The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #308 - Steve Volk

00:00:03.000 Hi, everybody.

00:00:04.000 This is how we begin.

00:00:06.000 Ready, set, go.

00:00:08.000 The first part of the podcast is not required listening.

00:00:11.000 It's essentially commercials, but occasionally it becomes entertaining.

00:00:15.000 In fact, sometimes more entertaining than the actual podcast itself.

00:00:19.000 This is disturbing.

00:00:20.000 And as we're winging this entire thing and have no real program for how it's supposed to run, we don't know what to say when that happens.

00:00:27.000 Sorry.

00:00:28.000 Oops.

00:00:29.000 Oops.

00:00:30.000 I took one too many hits.

00:00:32.000 Two too many hits?

00:00:34.000 Well, expect one of those shows, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:37.000 Expect possibly a few O'Brien moments.

00:00:41.000 This podcast is brought to you by Kerosene Games.

00:00:44.000 We're brought to you by a bunch of things, but everything we're brought to you by we believe in.

00:00:48.000 That is our 100% pledge. 1.00

00:00:51.000 We're never going to sell you dog shit. 0.99

00:00:52.000 We're never going to sell you something that's not good. 0.99

00:00:54.000 We've been offered a lot of different things that we didn't agree with, that neither Brian nor I thought were Interesting or just, you know, stuff that it just didn't seem like it was something that we should be endorsing.

00:01:07.000 So that's what we're trying to do.

00:01:08.000 We're trying to only endorse shit we would use and stuff we believe in. 0.93

00:01:13.000 And this Kerosene Games is a brand new startup and they have games that they're developing specifically for iPads. 0.94

00:01:21.000 And for iPhones and high-end Android devices starting in February.

00:01:26.000 And what it is, is a lot of the games, especially like really high-end, big, beautiful games, a lot of them, they start out making them for consoles or they start out making them for a PC. And then they port it over to an iPad.

00:01:42.000 That's not what these guys do.

00:01:43.000 What these guys do is they make badass games right out of the box for iPads and touch screen devices.

00:01:49.000 All, you know, the various Intuitive controls that they've put into these games.

00:01:56.000 They've put in and designed for use with an iPad, so it doesn't feel clunky at all. 0.79

00:02:02.000 The graphics are fucking awesome.

00:02:03.000 It's a really cool game, and I've gotten nothing but positive feedback from people that went out and bought it. 0.98

00:02:08.000 It's only three bucks.

00:02:10.000 It's really cheap.

00:02:10.000 $2.99.

00:02:11.000 I don't know why they say $2.99, not three bucks.

00:02:13.000 Stop playing with me.

00:02:14.000 Why do they do that? 1.00

00:02:15.000 I don't want to save a penny, you fuck. 1.00

00:02:16.000 Save three dollars! 1.00

00:02:17.000 They should do $3.01. 0.99

00:02:18.000 It's supposedly some psychological thing, and people are like, we're just a nation of pussies, that's what it is. 0.98

00:02:26.000 Like one penny. 0.99

00:02:26.000 If one penny keeps you from fucking buying something, well, can I get it for $2.99? 0.99

00:02:32.000 Then I'll be happy with my purchase. 0.98

00:02:34.000 With $3, I don't know, is it worth $3?

00:02:38.000 Just a nation of people poisoned by car smoke or something. 1.00

00:02:43.000 But not this motherfucker, this bladeslinger character. 1.00

00:02:46.000 He's like a bionic cowboy. 1.00

00:02:49.000 I don't know why they call him a cowboy, because there's no fucking cows. 0.99

00:02:52.000 I guess all you have to do is wear that hat and you're a cowboy. 1.00

00:02:55.000 This motherfucker's never seen a cow in his life. 0.99

00:02:58.000 This guy's the last thing from a cowboy. 1.00

00:03:00.000 You know what a cowboy is?

00:03:01.000 A cowboy's a guy who has to...

00:03:03.000 Take these cows and move them in a certain direction. 1.00

00:03:07.000 It's the most boring ass fucking life ever. 1.00

00:03:09.000 You're just running around pushing cows. 1.00

00:03:11.000 That's what a real cowboy does.

00:03:12.000 Occasionally you have to lasso one, and it's a big day.

00:03:15.000 So when you were playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you just lassoed cows and stuff?

00:03:19.000 No, I didn't understand.

00:03:20.000 You probably always got killed.

00:03:21.000 No, I never understood.

00:03:22.000 I didn't understand what cowboys really were. 0.97

00:03:24.000 I thought the cowboys were always fighting Indians in some sort of a fucking Hatfield versus the McCoy sort of a way. 0.95

00:03:31.000 I didn't really understand what a cowboy was. 0.88

00:03:33.000 I was young when I did this, my friend.

00:03:35.000 Anyway, it's Kerosene Games.

00:03:37.000 The game is Blade Slinger, and it's only three bucks.

00:03:40.000 Dude, an iPad 8-inch is one of the coolest things in the world, and playing this game on it, it's so much better than a Game Boy nowadays.

00:03:48.000 It's like a Game Boy that's also a computer.

00:03:50.000 I mean, the graphics on this are amazing. 1.00

00:03:52.000 Yeah, I thought the tablets were stupid as fuck when they first came out. 0.99

00:03:56.000 I was like, this is... 1.00

00:03:58.000 But they're so convenient.

00:03:59.000 It's so cool.

00:04:00.000 And it's amazing how much you can store on them.

00:04:03.000 I mean, that...

00:04:04.000 Hey! 1.00

00:04:05.000 You fuck? 1.00

00:04:05.000 What are you doing there, fella? 1.00

00:04:06.000 Those weren't real.

00:04:08.000 It doesn't matter if it's real. 0.99

00:04:09.000 They're tits. 1.00

00:04:09.000 Even if it's cartoon tits, we can get in trouble. 1.00

00:04:11.000 It's art. 0.95

00:04:12.000 Is it painting?

00:04:12.000 Yeah.

00:04:13.000 Is it painting of tits? 0.99

00:04:13.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:04:13.000 I still think we can get in trouble. 0.99

00:04:15.000 We are also brought to you by Desquad.tv.

00:04:18.000 Desquad.tv is the place where you can get...

00:04:20.000 The only place, as far as I know, where you can get those...

00:04:30.000 You know what's really hard is trying to draw the next one.

00:04:37.000 I'm in the middle of trying to draw the next one.

00:04:39.000 And it's hard to try to top.

00:04:42.000 Now I feel like I'm stressed about that.

00:04:44.000 Well, if you dig these shirts, too, these are completely designed and produced by Brian.

00:04:50.000 So, like, you're not, like, getting...

00:04:52.000 You know, he's not, like, hiring an artist to do it.

00:04:55.000 So you're actually getting his artwork.

00:04:57.000 I probably do.

00:04:58.000 I need to shroom or something.

00:05:00.000 Maybe you need to not shroom.

00:05:02.000 You need to take some coffee and join the Marines.

00:05:05.000 All right.

00:05:05.000 Anyway, deskwad.tv.

00:05:07.000 Go there.

00:05:07.000 And find when the upcoming shows are, because there's always...

00:05:11.000 There's always something going on in this wacky world.

00:05:13.000 And there's also Death Squad Podcast Network on iTunes where you can listen to the fabulous Kevin Pereira's Pointless, which is awesome.

00:05:22.000 One of my favorite podcasts.

00:05:24.000 And you can only get that off of Death Squad on iTunes.

00:05:27.000 We are also brought to you by Onnit.com. 0.95

00:05:29.000 That's O-N-N-I-T. Makers of Alpha Brain and Shroom Tech and Hemp Force and all the shit that we talk about on this podcast. 1.00

00:05:37.000 Goddammit, ad nauseum. 0.99

00:05:39.000 We also have this new dude who's on board, Dr. Robert Lazar.

00:05:43.000 Apparently he's some super smart neurosurgeon and he's a big fan of Alpha Brain.

00:05:50.000 There's a lot of people crying snake oil when it comes to anything that has to do with cognitive function.

00:05:56.000 They're like, wait a minute, what is this?

00:05:58.000 What kind of nonsense is this?

00:06:00.000 Because there's a lot of snake oil going around, ladies and gentlemen. 0.95

00:06:02.000 Remember when people were selling those hologram bracelets?

00:06:05.000 Yeah, and I love the people that still wear them.

00:06:07.000 Still wear them! 0.99

00:06:08.000 In Vegas, this chick was telling me that they took the real technology from that bracelet and they incorporated it into their own, but that bracelet was ripping people off, but this shit works. 0.99

00:06:20.000 I go, you got a hologram. 0.98

00:06:21.000 I go, what is that?

00:06:22.000 Is that a hologram?

00:06:23.000 Like, what's it called?

00:06:24.000 What are you calling it?

00:06:25.000 What are you calling it?

00:06:25.000 You got a piece of plastic on your wrist.

00:06:27.000 If you believe it, it makes you feel better.

00:06:29.000 A lot of how you feel is affected by your attitude.

00:06:33.000 A lot! 0.98

00:06:34.000 And if you truly feel like you've been gifted with this fucking rubber band around your wrist that makes you move better, you're gonna start thinking like a person who moves better. 0.99

00:06:43.000 Because that's a big part of what's fucked up about you, alright? 1.00

00:06:47.000 Get it together, bitches! 1.00

00:06:49.000 So in that vein, I would be very sensitive to anything that I thought was a placebo. 0.99

00:06:55.000 The science behind AlphaBrain is all rock solid.

00:06:58.000 You can look it up.

00:06:59.000 You can look up all the different various ingredients and the history of human use of these ingredients, including things like memory tests. 0.97

00:07:07.000 There's a lot of shit that people have learned about the efficacy of nootropics.

00:07:13.000 And the weight of evidence clearly sides on the idea that Vitamins and nutrients we know affect human performance. 0.98

00:07:24.000 We know they affect your body's ability to recover, your body's ability to be nourished in a way that allows it to move and function and operate at its optimum levels.

00:07:37.000 I'm a big fan of supplementation.

00:07:41.000 I'm also a big fan of eating right.

00:07:43.000 I think that's one of the most important and underlooked things. 0.99

00:07:46.000 People just don't get enough fucking vegetables in their diets. 0.95

00:07:49.000 And one of the reasons we started selling these Blendtec blenders at Onnit.com is for that very reason, to try to encourage people. 0.99

00:07:58.000 If you want to really be healthy, go to the supermarket as often as you can.

00:08:02.000 Go three, four times a week if you can.

00:08:05.000 Get kale and cucumbers and celery and garlic and get some sort of fruit like an apple so it doesn't taste like death. 0.99

00:08:13.000 Throw it in there with some coconut oil and rock that shit every morning. 0.99

00:08:17.000 You'll be a new human being. 1.00

00:08:19.000 You're just getting this big wave of nutrients first thing in the morning and then go about your day.

00:08:25.000 Take some multivitamins. 0.99

00:08:28.000 Take some protein supplements and get some fucking workouts in. 0.99

00:08:32.000 You can go get some kettlebells at Onnit.com, and we even have a DVD you can follow. 1.00

00:08:37.000 Try to follow it, you'll fucking puke. 0.99

00:08:39.000 It's the Extreme Kettlebell Cardio Workout. 1.00

00:08:41.000 It's brutal.

00:08:42.000 It's a brutal DVD. I can't get through it with a 35-pounder.

00:08:47.000 I know dudes who can do it.

00:08:48.000 It's a crazy workout, man.

00:08:50.000 And we sell that. 0.99

00:08:51.000 We sell everything to make you man the fuck up and get your shit together. 0.97

00:08:55.000 And if you use the code name Rogan, You will save 10% off any and all supplements. 0.95

00:09:01.000 As for my t-shirt, higherprimate.com, those t-shirts, they're selling out faster than I can make them.

00:09:10.000 I'm sorry.

00:09:10.000 I appreciate that everybody's trying to buy them.

00:09:14.000 There's nothing I can do.

00:09:15.000 We put it in order, and I made a much bigger order this time.

00:09:19.000 So thank you for all the people that are buying them, though.

00:09:21.000 It's higher-primate.com and I think most things are out of stock right now. 0.99

00:09:25.000 Sorry, you fucks. 0.98

00:09:26.000 Look, we got Steve Volk here. 0.99

00:09:28.000 He is an author about all things freaky and we're gonna get down to business.

00:09:33.000 We're gonna start this party.

00:09:35.000 As soon as Brian knows how to press that button, there's an issue here.

00:09:41.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:09:44.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:09:50.000 My man!

00:09:51.000 Thank you, sir.

00:09:52.000 Steve Volk, thank you very much, man.

00:09:53.000 Thanks for coming down here.

00:09:54.000 Thank you for having me. 0.86

00:09:55.000 Fringeology is your book, and dude, when Matt Staggs, our publicist, requested you or suggested you, I was so all over this, because this is so right in my wheelhouse of shit that I enjoy. 0.98

00:10:12.000 Bullshit and stuff that might not be bullshit, you know? 0.99

00:10:16.000 And there's a lot of both going around. 1.00

00:10:18.000 Right. 1.00

00:10:18.000 There's a lot of bullshit, folks. 1.00

00:10:20.000 Don't get me wrong, but it's not all bullshit. 1.00

00:10:23.000 There's some weird shit out there in the world. 1.00

00:10:27.000 Is that me? 1.00

00:10:27.000 How dare I? I made a beep off my phone. 1.00

00:10:31.000 But there's a lot of people that almost immediately discount Yeah.

00:10:50.000 And the phone rings and it's them.

00:10:53.000 And people are like, oh, you're attaching that to it.

00:10:56.000 This is a person you think about all day.

00:10:58.000 Sam Harris had some very logical points.

00:11:00.000 And I agree with him, absolutely, for the most part.

00:11:03.000 But there are specific isolated instances where you feel something and then something happens, where you know someone's looking at you.

00:11:12.000 Rupert Sheldrake did a controlled study In which he had people list four people who were present in their lives, somebody who might in fact call them.

00:11:23.000 And then for, I forget how long a period, it was a week or two weeks, something like that.

00:11:28.000 They were supposed to, any time the phone rang before they answered it, think of which of these four people it was.

00:11:35.000 And they thought of the correct person at a rate higher than chance, significantly higher than chance.

00:11:44.000 And I don't have all the numbers in my head right now, but it ended up being as statistically significant a fact, right?

00:11:50.000 So instead of being right when it was one of those four people one out of four times, they were right far more often.

00:11:57.000 Wow, that's interesting. 0.99

00:12:00.000 Well, is that because they knew that this one motherfucker just calls me all the time and he's money in the bank? 0.99

00:12:06.000 I'm going to prove some psychics. 1.00

00:12:09.000 What if one guy just fucking calls you all day? 0.99

00:12:11.000 Like, I know it's Marty. 0.99

00:12:12.000 And you pick it up and it's Marty because Marty calls you all day.

00:12:14.000 I suppose it could be.

00:12:15.000 Could be.

00:12:15.000 They had so many people involved in the study that it would seem to be what it was, a statistically significant effect.

00:12:23.000 In writing a book, though, do you start looking for fuckery in studies like that? 0.98

00:12:27.000 Oh, of course.

00:12:28.000 Because your purpose initially was kind of to disprove a lot of this stuff.

00:12:31.000 Yeah, and I have to tell you, the chapter on telepathy in particular scared the hell out of me because I had gotten so used to hearing the skeptical line, there's no evidence, there's no evidence, there's no evidence, that I really expected to find no evidence.

00:12:43.000 Right.

00:12:44.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:12:44.000 And when I realized I was going to have to hang my ass out on the line and say, you know what, there's actually some evidence. 0.96

00:12:51.000 It was scary. 0.96

00:12:52.000 That was scary.

00:12:53.000 Was it scary because you thought like intellectually you'd be criticized and you'd be marginalized?

00:12:59.000 Sure.

00:12:59.000 I thought I'd be ostracized within the profession of journalism, you know, for saying this.

00:13:03.000 But the fact is there's a really high level debate going on between really smart people about the proper way to slice and dice these studies in terms of analyzing the statistics that are generated.

00:13:15.000 And we can't at this point really be sure whether or not psi, as they put it, that's the whole field of telepathy, whether or not psi exists.

00:13:24.000 But there's a lot of really strong evidence that would suggest it does.

00:13:28.000 And I mention this in my book.

00:13:29.000 A couple of the leading skeptics, Chris French, Richard Wiseman, have both allowed that by the standards of any ordinary science, telepathy is proven, right?

00:13:40.000 So if they were just judging kind of a pharmaceutical and looking at the same sorts of numbers that these guys are generating, they would say, okay, something's happening here, right?

00:13:50.000 There's an effect.

00:13:51.000 But because it's a, quote, extraordinary claim, we don't understand the physics of this, what the mechanism would be that would allow for telepathy, we need greater evidence.

00:14:00.000 Well, when you say that it's been proven, how so?

00:14:04.000 Well, again, this is Wiseman in French who I'm quoting, but they would say that, like, say something like the Gansfield test, if you're familiar with that.

00:14:12.000 No, what is that?

00:14:12.000 Okay, the Gansfield test...

00:14:15.000 They'll have, there's many different ways to set it up, right?

00:14:19.000 But one of the ways to set it up is you've got a person who is the, one of the test subjects has halved ping pong balls put over their eyes, right?

00:14:32.000 They have white noise being pumped into their ears, and they're put into a very comfortable chair where they're just sort of kind of suspended.

00:14:41.000 So there's very, very little input into the system at that point.

00:14:45.000 And they're the receiver, right?

00:14:47.000 And they're in a soundproof room, so they're getting no normal input whatsoever, but they're supposed to just kind of go within, right?

00:14:55.000 Listen to themselves, what thoughts occur to them, and start reporting back on what it is that they're seeing in their mind's eye, hearing in their mind, that kind of thing.

00:15:05.000 And in another room, The sender is actually, they're in a soundproof room too, locked away from the receiver.

00:15:14.000 They're looking at some sort of stimulus.

00:15:17.000 They're looking at an image on a computer, perhaps, or photos in front of them.

00:15:22.000 And they are trying to send that image to the person in the other room, who they may or may not know, depending on the study.

00:15:32.000 And then there are four target images that are then presented usually in the best studies that an impartial judge will look at a transcript of what the receiver said, right?

00:15:46.000 And then they'll have four images in front of them, one of which was the target that the sender was actually trying to mentally send to the receiver.

00:15:55.000 And you would expect that if the person with, you know, the ping pong balls over their eyes got absolutely nothing, then the judge would select the correct image one out of four times.

00:16:07.000 But instead, you do enough trials and the meta-analyses on these when they crunch all the numbers from all the studies together shows more like a 32% effect.

00:16:15.000 Instead of being right one out of four times, they're right 32% of the time.

00:16:20.000 And this, Wiseman in French would allow that these studies are generally well controlled enough that if this was an ordinary claim that was being presented, this is fine and we would accept this as evidence that something's up here, some kind of information transfer.

00:16:35.000 The problem is, because we don't understand the physics of how this would work, they say we need greater evidence than this.

00:16:42.000 And they keep asking for greater and greater levels of scientific controls to be put on the studies, and they keep finding ways to reject the result.

00:16:52.000 I've never been skeptical of the potential for psychic phenomenon, but I've been very skeptical about almost every story that I've ever heard.

00:17:02.000 Unfortunately, I've met a lot of fakers. 0.98

00:17:05.000 I've met a lot of fake psychics. 0.99

00:17:07.000 I met a lot of crazy girls. 1.00

00:17:08.000 I want to tell you they're like clairvoyant, you know, and people who are channelers. 0.56

00:17:13.000 There's so many loony tunes that are connected to it, but a 32% increase sounds to me Like, probably what's real.

00:17:23.000 Isn't that like average, though?

00:17:25.000 Wouldn't you think that would be about average if you were to do the same study without having somebody trying to, you know, just the person guessing?

00:17:31.000 Yeah, but it's 25% without it.

00:17:33.000 25% to 32%.

00:17:35.000 That's the idea.

00:17:35.000 It's a small leap.

00:17:37.000 It's a 7?

00:17:38.000 Yeah.

00:17:38.000 Whatever it is.

00:17:39.000 7% jump.

00:17:40.000 Which is a 30% chance.

00:17:41.000 Yeah.

00:17:42.000 But what's interested in that 7%, I mean, if it's really statistically real, if the study hasn't been fucked with, The idea is that it's just a little bit.

00:17:51.000 It's just a little bit.

00:17:52.000 The idea is that there's this weak signal that we're not normally picking up on, especially look at the way we live now, where we're constantly being bombarded by information and input and just stimulus.

00:18:03.000 But when you shut all that out, And you close your eyes, and you don't have any sound that distracts you, what's there?

00:18:09.000 Are you receiving any kind of accurate information? 0.95

00:18:11.000 And I found the research really tantalizing, and I also, like I said, I found it scary, because I thought, well, here I am now, I'm going to write that, you know what, when they tell you there's no evidence, that's kind of bullshit, right?

00:18:22.000 In fact, there is some evidence, and the question is whether or not it's risen to the level yet where we have to accept it.

00:18:29.000 Right.

00:18:29.000 Yeah, it's a fascinating possibility that I think is inevitable.

00:18:34.000 I think it's inevitable either technologically or it's inevitable due to our own bodies advancing and changing and mutation.

00:18:44.000 Because I feel like if you look at lower primates, they have a very rudimentary language.

00:18:51.000 They think that chimps repeat certain sounds and they might mean certain things.

00:18:54.000 But it's nowhere near what we can do.

00:18:57.000 And I've got to assume that this isn't the end.

00:18:59.000 This isn't the last version of the ape.

00:19:02.000 If apes are going to continue to be successful, this model's not going to stick around forever. 0.99

00:19:06.000 You could look at this one in two ways.

00:19:08.000 One way, maybe we're evolving the ability.

00:19:11.000 Another way, maybe we're losing it.

00:19:13.000 Back in the day, when we were, you mentioned before, the sense of being stared at.

00:19:18.000 There's been some really good research on this.

00:19:20.000 Again, one of the skeptics I mentioned, Richard Wiseman, did a study with a woman named Marilyn Schlitz, where they collaborated.

00:19:26.000 And they did three separate studies trying to figure out whether or not somebody could sense that someone was staring at the back of their head.

00:19:33.000 And they had real nice controls on it.

00:19:35.000 Wiseman was part of the experiment.

00:19:37.000 Two out of the three times they did it, they got, again, a statistically significant effect where people were right far more often than chance would have suggested.

00:19:47.000 And if you think of it in an evolutionary sense, which I do in the book, right, is that Back in the day when we were being hunted all the time, when we didn't have the kinds of fortifications we have now against the angry packs of wolves that are out there, we would have needed to have this ability to know that we're being stared at.

00:20:08.000 It would have helped us survive as a species.

00:20:11.000 Yeah.

