Alex and Allison Gray are in the middle of building a 3-story, 12,000 sq ft building with a new roof and incredible spaces to exhibit visionary art. They talk about how they got the idea for the design, how they built it, and why it might be the coolest building on the planet. Plus, they talk about the Adam and Eve myth and how they re replicating the Caduceus in their new building. This episode is brought to you by Entheon, a 3D printing company based in Los Angeles, CA. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships and use promo code POWER10 at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the discount code: POWER10 when you place an order of $10 or more at the checkout counter. Thanks to our sponsor, for sponsoring this episode! Thanks also to our supporter, . for supporting this episode and all the support we ve gotten so far. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! We re listening to your favorite streaming platform so we can keep giving you the best listening experience possible! Thank you! See you next week for the rest of the week! Timestamps: 8:00 - What's your favorite thing you ve been listening to this week? 9:30 - What do you think of this episode? 11:00 12: What s your favorite piece of art? 13: What is your favorite part of the universe? 15:00 | What s the best piece of music you ve listened to in the past day? 16:00 / 17:00/16:00 // 17:30/17: What are you looking forward to next? 18:30 / 18:40/18:30 19:40 / 20:00 & 21:30 & 25:40 22:15 23:00 Or do you have a favorite piece from this week szn_ 27: Is it a better world? 26:00 + 3rd piece? 25:00 Is it better than the most important thing you re looking at it? ? 30:00 Some other stuff you ve heard me think it s a better than that? 35:00 Can you see it in your head?
00:02:49.000This is the planned corner, one of the angels of the four corners, that the direction of the building that we're kind of recycling the carriage house It has the corners of the buildings pointing in the cardinal directions.
00:03:06.000So I thought that a feature of them, there will be angels of the north, south, east, west.
00:03:13.000And part of the whole thing is getting the four quadrants together.
00:03:17.000On top of the building, there's a steeplehead that is basically a four-faced being that is the people of the four directions coming together in visionary oneness.
00:03:28.000So, as a building, it's a big, basically, godhead.
00:03:35.000Is that a real image of the actual outside of the building with that angel on it?
00:03:39.000No, that's the computer model that was made by one of the Disney animators, Ryan Toddle.
00:03:51.000He's a guy that is responsible for running one of the digital animation teams that did Zootopia and Frozen.
00:04:12.000One of the coolest things about the video that is in there is that it shows a kind of spin around of the building itself that was done by these amazing...
00:05:04.000So you really did the caduceus and then sort of replicated the DNA, which a lot of people believe was what the caduceus was based on in the first place, right?
00:05:15.000It's all growing out of some mushrooms there at the base.
00:05:18.000Alex did the drawing, and then it was sculpted in teak.
00:06:10.000On the end of this paintbrush, which is kind of flying up and indicating a kind of upward trajectory, There's a drip coming off of it, and the drip also looks like an eyeball.
00:06:26.000The center of the eyeball is the Earth.
00:06:29.000And there's a skeleton, a child, and a person who's fully grown, woman and man, on either side.
00:06:38.000And they each are reaching for the planet.
00:06:41.000Now the question is, who's going to get the ball, basically?
00:08:29.000I mean, there's indications that, you know, like, you don't know how money's going to come in.
00:08:34.000This campaign is only to finish the exhibition interiorly.
00:08:37.000And then, you know, if we still, which I think we will need to raise another $1.5 million today, To do the sculptural exterior, which is done by a 3D printout.
00:08:51.000It's a 3D printout, 20 feet high by 8x8.
00:08:55.000And what is the substance it's made of?
00:08:57.000Well, it'll be finished in glass-reinforced cast concrete, but you print out the foam, then you make the mold.
00:09:19.000We were thinking coming to California.
00:09:20.000There are places that do it out here, but we found a place so close, and they're Doing the Brooklyn Academy of Music and some of the big buildings in the city.
00:09:29.000Has anybody done anything even remotely like this?
00:09:34.000Well, you'll see theme parks where things are, but the glass reinforced cast concrete will make it enduring.
00:09:42.000If they don't knock it down with a wrecking ball, it'll be there in a thousand years.
00:11:11.000Whenever you have something that you're gonna call a church or a religion or you have a sacred area where you take it very, very seriously, you're gonna have at least one person who has an elevated Profile.
00:11:26.000You know, there's going to be one person or people who run this thing that other people are going to look at like they're different than us.
00:11:56.000And like a lot of artists, we feel like when we're really doing our thing, that there's a spiritual element of that, that your creativity and spirituality somehow seem like they're very strongly connected.
00:12:16.000Basically, emanations of a cosmos that's creative, then we're little embodiments of creative energy.
00:12:24.000And that creative energy can be used for the positive or the negative.
