In this episode, the boys talk about Blade, a new game from Kerosene Games designed specifically for the iPad and touch screen devices. Also, we talk about the new iPad 8-inch tablet, and why we don t want to buy it. And finally, we discuss what a cowboy really is and what a cowboy is not. This episode is brought to you in part one of a two-part mini-series that will be released every Monday night on the Apple Podcasts app, starting on January 1st, 2020. Stay tuned for the second half of the mini series, which will be available on all major podcast directories starting on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2020, starting at 8 PM Eastern every Tuesday night. If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review! We appreciate all of the support we ve gotten so far, we really appreciate it. Thank you so much for all the love and support, and we can t wait to do more of this in 2020. XOXO, Brian and Matt Xoxo - P.S. Sorry about the audio issues, we re still figuring it out. We re working out the kinks in this one. We ll figure it out, but we ll get it out next week. - Matt and Brian - XOXOXO - Matt - BONUS CONTENT: Blade, Blade, Slinger - Blade, the game we re talking about in this episode - Blade - the new game that's coming soon! - We ll be talking about cowboys, cowboys and Indians, and cowboys - we hope you like it - and other shit like that we like it - and we re not sure what cowboys really are - we re all cowboys - we ll talk about it (but we re just talking about it, but it s cool, right? xoxo - we love you guys, we ll see you soon. We ll see y'all soon, guys. -- Brian & Matt -- -- - Brian - Brian --- Matt :p - Jake Jake -- Jake - Kevin Mike Chris Joe Jack Josh Ben Chad Tom Ryan Evan Jeff John
00:00:51.000We're never going to sell you dog shit.
00:00:52.000We're never going to sell you something that's not good.
00:00:54.000We've been offered a lot of different things that we didn't agree with, that neither Brian nor I thought were Interesting or just, you know, stuff that it just didn't seem like it was something that we should be endorsing.
00:01:08.000We're trying to only endorse shit we would use and stuff we believe in.
00:01:13.000And this Kerosene Games is a brand new startup and they have games that they're developing specifically for iPads.
00:01:21.000And for iPhones and high-end Android devices starting in February.
00:01:26.000And what it is, is a lot of the games, especially like really high-end, big, beautiful games, a lot of them, they start out making them for consoles or they start out making them for a PC. And then they port it over to an iPad.
00:06:08.000In Vegas, this chick was telling me that they took the real technology from that bracelet and they incorporated it into their own, but that bracelet was ripping people off, but this shit works.
00:06:34.000And if you truly feel like you've been gifted with this fucking rubber band around your wrist that makes you move better, you're gonna start thinking like a person who moves better.
00:06:43.000Because that's a big part of what's fucked up about you, alright?
00:06:59.000You can look up all the different various ingredients and the history of human use of these ingredients, including things like memory tests.
00:07:07.000There's a lot of shit that people have learned about the efficacy of nootropics.
00:07:13.000And the weight of evidence clearly sides on the idea that Vitamins and nutrients we know affect human performance.
00:07:24.000We know they affect your body's ability to recover, your body's ability to be nourished in a way that allows it to move and function and operate at its optimum levels.
00:09:55.000Fringeology is your book, and dude, when Matt Staggs, our publicist, requested you or suggested you, I was so all over this, because this is so right in my wheelhouse of shit that I enjoy.
00:10:12.000Bullshit and stuff that might not be bullshit, you know?
00:10:16.000And there's a lot of both going around.
00:10:53.000And people are like, oh, you're attaching that to it.
00:10:56.000This is a person you think about all day.
00:10:58.000Sam Harris had some very logical points.
00:11:00.000And I agree with him, absolutely, for the most part.
00:11:03.000But there are specific isolated instances where you feel something and then something happens, where you know someone's looking at you.
00:11:12.000Rupert Sheldrake did a controlled study In which he had people list four people who were present in their lives, somebody who might in fact call them.
00:11:23.000And then for, I forget how long a period, it was a week or two weeks, something like that.
00:11:28.000They were supposed to, any time the phone rang before they answered it, think of which of these four people it was.
00:11:35.000And they thought of the correct person at a rate higher than chance, significantly higher than chance.
00:11:44.000And I don't have all the numbers in my head right now, but it ended up being as statistically significant a fact, right?
00:11:50.000So instead of being right when it was one of those four people one out of four times, they were right far more often.
00:12:28.000Because your purpose initially was kind of to disprove a lot of this stuff.
00:12:31.000Yeah, and I have to tell you, the chapter on telepathy in particular scared the hell out of me because I had gotten so used to hearing the skeptical line, there's no evidence, there's no evidence, there's no evidence, that I really expected to find no evidence.
00:12:59.000I thought I'd be ostracized within the profession of journalism, you know, for saying this.
00:13:03.000But the fact is there's a really high level debate going on between really smart people about the proper way to slice and dice these studies in terms of analyzing the statistics that are generated.
00:13:15.000And we can't at this point really be sure whether or not psi, as they put it, that's the whole field of telepathy, whether or not psi exists.
00:13:24.000But there's a lot of really strong evidence that would suggest it does.
00:13:29.000A couple of the leading skeptics, Chris French, Richard Wiseman, have both allowed that by the standards of any ordinary science, telepathy is proven, right?
00:13:40.000So if they were just judging kind of a pharmaceutical and looking at the same sorts of numbers that these guys are generating, they would say, okay, something's happening here, right?
00:13:51.000But because it's a, quote, extraordinary claim, we don't understand the physics of this, what the mechanism would be that would allow for telepathy, we need greater evidence.
00:14:00.000Well, when you say that it's been proven, how so?
00:14:04.000Well, again, this is Wiseman in French who I'm quoting, but they would say that, like, say something like the Gansfield test, if you're familiar with that.
00:14:15.000They'll have, there's many different ways to set it up, right?
00:14:19.000But one of the ways to set it up is you've got a person who is the, one of the test subjects has halved ping pong balls put over their eyes, right?
00:14:32.000They have white noise being pumped into their ears, and they're put into a very comfortable chair where they're just sort of kind of suspended.
00:14:41.000So there's very, very little input into the system at that point.
00:14:47.000And they're in a soundproof room, so they're getting no normal input whatsoever, but they're supposed to just kind of go within, right?
00:14:55.000Listen to themselves, what thoughts occur to them, and start reporting back on what it is that they're seeing in their mind's eye, hearing in their mind, that kind of thing.
00:15:05.000And in another room, The sender is actually, they're in a soundproof room too, locked away from the receiver.
00:15:14.000They're looking at some sort of stimulus.
00:15:17.000They're looking at an image on a computer, perhaps, or photos in front of them.
00:15:22.000And they are trying to send that image to the person in the other room, who they may or may not know, depending on the study.
00:15:32.000And then there are four target images that are then presented usually in the best studies that an impartial judge will look at a transcript of what the receiver said, right?
00:15:46.000And then they'll have four images in front of them, one of which was the target that the sender was actually trying to mentally send to the receiver.
00:15:55.000And you would expect that if the person with, you know, the ping pong balls over their eyes got absolutely nothing, then the judge would select the correct image one out of four times.
00:16:07.000But instead, you do enough trials and the meta-analyses on these when they crunch all the numbers from all the studies together shows more like a 32% effect.
00:16:15.000Instead of being right one out of four times, they're right 32% of the time.
00:16:20.000And this, Wiseman in French would allow that these studies are generally well controlled enough that if this was an ordinary claim that was being presented, this is fine and we would accept this as evidence that something's up here, some kind of information transfer.
00:16:35.000The problem is, because we don't understand the physics of how this would work, they say we need greater evidence than this.
00:16:42.000And they keep asking for greater and greater levels of scientific controls to be put on the studies, and they keep finding ways to reject the result.
00:16:52.000I've never been skeptical of the potential for psychic phenomenon, but I've been very skeptical about almost every story that I've ever heard.
00:17:02.000Unfortunately, I've met a lot of fakers.
00:17:25.000Wouldn't you think that would be about average if you were to do the same study without having somebody trying to, you know, just the person guessing?
00:17:42.000But what's interested in that 7%, I mean, if it's really statistically real, if the study hasn't been fucked with, The idea is that it's just a little bit.
00:17:52.000The idea is that there's this weak signal that we're not normally picking up on, especially look at the way we live now, where we're constantly being bombarded by information and input and just stimulus.
00:18:03.000But when you shut all that out, And you close your eyes, and you don't have any sound that distracts you, what's there?
