the very foundations on which a lot of our scientific method was built was constrained from parts of thinking that are not controllable. And I can understand wanting to get away from the abstract, but in getting rid of the abstract, you get away from potential solutions of problems. And it does make it controlled. And all of a sudden, as soon as it comes down to the scientific method and the soft sciences maybe, now you have an authoritarian set up in a way. Like, no, this is it.

You did that wrong. And look where we are right now with science. I read an article yesterday that talked about there's been a whole lot of potential problems showing that all the work in Alzheimer's has been falsified with the amount. I saw that. Isn't that mind-blown? Can you imagine? I can't imagine that. That's the problem.

I saw a similar thing about the antidepressants that also came out in the last two weeks. That the science that were based on antidepressant use, brain chemistry, is also totally, totally flawed. It's like the entire tobacco, we've used the entire tobacco industry scientists for everything. Yeah, and it's, you talk about the abstract, and it sort of ties into, It all ties into like what you were saying about logical, rational thinking being emphasized in the way we think of science today. And related to our last talk, where we're saying about how unless you have a PhD in something, they basically tell you to shut up, you don't know anything.

The end result is that basically society is saying that intuition is nonsense. They're just discarding it. Like there is no intuition anymore. It's like what can we measure? What can we prove? And then common sense is gone too. Like you throw out intuition, you throw out common sense as well. So we're going down this one, I guess the left brain path only, and we're totally ignoring the other one.

Yeah. There's a great book by, oh gosh, Ian McGilchrest. He's got two books actually. One is called The Master and His Emissary. And that particular book talks about the left hemisphere being the analytical part of your brain, being the emissary and the right. hemisphere being the master. And he says that the right hemisphere sees the big picture and uses the analytical scalpel of the left hemisphere to communicate using words and logic to, you know, the emissary is supposed to say what the master wants it to. But over the last few years, the

overuse of emissary, the hyper, the hyper exposure of analytical, um, exposure of analytical literature and the hyper exposure to the sharp scalpel that is the analytical mind has caused the emissary to kind of take over the king and be like, yeah, I'm just going to push you to the side. Like something out of like a Shakespearean novel, you know, it's getting rid of the right side.

And if you look at a lot of people who... Yeah, right? Go ahead, interrupt you, go ahead. Oh, so, you know, just to think about If we look at that, if we look at the world of the analytical, if we look at the world of the scientific paper writing the future, if we look at the world of almost the technocratic takeover that's happening, the way we can look at the world through ones and zeros,

and it makes sense because there's enough sort of resources for everybody. If we just split it up a certain way, then we'll be perfect. If you look at that analytical reasoning, you start to see things like the mass inoculation of children in the name of science because it makes sense. You know, like it's just, it's just that the scientific takeover has gone way too much.

It's this analytical takeover that is not seeing the humanitarian side of it, even though it promises to talk about it. I don't know if I did a good job explaining that. You know, you did. But what they, and what they say, sorry, what we're talking about, the analytical takeover, they act as though they act as though they're flawless, that they are almost clinically precise as if they're an AI or something that

was incapable of error, but they don't mention that everything is still motivated by very human incentives. And the incentive to maybe falsify something for personal or, financial gain. And I have these discussions about the current vaccine campaign. And people are like, well, when is it going to end? Like, when are they going to stop going with fifth, six, seven, eight boosters? And I think, I don't think it's going to end because, not because of anything. Maybe there is something nefarious. I don't know. But if you just look at pharma as a company, they made record profits last year. And every company has it as its fiduciary responsibility to grow.

So next quarter has got to be more than this quarter. And forever. So even taking any conspiracy out of it, their job is to make more money. So they're going to find more ways to make more money. And that means pushing more boosters. That means pushing more drugs. That means taking monkey pox, which is fucking a nothing burger, and turning it into a global pandemic of international concern

so they can put out more medicine and vaccines for that. And now it's got a life of its own. It's his own monster. And, yeah, we just act like this is science. There's no motivation here other than the desire to do good, which clearly isn't the case. There are too many human factors. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you don't need to have any sort of wild thinking to understand a business model, it's right there. It's what everybody does. It could be just simply incompetence. It could be just business and then momentum, and that's it. Like a lot of it's just momentum. They've set up all these testing centers and technology to test and track people, and people are employed by that.