00:12:30.000And it comes from the way that you view the world, how you're going to take that.
00:12:36.000And so as an emanation of creative energy, an artist is just a, you know, like an obvious symbol of that.
00:12:45.000And so we see that throughout history that All the religions, whether they agreed or disagreed, all used creative expression to get their message out.
00:12:58.000And so it's one of the things that unites all the different wisdom traditions and unites a lot of other stuff that would consider itself outside of religion as well.
00:13:10.000I feel that creativity itself is the original kind of religious impulse.
00:13:19.000It's the way of knowing oneself, the way of knowing God.
00:13:26.000I mean, we look at the cave art and you say, You know, they weren't talking about sects or something or disagreeing necessarily as like religious kind of ideas and things like that.
00:13:40.000They were making a mark of meaning and left behind something that was meaningful to their tribe.
00:13:48.000And I think that that's still what we're trying to do.
00:13:52.000I think religion, because it scares the shit out of really intelligent people for good reason because it's such a mess in the world and created such a mess and so much divisiveness,
00:14:09.000something that's supposed to be about love that's caused so much heartache and damage.
00:14:20.000What I think is that when I told my friend Robert Jesse from the Council on Spiritual Practices, well, I'm spiritual but I'm not religious.
00:14:31.000You know, you're saying, well, you know, Alex, we can't let the fundamentalists own the word religion.
00:14:43.000What we need are courageous experiments in religion that could help us to get to the other side of the bell curve, the evolutionary edge.
00:14:58.000Is there an evolving edge for religion?
00:15:00.000Could we get post-secular in the world?
00:15:03.000Can we imagine a world where people have...
00:15:06.000Most of the people of the world have taken a sacrament of one kind or another and have realized that there's an infinite intelligence at the basis of the cosmos that they are, you know,
00:16:06.000And so, how do you unite a world spiritually?
00:16:13.000Well, my candidate is the creative arts, you know, that all the world cultures have some means of creative expression.
00:16:23.000We get to know that culture through their music, through their, you know, painting, sculpture, various kinds of things.
00:16:31.000And that's how we get to know each other and see our connections, you know.
00:16:40.000And so as a potential, Something that's been used by all world religions.
00:16:46.000You know, it's something that, as a de facto, for the people who don't believe in God anymore, many of them still believe that artists are trying to do something authentic and truthful to their inner being.
00:17:01.000Isn't the word religion fairly loaded, though?
00:17:05.000And isn't what's important the idea behind what you're trying to do, right?
00:17:09.000The idea is that you're trying to make this sacred place.
00:17:12.000You're trying to make this amazing place where people can go and see expression.
00:17:16.000And see, you know, the purity of your creative vision.
00:18:18.000We might clean up the neighborhood a little, you know, and make it more habitable for people to want to look at their relationship with spirit through even the lens of religion.
00:18:36.000Because religion is associated in most people's minds with deities.
00:18:39.000Religion is associated in most people's minds with ancient traditions, ancient traditions that oftentimes stifle your behavior, tell you what to do, control you, and offer horrendous consequences for not complying.
00:18:53.000That's what a lot of people think of when they think of the word religion.
00:18:58.000But you have this thing, but let me get to this real quick.
00:19:01.000You have this thing, this beautiful thing.
00:19:07.000And when you're labeling it, you're connecting it with all these other religions that are so problematic and you're going to have to explain your way out of that.
00:19:14.000Why do that instead of just have this amazing center?
00:19:20.000Because I feel that we're intimately connected with whatever that religious impulse.
00:19:27.000And if you look at what is the primary religious experience, that is a mystical experience.
00:20:00.000So the idea being that the religion or these churches were set up so that people could reconnect with God.
00:20:06.000So they go about their day, they're filled with troubles and strife and all sorts of stress, and they can go back to the church and they can reconnect with God through religion.
00:20:14.000If you go to Egypt or you go to India...
00:20:24.000Gorgeous cathedrals that are a thousand years old.
00:20:26.000You go to these pilgrimage places and there is tremendous power because a lot of people invested a lot of love energy into a center and they built a shrine to whatever they believed that spirit to be.
00:20:45.000And that is part of a long tradition of a connectedness with a You know, their lens into the infinite, you know, whatever religion you're looking through, iconic, aniconic.
00:21:01.000Yes, they're a hell of a lot of trouble when you get to the secondary religious, you know, experience, which is everything else that you think about religion.
00:21:16.000The primary religious experience, every religion started with a mystical experience.
00:21:21.000And people are having those on acid every day now.
00:21:27.000And so, what, do you disconnect from that whole tradition where people were connecting to the infinite before?
00:21:34.000You say, this has nothing to do with that.
00:21:37.000Or do you say, hey, religion's fucked up, but what if we reimagine it?
