In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host talks with author and conspiracy theorist John McWhorter about the JFK assassination and why he thinks Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the 1963 shooting of President John F. Kennedy. They talk about conspiracy theories, the Warren Report, and whether or not there's any truth behind them. Also, the CIA is keeping documents from the public about the assassination of John Kennedy, and why that's a bad thing. Joe also talks about why he doesn't think it's irrational to believe conspiracy theories and why they don't work. And finally, why the CIA should release all the documents they've been holding back since 1963. Joe and John talk about why they think it would be a good idea to declassify all of the documents, and what that could mean for our understanding of the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories that have been floating around ever since. It's a good one, and it's worth the listen. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Hosted by Joseph McDade. Art by Mark Phillips and the Vigilante Crew. All rights reserved. Used by permission. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms using the hashtag and we'll be sure to feature it on the next episode of on our next episode. Thank you! if you leave a review and/or a review, we'll get a shoutout in next week's episode of the podcast. . thank you, Joe Rogans Podcast by Night, all thanks to John McReed all the best of your feedback is appreciated. by the Crew at by , all the Best Fiends , and all of your support is appreciated! and all the love and support is thanks to , Joe's Reviewed Joe's Backyard Podcasts by & much more! by: John McPhilett is by John McMcReed, John McCharity, the Good Morning Podcasts, and , and John McSwart, & of course, and Thank You, John Rocha Thanks, Joe, Jack, Joe, Sr. and the Crews in the Morning Show.
00:00:29.000Well, first of all, my argument is that it's not irrational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true.
00:00:37.000That it pays to err on the side of assuming more of them are true than actually are, then missing real conspiracy theories, and then that's a costlier error to make.
00:00:51.000The term conspiracy theory got thrown about.
00:00:54.000There was the first introduction of it into the zeitgeist was during the Kennedy assassination, correct?
00:01:00.000Yeah, well, around that time, right, before that, before World War II, really, conspiracy theories were kind of common knowledge.
00:01:08.000Everybody knew that things were going on behind closed doors, and it was just kind of commonly known, and we just got to try to figure it out.
00:01:15.000It didn't become really fringy until right after the JFK thing.
00:01:19.000It kind of got as a meme that you're crazy to think these conspiracy theories are true.
00:01:40.000It was just, I mean, even the Declaration of Independence, it's a conspiracy theory.
00:01:44.000It's saying, look, the British are doing this whole train of abuses and usurpations, and here's what we think they're up to, and here's what we think they want to do, and we're against that.
00:01:53.000It's printed right there in the Declaration.
00:02:16.000Oh, well, I have a whole chapter on it and we can get into that in a second.
00:02:20.000The twist about it where it seems like there was something up was that President Johnson was worried that if it looks like there's a conspiracy afoot with the Cubans or the Russians, that that could lead to a nuclear exchange.
00:02:35.000So we don't want the American people to think that this is some kind of vast conspiracy of the Russians.
00:02:41.000Have you gone back and forth on that at all?
00:02:44.000Or is it just something you've always believed?
00:02:55.000And then the Oliver Stone film, which floats every conspiracy theory there was in one package, and I thought, well, if 10% of this is true, it seems like there was something else going on.
00:03:06.000But then, you know, there were webpages posted of, like, here are all the mistakes in the film and here are all the counterarguments.
00:03:12.000And then I read Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and why all the evidence points to him.
00:03:18.000And then Vincent Bogliosi's book, Reclaiming History, which is like 1,500 pages long.
00:03:23.000And it dissects every one of the hundreds of conspiracy theories.
00:03:27.000Something on the order of 140 people have been accused and a couple hundred organizations have been affiliated with the JFK assassination.
00:03:36.000The problem is that there's no convergence of evidence to any other one than Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.
00:04:07.000It worries you because it makes people suspicious or it worries you because it points to their withholding information because that information looks bad?
00:04:17.000I would love to see the information, and I would change my mind in a heartbeat.
00:04:21.000What are your thoughts on the magic bullet?
00:04:24.000Okay, the magic bullet is not a magic bullet.
00:04:40.000So if you draw a line straight back to the sixth floor window of the book depository building, the bullet goes straight through his back, out his neck, into Connelly, through his arm, into his leg, and so forth, in a straight line.
00:04:52.000Well, you know the only reason why they had to come up with the theory that that one bullet did all that damage.
00:05:21.000Yeah, I have a picture of it in there.
00:05:22.000I know a lot about bullets, and one of the problems about bullets is there's never been a bullet that's gone through bone and shattered bone and gone through two different bodies and came out looking like that.
00:05:32.000That looks like a bullet that was shot into water.
00:06:05.000Even rifle bullets that are copper, because in California you can't use lead bullets anymore because condors and a lot of other Birds of prey, they eat the lead bullets and they get lead poisoning.
00:06:16.000Because, like, if there's an animal that gets shot and the hunter doesn't recover it, and then the condor or something else eats that, you know, some sort of a raptor eats that, then they get lead poisoning.
00:10:00.000So, you know, our sense is that big events, JFK assassination, Princess Di dies, 9-11, COVID-19.
00:10:10.000Counterfactually, if Oswald had missed Kennedy or just wounded him and he didn't die, would there be massive conspiracy theories about who he was?
00:11:41.000There's anecdotal evidence that shows that they supplied him with LSD when he got out of jail.
00:11:46.000Every time he got arrested for violating parole, these cops and these local sheriffs that had caught him were told that it was above their pay grade and they had to release him.
00:11:55.000Manson got out for multiple offenses after he was on parole, things that should have kept him locked up.
00:12:03.000There's some real good evidence that, you know, about MKUltra was a real thing.
00:12:08.000And that's an interesting conspiracy, right?
00:12:18.000That's where they were dosing up Johns when they would go to visit prostitutes and they would film them through two-way mirrors.
00:12:24.000You know, Jolly West was a part of that and he also was a part in some way, shape or form of that Manson family.
00:12:33.000Okay, but my point is that, let's say it was the mayor of Dallas that was shot that day, would there be vast conspiracy industry of books and films and so on?
00:12:47.000It doesn't seem right that a lone nut like Lee Harvey Oswald could have pulled this off, or that 19 guys with box cutters could have taken down the World Trade Center bill.
00:13:28.000So let's distinguish conspiracy theories from conspiracies.
00:13:31.000Conspiracies, by definition, are two or more people plotting in secret to gain an unfair, illegal, or immoral advantage over somebody else.
00:14:20.000It's not risky to assume a conspiracy theory is real when it's not.
00:14:24.000And so this is my argument, is that we've evolved this cognition to be very suspicious and paranoid about other people and what they're doing because, historically and evolutionarily-wise, in these small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers, anthropologists tell us there's a lot of conniving and cabals and so on.
00:15:10.000And you know that in times like that of great distress, people and eyewitness testimonies are some of the most unreliable because people are so blown away by the extreme moment that they can't really recall things correctly.
00:15:25.000Okay, let's just do another counterfactual.
00:15:28.000What would be true if this really was a conspiracy?
00:15:30.000Well, there should be some documentation somewhere.
00:15:33.000There is, and that's why they won't release it.
00:15:45.000I don't think they want to let anybody release that stuff.
00:15:47.000If I had to guess, it would be something like what the CIA was up to even more than what we know about, you know, overthrowing, rigging elections in South American countries, assassinating communist dictators.
00:17:13.000You know, I don't know if that's real good evidence.
00:17:15.000Juries are, you know, they're not the most...
00:17:20.000Well, there was a made-for-television BBC trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in absentia, in which Jerry Spence was his defense attorney in absentia, and what's-his-name was the prosecutor,
00:17:35.000the Reclaiming History, the Manson guy, the guy who put Manson away.
00:17:45.000Again, the jury, again, it's not a real jury, it's a made-for-TV series, but they presented all the evidence and they acquitted, I mean, they convicted Oswald based on the evidence as the lone assassin, because there was just nothing pointing to anybody else.
00:18:03.000There could be somebody else involved.
