In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I chat with a man who was born into a cult and grew up in it. He tells us about his early life growing up in the cult, and how he ended up in a group where he was raised by all men. It's a crazy story, and I think you'll agree that it's a good one to listen to with someone who was raised in a cult. I mean, who else would have the chance to grow up in such a group but a cult? It's crazy, and it's crazy bad, but it's real, and that's what makes it even crazier. Joe and I talk about it and talk about how crazy it is, and why it might not be so crazy after all. Joe and Michelle also talk about what it means to be a Mormon cult leader, and what it's like to be raised in one, and the weirdest thing that happens when you're raised in such an all male cult, you're not allowed to be in a relationship with a woman. And, of course, there's no sex. And there's a lot more to it than that! Listen to the full episode to find out more about the cult and the crazy things that went on in the group and how it was run by men. I hope you enjoy it, and have a great rest of your day :) Thanks for listening to this episode, Joe! XOXO! xoxo, Caitlyn & Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, Matt, and Joe, Michelle, Tim, Caitlyn, Joe, Joe, and Matt, Cheyenne, Mike, Michael, and Jon, Brian, and Ben, ( ) (Jon, Michelle, Jake, Ben, and Dan, etc., and Sarah, too! -Jon, Ben, Ben & Ben, too, and Brian, too? - Jon, Ben and Ben , Ben and Brian Chris, , Ben, Rachel, . Jake, Ben , Brian, and Rachel, Rachel , and Rachel & Brian, Ben? , etc., etc., Ben, etc, etc. , Jake, Brian, etc., and Ben & Rachel, etc! , Chris, etc.. Thank you so much for listening, Jon and Ben!
00:00:53.000Let's just say he was 12 when he first met my grandfather, who would later become his father-in-law, and my grandfather became his father figure.
00:01:01.000So my mom was married off to this man who was a follower of her father, and I am the second child of their union.
00:01:16.000So this took place, he originally started it near LA in Pasadena, which most people know because of the Rose Parade and other things like that.
00:01:24.000When he first started it, it started, my understanding is he was a Boy Scout leader and he was an orphan.
00:01:32.000He had come from Oklahoma when he was a young man and the Boy Scouts didn't allow him to have as much control as he wanted to have over the boys.
00:01:41.000So he left the Boy Scouts and he took the boys with him and some of the boys from his original troupe in 1931 stayed with him past his death.
00:01:50.000One of the first boys took over after him in the late 1980s.
00:02:22.000He came from a family where he was the only child that lived out of his particular mother who was married to a man who was a second marriage and his first wife had died and then you know he had a bunch of kids or whatever so he had a bunch of half siblings but no full siblings and apparently now this could be lore too they kind of excommunicated him he compared himself to Joseph You know,
00:02:46.000like, of the multicolored clothing and everything.
00:02:50.000So he was, like, put down a well, he liked to say, and he escaped, and he came to L.A. in the height of, I don't know, the silent films, things like that.
00:03:00.000There's no chance that is true, but he said he was, and he got some sort of probably church education when he got here, and he declared to everyone he was the prophet of God.
00:03:09.000He was going to live 500 years, and he was going to lead the army of God in the Second Coming.
00:04:17.000And he decided that since the world had not yet ended, that maybe he should marry her off before she either became an old maid or maybe a loose woman.
00:05:21.000My mom had the exact same haircut since she got married until she died the exact same haircut.
00:05:27.000She died in 2022. Yeah, so just a lot of the femininity was considered a temptation to the boys.
00:05:37.000And since it was supposed to be, they thought it was better to, you know, burn in hell than to lust after a woman.
00:05:43.000And they quoted some stuff from Paul, you know, in the apostles and the epistles and that basically you could get married as opposed to lust.
00:05:52.000And so eventually in the 1960s, they allowed their first wedding.
00:06:05.000It is just absolutely fascinating to me how some people develop these groups and how they do it and like what the characteristics of the leaders are.
00:07:19.000And he's crazy and, you know, they got the people in the woods in L.A. And so he moved out to Austin and had his followers build him this theater where he could dance in front of them.
00:08:48.000If you've ever been in a chaotic public environment where fights break out or something like that, there's a very strange feeling in the air that leads people to do things that they would never do before.
00:09:00.000People that would never pick up a shopping cart and throw it through a Starbucks window will do that now.
00:09:04.000It's like everybody just loses their fucking mind.
00:09:07.000And I think it happens in concerts when people are jamming out together.
00:09:11.000You all get in the same mind frequency.
00:09:14.000And I think a really good cult leader does that too.
00:09:17.000I think they get these people and they lock them into this way of thinking.
00:09:22.000And we don't want to call it hypnotism, but I think there's a lot of states that are very similar to hypnotism in that context.
00:09:30.000Something happens where you enter into an altered state of consciousness that's probably accessible somehow or another, but you don't know how to get there.
00:09:38.000But then this song brings you there or this person brings you there with their talk about the impending apocalypse and we're all locked in, you know, and it gives people like a sense of belonging and purpose that you're locked into this frequency that everybody else in the room is locked into.
00:10:47.000And I think that's what's so fascinating to me about these cults is how they do it, how they lock people in.
00:10:54.000I mean, I'm sure because of your experience, you've probably seen a few of these documentaries, right?
00:10:59.000You've probably seen I definitely have.
00:11:00.000And, you know, when I watched the reenactment of the Waco one, which is not the documentary, but did you watch the one that came out maybe five years ago?
00:11:50.000And one of these former members who I won't name, I hadn't seen, I didn't recognize him at all.
00:11:58.000I just hadn't seen him since I was a little kid.
00:12:00.000But several of them have come out who knew my parents and of course knew my grandfather before I was born and then maybe knew me when I was a little teeny girl and they have lots of stories.
00:12:09.000Anyway, he was on one of these things we called the TRIP with a capital T. And what we did on the trip, I mean, there were different things in different years, but this one was in the early 1970s.
00:12:18.000And he was, you know, doing all the things you do on the trip.
00:12:22.000But one thing they required, which my father required of us at home too, is to run every morning.
00:12:26.000First thing in the morning, which you can say there's some good things about this, but you slept together in tents and then you'd get up and you'd run and you'd have to beat your time.
00:12:34.000And my father used to time us as a kid, so I had to beat my time every day, which is really hard to do, of course, because at some point you're not going to be able to beat your time, right?
00:12:59.000There were three guys who didn't make their time, and they had to go through the SWAT machine.
00:13:02.000So my grandpa often made boys go through the SWAT machine.
00:13:05.000And the simple version, which was done at the actual location of the field, was you'd crawl through the other boys' or men's legs, and every boy would spank you.
00:14:10.000Potentially someone might think, why didn't you fight back?
00:14:12.000And of course I said, but you were trained.