00:21:46.000And can't we do it and say, this has a lot going for it, this quest for the infinite absolute mystery that's at the core of our being and the core of the cosmos.
00:22:01.000This quest to know that, it leads to science, it leads to art, it's the quest to know the truth about the nature of reality.
00:22:10.000And so that quest Is another reason why I think that if you harness that to creativity, just artists.
00:24:19.000That's where it gets really fascinating, is the tax-exempt status of religion.
00:24:25.000Religion is so odd in that way, that worshipping and being in a place where you worship, even if it's very clear that there's a lot of profit being made, you don't have to pay taxes on that.
00:24:36.000I just want to tell you this, just a touch of the history of why we became a church, because it wasn't really ever our intention to become a church.
00:24:44.000All the way from the beginning, 1985, when we visioned the temple simultaneously, Alex and I, on our first MDMA journey, lying on the bed, we both came out of it having visioned the circular temple.
00:25:12.000But we both saw this temple and we knew that this was sort of like our joint mission.
00:25:18.000This was the thing we were going to do together.
00:25:20.000We went in art school, so Alex always had his art, and I had my art.
00:25:24.000We shared a studio, but this was something we were going to do together.
00:25:29.000We never thought we would become a church.
00:25:32.000But here we were building this sacred site, and then all through our life, We started visiting sacred sites like we just came from St. Mark's in Venice and we see Chartres Cathedral and we go there with groups of people and go on pilgrimage to these sacred beautiful art places.
00:25:52.000But anyway, the way we became a church was a friend of ours who She started Sirius Satellite Network, actually.
00:27:34.000And the whole place we're giving away, it belongs to the community.
00:27:38.000And the community It's everybody who's spiritual and creative, but it tends to have a lot of psychedelophiles, people who feel like they've experienced the divine and they want a place to go ahead and talk about it.
00:27:54.000They wanted this in the city when we were in Manhattan for five years.
00:27:58.000It was just a place where you could go and talk about this.
00:28:04.000And we would always have security and make sure there wasn't, you know, anything being passed around because we can't get into trouble because we're, like, really legitimate.
00:29:27.000It's a permanent location in Wappinger, New York.
00:29:32.000It's in the Hudson Valley, like 65 miles from the city.
00:29:35.000You can get there on the train, but we found this lovely old retreat center all kind of imploding and, you know, and we've been, you know, working on it one building at a time.
00:29:46.000The Carriage House, which is turning into Entheon, the first temple of visionary art that we really came there to build, It's building four, actually.
00:29:55.000We have a 10-bedroom Victorian guest house and an office in our studio.
00:30:01.000So we have six buildings to work on, and we're on building four.
00:30:05.000But anyway, this is like a little retreat center that we're leaving to our community, our spiritual, creative, cosmonaut community.
00:30:15.000It's fascinating that Martine was involved in it because she's also involved in artificial intelligence.
00:30:20.000I interviewed her for this sci-fi show that I did.
00:31:35.000And I went to Catholic school when I was a young kid, and I remember, I didn't go to kindergarten, I just went right into first grade, and I remember the fear, the constant fear that they injected in you.
00:31:44.000This idea of what religion is, it was great for me, because it just queered me off religion so young, so early off, I was like, oh, okay, well this is all nonsense.
00:31:56.000Before that, when I was young, my parents were getting divorced, and when my parents were splitting up, I was really scared.
00:32:03.000I was really nervous, and I was young, and there was a lot of violence going around.
00:32:07.000There was a lot of yelling and screaming, and I needed something.
00:32:11.000And so I remember when I was little, I was always talking about God.
00:32:15.000And it was just like, well, there's got to be, if all these people around me are out of their mind, and everyone's crazy, there's got to be God.
00:32:21.000So I was actually excited to go to Catholic school.
00:32:26.000I thought of it as, well, maybe these people, these relatives and these family members that I live with are all crazy, but there's going to be a place that I can go where I'm going to be able to be loved, and it's going to be calm, and God has rules, and everyone's going to follow them.
00:32:41.000And I went there, and I was like, oh, good lord.
00:33:11.000You had a bullshit detector that was always acutely attuned.
00:33:16.000Well, that's one good thing about growing up in a really fucked-up household, is that you have a constant sense of danger, because you're around danger all the time, so you don't get to sleep cuddly, you don't get to rest calm,
00:33:32.000and you have an acute awareness of all the possibilities.
00:33:38.000So, I mean, ultimately, that was a great thing for me.
00:33:41.000I can really see how that It heightened your ability to also to always maintain a mindfulness that's over everything.
00:33:52.000It's what probably allows you to do so many things.
00:33:56.000There's always a balance between mindfulness and paranoia.