00:18:05.000But we need some evidence, at least some paper trail.
00:18:09.000Why in the Pentagon Papers that released all these top secret documents that Nixon tried to cover up and prevent from being published?
00:18:16.000There's nothing in there about, you know, the conspiracy to assassinate the CIA. Right, but they've stopped release of all of the documents about the Kennedy assassination.
00:18:25.000They keep postponing it decades and decades.
00:18:28.000My guess is probably the CIA was up to even more no good.
00:19:13.000But why would Jolly West go to visit the guy that killed Lee Harvey Oswald when he was the head of a mind control experiment for the CIA? Yeah.
00:19:21.000Again, this is what's called anomaly hunting, like any big event.
00:19:26.000We go searching for any little thing that's weird.
00:19:29.000Like, you know, the Umbrella guy, the Umbrella Man, Louis Witt.
00:19:33.000Well, there's a lot of that silly shit.
00:19:36.000But that points to be to this thing where people always try to look for connections.
00:19:41.000And I do agree with you that a lot of conspiracy theories are ridiculous.
00:19:45.000But a lot of conspiracies, as you said, are real.
00:19:49.000I don't know if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but I have a feeling that there were other people involved based on the evidence, based on a lot of it.
00:19:58.000And like Stone's thesis that the CIA military industrial complex and so on were involved because Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam.
00:20:08.000How come no one assassinated him from the military industrial complex?
00:20:11.000Well, that's only one piece that, I mean, his assumption that it was because of Them trying to get out of Vietnam was only one of the assumptions that they made.
00:21:27.000Where the FBI was sending in agents to act as social justice activists in American Indian movement, feminist groups, the Black Panthers, and so on, including blackmailing Martin Luther King Jr.,
00:21:44.000recording his sexcapades in hotel rooms.
00:21:47.000I mean, our government was doing this?
00:22:04.000I always forget that guy's name for some reason.
00:22:08.000But I talked to Mike Baker, who was formerly with the CIA. I use air quotes formally.
00:22:14.000He had investigated that for his television show and he said that is one of the weirdest ones because that guy was funded in some strange way.
00:22:23.000Like he was kind of a loser and then all of a sudden he had money and there was someone he believes was involved in aiding that guy to assassinate Martin Luther King.
00:22:35.000Again, so like we have the WikiLeaks, okay?
00:22:39.000Millions and millions of top secret documents.
00:22:41.000Why is there no mention of 9-11 as an inside job?
00:22:44.000Some documentation of somebody inside.
00:24:01.000Now, to be fair to the other side, you know, if you read about the development of the U-2 spy plane and the AR-71 Blackbird, you know, this was done in Burbank, near where you used to live.
00:24:14.000And that's right in the heart of LA. How did they do this for all those years and nobody knew about it, right?
00:24:20.000Well, they were acting on the interests of the government.
00:24:31.000So, again, like with the recent UAP sightings, What I want, my initial response is the SR-71 Blackbird was, before it was declassified, there were commercial pilots going, oh my god, there's something going 3,000 miles an hour,
00:24:51.000Well, actually, we did have something like that.
00:24:53.000So I suspect that some of these UAPs, I think in a decade or two, we're going to find out, oh, we had these incredible drones that could fly at these peaks.
00:25:01.000I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes.
00:25:08.000It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with no visible means of propulsion, no technology that we currently know is available could act in the way those things were acting.
00:25:21.000I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones.
00:25:49.000And that these people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a way like, you know, 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary.
00:25:58.000I wonder if those are super advanced drones.
00:26:01.000Another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, blurry, can't quite make out what's going on.
00:26:07.000Like the one that looks like it goes in the ocean comes back out.
00:26:10.000It's not clear that it goes in the ocean because the horizon in the ocean is so blurry, right?
00:26:15.000So I'm a member of this Galileo project at Harvard, run by Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department there.
00:26:28.000Particularly in the places where people like Graves say they—I mean, when Graves told you, we saw these things every day, it's like, every day, there surely must be high-resolution photos of these things.
00:26:39.000Those jets are not designed to take high-resolution video.
00:26:43.000They're designed to fight against enemy jets.
00:27:07.000But listen, the federal government, imagine they are running top secret programs using advanced drones and the technology that we're not currently aware of, right?
00:27:16.000And that the United States government has these.
00:27:18.000They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things.
00:27:23.000Right, but everyone has one of these in their pocket.
00:27:27.000Yeah, but you can't get digital video of something that's seven miles away moving at, you know, the speed of sound.
00:27:35.000You're not going to get digital video.
00:27:36.000That's what we want to do with the Galileo project.
00:27:38.000And according to Christopher Mellon, a guy who, you know, did work for the Defense Department, he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's aware of that are pretty spectacular that they don't understand.
00:27:58.000Just like the Blackbird, just like the Stealth Bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before they became public, why would they release all that information?
00:28:41.000I mean, the Russians had, you know, so 1945 was Hiroshima and 1949 the Russians, they stole our secrets, right?
00:28:49.000So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced drones that we have and the Russians and Chinese don't have, it's not likely they would not know the technology that we know, the physics, the aerodynamics and the engineering and all that, because they read the same journals,
00:31:52.000Pick up the widget on the dashboard and bring it back here.
00:31:56.000But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second,
00:32:20.000What is that thing that they have visual contact by multiple sources, and they tracked it, and they have video of this thing moving off at insane rates of speed?
00:32:36.000But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce, that's one of them.
00:32:47.000But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that.
00:32:50.000They always build on previous technologies.
00:32:52.000Right, but if you're talking about something from another planet or something from another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives in the water.
00:33:03.000And when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are operating with the most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are constantly being updated, and then when they update them,
00:33:19.000they start picking up these things, like Ryan Graves discussed on the podcast.
00:33:24.000Why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else?
00:33:29.000It depends on how you want to, like, pose the problem.
00:34:03.000Rather than going to a grand theory of visitation by aliens or the Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have or we have them and they don't have.
00:34:13.000I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something pretty close to that.
00:34:18.000There's nothing from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian drones that act anything like these UAPs.
00:34:25.000Surely they would use this technology if they had it.
00:34:27.000Well, we're assuming that those UAPs are military in nature and not something that they use to observe things.
00:34:36.000I mean, why would we assume that these things, if they're capable of behaving in this way and they're just some sort of a device that can travel at insane rates of speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or act in a military capacity?
00:34:50.000And you know there are UAP sightings over Ukraine.
00:34:54.000Yeah, but okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that showing that these were artillery shells and not what the other people said they thought it was, that it was like a drone or a plane or something weird like that.
00:35:07.000He showed that if it was what they thought it was, it would have had a much bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up, but it didn't, so these are artillery shells.
00:36:41.000Have you seen some of the new discussions based on the observations from the James Webb telescope that maybe the Big Bang Theory needs to be revisited?
00:37:01.000And we would assume that with more and more sophisticated ways of viewing the known universe, that we could possibly get some new data that would change our ideas of what the theory of the Big Bang theory or the theory of the universe itself would be.
00:37:16.000And that's one of the things that they're discussing right now.
00:38:02.000Because in an explosion, the initial explosion, the inflation in cosmology is really rapid, then it slows and slows and slows.
00:38:10.000So it was supposed to slow down in another 10 billion years or something and maybe collapse back on itself.
00:38:15.000And then they discover, oh my god, no, these Type II supernova, whatever it was, indicate that the expansion is accelerating.
00:38:22.000So there's this weird force, dark energy, that pushes it away.
00:38:26.000And dark matter is this proffered thing that explains why galaxies are held together.
00:38:32.000Because they don't have enough mass to hold them together in the structures that they are, as I understand it, and rotate it the way they're rotating.
00:38:38.000So there's something else we can't see.
00:38:40.000So when astronomers talk about dark energy and dark matter to explain these two anomalies, like how could this be, that's not an explanation.
00:38:48.000It's just a linguistic placeholder until we figure out what it is.
00:38:52.000So surely there is going to be some discoveries of some kind of new energy or some kind of matter that we don't know of.