00:14:15.000You were trained that you deserved this.
00:14:17.000And then apparently one of my uncles was really worried, wanted to take him to the hospital, but couldn't or didn't because they had no insurance.
00:14:27.000And this young man, who's no longer a young man, said that he could never tell his parents.
00:14:33.000And he never to this day ever told his parents or anyone.
00:14:36.000He and his brother have never spoken of their time in the fields.
00:14:43.000He got out maybe a year later, but he was...
00:14:46.000I mean, that was only one of many, many, many stories he told me, but that one just really struck me to feel ashamed of that, you know?
00:14:51.000Like, I... I guess for many years I too did not tell people where I came from because you feel like you must have done something weak to be a follower.
00:15:45.000I mean, we all would have, and I mean that, and I was born there and indoctrinated, and I would have completely taken anything that my grandfather or my parents told me was going to kill me.
00:15:57.000I would have felt that that was going to take me to heaven quicker, and everyone I knew would have done that.
00:16:03.000And the reason you don't hear about a lot of cults, by the way, is because they didn't end up in flames or mass suicide.
00:16:09.000But that doesn't mean that they didn't prey on, you know, dozens, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of people, depending on the cult.
00:16:18.000I was talking to Mark Andreessen, and he was explaining to me that there's still many, many active cults in California.
00:18:12.000And he was raised, you know, we were all raised collectively, but we were also raised separate from each other.
00:18:17.000And my biological siblings, we all had different experiences because they don't let you bond.
00:18:22.000They don't want my sister, who's just a little bit younger, she and I, we loved each other deeply, but we weren't allowed to speak to each other sometimes for weeks or months at a time.
00:18:31.000And they were just strongly against you forming what they would call allies.
00:18:36.000They didn't want friendships that could turn into anything that would be a little bit...
00:19:54.000With children, it just makes 100% sense.
00:19:56.000You're raised there, you think this is reality, and you think that the world outside reality is all a bunch of evil demons or whatever it is.
00:20:04.000But if you're an adult, like you're a grown adult, 34-year-old man, and you meet this dude at the auto repair shop, and he hands you a pamphlet, and the next thing you know, you're on a farm somewhere.
00:20:47.000But there's a lot more kids there than will ever get into the inner circles.
00:20:53.000And it's a little like the mob or something.
00:20:54.000Like, I was born in the inner circle, but there are plenty of people who came out of that cult who honestly weren't harmed by it because they got out young.
00:21:02.000So as long as you get out by the age of 12, you're probably okay.
00:21:06.000But they don't keep you unless you're really fully indoctrinated.
00:21:09.000And most of the people who stay really don't have a family to go back to.
00:21:12.000And they separate you from your family.
00:21:13.000And so they do more and more separation as you become a teenager.
00:21:16.000By the time you're 18, you're signing a commitment for life form.
00:23:02.000We have like one-tenth of access to information that we do today.
00:23:07.000And you're also a child and you think that this is reality.
00:23:10.000And parents were used to their kids being gone all the time.
00:23:13.000And I think that that was not something unusual.
00:23:15.000Because one thing I hear for kids who went there, people say, well, how did your parents allow that?
00:23:20.000And I mean, parents, like, they sent them off to the sports place, and then their kid got really into it.
00:23:23.000And then at some point, their kid became a teenager and didn't want to come home anymore.
00:23:26.000And I mean, they're like, well, I don't think my kid's doing drugs, or I don't think that they're, like, in prison, so it seems like they're doing pretty well.
00:23:32.000But it also seems like, societally, there was a shift at some point in time where, what was the year where more women entered the workforce, and more women started getting jobs?
00:23:48.000I think 1973 might have been like one of those.
00:23:51.000I mean, it obviously was starting to happen in the 60s, but there was a lot of women at home in the 60s.
00:23:55.000Around 1973 to 1979, you had a huge exodus of women out of the home.
00:24:02.000The women I come from, I mean, like my grandmother who had my father who joined this cult, she was always a working woman, minimum wage working woman.
00:24:11.000She didn't have more than eighth grade education.
00:24:13.000She worked because her father, excuse me, my dad's father, her husband, had been in World War II and got pretty severe PTSD or whatever, was an alcoholic and beat her.
00:25:36.000I remember there was this Christian group when I was in college that was trying to indoctrinate people, and they were like young, good-looking people And there was this beautiful Puerto Rican girl, and she was always trying to get me to go to parties with her.
00:25:55.000And I was like, wow, did I hit that jackpot?
00:25:58.000Like, eventually, I'm going to get a date with this girl.
00:26:53.000The landing gear didn't go out, and so the plane, just on the belly of the plane, skid across the runway, and there's all these crazy sparks.
00:28:39.000I think high control groups slash cults are a whole different experience.
00:28:44.000And yes, they use religion, but they don't teach you to have faith and to trust yourself in your faith.
00:28:48.000They teach you to follow someone else's faith.
00:28:50.000I used to have a joke about what's the difference between a cult and a religion, where a cult is created by one guy and he knows it's bullshit.
00:29:18.000I think if you tell me a story and I tell Jamie the story and then Jamie tells someone out in the lobby a story, by the time it gets to me all the way again, it's gonna be screwed up, right?
00:30:03.000It sounds a lot like if you would tell the Big Bang to your kids and your kids would tell it to their kids, and you're going to do this for a thousand years.
00:30:10.000At the end of it, you're going to get some real...
00:30:52.000And then when we read the King James Version of the Bible, I mean, you know, the king pronounced it to be so.
00:30:57.000And so anything that was left out, I mean, there was a lot left out, right, in what was canonized because it was perhaps dangerous to the particular regime that he was running.
00:31:24.000My problem is purely with human nature and what we know about humans.
00:31:28.000If there was a way that you got religion through some sort of non-human source, Like if you achieved your experience through a non-human source, I would go, okay, well maybe there's a place that you can go and you could actually go meet God.
00:31:42.000There's like a portal you walk through and you meet God.
00:31:44.000But as soon as you're doing, you're letting people tell you a story.
00:32:09.000So the people that are good at that job are generally full of shit.
00:32:14.000And so then you have a problem with the interpretation of the past, right?
00:32:18.000And you're seeing that right now in universities, like people are trying to reinterpret certain events because of the way people feel about sociopolitical issues today.
00:32:27.000So they're trying to reinterpret history, take down statues.
00:32:30.000There's a lot of like craziness that's going on today.
00:32:33.000Well, that's like a microcosm of the ancient history of human beings.
00:35:47.000Yeah, it's a little weird because it's all black, and so it kind of blends in, especially if you're like us and your eyes are probably going as time goes on.
00:36:31.000And that's why I asked because a lot of it is kind of tedious history.