00:34:00.000You don't want to be that guy that carries a gun to the bathroom.
00:34:03.000I know a lot of people that have surpassed this awareness and gone into this acute paranoia.
00:34:11.000I have this statement that I've been saying a lot lately, but I think it's important to bring up.
00:34:15.000I don't think human beings are designed to take in the bad news of seven billion people.
00:34:21.000I think the numbers that we deal with on a daily basis, with all the different stories of the world, They are too much for us to handle.
00:34:30.000You're supposed to deal with what's going on in your community with a watchful eye on the rest of the world.
00:34:37.000You shouldn't be deeply engrossed in all of the most disgusting aspects of the rest of the world 24 hours a day.
00:34:43.000And I think that's one of the real problematic issues of our time with social media and with the news that people have this distorted sense of what the world is.
00:34:55.000They think this world is just filled with violence and horror.
00:35:00.000It just occasionally has violence and horror.
00:35:03.000There's just so many people and the world is so big that if you look at all those people and this giant globe that we're on, then you can kind of get a sense that the sky is falling.
00:35:16.000But if you go outside right now in Woodland Hills, it's beautiful.
00:35:40.000And I think that's the same thing with someone who grows up in a bad environment.
00:35:43.000I think you could get a distorted perception of what the world is and think that the bad environment that you're currently in is the entire world.
00:35:51.000And it can shape your perceptions and your interactions and therefore shape how you react to other people and shape your actual reality.
00:36:00.000You know, it's one of the things that I've truly tried to impart upon people that I've learned I believe that how you treat people and your interactions with people literally change your reality.
00:36:10.000And this is from mistakes that I've made and this is from positive decisions that I've made.
00:36:16.000Because I think that when you look at life in a positive way and you try to treat people kind and you try to be nice to people and you try to move forward with that The people that you interact with, they will get that.
00:36:29.000They will most likely respond more kindly to you.
00:40:17.000He wrote about it and was very eloquent, and he loved being Catholic, but he didn't like the Pope telling him to paint the Sistine Chapel, for instance.
00:41:48.000He was there when they dug up the Lao Kuhn, you know, that Greek sculpture with the snakes and the crazy stuff that really deeply influenced him.
00:42:00.000I just want to say that the purity of the religion, the place where it's really true, you know, like that beautiful, you know, what it actually means at the core, at the heart core of any religion, is expressed through the art of that religion.
00:42:15.000So, you know, the other stuff is crap.
00:42:18.000The way people act towards each other and stuff, that's their own deficits and their own obstacles coming out, you know, all over the place.
00:42:26.000Even the popes that have been horrible and allowed, you know, child molestation to perpetrate.
00:42:43.000And doesn't it vary depending upon the individual?
00:42:46.000And why does that the purity of the religion, that what you're seeing is the purity of one man's expression, his view, his beautiful view of the world, that we're so fortunate to be able to still look at 500 years later.
00:43:00.000What does that have to do with Catholicism?
00:43:02.000I think that because he was part of That tradition, and he was marrying the ideas of the Greek ideal and the Neoplatonic, which was all about universality.
00:43:21.000You know, it was really more about, they as much as we're saying, you know, all religions are connected and are basically talking about the one spirit that moves through all of us.
00:43:36.000I'd prefer to call it something like that rather than some of the names that get so heavily weighted.
00:43:44.000But I'm comfortable with the word God.
00:43:47.000To me, God means just ultimate mystery.
00:43:51.000Yeah, we discussed this a couple times on previous podcasts, how weighted that word is.
00:43:56.000One of the things that I think is amazing about the Sistine Chapel, when you're looking at the two fingers touching, when you're looking at all these beautiful images, is those images They become what people think of when they think of God and they think of religion.
00:44:13.000Those images, it's almost like it takes a form on.
00:44:18.000And in taking on that form, it gives you a structure to house the ideas and the ideals of these religions.
00:44:27.000Like in seeing something, a visual representation, It becomes a real thing.
00:44:35.000It's an idea that becomes embodied by that art.
00:44:39.000I grew up in the Jewish tradition, which is a non-iconic tradition.
00:44:44.000The Christian tradition really is a story of a person.
00:44:49.000They were born, they taught, they healed, they died, they rose.
00:44:54.000And in the Jewish tradition, it's non-embodied.
00:44:58.000So I resonated with that when I first saw God in LSD, and it was really not a person's face at all, but I recognized that this is what people are talking about when they're talking about God, which is...
00:45:11.000This energy that interconnects everything.
00:45:39.000And in that scaffolding of these beautiful paintings, you can kind of form your own categories and have your own chapters in your mind that exist.
00:45:50.000It's almost like makes those things real.