And then if you're a company, you're trying to keep your employees, you're trying to grow. So they're going to just push to keep it going. Right. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes I was thinking recently about our model. medical system. Once I read the article about the data on Alzheimer's being potentially wrong, it made

me wonder, like, well, if that's wrong, what else is wrong? And then it always, you know what I mean? Like, and then it obviously brings you back to the idea, like, why are doctors always practicing? Because they don't know what they're doing. So they're always just practicing. I never really doing anything, you know, but so, but it makes me. Sorry, we'll jump in on that science bit a bit if I can.

Yeah, please. This is that another thing that I kind of am passionate about, uneducating people about. People, like you said, people have this idea that science is always right and it's infallible. And, you know, there's this peer review process to make sure that humans don't make mistakes. I am not an academic per se, but I was in the academic world for a time during my master's program. I used to help Taiwanese people edit and translate. their academic papers for publication in English-speaking journals. And I used to work with the dean of the school on that. And so he would help me also correspond with journals. So we would do the,

you know, to do the draft, we would send it in. He would get, you know, they would make comments or whatever, send it back. We would edit it and send it back again to try to get it published. So there's a few things to kind of highlight what we're talking about here, the motivations and so forth. Teachers, professors are motivated in many universities by publications. So the number of publications they make and in which journals they make them is directly contributing to tenure, to promotion, and so forth. So they have a financial personal incentive to get published. Okay. That's point number one.

Point number two, the peer review process that we claim is like this is an infallible check. usually it's only three people looking at it. So he would send it in. There's a paper editor, the journal editor would either say thumbs up or down right away. And if he said thumbs down, so he said thumbs up, he would send it to like three other professors in that field to read. Just three. And at no point in the process, does anyone check the raw data? Never.

The only check if your methodology makes sense, if the structure of your reasoning makes sense, if your conclusions make sense from the data you've presented. No one has the ability to check if you didn't just make up numbers. The only way to check that is to reproduce the study. But there is no incentive to reproduce a study because if you're a scholar trying to make your name for yourself, why do you spend all your time trying to duplicate Mr. So-and-so's work instead of working on your own work? So it's very easy for entire disciplines to be created based on one very flawed study that seems good. And then other people, instead of trying to prove that study, they base their studies off the already approved study. So they take their conclusions that already exist and assume that they use that as like their foundation for their reasoning.

and you can build entire fields like that. So, yeah, like a lot of it is just nonsense. Like, we don't even know. Like, and I think there was somebody that tried to do that. I forget which field it was in, but some scholars tried to reproduce the studies of a particular field and they only got like 14% of them. And the rest failed.

Again, it goes into like, what is a reality? We don't even know because a lot of the science that we think is infallible may not be. It may be a house of car. hearts. Yeah. It sounds like the, look, I mean, just look around the world right now. Like, look at what's happening. Like, it makes more sense if the majority of the things we thought we knew were wrong. I just look around the world right now. You know, and that, I mean, if there's a human incentives, you can almost guarantee it's wrong, right? If there's a human incentive, you know the

ego is getting involved, you know that things will probably get skewed and there will be bias. Almost guaranteed. Yeah. I saw an interesting interview. a couple years ago, and it was a bunch of scientists at the Milken Institute, and they were they were some, I forgot which schools they were from, but they were for some pretty big schools, and they were talking about the future of medicine. And they had talked about how with the, with so many baby boomers retiring, you know, 10,000 baby boomers retiring a day, and the problems we have with health care, the problems we have with medicine, and the problems we have with insurance companies and liabilities,

The best way to go about medicine in the future is to just come up with these drugs and try them out. Because there's so much red tape, there's so many problems, there's so much money involved, that by the time they get to a potential drug that could help, you know, it's already 20 years later. And they have all these new things. So why not just if you have something in the pipeline, just start testing it on people? And I, on some level, you know, I could see the guy that said it was very passionate about helping people. I could see that in his mind, he had probably lost patients to red tape. He had probably lost patients to drugs that ended up helping people.