00:36:35.000And there's a lot of he begats and there's the whole line, you know, of Christ, all the ancestors and the whole delineation of all that.
00:36:42.000And Where I come from, we were encouraged to read a verse of the Bible, but they would always tell you what it meant.
00:36:49.000And so I kind of went against, I used this little pin light and did it late at night, but I read the whole thing cover to cover when I was eight.
00:36:57.000And if you read every single book in order, you start to find that there's a lot of really beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Like what stuff?
00:37:22.000Well, there's, for example, I mean, this one's taught a little bit, but David, King David, I'm sure you've heard of him like as of David and Goliath, but then he became a powerful king.
00:37:32.000And he saw this woman who this woman is often talked about Bathsheba.
00:38:29.000And so then David sends him to the front lines to have him be killed so that he can marry his wife and get away with that child not being a bastard child.
00:39:24.000But occasionally they'll say, so-and-so, you know, Boaz through Ruth, or David's the father through Bathsheba.
00:39:30.000So Bathsheba ended up having a child who became Solomon, who we know, a lot of people know at least, of being the wisest man who ever lived, and he wrote Ecclesiastes and...
00:39:41.000And so there's four women who are named.
00:39:44.000And as a child, that was really interesting to me.
00:39:46.000And I would ask, you know, why are these four women in the line of Christ?
00:42:01.000It's just, if you're being honest, and if you believe in God, but you also know that people are full of shit, you have to put all this stuff through a filter.
00:42:47.000Well, that's not in the 66 books of the Bible that most people are taught in the Protestant tradition or the 69 or whatever in the Catholic tradition.
00:43:21.000So I'm a yoga teacher, among other things.
00:43:23.000And one thing that I say all the time when I'm teaching, which is a really common thing as a yoga teacher to say, is...
00:43:28.000Whatever I am giving you right now is a suggestion.
00:43:32.000So listen to your body, do what's great for you.
00:43:34.000If this doesn't feel right to you, please don't do it.
00:43:37.000And then you offer modifications, etc.
00:43:39.000And what high control religion does, and I'm not saying all religion, I'm saying the culture religion, doesn't give you the option of listening to your body or opting out of anything.
00:43:48.000This is the interpretation of the Word of God.
00:43:51.000And the one thing I will say is I don't know why Tamar did what she did or why Onan did what he did.
00:43:57.000You know, I don't know whether or not the stories were transcribed accurately or not, even if they were.
00:44:32.000Like, if there was no internet and no independent journalism, and they never had to account for the fact that Iraq never really had weapons of mass destruction, if the people in charge, if we're living in 1963, how long does it take before people figure out that Iraq didn't have those weapons?
00:46:17.000You know, there's a guy in Australia that says he's Jesus, and he runs this whole cult in Australia, and he has this woman who he says is Mary.
00:46:25.000But the problem is there was another woman who was Mary before, and it didn't work out with the original Mary.
00:46:32.000So he tells this new lady, I was wrong about that other lady.
00:46:45.000There's so many Marys in the Bible, like when people talk about Mary Magdalene or Mary and the other Jesus, or, you know, that it perhaps is just the translation for woman.
00:46:54.000Jesus as a historical figure is controversial.
00:46:58.000There's people that say that there's absolute evidence for Jesus, but then there's people that say, do you know, like, how much historical record we have on people that lived thousands of years before Jesus?
00:47:08.000You know, there's people that lived that they know what they said.
00:47:51.000And I am certainly not here to tell anybody what is true or not true, but the Gospels that are written about Jesus were written after, right?
00:48:26.000But the other, you know, Gospels were not written by anyone who had seen Jesus in that way, even though they were the versions like of when you have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these are the versions that they were told.
00:48:40.000Yeah, so this is where belief hits for people that are listening to this right now.
00:48:46.000Because there's going to be a certain percentage of people right now that have their hackles up because someone might be insinuating that maybe all this Jesus stuff is not legit.
00:49:55.000So I'm just saying, live your life this way.
00:49:58.000If that was a real thing, what would be any different than the Bible?
00:50:06.000What would be any different if a real event like that actually happened, where the Son of God came down and explained to mankind what they're doing wrong and lived this amazing life and taught so many people and they spread his wisdom and they spread his information,
00:50:23.000it wouldn't be any different than the Bible.
00:50:26.000Because even if it was very clear what he was saying and very clear what he had done and the impact and how they all knew he was the Son of God, By the time a hundred years go by, people talking about it, who the fuck knows?
00:50:47.000Jesus told a lot of parables, and those are easier to remember.
00:50:51.000So if you listen to, like, his Sermon on the Mount or, you know, these various things, it's possible that some of these stories, which they can be interpreted more than one way, but, like, you know, to say that, have you heard the expression, casting pearls to swine?
00:51:25.000And the father gives his younger son his inheritance.
00:51:28.000And this young man who is raised well goes out and Hires prostitutes, does all the things, right?
00:51:35.000And lives this loose life and he finds that he runs out of money.
00:51:39.000And he is in a pen of pigs and he is willing to eat what even the pigs won't eat, like the leftovers.
00:51:47.000And he is face down in the mud, according to the story, in the pig pen and says, even if I was a servant from my father, I'd be treated better than this.
00:51:58.000And his older brother is really upset because the father brings the son back and treats him, you know, he's just so grateful his son's returning to him.
00:52:07.000And his brother says, you know, or an expression like, you're casting pearls to swine.
00:52:14.000My brother is like, you know, from the pig pen, and you're giving him something that he doesn't deserve.
00:52:19.000And that whole story, I mean, you can interpret it any way you want, but this idea that you tell stories like this and someone could say God is willing to take you back, and perhaps even better if you have experienced life and that just being obedient isn't the only way to live a life.
00:52:37.000Maybe that's the—I don't know what the real interpretation is, right?
00:52:39.000But, like, when you read a story like that or you hear the story, Jesus didn't write it down, but if he told that story, then now people come to that and they think— What does that mean?
00:52:50.000Does that mean when I find myself in a pig pen that I can repent and go back?
00:53:51.000Even today, in this day and age with the internet, if you started doing something like that and you're schizophrenic, you could believe it.
00:54:02.000And then lots of people believe that other people are demons.
00:54:05.000There's a lot of like real funky beliefs that people hold on to.
00:54:09.000And if someone Like I said, if someone was a charismatic leader and they pretended to be the son of God versus someone who is actually the son of God, a hundred years later, it's going to be very difficult to parse out what's what.
00:55:38.000If God exists, why would God engineer an animal to be at the top of the food chain That is so filled with greed and wants so much power that it's willing to take over enormous swaths of land with giant machines and murder anybody who gets in their way and it's all justified in the name of nationalism.
00:56:01.000Why would God universally impart that kind of sensibility on a species.
