The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #797 - Alex & Allyson Grey

00:00:01.000 And we're live.

00:00:03.000 You don't have headphones?

00:00:05.000 There you go.

00:00:10.000 Alex and Allison Gray.

00:00:11.000 Hello, how are you guys?

00:00:12.000 Great, Joe. 0.95

00:00:14.000 I think you gotta turn that sucker around and see that one? 0.98

00:00:16.000 There you go. 0.99

00:00:18.000 Nope.

00:00:19.000 Oh my goodness.

00:00:20.000 This is Joey Diaz part two.

00:00:22.000 Remember when Joey Diaz couldn't figure out the headphones?

00:00:30.000 We are in the middle of building Entheon.

00:00:33.000 I've heard.

00:00:34.000 That's the rumor.

00:00:35.000 The thing that you got us kicked off on, really.

00:00:40.000 The last time that we spoke to you, we were doing a Kickstarter campaign to build Entheon.

00:00:46.000 It was like three years ago.

00:00:48.000 And we're in the middle of another one because we started building it.

00:00:53.000 And we need a little more money to finish the interior.

00:00:57.000 Now we've got a three-story, 12,000 square foot building with a new roof and incredible spaces to exhibit visionary art.

00:01:07.000 So it's there, and I guess it's just a matter of time about finishing it.

00:01:14.000 And the more money we get, the quicker we'll be able to finish it.

00:01:18.000 Are there images of it right now currently in construction that people can view?

00:01:23.000 Oh, look at that.

00:01:23.000 Jamie's on it.

00:01:24.000 Whoa, that's amazing.

00:01:26.000 Where did you get?

00:01:27.000 That looks like really old brick.

00:01:29.000 That's cool-looking brick.

00:01:31.000 1882 was built in it.

00:01:32.000 It's like we're saving the carriage house from 1882. So explain the process.

00:01:38.000 So it started out as a carriage house?

00:01:41.000 Yep.

00:01:41.000 And you saved part of it?

00:01:43.000 Yes.

00:01:44.000 We surrounded it.

00:01:45.000 Wow.

00:01:46.000 Oh, so you surrounded it with art.

00:01:48.000 It's inside the building.

00:01:50.000 Whoa.

00:01:51.000 Jamie, scroll back up.

00:01:51.000 Hold on.

00:01:52.000 Don't go anywhere.

00:01:53.000 Get back up to the top one.

00:01:54.000 Yeah, look at that.

00:01:55.000 Wow.

00:01:56.000 That's intense.

00:01:56.000 That's just one room on the third floor.

00:01:58.000 That's where the sacred mirrors are going to be.

00:02:00.000 There's three floors.

00:02:02.000 Yeah, we're going to put crisscross kind of lattice across the angels.

00:02:09.000 Let's see.

00:02:10.000 On my Instagram, I suppose, there's a more recent feed of the interior.

00:02:16.000 Now we've got a couple of the actual angels.

00:02:18.000 There were ten angels in the previous chapel installation there in New York City.

00:02:25.000 And I always wanted to...

00:02:29.000 He went to the wrong Alex Gray.

00:02:31.000 He went to some hottie. 0.99

00:02:33.000 Yeah.

00:02:34.000 Yeah.

00:02:35.000 That's relevant, isn't it?

00:02:37.000 It is.

00:02:38.000 It is.

00:02:38.000 Well, let's see.

00:02:39.000 So there's a space.

00:02:40.000 There's one of the angels over there.

00:02:43.000 That's a...

00:02:48.000 Wow.

00:02:49.000 This is the planned corner, one of the angels of the four corners, that the direction of the building that we're kind of recycling the carriage house It has the corners of the buildings pointing in the cardinal directions.

00:03:06.000 So I thought that a feature of them, there will be angels of the north, south, east, west.

00:03:13.000 And part of the whole thing is getting the four quadrants together.

00:03:17.000 On top of the building, there's a steeplehead that is basically a four-faced being that is the people of the four directions coming together in visionary oneness.

00:03:28.000 So, as a building, it's a big, basically, godhead.

00:03:35.000 Is that a real image of the actual outside of the building with that angel on it?

00:03:39.000 No, that's the computer model that was made by one of the Disney animators, Ryan Toddle.

00:03:51.000 He's a guy that is responsible for running one of the digital animation teams that did Zootopia and Frozen.

00:04:01.000 He's an amazing modeler.

00:04:03.000 Go back there, Jamie.

00:04:05.000 Look at this outside of this building.

00:04:06.000 That might be the coolest looking building on the planet Earth.

00:04:09.000 Go up a little bit and you'll see...

00:04:12.000 One of the coolest things about the video that is in there is that it shows a kind of spin around of the building itself that was done by these amazing...

00:04:24.000 That's from the front.

00:04:26.000 So you've got a kind of evolutionary thing going on on the sides.

00:04:32.000 Oh, yeah.

00:04:33.000 And then it gets to the front door, which is Adam and Eve creating a better world.

00:04:40.000 So it kind of brings together those mythologies of those narratives of development.

00:04:49.000 Can you zoom in on the Adam and Eve, Jamie?

00:04:52.000 Is it as zoom as it is, guys?

00:04:53.000 Is that a caduceus in the middle of them?

00:04:56.000 Let's see.

00:04:56.000 Actually, down below, way down below, there's a...

00:05:01.000 There you get to see.

00:05:03.000 Oh, wow.

00:05:04.000 So you really did the caduceus and then sort of replicated the DNA, which a lot of people believe was what the caduceus was based on in the first place, right?

00:05:15.000 It's all growing out of some mushrooms there at the base.

00:05:18.000 Alex did the drawing, and then it was sculpted in teak.

00:05:23.000 Whoa.

00:05:24.000 Full size, four by eight foot doors.

00:05:27.000 There's two of them.

00:05:28.000 And then we had it scanned.

00:05:30.000 We got a grant to have it scanned.

00:05:32.000 And then it'll be on the door in metal.

00:05:34.000 So it'll be cast in metal.

00:05:36.000 The originals will be on view inside because they're made of teak.

00:05:40.000 Oh, that's wild.

00:05:41.000 And they're so precious.

00:05:42.000 So what kind of metals are going to be cast in?

00:05:44.000 Bronze, I'm hoping.

00:05:45.000 Whoa, that is so cool.

00:05:48.000 And so what is going on with the evolution thing?

00:05:54.000 So there's the lower hominids, they become Homo erectus, and then what is that child-like thing with the arms up in the air? 0.99

00:06:04.000 Well, I wanted to...

00:06:06.000 Thanks for noticing that.

00:06:10.000 On the end of this paintbrush, which is kind of flying up and indicating a kind of upward trajectory, There's a drip coming off of it, and the drip also looks like an eyeball.

00:06:26.000 The center of the eyeball is the Earth.

00:06:29.000 And there's a skeleton, a child, and a person who's fully grown, woman and man, on either side.

00:06:38.000 And they each are reaching for the planet.

00:06:41.000 Now the question is, who's going to get the ball, basically?

00:06:46.000 The skeleton or the human?

00:06:48.000 Yeah.

00:06:49.000 Will we be handing this to the next generation? 0.50

00:06:52.000 Or are we just going to blow it?

00:06:54.000 So the skeleton sort of represents death?

00:06:56.000 Yeah, it represents the end of the line for the human species.

00:07:00.000 For anybody who's not...

00:07:01.000 I didn't even introduce your page.

00:07:04.000 The Instagram page is...

00:07:05.000 What is it?

00:07:06.000 Is it Alex Great Cosm?

00:07:08.000 C-O-S-M? This is buildentheon.com. 0.99

00:07:13.000 This is the Kickstarter page.

00:07:17.000 And how long has it been going on for now?

00:07:19.000 Let's say about 20 days.

00:07:20.000 We're halfway there.

00:07:21.000 We have a 40-day campaign.

00:07:23.000 We're about three times where we were last.

00:07:25.000 We did this campaign the same length the same days three years ago in 2013, and we're three times ahead of where we were.

00:07:33.000 And we actually, well, we did 160% of our goal the last time.

00:07:40.000 So we're, you know, we're challenging ourselves to even higher.

00:07:45.000 What I meant was how long has it been under construction?