00:18:09.000Are you receiving any kind of accurate information?
00:18:11.000And I found the research really tantalizing, and I also, like I said, I found it scary, because I thought, well, here I am now, I'm going to write that, you know what, when they tell you there's no evidence, that's kind of bullshit, right?
00:18:22.000In fact, there is some evidence, and the question is whether or not it's risen to the level yet where we have to accept it.
00:19:13.000Back in the day, when we were, you mentioned before, the sense of being stared at.
00:19:18.000There's been some really good research on this.
00:19:20.000Again, one of the skeptics I mentioned, Richard Wiseman, did a study with a woman named Marilyn Schlitz, where they collaborated.
00:19:26.000And they did three separate studies trying to figure out whether or not somebody could sense that someone was staring at the back of their head.
00:19:33.000And they had real nice controls on it.
00:19:37.000Two out of the three times they did it, they got, again, a statistically significant effect where people were right far more often than chance would have suggested.
00:19:47.000And if you think of it in an evolutionary sense, which I do in the book, right, is that Back in the day when we were being hunted all the time, when we didn't have the kinds of fortifications we have now against the angry packs of wolves that are out there, we would have needed to have this ability to know that we're being stared at.
00:20:08.000It would have helped us survive as a species.
00:20:13.000Yeah, it makes sense, especially when you consider there's got to be some pretty intense focus when a predator locks on you.
00:20:21.000If there is some sort of a psychic I think that there's probably a lot of senses that we lost.
00:20:40.000In our separation from the natural world to here, just intuitive senses.
00:20:45.000The Army has done some research on intuition, really, and who their most intuitive people are.
00:20:53.000These people are the ones that they'll sort of look at to notice when there's a hidden explosive device on the ground in Iraq.
00:21:01.000And they found that two groups in particular, I think there was a third, but there's two that I always remember, that are really good at this.
00:21:10.000Hunters and people from the inner city.
00:21:16.000So suburban milky people are fucking useless.
00:21:37.000And so the people who are best at finding these hidden explosive devices just can tell that something's It just feels off in this area, and then they start focusing in on what...
00:23:44.000But I met a retired homicide detective who told me he wanted to talk to me because he has worked with a psychic who gave him good, actionable information on multiple occasions.
00:24:25.000You know what, Joe, there's a couple of cases that are still sort of tantalizing out there that maybe something happened, maybe they did get actual information, but for the most part, if you've watched the Psychic Investigators show, what's really sort of funny about it is that even when they're saying that this information was so valuable,
00:24:41.000usually if you're really paying attention, it's not actually the information that broke the case.
00:24:45.000It's information that after the fact seemed to fit.
00:24:48.000And so I'm still, you know, I'm still, well, I'm still skeptical of everything, but I'm skeptical of the psychics helping detectives.
00:24:56.000But I'm really open to it because, again, if there is this sort of weak signal out there, you know, that occasionally we pick up on, well then maybe sometimes it provides actionable information.
00:25:06.000Do you remember the Psychic Friends Network?
00:25:53.000Can lock into a role so deeply that they almost must believe it in themselves because they're convincing you, even though you know it's Daniel Day-Lewis.
00:26:00.000You know he's not really an Irish boxer.
00:26:04.000You believe it because he's tricked you.
00:26:07.000He's bypassed all of your psychic energy.
00:26:10.000But when you're high and you watch someone faking the funk, you're like, oh, what are you doing up there?
00:30:47.000It would go on for tens of minutes at a time.
00:30:49.000It sounded like it was coming from somewhere upstairs.
00:30:52.000So my parents on the first floor thought it was on the roof of the house.
00:30:56.000My brother and I on one side of the house thought it was on the roof over our heads.
00:31:00.000My sisters in their room who did not share an adjoining wall with us thought it was on the roof and or in there up high in the walls and at first that's what it was.
00:31:12.000It was this noise but it was so loud it would wake everybody up and it would go on for a while and my parents hunted for Uh, prosaic explanations, um, didn't fit with like a water hammer or anything with the plumbing, didn't fit with the house settling because of how long it went on.
00:31:28.000Did you have an attic or was it just a roof?
00:31:36.000They started reporting that, um, their bed frames would shake in the middle of the night and wake them up.
00:31:41.000They claimed that they saw a woman walk right through the room, um, you know, literally a ghost, right?
00:31:47.000My parents, and I find this really important, my parents set that aside and discounted it for a couple of reasons.
00:31:53.000It was coming from kids, and who would want to believe that that's true?
00:31:57.000I mean, I think one of the things the skeptics always do is say, you know, it's sort of wishful thinking and superstition, that people hear a noise, And they leap to ghosts, but my family didn't.
00:32:07.000And so they spent nine months or a year trying to recreate the noise in various ways, trying to figure out what it was.
00:32:14.000And when my sisters would tell these crazy stories, they were just kind of like, number one, they didn't want to believe it.
00:32:20.000Who wants to believe your daughters are being terrorized at night, right?
00:32:34.000And he told him what was going on because he had run out of other answers.
00:32:37.000And the priest said, you know, usually in cases like this, which I always find that language interesting as well because it implies he does this on a fairly regular basis, usually in cases like this I come over and I bless the house.
00:32:48.000So he came over and I remember this vividly because to have Father Crowley come into the house with the vestments on and swinging Like, the incense around and praying in Latin was intense,
00:33:08.000I was like six, he was God himself, you know, standing up on that pulpit.
00:33:13.000And he comes into our house, he's swinging the incense around, and he leaves and he says to my dad, so long, Jerry, I'm sure everything will be fine.
00:33:20.000But that night, actually, things got worse.
00:33:23.000The booming went on longer and louder than ever before, and for the first time, it seemed to locate in a specific spot.
00:33:29.000So instead of coming from this sort of amorphous area somewhere up on the roof, it hits at the top of the stairs, the landing, and then it came downstairs, like one step at a time.
00:33:39.000My father said it sounded like a kid throwing a tantrum.
00:33:42.000And when it hit the bottom floor, they could feel the floor shake under their feet, my parents, and we never heard it again.
00:33:52.000And so I grow up with this story, and I think of it as, you know, for a long time, all the way through adolescence, it was just sort of a, I don't know, man, an article of faith.
00:34:04.000But, you know, you get into college then, and you start meeting other people, and you start getting familiar with critical thinking, and you're like, what the hell was that?
00:34:15.000And so whatever memories I have it are very fragmentary.
00:34:19.000But I gotta tell you, Joe, when I asked my parents about it for the book, and I actually interviewed them, I knew someday I was gonna write about this, right?
00:34:26.000I interviewed them many years before I really settled on this is the book I'm gonna write.
00:34:30.000And I actually sat them down and I recorded it.
00:34:33.000And I will never forget, when they were describing that last night when it came down the stairs, They turned white.
00:38:52.000Imagine, you know, you're talking about your experience and trying to tell the truth, the whole truth, and some fucking weirdo's eyeballing you and drawing your face.
00:39:44.000So as the years went on and I would share that story, I stopped sharing it because I was starting to run into more and more people who were totally adamantly opposed.
00:39:54.000Not only opposed to the idea of ghosts.
00:39:56.000I'm pretty suspicious about the idea of ghosts.
00:39:59.000They were adamantly opposed to the idea that there was even a mystery there.
00:40:03.000And so that's kind of what I hold out for in the book, that sometimes we just need to be able to admit – just say the words I don't know what happened.
00:40:10.000People want to rush to some kind of conclusion whether they have enough evidence or data or not.
00:40:16.000And I ran into people over the years who would insist it had to be a water hammer even though it doesn't fit the story at all.
00:40:27.000Like it has that crazy noise that it makes.
00:40:30.000When I used to live in an apartment building, you heard that a lot.
00:40:33.000Yeah, sudden flow of water stops, and then you get that sound because the energy of the water built up is converted to acoustic energy because it's got to go somewhere.
00:40:42.000Yeah, and it doesn't last that long, and it doesn't make that kind of noise, and it doesn't sound like it's coming from your roof or last tens of minutes, and it certainly never locates on the steps.
00:41:03.000Do I trust my mother and father's account, my sister's account, my brother's account?
00:41:07.000And, you know, on some level I do, but can I really buy into the idea that there are ghosts?
00:41:12.000I mean, so one of the things I explored, and I found this really interesting, I mean, there are people out there working with sort of other technologies to determine if maybe there's an abundance of electromagnetic energy in the air in certain areas, then it fucks with your temporal lobe, then you have...