00:56:27.000That's the answer to it, is that in the garden, when Adam and Eve didn't know the difference, and then they partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that by the choice to do that brought sin into the world.
00:56:38.000And once there's sin into the world, then humans always have the choice to follow the light or follow the darkness.
00:57:42.000And that the light, so in A Wrinkle in Time is a story, there's science in it and a lot of things, but that when you see the light and you're drawn to the light, that you might be tempted by the darkness, but when you really know what light is, that you'll always choose that.
00:57:56.000And so at the end of the day, that we're all going to see the light.
00:58:00.000But even if you don't believe in religion, if you know, like, good experiences and bad experiences in your life, and when you're happy with yourself and when you're upset with yourself in your life, you generally know, like, there's a direction that you really want to be moving in.
00:58:16.000And the more life experience you have, the more stupid things you do, the more you learn.
00:58:20.000And so the more you get a better database to draw from to understand what each and individual choice means in the greater The greater picture of your existence.
00:58:29.000And as you go further and further, you go, if you're living a harmonious life, you go almost naturally towards that direction.
00:58:38.000Trying to be nicer to people, love your neighbor, have more peace in the world, don't be murdering people.
00:58:44.000You know, and that's generally like how most religions want you to believe.
00:58:49.000It's like the origin of it, there's some sort of a guidebook for being a human.
00:59:22.000You know, he goes and has all these experiences, find himself, like, making every mistake possible, and then sees the light and goes back to his father.
00:59:32.000And these people that lived and were writing things down on animal skins while they were engaging in wars with spears, you know, like, these are fucking wild-ass times.
00:59:41.000And they were trying to sort it all out.
00:59:43.000Have you read Meditations, Marcus Aurelius?
01:00:31.000And if you go back 2,000 years before him, when people started writing all this stuff down, Well, people had a lot stronger ability to concentrate, obviously.
01:01:51.000And that there's so many truths in anything.
01:01:54.000And so learning to survive, like, literally off the land or in the desert or things like that was a really harsh training that I had as a kid.
01:02:00.000But it taught me to look around everywhere that I've been ever since and to pay attention.
01:02:39.000I don't remember, but I remember there was this Thai restaurant I used to go to on Ventura, this great Thai spot, and right above it was this fucking billboard that was giving you a very specific date, like, repent, the end is here,
01:04:11.000We had a good time and the world keeps going.
01:04:13.000But there's, you know, it's just a long calendar.
01:04:16.000It's a very bizarre, ancient calendar that they don't really fully understand.
01:04:20.000So to say that was the end of the world seems a little silly.
01:04:23.000Well, you know, when they give these dates, like when my grandfather gave the date of 1977, they can also say anytime it doesn't happen that the calendars are wrong.
01:04:39.000But the point is, like, oh, well, you know, with the Star of Bethlehem and all this, like, maybe that was redated because Herod didn't want us to know, like, when Jesus was really born because he was killing all the babies and he didn't really know the date of Jesus' birth.
01:04:50.000That's why he was killing, you know, all the young boys as opposed to just that one and et cetera, et cetera.
01:05:45.000The original Hebrew word from which the name Lilith is taken is in the biblical Hebrew, the book of Isaiah, though Lilith herself is not mentioned in any biblical text.
01:05:55.000In late antiquity, and how do you say that word?
01:06:02.000Medellin and Jewish sources from 500 A.D. onward, Lilith appears in Historalist, incantations incorporating a short mythic story in various concepts and localities that give partial descriptions of her.
01:06:19.000She is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud, Nadah, Shabbat, Bava Batra, and the conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan as Adam's first wife.
01:06:31.000And in the Zohar Leviticus 19a as a hot, fiery female who first cohabitated with man.
01:09:52.000Yeah, it's not too far from where I am.
01:09:54.000And when I feel that I need to commune with something greater than myself, you just go there and you just lay down and look at those stars.
01:10:00.000Light pollution is spiritual poisoning.
01:10:04.000And it's a big factor, I think, in how lost we are.
01:10:10.000We're not consistently humbled every night by the majesty of the stars.
01:10:15.000If we were consistently humbled every night, I think we'd generally tone people down a little bit.
01:10:23.000There is something really healing about looking at the stars, and there's also the ability to literally not be lost if you know how to read the stars, right?
01:10:30.000So that is something I was trained by my uncle, who was, you know, somewhat of an astronomer.
01:10:34.000But to look at the stars and to always know where you are.
01:10:37.000And if you know how to read the stars, you can never be lost.
01:10:40.000So you could like navigate with the stars?
01:10:43.000Like if you're in a boat, could you do it?
01:10:45.000I don't know if I could do it very well from a boat.
01:10:47.000But I could do it because I know how to put like a stick in the ground and to see the difference in the way that the sun goes so that you can see where you are.
01:10:55.000Because you've got to know where the North Star is, obviously.
01:12:09.000So if you want to be found, you put up a signal.
01:12:11.000If you don't want to be found, you need to know what creates a signal for people who are looking.
01:12:16.000So, for example, if you are in the desert, you try to find dark rocks to put SOS. But if you don't want to be found, you try to never put a contrast.
01:12:23.000So you try not to have anything that would contrast with the color of the land that a plane would see as contrast.
01:13:24.000And the idea, though, is that some people are left behind in order to try to win the last people, like all the evil people, sort of like Noah's Ark, right?
01:13:34.000Like Noah's left and he gets on this ark and like it's his job to, I mean, why didn't God just take Noah to heaven, right?
01:13:40.000But like he gets this boat and he has his family and all the animals and he gets to like stay clear from the flood.
01:13:44.000Or you have Sodom and Gomorrah, you have Lot, the only good person left, and he wants to like help the people.
01:13:49.000In the town or Jonah and Nineveh where he's told to go tell the people they're bad and then God saves the people anyway.
01:13:55.000So there's a lot of stories of God changing his mind.
01:13:58.000And yes, I know a lot of Bible stories.
01:14:03.000So if you leave some people behind who know how to lead the army of God, you can then proselytize and bring people into true faith and righteousness.
01:14:13.000It's also kind of like, I don't know, a way to keep people a little bit isolated if you're trying to teach them to do something that other people don't know how to do.
01:14:20.000And I was very ashamed of knowing like that kind of thing.
01:14:23.000So it's the kind of thing I talk about in Forager is like I spent a lot of time really feeling like I couldn't acclimate to the regular world like later because I, you know, it's like if you're always looking at, I'm sure Navy SEALs feel this way, but you know, like you're always waiting for disaster.
01:14:59.000No, but I mean, to some degree, I mean, I'm not actively preparing, but I feel like I, yeah, I mean, it makes it really hard to trust people when you've been trained that the people that you think you can trust are going to betray you.
01:15:12.000Really hard to get that out of your head.