00:07:48.000 It's been since September of 2015. Okay, so a year or so?

00:07:58.000 Yeah.

00:07:58.000 A year and a bit?

00:07:59.000 So what is the ultimate end date where you believe this will all be constructed?

00:08:05.000 Well...

00:08:06.000 It really depends on the money that we raise to do the exterior.

00:08:10.000 The interior we're going to have done by 2017 and we're aiming at the winter of 2017. It should be doable.

00:08:22.000 You know, everybody's telling us it's doable.

00:08:24.000 This is the interior we'll open.

00:08:26.000 The interior.

00:08:27.000 The exhibition.

00:08:27.000 And then we'll see.

00:08:29.000 You know, who knows?

00:08:29.000 I mean, there's indications that, you know, like, you don't know how money's going to come in.

00:08:34.000 This campaign is only to finish the exhibition interiorly.

00:08:37.000 And then, you know, if we still, which I think we will need to raise another $1.5 million today, To do the sculptural exterior, which is done by a 3D printout.

00:08:51.000 It's a 3D printout, 20 feet high by 8x8.

00:08:55.000 And what is the substance it's made of?

00:08:57.000 Well, it'll be finished in glass-reinforced cast concrete, but you print out the foam, then you make the mold.

00:09:06.000 You make a fiberglass mold.

00:09:08.000 There's about a couple dozen molds that will be needed to do the sculptures.

00:09:12.000 And there's a place right across the river from us, 30 minutes away, that does this.

00:09:17.000 Well, that's convenient.

00:09:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:09:19.000 We were thinking coming to California.

00:09:20.000 There are places that do it out here, but we found a place so close, and they're Doing the Brooklyn Academy of Music and some of the big buildings in the city.

00:09:29.000 Has anybody done anything even remotely like this?

00:09:34.000 Well, you'll see theme parks where things are, but the glass reinforced cast concrete will make it enduring.

00:09:42.000 If they don't knock it down with a wrecking ball, it'll be there in a thousand years.

00:09:49.000 The building itself is a tomb.

00:09:51.000 I mean, it's made to be enduring.

00:09:56.000 That's our mission.

00:09:57.000 So the mission is to have this thing survive you.

00:10:01.000 The mission is to build an enduring sanctuary of visionary art, to uplift a global community.

00:10:08.000 That's our actual mission.

00:10:09.000 Do you guys have a caretaker when you pass?

00:10:12.000 Have you already thought of, like, when you move on to the next dimension, who's going to take over this thing?

00:10:17.000 It's a church.

00:10:18.000 So it became a church in 2008. And so the church is generally run by its board and the staff that works there.

00:10:29.000 But the board of directors are the people that own the church.

00:10:33.000 We actually live there, but our house that we built there will belong to the church.

00:10:38.000 Everything we're doing there will belong to the church.

00:10:40.000 It's a 40-acre compound, basically, in the Hudson Valley.

00:10:44.000 And that's where it's happening.

00:10:47.000 There's 21 people working there now.

00:10:50.000 Wow.

00:10:51.000 I trust you guys with the church.

00:10:53.000 I know.

00:10:54.000 I don't trust a whole lot of people with the church.

00:10:56.000 I go, yeah, they're not gonna get crazy.

00:10:58.000 But what I would worry about if I was establishing a church is not me.

00:11:02.000 I would worry about what people are going to distort the message afterwards.

00:11:08.000 Oh, yeah.

00:11:08.000 That's always the real issue.

00:11:09.000 The real issue is...

00:11:11.000 Whenever you have something that you're gonna call a church or a religion or you have a sacred area where you take it very, very seriously, you're gonna have at least one person who has an elevated Profile.

00:11:26.000 You know, there's going to be one person or people who run this thing that other people are going to look at like they're different than us.

00:11:34.000 They are elevated.

00:11:35.000 They are the people that are in charge of this.

00:11:36.000 And when people have that feeling that they feel like they're the elevated one, God, that gets tricky.

00:11:41.000 It's so slippery.

00:11:43.000 It's so hard for people to manage.

00:11:45.000 Here's one of the ways that we try to avoid it, because we never claim to be enlightened ourselves.

00:11:50.000 You know, we're artists.

00:11:51.000 That's why I trust you.

00:11:52.000 Yeah.

00:11:52.000 Well, we're creative artists.

00:11:56.000 And like a lot of artists, we feel like when we're really doing our thing, that there's a spiritual element of that, that your creativity and spirituality somehow seem like they're very strongly connected.

00:12:11.000 There isn't any mythology about it.

00:12:13.000 Right.

00:12:16.000 Basically, emanations of a cosmos that's creative, then we're little embodiments of creative energy.

00:12:24.000 And that creative energy can be used for the positive or the negative.

00:12:30.000 And it comes from the way that you view the world, how you're going to take that.

00:12:36.000 And so as an emanation of creative energy, an artist is just a, you know, like an obvious symbol of that.

00:12:45.000 And so we see that throughout history that All the religions, whether they agreed or disagreed, all used creative expression to get their message out.

00:12:58.000 And so it's one of the things that unites all the different wisdom traditions and unites a lot of other stuff that would consider itself outside of religion as well.

00:13:10.000 I feel that creativity itself is the original kind of religious impulse.

00:13:19.000 It's the way of knowing oneself, the way of knowing God.

00:13:24.000 It's a means of worship.

00:13:26.000 I mean, we look at the cave art and you say, You know, they weren't talking about sects or something or disagreeing necessarily as like religious kind of ideas and things like that.

00:13:40.000 They were making a mark of meaning and left behind something that was meaningful to their tribe.

00:13:48.000 And I think that that's still what we're trying to do. 0.99

00:13:52.000 I think religion, because it scares the shit out of really intelligent people for good reason because it's such a mess in the world and created such a mess and so much divisiveness, 1.00

00:14:09.000 something that's supposed to be about love that's caused so much heartache and damage. 0.98

00:14:20.000 What I think is that when I told my friend Robert Jesse from the Council on Spiritual Practices, well, I'm spiritual but I'm not religious.

00:14:31.000 You know, you're saying, well, you know, Alex, we can't let the fundamentalists own the word religion.

00:14:39.000 Religion is too important a word.

00:14:43.000 What we need are courageous experiments in religion that could help us to get to the other side of the bell curve, the evolutionary edge.

00:14:58.000 Is there an evolving edge for religion?

00:15:00.000 Could we get post-secular in the world? 0.98

00:15:03.000 Can we imagine a world where people have...

00:15:06.000 Most of the people of the world have taken a sacrament of one kind or another and have realized that there's an infinite intelligence at the basis of the cosmos that they are, you know,

00:15:21.000 an expression of.

00:15:22.000 And that life is a divine...

00:15:31.000 We're good to go.

00:15:45.000 You know, because Toynbee, when he was writing about civilizations, talked about, you know, every civilization needs a spiritual core.

00:15:55.000 And as a planetary civilization, you can't have one religion dominate. 0.97

00:16:00.000 It's impossible.

00:16:02.000 It's just not possible.

00:16:06.000 And so, how do you unite a world spiritually?

00:16:13.000 Well, my candidate is the creative arts, you know, that all the world cultures have some means of creative expression.

00:16:23.000 We get to know that culture through their music, through their, you know, painting, sculpture, various kinds of things.

00:16:31.000 And that's how we get to know each other and see our connections, you know.

00:16:40.000 And so as a potential, Something that's been used by all world religions.

00:16:46.000 You know, it's something that, as a de facto, for the people who don't believe in God anymore, many of them still believe that artists are trying to do something authentic and truthful to their inner being.

00:17:01.000 Isn't the word religion fairly loaded, though?

00:17:05.000 And isn't what's important the idea behind what you're trying to do, right?

00:17:09.000 The idea is that you're trying to make this sacred place.

00:17:12.000 You're trying to make this amazing place where people can go and see expression.

00:17:16.000 And see, you know, the purity of your creative vision.

00:17:20.000 Why connect that to a loaded word?

00:17:23.000 Because it's, as Jesse said in my book, I think it's too easy to run away from that.

00:17:36.000 It's...

00:17:40.000 You know how a bad neighborhood gets, you know, and it's just like, oh my god, there's only criminals who live here.