00:20:13.000 Yeah, it makes sense, especially when you consider there's got to be some pretty intense focus when a predator locks on you.

00:20:21.000 If there is some sort of a psychic I think that there's probably a lot of senses that we lost.

00:20:40.000 In our separation from the natural world to here, just intuitive senses.

00:20:45.000 The Army has done some research on intuition, really, and who their most intuitive people are.

00:20:53.000 These people are the ones that they'll sort of look at to notice when there's a hidden explosive device on the ground in Iraq.

00:21:01.000 And they found that two groups in particular, I think there was a third, but there's two that I always remember, that are really good at this.

00:21:10.000 Hunters and people from the inner city. 1.00

00:21:16.000 So suburban milky people are fucking useless. 1.00

00:21:19.000 Apparently. 1.00

00:21:20.000 I knew it.

00:21:21.000 I knew that was the problem.

00:21:22.000 Think about it from the point of view of the person in the inner city.

00:21:25.000 They've got to be aware of their entire environment and the potential for danger.

00:21:29.000 And they've got to get used to honoring that impulse that something's a little off here.

00:21:34.000 I need to respect that.

00:21:35.000 In order to stay alive.

00:21:36.000 Yeah.

00:21:37.000 And so the people who are best at finding these hidden explosive devices just can tell that something's It just feels off in this area, and then they start focusing in on what...

00:21:45.000 Really?

00:21:46.000 Well, I didn't know, first of all, that the Army actually used intuitive people to try to find bombs.

00:21:51.000 Keep in mind, this is not about psychic ability, right?

00:21:55.000 At least they're not talking about it in that context.

00:21:58.000 The Army has done remote viewing research and all that stuff in the past, but this is a very straightforward intuition.

00:22:08.000 Somebody who can just...

00:22:10.000 Very, very aware of their surroundings, very aware of what's around them, and alert to something that just seems wrong in the environment.

00:22:18.000 That's not necessarily psychic at all.

00:22:23.000 But it's real, but it harkens back to that a little bit, that idea.

00:22:27.000 What kind of is psychic, though?

00:22:28.000 I mean, the idea that you can just have some spidey sense, doo-doo-doo, you know?

00:22:34.000 Well, I think they're towing the line.

00:22:36.000 I think they're towing the line.

00:22:38.000 They're right up on that line where spidey sense and talk of spidey sense is right where we should be.

00:22:43.000 But the language they're using is clearly very hardcore.

00:22:49.000 This is something that I've always wanted to ask someone like you.

00:22:52.000 Have police really used psychics to find victims or any of that stuff?

00:22:57.000 Has any of that stuff ever really panned out?

00:22:59.000 I've actually done a lot of police reporting in my past, as well as, you know, this book.

00:23:04.000 I mean, it's kind of generally, I read about cops, crime, courts, politics, that kind of thing.

00:23:09.000 And I've spent a lot of time with cops.

00:23:11.000 And there's one homicide detective I know who absolutely And he's actually a religious guy, which is sort of interesting.

00:23:19.000 He hates psychics.

00:23:22.000 They have led him on so many, or tried to lead him on so many wild goose chases.

00:23:28.000 They screw with him when he's in the middle of a tough homicide investigation.

00:23:30.000 He's getting phone calls.

00:23:33.000 Sometimes one of his higher-ups will be, maybe you ought to listen, maybe you ought to hear this out.

00:23:37.000 You know, he cannot stand them.

00:23:39.000 But I recently met, and I've really, I've got to follow up with this guy.

00:23:43.000 And I haven't yet.

00:23:44.000 But I met a retired homicide detective who told me he wanted to talk to me because he has worked with a psychic who gave him good, actionable information on multiple occasions.

00:23:53.000 Really?

00:23:53.000 And I haven't had a chance to...

00:23:57.000 I bet he was boning her. 0.96

00:23:59.000 I bet he was boning her. 0.93

00:24:00.000 Trying to promote her business. 0.87

00:24:01.000 I know how that works.

00:24:03.000 That's what he was doing, man.

00:24:04.000 He's an old guy. 0.92

00:24:04.000 I'm not sure he's boning anybody. 0.92

00:24:06.000 He's got to do what he's got to do.

00:24:07.000 Chick's got a psychic business. 1.00

00:24:09.000 It's tough to keep the lights on in this day and age.

00:24:12.000 I've always wanted to know.

00:24:13.000 I've heard a lot of people talk about it, but everybody that I've heard talk about it hasn't researched it.

00:24:19.000 Everybody wants to say, they've used psychics to find bodies.

00:24:22.000 I'm like, have they?

00:24:23.000 Have they really?

00:24:24.000 I don't know if they have.

00:24:25.000 You know what, Joe, there's a couple of cases that are still sort of tantalizing out there that maybe something happened, maybe they did get actual information, but for the most part, if you've watched the Psychic Investigators show, what's really sort of funny about it is that even when they're saying that this information was so valuable,

00:24:41.000 usually if you're really paying attention, it's not actually the information that broke the case.

00:24:45.000 It's information that after the fact seemed to fit.

00:24:48.000 And so I'm still, you know, I'm still, well, I'm still skeptical of everything, but I'm skeptical of the psychics helping detectives.

00:24:56.000 But I'm really open to it because, again, if there is this sort of weak signal out there, you know, that occasionally we pick up on, well then maybe sometimes it provides actionable information.

00:25:06.000 Do you remember the Psychic Friends Network?

00:25:08.000 Yep. 1.00

00:25:09.000 Do you remember that shit? 1.00

00:25:09.000 Was it Dionne Warwick? 1.00

00:25:10.000 Dionne Warwick, yeah.

00:25:11.000 And then Dionne Warwick got caught with weed at the airport.

00:25:14.000 That's what made her psychic.

00:25:16.000 Yeah, that's what was making her psychic. 1.00

00:25:17.000 It wasn't these assholes she was working with. 0.99

00:25:20.000 I think when you smoke pot, you get a little more psychic. 1.00

00:25:22.000 There you go.

00:25:23.000 Make that a quote.

00:25:24.000 Go ahead.

00:25:25.000 Use that to discredit me.

00:25:27.000 Take it in context, though.

00:25:28.000 I think you become super sensitive.

00:25:32.000 You become very aware if people are creepy.

00:25:35.000 Very aware of people who are angry.

00:25:37.000 Very aware of weird tension.

00:25:39.000 It makes you really sensitive.

00:25:41.000 It makes you really aware of bad acting too.

00:25:43.000 It's tough to get high and watch some bad acting. 0.99

00:25:46.000 You're like, whoa, you're fucking faking it. 0.98

00:25:48.000 And that is sort of like what acting really is. 0.99

00:25:51.000 The best actors...

00:25:53.000 Can lock into a role so deeply that they almost must believe it in themselves because they're convincing you, even though you know it's Daniel Day-Lewis.

00:26:00.000 You know he's not really an Irish boxer.

00:26:04.000 You believe it because he's tricked you.

00:26:07.000 He's bypassed all of your psychic energy.

00:26:10.000 But when you're high and you watch someone faking the funk, you're like, oh, what are you doing up there?

00:26:16.000 You see them acting. 0.93

00:26:18.000 It's disgusting.

00:26:20.000 It'd be interesting to watch early and later De Niro in that context.

00:26:24.000 Yeah, you're so right.

00:26:26.000 Is there ever a guy who's fallen so far from grace?

00:26:29.000 It's so sad. 1.00

00:26:30.000 Meet the fuckers, really? 1.00

00:26:32.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:26:33.000 Two, fuck you two, whatever the number two was. 1.00

00:26:37.000 Little fuckers. 1.00

00:26:37.000 We fucked you again. 1.00

00:26:38.000 Those little fuckers are bad. 1.00

00:26:39.000 I mean, I'm not even saying that's a bad movie, but it's just like, that's Robert motherfucking De Niro, you know? 1.00

00:26:45.000 And he's doing some new movie now with Alan Arkin, Aldo, where they get in a fight with each other, or Alan Arkin, rather. 0.99

00:26:51.000 It's just like, he was in that movie where he played like a wizard and shit. 0.99

00:26:56.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:26:56.000 Let's see this one. 0.99

00:26:57.000 Oh my god.

00:26:57.000 What was the movie where Robert De Niro played like a wizard?

00:27:00.000 A wizard.

00:27:00.000 It was like a really bad, like, The Hobbit type movie.

00:27:04.000 It looked so stupid. 1.00

00:27:06.000 I was like, Robert, what is going on? 1.00

00:27:09.000 I guess after a while you're like, fuck it. 1.00

00:27:11.000 I did my time. 1.00

00:27:12.000 I did my Goodfellas.

00:27:14.000 I did my Raging Bulls.

00:27:16.000 I'm just from here on.

00:27:17.000 I'm just cashing in and having some fun.

00:27:19.000 Yeah.

00:27:19.000 Think about what he did for Cape Fear and the way he bulked up.

00:27:22.000 Oh, my God. 0.99

00:27:23.000 He was fucking incredible. 0.99

00:27:23.000 Put on weight for Raging Bull. 0.99

00:27:26.000 I mean, you know, too much sacrifice.

00:27:27.000 He's a taxi driver. 0.99

00:27:29.000 He's just a fucking tremendous actor. 0.99

00:27:32.000 Just in his prime, in his youth, he was just unstoppable. 1.00

00:27:36.000 The Deer Hunter, I mean, my God, that was a fucking movie. 1.00

00:27:39.000 He did some incredible, incredible shit. 0.99

00:27:42.000 But the stuff he's doing now... 0.99

00:27:44.000 Poor Robert.

00:27:45.000 Poor, poor Robert. 1.00

00:27:47.000 Poor son of a bitch. 1.00

00:27:48.000 Sad. 1.00

00:27:49.000 Sad to see, man. 1.00

00:27:51.000 It's fucked. 1.00

00:27:52.000 I'm sure he's feeling really sad right now getting that triple blowjob. 1.00

00:27:55.000 I bet he is. 0.98

00:27:56.000 I bet he's not nearly as happy as he was during the Raging Bull days when he was just creating something fucking magnificent, you know?

00:28:04.000 You know what the tiff he got into with Jay-Z? What?

00:28:07.000 Robert De Niro got into tiff with Jay-Z? Yeah.

00:28:09.000 Jesus Christ, how is that possible?

00:28:11.000 He was apparently trying to phone Jay-Z to talk about some sort of entertainment event that was going on and Jay-Z didn't call him back.

00:28:17.000 And so De Niro, in public, kind of dressed him down for it.

00:28:21.000 What?

00:28:21.000 Yeah, and I thought that's a little much.

00:28:24.000 Jay-Z's kind of busy too.

00:28:26.000 If Bobby De Niro calls you, you call him back.

00:28:29.000 Well, how about maybe he didn't really know it was you?

00:28:32.000 It's Bobby De Niro.

00:28:34.000 Or what if he got the HOFO number or something? 0.99

00:28:36.000 Or what if Jay-Z went to see that Wizard movie and was like, what the fuck, Bobby De Niro? 0.99

00:28:41.000 What you doing, son? 0.99

00:28:43.000 You owe me 20 bucks.

00:28:46.000 Or what if just hanging out with Robert De Niro was just uncomfortable for a pot smoker? 0.99

00:28:50.000 Like if he just wanted to hang out all the time, like God, fucking Robert De Niro's coming over. 0.98

00:28:54.000 Yeah, he's too intense. 0.96

00:28:56.000 And what if he's like studying you?

00:28:58.000 Yeah.

00:28:59.000 And he wants to drink wine with you and stuff.

00:29:01.000 As a character actor, he's studying you, thinking if he could play you in a movie.

00:29:06.000 He starts rubbing your feet.

00:29:07.000 And Bobby De Niro as Brian Redman.

00:29:11.000 Red Band in the future.

00:29:12.000 That would be him.

00:29:13.000 Robert De Niro as Red Band in the future.

00:29:15.000 It's you in like 50 years and you still...

00:29:19.000 You would probably do that role.

00:29:21.000 Yeah.

00:29:22.000 Yeah.

00:29:23.000 You're still partying it up.

00:29:25.000 Still talking like you're 12. Yeah, I'll do it.

00:29:27.000 But now it's creepy because you're like almost 60 and everybody's like, what the fuck? 0.99

00:29:30.000 Is he going to grow up? 0.99

00:29:31.000 Nope.

00:29:32.000 He's not growing up.

00:29:34.000 It's Bobby De Niro as Red Band in his 60s.

00:29:38.000 That's a good idea for a movie.

00:29:40.000 It is.

00:29:41.000 No, it's not.

00:29:42.000 Somebody don't make that.

00:29:46.000 So what subject did you get started with?

00:29:48.000 What led you to just pursue the storyline in this book or the ideal line in this book of just chasing down all things fringe?

00:29:58.000 There were a couple things that...

00:30:01.000 That motivated me.

00:30:02.000 One of them was a family ghost story I grew up with as a kid, where supposedly our house...

00:30:07.000 These are my red band notes, by the way.

00:30:08.000 I notice you're noticing this. 0.91

00:30:10.000 I'm an avid listener to the show, and I know he might say totally random shit that will totally distract me.

00:30:15.000 And if he does, I want to be able to take a note on where I was. 0.92

00:30:18.000 That's a good move.

00:30:19.000 That's smart.

00:30:19.000 Good call.

00:30:19.000 Sorry, I brought a pen and paper.

00:30:21.000 We should have that. 1.00

00:30:22.000 Prepared for you, you fuck. 1.00

00:30:22.000 We should have that for the guest. 1.00

00:30:25.000 Captain Flow Wrecker.

00:30:27.000 So I grew up with a ghost story, a ghost that was supposedly in my house.

00:30:33.000 This stuff happened when I was five or six years old, so I have very fragmented memories of it, but it was a...

00:30:39.000 It really sort of starts with the cliché.

00:30:41.000 It was a thing that went bump in the night.

00:30:43.000 Only it bumped, it thudded, it boomed.

00:30:45.000 It happened only at night.

00:30:47.000 It would go on for tens of minutes at a time.

00:30:49.000 It sounded like it was coming from somewhere upstairs.

00:30:52.000 So my parents on the first floor thought it was on the roof of the house.

00:30:56.000 My brother and I on one side of the house thought it was on the roof over our heads.

00:31:00.000 My sisters in their room who did not share an adjoining wall with us thought it was on the roof and or in there up high in the walls and at first that's what it was.

00:31:12.000 It was this noise but it was so loud it would wake everybody up and it would go on for a while and my parents hunted for Uh, prosaic explanations, um, didn't fit with like a water hammer or anything with the plumbing, didn't fit with the house settling because of how long it went on.

00:31:28.000 Did you have an attic or was it just a roof?

00:31:30.000 No attic.

00:31:31.000 And, um, my sister started reporting stranger things. 0.99

00:31:34.000 It's really movie shit, right? 0.98

00:31:36.000 They started reporting that, um, their bed frames would shake in the middle of the night and wake them up. 0.99

00:31:41.000 They claimed that they saw a woman walk right through the room, um, you know, literally a ghost, right?

00:31:47.000 My parents, and I find this really important, my parents set that aside and discounted it for a couple of reasons.

00:31:53.000 It was coming from kids, and who would want to believe that that's true?

00:31:57.000 I mean, I think one of the things the skeptics always do is say, you know, it's sort of wishful thinking and superstition, that people hear a noise, And they leap to ghosts, but my family didn't.

00:32:07.000 And so they spent nine months or a year trying to recreate the noise in various ways, trying to figure out what it was.

00:32:14.000 And when my sisters would tell these crazy stories, they were just kind of like, number one, they didn't want to believe it.

00:32:20.000 Who wants to believe your daughters are being terrorized at night, right?

00:32:22.000 Right.

00:32:23.000 There's something going on in their room.

00:32:24.000 But finally, and I was raised Catholic, and we hadn't fallen out of the church yet.

00:32:28.000 That was still coming.

00:32:30.000 But my dad went to the family priest.

00:32:34.000 And he told him what was going on because he had run out of other answers.

00:32:37.000 And the priest said, you know, usually in cases like this, which I always find that language interesting as well because it implies he does this on a fairly regular basis, usually in cases like this I come over and I bless the house.

00:32:48.000 So he came over and I remember this vividly because to have Father Crowley come into the house with the vestments on and swinging Like, the incense around and praying in Latin was intense,

00:33:05.000 right, as a kid.

00:33:08.000 I was like six, he was God himself, you know, standing up on that pulpit.

00:33:13.000 And he comes into our house, he's swinging the incense around, and he leaves and he says to my dad, so long, Jerry, I'm sure everything will be fine.

00:33:20.000 But that night, actually, things got worse.

00:33:23.000 The booming went on longer and louder than ever before, and for the first time, it seemed to locate in a specific spot.

00:33:29.000 So instead of coming from this sort of amorphous area somewhere up on the roof, it hits at the top of the stairs, the landing, and then it came downstairs, like one step at a time.

00:33:39.000 My father said it sounded like a kid throwing a tantrum.

00:33:42.000 And when it hit the bottom floor, they could feel the floor shake under their feet, my parents, and we never heard it again.

00:33:52.000 And so I grow up with this story, and I think of it as, you know, for a long time, all the way through adolescence, it was just sort of a, I don't know, man, an article of faith.

00:34:02.000 Like, I didn't even question it.

00:34:03.000 It just was.

00:34:04.000 But, you know, you get into college then, and you start meeting other people, and you start getting familiar with critical thinking, and you're like, what the hell was that?

00:34:11.000 You know, what the hell was that?

00:34:13.000 How old were you when this was going on?

00:34:14.000 I was about six.

00:34:15.000 And so whatever memories I have it are very fragmentary.

00:34:19.000 But I gotta tell you, Joe, when I asked my parents about it for the book, and I actually interviewed them, I knew someday I was gonna write about this, right?

00:34:26.000 I interviewed them many years before I really settled on this is the book I'm gonna write.

00:34:30.000 And I actually sat them down and I recorded it.

00:34:33.000 And I will never forget, when they were describing that last night when it came down the stairs, They turned white.

00:34:39.000 They held hands across the table.

00:34:40.000 They were still frightened just by the memory of it.

00:34:43.000 So for them, whatever it was, was tremendously real.

00:34:48.000 And I wanted to explore that and see, well, could there have been anything strange there?

00:34:54.000 Could they have possibly somehow, and my brothers and sisters too, could we all have somehow imagined all this?

00:35:00.000 And so that was part of my inspiration for the book.

00:35:04.000 What is your conclusion on that?

00:35:06.000 Do you look back?

00:35:07.000 I mean, I don't remember anything that happened when I was six that I can tell you reliably what really happened.

00:35:13.000 I have, you know, just a few images.

00:35:16.000 Sure, sure.

00:35:18.000 And that's true of, generally, of people.

00:35:21.000 I mean, it's very hard to trust childhood memories.

00:35:23.000 I'm not sure I should trust my own memories of that event.

00:35:25.000 That's another thing that sort of...

00:35:26.000 It kind of disassociates me from it.

00:35:28.000 Yeah.

00:35:29.000 How old are you?

00:35:30.000 Now?

00:35:30.000 43. Yeah, when you look back at six, I mean, how much do you really...

00:35:34.000 How much do you remember of six?

00:35:36.000 I actually have a creepy amount of memories from my childhood.

00:35:39.000 Yeah?

00:35:40.000 But are they legit?

00:35:41.000 Well, that's the question.

00:35:42.000 I've got a bunch too, but I don't know how legit they are.

00:35:44.000 Piaget did this great psychologist, child psychologist, did a lot of studies on this, and one of the things he put out is in his own life.

00:35:54.000 He had this very vivid memory of being kidnapped because he was told he was kidnapped.

00:35:59.000 And then years later, the person who was supposedly the witness to the kidnapping admitted that they made the story up.

00:36:05.000 And so he had this really shocking, vivid memory through his whole life.

00:36:10.000 I forget at what point it was revealed to him.

00:36:12.000 And it wasn't true.

00:36:14.000 So that's how much we can be deceived by these things.

00:36:16.000 And you asked the conclusion I came to, and I think it's a very healthy conclusion. 0.99

00:36:20.000 The conclusion I came to is I don't know what the fuck happened. 0.99

00:36:22.000 Right? 0.98

00:36:24.000 There's still mystery there.

00:36:26.000 None of the normal prosaic explanations work for me, right?

00:36:29.000 It was not a water hammer.

00:36:31.000 It's not a rat.

00:36:32.000 No, it was not a rat making a noise that big.

00:36:34.000 It was not a plumbing problem, you know?

00:36:37.000 It was not the house settling.

00:36:39.000 And I've had skeptics.

00:36:41.000 Do you remember it being really loud?

00:36:43.000 Really loud.

00:36:44.000 Like really loud, like someone slamming a door or something like that?

00:36:47.000 Yeah, at its loudest, like a sledgehammer getting whelved on the roof.

00:36:51.000 Really?

00:36:52.000 At its loudest.

00:36:52.000 And so you go outside and there's no one on the roof.

00:36:54.000 Yeah, funny story there.

00:36:56.000 My parents, because I was so young, and I remember this.

00:37:01.000 This one, I know this memory is true.

00:37:03.000 I remember them taking me outside at night, because we were scared, to show me that there were raccoons jumping on the roof.

00:37:11.000 Because it was nighttime, and this was the story they gave their little kid.

00:37:14.000 Oh honey, it's just raccoons jumping up and down on the roof.

00:37:17.000 And I was young enough that I was like, okay, raccoons sometimes jump up and down on the roof. 0.99

00:37:22.000 But they do though, especially if they're fucking. 1.00

00:37:25.000 Girls will fight back and you get some gangster shit going on on your roof. 1.00

00:37:28.000 Gangster raccoons, yeah. 1.00

00:37:29.000 Yeah, throwing down on your roof.

00:37:31.000 Not enough of them.

00:37:32.000 It was that loud.

00:37:33.000 Too many nights, yeah.

00:37:34.000 And too many nights, man.

00:37:36.000 I mean, tens of minutes at a time, raccoons are just bouncing up and down on the roof.

00:37:39.000 Imagine if your roof was like the octagon for the Ultimate Fighting Championship for raccoons.

00:37:44.000 That would be noise.

00:37:46.000 Sure.

00:37:46.000 Then you open the door and they just get ghosts.

00:37:48.000 They just climb up the trees and hide. 1.00

00:37:51.000 They're crafty, those fucking raccoons. 1.00

00:37:53.000 I would have set up cameras everywhere. 1.00

00:37:54.000 I would have figured that shit out day two. 0.99

00:37:56.000 It was a long time ago, though. 1.00

00:37:57.000 Yeah, I would.

00:37:58.000 I'd be doing everything.

00:37:59.000 In 1975, we weren't walking around with these HD cameras.

00:38:04.000 I'd get courtroom sketch artists and just put them on every corner of the house.

00:38:15.000 It's like we're not supposed to be able to see inside the sacred courtroom where the decisions are being rendered.