01:15:14.000I had a friend who was a Mormon and when they left she was like in her 40s and she said she became really susceptible to any kind of like spiritual people, spirituality, like con people.
01:15:27.000She just had this trusting nature from being like a strict Mormon her whole life.
01:15:40.000Because if you're only around people who are homogenous and that, like, you're taught, which I was, that, like, everybody in your group is trustworthy, you don't see the signs.
01:15:48.000You don't know, I mean, you don't know the red flags, as people would say.
01:15:51.000She also said she found herself to be susceptible to people telling her things.
01:15:57.000She just had this automatic inclination to not question and believe things that came from being strict religion.
01:17:00.000Most people, it's not like you're telling people and they're laughing at you.
01:17:03.000You're not telling anyone because you're scared they're going to laugh at you or judge you.
01:17:06.000And so you spend your life in shame, hiding this truth that honestly doesn't make you a bad person at all and probably many people would understand.
01:17:36.000You're not that you that was five years old.
01:17:39.000And if that had been consistently perpetuated onto you, you wouldn't know.
01:17:43.000So there's a story we were raised with, which is a really common biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, and Abraham is told to kill his son, his only son, and he's told to, like, take him up on an altar and slaughter him, and the way that you would slaughter an animal.
01:17:55.000And Abraham, like, makes Isaac do this hike up to this mountain where he's going to kill him.
01:18:00.000And he, God has told him he must do this.
01:18:03.000And so he, like, ties his own son on this altar and brings up the knife to kill him.
01:18:08.000And like, very dramatically, you know, the story.
01:18:11.000And as he's plunging down the knife, an angel comes and grabs his wrist and stops.
01:18:15.000And God said, I just wanted to make sure you'd really do it.
01:18:18.000And this is the story I was raised on, and both my parents and my grandfather were very big on, like, you will kill your child if God asks you to.
01:18:25.000And I said this in the book, and my brother, who, you know, we really haven't talked about this, or we have now, but at the time we hadn't really talked about this.
01:18:44.000And we were raised very, you know, I don't know if community is exactly the truth because there wasn't necessarily anyone who was checking.
01:18:51.000But there was random people who, in my case a lot of men, who just raised us because our parents had more important things that God told them to do.
01:19:00.000And so there's a lot of ways to sacrifice kids.
01:19:02.000There's a lot of ways to think that, you know, God is talking to you.
01:19:36.000He's a doctor who spoke on Megyn Kelly when I was on that show too.
01:19:41.000And he has something called the Bite Method, which is just basically says that there's like these really four major ways of control that cults do.
01:19:50.000They control your behavior, your information, your thoughts, and your emotions.
01:19:53.000And so he has these deprogramming systems and counselors and people who can help you if you've been in that kind of high control group, even if it wasn't religious in nature.
01:20:03.000Yeah, I've talked to that dude before.
01:20:37.000What was the experience like of like all of a sudden you go from being this incredibly controlling religious cult that thinks the end of the world is coming to regular world?
01:20:47.000So it wasn't entirely all of a sudden.
01:20:49.000I had a childhood illness, an autoimmune disease, which was probably, I mean, there's no genetic nature to these diseases, but where your body attacks itself.
01:20:58.000So it's quite probable that my body was just like, I can't take this anymore.
01:23:11.000And I didn't drink or smoke or do any of those things because I was so afraid of losing control.
01:23:16.000I was so afraid that if I... I also felt like I was in a huge hole that I had to dig my way out of in order to find a way to live in the outside world.
01:23:23.000And so I couldn't afford to, like, I didn't know who to trust and who not to trust.
01:24:59.000So when you are learning these things, you have to, like, actually memorize them.
01:25:02.000You know, like, when you don't come from it because you're like, there's a lot of rules and all of them have systems, right?
01:25:09.000So I'm very actually fascinated by microcosms, you know, like the microcosm cultures of, like, Any sort of culture has a lot of rules attached to it.
01:26:15.000And it feels just like, I don't know, it just removes all the hierarchies.
01:26:18.000And I Have you ever seen those Middle Eastern guys all sitting around an enormous plate of food, and they're all just sitting, cross-legged, just digging in with their hands and eating with their hands?
01:27:35.000Just keep people, make them where they're nice as clothes so they don't want to get messy and give them a fork and a knife and keep everybody proper and everyone's trying to impress everybody else with how proper they are and how much they know about fine dining.
01:27:48.000May I see this sommelier to make a wine selection?
01:27:53.000I remember the first time, you know, someone came to pour this last wine or whatever, and then the guy is supposed to, like, take a sip of it to tell the guy if it's okay.
01:28:01.000And I'm like, what kind of culture is this?
01:28:03.000Like, I mean, also, and what are you going to say if it's not?
01:30:41.000Many different ways of making bong lassi.
01:30:44.000The traditional method is to blend fresh cannabis leaves, plain yogurt, a pinch of sugar, and nuts like almonds and pistachios, along with spices and ginger powder, fennel seeds, cardamom, and peppercorn, and water.
01:31:09.000Yeah, but I guess these guys take that stuff and get blasted.
01:31:14.000Yeah, so it's a really old and rich tradition, and they are very humble and kind people, the culture, very pacifist, and et cetera, et cetera.
01:31:23.000But probably that's what they've been doing for this year.
01:31:29.000So that's an example of a group of humans following a pattern that seems to be beneficial.
01:31:37.000It seems like they've got a harmonious relationship with each other.
01:31:40.000They do, but their workaround, you know, we can joke about their workaround, but the thing their workaround does means that when they associate with outsiders, they don't stick to their own custom.
01:31:47.000They accept the customs of the outsider.
01:31:50.000Right, and they work around it by the other person having the order.
01:31:53.000Right, but they participate in it, and because they participate in it, they don't keep themselves as narrow-minded.
01:31:58.000I mean, cult people, they're definitely, no matter who pours you that glass of wine, you're not allowed to drink it.
01:32:02.000My dad was in the military, and he was drafted, but he was like, no one could get me to drink a sip of alcohol, etc., etc.
01:32:30.000There's really a lot of things that are forbidden that are, I think, required for friendship.
01:32:35.000And so I had to learn that when I got on the outside.
01:32:37.000And I look back and I think, I was really impoverished by knowing people and moving in unison and having comfort, but not really having the experience of trust.
01:33:39.000So anyway, I had these index cards, and I put them all over my house, and they said that they had the values that I wanted for my kids, like resiliency, humor, agency, whatever.
01:33:50.000And then on the back, I would put the techniques.
01:33:52.000So for example, I didn't put restraints.
01:33:55.000Like I didn't use playpins or whatever.
01:33:58.000I just tried to create a safe environment, and then I did these things like they should be able to find me, but I shouldn't always be present.