00:45:53.000Whether or not they ever were real, whether or not they ever were angels on clouds, It's almost inconsequential because the result of it is kind of the same.
00:46:03.000If you believe that it's real, if you believe, and this is where religion gets so fucking squirrely.
00:46:15.000Are you saying that there was a snake and he told Eve to, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:46:19.000No, but if you operate your life as if those things were reality, and if you operate your life under the ideals that are transcribed and described in these beautiful paintings, it will become a real past in the sense that it will have a real meaning to you.
00:47:47.000The beautiful thing about the tryptamine experience is that whatever visual you're experiencing right now will morph into something else and it was one of the most important lessons that I ever learned while tripping was in a DMT experience I had a bunch of negative thoughts.
00:48:07.000I don't remember what they were about but I remember the visions that I was having turned dark And like a dark green and black and twisted, like they were contorted and compressed, like a visual representation of negative thinking.
00:48:23.000And then I realized that whatever these things are, entities, thoughts, whatever they were trying to express to me the actual negative consequences of thinking like that, That it showed me in a visual form and then I relaxed and thought positive and it literally bloomed in front of me like a flower and then changed into this wildly beautiful Geometric pattern that was like dancing in front of me and I realized
00:48:53.000like at that moment Like I realized to myself I said I have to remember this I have to remember this and I have to figure out how to express this because this is an incredible Realization that it's not this, like, abstract idea that,
00:49:08.000oh, you think negative and negative things happen, you think positive.
00:50:08.000The spiritual positive kind of frameworks sometimes that you're seeing life through when you're tripping, you know, and seeing the connections between things, lines forming and things like that.
00:50:19.000The more kind of organic geometries that show up.
00:50:24.000You see this intelligence of life and the light of divine intelligence that came through for Alison, like in this language.
00:50:36.000It seems to be weaving things together.
00:50:39.000And when you're in touch with that infinite light that seems to be the source, then you can keep it upwardly moving and very evolutionarily, cosmically,
00:50:57.000And when then you're thinking regretful thoughts or thinking negative thoughts and anger and things like that, there's a constriction that goes on in your heart, I think, and kind of shuts things down.
00:51:11.000And that kind of, like you were saying, twisting in and curling in and darkening and things are all things that when you're Journeying, you see them manifest literally in the flow of the theater of your imagination.
00:51:28.000And so I think you really beautifully described that, just in that I was totally there.
00:51:36.000I think it's a disease of consciousness.
00:51:39.000I think it's very similar to catching a cold.
00:51:48.000And I think there's an analogy to be made about diseases of consciousness that you can get locked into these terrible ways of looking at the world.
00:51:57.000And I think that's one of the most important things about what you're trying to do in terms of building a community.
00:52:03.000That if you can build a community and build a conscious ideology that is sort of prescribed to people and establish a very positive and loving environment,
00:52:18.000you can spread that like you can spread a disease.
00:52:24.000For no better word, seeds of love or whatever you would call it.
00:53:44.000It's just been a joke that we've accepted.
00:53:46.000You know, and we were talking about Hillary and all the criminal investigations that she's under, and that somehow or another, this one person who we know is insincere is a better option than this other person who we know is a jerk-off.
00:53:59.000Like, where's the right and where's the wrong?
00:54:02.000It's rarely been an election where that isn't true.
00:54:04.000I thought Obama was a pretty clear choice, and there was a lot of celebrating afterwards, but of course, Then he disappointed people like he predicted he would at his inauguration.
00:54:14.000He said, I'm not going to make everybody happy and you're not going to always be happy with me.
00:54:18.000He predicted that and he came through with that.
00:54:22.000But I remember all the elections of my life.
00:54:24.000It was like, you know, I mean, I always voted.
00:55:25.000I want to say 2007 or something like that.
00:55:27.000But it was a documentary where they exposed that these voting machines, not only can they be manipulated, they were designed to be manipulated.
00:55:35.000They were designed to have a third party entrance, like a third party could enter in data.
00:55:42.000And it's just madness that those machines are how our election got decided.
00:55:50.000And, you know, they've since then cleaned it up in some way, but still, it's a dirty system.
00:55:56.000Yeah, doesn't it seem like we could actually have some encryption that each voter could vote online and do it in a minute?
00:56:34.000They couldn't even get into that guy's phone.
00:56:36.000You can do this, and so they should do it.
00:56:39.000Well, representative government is not necessary anymore.
00:56:41.000We can communicate instantaneously with people all throughout the world.
00:56:44.000We're not talking about sending a raven.
00:56:46.000You know, this isn't, you know, the 1300s.
00:56:49.000This is an interesting time, and we're not taking advantage of the resources that are available to us as far as representing the actual people.