00:38:22.000 So instead, here's an artist's depiction of the action. 0.98

00:38:25.000 What the fuck are you showing me drawings for? 0.90

00:38:28.000 You know, you can show it to me or you can't. 1.00

00:38:30.000 Is that a real guy at a table?

00:38:32.000 That's what he looks like?

00:38:32.000 That's the drawing.

00:38:33.000 Represents what he looks like, right? 1.00

00:38:35.000 Show me a fucking picture, stupid. 1.00

00:38:37.000 What kind of game are we playing? 1.00

00:38:38.000 A flash would be distracting.

00:38:40.000 Is that what it is?

00:38:41.000 How about no flashes?

00:38:42.000 It seems pretty easy to just do no flashes, you know?

00:38:46.000 Shutter clicks. 0.99

00:38:47.000 It'd be even weirder if someone's fucking staring at you and drawing you. 1.00

00:38:50.000 That's even weirder, man. 0.99

00:38:52.000 Imagine, you know, you're talking about your experience and trying to tell the truth, the whole truth, and some fucking weirdo's eyeballing you and drawing your face. 1.00

00:39:02.000 That's got to be a little mindfuck. 0.99

00:39:03.000 Yeah, it would be. 0.99

00:39:04.000 Probably affects your decision-making skills when you're in court. 0.98

00:39:07.000 Actually, it's fucking true. 0.96

00:39:08.000 The cameras are a lot easier to handle than if somebody was sitting here drawing. 1.00

00:39:11.000 Yeah, some asshole using outdated technology. 0.98

00:39:14.000 He could be taking license with my image, too. 1.00

00:39:18.000 Yeah, he got there on a horse.

00:39:19.000 All his books are written in script.

00:39:22.000 We have courtroom sketch room artists for that show that I do.

00:39:25.000 They draw during the whole live podcast, the secret show thing.

00:39:30.000 That's hilarious.

00:39:31.000 See, like, here's Ari. 1.00

00:39:32.000 That's a good idea.

00:39:35.000 And we sell it and the artist gets all the money.

00:39:37.000 That's a good idea.

00:39:38.000 That's a way better idea than using it in court.

00:39:40.000 See?

00:39:40.000 We found a new use for those people.

00:39:42.000 We don't have to do that anymore.

00:39:44.000 So as the years went on and I would share that story, I stopped sharing it because I was starting to run into more and more people who were totally adamantly opposed.

00:39:54.000 Not only opposed to the idea of ghosts.

00:39:56.000 I'm pretty suspicious about the idea of ghosts.

00:39:59.000 They were adamantly opposed to the idea that there was even a mystery there.

00:40:03.000 And so that's kind of what I hold out for in the book, that sometimes we just need to be able to admit – just say the words I don't know what happened.

00:40:10.000 People want to rush to some kind of conclusion whether they have enough evidence or data or not.

00:40:16.000 And I ran into people over the years who would insist it had to be a water hammer even though it doesn't fit the story at all.

00:40:24.000 What is a water hammer?

00:40:25.000 That's when the water goes dunk, [...

00:40:27.000 Like it has that crazy noise that it makes.

00:40:30.000 When I used to live in an apartment building, you heard that a lot.

00:40:33.000 Yeah, sudden flow of water stops, and then you get that sound because the energy of the water built up is converted to acoustic energy because it's got to go somewhere.

00:40:41.000 Oh, that's what it is.

00:40:42.000 Yeah, and it doesn't last that long, and it doesn't make that kind of noise, and it doesn't sound like it's coming from your roof or last tens of minutes, and it certainly never locates on the steps.

00:40:54.000 But this is all when you were six.

00:40:57.000 Yeah, so in the end you kind of have to trust, or not, right?

00:41:01.000 That's the question you're left with.

00:41:03.000 Do I trust my mother and father's account, my sister's account, my brother's account?

00:41:07.000 And, you know, on some level I do, but can I really buy into the idea that there are ghosts?

00:41:12.000 I mean, so one of the things I explored, and I found this really interesting, I mean, there are people out there working with sort of other technologies to determine if maybe there's an abundance of electromagnetic energy in the air in certain areas, then it fucks with your temporal lobe, then you have...

00:41:28.000 Drilling?

00:41:29.000 I mean, where was this at?

00:41:30.000 It was in Pittsburgh.

00:41:32.000 Maybe.

00:41:33.000 And not a lot of fault lines, I don't think, there.

00:41:35.000 Although there is occasionally...

00:41:36.000 There was that one in Ohio that they just found out that we're making the earthquakes.

00:41:39.000 It happened some.

00:41:40.000 And a guy working with infrasound, a guy named Vic Tandy did research on infrasound.

00:41:46.000 It's a level of sound beneath even the range of human hearing.

00:41:50.000 But it actually has an effect.

00:41:51.000 It can create a sense of pressure and an easiness in your chest.

00:41:55.000 It actually can even impact sort of the eyeball, the actual vibration in the air, and cause you to see cloudy shapes when there aren't any. 1.00

00:42:03.000 I don't think any of those can necessarily explain Whatever happened in my house either, but what I like about it is at least here somebody's thinking creatively and not thinking so poorly of their fellow human that they just, yeah, you heard a creaking floorboard and you jumped to a fucking ghost because you're that stupid and that's superstitious. 0.96

00:42:21.000 These sorts of explanations, I think, grant people the proper dignity to be, that they're reporting things at least somewhat accurately, right?

00:42:30.000 Something really unusual was happening It's a very unfortunate reality that we live in that I can't trust anybody to tell me what really happened.

00:42:41.000 So when a legitimate event, if a legitimate event occurs, it's immediately dismissed.

00:42:48.000 If you really looked at how many strange things exist both in the natural world and in the world of space, just the world of dark matter and supernovas and All those things are way crazier than ghosts. 0.92

00:43:05.000 A ghost ain't shit compared to the sun. 0.97

00:43:08.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

00:43:09.000 The idea that we're living in a multiverse, that there's an infinite number of us having this conversation right now.

00:43:14.000 The idea that life exists at all, that you can see with eyeballs.

00:43:18.000 That is just as freaky as something that Used to live, but its essence in some form stays for some reason. 0.87

00:43:25.000 I think the idea that this dimension that we live in is super concrete and, you know, just because you can hit it with a fucking bald fist and push it into a street and watch a car slam into it.

00:43:37.000 You're dealing with real solid objects, and that's all there is here.

00:43:42.000 I don't necessarily buy that.

00:43:44.000 I don't believe in most of what I hear in terms of psychics and psychic readings and ghost stories. 0.99

00:43:52.000 I think most of it's bullshit. 0.87

00:43:54.000 But I think it's very possible that something remains of you and that you're not just skin tissue and bone tissue and blood. 0.99

00:44:04.000 More than me.

00:44:04.000 Yeah.

00:44:05.000 There might be something going on and that something might leave your body and exist in some other state in almost an inaccessible Environment that parallels us.

00:44:17.000 And that's not outside the realm of possibility.

00:44:19.000 It sounds so woo-woo, but it's not.

00:44:22.000 It's not because life itself, the whole idea that your body is just this big chemical reaction and electromagnetic impulses and all that's crazy.

00:44:33.000 Neuroscientists can't yet answer the basic question of how consciousness is produced.

00:44:37.000 Right.

00:44:37.000 So how we get from the physical stuff of the brain To non-physical, subjective experience is a complete and total mystery, and yet it is the thing that really defines our lives, our internal experience of the world, and there's no explanation for it.

00:44:50.000 I like how scientists get to what part of the brain does what.

00:44:57.000 Like, this guy got an injury here, so that removes this part of the brain.

00:45:01.000 That removes his ability to do this.

00:45:03.000 He's got an injury here, so now we know that this inhibits walking, and this is where your eyesight is dealt with.

00:45:10.000 But what they can't figure out is where's the thinking person with morals and ethics and love?

00:45:19.000 Where's he in there?

00:45:20.000 Is he just a crackling?

00:45:22.000 Is he just the energy that makes all those cells fire?

00:45:25.000 Where's she?

00:45:26.000 Where's the girl who can enjoy the things that she enjoys and enjoy the food that she enjoys? 0.95

00:45:34.000 Where's all that?

00:45:35.000 And there's something else to consider too, Joe, is that Okay, so we get this damage to our brain and we'll lose certain faculties.

00:45:41.000 Sometimes we only lose them for a certain time, right?

00:45:44.000 Because of neuroplasticity.

00:45:45.000 These things come back online.

00:45:48.000 Or other parts of the brain simply pick up those functions.

00:45:51.000 And this is easier to do when you're younger than when you're older.

00:45:54.000 But the thing that fascinates me are people who will lose their memory for a certain time, and then those memories begin to come back.

00:46:02.000 And this is, again, a relatively common thing.

00:46:06.000 How does that happen?

00:46:07.000 Where were the memories stored?

00:46:09.000 Where did they go when they were gone?

00:46:10.000 It's a very good question.

00:46:11.000 And it's one that happens when people get concussions.

00:46:16.000 Concussions cause a great deal of short-term memory loss.

00:46:19.000 I actually looked at this a little bit in the book.

00:46:23.000 Doctors will assess How severe a person's injury was by coming up with a degree of memory loss, like asking them, what's the last thing you remember before the injury?

00:46:32.000 What's the first thing you remember after the injury?

00:46:35.000 And the longer the blank period, the more hurt you are.

00:46:38.000 I looked at near-death experiences in the book, and so that's one of the things that drew me in there, because what's weird about these guys is that, and girls, is they oftentimes come back with a totally flowing memory of an event that should have knocked Their memory producing capabilities offline for a certain amount of time,

00:46:58.000 and yet somehow didn't seem to.

00:47:01.000 And I'm okay with saying, like, with the near-death experience, I take a lot of flack, really, from both sides, because believers will contact me and say they're upset that I won't come out and say that, you know, the near-death experience is smoking gun evidence that there's an afterlife.

00:47:15.000 You know, I don't think it is smoking gun evidence that there's an afterlife, but I also don't think it's yet been explained.

00:47:20.000 And again, we end up back in this place where Everybody wants to act like they know everything.

00:47:25.000 Everybody wants to push everything to a conclusion.

00:47:27.000 I think the most rational thing to say is we don't fully understand that experience yet, you know?

00:47:31.000 The near-death experience, it has to be related to what your own brain can produce as far as psychedelic chemicals.

00:47:38.000 It has to be.

00:47:39.000 Your own brain produces the most potent psychedelic drug known to man. 1.00

00:47:43.000 And why wouldn't it produce that shit if you were going to die? 1.00

00:47:46.000 If you're in high stress periods, if you're freaking, if this is the end, your body thinks, this is it, we're going to die, and then it comes back. 1.00

00:47:54.000 You know, you very likely could have come back from a psychedelic trip as well.

00:47:58.000 Let me tell you, I'm just going to cut straight to the chase, the best evidence that the NDE has to provide.

00:48:03.000 This is the best.

00:48:04.000 Janice Miner Holden, a researcher, did a study where she went through all the medical literature and all the research that's been done on NDEs so far.

00:48:11.000 And she tabulated veridical perceptions, so accurate and true perceptions that people got while, quote, out of body.

00:48:20.000 And what she came up with is that out of 38 cases in the medical literature where people were able to recount what was going on in the room when they were flat-lined.

00:48:33.000 Like seeing themselves above the table, like that kind of stuff.

00:48:36.000 Yeah, all that stuff, right.

00:48:36.000 When they were in this sort of severe physical distress, 35 of them were accurate in every detail they reported.

00:48:43.000 Two of them had minor errors, the sort of errors I'd have, you know, if I was trying to describe what I had for breakfast today.

00:48:48.000 You know what I mean?

00:48:49.000 I might miss something. 0.77

00:48:50.000 And then one person was just totally off the freaking reservation, right?

00:48:53.000 One person was just totally wrong about everything.

00:48:57.000 What was funny about his or her?

00:49:00.000 You know what?

00:49:01.000 I haven't read all the details of what they said, but they were just off on everything.

00:49:05.000 They had no idea what machines were used.

00:49:07.000 They had no idea how many people were in the room.

00:49:08.000 So some people were incredibly accurate.

00:49:10.000 35 of them were accurate.

00:49:12.000 Out of how many folks?

00:49:13.000 38. Oh my god.

00:49:14.000 In their entirety.

00:49:15.000 Now the skeptical response to this is that the researchers themselves, Would have suppressed information that wasn't accurate because they were so blown away by what they were hearing that they went ahead and only recorded sort of the positive responses because the negative ones weren't making any impact with them,

00:49:34.000 weren't landing with them.

00:49:36.000 And the other thing they'll propose is that, well, maybe...

00:49:40.000 That's a pretty serious accusation.

00:49:42.000 Why would they say that?

00:49:43.000 Do they have the questions and everything's been recorded, of course?

00:49:48.000 We'd have to go back through every last study to figure out what research materials they had in every case.

00:49:53.000 But that's just one objection they lodged.

00:49:55.000 The other objection they lodged is that, well, maybe they had some sort of anesthesia awareness.

00:49:59.000 If the person was on anesthesia, sometimes you're still aware of what's going on in the room.

00:50:04.000 So they'll lob that one in there, too.

00:50:06.000 Or they'll say that, they'll call it perfusion, Of blood to the brain.

00:50:16.000 Maybe they were getting cardiac massage.

00:50:17.000 And that does supply a certain amount of blood to your brain.

00:50:20.000 So maybe some part of the brain was still operating and able to retain a certain amount of information.

00:50:25.000 But it just, these are possibilities.

00:50:28.000 These are ideas that maybe explain it, but 35 out of 38?

00:50:35.000 It's remarkable.

00:50:36.000 And it's enough to push it into that area where you have to say, you know, Maybe something is going on here.

00:50:41.000 I mean, do you ever feel in a psychedelic experience that you get accurate information, not just stuff that your mind is coming up with, but some sort of signal or contact with something that's, quote, real?

00:50:54.000 Well, you believe that.

00:50:56.000 Whether or not it's happening is the big debate.

00:50:58.000 Right.

00:51:00.000 Absolutely believe that they're in contact with entities and there's other people that believe that you're just accessing the imagination and the mind is interfacing with distortion of its visual abilities in massive form and you're putting context to that and trying to make like rational understanding of it.

00:51:22.000 One of my favorite stories in the book When I was researching the near-death experience, I looked pretty deeply into the story of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the book on death and dying, which kind of galvanized the whole hospice movement and made end-of-life care in this country and really around the world a lot more humane.

00:51:37.000 And she is one of the first people ever to encounter the near-death experience.

00:51:41.000 And she did it before that phrase was even coined.

00:51:45.000 I mean, Raymond Mooney wrote the book in 1975. She, in the 60s, Was running across patients in the hospital wards, she was a psychologist, who were telling these same kinds of stories.

00:51:55.000 And what I find really, there's a couple layers to this I'm going to get to, but what's really fascinating is she wanted to reject this stuff at first, completely.

00:52:04.000 Her research partner, the Reverend Walamu Amara, who's a really terrific dude, I loved interviewing this guy, he's still around.

00:52:11.000 He was a reverend and he had been appointed to sort of go along on the hospital wards with her What she was doing was very controversial.

00:52:18.000 Nobody talked to the terminally ill at that point.

00:52:20.000 They were sort of shunted off to the side.

00:52:22.000 And so the fact that she was doing this was really angering a lot of the hospital staff.

00:52:26.000 So the administration put this reverend with her as a way of saying, Kind of giving her their blessing as a way of saying, it's not her alone, right?

00:52:35.000 There's somebody with her. 0.99

00:52:36.000 And I would imagine Amara was pretty formidable, so nobody wanted to fuck with Amara. 0.96

00:52:40.000 But anyway, because I met the guy, he's awesome. 0.65

00:52:43.000 But anyway, one of the early stories they encountered before they started even researching this experience, because they'd hear these stories and kind of blow them off, because they didn't know what to do with them.

00:52:53.000 Finally, he's out near the elevators one day, a woman goes into cardiac arrest, She's resuscitated right there in the hall.

00:53:02.000 They went to work on her.

00:53:03.000 They resuscitated her.

00:53:04.000 He goes to see her later, and she starts describing the scene of what happened exactly.

00:53:09.000 And she even describes that she was able, and this stuff sounds ridiculous, right?

00:53:12.000 But she was able to float in at one point behind a resident who was taking notes.

00:53:19.000 Because one of the things they did with, if you've got an inexperienced doctor on the scene like that, and there's an emergency thing going on, They generally just tell them, just take notes on what's going on.

00:53:27.000 It's a way of giving them something to do and keeping them out of the way, the people who really know what he's done right now.

00:53:32.000 And she was able to describe what he had previously doodled On the notepad that he was now taking notes on her resuscitation on.

00:53:41.000 Now Reverend Amara completely rejects this, right?

00:53:45.000 He hears this and he thinks, I'm going to prove you wrong, because this doesn't fit his dogma.

00:53:51.000 This is not what's supposed to happen when somebody dies.

00:53:54.000 Right.

00:53:54.000 So he goes and he finds the med student and he looks at the page of doodles, you know, or the page of notes and it has some doodles on it, and the doodles match with what she described.

00:54:06.000 He asked the student if he'd ever interfaced with this patient at all, they hadn't, and he'd asked the patient if they'd ever interfaced with the student, she hadn't. 0.77

00:54:13.000 You know, what we're left with now is we can say that Reverend Waluamara is lying, and I will never fucking say that, because he wasn't, right?

00:54:23.000 Or we have a genuine mystery here.

00:54:25.000 And that's where I land.

00:54:26.000 There's a genuine mystery here.

00:54:27.000 So where can one read about this?

00:54:31.000 My book?

00:54:32.000 It's completely in your book?

00:54:34.000 Oh yeah, the story.

00:54:35.000 Is it recorded anywhere else?

00:54:38.000 You know, intriguingly, Kubler-Ross herself wrote about it.

00:54:44.000 Not, I don't think, in as great a detail as I ended up doing it through Amara.

00:54:47.000 So what happens is, they have this event happen.

00:54:51.000 They're really shaken by it.

00:54:54.000 But they also are noticing that the patients who are reporting these experiences are changing.

00:54:58.000 They are no longer afraid to die.

00:55:01.000 I mean, you've got to imagine the anxiety That you would confront a terminal diagnosis with.

00:55:05.000 These people start losing that anxiety and start wanting to talk to her about, you know what, I want to clean up my relationships before I go.

00:55:14.000 They start talking about living hard in the time they have left rather than trembling at the fact that they're going to pass on.

00:55:20.000 It's a huge dramatic effect.

00:55:22.000 And that's when they decided to start taking notes. 0.99

00:55:25.000 Like, this whole idea that the near-death experience is merely wishful thinking is bullshit. 0.99

00:55:30.000 And it's at least bullshit in her experience and Amara's experience of it. 0.94

00:55:35.000 They rejected it until they really couldn't reject it anymore because here they are researching what happens when you're terminally ill, and one of the things that was coming up in dozens of cases were people who were losing their fear because of this event, and that's how they ended up justifying doing any research on it at all.

00:55:51.000 So when she wrote her book, she had a lot of different stories to tell.

00:55:54.000 I don't think she hit that story as hard as she should have.

00:55:57.000 The near-death experience being created or being facilitated, maybe is a better word, by a psychedelic experience, by the brain producing chemicals, it doesn't mean that there isn't something still going on.

00:56:14.000 It might mean that that's a chemical gateway.

00:56:16.000 Right.

00:56:16.000 To whatever's going on.

00:56:17.000 And that's how the brain releases this stuff and it interfaces with whatever the fuck it does when you have these trips.

00:56:25.000 There's a researcher, are you familiar with, I remember their last piece, Carhart Harris?

00:56:29.000 No.

00:56:30.000 He did a study on mushrooms, the active ingredient in mushrooms, with psilocybin.

00:56:39.000 And he found that it seemed to suppress brain activity.

00:56:47.000 The brain actually seemed less active, particularly the parts of the brain responsible for Making connections and relaying information from one spot to another.

00:56:56.000 What he thought was really interesting about that, and I would tend to agree with him, is that you would think at moments of heightened experience and heightened perception that we would see an excitement in the brain, right?

00:57:10.000 Greater activity.

00:57:11.000 Well, here he was seeing diminished activity, less activity.

00:57:14.000 And it calls me back anyway to the idea that a lot of what the brain does is filter our experience.

00:57:20.000 A lot of our processing is unconscious.

00:57:23.000 Information we're picking up from the environment all the time That doesn't rise into our awareness.

00:57:28.000 Our brain's making the decision for us as to whether or not we need to be, you know, worried about that little noise behind us or the creaking the chair is making or whatever, you know?

00:57:35.000 We don't even register it necessarily consciously.

00:57:38.000 And so the question becomes, when you take this chemical, which I may or may not be interested in taking myself...

00:57:44.000 I think you might be interested in it.

00:57:46.000 I think I might be.

00:57:48.000 When you take this chemical, are you actually...

00:57:52.000 Stopping the brain from filtering so much information.

00:57:54.000 Are you actually accessing more of the raw data that's out there?

00:57:57.000 Yeah, that's an interesting question.

00:58:01.000 The thing about the mushroom experience is that the mushroom experience actually mirrors normal human neurochemistry.

00:58:12.000 Part of what makes up a mushroom is dimethyltryptamine, the same stuff that your brain produces, or your lungs and your liver.

00:58:21.000 They know that the human body produces it, and it's been thought that the pineal gland, a lot of people get very angry if you're not very specific about this, because it's just anecdotal evidence that the pineal gland, which is the third eye of Eastern mysticism, produces this.

00:58:35.000 Whatever produces it, whatever they find, one day ultimately, they believe it's the pineal gland, but you've got to cut people's brains open within like, A certain amount of time while they're dead and then extract it to see if it's like...

00:58:49.000 Yeah, it would have to be pretty intense.

00:58:49.000 I did not know this.

00:58:50.000 This is intense.

00:58:51.000 I think to find...

00:58:51.000 They're trying to find better ways to measure.

00:58:54.000 But the most important thing is it's unquestionably produced in the body.

00:58:59.000 So the body is unquestionably...

00:59:01.000 Producing this incredibly potent human neurotransmitter, which is part of the ingredients of mushrooms.

00:59:08.000 Like psilocybin mushroom is something like 4-foxoriloxay and dimethyltryptamine.

00:59:14.000 And I know I fucked up the first part, the way you say it, but It's NN-dimethyltryptamine with something tagged on and my point is that people that take mushrooms have the exact same sort of feeling when it comes to without the near-death sort of connotation to it that they will die But they have the feeling like they have to clean up relationships.

00:59:38.000 They have the feeling like they want to live, like right now, with joy and happiness.

00:59:42.000 It's a very religious experience for a lot of people, and a lot of scholars actually believe it's the origin of religious experiences.

00:59:49.000 And you know about the death anxiety research going on there right now, too, right?