00:39:07.000I mean, what kind of discovery would it take, in terms of UAPs, for you to revisit your position?
00:39:15.000And say it's highly likely that this is either something that we don't understand that we are observing that's come from somewhere else or something that we don't understand because it's technology that hasn't been released.
00:39:43.000Why is it so fun, though, to think that it's from somewhere else?
00:39:46.000It's so much more fun to think that we're being visited than to think that our government has some super sophisticated gravity-propelling drones that somehow or another violate our laws of space-time.
00:40:01.000Why is it so much more exciting to think that?
00:40:05.000I think it's an idea that it feels like we're not alone.
00:40:09.000And when you think about the narratives from different religions, that there's something, an agent, a person, a being, not just matter, not just the laws of nature.
00:40:52.000And that was really a reflection of...
00:40:55.000And by the way, in the climax scene where the authorities kill him and they put him in the tomb, it's like the crucifixion of Jesus, and they put him in the tomb, and three days later, he's resurrected.
00:41:07.000Well, and then she goes to the robot and says, what you just said, and he goes there, burns a hole into the morgue, takes the body, takes it back to the spaceship, lays it on that slab, does some stuff with the lights, and he comes back to life.
00:41:41.000Yeah, there was a Breen Censorship Board that censored films that said, you know, you can't defend religious people is one of their criteria.
00:42:09.000They had censorship boards for science fiction, but they didn't for vampires.
00:42:12.000Well, I mean, even Star Trek, the original series, I mean, Roddenberry had to sneak in a lot of anti-Vietnam War commentary through these characters and had to be careful of how they...
00:42:23.000They were, you know, kind of presented because censorship boards are like that.
00:42:27.000You know, Captain Kirk, you know, he always got the woman, but, you know, you never saw anything, right?
00:42:32.000But that's just how things were back then.
00:42:34.000I didn't know that they would have a censorship board that would say you can't offend religious people by saying that aliens have the power to bring things back from the dead.
00:42:44.000Right, because there it kind of secularizes God.
00:42:47.000So in this scenario, I call it Schirmer's Last Law.
00:42:51.000It was one of my Scientific American columns.
00:42:53.000Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from God.
00:43:06.000They'd be able to engineer life forms, probably even engineer entire planetary systems to create Dyson spheres to capture all these fantastic scenarios.
00:43:15.000That would all be possible if you had sufficient time and intelligence.
00:43:20.000How would that be any different from what religions think God is?
00:43:24.000Wasn't there some sort of a recent experiment where they created an artificial life form?
00:44:01.000Yeah, I mean, and now extrapolate, go from here to 100,000 years of technology as long as we don't blow ourselves up or have a super volcano kill us all.
00:44:11.000Scientists from University of Cambridge have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of all other organs of the body.
00:45:02.000Assuming we live our lives long enough.
00:45:04.000So if you think of a life form that exists out there, you know, millions of light years away that has achieved this sort of advanced technology, Do you think that they would want to be visiting us and be interested in us with our nuclear power and all of our chaos and our territorial behavior and the fact that we have these thermonuclear weapons and we're pointing them at each other?
00:46:39.000And when that's not done, we have all kinds of problems, like the replication crisis in psychology and medical science over the last decade or so.
00:46:47.000Some significant two-digit percentage of these experiments can't be replicated.
00:46:51.000Even though they went through peer-reviewed professional journals and they were done by professional scientists at real universities and so on, So it's hard to know what to believe.
00:47:02.000There's also a problem of basing science on falsified studies, like the Alzheimer's issue that they're dealing with now.
00:47:09.000The whole amyloid plaque thing where they found out that a lot of...
00:47:14.000I don't want to butcher this because obviously I'm not a scientist, but there's a series of Alzheimer's drugs that were based on research that was falsified.
00:47:28.000And this is a terrible thing for people that have invested their health in these medications, people that have promoted these medications, that this was all based on falsified data.
00:47:40.000Or how about the- Find that, because that's pretty fascinating.
00:47:44.000Because that, here it is, this is a legitimate conspiracy.
00:47:48.000Neuroscience Image Sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer's articles threatening a reigning theory of the disease.
00:47:56.000That's terrifying to find out that the people that are responsible for doing these experiments falsified.
00:48:03.000Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom.
00:48:12.000A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease called semifilam.
00:48:21.000The drug's developer, Cassava Sciences, claimed an improved cognition, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid beta, a hallmark of Alzheimer's.
00:48:34.000The attorney's clients, two prominent neuroscientists who are Also, short sellers who profit if the company's stock falls believe some research related to simulflam may have been fraudulent according to a petition later filed on the behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
00:48:50.000So this is a huge scandal in medical science.
00:49:09.000Rare that a journalist from the outside discovers that he's usually a grad student or something that's suspicious of what the mentor professor is doing.
00:49:32.000There was another big meta-analysis on SSRIs, the antidepressants, showing big massive meta-analysis.
00:49:39.00050 years we've been prescribing these SSRIs for depression, and they do no better than nothing or just chance or just talking to friends or whatever.
00:49:49.000Well, also that this idea that it's a chemical imbalance of the brain is not based on science.
00:49:56.000Yeah, well, it's based on something, but it's probably incorrect science.
00:50:59.000So now there's a movement afoot to kind of have scientists say ahead of time, post on these websites, this is the experiment I'm going to do.
00:51:13.000So then you avoid the file drawer problem where you only publish the successful ones, the rest go in the file drawer that are not successful.
00:51:20.000I mean, a lot of major journals will not publish replication experiments.
00:51:27.000Well, this is a problem because, again, if you have this theory and no one can replicate it, but no one wants to publish the non-replication because it's not interesting, then you can go down this rabbit hole of an error perpetrating for decades.
00:54:49.000I think there was discussions about doing it because there was one particularly wacky mother, but it doesn't seem that there's any proof that they put a litter box in there.
00:54:57.000The reason why I was interested in it and willing to entertain it was...
00:55:02.000It was about 10 years or so ago, we went to, there was a UFC in Pittsburgh.
00:55:07.000And when we went there, as we landed where we're driving from the airport to the hotel, we see all these people with mascot outfits on.
00:55:27.000So they were at bars and on the streets, and it was like a get-together.
00:55:30.000They used to do it in San Diego, but at the time, San Diego was a little bit more conservative, and they were having a hard time doing it, so they moved it to Pittsburgh.
00:55:37.000And this was the year they moved it to Pittsburgh.
00:55:42.000The hotel, the guy who was working the front desk was saying how crazy it was that these folks were asking for their food to be delivered in bowls on the ground so they could eat it like animals.
00:56:19.000Out of all of my searching, I could only find one poster, one guy who said he had used a litter box.
00:56:28.000So this one person who was saying that he thought it was kinky and he liked to use it, he, they, it, them, whatever, liked to use a litter box.
00:57:48.000There is a report from ABC, though, where they went and talked to a bunch of younger kids and parents that were having a meeting, and they're like, our kids like to dress up and talk this way.
00:57:56.000But you should see how different they are when they do it.
00:57:58.000They went from being very reserved to outgoing.
00:58:01.000Right, because it allows them to, when they pretend that they're a wolf, they can just be freer.
00:58:07.000So maybe they're very shy, introverted kids, and this allows them some form of escapism.
00:58:15.000Like you said, like a cosplay type thing.
00:58:17.000Yeah, but so what happens then is—so there's an element of truth to the—and this is true with conspiracy theories—a little element of truth, and then it gets blown up into something else.
00:58:27.000And then if it gets politicized, oh, that's just the sort of thing those libtards would do in these schools of trying to groom our children.
01:00:14.000Okay, you can always find some weirdo who's a Satanist, right?
01:00:18.000And maybe they do some weird things with a cat or something, or a cat gets mutilated by a dog, and then you got the Satanist, he's over there, and then the mutilated cat was found over there, there must be some connection, and before you know it, you get this spiraling moral panic.
01:00:33.000And it was similar to the recovered memory movement in the 90s that when we started in 92, we started covering this because it was the same kind of thing where these were adult, mostly women, going into therapy for various issues, sleep problems, depression, weight issues, whatever.