And I'm sure that the liability from that is crazy. But those are big questions. Can you just take a drug and test it on people? Can you take them and then maybe someone gives my dad a drug? But I didn't want that. So there's liability involved there. But might that be? And then like, granted, this was a few years ago.

And then when I see the way in which things are being rolled out now, I have to wonder to myself, is this the way in which good people are trying to do new medicine? You know, and there are big questions. And it's too bad we can't have these type of, you know, instead of a Super Bowl, wouldn't it be amazing if we had like four doctors on both sides going head to head to debate about the way medicine should be? or, you know, instead of bread and circus, perhaps we should have incredible debates like Buckley Chomsky did, you know, 25 years ago about foreign policy. Like, I don't see any reason why we can't be having these huge debates and huge public forums to make our world better. But instead, everything has kept hush, hush, and quiet, and we move forward with blinders on. It makes me sad. Yeah, yeah.

And I think the only way we're ever going to get this to change is we just have to change the incentives. So the example you mentioned about the guy who went to fast track drugs, he might have been doing it from a good place. But it runs into the same problem as academic research in that there is more incentive to produce new exciting results financially and personally than are to prove after the fact whether it works. So unless you had some perhaps publicly funded body of money, you know, that they devote billions of dollars to verifying research or to following up on new drugs for real, you know, if there's actually a side effect or whatever 10 years later, because there's no incentive to do that now, there's no money in that. So we're never going to know for sure what's going on with these vaccines because

there's too little hard data and people aren't investigating enough. But those incentives right now are flipped. I don't know how we're going to do that. But if you could somehow figure that out, right, make the incentive to track the post, you know, the veracity of everything that were invented, then maybe it will change. I just, I don't think anyone's figured out

or maybe put much energy into figuring it out. Yeah, I agree. It seems to me that, that I guess this is kind of, of the plan for everything is if you don't stop, then you lose everything. You know, and it seems that we're on the cusp of like, there's so much good science out, and there's so many people behind science that have given their life to help people. But the way it's been bastardized lately and the studies, because of the incentive process,

like you explained, or the peer review, having whole industries built on houses of cards, it tarnishes the name and it makes it almost not worthwhile for, people to even look at, you know? Yeah. I wish we had that. I wish there was like some incentive for people to go and verify other research. At least make us more confident. Well, I mean, so there are people that like, I've learned that there's people that,

like if I put out a video, there's a whole slew of people on YouTube. Hey, you spelled that wrong, you big dummy. So there's people that will go and look for stuff just because they want to, you know, if they see it. You're like, hey, you dummy, look at that. So I think that the, um, the, some sort of built and incentive process is there. Maybe it is doing a, um, you know what? What if we started like some sort of like go fund me for finding, how about like the, you know how tech companies pay a bug bounty?

Maybe we could start like a go fund me bug bounty for problems and peer review research, you know? I would pitch in for that, right? I would too, but if you're a researcher, like, would you rather be a writer or would you rather be a reviewer of other writers? So we have to, like, somehow convince people to take their ego out of it and then go that route, you know? Maybe, maybe like high school kids for extra money, like, maybe, you know, or. We have to tie it to money somehow. That's going to move to people. I know it's sad.

Wouldn't it be funny if we could get a group of like fifth graders to do it and like find holes and like these people with masters like their theories like hey you guys. Yeah, yeah, you guys got debunked by these Santa Rose and third graders. Good job, guys. Yeah, I'm going to pass fifth grade scrutiny. Yeah, maybe there's not enough shame. You've got to figure out. Yeah, there was a book written recently about how powerful public shaming is. And, you know, I'm not saying you've got to bring back yellow stars or a scarlet letter,

but, you know, something to be said about public shaming. I mean, there's, we've gone from public shaming to having no shame. You know, it's, in fact, it's a, yeah, I scam these people. So what I, you know, it's almost like when you think of shame, on one level, you have the Nigerian print scam. And on the other side, you have the Federal Reserve. They're kind of the same thing. You know what I mean? They're just stealing everybody's money.

Yeah, it's built into the cake now. And my girlfriend was telling me something crazy, too. I didn't watch it, but there's this show on Netflix called The Tinder Predator or the Tinder scammer. And he was some guy who would get on the, and I don't know how I did it exactly, but he extorted all kinds of money from women and got them to pay for his lifestyle. and he got away with it because it was all in their name. Like he didn't actually sign on anything. And they voluntarily would sign for loans for him and stuff like that.