00:17:49.000 And then some artists show up, you know, and they start having their studios and various things like that.

00:17:59.000 And sooner or later, a really beat-up neighborhood will start to have some vitality.

00:18:05.000 Café moves in.

00:18:07.000 A little gallery.

00:18:08.000 Creative energy starts to infiltrate into destructive energy.

00:18:14.000 What I'm saying is, if the artist...

00:18:18.000 We might clean up the neighborhood a little, you know, and make it more habitable for people to want to look at their relationship with spirit through even the lens of religion.

00:18:34.000 But why religion, though?

00:18:36.000 Because religion is associated in most people's minds with deities.

00:18:39.000 Religion is associated in most people's minds with ancient traditions, ancient traditions that oftentimes stifle your behavior, tell you what to do, control you, and offer horrendous consequences for not complying.

00:18:53.000 That's what a lot of people think of when they think of the word religion.

00:18:58.000 But you have this thing, but let me get to this real quick.

00:19:01.000 You have this thing, this beautiful thing.

00:19:03.000 Why even put a name to it?

00:19:05.000 Why label it?

00:19:07.000 And when you're labeling it, you're connecting it with all these other religions that are so problematic and you're going to have to explain your way out of that. 0.92

00:19:14.000 Why do that instead of just have this amazing center?

00:19:20.000 Because I feel that we're intimately connected with whatever that religious impulse.

00:19:27.000 And if you look at what is the primary religious experience, that is a mystical experience.

00:19:38.000 Religio.

00:19:38.000 To reconnect.

00:19:42.000 To connect up.

00:19:43.000 To link back.

00:19:44.000 Is that what the word means?

00:19:45.000 Yes.

00:19:46.000 To relink.

00:19:47.000 To reconnect.

00:19:48.000 To what?

00:19:49.000 The self.

00:19:50.000 To God.

00:19:51.000 The self and God.

00:19:53.000 So that's the actual origin of the word religion?

00:19:55.000 Religio? 0.88

00:19:56.000 Is it a Latin word?

00:19:57.000 And French.

00:19:59.000 And it's to reconnect.

00:20:00.000 So the idea being that the religion or these churches were set up so that people could reconnect with God.

00:20:06.000 So they go about their day, they're filled with troubles and strife and all sorts of stress, and they can go back to the church and they can reconnect with God through religion.

00:20:14.000 If you go to Egypt or you go to India... 0.77

00:20:20.000 You just came back from Venice.

00:20:22.000 Or you go to some of these...

00:20:24.000 Gorgeous cathedrals that are a thousand years old.

00:20:26.000 You go to these pilgrimage places and there is tremendous power because a lot of people invested a lot of love energy into a center and they built a shrine to whatever they believed that spirit to be.

00:20:45.000 And that is part of a long tradition of a connectedness with a You know, their lens into the infinite, you know, whatever religion you're looking through, iconic, aniconic.

00:21:01.000 Yes, they're a hell of a lot of trouble when you get to the secondary religious, you know, experience, which is everything else that you think about religion.

00:21:16.000 The primary religious experience, every religion started with a mystical experience.

00:21:21.000 And people are having those on acid every day now.

00:21:27.000 And so, what, do you disconnect from that whole tradition where people were connecting to the infinite before?

00:21:34.000 You say, this has nothing to do with that. 0.98

00:21:37.000 Or do you say, hey, religion's fucked up, but what if we reimagine it? 0.99

00:21:44.000 What if we reimagine God? 0.99

00:21:46.000 And can't we do it and say, this has a lot going for it, this quest for the infinite absolute mystery that's at the core of our being and the core of the cosmos.

00:22:01.000 This quest to know that, it leads to science, it leads to art, it's the quest to know the truth about the nature of reality.

00:22:10.000 And so that quest Is another reason why I think that if you harness that to creativity, just artists.

00:22:21.000 Artists hate dogma.

00:22:24.000 You can't have a dogmatic.

00:22:27.000 I mean, artists always disagree.

00:22:30.000 And you're always going to have new vantage point.

00:22:33.000 You're always going to have one evolving point.

00:22:48.000 I think?

00:22:54.000 You know, we didn't know any of the stuff that we know now.

00:22:57.000 So that does make sense.

00:22:59.000 So any good religion ought to, their view of reality, at least science ought to be incorporated into it.

00:23:07.000 So you couldn't have a truthful religion without science.

00:23:12.000 So are you planning on writing something out, like the tenets of this religion, the ethics of this religion?

00:23:18.000 We have that.

00:23:19.000 We actually have liturgy.

00:23:21.000 In order to become a church, you have to submit liturgy to the IRS and the state attorney general.

00:23:27.000 And then we had to fight with our town.

00:23:29.000 I'm unfamiliar with that word.

00:23:31.000 What's that word?

00:23:32.000 Liturgy?

00:23:32.000 Liturgy, like a document, like stuff that you use on a regular basis in your ceremonies.

00:23:40.000 You have to have that in order to be recognized by the IRS? You don't have to.

00:23:45.000 Yes, you do.

00:23:46.000 It's part of the IRS requirement.

00:23:49.000 It's part of the question.

00:23:51.000 Do you have a liturgy?

00:23:52.000 Do you have a liturgy?

00:23:53.000 Okay, so you could say no and still...

00:23:54.000 I guess you're right.

00:23:55.000 Yeah, you probably could say no.

00:23:55.000 You could probably apply and maybe, you know...

00:23:58.000 It's all in your head?

00:23:59.000 Relax.

00:24:00.000 It's like a guy has to look over what you're doing and really question it and see if you've thought it out and stuff like that.

00:24:07.000 So Alex published Art Psalms, which was a poetry book, and you've seen Art Psalms.

00:24:12.000 So that was really submitted...

00:24:13.000 Have a copy of it.

00:24:14.000 Yeah, good.

00:24:15.000 That was submitted as Cosm Liturgy.

00:24:17.000 Perfect.

00:24:19.000 That's where it gets really fascinating, is the tax-exempt status of religion.

00:24:25.000 Religion is so odd in that way, that worshipping and being in a place where you worship, even if it's very clear that there's a lot of profit being made, you don't have to pay taxes on that.

00:24:36.000 I just want to tell you this, just a touch of the history of why we became a church, because it wasn't really ever our intention to become a church.

00:24:44.000 All the way from the beginning, 1985, when we visioned the temple simultaneously, Alex and I, on our first MDMA journey, lying on the bed, we both came out of it having visioned the circular temple.

00:24:59.000 What year was this?

00:25:00.000 1985. We had recently moved to New York together.

00:25:04.000 You guys were doing MDMA back in 1985. It was legal.

00:25:08.000 Praise Jesus!

00:25:12.000 But we both saw this temple and we knew that this was sort of like our joint mission.

00:25:18.000 This was the thing we were going to do together.

00:25:20.000 We went in art school, so Alex always had his art, and I had my art.

00:25:24.000 We shared a studio, but this was something we were going to do together.

00:25:29.000 We never thought we would become a church.

00:25:32.000 But here we were building this sacred site, and then all through our life, We started visiting sacred sites like we just came from St. Mark's in Venice and we see Chartres Cathedral and we go there with groups of people and go on pilgrimage to these sacred beautiful art places.

00:25:52.000 But anyway, the way we became a church was a friend of ours who She started Sirius Satellite Network, actually.

00:26:01.000 She's Martine Rothblatt.

00:26:03.000 But she loves Alex's work.

00:26:07.000 She's a collector.

00:26:08.000 She loves the work we're doing, COSM, with the community and all this.

00:26:12.000 And she said, you know, you're doing everything the churches do.

00:26:15.000 You're doing weddings, baby blessings, and memorials.

00:26:18.000 You have a prayer book, you know, basically the arts.

00:26:22.000 You're doing everything the churches do, and you're not getting any of the benefits of what churches get.

00:26:27.000 Business thinking.

00:26:28.000 No, she's so smart, really.

00:26:30.000 And she paid a lawyer. 1.00

00:26:32.000 She's the one that funded, granted us, you know, getting together with our guy who went through the process with us.

00:26:41.000 It took a good long time.

00:26:43.000 You have to basically write a lot of essays, and then they give you more essays.

00:26:47.000 And it was maybe three times through essays, and you write them all, and then you submit the liturgy.