00:41:51.000It can create a sense of pressure and an easiness in your chest.
00:41:55.000It actually can even impact sort of the eyeball, the actual vibration in the air, and cause you to see cloudy shapes when there aren't any.
00:42:03.000I don't think any of those can necessarily explain Whatever happened in my house either, but what I like about it is at least here somebody's thinking creatively and not thinking so poorly of their fellow human that they just, yeah, you heard a creaking floorboard and you jumped to a fucking ghost because you're that stupid and that's superstitious.
00:42:21.000These sorts of explanations, I think, grant people the proper dignity to be, that they're reporting things at least somewhat accurately, right?
00:42:30.000Something really unusual was happening It's a very unfortunate reality that we live in that I can't trust anybody to tell me what really happened.
00:42:41.000So when a legitimate event, if a legitimate event occurs, it's immediately dismissed.
00:42:48.000If you really looked at how many strange things exist both in the natural world and in the world of space, just the world of dark matter and supernovas and All those things are way crazier than ghosts.
00:43:05.000A ghost ain't shit compared to the sun.
00:43:09.000The idea that we're living in a multiverse, that there's an infinite number of us having this conversation right now.
00:43:14.000The idea that life exists at all, that you can see with eyeballs.
00:43:18.000That is just as freaky as something that Used to live, but its essence in some form stays for some reason.
00:43:25.000I think the idea that this dimension that we live in is super concrete and, you know, just because you can hit it with a fucking bald fist and push it into a street and watch a car slam into it.
00:43:37.000You're dealing with real solid objects, and that's all there is here.
00:44:05.000There might be something going on and that something might leave your body and exist in some other state in almost an inaccessible Environment that parallels us.
00:44:17.000And that's not outside the realm of possibility.
00:44:22.000It's not because life itself, the whole idea that your body is just this big chemical reaction and electromagnetic impulses and all that's crazy.
00:44:33.000Neuroscientists can't yet answer the basic question of how consciousness is produced.
00:44:37.000So how we get from the physical stuff of the brain To non-physical, subjective experience is a complete and total mystery, and yet it is the thing that really defines our lives, our internal experience of the world, and there's no explanation for it.
00:44:50.000I like how scientists get to what part of the brain does what.
00:44:57.000Like, this guy got an injury here, so that removes this part of the brain.
00:46:11.000And it's one that happens when people get concussions.
00:46:16.000Concussions cause a great deal of short-term memory loss.
00:46:19.000I actually looked at this a little bit in the book.
00:46:23.000Doctors will assess How severe a person's injury was by coming up with a degree of memory loss, like asking them, what's the last thing you remember before the injury?
00:46:32.000What's the first thing you remember after the injury?
00:46:35.000And the longer the blank period, the more hurt you are.
00:46:38.000I looked at near-death experiences in the book, and so that's one of the things that drew me in there, because what's weird about these guys is that, and girls, is they oftentimes come back with a totally flowing memory of an event that should have knocked Their memory producing capabilities offline for a certain amount of time,
00:47:01.000And I'm okay with saying, like, with the near-death experience, I take a lot of flack, really, from both sides, because believers will contact me and say they're upset that I won't come out and say that, you know, the near-death experience is smoking gun evidence that there's an afterlife.
00:47:15.000You know, I don't think it is smoking gun evidence that there's an afterlife, but I also don't think it's yet been explained.
00:47:20.000And again, we end up back in this place where Everybody wants to act like they know everything.
00:47:25.000Everybody wants to push everything to a conclusion.
00:47:27.000I think the most rational thing to say is we don't fully understand that experience yet, you know?
00:47:31.000The near-death experience, it has to be related to what your own brain can produce as far as psychedelic chemicals.
00:47:39.000Your own brain produces the most potent psychedelic drug known to man.
00:47:43.000And why wouldn't it produce that shit if you were going to die?
00:47:46.000If you're in high stress periods, if you're freaking, if this is the end, your body thinks, this is it, we're going to die, and then it comes back.
00:47:54.000You know, you very likely could have come back from a psychedelic trip as well.
00:47:58.000Let me tell you, I'm just going to cut straight to the chase, the best evidence that the NDE has to provide.
00:48:04.000Janice Miner Holden, a researcher, did a study where she went through all the medical literature and all the research that's been done on NDEs so far.
00:48:11.000And she tabulated veridical perceptions, so accurate and true perceptions that people got while, quote, out of body.
00:48:20.000And what she came up with is that out of 38 cases in the medical literature where people were able to recount what was going on in the room when they were flat-lined.
00:48:33.000Like seeing themselves above the table, like that kind of stuff.
00:49:15.000Now the skeptical response to this is that the researchers themselves, Would have suppressed information that wasn't accurate because they were so blown away by what they were hearing that they went ahead and only recorded sort of the positive responses because the negative ones weren't making any impact with them,
00:50:36.000And it's enough to push it into that area where you have to say, you know, Maybe something is going on here.
00:50:41.000I mean, do you ever feel in a psychedelic experience that you get accurate information, not just stuff that your mind is coming up with, but some sort of signal or contact with something that's, quote, real?
00:51:00.000Absolutely believe that they're in contact with entities and there's other people that believe that you're just accessing the imagination and the mind is interfacing with distortion of its visual abilities in massive form and you're putting context to that and trying to make like rational understanding of it.
00:51:22.000One of my favorite stories in the book When I was researching the near-death experience, I looked pretty deeply into the story of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the book on death and dying, which kind of galvanized the whole hospice movement and made end-of-life care in this country and really around the world a lot more humane.
00:51:37.000And she is one of the first people ever to encounter the near-death experience.
00:51:41.000And she did it before that phrase was even coined.
00:51:45.000I mean, Raymond Mooney wrote the book in 1975. She, in the 60s, Was running across patients in the hospital wards, she was a psychologist, who were telling these same kinds of stories.
00:51:55.000And what I find really, there's a couple layers to this I'm going to get to, but what's really fascinating is she wanted to reject this stuff at first, completely.
00:52:04.000Her research partner, the Reverend Walamu Amara, who's a really terrific dude, I loved interviewing this guy, he's still around.
00:52:11.000He was a reverend and he had been appointed to sort of go along on the hospital wards with her What she was doing was very controversial.
00:52:18.000Nobody talked to the terminally ill at that point.
00:52:20.000They were sort of shunted off to the side.
00:52:22.000And so the fact that she was doing this was really angering a lot of the hospital staff.
00:52:26.000So the administration put this reverend with her as a way of saying, Kind of giving her their blessing as a way of saying, it's not her alone, right?
00:52:36.000And I would imagine Amara was pretty formidable, so nobody wanted to fuck with Amara.
00:52:40.000But anyway, because I met the guy, he's awesome.
00:52:43.000But anyway, one of the early stories they encountered before they started even researching this experience, because they'd hear these stories and kind of blow them off, because they didn't know what to do with them.
00:52:53.000Finally, he's out near the elevators one day, a woman goes into cardiac arrest, She's resuscitated right there in the hall.
00:53:04.000He goes to see her later, and she starts describing the scene of what happened exactly.
00:53:09.000And she even describes that she was able, and this stuff sounds ridiculous, right?
00:53:12.000But she was able to float in at one point behind a resident who was taking notes.
00:53:19.000Because one of the things they did with, if you've got an inexperienced doctor on the scene like that, and there's an emergency thing going on, They generally just tell them, just take notes on what's going on.
00:53:27.000It's a way of giving them something to do and keeping them out of the way, the people who really know what he's done right now.
00:53:32.000And she was able to describe what he had previously doodled On the notepad that he was now taking notes on her resuscitation on.
00:53:54.000So he goes and he finds the med student and he looks at the page of doodles, you know, or the page of notes and it has some doodles on it, and the doodles match with what she described.
00:54:06.000He asked the student if he'd ever interfaced with this patient at all, they hadn't, and he'd asked the patient if they'd ever interfaced with the student, she hadn't.
00:54:13.000You know, what we're left with now is we can say that Reverend Waluamara is lying, and I will never fucking say that, because he wasn't, right?
00:55:01.000I mean, you've got to imagine the anxiety That you would confront a terminal diagnosis with.
00:55:05.000These people start losing that anxiety and start wanting to talk to her about, you know what, I want to clean up my relationships before I go.