So that happened. And now he's got a TV show. They're like, we need to promote this guy. And it's just, holy shit. I mean, all of Asian culture works on shame. Right. And there are obviously negatives to that because with shame you have obedience. I don't know

that has that like Switzerland does a pretty good job balancing those because Switzerland's pretty conformist but they've also got an independent streak so I think you've got to find that balance of cultural shaming so that people kind of like aren't

assholes but still have control over their country yeah sorry I think we and Asia goes a little too far the other way Like, I'm very obedient culturally, and they don't want to stand out. But then, of course, they just, you know, they're, they don't stand up.

They don't rise up. Yeah. It's interesting. I was at my, my kid goes to a, in Hawaii, you know, there's a lot more Asian influence than there is Western influence. And I was at a meeting in the morning with my kid and some other, well, not my kid, but at my kid's school with these other parents. And one of the counselors was talking about, you know, what is it that you parents want to see from, from us as teachers, like what is the end result? What kind of things would you like is to instill in your kids? And the Japanese lady next to me said, I want my child to be an obedient child. And I'm like,

that's the last thing I want. I want my kid to be challenging authority. You know, so when she said that, I had to stop for a minute and like think about like, I want my child to be an obedient child. And like, on one level, I'm like, no, I don't want that. But on the other level, I'm like, Maybe she has a different definition of what obedience is, you know? And so it made me stop for a minute and think about how difficult it is for the teachers at my kids' school to like try to balance this, this idea of all these different cultures being together. And, you know, I would agree. I ended up raising my hand and saying, you know, I can I ask you what you mean by obedience? And she's like, well, I want him to be respectful to me and respectful to his parents.

And I'm like, well, I can get behind that idea of obedience, you know. And then I told her, well, you know, I can, I understand that. And I like that as well. However, do you think it might be worthwhile to have your child challenge the barriers that are in front of him? And, you know, we were able to come to some sort of agreement. It was clear that we didn't see things the same way. But both of us were able to have a conversation about what is possible and what the potential pitfalls could be for that. It's interesting to think about that from a cultural point of view.

Yeah, I used to teach English in Japan, and it's interesting in that the, I saw that in the classroom, that there's just no one ever wants to speak up or stand out. And even if you ask someone a direct question, they maybe just won't answer you. But if they're in a group, they'll answer the question collectively. And what's interesting, another interesting aspect of that is that most of the people in Japan are quite conformist, but those that aren't tend to be extremely creative. Like, they just fall out of the system. I know some really, real, like, video games came from Japan.

Think about all the stuff that they've invented. And I knew of some really cool musicians that were just not really, you know, conform to the system. And he was amazing, this talented singer-songwriter. And so I wonder if, like, that would somehow create even more creativity by making people more conform it because the people that fall out of that system are more creative. I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that those who conform almost give up their creativity. You know, it's almost like you have to get rid of creativity to conform because, you know, creativity is being different. Creativity is having the freedom to think and see the world in a different way. and if you become that which conforms, then you've just taken your blind. It seems to me, I don't mean that to be a pejorative,

but it seems like it is to me. Maybe that's just the way I was built, or maybe that's because I have had a lot of instances where I hate authority, and I've had to rebel against it, and I feel like it is crushing. You know, I don't know if that's an innate thing or something we learn along the way,

or that's the Western culture, or in our DNA. Maybe it's something, I don't know. Yeah. Hold on. Cut out for a second. Yeah, kind of slipping. I guess I would be more comfortable with authority if I thought the authority had an authority.

Yeah. You know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean. I despise authority because, like you said, they're full of shit, they don't know. No one knows better. I can read the same source material and I can read the same ideas about things

that other people can. You know, and let me, can I share a quick story with you about authority. So when, after my first child had died, you know, it was a pretty traumatic experience. And my wife's second pregnancy, we went to the doctor and we were considered, we were deemed a high risk pregnancy. So we had to go through all these extra bells and whistles. And when it came time, you know, a month before the pregnancy, my wife's doctor, you know, she says, okay, you know what, guys, we're going to go ahead and take the baby early.