00:26:53.000 Eventually, just at the moment we were moving to the country, it was like the same minute.

00:26:59.000 The church status just magically came in after four years.

00:27:02.000 It was like all like coming together, you know.

00:27:05.000 So as it is, though, we have 40 acres.

00:27:08.000 And then we had to fight with our town over, you know, every church in our town.

00:27:12.000 And there's mosques and Buddhist, you know, stupas and, you know, lots of Catholic and every kind of Protestant.

00:27:20.000 And they were not paying real estate tax.

00:27:22.000 And we have this 40 acres and they were raising our taxes 15% every year.

00:27:27.000 Meanwhile, we're not making any money.

00:27:29.000 Alex and I are volunteers at COSM, by the way.

00:27:31.000 And so we make nothing.

00:27:33.000 We just give it away.

00:27:34.000 And the whole place we're giving away, it belongs to the community.

00:27:38.000 And the community It's everybody who's spiritual and creative, but it tends to have a lot of psychedelophiles, people who feel like they've experienced the divine and they want a place to go ahead and talk about it.

00:27:54.000 They wanted this in the city when we were in Manhattan for five years.

00:27:58.000 It was just a place where you could go and talk about this.

00:28:01.000 Because it's legal to talk about it.

00:28:04.000 And we would always have security and make sure there wasn't, you know, anything being passed around because we can't get into trouble because we're, like, really legitimate.

00:28:11.000 We're doing this in a legitimate way.

00:28:14.000 It took us four years to get our permits to do this building.

00:28:17.000 Hold on a second.

00:28:18.000 You had security to make sure that people didn't pass drugs around?

00:28:21.000 Well, we can't have anything visible.

00:28:23.000 What you do that is private is your own business.

00:28:27.000 If you can behave yourself, we watch out for you and we make a nice container.

00:28:33.000 I understand that.

00:28:33.000 But you had a bunch of people actually watching people to make sure that they didn't...

00:28:37.000 We always have security.

00:28:38.000 They're gentle giants.

00:28:39.000 We call them gentle giants.

00:28:41.000 You have to have security when you're having...

00:28:42.000 We have hundreds, we have thousands...

00:28:45.000 Well, like some of our full moons are from hundreds to a thousand people.

00:28:49.000 We have large, you know, groups of people.

00:28:52.000 Full moons?

00:28:52.000 What do you mean by full moons?

00:28:53.000 Well, that's what happened was a shaman told us that we had this whole idea of this temple we wanted to build, but where's your community?

00:29:02.000 You know, building a temple is the work of a community, he said.

00:29:05.000 So we're going to start full moon ceremonies in your home in Brooklyn.

00:29:10.000 So we did.

00:29:10.000 We started in January of 2003, 164 consecutive full moons ago.

00:29:17.000 We started them in our loft in Brooklyn.

00:29:19.000 And then we got a place in Manhattan, 12,000 square feet.

00:29:24.000 We did it for five years.

00:29:26.000 Then we found this...

00:29:27.000 It's a permanent location in Wappinger, New York.

00:29:32.000 It's in the Hudson Valley, like 65 miles from the city.

00:29:35.000 You can get there on the train, but we found this lovely old retreat center all kind of imploding and, you know, and we've been, you know, working on it one building at a time.

00:29:46.000 The Carriage House, which is turning into Entheon, the first temple of visionary art that we really came there to build, It's building four, actually.

00:29:55.000 We have a 10-bedroom Victorian guest house and an office in our studio.

00:30:01.000 So we have six buildings to work on, and we're on building four.

00:30:05.000 But anyway, this is like a little retreat center that we're leaving to our community, our spiritual, creative, cosmonaut community.

00:30:15.000 It's fascinating that Martine was involved in it because she's also involved in artificial intelligence. 0.95

00:30:20.000 I interviewed her for this sci-fi show that I did.

00:30:23.000 Did you?

00:30:23.000 Yeah, and she has this robot version of her wife.

00:30:27.000 Bina.

00:30:28.000 Yeah.

00:30:28.000 Bina 48. Bina 48 or whatever it is.

00:30:31.000 You were there.

00:30:31.000 Well, she started a church.

00:30:33.000 She and Bina started a church.

00:30:35.000 Oh, everybody's doing it.

00:30:35.000 It's called the Terrasem Movement.

00:30:37.000 Jan, we need to start a church.

00:30:38.000 You should.

00:30:39.000 The Church of Rogan.

00:30:40.000 The Church of Roganology.

00:30:43.000 Joey Diaz already has a church.

00:30:45.000 We should just join his.

00:30:47.000 Joey Diaz has the church of what's happening now.

00:30:50.000 Oh, there's some great churches out there, really.

00:30:53.000 I just think it's...

00:30:54.000 Why should these Catholics get it all? 1.00

00:30:56.000 You know what I mean?

00:30:56.000 They definitely shouldn't get it all.

00:30:58.000 No, no.

00:30:59.000 I think after you were involved in, like, the 100th child molestation, you probably should take it away.

00:31:07.000 But that's people.

00:31:07.000 And that's, like, a super conservative number.

00:31:10.000 That's horrible people.

00:31:11.000 Isn't that crazy? 0.97

00:31:12.000 That isn't religion.

00:31:13.000 Religion doesn't uphold that. 0.98

00:31:15.000 That's just awful people. 0.98

00:31:17.000 Yes, but awful people all throughout that one religion. 0.96

00:31:20.000 I mean, there's got to be some sort of a connection with suppression.

00:31:23.000 Suppression of sexuality, suppression of ideology, forcing people to behave in a certain way, and these blowbacks, and also the fear.

00:31:33.000 I mean, I was raised Catholic.

00:31:35.000 And I went to Catholic school when I was a young kid, and I remember, I didn't go to kindergarten, I just went right into first grade, and I remember the fear, the constant fear that they injected in you.

00:31:44.000 This idea of what religion is, it was great for me, because it just queered me off religion so young, so early off, I was like, oh, okay, well this is all nonsense.

00:31:56.000 Before that, when I was young, my parents were getting divorced, and when my parents were splitting up, I was really scared.

00:32:03.000 I was really nervous, and I was young, and there was a lot of violence going around.

00:32:07.000 There was a lot of yelling and screaming, and I needed something.

00:32:11.000 And so I remember when I was little, I was always talking about God.

00:32:15.000 And it was just like, well, there's got to be, if all these people around me are out of their mind, and everyone's crazy, there's got to be God.

00:32:21.000 So I was actually excited to go to Catholic school.

00:32:24.000 I was excited to go to church.

00:32:26.000 I thought of it as, well, maybe these people, these relatives and these family members that I live with are all crazy, but there's going to be a place that I can go where I'm going to be able to be loved, and it's going to be calm, and God has rules, and everyone's going to follow them.

00:32:41.000 And I went there, and I was like, oh, good lord.

00:32:45.000 No pun intended. 1.00

00:32:47.000 This fucking place is worse! 1.00

00:32:49.000 I was like, these people are out of their minds! 1.00

00:32:51.000 And my parents were gonna put me in there for second grade, and I literally told them I'd run away from home.

00:32:57.000 I was like, I'm gonna find my way out of this.

00:32:59.000 I'm like, I'm not doing this.

00:33:00.000 And I was seven.

00:33:01.000 You know, I was like, this is not happening.

00:33:03.000 Well, you had already become rational.

00:33:06.000 At seven.

00:33:07.000 Yeah.

00:33:08.000 You knew what was right and what was not right. 1.00

00:33:10.000 You knew what was bullshit. 1.00

00:33:11.000 You had a bullshit detector that was always acutely attuned. 1.00

00:33:16.000 Well, that's one good thing about growing up in a really fucked-up household, is that you have a constant sense of danger, because you're around danger all the time, so you don't get to sleep cuddly, you don't get to rest calm, 0.99

00:33:32.000 and you have an acute awareness of all the possibilities. 0.89

00:33:38.000 So, I mean, ultimately, that was a great thing for me.

00:33:41.000 I can really see how that It heightened your ability to also to always maintain a mindfulness that's over everything.

00:33:52.000 It's what probably allows you to do so many things.

00:33:56.000 There's always a balance between mindfulness and paranoia.