00:55:14.000They start talking about living hard in the time they have left rather than trembling at the fact that they're going to pass on.
00:55:22.000And that's when they decided to start taking notes.
00:55:25.000Like, this whole idea that the near-death experience is merely wishful thinking is bullshit.
00:55:30.000And it's at least bullshit in her experience and Amara's experience of it.
00:55:35.000They rejected it until they really couldn't reject it anymore because here they are researching what happens when you're terminally ill, and one of the things that was coming up in dozens of cases were people who were losing their fear because of this event, and that's how they ended up justifying doing any research on it at all.
00:55:51.000So when she wrote her book, she had a lot of different stories to tell.
00:55:54.000I don't think she hit that story as hard as she should have.
00:55:57.000The near-death experience being created or being facilitated, maybe is a better word, by a psychedelic experience, by the brain producing chemicals, it doesn't mean that there isn't something still going on.
00:56:14.000It might mean that that's a chemical gateway.
00:56:30.000He did a study on mushrooms, the active ingredient in mushrooms, with psilocybin.
00:56:39.000And he found that it seemed to suppress brain activity.
00:56:47.000The brain actually seemed less active, particularly the parts of the brain responsible for Making connections and relaying information from one spot to another.
00:56:56.000What he thought was really interesting about that, and I would tend to agree with him, is that you would think at moments of heightened experience and heightened perception that we would see an excitement in the brain, right?
00:57:11.000Well, here he was seeing diminished activity, less activity.
00:57:14.000And it calls me back anyway to the idea that a lot of what the brain does is filter our experience.
00:57:20.000A lot of our processing is unconscious.
00:57:23.000Information we're picking up from the environment all the time That doesn't rise into our awareness.
00:57:28.000Our brain's making the decision for us as to whether or not we need to be, you know, worried about that little noise behind us or the creaking the chair is making or whatever, you know?
00:57:35.000We don't even register it necessarily consciously.
00:57:38.000And so the question becomes, when you take this chemical, which I may or may not be interested in taking myself...
00:57:44.000I think you might be interested in it.
00:58:01.000The thing about the mushroom experience is that the mushroom experience actually mirrors normal human neurochemistry.
00:58:12.000Part of what makes up a mushroom is dimethyltryptamine, the same stuff that your brain produces, or your lungs and your liver.
00:58:21.000They know that the human body produces it, and it's been thought that the pineal gland, a lot of people get very angry if you're not very specific about this, because it's just anecdotal evidence that the pineal gland, which is the third eye of Eastern mysticism, produces this.
00:58:35.000Whatever produces it, whatever they find, one day ultimately, they believe it's the pineal gland, but you've got to cut people's brains open within like, A certain amount of time while they're dead and then extract it to see if it's like...
00:58:49.000Yeah, it would have to be pretty intense.
00:59:01.000Producing this incredibly potent human neurotransmitter, which is part of the ingredients of mushrooms.
00:59:08.000Like psilocybin mushroom is something like 4-foxoriloxay and dimethyltryptamine.
00:59:14.000And I know I fucked up the first part, the way you say it, but It's NN-dimethyltryptamine with something tagged on and my point is that people that take mushrooms have the exact same sort of feeling when it comes to without the near-death sort of connotation to it that they will die But they have the feeling like they have to clean up relationships.
00:59:38.000They have the feeling like they want to live, like right now, with joy and happiness.
00:59:42.000It's a very religious experience for a lot of people, and a lot of scholars actually believe it's the origin of religious experiences.
00:59:49.000And you know about the death anxiety research going on there right now, too, right?
01:00:49.000That's, yeah, the Terence McKenna stoned ape theory is a fascinating, fascinating idea.
01:00:54.000You know, it's really one of those who the fuck knows things.
01:00:57.000It's tough to go back and try to figure out what the hell happened that turned us from, you know, some sort of monkey-type creature, an ape, a lower ape, to however it became a human being.
01:01:09.000I just think, I think in general we need to be willing to say who the fuck knows more often.
01:01:13.000Well, if you do mushrooms, you should say who the fuck knows all day.
01:01:16.000Because if you do it, you're just going to go, how could I have known that that's there?
01:02:01.000If you're a nutty person and ingest that shit, if you're barely hanging on to sanity, I wouldn't recommend it.
01:02:10.000What was the most shocking find for you in the writing of this book?
01:02:16.000What's the one thing that set you back and really made you go, wow?
01:02:20.000I might have started with the telepathy, but the other thing was meeting Ricky Sorrels in Stephenville, Texas.
01:02:26.000He was one of the witnesses to what became known in UFO circles as the Stephenville Lights, this January 8th, I think, 2008 sighting.
01:02:38.000And Sorrell's, so on January 8th, dozens of people, I like to say, they had the misfortune of looking up because they faced a lot of heat after they reported what they saw.
01:02:49.000But it was some kind of series of lights in the sky that moved with such unity that it seemed to be one craft.
01:04:02.000And this is one of the things that people use to sort of subtly undermine him.
01:04:06.000In the same way that Monica Lewinsky was sort of framed for all of America by the fact that the dress that ended up with a semen stain came from the gap, right?
01:04:13.000So now we know where she shops, like she's this low-rent little girl, right?
01:04:55.000Anyway, Ricky's out deer hunting, and he trips over a branch, and he doesn't fall down, but he has to sort of steady himself, and he glances up, and he notices overhead now something.
01:05:08.000He ended up saying it was 300 feet over his head.
01:05:12.000He gauged this by the fact that there's a water tower in the community that is 300 feet high, and it seemed about the same height.
01:05:18.000He cannot see an edge to whatever it is that's floating above him.
01:05:23.000And it's not making any sound, but it is hanging over the trees.
01:05:27.000And in it, there are this series of sort of inverted cones, which he intuitively suspected must be part of, like, the propulsion system.
01:05:36.000So the narrow part is up further into the craft, and then it widens as it telescopes down, right?
01:05:41.000And so there's these series of inverted cones, and his first instinct, and I think people use this to sort of His first instinct was to put his gun on it.
01:07:56.000What was it people saw several weeks later?
01:07:59.000I mean, one of the things that interests me about that story is they were very near a military base.
01:08:04.000And again, this is all in the book, but one of the things that happened to him after he reported his sighting is he started getting calls from somebody who was identifying themselves as a member of the military who was advising him not to talk about this anymore and saying they wanted to meet with him.
01:08:33.000Motherfucker out there deer hunting without a phone.
01:08:35.000And actually, you know, the funny part about this, one of the witnesses, a constable, that's what they call their sheriff there, Leroy Gaten, right, had a camera nearby when he had his sighting.
01:08:47.000It was in his car and he was 10 feet from his car.
01:10:09.000Like, that's something we've already figured out how to do with, like, those Japanese jackets that show you an image of what's behind you, on you.
01:11:05.000I totally met people who are so invested in this idea that they're being...
01:11:10.000That they've been abducted or that they're visited by aliens.
01:11:14.000I met a guy who claimed to have an implant in his leg and he didn't want it removed because the times that he's thought about it he began to feel nauseous.
01:11:24.000And this made him think that the, you know, the aliens don't want him to have it removed and just this whole trip into lava wind because there's a lump under his skin, right?
01:11:36.000And that could be glass that's been working its way up, you know what I mean, for decades or who knows what the fuck it is, right?
01:11:53.000If anything, he just faced embarrassment over this.
01:11:56.000Well, I wish a story was enough for me, but I still have an open mind.
01:12:02.000I still have an open mind because even though I know that most people are full of shit, I still know that we can send a rover to Mars.
01:12:08.000If we can send a rover to Mars, if there was a Some sort of a civilization out there that wasn't just a thousand years advanced, but millions of years advanced.
01:12:18.000And perhaps they live in a solar system that doesn't get pelted by asteroids every couple hundred million years and wipes out everything on the planet.
01:12:25.000And who knows what level of achievement they've had technologically.
01:12:32.000One of the guys I write about in the book, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, NASA astronaut, his family In a hundred years, if you sort of trace the bloodline, they moved west in horse-drawn wagons, and then he was on the moon a hundred years later.
01:12:49.000That, that's technology advancing, from horse-drawn wagons to the moon.
01:13:11.000He says he's talked to members of the military since who've assured him that they're That UFOs should be identified as alien craft in some cases, right?
01:13:19.000But what happened in space was completely different.
01:13:21.000It was a religious or a spiritual, I'll say, spiritual experience.