00:59:52.000 Yes, I do, yeah.

00:59:53.000 It's fantastic.

00:59:54.000 I mean, this is the stuff, if I do a Fringology 2, which I intend to, I intend to look pretty deeply into...

01:00:00.000 Deeply, like as in you're going to take them.

01:00:02.000 Yeah.

01:00:03.000 You're going to have to.

01:00:04.000 Yeah.

01:00:04.000 Look, I do immersion journalism.

01:00:06.000 I mean, I debated, like, am I going to be coy or not?

01:00:08.000 But, like, I do immersion journalism.

01:00:10.000 You know, like, that's what I do.

01:00:11.000 I get into what I'm reporting on as much as I can.

01:00:14.000 I think psychedelic experiences are very, very helpful.

01:00:18.000 They can certainly send you off a path into nutty land, but I think they're very helpful.

01:00:24.000 And they're probably part of what's made us humans in the first place.

01:00:28.000 I mean, every single religion has some sort of substance that they...

01:00:32.000 You know, they talk about whether it's mana, whether it's, you know, soma.

01:00:37.000 There's like so many of them throughout, which are clearly some sort of psychedelic entheogen they would take in ritual form.

01:00:44.000 And it helped them connect to God.

01:00:46.000 I love the idea that it might have aided evolution in some way.

01:00:48.000 Yeah.

01:00:49.000 That's, yeah, the Terence McKenna stoned ape theory is a fascinating, fascinating idea. 0.99

01:00:54.000 You know, it's really one of those who the fuck knows things. 0.96

01:00:57.000 It's tough to go back and try to figure out what the hell happened that turned us from, you know, some sort of monkey-type creature, an ape, a lower ape, to however it became a human being. 0.99

01:01:09.000 I just think, I think in general we need to be willing to say who the fuck knows more often. 0.99

01:01:13.000 Well, if you do mushrooms, you should say who the fuck knows all day. 0.99

01:01:16.000 Because if you do it, you're just going to go, how could I have known that that's there? 0.99

01:01:20.000 How did you know?

01:01:21.000 And that DMT is mushrooms times a million plus aliens.

01:01:26.000 So it's impossible to even wrap a word around it.

01:01:32.000 And all those things, they can change you just like a religious experience can change you.

01:01:37.000 They can also freak you the fuck out and make you think you're haunted.

01:01:40.000 Haunted?

01:01:41.000 Like afterward?

01:01:42.000 You could lose.

01:01:43.000 You could blow a fuse.

01:01:44.000 It's possible for a lot of people.

01:01:47.000 Just do too much.

01:01:48.000 It's all about the situation you put yourself into.

01:01:50.000 Well, do you find that...

01:01:52.000 I mean, I would take it with so much excitement at this point.

01:01:54.000 Like, just so much like...

01:01:56.000 You would.

01:01:57.000 Let's do it.

01:01:58.000 But you're not crazy.

01:01:58.000 You're a successful author.

01:02:00.000 You seem like a nice guy. 1.00

01:02:01.000 If you're a nutty person and ingest that shit, if you're barely hanging on to sanity, I wouldn't recommend it. 0.99

01:02:10.000 What was the most shocking find for you in the writing of this book? 1.00

01:02:16.000 What's the one thing that set you back and really made you go, wow?

01:02:20.000 I might have started with the telepathy, but the other thing was meeting Ricky Sorrels in Stephenville, Texas.

01:02:26.000 He was one of the witnesses to what became known in UFO circles as the Stephenville Lights, this January 8th, I think, 2008 sighting.

01:02:38.000 And Sorrell's, so on January 8th, dozens of people, I like to say, they had the misfortune of looking up because they faced a lot of heat after they reported what they saw.

01:02:49.000 But it was some kind of series of lights in the sky that moved with such unity that it seemed to be one craft.

01:02:58.000 It would have been very, very big.

01:03:00.000 At one point it was actually trailed by F-16s that couldn't catch up to it.

01:03:05.000 And these were the sorts of reports you were getting out of Stephenville at the time.

01:03:09.000 And Ricky came forward to the newspaper and said that he had seen something many weeks before.

01:03:17.000 I think it was shortly after Thanksgiving.

01:03:19.000 And it was a solo daytime sighting.

01:03:23.000 And it was the wildest story of all the stories anyone ever told me, right?

01:03:28.000 In relation to the book, this was probably the wildest.

01:03:30.000 And part of it had to do with Ricky himself.

01:03:33.000 He didn't want to tell me the story.

01:03:34.000 I had to go through an intermediary who talked him into ultimately speaking to me.

01:03:39.000 As far as I'm aware, he has not done another interview since.

01:03:42.000 And we're now looking at three and a half years since I spoke to him.

01:03:46.000 He made not a dime on this.

01:03:49.000 If anything, he just faced a lot of ridicule locally in Stephenville at first.

01:03:55.000 Except, of course, from the people who'd seen it or had a loved one see it.

01:03:58.000 And so he has this sighting.

01:04:00.000 He's out hunting.

01:04:02.000 And this is one of the things that people use to sort of subtly undermine him.

01:04:06.000 In the same way that Monica Lewinsky was sort of framed for all of America by the fact that the dress that ended up with a semen stain came from the gap, right?

01:04:13.000 So now we know where she shops, like she's this low-rent little girl, right? 0.98

01:04:16.000 That's how people did her in. 1.00

01:04:20.000 With Ricky, one of the things people like to report, sort of demean him, is that we call him a deer hunter, right?

01:04:25.000 He's a father, he's a machinist, he's had his job for 15, 20 years.

01:04:29.000 I mean, he's a lot more than a deer hunter, but he was out hunting deer when this happened.

01:04:33.000 Why did they think that that's somehow another...

01:04:35.000 I think it located him as a hick. 0.94

01:04:37.000 You know what I mean?

01:04:37.000 He's in Stephenville, Texas, which is literally a cow town.

01:04:40.000 You were talking before about the cowboy with kerosene games.

01:04:42.000 These are cowboys.

01:04:43.000 These are people who are raising cattle, right?

01:04:46.000 And the cliche of UFO sightings is that it's, quote, it's hicks who see them, right?

01:04:53.000 One of the cliches of it.

01:04:55.000 Anyway, Ricky's out deer hunting, and he trips over a branch, and he doesn't fall down, but he has to sort of steady himself, and he glances up, and he notices overhead now something.

01:05:08.000 He ended up saying it was 300 feet over his head.

01:05:12.000 He gauged this by the fact that there's a water tower in the community that is 300 feet high, and it seemed about the same height.

01:05:18.000 He cannot see an edge to whatever it is that's floating above him.

01:05:23.000 And it's not making any sound, but it is hanging over the trees.

01:05:27.000 And in it, there are this series of sort of inverted cones, which he intuitively suspected must be part of, like, the propulsion system.

01:05:36.000 So the narrow part is up further into the craft, and then it widens as it telescopes down, right?

01:05:41.000 And so there's these series of inverted cones, and his first instinct, and I think people use this to sort of His first instinct was to put his gun on it.

01:05:51.000 Put his sight on it, right?

01:05:52.000 Just instinct. 0.99

01:05:53.000 What the fuck is that? 0.99

01:05:54.000 You know, he points the gun at it and then quickly, within a second or two, realizes, you know, I'm not gonna shoot at this thing. 1.00

01:06:02.000 Whatever it is, I'm not gonna shoot at it.

01:06:04.000 And so he lowers his gun, and I remember him telling me about this, that he just told himself, calm down.

01:06:10.000 Remember as much of this as you can.

01:06:13.000 Just look at it.

01:06:14.000 Take it in.

01:06:15.000 And then, boom.

01:06:17.000 I forget exactly how long he was looking at it, but for a little while, it just shot off.

01:06:22.000 And it went so fast, he said, there's no word for this kind of speed.

01:06:27.000 There's no word that can describe this kind of speed.

01:06:29.000 It went from blocking my entire field of vision because it was so big to just shooting up into the air like a lightning flash.

01:06:37.000 And what was so convincing to you about his story?

01:06:40.000 Here's the convincing part.

01:06:42.000 I'm used to sitting across from people and having them tell me all kinds of information.

01:06:49.000 And I have to look at various tales and just sort of see how I feel about them, right?

01:06:54.000 Are they telling me the truth?

01:06:56.000 Ricky just seemed utterly, completely truthful.

01:06:59.000 He was getting nothing from them. 0.53

01:07:00.000 What if he was crazy? 0.82

01:07:00.000 That's the, you know, obviously the skeptic's point of view, the cynic's going to come in and go, what if he was crazy? 0.82

01:07:06.000 What if he was a good liar? 0.96

01:07:07.000 You're basing your belief off, this is the most shocking thing, an anecdotal story from a good liar.

01:07:13.000 Well, like I said, I want to start with the telepathy, actually, because I could look at that research for myself and judge it.

01:07:17.000 But he freaked you out enough.

01:07:19.000 He freaked me out in this sense, because here's the thing, Joe.

01:07:21.000 To me, he's demonstrably not crazy.

01:07:23.000 He's fully functional.

01:07:24.000 He's still got the same job.

01:07:26.000 He's still got the same friends.

01:07:27.000 Have you drunk?

01:07:28.000 Did you go drinking with him?

01:07:29.000 I actually met him for lunch, and we did have a beer or two.

01:07:32.000 Unless he's hammered.

01:07:32.000 You don't know that dude.

01:07:35.000 Unless you've seen him hammered, you don't know him.

01:07:36.000 He's got a life and kids, and he's got a whole life.

01:07:39.000 And he's running that life.

01:07:40.000 What's his name?

01:07:41.000 Ted Haggard? 1.00

01:07:43.000 The guy, the church guy who smokes meth and gets gay hookers. 1.00

01:07:47.000 That's what's so interesting to me about a story like that. 1.00

01:07:49.000 What we're left with is the idea that what we have to say is, well, he must be crazy.

01:07:54.000 Something must be off with him.

01:07:56.000 What was it people saw several weeks later?

01:07:59.000 I mean, one of the things that interests me about that story is they were very near a military base.

01:08:04.000 And again, this is all in the book, but one of the things that happened to him after he reported his sighting is he started getting calls from somebody who was identifying themselves as a member of the military who was advising him not to talk about this anymore and saying they wanted to meet with him.

01:08:16.000 That was me.

01:08:17.000 I was calling.

01:08:19.000 I was just trying to get him to come on the podcast.

01:08:21.000 It was Robert De Niro.

01:08:22.000 It was De Niro rehearsing a new role.

01:08:23.000 I was rehearsing my role.

01:08:27.000 Yeah, you know, I wish he'd just pulled out his phone, took a picture of that.

01:08:32.000 Didn't have one. 1.00

01:08:33.000 Motherfucker out there deer hunting without a phone. 0.99

01:08:35.000 And actually, you know, the funny part about this, one of the witnesses, a constable, that's what they call their sheriff there, Leroy Gaten, right, had a camera nearby when he had his sighting. 0.99

01:08:47.000 It was in his car and he was 10 feet from his car.

01:08:50.000 And he had to make a choice.

01:08:52.000 Do I take my eyes off this unbelievable sight and miss it, or do I go grab the camera?

01:08:58.000 And his choice was to stay rooted to the spot.

01:09:01.000 And I think that that's another thing where I just sort of caution the skeptics.

01:09:05.000 I mean, at the end of the day, you know, what they saw in Stephenville is an unidentified flying object.

01:09:10.000 And we end up with believers who hear that and say, we don't know what it was, therefore aliens.

01:09:16.000 Right. 0.97

01:09:16.000 Ridiculous, right? 0.97

01:09:18.000 But we also end up with skeptics who want to explain in a way as flares. 0.87

01:09:21.000 And you know what? 0.98

01:09:21.000 That's equally frickin' ridiculous. 0.98

01:09:24.000 It wasn't flares. 0.99

01:09:24.000 I was with you until you said frickin'. 0.99

01:09:26.000 And I'm like, listen, man, we're grown adults here. 1.00

01:09:28.000 Fuckin'. 0.99

01:09:29.000 Thank you. 0.99

01:09:29.000 Thank you, sir. 0.99

01:09:30.000 I'm with you.

01:09:31.000 You hurt Brian.

01:09:32.000 You know what, man?

01:09:33.000 This is the first podcast I've been on where, like, swearing is just, like, cool.

01:09:36.000 Really?

01:09:37.000 Yeah.

01:09:37.000 What podcasts don't swear?

01:09:39.000 Maybe Matt does on Disinfo, and I didn't realize it.

01:09:41.000 But the other ones, they're clean.

01:09:43.000 You know, if you listen to them, they're clean.

01:09:45.000 Oh, God. 0.99

01:09:45.000 And up to our reporters, we fucking swear our asses off. 0.99

01:09:48.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

01:09:48.000 Like, I swear all the fucking time. 1.00

01:09:50.000 But I'm used to in this setting... 0.99

01:09:52.000 That'd be cool if UFOs were Bigfoots. 0.89

01:09:54.000 Instead of ships, they're just flying Bigfoots.

01:09:55.000 Flying Bigfoots.

01:09:57.000 Well, remember I just...

01:09:58.000 That's why I brought my Brian pad.

01:10:00.000 I used to have a...

01:10:01.000 I used to have a joke that if there was going to be UFOs, why would they come in the form of a disk?

01:10:05.000 If they can get here from another planet, they could make themselves look like a cloud.

01:10:09.000 Yeah, right.

01:10:09.000 Like, that's something we've already figured out how to do with, like, those Japanese jackets that show you an image of what's behind you, on you.

01:10:17.000 Have you ever seen that?

01:10:18.000 Some new technology.

01:10:19.000 There are people, actually, who do claim they come here as clouds.

01:10:22.000 I'm sure they do.

01:10:23.000 Which I find, yeah.

01:10:23.000 Oh, well, I have a problem.

01:10:24.000 I have a friend who's got a problem, rather. 0.95

01:10:26.000 I didn't know he was nutty.

01:10:28.000 And we were in the improv one night, and he's like, check these out.

01:10:32.000 And he starts showing me pictures of clouds.

01:10:34.000 And I go, ah, it's beautiful.

01:10:36.000 He's on his iPhone, showing me pictures of clouds.

01:10:38.000 He goes, you know, they're out there all the time.

01:10:39.000 They're always, they're following me all the time.

01:10:41.000 I go, what exactly are you saying?

01:10:44.000 He goes, these are flying saucers.

01:10:45.000 He goes, these are from another planet.

01:10:47.000 He goes, they're out there.

01:10:47.000 They're following all the time.

01:10:48.000 And I realized, oh, I thought this dude was just nutty. 0.58

01:10:52.000 I thought he was like a nutty comic. 0.88

01:10:54.000 No.

01:10:55.000 No, he's got something.

01:10:57.000 Some A is connected to B, and B is hanging down here loose and sparking.

01:11:03.000 We are smoking aliens, Joe.

01:11:05.000 I totally met people who are so invested in this idea that they're being...

01:11:10.000 That they've been abducted or that they're visited by aliens.

01:11:14.000 I met a guy who claimed to have an implant in his leg and he didn't want it removed because the times that he's thought about it he began to feel nauseous.

01:11:24.000 And this made him think that the, you know, the aliens don't want him to have it removed and just this whole trip into lava wind because there's a lump under his skin, right? 0.94

01:11:36.000 And that could be glass that's been working its way up, you know what I mean, for decades or who knows what the fuck it is, right?

01:11:42.000 Like some kind of growth.

01:11:44.000 So I definitely met people like that.

01:11:46.000 I think that's one of the things that impressed me so much about Ricky.

01:11:49.000 He didn't want to give the interview.

01:11:50.000 He hasn't done another interview since.

01:11:52.000 There's no profit in it for him.

01:11:53.000 If anything, he just faced embarrassment over this.

01:11:56.000 Well, I wish a story was enough for me, but I still have an open mind. 0.99

01:12:02.000 I still have an open mind because even though I know that most people are full of shit, I still know that we can send a rover to Mars. 0.98

01:12:08.000 If we can send a rover to Mars, if there was a Some sort of a civilization out there that wasn't just a thousand years advanced, but millions of years advanced. 0.99

01:12:18.000 And perhaps they live in a solar system that doesn't get pelted by asteroids every couple hundred million years and wipes out everything on the planet.

01:12:25.000 And who knows what level of achievement they've had technologically.

01:12:30.000 It's absolutely possible.

01:12:32.000 One of the guys I write about in the book, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, NASA astronaut, his family In a hundred years, if you sort of trace the bloodline, they moved west in horse-drawn wagons, and then he was on the moon a hundred years later.

01:12:49.000 That, that's technology advancing, from horse-drawn wagons to the moon.

01:12:55.000 Well, he's a big UFO believer.

01:12:57.000 He's actually said that he saw some things when he was in space?

01:13:01.000 No.

01:13:01.000 Well, no, no, no.

01:13:02.000 Not in relation to UFOs at all.

01:13:04.000 He maintains that he saw nothing in terms of UFOs when he was in space.

01:13:07.000 He does believe in UFOs.

01:13:11.000 He says he's talked to members of the military since who've assured him that they're That UFOs should be identified as alien craft in some cases, right?

01:13:18.000 That we are being visited.

01:13:19.000 But what happened in space was completely different.

01:13:21.000 It was a religious or a spiritual, I'll say, spiritual experience.

01:13:25.000 He had an epiphany where he had the same sort of experience that people report in meditation when they hit this kind of bliss Or sometimes on psychedelics where it was like everything dropped away and he felt himself being at one with the entire universe.

01:13:45.000 That everything was connected.

01:13:47.000 Everything was one thing.

01:13:49.000 And it was a feeling that he had all the way back, you know, over a period of a day or two.

01:13:56.000 He would have this experience every, you know, regularly.

01:14:03.000 Feel this sense of wonder and this sense that he was, you know, he rejected his parents' religion.

01:14:10.000 He'd gone completely down the science path.

01:14:13.000 And it completely altered his perspective and made him think that there's some way of uniting spirituality and science.

01:14:21.000 He landed and started the Institute of Noetic Sciences to try and find some sort of connection between spiritual experiences and some scientific basis for them.

01:14:32.000 Yeah, what Edgar Mitchell's deal is with aliens, rather, is that he has talked to quite a few people that were high-knowing people in Joint Chiefs of Staff,

01:14:50.000 Intelligence Committee-type characters, and they told him there was a UFO crash, that there was an alien spacecraft at Roswell, and that...

01:15:00.000 It's pretty fascinating stuff.

01:15:01.000 Listening to him, I'm reading this thing, and he had something to do with the Disclosure Project with Dr. Stephen Greer, who one day we would like to get him on this podcast as well, because he's another very highly credible person, and his Disclosure Project included a lot of very high I think it's high time that we start being honest about what these people in high levels of the military have already experienced,

01:15:29.000 know about it and the fact that there's probably a high level of probability That we are consistently visited by some freaky dudes from another part of the world or another dimension, but they just can slip in and out like that,

01:15:47.000 and we don't really know what the fuck is going on. 0.83

01:15:49.000 Well, that whole... 0.98

01:15:50.000 One of the arguments you'll get from the Skeptics is that our planet is one among so many.

01:15:57.000 How would they find us?

01:15:58.000 What kind of propulsion system could possibly carry them here?

01:16:03.000 And they're basing this all off on what we know right now with our technology and our understanding at the moment.

01:16:08.000 But as you said, if you've got a civilization that's been around for thousands or potentially even a million or more years, who knows what they could have?

01:16:16.000 It's a silly sort of argument to me because it's based so much on this idea that this is as advanced as we're ever going to get.

01:16:23.000 Well, I always point out to the fact that 200 years ago, when you wanted to picture something, you had to draw it. 0.98

01:16:28.000 If you wanted to get around, you had to ride a fucking animal. 0.99

01:16:31.000 It was the dumbest time ever. 1.00

01:16:33.000 You had to draw... 0.98

01:16:34.000 200 years ago, you had to draw things to let anybody else know what they looked like.

01:16:40.000 And we're still doing that in the courtroom. 1.00

01:16:41.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:16:42.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:16:42.000 But it's really incredible, if you stop and look at that, that we've gone from that in 200 years to... 1.00

01:16:48.000 Making high-res videos with your cellphones, watching streaming videos, playing video games on a tablet.

01:16:54.000 I mean, just that leap, no one saw coming before photographs.

01:16:58.000 No one would have imagined that this tiny blip in human time of 200 years could have that much innovation. 0.98

01:17:06.000 You know, the only time I really get sad about dying now is when I think about the shit I'm gonna miss. 0.94

01:17:11.000 You know, the advances that are coming up. 0.96

01:17:13.000 Like, I'd like to experience that stuff.

01:17:15.000 Like privacy?

01:17:16.000 You're gonna miss privacy. 1.00

01:17:18.000 That shit's out the window, son. 1.00

01:17:20.000 Yeah, that's the first thing that's going to go, I think. 1.00

01:17:23.000 I think there will really be no privacy in about a hundred years.

01:17:26.000 In a hundred years, I think everyone's going to know each other.

01:17:28.000 It probably won't even take that long.

01:17:29.000 Don't people seem strangely disinterested in privacy now, too?

01:17:32.000 I mean, I can't get over how raw people are in terms of the information they share about themselves.

01:17:38.000 You lose a phone, you lose your diary.

01:17:41.000 You could get all your family photos or people's phone numbers, your past texts, your emails.

01:17:46.000 That person's just gained a huge part of your privacy by just losing a phone. 1.00

01:17:51.000 Yeah, if you don't have a fucking password on it, stupid. 1.00

01:17:54.000 Most people don't. 1.00

01:17:56.000 That's true, if you're a person who wants to peer into someone's text messages.

01:18:00.000 But I think that access, ultimately, will one day just be universal.

01:18:06.000 Everybody will be able to find out anything that anybody's doing.

01:18:09.000 People are walking around with apps now that will automatically tweet where they are.

01:18:12.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

01:18:14.000 Geotagging.

01:18:14.000 It's great if you want to stalk them, though.

01:18:16.000 Really stalking somebody and they're geotagging all over the fucking place. 0.98

01:18:19.000 You can narrow it down. 0.99

01:18:21.000 Pretty good.

01:18:23.000 Yeah.

01:18:23.000 People are weird, man.

01:18:25.000 The whole connection hasn't been figured out yet.

01:18:28.000 This whole connection between every human being on the planet through the internet really hasn't been figured out yet.

01:18:33.000 I thought you were going mystical with that for a second, this whole connection.

01:18:36.000 Well, there's that as well.

01:18:36.000 Because we're trying to figure that out, too, right?

01:18:38.000 Well, I think that, as we said, I don't think that the human body in this form is done.

01:18:44.000 You know, I think it's continuing to change and continuing to...

01:18:48.000 A lot of people don't like to use the word evolve because, you know, real evolution involves mutation and adaptation to your natural surroundings.