00:34:00.000 You don't want to be that guy that carries a gun to the bathroom.

00:34:03.000 I know a lot of people that have surpassed this awareness and gone into this acute paranoia.

00:34:11.000 I have this statement that I've been saying a lot lately, but I think it's important to bring up.

00:34:15.000 I don't think human beings are designed to take in the bad news of seven billion people.

00:34:21.000 I think the numbers that we deal with on a daily basis, with all the different stories of the world, They are too much for us to handle.

00:34:30.000 You're supposed to deal with what's going on in your community with a watchful eye on the rest of the world.

00:34:37.000 You shouldn't be deeply engrossed in all of the most disgusting aspects of the rest of the world 24 hours a day.

00:34:43.000 And I think that's one of the real problematic issues of our time with social media and with the news that people have this distorted sense of what the world is.

00:34:55.000 They think this world is just filled with violence and horror.

00:34:58.000 No, the world is fine.

00:35:00.000 It just occasionally has violence and horror.

00:35:03.000 There's just so many people and the world is so big that if you look at all those people and this giant globe that we're on, then you can kind of get a sense that the sky is falling.

00:35:16.000 But if you go outside right now in Woodland Hills, it's beautiful.

00:35:20.000 Birds are chirping.

00:35:21.000 News is the bad news.

00:35:22.000 Nice.

00:35:23.000 It's always the worst thing happening in every area.

00:35:25.000 Sometimes it's not, but it's so rare.

00:35:28.000 It's like occasionally they give you some good food.

00:35:30.000 When they're feeding you poison, you're about to die.

00:35:32.000 They slip you a piece of fruit.

00:35:35.000 Yes, they do.

00:35:37.000 I just don't think it's good for us.

00:35:39.000 I don't think it is.

00:35:40.000 And I think that's the same thing with someone who grows up in a bad environment.

00:35:43.000 I think you could get a distorted perception of what the world is and think that the bad environment that you're currently in is the entire world.

00:35:51.000 And it can shape your perceptions and your interactions and therefore shape how you react to other people and shape your actual reality.

00:36:00.000 You know, it's one of the things that I've truly tried to impart upon people that I've learned I believe that how you treat people and your interactions with people literally change your reality.

00:36:10.000 And this is from mistakes that I've made and this is from positive decisions that I've made.

00:36:16.000 Because I think that when you look at life in a positive way and you try to treat people kind and you try to be nice to people and you try to move forward with that The people that you interact with, they will get that.

00:36:29.000 They will most likely respond more kindly to you.

00:36:33.000 And the world changes.

00:36:34.000 The world literally changes in front of you.

00:36:36.000 It's billiard balls of kind acts that could be sending waves.

00:36:44.000 A smile could actually prevent somebody from committing suicide.

00:36:50.000 If that's all it takes, maybe you should just go ahead and end it.

00:36:53.000 Smile.

00:36:54.000 Well, I heard from some kids who were really desperate.

00:37:02.000 Am I going to jump or am I not?

00:37:04.000 And some stranger looked at me and smiled.

00:37:08.000 And that stopped me from doing it.

00:37:10.000 What stopped you, Alex?

00:37:12.000 What stopped me?

00:37:13.000 Acid stopped me from killing myself.

00:37:17.000 That can do it.

00:37:18.000 Because for me, I wondered whether God exists, just like your question when you were seven.

00:37:25.000 You were hoping that there was something that was not...

00:37:31.000 You know, that there was a center of peace somewhere, I guess.

00:37:36.000 Now, I don't know that I would ever call God a center of peace.

00:37:40.000 You know, I would say that that's one aspect of the entire, you know, meat storm of being alive.

00:37:49.000 I love that word.

00:37:50.000 Meat storm.

00:37:51.000 What a great expression.

00:37:53.000 The meat storm.

00:37:54.000 You should make a t-shirt.

00:38:01.000 That's a great band.

00:38:02.000 That would be a radical band.

00:38:04.000 Hudson Valley Meatstorm.

00:38:06.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:38:07.000 We have a grinder attached to an industrial fan, folks.

00:38:12.000 I wouldn't think about it that way.

00:38:13.000 I would think about a bunch of people just jumping around, getting crazy.

00:38:16.000 There you go.

00:38:21.000 Meatstorms.

00:38:22.000 What a great word.

00:38:23.000 Well, I thought of that when I saw The Last Judgment by Michelangelo, speaking of Catholics. 0.97

00:38:29.000 So you've got to look at the good things.

00:38:32.000 Right.

00:38:36.000 Terrible stuff happened in those Howard Halls of the Vatican.

00:38:41.000 Some really awesome art was there.

00:38:44.000 It's amazing to go there.

00:38:46.000 Have you ever seen the Sistine Chapel?

00:38:48.000 No, I'm actually going there this summer.

00:38:49.000 We spent an entire day from 9 until 5. We got there at the front of the line and got in.

00:38:55.000 Ran.

00:38:55.000 Got a seat.

00:38:56.000 We ran.

00:38:56.000 All the way.

00:38:57.000 Ran all the way there.

00:38:58.000 You've got to run all the way through the Vatican.

00:39:01.000 No, you don't want to do that the first time.

00:39:04.000 Yeah, you do.

00:39:05.000 Why do you want to run?

00:39:06.000 Well, we wanted to get to the Sistine Chapel.

00:39:08.000 Because you want to trip in the Sistine Chapel.

00:39:09.000 Oh, so you've got to take it and then get there in time when it kicks in.

00:39:13.000 And then we were there all day from 9 to 5 drawing.

00:39:17.000 We just sat, we got a seat, and we were just drawing all day.

00:39:21.000 And our focus, it was just unbelievable.

00:39:23.000 And the drawings came out really amazing, too.

00:39:26.000 Some of them are in art songs.

00:39:28.000 But we had been to Vatican before, I have to say.

00:39:30.000 So when you go to the Vatican for the first time, you have to walk through so you can see all the amazingness on the way there.

00:39:35.000 Because the Sistine Chapel is at the end of the tour.

00:39:38.000 You know, you go out there and then afterwards you come back.

00:39:41.000 So...

00:39:42.000 So, you know, on the way, you want to take a look, but we had already done that, so we were like, made the decision.

00:39:47.000 This was our day to draw the Sistine Chapel.

00:39:49.000 Michelangelo's the man, you know, so I got it.

00:39:52.000 You know, that was all I wanted to see anyway, so everything else is just a blur, and then you get to the Sistine Chapel.

00:40:00.000 It is quite fascinating that you're looking at the work of someone who lived hundreds of years ago.

00:40:06.000 500 years ago.

00:40:07.000 Amazing.

00:40:08.000 He didn't like everything that Catholics did, by the way. 1.00

00:40:12.000 Nobody does.

00:40:12.000 Well, he didn't, but he did like being Catholic.

00:40:15.000 He really did.

00:40:17.000 He wrote about it and was very eloquent, and he loved being Catholic, but he didn't like the Pope telling him to paint the Sistine Chapel, for instance.

00:40:25.000 Look at that.

00:40:26.000 Yeah, look at that.

00:40:27.000 How long did it take for him to do that?

00:40:29.000 I don't know.

00:40:29.000 Years and years.

00:40:31.000 The Last Judgment is the one that was, I guess, I've always called my favorite painting of all time.

00:40:37.000 That's The Meat Storm.

00:40:39.000 It's like, you know, and there were no clothed figures on that.

00:40:46.000 They Michelangelo was still alive when they got what they called a...

00:40:54.000 He was a good fresco painter, but he became basically Michelangelo's breeches painter.

00:41:03.000 He was always thought of as the one who added clothing and drapery over the genitalia that Michelangelo had painted.

00:41:13.000 He loved the body.

00:41:14.000 And he...

00:41:17.000 It made what I would call an anthropocosm out of it, a kind of a temple of humanity.

00:41:26.000 And it was very much about the nobility and connected with the Greek idealist tradition.

00:41:33.000 The Greek idealist tradition is a psychedelic tradition from the Neoplatonic and the Platonic, you know, Socrates and all the rest.

00:41:46.000 Wave was just getting...

00:41:48.000 He was there when they dug up the Lao Kuhn, you know, that Greek sculpture with the snakes and the crazy stuff that really deeply influenced him.