01:00:48.000And the therapist who had bought in all this Freudian stuff that you suppress, you suppress your memories, and we can get them out as if memory is like a video recording, and you can watch it on the little Cartesian theater of your mind as if there's a little homunculus in there looking at the screen.
01:01:06.000Okay, play back for me what your father did.
01:02:19.000And it was a similar situation where they were using hypnotic regression.
01:02:24.000And the problem was the way the questions were formulated and the way these hypnotic regression sessions were conducted, a lot of people thought was extremely unscientific and in fact could have introduced these ideas.
01:02:37.000Because one of the things was like, oh, this is a uniform tale that everyone keeps telling.
01:02:42.000Okay, well, do you have the same person asking these people these questions?
01:02:47.000And do they have a vested interest, like perhaps maybe they're publishing a book?
01:02:51.000Do they have a vested interest in trying to make this a narrative?
01:02:55.000And it turns out, yeah, that seems to be the case, that they were asking these people these very leading questions and taking them through these hypnotic regression sessions, and they were all convinced that they were abducted by aliens.
01:03:09.000Yeah, the pioneering researcher on this, Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who studies memory, she made famous these studies of where you show people like a video of a car accident, and you ask one group, how fast would you estimate the cars are traveling when they collided?
01:03:24.000Second group, how fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they smashed into each other?
01:03:28.000The latter one gets a higher estimated speed.
01:03:31.000Or you show subjects a little 30-second video clip of somebody sitting on a park bench and some guy walks up and grabs her purse and runs off.
01:03:57.000Her most famous research was on the lost in a mall.
01:04:00.000So these are adult subjects who had been screened, and they know that when they were children they were never lost in a mall, right?
01:04:08.000But they introduced, amongst many things that they were talking about, do you remember the time when you were five, because your parents told us about this, when you were lost in the mall?
01:04:20.000And then I remember hearing the voice of my mom, and then this guy helped me, and he was wearing this flannel shirt, and he took me to my mommy, and so on.
01:04:27.000And so they just make up this complete...
01:05:04.000But if he's really innocent and you find him guilty, that's really bad, right?
01:05:08.000So we have this kind of what's called the Blackstone ratio of 10 to 1. Better 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person be found guilty.
01:05:17.000And so the criminal justice system has the same problem.
01:05:20.000Before DNA and some of that forensic evidence, it was all eyewitness, and it's terrible.
01:05:26.000So the Innocence Project has, as you know, exonerated, I don't know, 300-and-something people, many of them on death row, for crimes they never committed.
01:05:35.000Even like forensic stuff you see on CSI, you know, the bite marks or the hair analysis of the fabric, even that's not very well tested and replicated.
01:05:47.000In fact, Josh Dubin, who worked with the Innocent Project, talked about that.
01:05:51.000He has a podcast on junk science and particularly discuss bite marks about how you can tell people that it was a bite mark from a specific individual and they'll go with it.
01:06:02.000And then you can show them that that absolutely is not the case.
01:06:05.000And, you know, this is not like DNA evidence.
01:06:11.000It's not like something that is absolutely 100% true.
01:06:15.000Even the polygraph, there's a reason it's not allowed in...
01:06:28.000If you believe it, you're not going to give up.
01:06:30.000Also, like, you have to have a very specific response to, like, this question.
01:06:34.000And everyone's response to stimuli and stress, they vary.
01:06:39.000Some people are going to react in a certain way, but that's not indicative of evidence like you can absolutely prove.
01:06:46.000Also, there was a woman who was convicted, I believe, in India from fMRI data of a murder because she had knowledge of the crime scene.
01:07:00.000And so, like, I discussed this with a neuroscientist in America and she was like, that is absolutely not evidence that that person committed the crime.
01:07:09.000But if you are in a trial and you have knowledge of the crime scene because they've told you this is the case, this is what they're saying happened, and then they use this fMRI data to show that you have knowledge of the crime, Well, of course you have knowledge of the crime.
01:07:25.000You're about to go to fucking jail for something you didn't do, and they're telling you, you know, it was Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.
01:07:32.000Like, oh, look, through MRI data, we can show she knows about Colonel Mustard.
01:07:37.000So I believe this woman was actually convicted.
01:07:40.000There are people, neuroscientists, trying to figure out how to use MRIs to see if you can see if somebody's lying.
01:08:52.000OJ was acquitted based on a conspiracy theory that the LAPD planted the bloody glove and the blood splatter and so forth, and the jury accepted it.
01:09:00.000Now, you know, the evidence is pretty overwhelming.
01:09:02.000He killed his wife and her friend, and there was no police tampering.
01:09:07.000There was the one guy, Furman, who was probably a racist, but it wasn't clear that he did anything.
01:09:12.000But my explanation is that in a way the jury said, yeah, maybe not this time, but the LAPD have done these sorts of things.
01:09:21.000And there's this great ESPN documentary series called OJ in America.
01:09:25.000And it's like six hours long and it tracks the history of the African American community post-World War II coming to Southern California.
01:09:32.000And how bad the relationships were between the LAPD and the African American community, particularly right in downtown LA. And they did plant evidence.
01:10:12.000And if he gets off, he's going to commit another crime.
01:10:15.000So we're doing the justice thing here by planning it.
01:10:20.000Enough of that has happened that it's reasonable for African Americans to be suspicious.
01:10:24.000Same thing with their higher rates of vaccine hesitancy now, recently anyway, because of the Tuskegee experiments, you know, where our government did do these things, right?
01:10:36.000The syphilis patients that were not treated when they could have been.
01:10:39.000Without their consent, without their knowledge.
01:11:03.000Her books are just first-class good journalism on that, where she tracked down.
01:11:08.000If you put a paperclip on the file, it means we're going to adopt this guy as one of our scientists before the Russians—these are German scientists—before the Russians get him, right?
01:11:17.000And a lot of these guys were doing chemical warfare experiments, biological warfare experiments, and, of course, Wernher von Braun with the V-2 rockets, the most famous of the paperclip experiments.
01:11:43.000That was a crazy one because they were just justifying it based on, listen, we're in the middle of a Cold War with Russia, and if we don't get these people, the Russians are going to get them.
01:11:51.000And yes, they are Nazis, but they're also very advanced scientists, and they have research that could benefit us and our rocket programs and a lot of our other scientific experiments.
01:12:00.000It's pretty wild shit when you find out that it's true.
01:12:03.000The guy who invented sarin gas, the German chemist, and he lived in...
01:12:27.000He was one of the great scientists of all time.
01:12:29.000He won two Nobel Prizes, one for peace, one for chemistry.
01:12:33.000And he was spied on by the FBI. And he was not allowed to go...
01:12:38.000Well, he was allowed to go collect his one Nobel Prize, but he couldn't go to some conferences because they thought he might be a communist and all this stuff because he was anti-nuclear war.
01:14:00.000Apparently those experiences were very abusive because they were studying what would happen if you give these people LSD and you emotionally and psychologically abuse them.
01:14:10.000And he had, according to his brother, all sorts of real problems with relationships and other human beings.
01:14:17.000Just a really damaged human being overall.
01:14:21.000Did you see Earl Morris' film, Wormwood, about the Frank Olson case?
01:14:39.000Yeah, so this was Frank Olson, one of the chemists that worked in the MKUltra program, but they dosed him.
01:14:46.000He's just at some bar and some club with the other CIA guys, and they said, hey, let's put some LSD. And then like 10 days later, he jumps out of a New York City high-rise window, or did he?
01:15:00.000And there was evidence that there was a couple of CIA guys that were there.
01:15:45.000Yeah, and so when you have someone like Alex Jones, when he was on your show, and I show a clip of this to my class actually last night, you know, where he's ranting on about NASA has this headquarters in San Francisco where they're dosing people to talk to the aliens,
01:16:01.000you know, he goes off on something, right?
01:16:03.000But that the CIA was dosing people with, you know, hallucinogenic drugs, that's true.