01:13:25.000He had an epiphany where he had the same sort of experience that people report in meditation when they hit this kind of bliss Or sometimes on psychedelics where it was like everything dropped away and he felt himself being at one with the entire universe.
01:13:49.000And it was a feeling that he had all the way back, you know, over a period of a day or two.
01:13:56.000He would have this experience every, you know, regularly.
01:14:03.000Feel this sense of wonder and this sense that he was, you know, he rejected his parents' religion.
01:14:10.000He'd gone completely down the science path.
01:14:13.000And it completely altered his perspective and made him think that there's some way of uniting spirituality and science.
01:14:21.000He landed and started the Institute of Noetic Sciences to try and find some sort of connection between spiritual experiences and some scientific basis for them.
01:14:32.000Yeah, what Edgar Mitchell's deal is with aliens, rather, is that he has talked to quite a few people that were high-knowing people in Joint Chiefs of Staff,
01:14:50.000Intelligence Committee-type characters, and they told him there was a UFO crash, that there was an alien spacecraft at Roswell, and that...
01:15:01.000Listening to him, I'm reading this thing, and he had something to do with the Disclosure Project with Dr. Stephen Greer, who one day we would like to get him on this podcast as well, because he's another very highly credible person, and his Disclosure Project included a lot of very high I think it's high time that we start being honest about what these people in high levels of the military have already experienced,
01:15:29.000know about it and the fact that there's probably a high level of probability That we are consistently visited by some freaky dudes from another part of the world or another dimension, but they just can slip in and out like that,
01:15:47.000and we don't really know what the fuck is going on.
01:15:58.000What kind of propulsion system could possibly carry them here?
01:16:03.000And they're basing this all off on what we know right now with our technology and our understanding at the moment.
01:16:08.000But as you said, if you've got a civilization that's been around for thousands or potentially even a million or more years, who knows what they could have?
01:16:16.000It's a silly sort of argument to me because it's based so much on this idea that this is as advanced as we're ever going to get.
01:16:23.000Well, I always point out to the fact that 200 years ago, when you wanted to picture something, you had to draw it.
01:16:28.000If you wanted to get around, you had to ride a fucking animal.
01:18:36.000Because we're trying to figure that out, too, right?
01:18:38.000Well, I think that, as we said, I don't think that the human body in this form is done.
01:18:44.000You know, I think it's continuing to change and continuing to...
01:18:48.000A lot of people don't like to use the word evolve because, you know, real evolution involves mutation and adaptation to your natural surroundings.
01:19:26.000And for Mitchell, it becomes a spiritual experience.
01:19:29.000For other people, it got them more involved in politics.
01:19:32.000They recognize how arbitrary the lines between countries are and the lines we draw culturally.
01:19:38.000But they see just how fragile our little Planet is hanging out there in space, and it changes them, and I think most of us would agree it's changing them for the better.
01:19:51.000They end up coming home and doing sort of more altruistic things with their lives, and now we're going to have civilians being sent up into space, mostly wealthy civilians initially, because how much that ride's going to cost,
01:20:09.000We're talking about $100,000, $150,000.
01:20:12.000I can't remember the price at this point, but I had researched it.
01:20:15.000And we're going to have general civilians getting shot up into space and having an experience of seeing the Earth from there.
01:20:22.000And it's going to begin to slowly change the culture, I would think, because if you look at how dramatically it changed the lives of all the people who've gone into space, it's going to change these people too, to some degree.
01:20:35.000Yeah, Edgar Mitchell's take on it is very trippy, man.
01:20:41.000When he was in the spacecraft coming home, this is his word, suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body were created in an ancient generation of stars, and suddenly that became personal and visceral, not intellectual, and I had never had this experience.
01:20:58.000It was accompanied by bliss and ecstasy I had never experienced.
01:21:03.000So he's calling it, it's calling it samadhi.
01:21:05.000I quote that in the book, actually, because it's a heavy quote.
01:21:10.000He felt, literally, it was like his flesh dropped away.
01:21:19.000The Keck Observatory in Hawaii is on the Big Island, and there's one island in Hawaii that's so big, you get so high on the Big Island, that you go through the clouds.
01:21:35.000The Keck Observatory is, I think it's on the Mauna Loa volcano, whatever one it is, the biggest one.
01:21:43.000And it's at, there's like a visitor station that's down at like 9,000 plus feet, and then you go even higher, they have the telescopes there.
01:21:54.000But you get out of the car, and you're through the clouds, and the way the Big Island is set up, they have these diffused lights so that they don't create light pollution because of the observatory.
01:22:04.000So, the fucking Milky Way was so stunning!
01:22:09.000It was so, that to this day, All I think about when we talk about going on vacation is, like, we've got to get back to that.
01:24:35.000They go down, you gotta execute them, trust me.
01:24:39.000Yeah, the thing that's weird about camping is that when you're away from, like, electricity and a house and all that shit for long enough, you kind of, like, get this, like, real humble feeling.
01:24:54.000Like, we're just, like, another animal who just figured out some way to separate ourselves so we can do our work.
01:25:01.000We separate ourselves in our houses and in there we create these computers and electrically hook things together and As long as we separate ourselves from the nature, because we're out there in the nature, you might get eaten, or you gotta go find some food.
01:25:26.000When you're out there for, I did it recently, five days with no cell phones in it, no electricity, no heat, no nothing.
01:25:34.000And we had to start a fire if we wanted to stay warm, and it was in Montana, it was freezing cold.
01:25:38.000But doing that, you really have a different sort of feeling and appreciation for what nature actually is.
01:25:48.000We're disconnected from one of the fucking coolest things ever for a human to experience.
01:25:54.000We're completely disconnected from it.
01:25:56.000There's a lot of people who live their whole lives in cities and in suburbs and they drive back and forth from work and they never get out there in the woods.
01:26:04.000I'll never forget a guy in college who went on this big, long tirade, and I thought he might be mentally unbalanced, because he went on this big, long tirade.
01:26:13.000It was in philosophy class, actually, too.
01:26:16.000I'm so sick of people talking about the outdoors and how the outdoors are so great.
01:26:42.000That is our spoiled society's creation.
01:26:47.000I have to tell you, that's one of the biggest pushbacks I've gotten from that sort of crowd on the book.
01:26:54.000The whole idea that I was going to go study lucid dreaming and learn to meditate and do all these things, you know, like, why?
01:27:01.000Why would you put that kind of effort...
01:27:03.000I don't know, I guess they feel so great in their skinny jeans that the idea of doing something to improve themselves further, you know what I mean, just seems like an admission of defeat, right?
01:27:13.000Because they're supposed to be so cool right now.
01:28:27.000We have a part of our brain, the amygdala, that whenever we're confronted by ambiguous information is immediately going to be like, check for danger, check for danger.
01:28:34.000And it sort of prohibits us from learning, growing, trying to find out new things if we give in to that.
01:28:42.000Yeah, I mean, we're animals and we have instincts to stay alive and those instincts are gonna get fired up left and right all around.
01:28:48.000Especially if you're in a city and it's constantly surrounded by people and packed into a place.
01:29:27.000What other information or what other pieces of evidence about aliens have ever led you to believe conclusively one way or another that That there is something out there.
01:29:40.000You know, that's another one where I conclusively believe that UFOs are unidentified flying objects, right?
01:29:46.000And there are times when we just need to kind of, there are people who want to honor sort of like materialist science, and there are people who want to honor some sort of dogmatic religion.
01:29:53.000I want to honor that like gap in our knowledge to some degree, right?
01:30:12.000I mean, even that Stephenville Siding, I didn't get a chance to get into this, but that Stephenville Siding, there's a military base nearby.
01:30:17.000This guy claimed that he was harassed for weeks afterward by a member of the military.
01:30:22.000There's a story in the book about somebody showing up on his property and in the middle of the night making his dogs bark and just staring into his door and clearly wearing camo gear.
01:30:34.000And this was during the same period when he was getting these threatening phone calls from a guy who was identifying himself as a member of the military.
01:30:41.000So is it possible that people are encountering at times some sort of advanced military technology?
01:30:51.000To me, no coincidence that people started reporting triangle-shaped UFOs shortly before the stealth bomber was ultimately revealed.
01:31:02.000But, you know, for me, simply the vastness of the universe, its age, the chances that we're the only, only planet that's evolved life like this seem so small.
01:31:22.000That surely somebody out there has developed the kind of technology it would take to find us and get here.