01:18:55.000 And it might not just be that.

01:18:56.000 There might be a lot of things going on.

01:18:58.000 A constant move towards improvement.

01:19:00.000 Or we keep on losing senses.

01:19:02.000 Are you familiar with the overview?

01:19:03.000 Could be that.

01:19:04.000 The overview?

01:19:04.000 Overview effect.

01:19:05.000 Are you familiar with that?

01:19:06.000 No, it's that.

01:19:07.000 So that's what Edgar Mitchell experienced, right?

01:19:09.000 And he's very adamant about this, and it seems to be true. 1.00

01:19:13.000 NASA... It allows that this happens now.

01:19:16.000 The people they send up into space are changed by the experience of seeing the Earth from space.

01:19:23.000 It has a profound impact on them.

01:19:25.000 They feel...

01:19:26.000 And for Mitchell, it becomes a spiritual experience.

01:19:29.000 For other people, it got them more involved in politics.

01:19:32.000 They recognize how arbitrary the lines between countries are and the lines we draw culturally.

01:19:38.000 But they see just how fragile our little Planet is hanging out there in space, and it changes them, and I think most of us would agree it's changing them for the better.

01:19:51.000 They end up coming home and doing sort of more altruistic things with their lives, and now we're going to have civilians being sent up into space, mostly wealthy civilians initially, because how much that ride's going to cost,

01:20:07.000 right?

01:20:07.000 Bigelow Aerospace or Virgin.

01:20:09.000 We're talking about $100,000, $150,000.

01:20:12.000 I can't remember the price at this point, but I had researched it.

01:20:15.000 And we're going to have general civilians getting shot up into space and having an experience of seeing the Earth from there.

01:20:22.000 And it's going to begin to slowly change the culture, I would think, because if you look at how dramatically it changed the lives of all the people who've gone into space, it's going to change these people too, to some degree.

01:20:35.000 Yeah, Edgar Mitchell's take on it is very trippy, man.

01:20:39.000 It's very trippy.

01:20:41.000 When he was in the spacecraft coming home, this is his word, suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body were created in an ancient generation of stars, and suddenly that became personal and visceral, not intellectual, and I had never had this experience.

01:20:58.000 It was accompanied by bliss and ecstasy I had never experienced.

01:21:03.000 So he's calling it, it's calling it samadhi.

01:21:05.000 I quote that in the book, actually, because it's a heavy quote.

01:21:10.000 He felt, literally, it was like his flesh dropped away.

01:21:15.000 His bones went away.

01:21:16.000 Have you ever been to the Keck Observatory?

01:21:19.000 No.

01:21:19.000 The Keck Observatory in Hawaii is on the Big Island, and there's one island in Hawaii that's so big, you get so high on the Big Island, that you go through the clouds.

01:21:32.000 Talk about Hilo?

01:21:32.000 Yeah, well Hilo is just a city.

01:21:35.000 The Keck Observatory is, I think it's on the Mauna Loa volcano, whatever one it is, the biggest one.

01:21:43.000 And it's at, there's like a visitor station that's down at like 9,000 plus feet, and then you go even higher, they have the telescopes there.

01:21:54.000 But you get out of the car, and you're through the clouds, and the way the Big Island is set up, they have these diffused lights so that they don't create light pollution because of the observatory. 0.95

01:22:04.000 So, the fucking Milky Way was so stunning!

01:22:09.000 It was so, that to this day, All I think about when we talk about going on vacation is, like, we've got to get back to that. 0.99

01:22:15.000 I've got to see that again.

01:22:16.000 I've just got to look up and see that again.

01:22:17.000 Because it really did feel like you were flying through an impossibly filled galaxy.

01:22:24.000 Whereas, like, usually you see, like, a few stars, like, here and there, you know, up there with that.

01:22:30.000 High altitude and the really zero light pollution and clear skies.

01:22:35.000 It was amazing.

01:22:36.000 I studied lucid dreaming in Hilo on the Big Island.

01:22:39.000 And one of the things I would do is at night before I go to bed, I would lay out in the grass and just stare straight up.

01:22:46.000 Because I'm in Philly, right?

01:22:47.000 You just don't get stars like that in Philadelphia.

01:22:50.000 Because there were really no lights.

01:22:52.000 We were at this little retreat type center.

01:22:54.000 And it just set the scene real well to go upstairs and try and have a lucid dream.

01:23:00.000 Yeah, I would imagine it would set the scene for freaking yourself out.

01:23:04.000 I've never gotten over that image.

01:23:06.000 I mean, it was only a couple hours of just staring at the sky, but I couldn't believe how beautiful it looked.

01:23:12.000 I gotta imagine it's probably a hundred times more beautiful when you're in space orbiting the Earth.

01:23:18.000 Have you seen those photos that they take when they're up there? 1.00

01:23:21.000 It's like, oh my god, you're orbiting the fucking planet! 0.97

01:23:25.000 You're above it, looking down at the circular nature of it all. 0.98

01:23:29.000 It's something to consider there, too, that's really interesting.

01:23:33.000 Fascinating about the overview effect.

01:23:35.000 You can show people these pictures and they don't have the reaction that you have from being there.

01:23:40.000 Of course.

01:23:41.000 Images never capture the real emotion of the moment. 0.98

01:23:46.000 The connection of the moment when you're actually in space has got to be a real mindfuck.

01:23:51.000 It's like the connection of camping as opposed to actual camping. 0.99

01:23:56.000 Most people go, why the fuck are you going camping? 1.00

01:23:59.000 What are you going to sleep in the woods, stupid? 1.00

01:24:01.000 Don't you have a house? 1.00

01:24:03.000 But once you do it and you go, oh, I get it.

01:24:06.000 This is crazy.

01:24:07.000 You're out here in nature.

01:24:08.000 This is a totally different feeling.

01:24:10.000 My wife is going to be really glad that you're saying this because she wants me desperately to go tent camping with her.

01:24:15.000 And my feeling always, you know, let's just get a cabin, honey.

01:24:18.000 We'll walk out into the woods at night.

01:24:20.000 Tell her you want to go deer hunting.

01:24:22.000 Then you can camp out.

01:24:24.000 Make some sort of an agreement.

01:24:30.000 We're back to De Niro.

01:24:31.000 One shot. 0.98

01:24:32.000 Yeah, De Niro's ridiculous. 1.00

01:24:34.000 You gotta shoot him twice sometimes. 1.00

01:24:35.000 They go down, you gotta execute them, trust me. 1.00

01:24:39.000 Yeah, the thing that's weird about camping is that when you're away from, like, electricity and a house and all that shit for long enough, you kind of, like, get this, like, real humble feeling. 0.99

01:24:52.000 Like, oh, okay, I get this.

01:24:54.000 Like, we're just, like, another animal who just figured out some way to separate ourselves so we can do our work.

01:25:01.000 We separate ourselves in our houses and in there we create these computers and electrically hook things together and As long as we separate ourselves from the nature, because we're out there in the nature, you might get eaten, or you gotta go find some food. 0.99

01:25:14.000 Shit can go wrong. 1.00

01:25:16.000 Put that Purell on your hands, bitch, and go back to work. 1.00

01:25:19.000 So you get in your house and you hide from the connection with the outside world. 1.00

01:25:23.000 But when you're camping, it's inescapable.

01:25:25.000 It's a weird feeling.

01:25:26.000 When you're out there for, I did it recently, five days with no cell phones in it, no electricity, no heat, no nothing.

01:25:34.000 And we had to start a fire if we wanted to stay warm, and it was in Montana, it was freezing cold.

01:25:38.000 But doing that, you really have a different sort of feeling and appreciation for what nature actually is.

01:25:48.000 We're disconnected from one of the fucking coolest things ever for a human to experience.

01:25:54.000 We're completely disconnected from it.

01:25:56.000 There's a lot of people who live their whole lives in cities and in suburbs and they drive back and forth from work and they never get out there in the woods.

01:26:04.000 I'll never forget a guy in college who went on this big, long tirade, and I thought he might be mentally unbalanced, because he went on this big, long tirade.

01:26:13.000 It was in philosophy class, actually, too.

01:26:16.000 I'm so sick of people talking about the outdoors and how the outdoors are so great. 0.97

01:26:20.000 The outdoors suck.

01:26:21.000 You get bit by bugs. 1.00

01:26:23.000 You don't know what the fuck's going on. 0.96

01:26:24.000 You don't know what's going to happen next. 1.00

01:26:25.000 You get rained on.

01:26:26.000 You're wet. 0.99

01:26:27.000 What the fuck's great about that? 0.99

01:26:28.000 That was his take on the entire outdoors. 0.99

01:26:30.000 He spent his entire life in a mall, I guess.

01:26:34.000 That's the classic cynics approach, isn't it?

01:26:36.000 Isn't it the classic cynics approach? 1.00

01:26:38.000 The hipster, like, fucking everything sucks, man. 1.00

01:26:42.000 That is our spoiled society's creation. 1.00

01:26:47.000 I have to tell you, that's one of the biggest pushbacks I've gotten from that sort of crowd on the book.

01:26:54.000 The whole idea that I was going to go study lucid dreaming and learn to meditate and do all these things, you know, like, why?

01:27:01.000 Why would you put that kind of effort...

01:27:03.000 I don't know, I guess they feel so great in their skinny jeans that the idea of doing something to improve themselves further, you know what I mean, just seems like an admission of defeat, right?

01:27:13.000 Because they're supposed to be so cool right now.

01:27:15.000 Well, that is the thing.

01:27:17.000 Like, why bother? 1.00

01:27:18.000 What are you doing out there with your stupid psychic bullshit? 1.00

01:27:23.000 It's not real. 1.00

01:27:24.000 It doesn't matter.

01:27:25.000 Look at my jeans.

01:27:26.000 What if they have skinny jeans and they're sagging?

01:27:28.000 Have you seen that? 0.99

01:27:28.000 That makes you fucking violent, doesn't it? 0.99

01:27:30.000 Oh, it makes me want to throttle those little fucks. 1.00

01:27:32.000 Oh, if you're so skinny that your skinny jeans are sagging, there's a problem. 1.00

01:27:35.000 Well, they put them down low on purpose.

01:27:38.000 Like, that's a move, to have your skinny jeans kind of saggy.

01:27:41.000 Male cleave a little. 0.53

01:27:43.000 Yeah, a little bit.

01:27:44.000 It's like you're just letting them know. 1.00

01:27:46.000 Silly fucks. 1.00

01:27:48.000 Yeah, that detachment thing is really disturbing. 1.00

01:27:51.000 It's such a weak, fake sort of complacency.

01:27:56.000 They're just terrified. 0.99

01:27:58.000 So they're just pretending to don't give a fuck about anything. 0.99

01:28:00.000 Don't care about anything. 0.99

01:28:01.000 I'm a hipster.

01:28:02.000 Well, I think there's a lot of that.

01:28:04.000 Terrified, I think, is the operative word.

01:28:06.000 And it's funny.

01:28:08.000 I'm not going to be able to quote him exactly, but it was Martin Sheen. 0.99

01:28:12.000 And that guy went through the shit, right? 0.99

01:28:14.000 I mean, look at the whole Apocalypse Now filming and that whole story, the whole arc he went through. 0.99

01:28:18.000 The basic fact we need to understand about life is that it's terrifying.

01:28:23.000 We are cauldrons of anxiety.

01:28:27.000 We have a part of our brain, the amygdala, that whenever we're confronted by ambiguous information is immediately going to be like, check for danger, check for danger.

01:28:34.000 And it sort of prohibits us from learning, growing, trying to find out new things if we give in to that.

01:28:42.000 Yeah, I mean, we're animals and we have instincts to stay alive and those instincts are gonna get fired up left and right all around.

01:28:48.000 Especially if you're in a city and it's constantly surrounded by people and packed into a place.

01:28:54.000 And I think your senses, they adapt.

01:28:57.000 Your feelings and intuitions sort of adapt to that environment.

01:29:00.000 That's why it really made sense when you were talking about people who were hunters and people who were inner city people.

01:29:06.000 Because when you're involved in an inner city situation, that's very primal.

01:29:12.000 And you have to learn to slow it down.

01:29:14.000 Because there's so much happening around you, in a way you kind of have to learn to slow it down to see what's important here.

01:29:20.000 What do I really have my eye on?

01:29:22.000 Because there's so many different things that could distract you. 0.99

01:29:25.000 Potentially fuck you up. 0.99

01:29:26.000 Yeah. 0.85

01:29:27.000 What other information or what other pieces of evidence about aliens have ever led you to believe conclusively one way or another that That there is something out there.

01:29:40.000 You know, that's another one where I conclusively believe that UFOs are unidentified flying objects, right?

01:29:46.000 And there are times when we just need to kind of, there are people who want to honor sort of like materialist science, and there are people who want to honor some sort of dogmatic religion.

01:29:53.000 I want to honor that like gap in our knowledge to some degree, right?

01:29:56.000 And just acknowledge that it's there.

01:29:58.000 And that's what we're working through.

01:30:01.000 You know, we need more information, more data, not less.

01:30:07.000 So the UFO question, I mean, have we been visited?

01:30:10.000 I'm not entirely sure.

01:30:12.000 I mean, even that Stephenville Siding, I didn't get a chance to get into this, but that Stephenville Siding, there's a military base nearby.

01:30:17.000 This guy claimed that he was harassed for weeks afterward by a member of the military.

01:30:22.000 There's a story in the book about somebody showing up on his property and in the middle of the night making his dogs bark and just staring into his door and clearly wearing camo gear.

01:30:34.000 And this was during the same period when he was getting these threatening phone calls from a guy who was identifying himself as a member of the military.

01:30:41.000 So is it possible that people are encountering at times some sort of advanced military technology?

01:30:51.000 To me, no coincidence that people started reporting triangle-shaped UFOs shortly before the stealth bomber was ultimately revealed.

01:30:59.000 So sometimes that's the explanation.

01:31:02.000 But, you know, for me, simply the vastness of the universe, its age, the chances that we're the only, only planet that's evolved life like this seem so small.

01:31:22.000 That surely somebody out there has developed the kind of technology it would take to find us and get here.

01:31:27.000 That's the kind of thinking that really opens me up to the possibility.

01:31:31.000 The numbers are just too crazy.

01:31:33.000 A hundred billion stars with who knows how many planets.

01:31:38.000 More than one per star.

01:31:41.000 Some of our binary systems.

01:31:43.000 We don't know.

01:31:45.000 That's just this galaxy.

01:31:46.000 It's a joke.

01:31:47.000 And there are enough of these cases where You know, like Greer's people, the military people who come forward and say that something happened or whatever.

01:31:54.000 Enough of these people are credible and it's left in an unidentified category that you start to think, well, you know, maybe at some point, some of these... 0.99

01:32:04.000 But so many people are full of shit and so many people have told lies that if you have... 0.99

01:32:10.000 Any thoughts in your head that you're going to be able to tell people that you believe in UFOs and not have them ridicule you? 1.00

01:32:17.000 Good fucking luck. 0.99

01:32:18.000 Good luck being a serious person and being taken seriously. 0.99

01:32:22.000 If we had Obama, if Obama was on TV and he started talking about UFOs, And his experience and what he believes they are and that he believes that we're being visited by intelligent beings from some other dimension or planet.

01:32:34.000 He immediately is going to get...

01:32:36.000 People will haul him off to crazy town in their minds.

01:32:38.000 Don't take him away!

01:32:38.000 Look what happened to Dennis Kucinich when he told that story or, you know...

01:32:42.000 Sort of was dragged through that story during a debate.

01:32:45.000 What was his story again?

01:32:47.000 What year did he run?

01:32:49.000 He ran in recently.

01:32:51.000 2004?

01:32:52.000 Yeah.

01:32:53.000 He had written, or I'm sorry, Shirley MacLaine, who I guess is like a great aunt or something to him, or a godmother.

01:33:00.000 I can't remember the relationship.

01:33:01.000 She had written a book.

01:33:02.000 Red flag!

01:33:03.000 She had written a book in which she claimed that he had seen a UFO. And Tim Russert asked him about it during a debate, and people immediately, and this is, again, the language was UFO,

01:33:19.000 not an alien craft, but a UFO. People immediately burst into laughter, and you can hear it, you know, on the video.

01:33:25.000 I write about this in the book, too.

01:33:27.000 People immediately start laughing, and he starts saying, well, look, you know, UFO, it's unidentified.

01:33:31.000 And people are still sort of, now you hear people kind of gasping, because instead of rejecting it out of hand, he's sort of trying to stick up for this.

01:33:40.000 Those are the press people that you root for to get killed by the aliens that were in that Mars Attacks movie.

01:33:46.000 They come down with the ray guns. 1.00

01:33:49.000 Just start blasting them and killing them. 1.00

01:33:51.000 How undignified to be killed by cartoonish aliens. 1.00

01:33:53.000 That would be the perfect end. 1.00

01:33:54.000 That's the way to go. 0.97

01:33:56.000 That movie was fucking awesome. 0.97

01:33:58.000 That's one of my favorite all-time alien movies. 0.97

01:34:01.000 Mars Attacks.

01:34:02.000 It's much more likely how it's going to go down, too.

01:34:04.000 These people, these knuckleheads that think that the alien's going to come save us. 0.67

01:34:08.000 We're not saving chimps. 1.00

01:34:09.000 We're not going to the fucking Congo and giving them laptops. 0.99

01:34:13.000 They're not going to save us. 0.99

01:34:16.000 Why would they save us? 0.99

01:34:17.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

01:34:19.000 Edgar Mitchell. 1.00

01:34:20.000 He knows.

01:34:21.000 He knows something.

01:34:22.000 He doesn't want to tell us.

01:34:24.000 This guy, your guy, did he have drawings?

01:34:29.000 Did he ever...

01:34:30.000 Sorrels?

01:34:31.000 Yeah.

01:34:31.000 Did he, like, try to show you?

01:34:32.000 Well, you know what's funny?

01:34:33.000 He tried to take pictures later of other, you know, another sighting he said he had using a cell phone camera.

01:34:42.000 He had another sighting?

01:34:44.000 Yeah.

01:34:44.000 Same town?

01:34:45.000 Same town, but at night.

01:34:47.000 And this is 2008. And it's a shitty fucking picture. 1.00

01:34:51.000 And actually it's a little bit of video, actually, too. 1.00

01:34:55.000 I think he captured video.

01:34:56.000 He stopped showing it because he realized it was embarrassingly bad.

01:35:02.000 It's probably YouTube comments.

01:35:03.000 They got rude.

01:35:04.000 Well, here's the issue.

01:35:06.000 How good a picture is a cell phone camera going to take of a light in the sky? 0.98

01:35:10.000 Not very fucking good. 0.98

01:35:11.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:35:12.000 I mean, think about how good of a picture does it take of the moon?

01:35:14.000 It looks like a tiny little dot.

01:35:16.000 It's impossible to see with an iPhone.

01:35:18.000 So that's another one of the sort of misleading, you know, the red herrings thrown out there by the skeptics.

01:35:22.000 But we're all walking around with camera phones now. 0.99

01:35:24.000 Yes, and those camera phones suck. 1.00

01:35:25.000 For the most part, they'd have a very hard time taking a picture of a light in a dark field, right? 0.98

01:35:30.000 Did you look up Bigfoot?

01:35:33.000 I did not.

01:35:34.000 Did you do no Bigfoot research?

01:35:35.000 I decided I was not going there.

01:35:38.000 Maybe in book two, after you take mushrooms, then you commune with Bigfoot.

01:35:41.000 Yeah, Bigfoot to me was not on the radar.

01:35:43.000 Here's the thing.

01:35:44.000 I was drawn to the idea that where the whole title of Fringology came from is these are subjects we push to the fringe, but if you look at near-death experiences, ghosts, UFOs, They speak to the big existential questions that really plague us,

01:36:02.000 the ones we don't have answers to.

01:36:04.000 What happens when we die?

01:36:06.000 Are we alone in the universe?

01:36:08.000 What's it mean to be human?

01:36:10.000 These sorts of questions.

01:36:11.000 Bigfoot doesn't really get into that field.

01:36:16.000 He's not something that's going to make me question The idea that there might be some undiscovered ape does not affect what happens when I die or whether or not we're alone in the universe.

01:36:27.000 You say this. 0.99

01:36:27.000 Unless he got here on a fucking spaceship. 0.99

01:36:29.000 See, you say this, but my friend called me up the other day. 0.99

01:36:32.000 I swear to God, someone actually had a conversation with me about this the other day on the phone.

01:36:36.000 He goes, do you think that Bigfoot could be like an interdimensional being?

01:36:41.000 It comes up.

01:36:42.000 People do throw that out there, but I decided to stay away.

01:36:46.000 And I said, no, I don't think that.

01:36:48.000 I don't think that at all. 1.00

01:36:49.000 Even after you said it, I refuse to think it, you fuck. 1.00

01:36:52.000 Who was that? 1.00

01:36:52.000 I'm not telling you. 1.00

01:36:53.000 It wasn't me.

01:36:54.000 It wasn't you.

01:36:55.000 It was not Brian Redman. 0.99

01:36:57.000 Brian Redman could give a fuck about Bigfoot or UFOs. 1.00

01:37:00.000 He's a silly boy, but he's not a silly boy when it comes to ghosts and shit like that. 1.00

01:37:06.000 My mom and my sister and my stepdad all say that their house is haunted. 1.00

01:37:11.000 I've stayed at that house. 0.81

01:37:12.000 I've screamed like ghosts are Jerks.

01:37:15.000 That was the edited version.

01:37:16.000 But I tried everything to see or hear this ghost that they all swear upon.

01:37:21.000 Yeah, maybe they're haunted. 1.00

01:37:22.000 Maybe their minds and their fucking dreams are haunted. 1.00

01:37:25.000 That's right. 1.00

01:37:26.000 Their life is haunted.

01:37:27.000 Maybe that. 1.00

01:37:27.000 Maybe their life sucks a fat one, so they manufacture ghosts to scare the shit out of them in the middle of the night. 1.00

01:37:32.000 I hear it all the time, too. 0.99

01:37:34.000 I went out with a ghost hunter for about, not dated, but went along with them for about nine months or a year.

01:37:41.000 What?

01:37:41.000 That seems like a long time.

01:37:43.000 That's part of the research for the book.

01:37:44.000 Nine months for a year?

01:37:45.000 How often did you do it?

01:37:46.000 Oh, gosh.

01:37:47.000 Once a month, probably, we went out.

01:37:50.000 And then when he had, like, a quote, hot case, I would go.

01:37:53.000 There was one case I went out on, like, three, four nights in a couple-week time span.

01:38:00.000 And look, there were times when the people didn't want to think anything was going on in their house and brought him in hopefully to debunk it, but there were a lot of times that people brought him in hoping.

01:38:10.000 That they had a ghost.

01:38:12.000 Excited about it.