01:16:18.000And I was talking to Megyn Kelly about this because she came here to Austin, met with Alex, did a whole show when she was with NBC on Alex Jones.
01:16:42.000And then he spins it off into something else, and this is the problem with conspiracism.
01:16:46.000Well, it's also the problem with, like, if you're going to find all these different conspiracies, how much time do you have?
01:16:52.000How much time do you have to investigate all of these in a very thorough manner?
01:16:58.000It's almost impossible to get to the bottom of every single one of those and have an objective analysis of the facts.
01:17:08.000I was talking about Tom O'Neill, the book Chaos, where he covered Manson.
01:17:12.000He wrote that book for 20 years, 20 years on one case.
01:17:17.000He started off, he was hired to do a article, I forget what magazine it was for, but whatever publication it was for, it was the anniversary of the Manson case.
01:17:28.000So he was just supposed to do this little thing about the case, and so he's a really good journalist, and as he goes into this story, he keeps uncovering more and more evidence of fuckery, more and more evidence of There's a bunch of weird shit,
01:18:13.000Well, when you talk to like schizophrenics and they make those maps of all the connections, That people, this person met that person, who met that person, who met this person, who was in the same airport as that person in 1969. So therefore, they're involved with this, that,
01:19:23.000He was saying, he goes, you know, they're seeing that in Russia with a lot of the Russian, someone else was explaining this to me, that a lot of these Russian weapons, they're faulty.
01:19:34.000And one of the reasons why they're faulty is because there's corruption.
01:19:37.000And the people that are responsible for making them are skimming.
01:19:40.000They're taking, you know, you're supposed to spend X amount of money.
01:19:45.000And so a lot of the shit doesn't even work correctly because of corruption, because there's a bunch of people that are involved that are, you know, they're Profiting in an absurd way.
01:19:55.000His point was that the World Trade Center buildings were maybe not up to code?
01:20:19.000I was going to him, and he gives me this book, and he was very loony, and he gives me this book saying that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by Tesla energy.
01:23:08.000And the sea cell conch with a bomb in it where he scuba dives.
01:23:12.000I remember when they started the embargo with Cuba, when they wouldn't let you get Cuban goods, before they did it, Kennedy famously got boxes and boxes of cigars sent to him.
01:23:56.000But that's, you know, but that's always the case with people in power.
01:24:00.000They, you know, they'll come up with things that look good in terms of optics and like these are the measures that we're going to take and everyone has to abide by them except for me.
01:24:28.000You think they're just lying when they're making their campaign speeches and they have no intention?
01:24:33.000I don't think they know, because until you're the nominee, until you're the head nominee and it's close, are you allowed to know what's really going on, right?
01:24:43.000I mean, I think when Obama won, when he actually won the election, I think that's when they gave him the, whatever they call them, the white papers or the debriefing papers.
01:24:52.000You know, from the National Security Agency and so on.
01:24:54.000And I'm pretty sure it's like he had all this list of stuff.
01:25:05.000Remember, you wanted to impose the no first, what was it, nuclear weapons, no launch on warning, LOW, no launch on warning because it's too risky.
01:25:55.000And then point to the fact that every single president that's ever said they were going to do all these things, once they get in office and they get the information, Yeah, so here's what I'm conflicted about.
01:26:26.000He's schooling Tom Cruise on the stand, you know, son, we live in a world with walls, and on those walls are men with guns, and you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall, you know, and so on.
01:27:16.000Minimum laws because that's where things – yeah, okay, if you have 12 people, that probably works.
01:27:21.000But if you have 1,200 or 12 million people … Do you think Earth is going to be the new United States?
01:27:26.000Like the United States was a civilization or was a country rather that was started because people were fed up with the way things were run in Europe and they said, well, we're going to go over here and we're going to – Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and we're going to establish this land of the free.
01:27:42.000And, you know, it worked out pretty well for a long time.
01:27:45.000And, you know, as time goes on, it gets more and more complex and more and more fucked up.
01:27:50.000Is it inevitable that government bureaucracies just grow?
01:27:54.000They just can't not grow and they get more complex and you need more rules and laws and then you need guns and jails and...
01:28:08.000But it seems like if you started with 10 people at Mars and then you had 1,000 and then 10,000 and then 100,000 and then a million, you're going to end up with lawyers and courts and mediators and police.
01:28:31.000And we're avarice, and we're greedy, and that's who we are.
01:28:35.000I wonder if the solution to that is some sort of an integration with technology.
01:28:41.000I wonder if things like Neuralink and these new proposed technologies that will increase the bandwidth of the human mind.
01:28:49.000I wonder if those perhaps will come with an ability to read thoughts and minds and communicate telepathically, which is what I think ultimately...
01:29:00.000You know, we talk about the evolution of the human body and the human animal from lower primate to what we are today.
01:29:07.000We assume that it's going to be a biological evolution from here on out, but it might not be.
01:30:11.000If they're sentient and far more intelligent than us, it seems to me that that would be the thing that they would realize right away is a real problem with the programming.
01:30:18.000Like, why do we have all this nonsense, ego, and all these needs to acquire things and control things?
01:30:37.000This is my argument for why I don't fear making contact with extraterrestrials.
01:30:41.000This is the argument that we shouldn't try to communicate with them or send signals out because look what happened historically when an advanced civilization came in contact with a less advanced civilization.
01:30:51.000They enslaved them or genocide or so on.
01:30:53.000But I don't think you could get to the point where you have an interstellar civilization and you have Dyson spheres and you have massive super advanced technology and so on and still be colonials, enslaving people, genocidal maniacs.
01:31:10.000I don't think you could get there with that kind of attitude.
01:31:14.000Do you think that the only thing that separates the biological organism from this advanced creature, the only way to get past that, because everything that evolves biologically evolves in a state of competition, right?
01:31:29.000I mean, there's a reason why it advances and improves its natural selection and there's a lot going on there.
01:31:38.000Would that be the only way that we could get past all of these bizarre human emotions and ego and greed and need is to separate ourselves from biological evolution and become...
01:32:22.000You know, we just kind of learned to channel our inner better angels and kind of suppress our inner demons through not just laws, you know, top-down laws you probably have to have.
01:32:36.000But, you know, we don't really need laws now to prevent slavery from happening.
01:32:40.000I mean, it's just pretty much nobody, no government's going to say, hey, I got this great idea that's enslaved people.
01:32:49.000And that has driven a lot of human progress without having to do the biological evolution or genetic engineering or reprogramming.
01:32:58.000Because you don't want to take out somebody's sense of I don't know, pride and avarice, and I want to be successful, I want to make money, I want to be creative, I have these drives.
01:33:31.000I think that is happening and that's one of the reasons why, you know, when things happen like this sort of social progress movement and, you know, social justice movement The reason why I think that's a good thing is like maybe it goes too far in some ways,
01:33:50.000but the direction of it, the thought process behind it is making the world a fairer, better place, which I think is ultimately good.
01:33:59.000And there's going to be like, it's not a perfect thing because humans aren't perfect.
01:34:02.000So it's like there's a wave, the ebbs and the flows.
01:34:04.000There's an overreach and then there's a correction.
01:34:07.000And I think that if you look at Pinker's work, and one of the pushbacks on Pinker's work is, you know, Pinker says that the world is safer, it's better in so many ways now than it's ever been before.
01:34:16.000How can you say this when there's all this crime and injustice and racism and murder and rape and thievery and all this shit that's going on?
01:34:24.000That's not denial of all the horrors and atrocities that exist currently.
01:34:28.000But if you look at the grand scale of what the world was like during Genghis Khan's reign versus the world is like today, it's far safer than it's ever been before.
01:34:38.000This is the best time to be alive ever, even though things are still relatively fucked up in comparison to utopia.
01:34:48.000Utopia is a terrible goal to have because we're never going to get there.
01:34:51.000And also, it gives a perverse calculation that, you know, we can achieve this perfect society in which everybody is happy forever if it weren't for those people right there.