And I says, oh, why? And she goes, what do you mean? Why? And I got kind of offended. I'm like, I mean, why are we taking the baby early? Why are you doing this? Isn't the last month the time in which the majority of brain cells are born? And can't you look at the literature and see that children that are taken premature tend to be like 10 IQ points less than the babies that aren't? And she's like, yeah, I can see that, George, but do you know what happened to your last child? I'm going to fucking strangle her. I'm like, yeah, I was there.

I was there. And do you know what? Like, why did my child die? And she just looked at me. She goes, well, we don't know why. I'm like, then why did you ask me that question? Like, why would you ask me that? Like, you don't know, but then you sit here and ask me and you want to take my child when you know what's going to potentially lead to having a worse life?

Like, what's wrong with you? Why would you do that? That's what I'm asking you. And she's like, well, you know, George, you know, we just want to make sure that that doesn't happen again. I'm like, well, how are you going to do that? That's what I'm asking. I'm trying not to get mad and like lash out because I want to know what she has to say. Like, well, how do we know that's going to solve it?

How do we know? She's like, well, we don't know. And I'm like, then why would we do it? Why? You know, and like that was the authority that like I could see her standing over me and just looking down at me. Like, you big dummy, you don't know anything. I'm a doctor. We got to take your kid early because your child died last time.

And I'm like, that makes zero sense. That means no sense at all. You want to do it. And then it hit me, oh, you feel guilty as a doctor. So you want to make sure it doesn't happen. You don't give a shit about me or my wife. You don't want that in your conscience. And like, I had gotten like three other opinions and talked to other people and they're like,

you know what, George, we don't know what happened. There's, there's, the doctor just wants to do that because. of her own reasons, you know, and there's no, I'm like, what are the chances of something like happening again? And they're like, we can't tell you, we don't know. Zero, 80? We don't know. There's no reason it should. But like, it's been that struggle with authority. And for me, that was just like, that was it for me. Even, I mean, through high school and stuff, I hated authority, but for me, that was it. I'm like, you know what? Never again. I don't care who, what doctor or what judge. I can read the same source material.

and come up with my own ideas. And I feel much better about the outcome, even if it's a negative outcome. At least it was my decision to do it. Instead of relying on some authority figure who, you know, it's just, it kills me, man. It kills me to think about it. At this point, I'm ready for AI to be the authority.

It's like, it sucks and scary as shit, but at least I know they're not motivated by ego and other greed factors. Because, like, okay, we need to have government, I guess. but I would be much more comfortable with government if I thought that they were answering to some authority that was not motivated by greed or ego. Yeah, what, how do you see that?

Yeah, do you think that's, like, what about the programmer? Isn't AI only as good as the people that program it? Yeah, at the end of the day, there's still a human touch, I suppose. So I probably never have this infallible judge. You can't have it. Let's get rid of all.

Yeah. She's like, do your own thing. I kind of feel sometimes, like, that's where we're at. Like, I saw a really good interview between Brett Weinstein, or one of the Weinstein brothers and Peter Thiel. And what they were saying in that interview, what Peter Thiel said that, you know, if you look around your room, the only thing that's changed in the last 50 years is the screen in there.

So if you took out your phone, your iPad, your tablet, your computer, your TV, that room would be essentially the same as it was 50 years ago. And further in that conversation, he said the problem with the future is technology never showed up. And this is coming from Peter Thiel.

But the problem is technology never showed up. We bet the farm, all the nation states, the politicians, the big companies, the investment funds, the retirement funds, they bet the farm on automation and technology.

and all these big tech companies, but never showed up. And so now we're sitting around like, okay, guess that didn't pan out. You know, like, there's, you know, when we were little, we saw the Jetsons, but we're supposed to live in the skypad apartments and a flying cars. 20 years ago, we were supposed to have self-driving trucks, you know, and like we always have the answer to all our problems is five years away. And then next year would be five more years away. It never shows up.