01:38:13.000 Showing pictures of dust motes in the air and saying, look at these orbs.

01:38:16.000 What are the orbs?

01:38:17.000 Please explain to me what the orbs are.

01:38:19.000 Usually they're dust motes.

01:38:21.000 It's just dust and stuff floating in the air near the camera lens.

01:38:26.000 And so the light flashes off of that dust and creates this round image that's semi-transparent.

01:38:33.000 You need to talk to Eddie Bravo.

01:38:35.000 Because Eddie Bravo believes you manifest them with positive thinking.

01:38:39.000 And you hold your hands out like he's got them gathered in his hands.

01:38:43.000 What's going on there?

01:38:44.000 Here's a test for Eddie Bravo.

01:38:45.000 Get into a room as still as possible.

01:38:49.000 Take some snaps, right?

01:38:52.000 And test it.

01:38:53.000 Be really, really still in that room.

01:38:55.000 See if the amount of orbs seems to decrease the longer he stays there. 0.94

01:39:00.000 And I think what he'll find, because I know some people who did this, is that they go the fuck away because you stopped stirring up the air.

01:39:05.000 You've now been really still for a while and you're taking pictures because, generally speaking, that's pretty much.

01:39:10.000 Okay, what about when you get them in outdoor shots?

01:39:13.000 Bugs. 1.00

01:39:14.000 I got you, bitch! 1.00

01:39:15.000 I got you, bitch! 1.00

01:39:19.000 Outdoor orbs! 1.00

01:39:20.000 Remember those aliens that just happened to be the bugs? 0.97

01:39:23.000 Oh, well that was a video artifact from filming those fucking cones, you know those rods, the Roswell rods, you know that whole thing? 0.98

01:39:34.000 That's hilarious. 0.98

01:39:35.000 I bought that documentary.

01:39:37.000 I was like, what are those things?

01:39:38.000 This is crazy.

01:39:40.000 I was like, maybe there's some part of the world where there's a bug that just flies really fast and looks really weird.

01:39:45.000 I didn't even think it was that crazy.

01:39:46.000 But then they're thinking they're travelers from another planet.

01:39:50.000 That's why they're so fast.

01:39:51.000 They're always there.

01:39:51.000 Yeah, but it turns out that it's just...

01:39:53.000 And MonsterQuest broke this.

01:39:55.000 It took MonsterQuest to debunk you.

01:39:58.000 A show that never gets... 1.00

01:40:00.000 They never haven't debunked shit. 0.99

01:40:02.000 Except the rods. 1.00

01:40:03.000 But the rods, they got you, bitch. 1.00

01:40:05.000 It's just a video artifact of certain cameras that when they put a super high-speed camera on it, it didn't happen. 0.99

01:40:11.000 They got the exact same area photographed.

01:40:14.000 They lit a fire and bugs would fly around the fire.

01:40:17.000 And when the bugs would fly around the fire on one camera, they would come out like these rods because the camera couldn't compete with it or couldn't rather pick up the image when it was moving too fast, too close to it.

01:40:27.000 It didn't know it was focusing on the front and the back.

01:40:29.000 You know, digital imagery is kind of funky.

01:40:32.000 But on the high-speed camera, they got it loud and clear. 1.00

01:40:34.000 And it's like, there it is, stupid. 1.00

01:40:38.000 This fucking asshole dedicated decades of his life to selling these DVDs and telling everybody there's fucking rods flying around the air. 1.00

01:40:47.000 Yeah, I was trying to look for things that would help me answer the big questions, if only for myself. 1.00

01:40:52.000 I got tired of, like, you know, I don't want to listen to some right-wing, dogmatic, religious person tell me how it is.

01:40:58.000 I got tired of listening to Richard Dawkins telling me that I'm just meat.

01:41:01.000 And I just thought, you know what, if it's knowable, if it's observable that there's more to me than that, I should be able to find a way to experience this directly for myself and learn about it directly for myself.

01:41:12.000 So I started looking into meditation and lucid dreaming and trying to find some way, Of experiencing myself, in a sense, disconnected from the meat, right?

01:41:21.000 My problem with Dawkins is he doesn't seem happy.

01:41:24.000 I love the idea.

01:41:26.000 He's not a great advertisement for it.

01:41:27.000 It's a terrible advertisement. 1.00

01:41:28.000 He seems like a bitter old cunt. 1.00

01:41:30.000 I love the idea that he's standing up for science and he's standing up against religious ideology and brainwashing. 1.00

01:41:41.000 But he's doing it in such an arrogant, sort of aggressive way that it makes you go, like, you're kind of a bad spokesperson for the thing.

01:41:49.000 But I'm sure from the scientific community, like, the encouragement is, like, so strong and profound and almost hero-like that it sort of encourages him to be this aggressive force of reason.

01:42:00.000 I'm sure there's enough people like that that he gets the encouragement he needs.

01:42:05.000 Peter Higgs, the guy who first started us off looking for the Higgs boson, he recently even just came out and said that Dawkins is a fundamentalist.

01:42:13.000 Well, he said he's embarrassing.

01:42:15.000 He said that Dawkins' behavior against or about religion is embarrassing.

01:42:20.000 Yeah, and he called him a fundamentalist.

01:42:22.000 He said he's an atheist fundamentalist.

01:42:24.000 And that's sort of the worst insult, I mean, that you can level out an atheist because they are so, you know, they're reacting to fundamentalism in their view.

01:42:32.000 You know, if you adopt a point of view to that degree with that passion, if it walks like a fundamentalist and talks like a fundamentalist and quacks like a fundamentalist, that's what it is. 0.88

01:42:42.000 I guarantee you that if you could get Richard Dawkins to take place in at least one mushroom trip, if not several, I think one to find out what the fuck it is and then reset and revisit, go back in and sort of analyze what the fuck is happening, I bet he will have a completely different opinion as to the possibilities.

01:43:00.000 Did you ever follow the God Helmet? 0.96

01:43:01.000 That's that thing that they put on you and stimulated certain parts of your brain.

01:43:05.000 Simulates the temporal lobe with electromagnetic energy.

01:43:08.000 Makes religious experiences.

01:43:09.000 Yeah.

01:43:09.000 And a lot of other kinds of experiences, too.

01:43:12.000 But the thing is, the atheist community, that sort of fundamentalist, materialist community, came out and said this is an explanation for God and religious experience.

01:43:20.000 But people have all sorts of strange experiences when they put that helmet on.

01:43:23.000 But guess who didn't?

01:43:25.000 Who? 0.99

01:43:25.000 Richard fucking Dawkins. 0.99

01:43:27.000 And when they screened him before he put it on, because he wanted to take part in this, when they screened him and put him through the questionnaire they put him through, and I have not seen it, so I'm not going to be able to describe this in great detail, but Persinger related this much of it to me. 0.98

01:43:44.000 When they screened him, his temporal lobe was really, really in It's not a normally active sort of temporal lobe, which is what they were trying to stimulate.

01:43:58.000 So when he didn't have an experience, Persinger dismissed it as saying, well, this guy isn't built like the rest of us.

01:44:06.000 And it's an intriguing thing to think that is that part of what created his worldview, his atheistic worldview.

01:44:16.000 Is that the case or is it just he rejects religion so strong that the area of his brain responsible for religion just gets shut down?

01:44:24.000 Totally.

01:44:24.000 That's a great point because that's the other possibility, right?

01:44:27.000 It could be, if that's the source of all unrealistic hope is in that area.

01:44:33.000 Well, you know what?

01:44:34.000 Not even unrealistic hope, right?

01:44:35.000 Maybe reality.

01:44:36.000 The degree to which we feel, if you pray or if you meditate and you feel like you're contacting something sort of outside yourself, this is the part of the brain that processes that information.

01:44:48.000 Well, if you're never using that part of the brain, if you're never stimulating it, It will become less active.

01:44:54.000 That's neuroplasticity in action.

01:44:56.000 That's just how it works.

01:44:57.000 That totally makes sense.

01:44:58.000 If you completely reject any idea of woo-woo whatsoever, the woo-woo part of your brain.

01:45:03.000 You know, there's a big issue that I have with people that will say that an experience, whether it's an experience like Edgar Mitchell had or whether it's a psychedelic experience, They'll say, especially in terms of psychedelic experience,

01:45:18.000 they'll say that it's not real.

01:45:20.000 Like you had a hallucination.

01:45:21.000 But the same effect It has the same effect, rather, on you as a real experience.

01:45:30.000 Like, even if it's a hallucination.

01:45:32.000 Let's define a hallucination as you're seeing something that's not there.

01:45:36.000 Even if it's that.

01:45:39.000 From that, you benefit greatly.

01:45:42.000 And you have a real thing is going on in your imagination or wherever it is.

01:45:47.000 You really are receiving information.

01:45:50.000 You really are looking at yourself and the world in a totally different way.

01:45:55.000 It's actually happening.

01:45:56.000 So this event, this experience, whatever it is, I mean, we want to compartmentalize it because you're taking in some sort of a substance alien to the body that tricks the body into having this state and achieving this state and having this experience.

01:46:11.000 It's still an experience that you actually really have.

01:46:15.000 Can we segue into lucid dreaming?

01:46:17.000 I heard you mention that you were interested in it.

01:46:20.000 Maybe the most gratifying thing that's happened to me in writing the book is whenever I do a public appearance or a podcast with a big enough audience, I end up getting notes from people afterward that they had a lucid dream.

01:46:30.000 Either, you know, after the interview or after they went and then read the book or whatever it is.

01:46:34.000 And I love turning people on to it.

01:46:37.000 Are you a big...

01:46:38.000 Do you do this on a regular basis?

01:46:40.000 I do it on a regular basis.

01:46:41.000 Before we had our...

01:46:42.000 My wife and I just had fraternal twin boys and they're almost six months old.

01:46:46.000 So sleep has been hard to come by at home.

01:46:48.000 Right.

01:46:48.000 But I'm so proud of this, right?

01:46:51.000 Before they came along, I was having a lucid dream every two or three weeks without even trying.

01:46:56.000 I mean, just spontaneously because I'd...

01:46:58.000 Trained at it long enough, hard enough, that I was having them every two or three weeks.

01:47:03.000 Since they were born, I actually recently, because they're starting to sleep a little bit now, I actually had a couple, just in the last couple of weeks, or three weeks, I had two.

01:47:12.000 And it's like, oh great, it's coming back online.

01:47:14.000 This function of Steve Volk is returning now that he's getting proper rest, you know?

01:47:20.000 And it's pretty terrific.

01:47:22.000 And one of the great things about it is that it changes your waking life as well as your...

01:47:27.000 Dreaming life.

01:47:28.000 I mean, it honestly wouldn't be worth the effort if you were only doing it to experience a change in your consciousness when you're dreaming.

01:47:34.000 So lucid dreaming, for those that don't know, is the act of being aware you're dreaming while you're dreaming and then choosing accordingly, right?

01:47:42.000 So think of it this way.

01:47:44.000 One great way of introducing people to the idea is that...

01:47:47.000 Yeah, we're going to talk about the pills.

01:47:48.000 Take it.

01:47:48.000 Four more algorithms right now while I'm serious.

01:47:51.000 One of the ways of introducing people to lucid dreaming to understand what it really is, and usually I'm asking this if like a crowded book reading or something, but I'll ask you guys here.

01:48:00.000 Have any of you ever woken yourself up from a nightmare?

01:48:03.000 Yes.

01:48:04.000 Yeah.

01:48:04.000 You were this close to having a lucid dream because you were aware you were dreaming while you were dreaming.

01:48:10.000 You were like, shit, this is a nightmare, right? 0.98

01:48:12.000 I'm gonna wake myself up. 1.00

01:48:13.000 And you chose to wake yourself up.

01:48:14.000 But the fact is, since whatever was chasing you or whatever was happening that made it qualify as a nightmare, If you had no external reality, you could have just walked away from it in your dream.

01:48:23.000 You could have, because the laws of physics don't apply, flown away from it. 0.97

01:48:27.000 You could have gone up to it and said, yo, what the fuck's up? 0.96

01:48:29.000 Why are you chasing me? 0.99

01:48:30.000 You just completely control your dream.

01:48:32.000 Well, no.

01:48:33.000 You control you within your dream.

01:48:35.000 And for some people, they find that they can begin to control other aspects of it and make things happen.

01:48:40.000 I had one that was totally like I could stop time and rewind the tape and And started again.

01:48:47.000 I had a dream that I was in a car accident and I got lucid.

01:48:51.000 And I'm actually already, I'm just really outing myself here, I always had a phobia about driving.

01:48:55.000 I do it, I've never enjoyed it, right?

01:48:56.000 But lucid dreaming really helped me push past that.

01:49:01.000 And one of the ways was, I was having this recurring nightmare.

01:49:05.000 This is not one that's in the book, this is a bonus baby.

01:49:07.000 There's a different nightmare I dealt with in the book.

01:49:10.000 I had this recurring dream that I would find myself outside the car, But the car was, but I was driving the car.

01:49:17.000 So there was like a me watching and then a me driving.

01:49:20.000 And I would wreck because I felt myself not in control of the car.

01:49:24.000 And so I finally had a lucid dream.

01:49:26.000 I got lucid and realized, oh, I'm in this freaking recurring dream.

01:49:30.000 And I kept crashing the car from this distance, and I would just rewind it and try and get better control of it.

01:49:38.000 But I kept trying to get better control of it from a distance.

01:49:41.000 And so finally I just kind of zapped myself into the body that was driving the car, the me that was actually driving the car. 0.99

01:49:47.000 It's like, well shit, I just need to drive the car. 0.99

01:49:49.000 I need to actually be behind the wheel. 0.99

01:49:51.000 Not in this disconnected way, but in this present way.

01:49:54.000 I realized what the dream had been telling me all the time.

01:49:56.000 You purposely got involved in the idea of lucid dreaming for the book.

01:50:03.000 So how did you go about manifesting a lucid dream?

01:50:07.000 I started researching the main guy who has studied lucid dreaming and proved it was real and all sorts of things, Dr. Stephen LaBerge.

01:50:15.000 I started reading his book and planning to go to Hawaii for his 10-day workshop.

01:50:20.000 How convenient.

01:50:21.000 He has a 10-day workshop in Hawaii.

01:50:23.000 It's pretty cool.

01:50:25.000 I highly recommend it.

01:50:26.000 It's a vacation.

01:50:27.000 It's an incredible vacation.

01:50:29.000 And it's a vacation that tapped me into a whole new wing of my life.

01:50:35.000 It's the act of being where you're dreaming, while you're dreaming, and choosing accordingly.

01:50:39.000 And I realized, once I read that, that I had woken myself up from nightmares for years.

01:50:45.000 And so it's like, okay, I have an opportunity to do something different here.

01:50:49.000 So there's different ways you can train for it.

01:50:51.000 One of them is you take the time to remember, for instance, a recurring dream or the dream you had last night, right?

01:50:59.000 I really recommend doing it with a recurring dream.

01:51:02.000 You remember it, particularly a nightmare, because those are so vivid.

01:51:06.000 You remember it, it's like a meditation.

01:51:08.000 You meditate on it and you choose the point in the dream where you wish you had become lucid, where you wish you had gained control. 0.75

01:51:16.000 And so the dream in the book that I had worked with was a dream where this creepy fucking dude shows up outside my house and he's peeking in through the window and eventually I end up getting angry that he's trying to terrorize me and I open the door and we would fight, we would clash. 0.85

01:51:32.000 And I would wake up literally at times punching the air, just Because I'm going after this guy. 0.63

01:51:37.000 So I decided to meditate on that dream and look for the spot within that dream where I could get lucid.

01:51:46.000 And gosh, I'm not sure how long I, at this point in the book, but it was probably a couple of weeks of work where maybe 10 minutes one day, 5 minutes the next, maybe 15 minutes before I fell asleep one night.

01:51:59.000 And finally the dream happened. 0.97

01:52:01.000 And when the guy showed up in my window, I realized, shit, this is the dream. 0.99

01:52:09.000 I'm dreaming. 0.95

01:52:10.000 And to feel yourself, like, to feel this, you don't realize it until you've had a lucid dream, but there's a sense of disconnect between you and the dream, right?

01:52:22.000 Until you lucid dream and suddenly find yourself in this dream body, you're no longer watching it like a movie.

01:52:29.000 You are in it. 0.99

01:52:30.000 And it's like the fucking Matrix. 1.00

01:52:33.000 You get to be Neo. 0.99

01:52:35.000 Suddenly, as I said before, the laws of physics play no part.

01:52:39.000 And most people find when they really begin, when they first have a lucid dream, there's this exhilarating sort of feeling flying and dream sex.

01:52:48.000 Like, those are the first things that people usually do.

01:52:51.000 Yeah, that's all anybody wants to do. 1.00

01:52:51.000 Fly and fuck. 1.00

01:52:52.000 Yeah! 1.00

01:52:53.000 They bang some honey or they take off, man, and fly.

01:52:55.000 They just let you know what is best in life.

01:52:58.000 Conan was right.

01:53:00.000 He was right.

01:53:01.000 Everybody running around, oh, it's most important to have friends. 0.99

01:53:03.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

01:53:04.000 What do you do when you're in your dream? 1.00

01:53:06.000 Do you make some friends?

01:53:07.000 No. 1.00

01:53:07.000 You fuck and you fly. 1.00

01:53:10.000 I have found that when I... We're doomed. 1.00

01:53:12.000 When I don't have a plan in a lucid dream, I spontaneously, the first thing I think to do...

01:53:18.000 Because you can plan activities.

01:53:20.000 You can say, I want to have a conversation with so-and-so.

01:53:22.000 I've had a fair amount of deaths in my family.

01:53:24.000 My mom's dead.

01:53:26.000 My oldest brother is dead.

01:53:27.000 A brother-in-law, who's very much like a brother to me, was in the family since I was 12. We'd shared a room together.

01:53:33.000 He's dead.

01:53:33.000 I had two friends die of cancer.

01:53:36.000 Right around the time I was working on the book, And I wanted to see my mother again.

01:53:42.000 So I had a lucid dream in which, you know, I remembered that that's what I wanted.

01:53:46.000 And I called out into the dream, show me my mother.

01:53:50.000 Show me, you know, show me my brother.

01:53:51.000 Show me my brother-in-law.

01:53:52.000 And suddenly, I was in a, I was in kind of like a, when the dream started, I was in kind of like a mall.

01:53:57.000 And I got lucid because Leonardo DiCaprio showed up and shoved me. 0.97

01:54:00.000 And I realized, that's fucking weird. 0.95

01:54:02.000 Leonardo DiCaprio, oh, I'm in a dream, right? 0.98

01:54:04.000 That's how, that's how I gained lucidity.

01:54:06.000 And I remembered what it was that I wanted to be there for.

01:54:10.000 And so when I called out, show me my mother, it was like the mall disappeared and I was just in this black space.

01:54:17.000 And then my mom was there.

01:54:19.000 And this is years after she died.

01:54:21.000 I got to hug her and it felt Every bit as real as really doing it.

01:54:26.000 I could feel her warm, soft skin.

01:54:28.000 I could feel the bones under the skin.

01:54:30.000 I could smell her shampoo that she used on her hair. 1.00

01:54:34.000 Shit I had not even thought of. 1.00

01:54:35.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

01:54:36.000 Like, there were memories of hugging my mother.

01:54:39.000 Just a beautiful, beautiful experience.

01:54:41.000 And I called for my brother and my brother-in-law.

01:54:43.000 They were there.

01:54:43.000 We ended up doing, like, kind of a group hug.

01:54:45.000 It was really awesome.

01:54:46.000 What do you think is going on when you're having a lucid dream?

01:54:49.000 I think you're dreaming, right?

01:54:50.000 But what is that?

01:54:51.000 What is allowing you to piece together this artificial reality?

01:54:55.000 You know, they're not entirely, well, what's allowing you to dream.

01:55:00.000 Here's the thing.

01:55:01.000 People think of being asleep as losing consciousness.

01:55:05.000 The fact is what you lose is awareness.

01:55:07.000 You're conscious because you're able to report what happened afterward, or at least most of us have some memory of our dreams.

01:55:14.000 Well, you're essentially entering into another dimension.

01:55:17.000 Dreaming is what happens in the absence of external input.

01:55:20.000 We're not getting any external input anymore.

01:55:22.000 This is just our mind.

01:55:26.000 Can we call that another dimension? 0.91

01:55:29.000 The dimension of imagination, whatever the fuck that is, however it exists in, whatever theater it plays out in, it's going on somewhere. 0.99

01:55:41.000 Whether it's just a bunch of shit firing inside your head that's not really real, At least inside your head, there's a whole fake world. 0.99

01:55:49.000 Like, what is that? 1.00

01:55:51.000 That's the mystery of consciousness, right?

01:55:54.000 That's the mystery of consciousness.

01:55:55.000 Where does this experience really come from?

01:55:58.000 How could the neurons, this three-pound gelatinous mass, Secreting and emitting chemicals and electrical firings create this. 0.96

01:56:07.000 And the truth of this is that we don't fucking know. 0.83

01:56:11.000 And yet we're inundated with people telling us what we should consider important. 0.97

01:56:17.000 And telling us at this point, too, just drilling us with this kind of materialist paradigm that we are meat computers, that we have no free will, all this sort of...

01:56:27.000 To me, you know, just sort of...

01:56:29.000 I don't buy that, the no free will thing.

01:56:31.000 And I think if...

01:56:33.000 If they don't know how to explain it, how we have free will, it's because we don't know yet enough about the brain and consciousness.

01:56:42.000 And I love Sam Harris.

01:56:43.000 Sam Harris really turned me on to meditation through reading his book.

01:56:47.000 And I consider him like sort of among the new atheists.

01:56:50.000 He is a breed apart.

01:56:51.000 I love the interview you did with him because he admits that the paranormal's been unfairly stigmatized and all this sort of stuff.

01:56:57.000 But he's one of the guys out there trumpeting that we have no free will.

01:57:00.000 And I'm really happy for the opportunity to talk about this because, you know, and he says rightly that dogmatic religion has an unhealthy effect on the psyche.

01:57:12.000 And it certainly does for a lot of people, right?

01:57:14.000 A healthy effect on people and society because they're fearful and they're judgmental of other people and all this sort of stuff.

01:57:22.000 But when you tell people they have no free will, they are more likely to cheat.

01:57:29.000 And this has been researched, right?

01:57:31.000 When you expose people to the idea that they have no free will and then you give them an opportunity to cheat at something, they'll do it.

01:57:39.000 And if you tell people...

01:57:41.000 What was the other one?

01:57:43.000 Oh, they did a...

01:57:43.000 Is this games?

01:57:44.000 Anything?

01:57:45.000 Or are you talking about romantic?

01:57:46.000 It was a test.

01:57:47.000 It was an academic test.

01:57:48.000 And they cheated on it.