01:35:12.000So how about just, so this is what Kevin Kelly calls protopia, not utopia, just make tomorrow just a little bit better than today, just incremental, just a tiny bit, and just goes two steps up, one back, okay, adjustments, boom, boom, boom, and then in a century,
01:35:27.000you know, things are twice as good as they were.
01:37:05.000Well, it's normal for, you know, no one's going to say, if I went over to someone's house and they're like, these gays want to get married, like, what do you give a fuck?
01:38:22.000Yeah, I was reading a review of this book on witches and just one town in New England and what life was like there.
01:38:30.000And it's just this miserable life where people are dying and diseases and the Indians are going to get us and the drought and this winter storm.
01:38:39.000And, you know, pretty much life was nasty, brutish and short.
01:39:50.000So you could have, I could see, like, one, say, teenage girl does this and hallucinates and is chattering in voices or whatever, and then her other friends, they start mimicking it, sort of a social contagion.
01:40:01.000Like, it's fun, and then it's like, oh, it's more than fun, and then the adults go like, oh, what's going on here?
01:40:06.000And then you have, like, a half a dozen elements going on there.
01:40:57.000It's like, no, there must be something behind it.
01:40:59.000And if you don't have an explanation, no meteorology to explain weather and no germs theory of disease to explain disease and so forth, what have you got?
01:41:24.000And that was the thing, they would drown a lot of witches and they would say that if they drowned them, if they lived, clearly they were witches.
01:41:39.000And there's a lot of research on this, also accusing people who are marginalized, poor people, women, and so on, who didn't have any power.
01:41:49.000So the magistrates, people that had power and money that could have lawyers, whatever, they escaped.
01:43:15.000You've got to denounce your neighbors as communists before they denounce you, or as non-communists, they denounce you, right?
01:43:23.000So that's the fear during mass hysteria, that people are going to turn on each other because they're afraid that someone's going to come after them, so they come after you first.
01:43:35.000I'm going to get somebody on my campus and they used the wrong pronoun or the wrong adjective and I'm going to denounce them before I get denounced and make the mistake.
01:43:51.000Yeah, so you get this thing called pluralistic ignorance or the spiral of silence where everybody thinks everybody else is thinking something when, in fact, nobody's actually thinking that.
01:43:58.000The classic experiment on this was binge drinking on college campuses.
01:44:02.000So you ask individual students by themselves, how do you feel about this?
01:44:06.000I don't really like it, but I know everybody else likes it.
01:44:08.000So everybody thinks that everybody else likes binge drinking, but actually, individually, they really don't like it.
01:44:14.000But I got to do it because everybody else is doing it, right?
01:44:16.000So this in part explains the kind of sustaining of the Nazi regime.
01:44:22.000Everybody – well, initially Hitler was popular because he stopped the depression and got the economy going again and so on.
01:44:30.000And then he starts escalating and everybody thinks, well, I'm not too happy about this policy and the thing with the Jews, I don't know.
01:44:36.000But everybody else seems to be going along with it.
01:44:38.000And then by the time you get to the point where somebody needs to speak up and say, you know, this is wrong, they have concentration camps for those people.
01:44:47.000And they did it in a way that you could see your neighbor being hauled out and think, I'm keeping my mouth shut.
01:45:14.000But any one of them by themselves that speaks out, you know, they may just get kicked off the team or get punished by their peers or whatever.
01:45:21.000It would really take, you know, how do we reverse this trend we're in?
01:45:25.000It would take all of them together saying, we're not going to compete, all of us, if that person comes in here.
01:46:29.000You know, I don't think people should be discriminated against for whoever they want to identify as or whatever, but there's conflicting rights.
01:46:36.000And, you know, my favorite quote from Thomas Sowell, there are no perfect solutions, there's just compromises.
01:46:42.000You know, yes, trans rights, but women's rights, you know, women's bathrooms, but the guy wants to go, no, no, you can't, no.
01:46:49.000You just can't have everything, right?
01:46:51.000Right, you can't have everything, because also you're going to have people that take advantage of, you know, the current cultural climate that might be sexual predators.
01:51:17.000So it's, I think if you build it, they will come.
01:51:19.000And if there are that many trans female, you know, trans women MMA competitors out there, maybe if they developed a division and they had that, maybe you would see a lot of competitors that would enter that and it would become an exciting division.
01:51:36.000But to make them compete against biological females, or excuse me, to make biological females compete against people who identify as female, I think is just insane.
01:52:32.000So we had, in 93, 94, 95, I had two women that were competing, Shawna Hogan and Muffy Ritz, and they were phenomenal athletes, just really tough as could be.
01:55:13.000What is that about human beings, though, that they don't want to speak out and that we're willing to accept something that we know is not fair because culturally that's an accepted thing?
01:55:24.000Well, part of it is fear of punishment.
01:55:26.000You punish the outliers, the people who speak out.
01:55:37.000So there might be some complex psychology there where I get this preemptive denunciation and also virtue signaling.
01:55:44.000Like if I stand out as being super virtuous, I'm going to get some points for that.
01:55:49.000You know, some of that, I think, is going on, you know, multiple factors.
01:55:54.000And, you know, we're in the middle of it now, I think, probably within five years.
01:55:58.000I mean, what, five years ago, no one was talking about, was it a Ricky Gervais bit about, you know, the use of the term, you know, a woman without a penis?
01:56:30.000But what about all the comedians down here that are cancelable?
01:56:34.000They're going to probably keep their mouth shut.
01:56:36.000Yeah, but the thing is there's a reward for speaking out and saying the things that everybody thinks but they're afraid to say, particularly with audiences.
01:56:49.000Like when you're anonymous in a crowd and you're having a couple of cocktails and it's dark and someone says it like, yes, finally!
01:56:56.000You see it in comedy clubs that people are taking chances because they're recognizing that it's rewarded to speak out and say these things.
01:57:08.000Another thing I think back to the kind of moral progress that we might be experiencing now is we've made so much moral progress.
01:57:15.000Today's young activists that want to do something to make the world a better place, well, you know, slavery, torture, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, done!
01:57:57.000Well, there's a march tomorrow, and we're going to go down there and we're going to voice our disapproval of the way African Americans are treated.
01:58:04.000Yes, I'm going to go down there and do it.
01:58:11.000I feel like I did a little something, even though it probably doesn't do anything.
01:58:16.000How do you think this stuff all plays out?
01:58:19.000Do you think eventually it's one of those things, like as we were talking about before, the ebb and flow of things that, you know, there's an overcorrection, and then things kind of bounce itself out?
01:58:49.000Is it really the numbers that we're now seeing, you know, spike, 2,000% spike in the last two years and these massive increases in the U.K.? Probably some of that is social contagion.
02:00:14.000But if it was just like, I'm just going to be a man and I'm not going to tell anybody, I'm just going to change the way I'm living my life.
02:00:19.000I think that would not be as interesting or rewarding.
02:00:23.000There would be no social, you know, reinforcement for that.
02:00:26.000So I think in part, again, multiple things.
02:00:44.000And he makes the point, and since he's a gay guy, he could do this, you know, that when he was a teenage boy, 13, 14, 15, he finds himself attracted to other guys and not women.
02:00:53.000And what if he was told at that time, you're not gay.
02:02:23.000But is it really a whole other category, right?
02:02:25.000So from an evolutionary biology perspective, if we really had more than two sexes, there would be like a billion, you know, of the third sex.
02:04:39.000It seems to be just an aspect of human beings.
02:04:43.000But again, going to moral progress, it is a clear sign of moral progress, the difference between when I was 11, my friend's dad, who was so angry that people were gay and they were getting married, versus today, where it's very accepted.
02:06:37.000I'm hoping that this is just a couple of far-out GOP candidates that are trying to appeal to their base by saying, you know, we're going to take away gay marriage, and by the way, we're going to get rid of contraception, too.
02:06:47.000We want women to just be in the bedroom making babies.
02:06:50.000I'm hoping that the GOP en masse says, no, no, that's not what we're about.
02:06:55.000But it is wild that in 2022 that's still up for discussion.