00:42:00.000 I just want to say that the purity of the religion, the place where it's really true, you know, like that beautiful, you know, what it actually means at the core, at the heart core of any religion, is expressed through the art of that religion. 0.97

00:42:15.000 So, you know, the other stuff is crap. 0.94

00:42:17.000 You know what I mean? 0.97

00:42:18.000 The way people act towards each other and stuff, that's their own deficits and their own obstacles coming out, you know, all over the place.

00:42:26.000 Even the popes that have been horrible and allowed, you know, child molestation to perpetrate. 1.00

00:42:32.000 Those people are sick people. 0.99

00:42:34.000 They don't represent the purity of the religion, which is represented in the art. 0.99

00:42:41.000 But what is that?

00:42:41.000 What is the purity of the religion?

00:42:43.000 And doesn't it vary depending upon the individual?

00:42:46.000 And why does that the purity of the religion, that what you're seeing is the purity of one man's expression, his view, his beautiful view of the world, that we're so fortunate to be able to still look at 500 years later.

00:43:00.000 What does that have to do with Catholicism?

00:43:02.000 I think that because he was part of That tradition, and he was marrying the ideas of the Greek ideal and the Neoplatonic, which was all about universality.

00:43:21.000 You know, it was really more about, they as much as we're saying, you know, all religions are connected and are basically talking about the one spirit that moves through all of us.

00:43:34.000 You can call it creative spirit.

00:43:36.000 I'd prefer to call it something like that rather than some of the names that get so heavily weighted.

00:43:44.000 But I'm comfortable with the word God.

00:43:47.000 To me, God means just ultimate mystery.

00:43:51.000 Yeah, we discussed this a couple times on previous podcasts, how weighted that word is.

00:43:56.000 One of the things that I think is amazing about the Sistine Chapel, when you're looking at the two fingers touching, when you're looking at all these beautiful images, is those images They become what people think of when they think of God and they think of religion.

00:44:13.000 Those images, it's almost like it takes a form on.

00:44:18.000 And in taking on that form, it gives you a structure to house the ideas and the ideals of these religions.

00:44:27.000 Like in seeing something, a visual representation, It becomes a real thing.

00:44:34.000 It's an idea.

00:44:35.000 It's an idea that becomes embodied by that art.

00:44:39.000 I grew up in the Jewish tradition, which is a non-iconic tradition.

00:44:44.000 The Christian tradition really is a story of a person.

00:44:49.000 They were born, they taught, they healed, they died, they rose.

00:44:54.000 And in the Jewish tradition, it's non-embodied.

00:44:58.000 So I resonated with that when I first saw God in LSD, and it was really not a person's face at all, but I recognized that this is what people are talking about when they're talking about God, which is...

00:45:11.000 This energy that interconnects everything.

00:45:14.000 It's like the force more than a face.

00:45:18.000 But that was my experience of God.

00:45:21.000 And in that experience when I was 20, I recognized this is what people are talking about when they say God.

00:45:28.000 It's not physical.

00:45:32.000 What I'm saying is that this guy creating these iconic works, he gives it a structure.

00:45:38.000 He gives it like a scaffolding.

00:45:39.000 And in that scaffolding of these beautiful paintings, you can kind of form your own categories and have your own chapters in your mind that exist.

00:45:50.000 It's almost like makes those things real.

00:45:53.000 Whether or not they ever were real, whether or not they ever were angels on clouds, It's almost inconsequential because the result of it is kind of the same. 0.98

00:46:03.000 If you believe that it's real, if you believe, and this is where religion gets so fucking squirrely. 0.98

00:46:08.000 I know. 0.95

00:46:09.000 Because are you saying that Adam and Eve were the only two people in the world and everybody came from them?

00:46:14.000 No, absolutely not.

00:46:15.000 Are you saying that there was a snake and he told Eve to, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:46:19.000 No, but if you operate your life as if those things were reality, and if you operate your life under the ideals that are transcribed and described in these beautiful paintings, it will become a real past in the sense that it will have a real meaning to you.

00:46:38.000 It gets real weird in that way.

00:46:40.000 It's very weird.

00:46:42.000 And that's where I think art in general, and your art, is particularly important because The things that you paint, you can actually see.

00:46:51.000 I've seen a lot of the things that you paint.

00:46:54.000 Maybe not specifically, but one of the things that I remember when I was first introduced to some of your art, I saw...

00:47:04.000 I forget which one it was.

00:47:05.000 I've seen so many of your pieces, but I remember going, oh, this guy's seen it like 100%.

00:47:11.000 You've been there.

00:47:13.000 When I thought of tryptamine experiences and I saw your art, I was like, oh, this guy, he nailed it.

00:47:18.000 I mean, some people have come kind of close.

00:47:21.000 They've kind of...

00:47:23.000 Even though what you're showing, it doesn't exist in a static form in the tryptamine dimension.

00:47:29.000 Like, there's no way you can take a...

00:47:30.000 You know how you take your phone and you take a screenshot?

00:47:34.000 Don't you want to?

00:47:35.000 When you're in there, don't you want to press that button and say, gotta save that.

00:47:39.000 No, that's too good.

00:47:40.000 No, can I just press the movie?

00:47:42.000 How can I capture this?

00:47:43.000 Well, the problem also is it changes every fraction of a second.

00:47:46.000 Exactly.

00:47:47.000 The beautiful thing about the tryptamine experience is that whatever visual you're experiencing right now will morph into something else and it was one of the most important lessons that I ever learned while tripping was in a DMT experience I had a bunch of negative thoughts.

00:48:07.000 I don't remember what they were about but I remember the visions that I was having turned dark And like a dark green and black and twisted, like they were contorted and compressed, like a visual representation of negative thinking.

00:48:23.000 And then I realized that whatever these things are, entities, thoughts, whatever they were trying to express to me the actual negative consequences of thinking like that, That it showed me in a visual form and then I relaxed and thought positive and it literally bloomed in front of me like a flower and then changed into this wildly beautiful Geometric pattern that was like dancing in front of me and I realized

00:48:53.000 like at that moment Like I realized to myself I said I have to remember this I have to remember this and I have to figure out how to express this because this is an incredible Realization that it's not this, like, abstract idea that,

00:49:08.000 oh, you think negative and negative things happen, you think positive.

00:49:11.000 No, you're literally manifesting energy.

00:49:14.000 You're manifesting a certain kind of energy with negative thinking.

00:49:17.000 It's one of the reasons why we like getting away from negative people.

00:49:20.000 When someone's, like, really negative and complaining and whining, you're just like, oh, Jesus, I gotta get out of here.

00:49:25.000 You really feel like they're gonna suck me into their vortex.

00:49:28.000 I've gotta escape.

00:49:30.000 Yeah.

00:49:31.000 There is...

00:49:32.000 Let's see...

00:49:35.000 You could think of it like an amoeba around your physical body, a cloud of pulsating thought forms.

00:49:46.000 And as you're imagining the beautiful elements of life and things, it seems to be in a kind of order and maybe kind of wafting upward.

00:50:05.000 These are like...

00:50:08.000 The spiritual positive kind of frameworks sometimes that you're seeing life through when you're tripping, you know, and seeing the connections between things, lines forming and things like that.

00:50:19.000 The more kind of organic geometries that show up.

00:50:24.000 You see this intelligence of life and the light of divine intelligence that came through for Alison, like in this language.

00:50:36.000 It seems to be weaving things together.

00:50:39.000 And when you're in touch with that infinite light that seems to be the source, then you can keep it upwardly moving and very evolutionarily, cosmically,

00:50:54.000 consciously moving forward.

00:50:57.000 And when then you're thinking regretful thoughts or thinking negative thoughts and anger and things like that, there's a constriction that goes on in your heart, I think, and kind of shuts things down.

00:51:11.000 And that kind of, like you were saying, twisting in and curling in and darkening and things are all things that when you're Journeying, you see them manifest literally in the flow of the theater of your imagination.

00:51:28.000 And so I think you really beautifully described that, just in that I was totally there.

00:51:36.000 I think it's a disease of consciousness.

00:51:39.000 I think it's very similar to catching a cold.

00:51:42.000 You don't see the cold.