And if you look at the world erupting, into world, into a chaotic mess of populism or an outbreak of freedom, however you want to describe it, it seems to me that the money's been changed, it's changed hands, it's gone to the people that said they could do it, and they haven't delivered. And I don't see them delivering. I don't see AI coming. I don't see automation coming. I don't see the robot flipping burgers at the burger joint. I don't see the technology anywhere. Maybe it is, but, you know, maybe it's in bombs or swarming mosquito drones, but I don't see it. I don't see it in my neighborhood. Have you seen the robot attack dogs?

I have seen those. They used to go on the right on its back, shooting the targets. Where was that at? I don't know. I saw it last week. Boston Dynamics. George Orwell quote, the future humanity is a boot stepping on a human face. That's the kind of, I get when I see that. Yeah. Yeah, we have all these weapons of war. Okay, let me just take you down this little side rabbit hole right here

Who do you think are the kids? Do you think the people, some of the lead scientists today May be the children of Operation Paperclip? Which one was that? I don't remember. So Operation Paperclip was when we brought over like all the Nazi doctors. All the end of the USS. Werver von Braun, you know, they pretty much run NASA and stuff. Like whatever, what? I don't know.

It just makes me wonder, like, if those were the scientists that came over and developed everything, no wonder we have Boston dynamics. No wonder we have all these crazy robots and automated space weapons and stuff like that. It's crazy. Yeah. I don't know. I think total control is a goal. So, I mean, right now we're in that moment.

Like, how much fight do we have in us? Or are we just going to let it happen? Maybe there's no fighting it. Maybe total control and total transparency is the future. My concern is that it's transparency for the many, but not the few. Yeah. I was talking to this guy, Benjamin George, yesterday, and he told me that what he sees coming down the pipe is like the end of the nation state.

And if you look at the way in which corporations already rule the world, you know, they have the interlocking board of directors. They pretty much have a pretty firm grip on at least trade in a lot of areas. And they're able to sidestep the government regulations by much, moving, they're accounting to Ireland and they're being protected by the United States and, you know, really finding a way to finesse the laws of every country. And he says that the nation state is slowly becoming irrelevant. And what you're seeing is pretty soon you'll be able to buy a, you'll get the company dollar that's good at the company store, be it an Apple dollar, a Google

dollar. And, you know, there's little Google cities here and Apple cities there. It's kind of an interesting thought. Yeah, I mean, the foundation is for sure being laid as we speak. And we see it in a few different areas already. So one is that where you mentioned or what Benjamin George mentioned. And there is, for example, if you were following the WHO treaty votes of a few weeks ago, there was, you have, right? Tell me in, I'm not familiar with a lot of those.

No. I think it was a month or two ago. The WHO wanted to revise its treaty with all of the member nations in which the WHO would, their decrees would overrule the sovereignty of each nation in terms of any health crisis. And so anytime they say pandemic, well, then WHO can just do what they want to the people and the country has no say anymore. And there was a huge kind of upswell of rebellion against this. And it ended up failing. And there was a lot of people that signed on from each countries to say, no, stop here.

But they've tried it already. And they're going to keep trying it. And so WHO may be one arm of this new one world government that they're trying to make. Another arm of it is already happening in the realm of tax. So I think right now it's limited to the EU, but they're proposing a global or EU level minimum tax. And the reason I'm aware of this is because I'm a national of Switzerland and I'm keyed into the tax industry there. And Switzerland has been known for having preferable tax rates for people and businesses to attract business. And it's good for business.

And so there's a huge discussion in Switzerland now because they're, apparently decided to comply with this minimum tax rate. So they're trying to figure out how to balance that with the needs of the country. And I think they've agreed to do it. And then I think now it means there's a 15% minimum tax in this zone, which maybe is just Europe or we'll probably expand. And we know what happens with taxes over time. They almost never go down.

The 15% minimum is going to be 18 and then 20 and then 25 eventually. So that's one other area. And what is the third one? Oh, central bank digital currencies are coming. And this isn't my information, but I'm keyed into some people in the crypto space that are very well-networked to governments at all levels and banks and so forth. And what he's telling me all the time, he's like the crypto space is going to be destroyed eventually, except for a few regulated country-backed digital currencies, CBDCs they call them. They're already working on them.