02:07:11.000With moral progress, there's going to be an overcorrection.
02:07:15.000And that some people, you know, the outliers of the religious fundamentalists who don't want any progress, they basically want things to go back to like a religious fundamentalist version of what a Christian society should be.
02:07:33.000And there's some people that are out there, and it's not a small number.
02:07:42.000There's a new documentary out of, oh, a CNN film about him, in which this is a, he's got huge crowds, in which he's basically saying we need to return America, make America great again, but make America Christian again, is what he's saying.
02:07:54.000Well, he's one of those QAnon guys, too.
02:08:04.000And I had the gentleman on who created that and it just, what a fucking wild thing it is to see the actual people that created it and to see what a scam they pulled off and how weird it is that people just hopped on board and they really did think that there was some people working behind the scenes that were working for God and country and they were going to expose all these pedophiles and Satanists and...
02:08:34.000Do you think when people say, you know, they tell a poster, yeah, I think there could be something to the QAnon or Pizzagate or whatever, do they really believe it?
02:08:41.000I mean, the one guy did, Edgar Welch, who went to that Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria with his AR-15 and shot up the place.
02:08:50.000You know, if you really thought there was a pedophile ring, a crime going on, and the police wouldn't do anything about it, wouldn't you go there?
02:11:23.000With those poor people, and some of them that were Obama supporters, that just flipped over to, you know, now I realize they're the bad ones, and we're the good ones, and we're patriots, and it's crazy.
02:11:34.000Well, yeah, and there's entertainment value.
02:11:37.000These things are really interesting and fun to read about.
02:11:41.000Well, that goes along with all the other conspiracy theories.
02:11:44.000I went into, unfortunately, last night, I went down a rabbit hole of Bigfoot.
02:11:55.000There was a video that showed up in my YouTube feed, and I clicked on it, and then you know how YouTube on the right-hand side gives you, maybe you want to watch this?
02:12:05.000And so I forget what the initial video was, but I went three or four videos down the hole, and I got to a professor out of Oregon, and I've actually meldred him.
02:13:18.000But smart people and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons, right?
02:13:23.000So Dino Reinhold Mesner, the great alpinist that summited Everest, I think seven times without oxygen, considered the greatest climber of all time, a German alpinist.
02:13:33.000He wrote a book about Bigfoot, a Yeti, you know, because he's heard all about Yeti in the Himalayas, and he had told all the Sherpas, okay, look, if you see this thing, you know, just wake me up out of the tent.
02:14:08.000Black bears, from very close, from 20 yards away.
02:14:11.000I've seen them walk multiple steps on their back feet.
02:14:15.000Now, if you were looking at that through the forest, like a deep forest, I don't think it's a coincidence that the Pacific Northwest is where they sight a lot of them, because there's a rainforest out there that are so dense.
02:14:27.000The way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips.
02:14:30.000Like, seeing through the Q-tips, you can't possibly see.
02:14:32.000So if you saw a bear walking on two legs, Through like a couple of trees and then your mind starts going, oh my god, did I just see a gorilla or some sort of an ape creature?
02:15:10.000You know, those auditory illusions where they put the words on the top of the screen and they play the voice.
02:15:17.000You can't quite make out what it is, but when you see the words, and it flips back and forth, back and forth.
02:15:22.000So this works because when you can't quite tell what it is, then a cue, a prime, it's called priming, will direct your brain to hear one thing or the other thing, or see things.
02:15:33.000This is how these visual illusions work, right?
02:17:59.000It makes you wonder, like, was it Homo sapien females that bred with the Neanderthal males, or was it Neanderthal females that Homo sapien males?
02:18:12.000Well, given human sexual psychology and the differences between men and women and how indiscriminate men are compared to women, women are much more risk-averse about that.
02:19:26.000Yes, that there was these little three-foot-tall, and they don't really know what they looked like other than guesswork, but they think they were hairy.
02:19:33.000These hairy little three-foot-tall bipedal people-like things that were a separate branch of the evolutionary chain of primates.
02:20:09.000But that is one of those mythological creatures that until they found the Flores people, I think they found them in, I want to say it's the 2000s.
02:20:45.000So, even the age of satellite mapping, global positioning, there remains lost worlds where few humans tread, where species of animals unrecognized by science live.
02:20:59.000Karensi Seblat National Park in West Sumatra is one such place.
02:21:04.000The size of a small country, its dim, steamy interior has never been explored properly, and last month I returned to these jungles for the fourth time to track an elusive and yet unrecorded species of ape known to the locals as the Orang Pendek or Short Man.
02:21:48.000Before team left, one guide, Sahar, introduced us to an eyewitness called Pak Entis, who claimed to have seen an orang pendek in the garden area in April.
02:21:59.000He described it as around three feet tall, but with massive shoulders and chest.
02:22:40.000Given how many of these species went extinct, we're the only ones still around.
02:22:45.000Imagine if we had gone extinct and Neanderthals survived, would they be making spaceships and internet and computers?
02:22:54.000So it's a question of progress, evolutionary and cultural progress.
02:22:58.000Is there a certain inevitability to it?
02:23:01.000Which brings us back to the SETI question.
02:23:03.000You could have a planet in which life gets all the way up to the level of Neanderthal complexity with big brains and hands and art and so on.
02:23:11.000And maybe you never detect them because they never get to a stage where they make radio technology and space ships and things like that.
02:23:53.000You know, because they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years.
02:23:57.000But their toolkits don't get progressively more complex and their art doesn't get more complex like ours does.
02:24:04.000When we got to Europe and they went extinct and then you see that kind of progress.
02:24:07.000So it's an open question that no one knows the answer to.
02:24:10.000But it touches on the SETI thing because...
02:24:13.000Is there kind of a directionality to evolution where you end up with communicating technologically sophisticated civilizations or is it pretty random and you could get pretty far and then we'd never know that they were there?
02:24:25.000Well, I think if you think about the absolutely enormous numbers of possibilities, you probably have all of them.
02:24:32.000You probably have places where dinosaurs just rule and that's it, and shrews, stage shrews.
02:24:39.000Right, the impact never happened on that planet.
02:24:41.000Or you get to something where you have a completely different sort of an environment and things progress far more rapidly.
02:24:49.000And they also don't have the concern with asteroidal impacts or natural disasters.
02:24:54.000It's a much more stable environment on these planets.
02:24:57.000I mean, you think of the variability would be endless.
02:25:00.000Just the sheer numbers of planets you're dealing with.
02:25:04.000The question is, like, once we find life somewhere else, then it all becomes open-ended, right?
02:25:09.000Once we find absolute evidence that there is a life form on this other spinning body that's...
02:25:24.000I had an interesting discussion with Richard Dawkins one time about to what extent that aliens would look anything like us.
02:25:33.000Like the alien abduction stories, it's always this bipedal primate with the big eyes and the bulbous head and no ears and so forth.
02:25:40.000But one of the chances they'd look anything like us evolved on some other planet, right?
02:25:45.000They could be like octopuses or something.
02:25:48.000But Richard points out it may not be as random as I'm describing because Simon Conway Morris, who studies convergent evolution, Shows that based on physics of water, air, and land, to move around on the land, you've got to have something like legs.
02:26:03.000To move through the water, you have to have kind of a smooth, fusiform body to slide through such a dense medium.
02:26:08.000If you're in the air, you've got to have something like wings, right?
02:26:11.000And so you're going to have probably creatures with most of the sensory apparatus and brains on one end, waste disposal system on the other end, some arms and legs to move around on the land.
02:26:20.000You could get something like a bipedal primate.
02:26:31.000Could be, but then you also have the intelligent life that we know exists on Earth that doesn't have the ability to manipulate its environment like orcas and dolphins, which is fascinating because orca and dolphin have enormous brains.
02:26:45.000They have complex languages that we can't decipher.
02:26:47.000They have very sophisticated social systems.
02:27:22.000Although people like Jack Horner, the paleontologist, he thinks they're much more social and communicating in a social way than we've given them credit for.