00:51:45.000 You don't see a disease.

00:51:46.000 You don't see it, but it affects you.

00:51:48.000 And I think there's an analogy to be made about diseases of consciousness that you can get locked into these terrible ways of looking at the world.

00:51:57.000 And I think that's one of the most important things about what you're trying to do in terms of building a community.

00:52:03.000 That if you can build a community and build a conscious ideology that is sort of prescribed to people and establish a very positive and loving environment,

00:52:18.000 you can spread that like you can spread a disease.

00:52:24.000 For no better word, seeds of love or whatever you would call it.

00:52:29.000 You could do it the wrong way.

00:52:30.000 You could do it what the Nazis did and do what Genghis Khan did and do what some horrible people throughout history have done.

00:52:37.000 There are similar things in a lot of ways because there are diseases of ideas.

00:52:42.000 There are diseases of consciousness.

00:52:44.000 Or you could do it the right way or a good way or a beneficial way or a positive way.

00:52:49.000 And it seems like throughout history We almost have to see those negative ones to learn the consequences of letting these things happen.

00:53:01.000 I mean, it's one of the reasons why Germany won't let in the Scientologists.

00:53:04.000 They're like, hey, we've seen what happens when cults take over, okay? 0.99

00:53:08.000 We've got a deep history with fucked up group thinking. 0.97

00:53:11.000 So let's just not let you guys in. 0.95

00:53:14.000 And it's what we were talking about before the podcast.

00:53:17.000 We were talking about Trump.

00:53:19.000 And what's going on in this country right now?

00:53:21.000 And I was saying that I think it's probably a good idea to have this moment where we realize, like, oh, we really have to pay attention.

00:53:30.000 Like, we can't just sit back and not participate anymore.

00:53:33.000 Because look what's happened.

00:53:35.000 It's a mockery.

00:53:36.000 The whole system has, like, been exposed by this one guy as being a joke.

00:53:42.000 And it's always been a joke.

00:53:44.000 It's just been a joke that we've accepted. 0.99

00:53:46.000 You know, and we were talking about Hillary and all the criminal investigations that she's under, and that somehow or another, this one person who we know is insincere is a better option than this other person who we know is a jerk-off. 0.97

00:53:59.000 Like, where's the right and where's the wrong? 0.98

00:54:01.000 I don't know.

00:54:02.000 It's rarely been an election where that isn't true.

00:54:04.000 I thought Obama was a pretty clear choice, and there was a lot of celebrating afterwards, but of course, Then he disappointed people like he predicted he would at his inauguration.

00:54:14.000 He said, I'm not going to make everybody happy and you're not going to always be happy with me.

00:54:18.000 He predicted that and he came through with that.

00:54:22.000 But I remember all the elections of my life.

00:54:24.000 It was like, you know, I mean, I always voted.

00:54:28.000 For the least worst person.

00:54:31.000 You know what I mean?

00:54:32.000 I mean, I think Al Gore was up there.

00:54:34.000 He was really good.

00:54:36.000 And I liked him.

00:54:37.000 He actually won.

00:54:38.000 Yeah.

00:54:39.000 And he actually won.

00:54:40.000 It was coup d'etat.

00:54:42.000 That's where the coup took place, right there, where corporate America took over.

00:54:47.000 Yeah, it really did.

00:54:48.000 I mean, well, it's also where the system that we're voting under is exposed.

00:54:53.000 Like, they're still using pieces of paper.

00:54:56.000 And then also, did you ever see Hacking Democracy, the HBO documentary on the Diebold systems?

00:55:02.000 Oh.

00:55:02.000 Oh, my God.

00:55:04.000 Alex's brother was a vice president there.

00:55:07.000 He used to work there.

00:55:08.000 He used to.

00:55:09.000 He left there before they were making voting machines.

00:55:13.000 Whoa.

00:55:14.000 Yeah, they actually changed their name after that documentary.

00:55:16.000 Is that right?

00:55:17.000 Yeah.

00:55:17.000 Well, they established a voting machine where you could...

00:55:20.000 I recommend everybody watch Hacking Democracy.

00:55:23.000 I think it was from...

00:55:25.000 I want to say 2007 or something like that.

00:55:27.000 But it was a documentary where they exposed that these voting machines, not only can they be manipulated, they were designed to be manipulated.

00:55:35.000 They were designed to have a third party entrance, like a third party could enter in data.

00:55:42.000 And it's just madness that those machines are how our election got decided.

00:55:50.000 And, you know, they've since then cleaned it up in some way, but still, it's a dirty system.

00:55:56.000 Yeah, doesn't it seem like we could actually have some encryption that each voter could vote online and do it in a minute?

00:56:06.000 Sure.

00:56:07.000 And we'd know.

00:56:09.000 Here's a perfect example.

00:56:10.000 Banking.

00:56:12.000 Everyone banks online.

00:56:13.000 Who doesn't bank online?

00:56:15.000 Who doesn't buy things online?

00:56:16.000 Credit card transactions, people are like, whoa, it gets hacked.

00:56:19.000 How often?

00:56:20.000 How often?

00:56:21.000 How many people?

00:56:22.000 What percentage of it?

00:56:24.000 Is it enough to shift an election?

00:56:26.000 I would say it's probably not.

00:56:27.000 I would say it's not.

00:56:28.000 I would say if you could make banking secure, you can make voting secure.

00:56:33.000 Right, and the phone.

00:56:34.000 They couldn't even get into that guy's phone.

00:56:36.000 You can do this, and so they should do it.

00:56:39.000 Well, representative government is not necessary anymore.

00:56:41.000 We can communicate instantaneously with people all throughout the world.

00:56:44.000 We're not talking about sending a raven.

00:56:46.000 You know, this isn't, you know, the 1300s.

00:56:49.000 This is an interesting time, and we're not taking advantage of the resources that are available to us as far as representing the actual people.

00:56:58.000 But I think there's also a problem with that, too, is there's a lot of people that are just completely uneducated, uninterested, slovenly lazy people, and we have to energize those people.

00:57:07.000 We have to reinvigorate their ideas of participation and of community, and you have to say, like, look, you can't just sit on your couch and eat Twinkies and watch Beverly Hills Housewives.

00:57:18.000 You can't do that anymore. 0.99

00:57:19.000 Because if you do, you're not allowed to complain about the world being fucked up, because you're a part of the world being fucked up. 0.94

00:57:26.000 And I think until we can energize people, until we can give people this sense that they actually can participate, and it is just a bunch of human beings that are trying to figure out the right and the wrong way to do things. 0.97

00:57:39.000 I think there's a lot of that going on right now.

00:57:41.000 I think there's this ebb and flow of social media.

00:57:45.000 Positive aspects of it and negative aspects of it.

00:57:48.000 But ultimately, I think a lot of that is just us learning to navigate the landscape, this new landscape, this digital, interconnected landscape that's unprecedented in human history.

00:57:58.000 I don't think we can understand it because we're a part of it.

00:58:01.000 I mean, I think we can sort of.

00:58:03.000 We're talking about it, right?

00:58:04.000 But I don't think, if we look back in history and they, a thousand years from now, look at this day, the way we're looking at Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci or Genghis Khan or anyone, you look back and you go, wow, what a crazy time.

00:58:18.000 That's nothing compared to today!

00:58:20.000 Today is the craziest time ever.

00:58:22.000 The emergence of artificial intelligence, the emergence of A very bizarre method of communication where you can instantaneously reach people on the entire planet, where data is shared like that amongst hundreds of millions of people instantly.

00:58:41.000 It's a new world. 0.99

00:58:42.000 It's a fucking crazy new world. 1.00

00:58:45.000 It's a birth. 1.00

00:58:45.000 It is literally like a birth. 1.00

00:58:47.000 It's like an organism coming out of an egg and poking its head out. 0.99

00:58:51.000 And right now the shell's being chipped and the head's popping up, but this fucking thing's going to emerge and it's going to fly. 0.93

00:58:58.000 Well, Teilhard de Chardin talked about the neosphere, you know, about the thinking layer of the earth, you know. 0.95

00:59:06.000 And that's really what enabled.

00:59:09.000 I mean, you talked about it in the mid-20th century.