A lot of the exchanges are going to be banned in his opinion from trading anything but these currencies. Crypto will exist outside of these currencies, but it'll be black market. You won't be allowed to use them to buy anything. And once they get rid of cash, you will only be allowed to use these to purchase things. have a complete transparent overview of everything that you buy. And it will be, I mean, you've seen these movies that kind of predict this. Like if you see movies from the future where they were walking around. I don't know if it's, what was it, Will Smith movie?

Like I Robot or I think it's one of them got like a chip in his hand and it shows his credits. And every time he buys a beer, he just scans his hand or something. They are working on that. There's already technology that they can implant in your hand that has your credit balance. So it will be complete control of what you do, what you spend. The World Economic Forum just happened a few weeks ago, and I forget who was speaking, but he's like, yeah, we're going to have a system where people can control or they can see how much their carbon footprint is. So all this is going to be implemented under the guise of the world, of climate change, of carbon footprint.

And every good is going to be associated with a carbon footprint. and if you spend too much, they're going to just shut you off. They're going to be like, nope, you've exceeded your credits. No more carbon footprint for you for this month. They will have that ability if this happens. So they don't necessarily need to create a government.

They can do it piecemeal through all of these different mechanisms. And that to me is the most terrifying thing, because the more, this is what was my focus in economics, the area of institutional economics, and the idea of voting with your feet. And the less ability you have to vote with your feet, the less freedom you have. So the more effort it takes to exit a jurisdiction, the less freedom you have.

So in the U.S. initially, states have more power. By and large, the federal power has taken over the states. So if you want to go to a jurisdiction where they have vastly different laws or taxes, you've got to leave the U.S. What happens when that government is the world? there's no place for you to go. Yeah, there's nowhere to run. Nope.

Can't over your feet anymore. You're stuck there. And so what I think is going to happen is we will probably have something like that, but we'll just have all of these like, and I guess the counter argument to saying, this is good for people because in the old times, we had tribes, we had nation states, we had these bands of whatever that were constantly at war with each other. So to create a bigger government means more peace in the end. and it probably will because there won't be direct conflict between sovereign nations,

but you're going to have more and more of these regional disputes. They're going to have more civil wars of like these little uprisings that's going to be quashed by whatever the global army is. And that's kind of my dystopian view of the world right now unless things change. Yeah, it makes sense. I can see it. It's like a minority report. You know, if you can have smaller and smaller groups, they're easier and easier to squash.

and look at. Yeah, and then you see the censorship, right? They're already censoring the dissent. And they're kind of like probably flagging people that I've been banned from LinkedIn a couple times because of some things I said and brought back. And, you know, there's something. The other scary thing I saw is that I think it was some senator of the U.S. warning about the ability to create DNA customized bio weapons in the future.

Wow. So they're going to be able to create a virus. that's just for George Monty. And they've, another thing I saw is with these COVID swabs that when people have to take the PCR tests, it's estimated that 10% of all the swabs taken were sold to other DNA companies to like collect.

So you can imagine a future where like not only you can't say certain things, but if you're too uppity, they can destroy your social credit. But they can stop it from spending. And in the worst case, they've got your DNA file. They can just have someone sneeze on you and kill you off. That's crazy to think about. Yeah, I mean, what's 23 and me?

Like, they've been doing it for years, you know? I did. I didn't know what I was doing. I was like, oh, this is cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess on some levels, personalized medicine may hold the power for longevity.

But, I mean, is it promising? or is it suffering? Do you really want to be bad? It's crazy to think about, man. Well, Kevin, I'm having an absolute blast, man. I've got to get down and hang out the fam a little bit. I'm sure you've got some things you've got to handle. But this is awesome, man.

I'm really thankful to get to spend time with you and talk to you. And hopefully we can make it a weekly thing where we can find a day to carve out and just continue to solve the most problems for everybody. Thanks again for having me. It's already the last one we did, it already resulted in a couple of book sales that people reach out and they said, hey, I saw your interview and I want to get your book. I'm super excited and I'm super thankful to have had you here to help build this and make this better because I really enjoy talking to you. And I think the audience enjoys talking to you as well. So thank you for that.

Yeah. Okay, man. Yep. All right. Enjoy time with your. We'll talk to you soon, man. Okay. All right.

All right. All right. See.