02:28:44.000Yeah, we also had that experiment where he had the woman living in the home with a dolphin and she had to masturbate the dolphin to get it to pay attention.
02:28:52.000And so they killed the study once that came out.
02:29:15.000I just want to ask you directly, you know, when somebody takes LSD or one of the others and they feel like it's a door opening doors of perception into some other reality, is there really a reality or is it just brain chemistry?
02:29:53.000Dr. Rick Strassman on, who conducted the first FDA-approved studies on psychedelics with dimethyltryptamine, where they were IV dosing these people with it.
02:30:05.000And I actually had a conversation with Graham Hancock when I was in London this weekend, and he said that they're doing some at the University of London now, too, that are very fascinating.
02:30:14.000Where they're doing the same sort of thing, where they're using IV drips so they can prolong the DMT state for very long periods of time and then come back with these very similar descriptions of what's going on.
02:30:31.000If that is a doorway that opens up in the mind that leads you to another dimension or whether it's the human consciousness, the imagination, And the visual cortex interacting with these incredibly powerful psychoactive compounds that give a similar visual hallucination to everyone.
02:30:50.000You know, I don't think there's a way to know right now.
02:31:35.000How do we get out of the loop that it may just be brain chemistry and nothing more than that, or you're actually going somewhere?
02:31:41.000Have we hit an epistemological wall we can't know?
02:31:44.000I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do think that it would benefit you to try it just so that you could experience something that's so profoundly unique that it throws into question what reality is Because we think of reality as only being things that we can measure,
02:32:04.000things that we can touch, things that we can put on a scale.
02:32:07.000And you, as the editor of Skeptic Magazine in particular, you're very skeptical about things.
02:32:12.000But what you experience with the most potent of hallucinogens, whether it's mushrooms, whether it's psilocybin, or whether it's dimethyltryptamine, or any of these really, really potent ones...
02:32:22.000You experience something that seems so much more vivid than reality itself.
02:32:30.000Am I actually interacting with entities, or are there thoughts that I have in my mind that are so potent and profound, like things like creativity and love and emotions, that if you attach them to this psychedelic compound,
02:32:46.000they dance for you in a way that seems like they're an actual entity.
02:34:08.000Oh, there's this whole other world out there that I didn't know about.
02:34:11.000And here's what I'm worried about, Joe.
02:34:13.000If we were having this conversation 500 years ago, and somebody's telling us about dark energy and dark matter and quantum physics, and we'd be going, this is bullshit.
02:34:28.000Because I don't think, you know, it's...
02:34:30.000The thing about dimethyltryptamine in particular, which is what ayahuasca, that's the psychoactive compound, is that it's endogenous to the human body, and it's one of the most transient drugs ever observed.
02:34:45.000Your body brings you back to baseline very quickly, especially with the smoked version of DMT. The oral one is different, the ayahuasca, you know, because you're...
02:34:55.000Orally, it's broken down in the gut by monoamine oxidase.
02:34:58.000And so with ayahuasca is a combinatory medication where you're taking DMT from one plant and MOA inhibitors from another plant.
02:35:09.000And that's what allows you to take it orally.
02:35:11.000So it's a longer acting but less profound version in terms of like the flash of DMT is so much more vibrant apparently.
02:35:29.000I've only done DMT, which is the more potent version of it.
02:35:33.000The ayahuasca version I haven't done yet, but I'm doing it soon.
02:35:36.000And that is supposed to be the long term.
02:35:40.000And the thing about the benefit of the long one seems to be that the more you can interact with that state, the more you come back with life lessons.
02:35:50.000Well, there was something about the ayahuasca where you revisit dark memories and bad things in your life, and I'm not sure I want to go through that again.
02:36:58.000I don't mean this in that kind of postmodern way, but just maybe it is a postmodern way.
02:37:03.000Yeah, the way I've described it is imagine if you could have a conversation with God, absolutely real conversation with God, where you could go to a place and have a conversation with this Loving,
02:37:19.000knowing entity that knows all and sees through you and explains to you that we're all connected in this unseen cosmic way.
02:37:31.000And if you just address that in your life and treat people that way, you will live a better life.
02:37:36.000And you have this brief meeting with God and it's very profound.
02:37:39.000And then you come back and you have to sort of come to grips with what you've experienced.
02:37:48.000That you wouldn't be able to measure either.
02:37:51.000That feeling, that experience, how would you be able to prove to people that you had a conversation with God?
02:37:57.000You would just have to, like, learn from that experience yourself and somehow or another try not to slip back into the human folly and all the bad behavior and thought patterns that we've all existed with.
02:38:14.000Well, psychedelics in the most profound breakthrough way are like that.
02:38:19.000They are like having a conversation with God.
02:38:22.000And whether or not it's a hallucination or whether or not it's actually meeting and interacting with all knowing entities, the experience is the same.
02:38:32.000So whether it's real or whether it's an imagination or a hallucination, the profundity, the profound nature of the experience is the same.
02:39:10.000Yes, but these things are not measurable, and that's one of the more interesting things about them, that these psychedelic experiences are not measurable, and they're very personal, and they're very profound.
02:39:21.000And I don't think it would hurt you at all.
02:39:31.000What if somebody had one of these trips way back 5,000, 10,000 years ago and said, I talked to God, and they did in their head.
02:39:37.000And other people, you know, like that Ricky Gervais movie, The Invention of Lying, where he comes out and they think he talked to God and he knows.
02:39:46.000And it's like, oh, because he can't lie, right?
02:40:14.000And he was a scholar who was assigned to be one of the people to deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
02:40:19.000And after 14 years of working on it, it was his belief that the Christian religion was really initially about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
02:40:31.000But, you know, good luck trying to decipher that and find out if it's right.
02:41:06.000These are kind of conflicting conversations I have with myself.
02:41:08.000I've changed my stance on religion over the years in that I think that the real benefit is that it acts as a moral scaffolding for a lot of people.
02:41:17.000And whether or not those things are true, that clearly, whether they're true or not, whether the origin was actually the Word of God, Clearly they've been affected by human beings.
02:41:28.000When you read things in the Bible that treat women as second-class citizens and condone slavery and talk about murdering people for disobeying, clearly the work of man is involved in there somewhere.
02:41:43.000We know people are full of shit and we know that they lie in order to To prop up their better interests.
02:41:54.000And there's clearly some of that in religion.
02:41:57.000But there's also a moral scaffolding involved in religion that seems to be very beneficial to some people because it allows them to live their life with a structure that they think is for the greater good.
02:42:13.000Yes, if you think, well, what's the meaning of all, in 14 billion years, there'll be no universe or whatever it is, then what's the point, right?
02:43:14.000You were talking about this earlier that a lot of the, like, even, like, the woke attitudes that people have and a lot of the progressive dogma that people talk about...
02:44:35.000Because we get our truths in part socially, like other people guide us in our youth and professors and our teachers and books and experts, and we determine what's true in part by what other people believe.
02:45:24.000I always point out to Christians, the theologians that I debate on, the resurrection really happened, here's the arguments, here's the six best arguments, the empty tomb, Mary was there, and then the body was gone, and this and that, and this finger in the side, and whatnot.
02:45:38.000If these arguments are so good, why don't Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah who was crucified and resurrected?
02:45:44.000Well, if they understood the arguments, they would know—it's like, they understand the arguments.
02:45:49.000These are smart rabbis that know a lot, right?
02:45:52.000It's that just not—that's not their truth.
02:46:19.000So I do think, again, if you were chronically frozen and came back a thousand years from now, and you found out all this stuff that we're talking about, oh, this was this, that's the explanation, oh...
02:47:11.000Well, it's also, if you think about this stage of evolution that we currently exist in, we think of this as the pinnacle.
02:47:17.000But if you went back to the early hominids and you tried to express any of the thoughts that we have today or looked at the civilization that we've created, the cities, the flying airships and the satellite images and the fucking video flying through your cell phone to someone in New Zealand instantaneously,
02:47:36.000all of it is witchcraft and voodoo and chaos.
02:47:39.000If you keep going, if we keep going in whatever...