01:57:49.000 They would cheat on an academic test because they were told they have no free will.

01:57:53.000 So they were more likely to cheat.

01:57:54.000 They were exposed to the idea that they most likely had no free will.

01:57:56.000 Wow.

01:57:57.000 And the control group who was not exposed to that information didn't cheat as much as the people who...

01:58:11.000 It's a very comprehensive sort of a take on things that has to do with not just natural selection, but the human organism itself and all the reward systems that are put in place to motivate behavior.

01:58:27.000 It's not like he believes that there's an architect that's guiding your life.

01:58:34.000 I just want to let everybody else know.

01:58:36.000 When you say you have no free will...

01:58:39.000 A lot of people equate that with a religious idea.

01:58:41.000 Exactly.

01:58:42.000 A fundamental idea.

01:58:43.000 He's looking at it completely the opposite.

01:58:48.000 From a scientific perspective, the idea is that you're motivated constantly by A series of factors that are beyond your control.

01:58:55.000 Theoretically, if this is a completely naturalistic material universe, if we could measure all the variables from the Big Bang until now, we could predict everything you're going to do your entire life, every choice you're going to make, because it's all the result of the conditions that led up to it.

01:59:12.000 Yeah, I had a crazy idea once of taking a computer that's so powerful that you could input in all of the data of everything in the state that it exists right now in the world, everything that exists in the world, In the state that it exists right now,

01:59:27.000 and from that you could extrapolate and go back through time and get a full detailed depiction of every single event that took place.

01:59:37.000 It sounds completely ridiculous right now, but I don't think that's ridiculous in the future.

01:59:42.000 I think we're going to be able to get data from, I'm like, whoever thought like a million years ago you'd be able to get ice samples?

01:59:48.000 And that was going to tell you climate change from thousands and thousands of years. 0.72

01:59:53.000 And that's how we know what the fuck was going on 6,000 years ago. 0.99

01:59:55.000 You drill a gigantic chunk of ice and go, well, shit was different here. 0.99

01:59:59.000 And looking at it a foot higher, it's different here. 0.98

02:00:03.000 Can I take this back to Lucid Dreaming?

02:00:05.000 Yeah, please.

02:00:06.000 So another way of...

02:00:07.000 And this is the part that really gets beneficial for your daily life.

02:00:11.000 The part that was most powerful for me in that sense.

02:00:14.000 The other way you can train yourself to have a lucid dream, first of all, you have to ask yourself the question, how do you know when you're awake or when you're dreaming?

02:00:21.000 How do you know?

02:00:22.000 What's different?

02:00:23.000 And what LaBerge found and what everybody else subsequently has found Is that there's this kind of state test you can do to see which state you're in.

02:00:33.000 And the idea is to start doing it when you're awake.

02:00:37.000 Do it all the time.

02:00:38.000 It should probably come from some cue in the environment.

02:00:40.000 If something odd happens where you just think, oh, that's strange, lock into that, right?

02:00:45.000 And here's how you would do a state test.

02:00:48.000 Print changes in a dream.

02:00:51.000 If you look at it, something printed, and then look away, and then look back, sometimes you have to do it a couple times, it will change.

02:00:59.000 And the reason is because that print doesn't have any external reality.

02:01:02.000 It's something that your mind is producing for you.

02:01:08.000 I had print at one point.

02:01:11.000 Usually I've just been able to figure out, I just kind of lock into it and get, okay, this is a dream.

02:01:15.000 Like Leonardo DiCaprio pushed me.

02:01:17.000 What if he did push you? 0.99

02:01:19.000 And it was out in real life, and all of a sudden you thought you had a dream, so you started fucking random people. 1.00

02:01:23.000 Steve Volk, what the fuck, man? 1.00

02:01:26.000 I thought I was lucid dreaming. 0.99

02:01:27.000 Well, this is why you might want to do a state test as well, right?

02:01:30.000 Yes.

02:01:30.000 And so you check print, and you see if the print changed.

02:01:33.000 And I had print change into just...

02:01:34.000 Like symbols at one point.

02:01:36.000 A book just changed into a series of incomprehensible symbols.

02:01:41.000 Digital clocks will really malfunction and machinery in general will malfunction because, you know, you flick that light switch over there and it's actually connected to the light bulbs.

02:01:50.000 But in a dream, it's not connected to anything, right?

02:01:53.000 So you flip the light switch and maybe the light goes on the first time and then when you turn it off, it doesn't go off because it's not actually connected to anything.

02:01:59.000 Yeah, I've had that happen in dreams before where I realized it was lucid because I couldn't turn light switches on and off.

02:02:05.000 I've had that and so I realized, oh, this is a lucid dream.

02:02:08.000 Like, this is a dream.

02:02:09.000 And did you do anything with that?

02:02:10.000 You know, when I started taking nootropics, I had much more success with lucid dreaming.

02:02:17.000 I found that my lucid dreams before were so fragile, they were like a bubble, like a child's bubble, you know, and they blow with those things. 0.97

02:02:26.000 But then, once I started taking nootropics, they were like a fucking volleyball. 0.83

02:02:31.000 You know, it was like hard. 0.99

02:02:32.000 You can kick it around.

02:02:33.000 Like, it was different.

02:02:34.000 You couldn't pop it.

02:02:35.000 I can't wait to take my Onnit.

02:02:37.000 Yeah.

02:02:39.000 Any nootropics.

02:02:40.000 Obviously, we sell Onnit products because they're the best that we can possibly sell. 0.99

02:02:45.000 We sell the best shit we can sell. 0.97

02:02:47.000 But if you're not into it for whatever reason, if you're skeptical, there's a lot of ingredients. 0.98

02:02:51.000 The ingredients are available online.

02:02:53.000 Take any of those, whether in conjunction or individually.

02:02:57.000 There's a lot of different companies that have them.

02:02:59.000 I've always talked about Neuro One, which is Bill Romanowski's stuff.

02:03:04.000 It's all fascinating stuff.

02:03:06.000 And you will have an increase in brain function.

02:03:09.000 So when you're doing a state test when you're awake, right?

02:03:12.000 One of the other things you do is you look for the strange behavior in the people that are around you.

02:03:17.000 That's my whole life though.

02:03:19.000 Well, you're a comedian.

02:03:20.000 I'm in a dream.

02:03:21.000 And you'll find that initially when you first start trying to do state tests when you're awake, maybe the first day it feels really awkward.

02:03:31.000 Because now I'm having a conversation with you, but I'm also looking at the print on your shirt.

02:03:35.000 I'm looking down and then up and down and then up to see that it stays the same.

02:03:38.000 But after you get used to doing that, and for me it only took a day, day and a half, you know, something like that, of doing a state test maybe eight or ten times a day, I found that my state tests were actually making me more aware and more mindful of everything that was going on around me all the time.

02:03:55.000 And it seemed to have that effect of slowing my life down, making me more considerate of what's happening, making me more present to the person that I'm with.

02:04:04.000 And suddenly I realized, right, when Sam or somebody says we have no free will, you know, a lot of times we are just on autopilot.

02:04:11.000 We're just reacting.

02:04:12.000 How often do you eat a meal and don't really taste it because you were busy and you were thinking about something else?

02:04:19.000 When I started practicing lucid dreaming, it was really, it's a mindfulness practice.

02:04:23.000 I mean, it harkens back to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness.

02:04:26.000 You're just more aware of what's going on all the time.

02:04:30.000 I saw a movie that gave me a great technique.

02:04:32.000 I forget what it was. 0.98

02:04:33.000 I think it was Through the Rabbit Hole or one of those What the Bleep movies, which are just overrun with fuckery. 0.99

02:04:40.000 There's a lot of fuckery in those movies. 0.98

02:04:42.000 However, even amongst fuckery, you can sometimes get some good things. 0.96

02:04:46.000 Get something you can use.

02:04:47.000 And one of them is, in one of the videos, a guy said, when you come to a doorway, knock on the door.

02:04:54.000 Knock on the side of the door and say, am I dreaming?

02:04:56.000 And do that during your waking hours.

02:04:59.000 Do that and go, am I dreaming?

02:05:00.000 And I did it.

02:05:02.000 I walked up to a door and I said, am I dreaming?

02:05:05.000 And there was nothing there. 1.00

02:05:06.000 I went, oh shit, I'm fucking dreaming. 1.00

02:05:08.000 And then I went into the lucid dream. 1.00

02:05:11.000 But it was amazing how quickly it shifted over from just...

02:05:16.000 Random sleep and dream state to just that one action of am I dreaming? 1.00

02:05:21.000 Holy fuck, I am dreaming! 0.98

02:05:22.000 And then the conscious mind It completely arose inside of the dream. 1.00

02:05:28.000 I didn't maintain it for very long.

02:05:29.000 I've still never been able to maintain it for very long.

02:05:31.000 I don't get laid at all in my dreams.

02:05:33.000 It helps to have a plan. 0.99

02:05:34.000 I get no pussy in my dreams. 1.00

02:05:36.000 It helps to have a plan so when you're thinking about it, you will. 0.99

02:05:40.000 You'll get there.

02:05:41.000 They think so?

02:05:41.000 Yeah, you'll get there.

02:05:43.000 I've never had. 0.99

02:05:44.000 I have fucking faith. 0.99

02:05:45.000 You will get there. 1.00

02:05:46.000 If anybody will, it's you. 0.99

02:05:47.000 Maybe I jerk off too much.

02:05:48.000 But if you have a plan before you go to sleep, if you've mentally rehearsed, just take 30 seconds to do it two or three times a day.

02:05:58.000 If I have a lucid dream, this is what I want to do.

02:06:00.000 You will remember, like I did with my mom.

02:06:02.000 I remembered, because at first I was like, oh shit, okay, I'm in this mall, and what am I going to do? 0.92

02:06:07.000 And I was like, oh yeah, that's right. 0.99

02:06:09.000 Tonight I had a mission.

02:06:10.000 I want to see my mother.

02:06:11.000 Right.

02:06:12.000 And so if you train for that, you will be able to...

02:06:18.000 What if you have nefarious intentions?

02:06:19.000 Go for it.

02:06:20.000 Really?

02:06:21.000 Well, go for it, but maybe not.

02:06:23.000 Because here's what's interesting, right?

02:06:25.000 There's no laws, right?

02:06:27.000 Societal laws, you know, in a dream.

02:06:29.000 Right.

02:06:29.000 But you still have to deal with yourself in the morning.

02:06:32.000 And I know that sounds fucking funny, but like, I had a chance in one of my very, very early lucid dreams to bang this dream hottie. 0.99

02:06:38.000 It was... 0.97

02:06:38.000 Great. 0.97

02:06:39.000 This is the first lucid dream I had in Hawaii.

02:06:41.000 You tell me that you feel guilty when you woke up in the morning.

02:06:44.000 I didn't even do it.

02:06:45.000 Because here's what happened.

02:06:47.000 I ended up...

02:06:48.000 So I climbed up into this building and I gained lucidity.

02:06:53.000 And there was this woman in the room. 0.99

02:06:56.000 And I said to her, and this happens a lot of times with dream characters.

02:06:58.000 I said, I'm having a lucid dream.

02:07:01.000 I'm dreaming.

02:07:02.000 She said, no, you're not.

02:07:03.000 And they will, dream characters will invariably tell you, if you say to them, this is not a dream, they will invariably say to you, no it's not.

02:07:10.000 And this is one of the weirdest, coolest parts of lucid dreaming, because even LaBerge, right, eminent sort of scientist, just kind of shrugs his shoulders, like somehow the dream world wants to maintain its It's status as real for you,

02:07:25.000 right?

02:07:26.000 So the dream characters will say, this is not a dream.

02:07:29.000 Yeah.

02:07:29.000 And so I said to her, no, I'll prove it to you.

02:07:31.000 It's a dream.

02:07:32.000 And so I turned, and it was like, you know what you were talking before about when you have a subjective experience...

02:07:38.000 You still had the experience, right? 0.93

02:07:40.000 So I know totally what it's like to be fucking X-Man because I said, I'm going to prove it to you. 0.93

02:07:45.000 And I turned and there were these big double doors, like, you know, 30 feet away or something. 0.97

02:07:49.000 And I just went like this with a wave in my hand and the doors, I said, I'm going to close these doors from here.

02:07:54.000 I went like this with a wave in my hand and the door slammed shut. 0.98

02:07:57.000 And I was like, holy shit, it worked. 0.62

02:07:59.000 Cause it was like one of my first lucid dreams. 0.95

02:08:01.000 It was awesome.

02:08:02.000 And then I turned to her and I was like, so now I'm going to have you, right?

02:08:05.000 And so I grabbed her, and I went to kiss her, and then I remembered, because at that point I was engaged to my wife, right?

02:08:10.000 And I was like, oh, but, you know, I'm engaged, and it felt so real.

02:08:14.000 Again, her skin, the smell of her, her, it just, I was really... 0.99

02:08:18.000 This story just got really gay. 1.00

02:08:20.000 I know, you gotta fuck that ghost pussy. 1.00

02:08:22.000 Yeah, man, get that ghost pussy. 1.00

02:08:23.000 Sorry, fellas. 1.00

02:08:25.000 I am who I am. 1.00

02:08:26.000 You're getting dream pussy. 1.00

02:08:27.000 I am who I am. 1.00

02:08:28.000 Well, you know what, maybe now...

02:08:30.000 Even in your dreams, I want you to be faithful?

02:08:33.000 Can you do that?

02:08:34.000 Wait, let me tell you something about my wife. 1.00

02:08:36.000 I've got to get my wife's back on this, because when I told her about it later, she's like, you could have Oh, did you immediately just fucking take some choline and go right back in? 1.00

02:08:45.000 Well, I'll just say this.

02:08:45.000 I've been doing other lucid dreaming since.

02:08:48.000 Oh, okay.

02:08:49.000 Good cover.

02:08:50.000 Been experimenting with dark clouds.

02:08:53.000 Wait, though.

02:08:53.000 There's something to think about here because one of the guys in the workshop who attended the workshop before brought this up in Hawaii.

02:09:01.000 He said, you know, he went to have sex with a dream character and the dream character refused him.

02:09:07.000 And his first thought, and this is just awful, right? 0.99

02:09:10.000 Was to commit dream rape, right? 0.90

02:09:13.000 And so he was going to force himself on this dream character. 0.90

02:09:15.000 And as he started to do it, he realized this is not something he wanted.

02:09:20.000 Because again, Joe, remember, it feels real.

02:09:24.000 Afterward, it feels as real as anything you've ever done.

02:09:27.000 I mean, you sound like you're having these very fragile dreams to begin with.

02:09:29.000 That happens.

02:09:30.000 I mean, sometimes it takes a while to get it built up so that your lucid dreams feel...

02:09:35.000 At least is real, right?

02:09:37.000 Is this reality? 0.98

02:09:38.000 Do you want to carry around the memory of raping somebody? 0.99

02:09:40.000 No. 0.98

02:09:41.000 Did I want to carry around the memory of cheating on my wife?

02:09:44.000 No. 0.98

02:09:45.000 Well, he's got shitty dreams, because in my dream, I'm a pimp. 1.00

02:09:48.000 I just get pussy left and right. 1.00

02:09:50.000 I'm beating it off with a stick. 1.00

02:09:52.000 My problem is I wake up right before I put it in.

02:09:54.000 I get alone, like, oh yeah, let's do this.

02:09:57.000 Huh?

02:09:57.000 What?

02:09:57.000 I'm awake?

02:09:58.000 Fuck! 1.00

02:09:59.000 Damn it! 1.00

02:10:01.000 I mean, I have shot loads in my sleep, so I'm sure it's happened, I just haven't been lucid. 1.00

02:10:05.000 I never get lucid sucks.

02:10:07.000 But the girls are always nice to me. 1.00

02:10:09.000 No one's ever angry at me, you know? 1.00

02:10:11.000 And I never have, like, a lucid dream, and this bitch is like, you never get this pussy! 1.00

02:10:15.000 This is my dream! 1.00

02:10:18.000 Why are you so mean to me in my dream?

02:10:21.000 That's never happened, luckily.

02:10:23.000 But yeah, I mean, I've never wanted to do anything creepy in my dreams, either.

02:10:26.000 I've never wanted to do anything evil.

02:10:27.000 Right.

02:10:28.000 But I have fought crime.

02:10:30.000 Really? 0.99

02:10:30.000 I have fought dragons and shit in my dream. 0.99

02:10:32.000 In a lucid dream? 0.99

02:10:33.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:10:33.000 Yeah?

02:10:34.000 Fuck yeah. 1.00

02:10:35.000 My lucid dreams are really boring. 1.00

02:10:36.000 I'm, like, getting shit done, like errands and, like...

02:10:38.000 Really? 0.83

02:10:40.000 It's pretty cool knowing...

02:10:42.000 I've done a few lucid dreams before.

02:10:45.000 I always feel it's like the level of your sleep because it always seems to happen.

02:10:49.000 You're right.

02:10:50.000 It's definitely the level of your sleep. 0.98

02:10:51.000 If you're fucking exhausted, you're not going to really put out a good one. 0.98

02:10:54.000 But we should do an experiment with the show. 0.99

02:10:56.000 We should all of us try to have someone who's going to come on again, like Ari.

02:11:03.000 All of us try to have a lucid dream.

02:11:06.000 Just force it.

02:11:07.000 And then see what kind of progress we can make.

02:11:10.000 Because you're having them, but you're not trying to have them.

02:11:12.000 Number one, I'm flattered that you already know I won't be back.

02:11:15.000 What?

02:11:15.000 I said, number one, I'm already flattered that you know I won't be back.

02:11:18.000 No, no, that's not what I meant.

02:11:19.000 I mean, someone who's here all the time, like Ari. 0.99

02:11:21.000 You live in Philadelphia, sir.

02:11:22.000 I'm getting in the spirit of this.

02:11:25.000 That's not the spirit. 1.00

02:11:26.000 To fuck with you? 1.00

02:11:28.000 A little bit? 1.00

02:11:29.000 Brian, real quick, honestly, so you've been in a lucid dream and have chosen to just carry out errands? 0.99

02:11:34.000 He just gets raped. 0.99

02:11:35.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:11:35.000 Everywhere he goes outside, he gets tackled and raped by big, giant women that look like they're in R. Crumb comic books. 0.99

02:11:41.000 You've never thought... 0.98

02:12:00.000 Yeah, sure. 0.93

02:12:05.000 I have sex with a lot of ex-girlfriends in my dreams, I notice. 0.96

02:12:08.000 I'll be like, okay, come on in the room. 0.97

02:12:11.000 Wouldn't that be beautiful?

02:12:12.000 And lucid?

02:12:13.000 Yeah.

02:12:14.000 That'd be beautiful if you could just call it up. 0.99

02:12:16.000 If you had a girl that you're not compatible with, but god damn, you guys had some awesome sex. 0.99

02:12:21.000 Couldn't you just... 1.00

02:12:23.000 Honestly, you can, though.

02:12:25.000 That's the thing.

02:12:25.000 If you train at this long enough, I mean, I was able to, you know, quote, manifest my mom, right?

02:12:31.000 I mean, you could manifest Britney Spears or whoever it might be.

02:12:35.000 Britney Spears?

02:12:35.000 Not now, I understand.

02:12:37.000 Bitch, don't you know... 1.00

02:12:40.000 I think that idea of being able to do that is fascinating, and it's even more fascinating how few people pursue it. 0.99

02:12:49.000 This is one of the sad parts of Stephen LaBerge's story, is that he discovered this thing that you can really use to defeat nightmares.

02:12:56.000 If you're one of those people who has night terrors, where you wake up and suffer from sleep paralysis, Or you have recurring nightmares or anxiety around an event, right?

02:13:06.000 You know, you're going to be doing public speaking or something and maybe that's not your bag.

02:13:09.000 You can rehearse, right, in the dream.

02:13:12.000 So he's discovered...

02:13:13.000 And look, it's enriched my daily life.

02:13:15.000 I mean, today I was doing...

02:13:16.000 I was just trying to train it again because now I'm finally getting some sleep.

02:13:19.000 The boys are letting me sleep.

02:13:21.000 And so I'm starting to do state tests again and stuff.

02:13:23.000 And I just...

02:13:24.000 Look, man, it just locked me into my environment in such a cool way.

02:13:28.000 I could suddenly...

02:13:29.000 Really pick out the sound of the leaves blowing in the wind.

02:13:33.000 That's really interesting.

02:13:35.000 It was fantastic.

02:13:37.000 Do you detail how to do that in this?

02:13:39.000 I do.

02:13:39.000 How someone can do it if they want to follow it?

02:13:41.000 Yep.

02:13:42.000 I use the rehearsing a dream scenario and I use the state tests.

02:13:46.000 I give both those methods. 0.99

02:13:48.000 And don't forget the door knock, folks, because that shit worked for me. 0.98

02:13:51.000 Just say, am I in a dream? 0.99

02:13:53.000 Well, that's it.

02:13:53.000 You have to do that during the daytime also, though, don't you?

02:13:57.000 Yeah, you just do that during the day. 0.98

02:13:58.000 That would be so hilarious to see you walking around fucking knocking on doors, and every time you do it, you go, am I dreaming? 0.99

02:14:04.000 Okay, then I'll do it. 0.99

02:14:05.000 I'll do it.

02:14:06.000 I just go, if I have a dreidel, then I'm dreaming. 0.64

02:14:08.000 There's no reason I would have a dreidel. 1.00

02:14:09.000 That's a good one as well.

02:14:11.000 And also dreidels pop up.

02:14:12.000 Or Chinese people, right? 0.66

02:14:13.000 Didn't you say Asians appear in your dreams?

02:14:15.000 There's actually been really good research that what we dream tends to be stuff we've been thinking about a lot in the last 24 to 48 hours.

02:14:22.000 So the whole principle of state testing and asking that question, is this a dream, right?

02:14:26.000 Or, you know, the way I always present, am I awake or am I dreaming? 0.96

02:14:30.000 The whole point of that is that when you do that regularly, you're more likely to have that thought then arise while you are fucking dreaming, when you're really dreaming. 0.98

02:14:38.000 And it works. 0.90

02:14:41.000 Yeah, that was the idea of the habit of knocking on the door, that you'll transfer that habit to your dreams.

02:14:46.000 Yeah.

02:14:47.000 The idea of dreams are so fucking fascinating. 0.98

02:14:50.000 There's so little we know about what the fuck is really happening and what kind of weird imaginary world you're creating inside your mind. 0.92

02:14:56.000 I love when people try to say, well, this means that the dragon represents... 1.00

02:15:02.000 You don't know what the fuck is talking. 0.99

02:15:03.000 I am in the Lord of the Rings, and I'm fighting a dragon. 1.00

02:15:06.000 It doesn't represent shit. 0.99

02:15:07.000 It represents, I like watching wacky movies, so I got high and watched Game of Thrones, took five alpha brains, went to sleep, and had a fucking dragon war. 0.97

02:15:16.000 Sometimes the cigar really is just a fucking cigar, but there are definitely times when you can say to yourself, okay, why this content? 0.92

02:15:24.000 Why these images? 0.99

02:15:25.000 Why these sounds?