01:34:03.000So I would say, hi, I'm going to be working right here in this room, like to a one-year-old, right?
01:34:46.000Well, just the fact that the way you communicate about it, you're so open about it.
01:34:49.000And I mean, I can't imagine what that's like.
01:34:54.000I can't imagine what that life is like, what your childhood was like with being 17 and just being out in the world on your own trying to decipher what the fuck the outside world does.
01:37:57.000I don't relate to the music of my generation because I never heard it.
01:38:00.000And so people, you know, like people our age is sort of like everyone should sort of like the same kind of thing and I don't have, it never, I didn't go to concerts when I was a teenager ever, I never.
01:38:09.000So I didn't have any idea what that felt like and so I don't associate with that with youth, for example.
01:40:08.000In my early 20s, I had all these little kids, and I was doing, you know, the mom thing and trying to get myself educated so I could, you know, make good money and take care of everybody.
01:40:19.000It just felt like there wasn't time for that.
01:40:22.000And so I met a music critic when I was in my 30s.
01:40:25.000I'm actually putting this in my next book, which is actually called Prodigal Daughter.
01:40:29.000And he introduced me to the songs of, it was in the early 2000s, and he introduced me to the songs of the 90s and taught me the derivations of the beats and the lyrics.
01:40:41.000And he had come from a pastor father, so he understood religion in relation to music.
01:40:46.000And it was just this wonderful music education.
01:41:39.000And he's like, yeah, she just wrote a book.
01:41:40.000You should, like, read it so you can figure out where I come from, you know, because he never told his very best friends, who he had been, like, friends with for over 20 years.
01:41:48.000And I think that, you know, and he looks really normal, you know, like he has, but he didn't have the ability, I think, to really maybe gauge the way that it affected him.
01:42:28.000I mean, just, there's so many things that can happen to a child when they're young that will screw them up forever.
01:42:34.000But the fact that you had no understanding of the outside world, and you fully believed all this stuff that you were being told, you learned how to forage and survive in the woods, and then you get released.
01:42:49.000And then you're out in the world because you went to see the color purple.
01:43:07.000Were you at a rush to try to find a new one?
01:43:11.000I was in a rush for everything because I didn't think I was going to live very long because it was still inside my head that I was A, breaking.
01:43:17.000I mean, even now, like, to be honest, writing about this, this is what the former field people have to say to me all the time, is like, nobody's ever talked about this publicly.
01:43:25.000We were trained, you know, like, once you're in the field, you're always in the field.
01:43:29.000Like, it's like being a Marine or something.
01:43:30.000Like, these are our brothers and sisters in arms, and you...
01:43:56.000I mean, I'm kind of going around a circle to answer that question, but it felt like it's been very recent that I can own that as being an essential part of my identity.
01:44:37.000So it's not just humans, but it's animals, plants, whatever.
01:44:40.000And so I think that because I was raised understanding the natural environment, I really feel like when I've been lost in the world, or you think you're lost, I don't know if we can ever truly be lost.
01:44:52.000I think that we're just learning what's around us that isn't working.
01:45:34.000We forget that, I think, sometimes in our contemporary culture, that everything comes out of the earth.
01:45:39.000And so I think that one of the practices, I do meditate, but I meditate before I came here today, but I think that if I can be under a tree and on the earth in some way, then I feel like...
01:45:53.000I guess it's that neuroplasticity thing.
01:45:57.000There's no point at which I'm separate.
01:46:00.000And I think there's that part of practice of being like, no, I'm truly connected.
01:46:04.000And all the things they taught me was a way of keeping me separate.
01:46:07.000But I can always go back to the source itself.
01:46:10.000Yeah, I think when we're talking about the sky and the light pollution being a spiritual deficiency, I think we have that also from the forests.
01:46:20.000I think there's something that connects us when we're in the wilderness.
01:46:25.000There's a humbleness that comes about you, a humility that you have to accept, that the wilderness is so vast and powerful and amazing that It puts you in check.
01:46:37.000It gives you like this feeling of connectedness to everything.
01:46:41.000We think when we're living in cities and we're getting Ubers and we're going to restaurants, we think we're disconnected from nature because we've kind of set it up that way.
01:46:49.000We set our own little hamster wheel up over nature.
01:46:53.000But we're missing something by doing that.
01:49:30.000But what I'm saying is GPS coordinates that your maps work.
01:49:35.000I think your maps still work even if you don't have cell phone signal.
01:49:40.000You can't put in, I can tell you this, if you're in a forest, it's not going to tell you which way to go because it hasn't been mapped in that way.
01:49:48.000Like, it's not going to tell you turn left in 50 yards.
01:50:25.000An iPhone's GPS will work fine without cell phone coverage.
01:50:28.000Your phone will know where it is, but you will not be able to see your location displayed on Apple Maps without a data connection to download the map.
01:51:31.000They think they're going north, and they're going deeper into the woods.
01:51:33.000And another thing about going deeper in the woods, humans are prone to circular movement.
01:51:37.000So if you don't know that, you will just keep walking in circles.
01:51:41.000And so you could see the north and you could keep walking kind of towards it, but you're going to veer slightly and you're going to find yourself right back where you came from.
01:53:25.000Actually, the teenager lived because the mother and the aunt gave her all their clothes and they covered her and everything and she survived and they both died.
01:54:17.000Can you imagine moving at those speeds?
01:54:19.000But the point is, you can understand the wilderness, but people don't.
01:54:22.000And in a sense, they're not humble enough, right?
01:54:24.000They don't understand that there's something terrifying if you don't know what you're facing.
01:54:29.000And it's interesting that the disconnect from nature that we get with cities enables people to create things where you don't need nature anymore.
01:54:40.000Supermarkets, trucks, all those inventions, everything's coming out of cities, and it's all getting constructed, built, put together by a group of people living in cities.
01:54:47.000And it all comes from nature, but nobody sees that because it's so many steps removed.
01:55:12.000But there's this idea, I think, that if we could understand our true nature, we'd be a lot less susceptible to all sorts of control, right?
01:55:22.000Because we would understand that we don't have control and that no human...
01:55:26.000You know, who professes to have the ultimate wisdom could possibly have it because we would be so attached to—I mean, the cycles of nature, like, everything is prey and predator and, like, everything's part of a much larger system.
01:55:37.000And if you saw yourself as part of that, it would be really hard to fully believe any one person could be the son of God in today's age, you know?
01:55:46.000Like, if they profess to be the prophet or whatever, you would have a lot more cynicism, I think, if you understood nature.
01:56:26.000In fact, I've been physically assaulted.
01:56:29.000I mean, I've been physically assaulted by people I had no idea were dangerous.
01:56:33.000You were some guy, and he's like, oh, I'm having this backyard barbecue or whatever, and then there's nobody else there, and you don't know to leave.