01:31:27.000That's the kind of thinking that really opens me up to the possibility.
01:31:47.000And there are enough of these cases where You know, like Greer's people, the military people who come forward and say that something happened or whatever.
01:31:54.000Enough of these people are credible and it's left in an unidentified category that you start to think, well, you know, maybe at some point, some of these...
01:32:04.000But so many people are full of shit and so many people have told lies that if you have...
01:32:10.000Any thoughts in your head that you're going to be able to tell people that you believe in UFOs and not have them ridicule you?
01:32:18.000Good luck being a serious person and being taken seriously.
01:32:22.000If we had Obama, if Obama was on TV and he started talking about UFOs, And his experience and what he believes they are and that he believes that we're being visited by intelligent beings from some other dimension or planet.
01:33:03.000She had written a book in which she claimed that he had seen a UFO. And Tim Russert asked him about it during a debate, and people immediately, and this is, again, the language was UFO,
01:33:19.000not an alien craft, but a UFO. People immediately burst into laughter, and you can hear it, you know, on the video.
01:33:27.000People immediately start laughing, and he starts saying, well, look, you know, UFO, it's unidentified.
01:33:31.000And people are still sort of, now you hear people kind of gasping, because instead of rejecting it out of hand, he's sort of trying to stick up for this.
01:33:40.000Those are the press people that you root for to get killed by the aliens that were in that Mars Attacks movie.
01:35:44.000I was drawn to the idea that where the whole title of Fringology came from is these are subjects we push to the fringe, but if you look at near-death experiences, ghosts, UFOs, They speak to the big existential questions that really plague us,
01:36:11.000Bigfoot doesn't really get into that field.
01:36:16.000He's not something that's going to make me question The idea that there might be some undiscovered ape does not affect what happens when I die or whether or not we're alone in the universe.
01:37:50.000And then when he had, like, a quote, hot case, I would go.
01:37:53.000There was one case I went out on, like, three, four nights in a couple-week time span.
01:38:00.000And look, there were times when the people didn't want to think anything was going on in their house and brought him in hopefully to debunk it, but there were a lot of times that people brought him in hoping.
01:38:55.000See if the amount of orbs seems to decrease the longer he stays there.
01:39:00.000And I think what he'll find, because I know some people who did this, is that they go the fuck away because you stopped stirring up the air.
01:39:05.000You've now been really still for a while and you're taking pictures because, generally speaking, that's pretty much.
01:39:10.000Okay, what about when you get them in outdoor shots?
01:40:05.000It's just a video artifact of certain cameras that when they put a super high-speed camera on it, it didn't happen.
01:40:11.000They got the exact same area photographed.
01:40:14.000They lit a fire and bugs would fly around the fire.
01:40:17.000And when the bugs would fly around the fire on one camera, they would come out like these rods because the camera couldn't compete with it or couldn't rather pick up the image when it was moving too fast, too close to it.
01:40:27.000It didn't know it was focusing on the front and the back.
01:40:29.000You know, digital imagery is kind of funky.
01:40:32.000But on the high-speed camera, they got it loud and clear.
01:40:38.000This fucking asshole dedicated decades of his life to selling these DVDs and telling everybody there's fucking rods flying around the air.
01:40:47.000Yeah, I was trying to look for things that would help me answer the big questions, if only for myself.
01:40:52.000I got tired of, like, you know, I don't want to listen to some right-wing, dogmatic, religious person tell me how it is.
01:40:58.000I got tired of listening to Richard Dawkins telling me that I'm just meat.
01:41:01.000And I just thought, you know what, if it's knowable, if it's observable that there's more to me than that, I should be able to find a way to experience this directly for myself and learn about it directly for myself.
01:41:12.000So I started looking into meditation and lucid dreaming and trying to find some way, Of experiencing myself, in a sense, disconnected from the meat, right?
01:41:21.000My problem with Dawkins is he doesn't seem happy.
01:41:30.000I love the idea that he's standing up for science and he's standing up against religious ideology and brainwashing.
01:41:41.000But he's doing it in such an arrogant, sort of aggressive way that it makes you go, like, you're kind of a bad spokesperson for the thing.
01:41:49.000But I'm sure from the scientific community, like, the encouragement is, like, so strong and profound and almost hero-like that it sort of encourages him to be this aggressive force of reason.
01:42:00.000I'm sure there's enough people like that that he gets the encouragement he needs.
01:42:05.000Peter Higgs, the guy who first started us off looking for the Higgs boson, he recently even just came out and said that Dawkins is a fundamentalist.
01:42:15.000He said that Dawkins' behavior against or about religion is embarrassing.
01:42:20.000Yeah, and he called him a fundamentalist.
01:42:22.000He said he's an atheist fundamentalist.
01:42:24.000And that's sort of the worst insult, I mean, that you can level out an atheist because they are so, you know, they're reacting to fundamentalism in their view.
01:42:32.000You know, if you adopt a point of view to that degree with that passion, if it walks like a fundamentalist and talks like a fundamentalist and quacks like a fundamentalist, that's what it is.
01:42:42.000I guarantee you that if you could get Richard Dawkins to take place in at least one mushroom trip, if not several, I think one to find out what the fuck it is and then reset and revisit, go back in and sort of analyze what the fuck is happening, I bet he will have a completely different opinion as to the possibilities.
01:43:09.000And a lot of other kinds of experiences, too.
01:43:12.000But the thing is, the atheist community, that sort of fundamentalist, materialist community, came out and said this is an explanation for God and religious experience.
01:43:20.000But people have all sorts of strange experiences when they put that helmet on.
01:43:27.000And when they screened him before he put it on, because he wanted to take part in this, when they screened him and put him through the questionnaire they put him through, and I have not seen it, so I'm not going to be able to describe this in great detail, but Persinger related this much of it to me.
01:43:44.000When they screened him, his temporal lobe was really, really in It's not a normally active sort of temporal lobe, which is what they were trying to stimulate.
01:43:58.000So when he didn't have an experience, Persinger dismissed it as saying, well, this guy isn't built like the rest of us.
01:44:06.000And it's an intriguing thing to think that is that part of what created his worldview, his atheistic worldview.
01:44:16.000Is that the case or is it just he rejects religion so strong that the area of his brain responsible for religion just gets shut down?
01:44:36.000The degree to which we feel, if you pray or if you meditate and you feel like you're contacting something sort of outside yourself, this is the part of the brain that processes that information.
01:44:48.000Well, if you're never using that part of the brain, if you're never stimulating it, It will become less active.
01:44:58.000If you completely reject any idea of woo-woo whatsoever, the woo-woo part of your brain.
01:45:03.000You know, there's a big issue that I have with people that will say that an experience, whether it's an experience like Edgar Mitchell had or whether it's a psychedelic experience, They'll say, especially in terms of psychedelic experience,
01:45:56.000So this event, this experience, whatever it is, I mean, we want to compartmentalize it because you're taking in some sort of a substance alien to the body that tricks the body into having this state and achieving this state and having this experience.
01:46:11.000It's still an experience that you actually really have.
01:46:17.000I heard you mention that you were interested in it.
01:46:20.000Maybe the most gratifying thing that's happened to me in writing the book is whenever I do a public appearance or a podcast with a big enough audience, I end up getting notes from people afterward that they had a lucid dream.
01:46:30.000Either, you know, after the interview or after they went and then read the book or whatever it is.
01:46:51.000Before they came along, I was having a lucid dream every two or three weeks without even trying.
01:46:56.000I mean, just spontaneously because I'd...
01:46:58.000Trained at it long enough, hard enough, that I was having them every two or three weeks.
01:47:03.000Since they were born, I actually recently, because they're starting to sleep a little bit now, I actually had a couple, just in the last couple of weeks, or three weeks, I had two.
01:47:12.000And it's like, oh great, it's coming back online.
01:47:14.000This function of Steve Volk is returning now that he's getting proper rest, you know?
01:47:28.000I mean, it honestly wouldn't be worth the effort if you were only doing it to experience a change in your consciousness when you're dreaming.
01:47:34.000So lucid dreaming, for those that don't know, is the act of being aware you're dreaming while you're dreaming and then choosing accordingly, right?
01:47:48.000Four more algorithms right now while I'm serious.
01:47:51.000One of the ways of introducing people to lucid dreaming to understand what it really is, and usually I'm asking this if like a crowded book reading or something, but I'll ask you guys here.