00:56:58.000But I think there's also a problem with that, too, is there's a lot of people that are just completely uneducated, uninterested, slovenly lazy people, and we have to energize those people.
00:57:07.000We have to reinvigorate their ideas of participation and of community, and you have to say, like, look, you can't just sit on your couch and eat Twinkies and watch Beverly Hills Housewives.
00:57:19.000Because if you do, you're not allowed to complain about the world being fucked up, because you're a part of the world being fucked up.
00:57:26.000And I think until we can energize people, until we can give people this sense that they actually can participate, and it is just a bunch of human beings that are trying to figure out the right and the wrong way to do things.
00:57:39.000I think there's a lot of that going on right now.
00:57:41.000I think there's this ebb and flow of social media.
00:57:45.000Positive aspects of it and negative aspects of it.
00:57:48.000But ultimately, I think a lot of that is just us learning to navigate the landscape, this new landscape, this digital, interconnected landscape that's unprecedented in human history.
00:57:58.000I don't think we can understand it because we're a part of it.
00:58:04.000But I don't think, if we look back in history and they, a thousand years from now, look at this day, the way we're looking at Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci or Genghis Khan or anyone, you look back and you go, wow, what a crazy time.
00:58:22.000The emergence of artificial intelligence, the emergence of A very bizarre method of communication where you can instantaneously reach people on the entire planet, where data is shared like that amongst hundreds of millions of people instantly.
00:59:09.000I mean, you talked about it in the mid-20th century.
00:59:12.000And so this thinking layer, thinking atmosphere that's around the Earth now, through satellites, through all of the interactive technology that we're currently speaking on, You know,
00:59:28.000is a new body for the soul of humanity.
00:59:34.000You know, this is now what we're working on now is the theosphere.
00:59:40.000You know, that's what we've got to tap and access.
00:59:44.000Now we have connectedness with each other.
00:59:48.000Now, as a symbol, that should really clue us into something important.
00:59:54.000If we look at Other nature systems like the mycelial intelligence that weaves the woods together and that weaves our entire soil and makes it alive, really.
01:00:09.000These are spores connected by fibers, and that's what we are.
01:00:15.000Well, if you can't explain what's going on in the Pacific Northwest in regards to that, like how enormous the actual individual organism of mycelia connection is in the Pacific Northwest, it's essentially like someone described it, it might have been McKenna,
01:00:53.000They actually breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide like people.
01:00:58.000I've been incredibly fascinated over the last few months with plant intelligence and with plant communication and calculations and this idea that plants have some sort of a consciousness.
01:01:11.000And one of the things that I've been tripping out about is acacia trees, where if an animal eats them...
01:01:18.000And the wind carries the scent of the acacia tree being consumed.
01:01:23.000The bushes and trees downwind smell it and become bitter so that it discourages predation.
01:01:34.000The downwind animals were starving because they wouldn't eat the bushes from the trees that had taken the scent of the trees that were up north.
01:02:21.000We're going to be a Burning Man this summer.
01:02:23.000I just want to tell everybody out there, come and be a part of the Dr. Brawner Foam Dome Camp and get yourself sprayed with foam and see us paint our murals.
01:02:49.000That's where, you know, the rangers, when they go around and they find people who are having a bad time, they go to the Zendo and they take care of them.
01:08:01.000But you've got to collect all that water, and they collect them in these great big greywater tankers and take them away and bring in fresh water.
01:08:10.000It's like they're practicing setting up a village of the apocalypse.
01:08:16.000I'm telling you, this is the practice for that.
01:08:20.000These people can go in, and in a week or two, I mean, the government, I mean, the army went in there to study this because they can do this.
01:08:26.000In a couple of weeks, they put it all together.
01:10:07.000And the reason why they even do them at all in one big way is so that you can get on the top of them, so that you can see over everybody else when you go to see the man, and you can see all these fire spinners that are all around this.
01:23:38.000Look, Joe, you were really helpful to us when the last time we did the podcast, there was definitely a Rogan bump that happened to the Kickstarter that took us to a new level.
01:23:53.000Well, the good news is that there's probably like...
01:23:57.000How many more million people listening now?
01:24:00.000How many years ago was it that you guys came on last year?
01:24:03.0002013. So, that was, we were getting probably like 4 million downloads a month.
01:24:51.000And, you know, your artwork, I'm just a huge fan of what you do, and I just think that the design itself is literally, like I said, probably the coolest building on the planet.
01:25:01.000And it's a real, I mean, what you're doing is essentially an extension of the great works of all these, you know, when you're talking about the Sistine Chapel, or if you're talking about the Egyptian pyramids, or any of these sacred sites that exist all throughout the world, you're doing a modern version of that,
01:25:44.000That's like the prints that a lot of people have, the limited edition prints that they have of paintings that wonderful, labor-intensive art is made.