01:56:39.000You're just in the backyard, and he grabs you.
01:58:01.000But there is such a thing as a cult directory, which you had mentioned, too.
01:58:04.000So when I was on, I did a local television right at the beginning when the book came out, Frank Buckley, and the woman who was his producer, he was asking at the end, it's like, oh, you know, I didn't know this cult existed.
01:58:55.000Thousands of dudes threatened to sue the IRS and they filed lawsuits and I guess the IRS caved and said, all right, we don't want to deal with all this.
01:59:04.000But also if you declare yourself a religion, then you do get tax exempt status.
01:59:09.000But I think what makes a cult is, yeah, I mean, there's like the Steve Hassan thing that we talked about, but you know, this is really, really high control.
01:59:18.000But the question is, unless the abuse is reported in real time, it's really hard to find.
01:59:23.000And the people who are in the cult, A, don't recognize it's a cult because nobody's in a cult calls it a cult.
02:00:29.000Like, if you just break it down to what the ingredients are, like, you could tell me it's a steak, but it has all the ingredients of a carrot cake.
02:01:00.000I don't think you can come up with a legitimate reason why.
02:01:03.000And in all these groups, Scientology and Mormonism too, there's these inner circles that are much, much more devout.
02:01:08.000So there's plenty of people who define themselves as Mormon or Scientologists who aren't living this really narrow life, but the people at the center are.
02:01:50.000Well, it would be really hard to argue, especially when you're dealing with something like Scientology, when you have a science fiction writer who is, you know, he's the most prolific fiction writer of all time.
02:02:03.000L. Ron Hubbard, he wrote more words down and had them published than any human being that's ever lived.
02:02:11.000I think he was a Boy Scout, too, actually.
02:04:14.000If you read Lawrence Wright's Going Clear, it's a very fascinating book that sort of details the whole history of L. Ron Hubbard creating it.
02:04:23.000He was basically a crazy person who was self-diagnosing.
02:04:46.000And I didn't know that it meant, like, I didn't know the whole story behind the volcano where, like, the aliens throw the fucking frozen souls at the volcano, all that crazy shit.
02:04:55.000So I just thought it was a self-help book.
02:04:58.000And back then, I was really into self-help books.
02:04:59.000I bought, like, Anthony Robbins audio cassettes and all that shit.
02:06:40.000Either you open up that folder and start behaving exactly how you used to because you have a pattern that you're accustomed to.
02:06:46.000Or you try to re-engage with the world, re-interface with the world with this newfound experience as a guide.
02:07:00.000I think that's what the heart of all religious experiences are.
02:07:02.000I think there was people back then that experimented with psychedelic drugs and they had profound experiences and they might have even experienced entities.
02:07:10.000They might have even had interaction with God.
02:07:13.000It might be a real thing that you could do with the right stuff.
02:07:17.000And I think people have been talking about it and writing it on cave walls and depicting it in many religious texts and drawing images of it on the fucking ruins of Egypt.
02:07:45.000And I think that a lot of people believe that it was the foraging of those mushrooms that led to psychedelic drugs that led the cultivation of communities that were religiously based.
02:07:56.000But that they really came from just looking for food initially.
02:07:59.000And then they'd have these experiences and they could see something bigger than the life they were living.
02:08:04.000I always wondered why the Hindus don't eat cows.
02:09:04.000Or some of their iconography, I shouldn't say that.
02:09:07.000Like some of their writings, what's left.
02:09:09.000It's like so many cultures that show evidence that they've been doing stuff with psychedelic drugs forever.
02:09:15.000They probably formulated so many of their...
02:09:18.000You know, like their shamanistic practices and how they organize their culture and their communities.
02:09:26.000They'll probably all do rituals together to connect to each other, you know, and stare at the stars.
02:09:31.000But the thing about psychedelics, though, that is so beautiful compared to cults, and cults don't do these because they tap you into yourself and you have your own unique, or someone unique, but, you know, you have your own individual experience of what it means to you.
02:10:26.000Like people infiltrate certain kind of groups of people if they feel like, It's a bunch of vulnerable people in those groups and a bunch of easily influenced and open to interpretation.
02:10:37.000You can just tell them that you're connected to God in a very unique way and also you're a guru.
02:12:26.000Well, that's the really scary thing to think that if the Son of God really did return, if that is a real true thing, how the fuck would we ever believe that?
02:13:45.000If Jesus came back today and the world was in the middle of chaos, if we're in the middle of World War III and Jesus returns, there's a real likelihood that they would crucify him again or something similar.
02:16:25.000I think for individuals, the most important thing is exercise.
02:16:28.000It's one of the most important things, I should say, because you can induce enough stress voluntarily that the regular stress of the outside world is mitigated because you've already experienced a higher level of difficulty in your day by choice than the world can impose upon you.
02:16:45.000So if you have rigorous workout schedules, if you like to run, if you want to lift weights, if you want to do yoga, like you want to do something like jiu-jitsu, do something that's physically taxing, that's what you should do.
02:16:56.000Do something like that and the physical act of forcing yourself to do something extremely difficult that makes you uncomfortable for a short period of time but makes the rest of the day much easier.
02:18:00.000It's too limited in the way you interact with it.
02:18:05.000You can get good information online, and you can get interesting discussions on Twitter, but you could also get, like, you're dealing with legitimately mentally ill people.
02:18:15.000And I don't use that term lightly, okay?
02:18:33.000If you can't stop smoking cigarettes, you're mentally ill.
02:18:36.000You have this thing that you can't stop.
02:18:38.000You're physically attracted to it, you're physically addicted to it, but you're also mentally ill because you don't recognize that you should stop before you get fucking lung cancer, right?
02:18:46.000That's the same thing with everything, I think.
02:18:49.000I think these are just like normal patterns and I think people that are addicted to arguing with people on Twitter, they're mentally ill.
02:18:56.000This is serving the same thing as online poker.
02:19:00.000This is serving the same thing as, fill in the blanks, whatever you like to do that you probably shouldn't be doing, scratch tickets, lottery, whatever it is that you just can't get out of your head because you got locked into it.
02:19:54.000Because they're so used to communicating like that on Twitter and on Facebook and Instagram that they think it's normal to just be completely rude to people.
02:20:28.000So if you're doing that, you're mentally ill.
02:20:30.000So if you have gangs of mentally ill people that are just constantly engaging with other gangs of mentally ill people online all day long, arguing over everything cultural, everything environmental, fill in the blanks.
02:21:30.000I would say that the same, I guess, impulsives that make people do everything you're describing are really the same things that keep people in cults.
02:21:38.000Like there was a lot of the similar traits of people who become mentally ill because they are constantly only focusing on one person's definition of anything.
02:21:50.000And so if cults were online doing that to each other, that's what they would sound like.