01:48:00.000Have any of you ever woken yourself up from a nightmare?
01:48:14.000But the fact is, since whatever was chasing you or whatever was happening that made it qualify as a nightmare, If you had no external reality, you could have just walked away from it in your dream.
01:48:23.000You could have, because the laws of physics don't apply, flown away from it.
01:48:27.000You could have gone up to it and said, yo, what the fuck's up?
01:50:29.000And it's a vacation that tapped me into a whole new wing of my life.
01:50:35.000It's the act of being where you're dreaming, while you're dreaming, and choosing accordingly.
01:50:39.000And I realized, once I read that, that I had woken myself up from nightmares for years.
01:50:45.000And so it's like, okay, I have an opportunity to do something different here.
01:50:49.000So there's different ways you can train for it.
01:50:51.000One of them is you take the time to remember, for instance, a recurring dream or the dream you had last night, right?
01:50:59.000I really recommend doing it with a recurring dream.
01:51:02.000You remember it, particularly a nightmare, because those are so vivid.
01:51:06.000You remember it, it's like a meditation.
01:51:08.000You meditate on it and you choose the point in the dream where you wish you had become lucid, where you wish you had gained control.
01:51:16.000And so the dream in the book that I had worked with was a dream where this creepy fucking dude shows up outside my house and he's peeking in through the window and eventually I end up getting angry that he's trying to terrorize me and I open the door and we would fight, we would clash.
01:51:32.000And I would wake up literally at times punching the air, just Because I'm going after this guy.
01:51:37.000So I decided to meditate on that dream and look for the spot within that dream where I could get lucid.
01:51:46.000And gosh, I'm not sure how long I, at this point in the book, but it was probably a couple of weeks of work where maybe 10 minutes one day, 5 minutes the next, maybe 15 minutes before I fell asleep one night.
01:52:10.000And to feel yourself, like, to feel this, you don't realize it until you've had a lucid dream, but there's a sense of disconnect between you and the dream, right?
01:52:22.000Until you lucid dream and suddenly find yourself in this dream body, you're no longer watching it like a movie.
01:52:35.000Suddenly, as I said before, the laws of physics play no part.
01:52:39.000And most people find when they really begin, when they first have a lucid dream, there's this exhilarating sort of feeling flying and dream sex.
01:52:48.000Like, those are the first things that people usually do.
01:55:55.000Where does this experience really come from?
01:55:58.000How could the neurons, this three-pound gelatinous mass, Secreting and emitting chemicals and electrical firings create this.
01:56:07.000And the truth of this is that we don't fucking know.
01:56:11.000And yet we're inundated with people telling us what we should consider important.
01:56:17.000And telling us at this point, too, just drilling us with this kind of materialist paradigm that we are meat computers, that we have no free will, all this sort of...
01:56:51.000I love the interview you did with him because he admits that the paranormal's been unfairly stigmatized and all this sort of stuff.
01:56:57.000But he's one of the guys out there trumpeting that we have no free will.
01:57:00.000And I'm really happy for the opportunity to talk about this because, you know, and he says rightly that dogmatic religion has an unhealthy effect on the psyche.
01:57:12.000And it certainly does for a lot of people, right?
01:57:14.000A healthy effect on people and society because they're fearful and they're judgmental of other people and all this sort of stuff.
01:57:22.000But when you tell people they have no free will, they are more likely to cheat.
01:57:57.000And the control group who was not exposed to that information didn't cheat as much as the people who...
01:58:11.000It's a very comprehensive sort of a take on things that has to do with not just natural selection, but the human organism itself and all the reward systems that are put in place to motivate behavior.
01:58:27.000It's not like he believes that there's an architect that's guiding your life.
01:58:34.000I just want to let everybody else know.
01:58:43.000He's looking at it completely the opposite.
01:58:48.000From a scientific perspective, the idea is that you're motivated constantly by A series of factors that are beyond your control.
01:58:55.000Theoretically, if this is a completely naturalistic material universe, if we could measure all the variables from the Big Bang until now, we could predict everything you're going to do your entire life, every choice you're going to make, because it's all the result of the conditions that led up to it.
01:59:12.000Yeah, I had a crazy idea once of taking a computer that's so powerful that you could input in all of the data of everything in the state that it exists right now in the world, everything that exists in the world, In the state that it exists right now,
01:59:27.000and from that you could extrapolate and go back through time and get a full detailed depiction of every single event that took place.
01:59:37.000It sounds completely ridiculous right now, but I don't think that's ridiculous in the future.
01:59:42.000I think we're going to be able to get data from, I'm like, whoever thought like a million years ago you'd be able to get ice samples?
01:59:48.000And that was going to tell you climate change from thousands and thousands of years.
01:59:53.000And that's how we know what the fuck was going on 6,000 years ago.
01:59:55.000You drill a gigantic chunk of ice and go, well, shit was different here.
01:59:59.000And looking at it a foot higher, it's different here.
02:00:03.000Can I take this back to Lucid Dreaming?
02:00:07.000And this is the part that really gets beneficial for your daily life.
02:00:11.000The part that was most powerful for me in that sense.
02:00:14.000The other way you can train yourself to have a lucid dream, first of all, you have to ask yourself the question, how do you know when you're awake or when you're dreaming?
02:00:23.000And what LaBerge found and what everybody else subsequently has found Is that there's this kind of state test you can do to see which state you're in.
02:00:33.000And the idea is to start doing it when you're awake.
02:01:36.000A book just changed into a series of incomprehensible symbols.
02:01:41.000Digital clocks will really malfunction and machinery in general will malfunction because, you know, you flick that light switch over there and it's actually connected to the light bulbs.
02:01:50.000But in a dream, it's not connected to anything, right?
02:01:53.000So you flip the light switch and maybe the light goes on the first time and then when you turn it off, it doesn't go off because it's not actually connected to anything.
02:01:59.000Yeah, I've had that happen in dreams before where I realized it was lucid because I couldn't turn light switches on and off.
02:02:05.000I've had that and so I realized, oh, this is a lucid dream.
02:02:10.000You know, when I started taking nootropics, I had much more success with lucid dreaming.
02:02:17.000I found that my lucid dreams before were so fragile, they were like a bubble, like a child's bubble, you know, and they blow with those things.
02:02:26.000But then, once I started taking nootropics, they were like a fucking volleyball.
02:03:21.000And you'll find that initially when you first start trying to do state tests when you're awake, maybe the first day it feels really awkward.
02:03:31.000Because now I'm having a conversation with you, but I'm also looking at the print on your shirt.
02:03:35.000I'm looking down and then up and down and then up to see that it stays the same.
02:03:38.000But after you get used to doing that, and for me it only took a day, day and a half, you know, something like that, of doing a state test maybe eight or ten times a day, I found that my state tests were actually making me more aware and more mindful of everything that was going on around me all the time.
02:03:55.000And it seemed to have that effect of slowing my life down, making me more considerate of what's happening, making me more present to the person that I'm with.
02:04:04.000And suddenly I realized, right, when Sam or somebody says we have no free will, you know, a lot of times we are just on autopilot.
02:07:03.000And they will, dream characters will invariably tell you, if you say to them, this is not a dream, they will invariably say to you, no it's not.
02:07:10.000And this is one of the weirdest, coolest parts of lucid dreaming, because even LaBerge, right, eminent sort of scientist, just kind of shrugs his shoulders, like somehow the dream world wants to maintain its It's status as real for you,
02:08:34.000Wait, let me tell you something about my wife.
02:08:36.000I've got to get my wife's back on this, because when I told her about it later, she's like, you could have Oh, did you immediately just fucking take some choline and go right back in?
02:12:40.000I think that idea of being able to do that is fascinating, and it's even more fascinating how few people pursue it.
02:12:49.000This is one of the sad parts of Stephen LaBerge's story, is that he discovered this thing that you can really use to defeat nightmares.
02:12:56.000If you're one of those people who has night terrors, where you wake up and suffer from sleep paralysis, Or you have recurring nightmares or anxiety around an event, right?
02:13:06.000You know, you're going to be doing public speaking or something and maybe that's not your bag.
02:13:09.000You can rehearse, right, in the dream.
02:14:13.000Didn't you say Asians appear in your dreams?
02:14:15.000There's actually been really good research that what we dream tends to be stuff we've been thinking about a lot in the last 24 to 48 hours.
02:14:22.000So the whole principle of state testing and asking that question, is this a dream, right?