01:26:43.000And you look at it now, there's a giant body of art that represents these psychedelic trips that really didn't exist before.
01:26:51.000So, in a lot of ways, it is a quiet new chapter in the world of art that one day I think people are going to look back on.
01:27:01.000Once we realized the ridiculousness of the prohibition on drugs, especially on psychedelic drugs, non-toxic, non-problematic, as far as health repercussions, and you wonder, what was it about our restrictive society that put this sweeping,
01:27:18.000comprehensive ban on psychedelic substances in 1970, and what were the ramifications?
01:27:23.000What were the consequences of society?
01:27:32.000There was no, you know, save the planet talk.
01:27:37.000Climate change, we never heard about that growing up.
01:27:40.000Well, there was people that were talking about it, and there were certainly people that were recycling and composting and doing things along those lines and trying to leave a smaller footprint back then aware of it.
01:27:50.000But as far as a gigantic global conscious movement and also the urgency that's attached to it today where people are stepping back and they're looking at islands disappearing and, you know, they're looking at the rising sea levels and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is real.
01:28:05.000This is actually happening inside of our lifetime.
01:28:08.000There's a lot going on that I think...
01:28:29.000Go back and look at religious history and you look at the enlightenment, you look at the various styles of art that's connected to religion or cultural change.
01:28:47.000I think that it's showing that the big news today is the sacramental Sort of reformation, you know, that there's a return of the sacrament to the West.
01:29:05.000It's been demonized and hidden for thousands of years.
01:29:09.000Now it's back, and you're not going to get rid of it.
01:29:15.000There's nothing that's going to turn consciousness around toward a sacred planet that wants to save itself from self-destruction like psychedelics.
01:29:27.000There is no greater prescription for soul medicine than this is the stuff that is curing All of the traumatic stress of the vets, you know, marijuana is leading the way in the medicinals and opening the door literally for the sacred drugs,
01:29:50.000We don't even have a context established in America, but it's beginning.
01:29:56.000You know, the UDV church won their right to use the sacrament.
01:30:00.000The Native American church has peyote.
01:30:04.000There is legal precedent for religious use already, as there has been throughout history, except for the last couple thousand years.
01:30:15.000Well, in this country, as you were talking about with MDMA, I mean, just really the last few decades, and 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, I bought that stuff online, like in 2001 or something like that.
01:30:29.000You could just order it from some chemical company.
01:30:37.000And somehow, we've got to find a way to incorporate these sacraments.
01:30:44.000Well, I think they're being incorporated.
01:30:45.000I think one of the things that you said that you just sort of glossed over, but it's incredibly important, is that marijuana is the door opener.
01:30:51.000Marijuana is the guy that you let into the party that has the magic dust, and he went, whew, and he blew it on everybody.
01:30:56.000Because once that gets in, and especially edible marijuana, because edible marijuana is a psychedelic drug, and many people don't know it, and that's one of the reasons why when people eat brownies or something, they'll say, oh my god, someone laced the brownie.
01:31:12.000That is the most potent form of marijuana, is the edible form of marijuana, and it is very visionary, especially in high doses.
01:31:19.000It's incredibly introspective, acid-like in a lot of ways.
01:31:23.000You know, you get a perspective that is life changing and shifting and it's one of those directional shifts where even if it's a small degree of change over the course of the rest of your life that small degree of change could equal a very large shift in the direction that you're going as you continue down your path that slight turn to the right will make a huge difference five years from now ten years from now I think marijuana becoming legal in Colorado and we are seeing not
01:31:53.000just the positive Benefits in terms of the community.
01:31:57.000You're looking at people that are making way more money than they've ever made before.
01:32:03.000You're looking at housing prices, real estate prices going up, people having a new sense of community where they're like, oh, there's others like us.
01:32:19.000I did a show there a couple months ago at the Belco Theater, and it was amazing.
01:32:24.000It was like, this place has changed in a year!
01:32:27.000I recorded my last comedy special about two years ago, two years in August, in Colorado, and then I did the most recent one about six months ago in Colorado, the most recent show that I did there.
01:32:39.000And I could feel the shift when you're driving down the street.
01:34:35.000Since it was probably the original or one of the original cultivated plants, I think that humanity over the millennia worked out a symbiotic relationship with this plant and so we have the endocannabinoid system.
01:35:34.000Well, that was what those recent papers were released about the Nixon administration.
01:35:37.000It's one of the ways they demonize the black rights movement, civil rights movement, and also the anti-war movement, is they attacked marijuana and they attacked psychedelic drugs.
01:35:48.000And that was the reason why they passed that sweeping legislation in the first place.
01:35:52.000It was just to be able to have a reason to arrest those people.