02:23:05.000And if you have a good system set up where everybody polices everybody else, like woke people on Twitter, and then you have a good system of the person who's in charge and the underlings and all the other people, and people are benefiting from it in a good way, yeah.
02:23:20.000You can get a bunch of businesses going.
02:23:22.000You could infiltrate corporations with this nonsense.
02:23:52.000I think your story is very important for people to hear, and I'm really happy that you had the courage to say it, because I would imagine it would be very, very hard to tell that story, very hard to explain the vulnerabilities that you experienced and what it was like to be this 17-year-old kid who's still a kid,
02:24:11.000who's just becoming a woman out there in the world, And you just escaped from a cult where you couldn't even see movies and all you sung was hymns and you thought the end was near and then you're out there in the world just interacting with all these people that went to like normal schools and had normal childhood American experiences and you have to kind of relearn everything.
02:24:32.000And there's a lot of excommunication that still goes on in terms of, it's my family of origin.
02:24:38.000Every single cousin I had was raised there.
02:24:40.000I did not have any cousins on the other side.
02:24:42.000100% of my relatives were raised in there.
02:24:44.000And so, yeah, you have to be willing to, in a sense, step away from the acceptance that you get, which I think could relate to many, many, many, many people who have nothing to do with religion.
02:24:56.000But yeah, all the different types of cults in the world.
02:24:58.000It's like being willing to stand back and say, wait, I don't believe this.
02:25:02.000I think this story, your story is really important too for people that may be vulnerable.
02:25:08.000Maybe they don't have the tools to discern.
02:25:11.000Maybe they're being courted by a group.
02:25:17.000Just fundamentally, if someone's telling you that they have secret information that only they have, and it comes from a mystical source, either it comes from aliens or it comes from God or...
02:27:07.000I feel like there's no simple answer for that, but in my grandfather's case and in many other of these young men cases, they were outsiders in some way and they had some bone to pick and they wanted...
02:27:17.000I think they maybe started out of wanting belonging, but then they got really drunk on the power so quickly.
02:27:46.000And I'm not like talking about the politics of all that or like, I'm just saying that, I mean, I'm very grateful that nobody asked me to kill anybody.
02:27:55.000You know, I'm not, I would like to think I wouldn't, but I don't think any of us know.
02:28:59.000And honestly, once people start believing you, it's probably a pretty big high.
02:29:03.000Yeah, I had David Holthouse on the podcast the other day and he did that documentary series that's on Peacock about the Hare Krishnas and about this one guy that created this sect of the Hare Krishnas and it was all child molestation and murder.
02:29:19.000They're killing people and it's just, it's a crazy, it's a really good doc, he's a really good director.
02:29:25.000And the documentary series is really interesting, but it's just like, goddamn, that pattern just repeats itself over and over.
02:29:32.000Waco, holy hell, up there, wild, wild country.
02:29:58.000But there's this inclination to get people to follow you and to tell them what to do and to tell them how to live life and to make them worship you.
02:30:11.000Just some sort of weird evolutionary response.
02:30:15.000Because in tribal cultures, there was always a leader, and that leader was generally the wisest person who had the most life experience, who could tell you, hey, this is the plant you can't eat.
02:30:25.000Don't go over there, they'll kill you.
02:31:04.000Into these societies and cities and large groups of human beings, we still have the desire to have one individual leader because we have this primate genetic imprint in us of the alpha who runs the people.
02:31:20.000To the point where we'll pretend that someone's alpha.
02:31:22.000Like, we'll pretend Joe Biden is really running the country.
02:31:24.000And so many Democrats are all in on it.
02:31:26.000Like, the most culty of cult members, the wokest of woke, are the ones who are the most likely to try to fucking gaslight you that he's fine, and he's doing great, and he's the best president ever, and just look at the economics, and look at the economy's doing better, and look at the...
02:32:04.000You have a certain amount of time here, and you never think like you have enough time, and you never think you did enough, and it always feels weird, and you never even know what the fuck is going on while you're driving your car or sitting on the bus.
02:32:15.000The whole time, you're like, what is this?
02:33:21.000There's so much weirdness just in the observable universe that the whole thing is a crazy mystery.
02:33:30.000And to not approach it that way and to approach it with some bizarre confidence that you have the answers, you're not doing anybody any good because you're full of shit.
02:34:58.000I don't think you know what you're talking about.
02:35:00.000And if you don't say that, if you don't have the humility to say that this is, at the very least, a massive mystery, We know so much.
02:35:08.000I mean, we know so much more than we've ever known before, and thank God there's people out there that are trying to figure the world out.
02:35:13.000Thank God there's people out there that are doing the work and doing the fucking theoretical physicists and all the quantum mechanics people and all the people that are trying to make rocket ships.
02:35:27.000At the end of the day, this is a crazy mystery.
02:35:30.000That you go to bed every night, you close your eyes, and you disappear.
02:35:35.000Hopefully for eight hours, if you get in your eight hours, Michelle.
02:35:38.000And then that alarm clock goes off, and then you re-engage with reality and assume that this is the exact same world that you went to bed eight hours ago for.
02:36:41.000Yeah, but that alone is a strange, strange one that we've just accepted because if that didn't exist and all of a sudden everybody said, listen, we have found a new thing.
02:36:50.000Instead of just being awake all the time, if you can just go to sleep.
02:36:55.000You'll live longer and you'll be better.
02:38:54.000I've only done lucid dreaming accidentally a couple of times and every time I've done it, I've recognized that I'm dreaming and then I wake up.
02:42:00.000There's something about wolves because they're intelligent and they operate in packs and they have some sort of nonverbal communication where they understand each other in some very weird way.
02:42:09.000They're similar to us in a lot of ways.
02:42:41.000I mean, he used to be a wolf if you go back 20,000 years ago or whatever it was when they started taking these bitch-ass wolves who were willing to come by the forest fire, or by the campfire rather.
02:42:50.000But the wolves that live and operate in the wild are these ruthless, majestic creatures who are intelligent.
02:44:17.000These people would be lying in the trenches with a bullet hole and then you'd hear wolves tearing these people apart and they'd be screaming.
02:44:25.000Yeah, they would send people out on patrol and just find a boot with a foot in it.
02:49:38.000I mean, how many years did you have to learn that stuff?
02:49:41.000I mean, I learned them for a lot of years.
02:49:42.000And it gets inside of you, and I think that's the thing about muscle memory, right?
02:49:45.000And I believe in exercise, by the way, too.
02:49:47.000I mean, I was trained like that, so I can't not exercise.
02:49:50.000And I think that just like exercise, like I'm sure you feel like shit if you don't exercise, and as do I. But I also feel like when it gets inside of you, like what survival is, you feel, I think, without doing some of those things, that you're not really fully human.