02:14:26.000Or, you know, the way I always present, am I awake or am I dreaming?
02:14:30.000The whole point of that is that when you do that regularly, you're more likely to have that thought then arise while you are fucking dreaming, when you're really dreaming.
02:15:07.000It represents, I like watching wacky movies, so I got high and watched Game of Thrones, took five alpha brains, went to sleep, and had a fucking dragon war.
02:15:16.000Sometimes the cigar really is just a fucking cigar, but there are definitely times when you can say to yourself, okay, why this content?
02:15:29.000Something my subconscious is gnawing on That I should be aware of and work with in some way.
02:15:34.000Well, I'm sure there's a lot of things that occur in a dream are things that you're fixated on and things that are constantly in your mind and that your imagination will turn them into a dragon or a witch or a demon or a vampire or a disease.
02:15:53.000There's all sorts of things that you're terrified of in real life that you fixate on and much like the knocking on the door, they just follow you into your dreams.
02:16:02.000And this gives you a chance to deal with them.
02:16:04.000If you approach something that's in a nightmare more like a friend, and that's weird to say, but LaBerge did this with this really ugly ogre that showed up in one of his dreams that he would always recoil from.
02:16:18.000He decided to, well, confront it's the wrong word because it sounds adversarial, but he decided to approach it in a spirit of curiosity and compassion and figure out what's going on with it.
02:16:29.000And I can't remember what exactly he said to it, but he accepted it.
02:16:52.000They're things we deny about ourselves and about our experience.
02:16:56.000And they come up in your dream because this is something you need to deal with and need to look at.
02:17:01.000And so if you do accept it in that way, you end up feeling more empowered because instead of rejecting this thing, You're dealing with it in a dream.
02:17:10.000Well, I always thought that was fascinating when people give the very good advice of sleep on it.
02:17:15.000If something's bothering you, sleep on it.
02:17:17.000Because there is something that happens to you during the dream state where you have a better perspective in the morning.
02:17:25.000I don't know what it is, but I am a big proponent in sleeping on it.
02:17:28.000I'm also a big proponent in jerking off before you make any decisions.
02:19:37.000I would go out and buy fresh groceries and a bottle of wine.
02:19:40.000And when my wife would get home, I'd be this joyful firefighter standing there making her this delicious dinner and totally enjoying my life, like rocking balls.
02:22:28.000So I think a lot of people are getting their books that way now, right?
02:22:31.000Do you know what the percentage of e-book to regular book is that you're selling?
02:22:35.000I know this book is outselling from the time it was released.
02:22:41.000It's way more electronic and more than the general industry.
02:22:46.000So when this first came out a year and a half, two years ago or whatever it is, I think they told me the figure was low 50% higher for electronic books.
02:22:55.000This book was over 60% electronic books.
02:23:19.000And I did it, I think, three days in a row where I think the first day I wanted to go 15 minutes and I just started feeling so silly after seven or eight that I stopped.
02:23:28.000And then on day two, you know, I think I did three or four minutes.
02:23:30.000And on day three, I'm like staring at the spoon for like 45 seconds and I was like, I can't do this.
02:24:08.000I mean, the guy who popularized it, Uri Geller, is, you know, in my First Amendment protected opinion, because he's very litigious, a magician.
02:24:17.000And so it's a very controversial subject.
02:24:20.000This is one of the places that James Randi kind of made his bones as a skeptic and a debunker, was going after Uri Geller.
02:24:26.000And so a lot of people just don't want to be publicly linked to this subject, even if they believe in it.
02:24:33.000And so I met some people like that who have never publicly spoken about it, but they're doing credible stuff in the world, and they claim that they were able to do it.
02:24:46.000They were at a, quote, spoonbending party.
02:24:48.000There's some people who throw spoonbending parties.
02:25:14.000The people who are doing credible parapsychology don't fit in to the way the prize works.
02:25:19.000So people like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake, and I remember when Sam was on here, he talked about Rupert and said that there's something very fishy about not going after the million.
02:25:28.000And I love Sam, but I just think that maybe he, again, we all come at this with a worldview, and he's probably a little more predisposed to be on the materialist side of things, right?
02:25:39.000But Sheldrake or Dean Radin or any of these guys, Daryl Bem, they're going to construct a study that requires dozens, if not a hundred subjects.
02:25:49.000That will take an hour and a half for each individual session, conducted over weeks, months, or a year, to get this Gansfeld effect at 32% versus 25% that we started this whole thing with.
02:26:02.000And James Randi needs an event that will take place with a very small sample size, where you'll get 10 bites at the apple, basically, 10 chances to guess something, or 12, in an afternoon or an evening.
02:26:37.000Yeah, and you have to do it in a small...
02:26:40.000The big thing is you have to do it in a small sample size.
02:26:42.000I mean, statistical significance is generated by sheer repetition.
02:26:47.000And Randy requires a small sample size to prove?
02:26:51.000He doesn't specifically require a small sample size, but whenever you look at any of the studies they're doing, they're doing stuff that takes, again, an afternoon or an evening, and it's kind of a public event.
02:27:02.000And again, there are some parapsychologists, I think his name is Dick Bierman, who said he approached him and couldn't work anything out.
02:27:09.000Supergirtle approached him and couldn't work anything out.
02:27:12.000Daryl Bem apparently thought about it and realized that within these parameters, the kind of research he's doing, the kind of effect size he's trying to get, the time it would take him to generate that, just doesn't really fit into what they're doing over there.
02:27:27.000Well, it seems to me that that statistical 32%, that's a real number.
02:27:41.000But I think that this sort of the professionals...
02:27:43.000And look, there are professional skeptics like French and Wiseman, the guys I mentioned before, who will engage in a reasonable conversation about this.
02:27:51.000But then there are skeptics, to me, like the J-Ref, the James Rene Educational Foundation, those guys who are just kind of rejecting it out of hand.
02:28:15.000That tiny percentage bump is really fascinating because it really makes you go, maybe it is an emerging skill or maybe it is an emerging sense or, as you said before, a declining one because we don't use it in the natural world anymore.
02:28:34.000And look, you know, it's a figure, when you look at that, like the Ganzfeld effect, 32 versus 25, you know, whatever an individual study might show, right?
02:28:42.000One of the things that's powerful about that figure, and it speaks to one of the things the skeptics do well, right, is they warn you away from those people who really are con artists.
02:28:52.000I mean, the idea of the super psychic, John Edwards, Sylvia Brown, there is threadbare Evidence for that.
02:28:58.000It's not something that I would put my name on and reputation on as saying there's something we really need to look at this, right?
02:29:06.000But the Gansfeld effect, there's so many studies, dozens and dozens of studies that go into these, what they call these meta-analyses when they crunch all the numbers together.
02:29:14.000That I will put my name on and say, you know, we should fucking look at that.
02:29:18.000And so it's not that the skeptics are all wrong or all wet, right?
02:29:22.000But they paint with far too broad a brush.
02:29:23.000And I think at the end of the day, my own guess and their motivation is the fact that that mechanism would be unexplained, the fact that that mechanism would suggest there is more to us than meat.
02:29:34.000is not something they want to acknowledge because when you really look at these people, when you look at Randy, he's also a dogmatic atheist.
02:29:40.000The idea that we're more than meat starts to introduce the idea of a soul, right?
02:29:44.000Something that will transcend this bodily death and the idea that we have to, you know, worry about that to some degree and govern our behavior based on what we're going to become later or what we're going to have to deal with later, potentially.
02:29:55.000And so I think that they're kind of keeping the barn door shut, right?
02:29:58.000They've taken on this tack in life that they are going to hold this shit down.
02:30:04.000The fringe ideas, the unexplained anything, occult, what have you, all those things are just not to be given any power.
02:30:16.000But it's kind of unscientific to block out anything, isn't it?
02:30:47.000All the interviews I've done now, and I've done a ton of them, This was the biggest honor, and the reason is because I've been listening to this podcast for the last couple years now, like a year and a half or more.
02:30:58.000And I find, and so it's funny, I'm not sure how many guests you've had on in this position, where this show has become part of the way I reinforce my own good habits.
02:31:06.000Like, I find that it just keeps me motivated, it keeps me focused on, I think of this podcast ultimately, secretly, it's kind of a cloak and dagger enterprise to get people to live their best possible life.
02:31:15.000And that's the function it performs for me.
02:31:18.000And so being on your show, totally fucking jacked to be here.