01:35:55.000They knew they could attack the communities, and in attacking those communities, the best way to do it was to go after the drugs.
01:36:01.000Nixon hated them, and Nixon was a traitor to America.
01:36:08.000Nixon was probably, with Bush, one of the worst we've ever experienced.
01:36:14.000And through his hatred and venom, we have the drug war that now for over 40 years, we've just been laboring under the boot of a fascist traitor that once resigned from office.
01:37:03.000Well, you remember the revelation that they had a few years back when they were trying to figure out what caused the Salem witch trials, and one of the leading theories was that they had had a late frost, and the late frost had caused These funguses to grow on bread,
01:37:52.000He was responsible for Chartres Cathedral.
01:37:55.000Like a thousand years ago basically prayed to Mary and said, if you'll cure me of this ergotism, which is very dangerous but it leads to many visions, I will build you the most beautiful temple ever built.
01:38:12.000And so he was cured and he did found a shark cathedral, but as a result.
01:38:17.000So that's one of the cool things about ergotism and ergot.
01:38:21.000But the coolest thing is definitely LSD and Hoffman's ability to stabilize that.
01:38:29.000And then, so basically the coolest thing about the psychedelics to me is that they, and the science that has been done, is the Good Friday experiment and Roland Griffith's work And that has basically given us the best evidence for the existence of God because 65% of people who take psilocybin in a safe setting and they're spiritually inclined will have a full-blown mystical experience.
01:39:00.000So a majority of people who take a psychedelic basically in a positive setting and they don't, you know, they're not pre-schizo themselves, you know, not a borderline personality if you're stable.
01:39:14.000Pre-schizo, yeah, that's important to put out, you know, because I think that a lot of people think that psychedelics are for everybody, but unfortunately there's some folks amongst us that have a very difficult time with just regular stable sobriety.
01:39:29.000But I think in the end, they're going to, with science, medicine and science, I think what's going to be found out is that these psychedelics are going to cure schizophrenia.
01:39:39.000I really think that when they use it properly, because that's what the science is doing now, they're experimenting with With schizophrenics?
01:40:19.000Well, MAPS is really fascinating and amazing, and what they've done is just add an actual intellectual perspective on psychedelic drugs, an undeniably researched, really well-documented perspective that's so important.
01:40:39.000My first experiences with MAPS, I remember thinking like, thank God there's someone like this out there.
01:40:46.000Someone like Doblin out there, Rick Doblin, who has taken the super intelligent approach to recognizing what these substances are and what are the positive benefits are and how can you get these things slowly but surely through the legal system.
01:41:00.000And that's what they're doing now with MDMA. That's what they're doing now with the studies that they're doing on soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and all sorts of other people too, police officers, anybody...
01:41:19.000Really beneficial things that we're being denied, and we're being denied by people who haven't experienced them, which is the most ironic aspect of it.
01:41:26.000It's like someone having penicillin, but they won't let you try it, because they don't use it themselves.
01:41:31.000And we know that such things as Ibogaine exist.
01:41:36.000There is a way to interrupt opioid Addiction and the addiction process.
01:41:42.000This is a potential cure for the many millions of people who are currently opiate addicted.
01:41:53.000Ibogaine therapy has been working out miraculous results for people.
01:41:58.000It helps them turn around their lives and to stop needing the junk.
01:42:45.000Well, post-traumatic stress disorder, what's really fascinating about it is that there's this reaction to stress, to intense stress, traumatic situations, and that your body has this almost this Intense anticipation of a constant battle of constant stress and that that can be interrupted and that this is there's really no other method I mean you can go to therapy all your life and slowly perhaps slowly erode the memories of this and give
01:43:15.000yourself some psychological tools to manage these experiences But as far as like something that can sort of stop it in its tracks There's never been anything that's demonstrated that has the power of psychedelics The post-traumatic stress disorder studies are showing that 85% of vets that have it and are otherwise untreatable are having success after one treatment.
01:43:39.000And MAPS got a grant to do a second and third trial.
01:43:44.000That means the people, the 15% who didn't You know, really feel a relief from post-traumatic stress disorder, get a second turn and a third turn.
01:44:44.000You know, the psychologists basically say that you have to be able to look at your subjective state from another objective observation on that subjective state.
01:44:57.000And so that's literally what's happening with the MDMA. You're distanced from it.
01:45:05.000You can look at your behavior or what happened to you with more dispassion.
01:45:12.000You can have compassion on yourself and start to forgive everyone involved.
01:45:21.000It's miraculous and life-changing, which then leads to new neural growth.
01:45:27.000In both psilocybin and MDMA, they've been charting that there is new neural pathways.
01:45:34.000Not only does it just feel it that way, but it literally is that way.