02:15:27.000 Is there some message for me here?

02:15:29.000 Something my subconscious is gnawing on That I should be aware of and work with in some way.

02:15:34.000 Well, I'm sure there's a lot of things that occur in a dream are things that you're fixated on and things that are constantly in your mind and that your imagination will turn them into a dragon or a witch or a demon or a vampire or a disease.

02:15:53.000 There's all sorts of things that you're terrified of in real life that you fixate on and much like the knocking on the door, they just follow you into your dreams.

02:16:02.000 And this gives you a chance to deal with them.

02:16:04.000 If you approach something that's in a nightmare more like a friend, and that's weird to say, but LaBerge did this with this really ugly ogre that showed up in one of his dreams that he would always recoil from.

02:16:18.000 He decided to, well, confront it's the wrong word because it sounds adversarial, but he decided to approach it in a spirit of curiosity and compassion and figure out what's going on with it.

02:16:29.000 And I can't remember what exactly he said to it, but he accepted it.

02:16:34.000 He didn't recoil from it.

02:16:36.000 And it actually, if I remember correctly, it became a part of him.

02:16:41.000 The hogar became a part of him?

02:16:43.000 Yeah, it just kind of blended into him.

02:16:45.000 And he took that as a sign of...

02:16:48.000 Mr. Comedian, take this on for size, right?

02:16:51.000 Dreams are about integration.

02:16:52.000 They're things we deny about ourselves and about our experience.

02:16:56.000 And they come up in your dream because this is something you need to deal with and need to look at.

02:17:01.000 And so if you do accept it in that way, you end up feeling more empowered because instead of rejecting this thing, You're dealing with it in a dream.

02:17:10.000 Well, I always thought that was fascinating when people give the very good advice of sleep on it.

02:17:15.000 If something's bothering you, sleep on it.

02:17:17.000 Because there is something that happens to you during the dream state where you have a better perspective in the morning.

02:17:25.000 I don't know what it is, but I am a big proponent in sleeping on it. 0.90

02:17:28.000 I'm also a big proponent in jerking off before you make any decisions.

02:17:32.000 That's also very important. 0.83

02:17:34.000 I have to tell you, man, I had an experience writing the book with Lucid Dream where you can imagine the anxiety I had before writing it.

02:17:40.000 It was my first book.

02:17:41.000 I've been writing for years and years and years, but like, you know, 5,000-word stories, maybe a 7,000-word story.

02:17:47.000 Now I'm going to have to write... 0.98

02:17:48.000 This is a fucking legit book in hardcover form. 0.98

02:17:52.000 I'm gonna have to write 90,000 words in 10 weeks, and it was right before I was supposed to go get married. 0.98

02:17:59.000 And so there was no fucking with that deadline, right?

02:18:03.000 I was gonna have to write this thing and have a full good working draft of it done in a 10 week period. 0.85

02:18:09.000 And I was having all sorts of anxiety over it.

02:18:11.000 And I ended up approaching a dream character in a store.

02:18:17.000 And I said to them, I need help.

02:18:19.000 And she's like, what do you need help with?

02:18:20.000 And I said, well, I'm writing a book.

02:18:22.000 And she said to me with like the utmost sort of compassion and sincerity, she said, the book is already written.

02:18:31.000 And I had, from that, the feeling of, you know, there's just not, well, you, you work on creative projects all the time.

02:18:40.000 There's nothing like having finished and knowing it's right and it's good.

02:18:43.000 And I had that feeling just sort of flood into me when she said this.

02:18:48.000 So real and so vividly that when I woke up, I started thinking about all the vagaries of how time works and all this sort of stuff.

02:18:54.000 And then, you know, in a sense, the book is already written.

02:18:56.000 I'm just going to live through the period of writing it.

02:18:58.000 And it just totally reframed the experience of writing that book for me.

02:19:02.000 And in a strange sort of way, I mean, to say that I wrote the book in an altered state is a big, powerful statement.

02:19:08.000 In a way, I did.

02:19:09.000 I never had less anxiety about writing anything in my life.

02:19:12.000 I would wake up 7, 7.30 in the morning.

02:19:15.000 I was completely on leave from work.

02:19:16.000 I would get a cup of coffee.

02:19:18.000 I'd be writing within 15 minutes of waking up.

02:19:20.000 Instead of producing what my goal was, which is around 1,500 words a day, I was regularly writing 3,000, 5,000, 8,000.

02:19:28.000 There were days I wrote over 10,000 words in one day.

02:19:31.000 I would finish at 2.30 or 3.00. 0.99

02:19:33.000 I would eclipse my fucking goal. 1.00

02:19:35.000 By miles. 1.00

02:19:36.000 I would finish at 2.30 or 3.00.

02:19:37.000 I would go out and buy fresh groceries and a bottle of wine.

02:19:40.000 And when my wife would get home, I'd be this joyful firefighter standing there making her this delicious dinner and totally enjoying my life, like rocking balls.

02:19:50.000 It was awesome.

02:19:52.000 And it was lucid dreaming that did that.

02:19:55.000 And it was that experience of having that anxiety taken away from me in this really vivid, real way.

02:20:02.000 That was really fascinating.

02:20:04.000 It was awesome.

02:20:04.000 I wonder if we could get people in on this.

02:20:07.000 I wonder if we could get people to just start trying to lucid dream.

02:20:13.000 Is there resources online besides your book?

02:20:15.000 Would you recommend people checking out?

02:20:18.000 You can go to Steven LaBerge's website.

02:20:20.000 How do you say his name?

02:20:21.000 LaBerge, L-A-B-E-R-G-E. And he has a website, Steven LaBerge?

02:20:27.000 Yeah, just search.

02:20:27.000 I can't remember what the address is for it.

02:20:30.000 His book is really phenomenal.

02:20:34.000 It's very scientific, but it's for the, you know, anybody can read it and pick it up.

02:20:40.000 So, I mean, they're...

02:20:43.000 It's become the Bible for what they call themselves onironauts, for people who lucid dream regularly.

02:20:50.000 I want to say something about my book, by the way.

02:20:52.000 It is right now.

02:20:55.000 It's backlisted, which means they're not completely ignoring it, but it's been out for a couple of years, so they're not pushing it.

02:21:01.000 And one of the things they do with a backlisted book is they'll price it down to $1.99 on Kindle for a couple of weeks.

02:21:08.000 And jack up the sales figures, right?

02:21:11.000 And so I asked them in advance of the show, could you please leave it?

02:21:13.000 Because they just did it recently.

02:21:14.000 I was like, please leave it at $1.99 for the show.

02:21:17.000 And they said, no.

02:21:19.000 But I woke up this morning, and Brian, I guess, has got up now.

02:21:22.000 It's still $1.99.

02:21:24.000 Please, I don't... 0.99

02:21:25.000 So they fucked up. 0.98

02:21:26.000 What's it supposed to be? 1.00

02:21:27.000 They fucked up, but good. 0.99

02:21:28.000 Because my... 0.99

02:21:29.000 It's $9.99 normally.

02:21:31.000 But my feeling is, let's just get it into people's hands.

02:21:33.000 And so right now, let's all engage in an act of piracy. 0.99

02:21:37.000 HarperCollins fucked up. 0.96

02:21:38.000 Get out there and get the book for $1.99. 0.98

02:21:40.000 I love it.

02:21:41.000 And I hope they...

02:21:41.000 Look, I hope they change their minds.

02:21:43.000 It's possible that the person I talk to...

02:21:44.000 Ended up running up the flagpole and decided, you know what?

02:21:46.000 We should leave it at this price.

02:21:48.000 I don't really know, but I know what they told me was an unequivocal no, but here it is.

02:21:52.000 Still $1.99.

02:21:53.000 But he's found it also for $11.

02:21:55.000 That's the hardcover.

02:21:56.000 Oh, the hardcover.

02:21:57.000 Yeah.

02:21:57.000 Oh, okay.

02:21:58.000 Well, that's great, man.

02:21:59.000 $1.99 is very reasonable.

02:22:00.000 I get all my books through...

02:22:02.000 I have one of those.

02:22:04.000 I have a Kindle and I have a...

02:22:05.000 I love it.

02:22:07.000 The Nook, too.

02:22:08.000 I love it.

02:22:09.000 The Barnes& Noble version of it.

02:22:10.000 Any book, any magazine, I suddenly feel the impulse to read.

02:22:13.000 It's there on my tablet.

02:22:15.000 Instantly.

02:22:16.000 We live in strange times, man.

02:22:18.000 The ability to get those.

02:22:19.000 You get a book like that off of Wi-Fi, and some of them even have 3G connections. 0.99

02:22:25.000 Wacky fucking times for publishing. 0.99

02:22:27.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:22:28.000 So I think a lot of people are getting their books that way now, right?

02:22:31.000 Do you know what the percentage of e-book to regular book is that you're selling?

02:22:35.000 I know this book is outselling from the time it was released.

02:22:41.000 It's way more electronic and more than the general industry.

02:22:46.000 So when this first came out a year and a half, two years ago or whatever it is, I think they told me the figure was low 50% higher for electronic books.

02:22:55.000 This book was over 60% electronic books.

02:22:58.000 It kind of makes sense.

02:22:59.000 Well, the fringe subjects are really supported by the internet.

02:23:03.000 Internet websites and all the nuttiness.

02:23:07.000 There's a bent spoon on the cover.

02:23:09.000 Can people bend spoons with their brain?

02:23:11.000 You know, I wanted to get to the bottom of that. 0.99

02:23:13.000 And as an immersion journalist, I actually was waking up in the morning and trying to bend a fucking spoon, right? 0.99

02:23:18.000 Really? 0.99

02:23:19.000 With my head.

02:23:19.000 And I did it, I think, three days in a row where I think the first day I wanted to go 15 minutes and I just started feeling so silly after seven or eight that I stopped.

02:23:28.000 And then on day two, you know, I think I did three or four minutes.

02:23:30.000 And on day three, I'm like staring at the spoon for like 45 seconds and I was like, I can't do this.

02:23:36.000 I cannot do this.

02:23:37.000 Maybe if you're like one of those monks on a mountain dude, you have to stare at that spoon for days and days and days.

02:23:43.000 It goes like this.

02:23:45.000 Just imperceptibly.

02:23:47.000 I've had some people I respect tell me they think it's real and that I couldn't do it because I couldn't do it because I wasn't taking it.

02:23:53.000 People you respect.

02:23:53.000 Didn't really believe in it.

02:23:54.000 Why do you respect them? 1.00

02:23:56.000 Because they can kick your ass? 1.00

02:23:58.000 That's one reason to respect somebody. 1.00

02:23:59.000 That's one reason to respect somebody.

02:24:00.000 They have a lot of money.

02:24:01.000 No, you know what?

02:24:02.000 There were some parapsychologists I met along the way who haven't stuck their neck out on this publicly.

02:24:07.000 Because it's really fraught, man.

02:24:08.000 I mean, the guy who popularized it, Uri Geller, is, you know, in my First Amendment protected opinion, because he's very litigious, a magician.

02:24:17.000 And so it's a very controversial subject.

02:24:20.000 This is one of the places that James Randi kind of made his bones as a skeptic and a debunker, was going after Uri Geller.

02:24:26.000 And so a lot of people just don't want to be publicly linked to this subject, even if they believe in it.

02:24:33.000 Right.

02:24:33.000 And so I met some people like that who have never publicly spoken about it, but they're doing credible stuff in the world, and they claim that they were able to do it.

02:24:46.000 They were at a, quote, spoonbending party.

02:24:48.000 There's some people who throw spoonbending parties. 0.99

02:24:50.000 Get the fuck out of here. 1.00

02:24:50.000 I'm going to bend my spoon right up your ass. 1.00

02:24:52.000 Ain't no spoonbending party. 1.00

02:24:54.000 You know what? 0.97

02:24:55.000 That's a really fucking strange party, I've got to say. 0.98

02:24:57.000 All those guys would pass on the million-dollar prize that he's offering. 0.98

02:25:03.000 You know, the million dollar prize is... 0.99

02:25:06.000 Randy's million dollar prize is bullshit? 0.99

02:25:08.000 I'm not into it. 1.00

02:25:09.000 I mean, I think that it...

02:25:10.000 You're not into his idea?

02:25:12.000 The idea of the prize?

02:25:14.000 Well, here's the thing.

02:25:14.000 The people who are doing credible parapsychology don't fit in to the way the prize works.

02:25:19.000 So people like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake, and I remember when Sam was on here, he talked about Rupert and said that there's something very fishy about not going after the million.

02:25:27.000 There's really not.

02:25:28.000 And I love Sam, but I just think that maybe he, again, we all come at this with a worldview, and he's probably a little more predisposed to be on the materialist side of things, right?

02:25:39.000 But Sheldrake or Dean Radin or any of these guys, Daryl Bem, they're going to construct a study that requires dozens, if not a hundred subjects.

02:25:49.000 That will take an hour and a half for each individual session, conducted over weeks, months, or a year, to get this Gansfeld effect at 32% versus 25% that we started this whole thing with.

02:26:02.000 And James Randi needs an event that will take place with a very small sample size, where you'll get 10 bites at the apple, basically, 10 chances to guess something, or 12, in an afternoon or an evening.

02:26:15.000 Apples to oranges.

02:26:16.000 It is completely inapplicable to what credible parapsychologists are doing. 0.97

02:26:21.000 So the idea that Rupert Sheldrake hasn't taken it up is not only not very fishy, it tells you that he has some fucking sense.

02:26:30.000 So, in order to get Randy's money, you have to do something like make the Empire State Building disappear. 0.59

02:26:37.000 You have to do something...

02:26:37.000 Yeah, and you have to do it in a small...

02:26:40.000 The big thing is you have to do it in a small sample size.

02:26:42.000 I mean, statistical significance is generated by sheer repetition.

02:26:47.000 And Randy requires a small sample size to prove?

02:26:51.000 He doesn't specifically require a small sample size, but whenever you look at any of the studies they're doing, they're doing stuff that takes, again, an afternoon or an evening, and it's kind of a public event.

02:27:02.000 And again, there are some parapsychologists, I think his name is Dick Bierman, who said he approached him and couldn't work anything out.

02:27:09.000 Supergirtle approached him and couldn't work anything out.

02:27:12.000 Daryl Bem apparently thought about it and realized that within these parameters, the kind of research he's doing, the kind of effect size he's trying to get, the time it would take him to generate that, just doesn't really fit into what they're doing over there.

02:27:27.000 Well, it seems to me that that statistical 32%, that's a real number.

02:27:31.000 That 7% difference is legit, right?

02:27:35.000 I mean, it seems like that's something that has to kind of be looked at, no?

02:27:38.000 It should be.

02:27:40.000 I would agree with you.

02:27:41.000 It should be.

02:27:41.000 But I think that this sort of the professionals...

02:27:43.000 And look, there are professional skeptics like French and Wiseman, the guys I mentioned before, who will engage in a reasonable conversation about this.

02:27:51.000 But then there are skeptics, to me, like the J-Ref, the James Rene Educational Foundation, those guys who are just kind of rejecting it out of hand.

02:28:00.000 But there's really something...

02:28:01.000 There is something to look at here.

02:28:03.000 There's something to wonder about.

02:28:04.000 And I find that, you know... 0.95

02:28:07.000 Number one, a more fucking accurate way of looking at it, which is great, right? 0.89

02:28:12.000 And it's also a far more interesting world. 0.89

02:28:14.000 Yeah, it's fascinating.

02:28:15.000 That tiny percentage bump is really fascinating because it really makes you go, maybe it is an emerging skill or maybe it is an emerging sense or, as you said before, a declining one because we don't use it in the natural world anymore.

02:28:33.000 Yeah, and don't cultivate it at all.

02:28:34.000 And look, you know, it's a figure, when you look at that, like the Ganzfeld effect, 32 versus 25, you know, whatever an individual study might show, right?

02:28:42.000 One of the things that's powerful about that figure, and it speaks to one of the things the skeptics do well, right, is they warn you away from those people who really are con artists.

02:28:52.000 I mean, the idea of the super psychic, John Edwards, Sylvia Brown, there is threadbare Evidence for that.

02:28:58.000 It's not something that I would put my name on and reputation on as saying there's something we really need to look at this, right?

02:29:06.000 But the Gansfeld effect, there's so many studies, dozens and dozens of studies that go into these, what they call these meta-analyses when they crunch all the numbers together. 0.87

02:29:14.000 That I will put my name on and say, you know, we should fucking look at that. 0.85

02:29:17.000 Right. 0.95

02:29:18.000 And so it's not that the skeptics are all wrong or all wet, right?

02:29:22.000 But they paint with far too broad a brush.

02:29:23.000 And I think at the end of the day, my own guess and their motivation is the fact that that mechanism would be unexplained, the fact that that mechanism would suggest there is more to us than meat.

02:29:34.000 is not something they want to acknowledge because when you really look at these people, when you look at Randy, he's also a dogmatic atheist.

02:29:40.000 The idea that we're more than meat starts to introduce the idea of a soul, right?

02:29:44.000 Something that will transcend this bodily death and the idea that we have to, you know, worry about that to some degree and govern our behavior based on what we're going to become later or what we're going to have to deal with later, potentially.

02:29:55.000 And so I think that they're kind of keeping the barn door shut, right? 0.99

02:29:58.000 They've taken on this tack in life that they are going to hold this shit down. 0.98

02:30:04.000 The fringe ideas, the unexplained anything, occult, what have you, all those things are just not to be given any power. 0.98

02:30:16.000 But it's kind of unscientific to block out anything, isn't it?

02:30:18.000 Yes.

02:30:19.000 I mean, the idea of science is to observe everything, even very infrequent but possibly real events.

02:30:25.000 Yes.

02:30:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:30:26.000 So you're a fucking scientist, Steve Volk. 1.00

02:30:29.000 You're a scientist, goddammit. 1.00

02:30:31.000 And the book is Fringeology... 0.99

02:30:33.000 And it sounds fucking awesome, man.

02:30:35.000 I'm going to get into this, dude.

02:30:37.000 Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

02:30:39.000 Thanks for getting the book, and thanks for telling them to keep it at $1.99, which you can get right now on Amazon.com.

02:30:45.000 I just want to say one more thing.

02:30:46.000 I just want to say this.

02:30:47.000 All the interviews I've done now, and I've done a ton of them, This was the biggest honor, and the reason is because I've been listening to this podcast for the last couple years now, like a year and a half or more.

02:30:58.000 And I find, and so it's funny, I'm not sure how many guests you've had on in this position, where this show has become part of the way I reinforce my own good habits.

02:31:06.000 Like, I find that it just keeps me motivated, it keeps me focused on, I think of this podcast ultimately, secretly, it's kind of a cloak and dagger enterprise to get people to live their best possible life.

02:31:15.000 And that's the function it performs for me. 0.96

02:31:18.000 And so being on your show, totally fucking jacked to be here. 0.97

02:31:20.000 Oh, well, thank you, brother. 0.96

02:31:21.000 I really appreciate that, man.

02:31:22.000 That means the world to me.

02:31:23.000 And I really appreciate you coming on here to share your thoughts and have a cool conversation with us and enhance the podcast. 0.99

02:31:30.000 Become a part of podcast history, you dirty fucks. 0.98

02:31:34.000 All right, ladies and gentlemen, we got a lot going on this week. 0.99

02:31:37.000 We got tomorrow, we got bringing on Adam Hunter.

02:31:40.000 We got Duncan Trussell this week.

02:31:41.000 We got Ari Shafir.

02:31:43.000 And this Friday, I am at the Ice House in the Big Room at 8.30 and 10.30.

02:31:50.000 Two shows this Friday at the Ice House.

02:31:53.000 And there's also a show going on in the Little Room at the same time.

02:31:57.000 You don't have a show going on over there?

02:31:59.000 Okay.

02:32:00.000 Well, Brian will be on my show, too.

02:32:01.000 Unless you got something to do.

02:32:02.000 Are you doing something?

02:32:06.000 Next week, Steve Rinello's coming back on the podcast, as well as Jimmy Smith.

02:32:11.000 We move Jimmy to next week.

02:32:13.000 Jimmy, who is the...

02:32:14.000 He does what I do for Bellator.

02:32:16.000 Very cool guy.

02:32:17.000 We're going to have some...

02:32:17.000 So all you people going, why don't you talk more MMA? Stop all this queer ghost shit.

02:32:23.000 Those people will be fulfilled next Tuesday. 0.99

02:32:26.000 So tomorrow is Adam Hunter, and if you want to follow Steve Volk on Twitter, it's Steve V-O-L-K, and the book is Fringeology. 0.97

02:32:38.000 And it is available, as we said, right now on Amazon.com, you fuckheads. 0.97

02:32:43.000 And I say that with all love. 0.95

02:32:45.000 Thank you to Kerosene Games for sponsoring the podcast.

02:32:50.000 Go pick up Blade Slinger.

02:32:52.000 It is available right now for $2.99.

02:32:56.000 How do you go wrong there? 0.99

02:32:58.000 You don't, you fucks. 1.00

02:32:59.000 Okay? 1.00

02:33:00.000 You don't.

02:33:01.000 Go to Onnit.com.

02:33:02.000 O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements.

02:33:09.000 Alright, anything more to say to the nice kids before we get out of here, Brian?

02:33:13.000 I'm going to be at AVN with Sam Tripoli, and it's about to be announced later today.

02:33:19.000 Oh, you're not supposed to tell anybody.

02:33:21.000 You just blew your own press release.

02:33:24.000 How dare you.

02:33:25.000 That's how much he loves you, folks.

02:33:27.000 He violated all of his confidentiality agreements and just went nutty.

02:33:31.000 Well, I've been talking about doing a show in Vegas for the last week or month.

02:33:34.000 But you weren't supposed to tell people about this one.

02:33:36.000 I didn't tell you what it is yet. 0.99

02:33:37.000 You just threw a goddamn monkey wrench. 0.99

02:33:40.000 Sam Tripoli is about to announce it on tonight's Naughty Show. 1.00

02:33:42.000 Oh, well there you go, you fucking beautiful humans. 0.99

02:33:46.000 We'll see you guys tomorrow, maybe. 1.00

02:33:48.000 I don't know what you're doing.

02:33:50.000 I mean, you don't have to listen every time.

02:33:52.000 I'm not needy or nothing.

02:33:53.000 Alright, see ya.

02:33:55.000 Love ya. 0.69

02:33:55.000 Love the fuck out of all ya. 0.69

02:34:14.000 I think? 0.92

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 07, 2013

Joe Rogan Experience #308 - Steve Volk

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