00:59:12.000 And so this thinking layer, thinking atmosphere that's around the Earth now, through satellites, through all of the interactive technology that we're currently speaking on, You know,

00:59:28.000 is a new body for the soul of humanity.

00:59:34.000 You know, this is now what we're working on now is the theosphere.

00:59:40.000 You know, that's what we've got to tap and access.

00:59:44.000 Now we have connectedness with each other.

00:59:48.000 Now, as a symbol, that should really clue us into something important.

00:59:54.000 If we look at Other nature systems like the mycelial intelligence that weaves the woods together and that weaves our entire soil and makes it alive, really.

01:00:09.000 These are spores connected by fibers, and that's what we are.

01:00:15.000 Well, if you can't explain what's going on in the Pacific Northwest in regards to that, like how enormous the actual individual organism of mycelia connection is in the Pacific Northwest, it's essentially like someone described it, it might have been McKenna,

01:00:31.000 as like a thousand gray whales.

01:00:33.000 Like that's how big this organism is.

01:00:35.000 And it's essentially one interconnected mushroom.

01:00:39.000 Yes.

01:00:39.000 Like, whoa!

01:00:41.000 Exactly.

01:00:42.000 The biggest being on Earth.

01:00:43.000 The biggest being on Earth is a mushroom.

01:00:46.000 Exactly.

01:00:46.000 Well, it's the oldest beings as well.

01:00:49.000 You know, we're more like mushrooms than any other plant.

01:00:53.000 Yes, yes.

01:00:53.000 They actually breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide like people.

01:00:58.000 I've been incredibly fascinated over the last few months with plant intelligence and with plant communication and calculations and this idea that plants have some sort of a consciousness.

01:01:11.000 And one of the things that I've been tripping out about is acacia trees, where if an animal eats them...

01:01:18.000 And the wind carries the scent of the acacia tree being consumed.

01:01:23.000 The bushes and trees downwind smell it and become bitter so that it discourages predation.

01:01:32.000 And animals were starving.

01:01:34.000 The downwind animals were starving because they wouldn't eat the bushes from the trees that had taken the scent of the trees that were up north.

01:01:42.000 I mean, it's madness.

01:01:44.000 They're literally sending out a signal to the other plants.

01:01:48.000 Hey, hit the alarm.

01:01:49.000 We're getting eaten.

01:01:51.000 They're communicating with each other.

01:01:53.000 Absolutely.

01:01:53.000 It's the underground and overground network of plant intelligence.

01:01:58.000 I think of basically the festival culture as being mushrooms that are growing out of the underground intelligence.

01:02:09.000 Like raves and stuff like that?

01:02:10.000 Exactly.

01:02:10.000 Those are the little fruiting bodies.

01:02:13.000 Not Coachella, though.

01:02:14.000 I don't know what kind of a mushroom that is.

01:02:17.000 What about South by Southwest?

01:02:18.000 They didn't even pay people.

01:02:19.000 Burning Man, baby.

01:02:21.000 We're going to be a Burning Man this summer.

01:02:23.000 I just want to tell everybody out there, come and be a part of the Dr. Brawner Foam Dome Camp and get yourself sprayed with foam and see us paint our murals.

01:02:32.000 Dr. Brawner, hemp soap?

01:02:35.000 We're going to be in the MAPS Brawner Camp.

01:02:37.000 The MAPS is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, many of us know.

01:02:42.000 And they have the Zendo, where people go when they need some help.

01:02:46.000 And then there's also...

01:02:47.000 What?

01:02:47.000 Wait a minute.

01:02:48.000 What's that mean?

01:02:48.000 The Zendo.

01:02:49.000 That's where, you know, the rangers, when they go around and they find people who are having a bad time, they go to the Zendo and they take care of them.

01:02:57.000 They're helped.

01:02:58.000 They call it the Zendo.

01:03:00.000 Oh yeah, we have a Zendo at Cosm.

01:03:03.000 It's a place for meditating and to chill out, to get away from the frenetic energy and just have a place of peace.

01:03:13.000 Is this it?

01:03:13.000 This is the Zendo?

01:03:14.000 Yeah, the Zendo from MAPS. Oh, you know that smells like feet.

01:03:19.000 It's really beautiful, and it sounds strange, but it's made out of wood and bamboo and cardboard.

01:03:26.000 So how do they construct that out in the middle of the burning man?

01:03:29.000 They bring it in pieces and put it up, correct it.

01:03:31.000 They do everything else there.

01:03:33.000 Wow.

01:03:33.000 How long does it take to put that together?

01:03:35.000 People come in like a week or two ahead of time, depending on how complex your put together is.

01:03:39.000 But we did a dome in 2006 with Maps and Matt Atwood, who did the infrastructure, and it was called the Entheon Village.

01:03:50.000 And it was Entheon Village for years.

01:03:51.000 Alex named it.

01:03:52.000 So now we have Entheon growing in Cosm, but it used to be at Burning Man.

01:03:58.000 But anyway, do you go?

01:04:00.000 No, I don't go.

01:04:01.000 You don't go?

01:04:01.000 I can't be around that many hippies.

01:04:04.000 I just can't.

01:04:05.000 It's all kinds of people, but it is the freest place on earth.

01:04:08.000 It's certainly infested with hippies, though.

01:04:10.000 Let's be honest with ourselves.

01:04:12.000 It's infested with people who are using sacraments. 1.00

01:04:15.000 I want to take objection for a moment and speak for the hippies, because I think that this is one of the last places where it's okay. 0.90

01:04:26.000 It's no longer okay to say nigger or queer, okay?

01:04:32.000 Unless you're of that. 0.99

01:04:36.000 So if you're a hippie, maybe you could call another hippie a dirty hippie. 0.96

01:04:40.000 Yeah, but I'm kind of a hippie. 0.97

01:04:41.000 Are you?

01:04:42.000 Yeah.

01:04:43.000 There you go.

01:04:47.000 I'm essentially a weird version of a hippie.

01:04:50.000 Hippie.

01:04:51.000 But I don't fit into the mold because I'm also a cage fighting commentator.

01:04:55.000 I like the diversity.

01:04:57.000 And you know, Burning Man used to have the genital portrait studio and the... 0.96

01:05:02.000 Genital portrait studio where you pose? 0.91

01:05:04.000 Thunderdome.

01:05:05.000 Thunderdome.

01:05:06.000 You would love Thunderdome.

01:05:07.000 You say this like I should know.

01:05:09.000 They had a shooting range.

01:05:11.000 Yeah, the drive-by shooting range.

01:05:14.000 With guns?

01:05:14.000 You shoot guns?

01:05:15.000 Oh, there's all kinds.

01:05:16.000 They have open bars there, and they're giving it all away.

01:05:19.000 The thing about Burning Man is it's a gift economy, so it's an experiment in gift economy.

01:05:24.000 Once you get in...

01:05:26.000 And it costs something to get in, of course.

01:05:28.000 But once you get in, it's like, you know, you don't take your wallet out.

01:05:31.000 You can't pay for anything, and there's no bartering.

01:05:33.000 It's only gifting.

01:05:34.000 And people give it away.

01:05:36.000 Are these guys fighting with sticks?

01:05:37.000 Yeah.

01:05:38.000 There's the Thunderdome.

01:05:38.000 They're bashing each other.

01:05:39.000 They're like Nerf sticks.

01:05:40.000 They don't really hurt each other, but they try to knock them off of their perch there.

01:05:46.000 They're swinging.

01:05:47.000 On those ropes in that dome.

01:05:49.000 It's a dome frame.

01:05:51.000 Anyway, there's all kinds.

01:05:52.000 There's 80,000 people there.

01:05:54.000 It's the best, biggest, most amazing environment.

01:05:57.000 It's like being on the moon.

01:05:59.000 It's like being nowhere else on Earth.

01:06:01.000 You have to always carry your dust mask and your goggles and your hair covering and your camelback.

01:06:08.000 It's so drying that you have to be drinking a couple gallons a day just to...

01:06:14.000 There's no insects there.

01:06:16.000 There is not a blade of any kind of life there.

01:06:20.000 It's like walking on the moon, seriously.

01:06:23.000 Except you can breathe, but you have to have a face mask.

01:06:26.000 Because the dust storms just come up at every moment.

01:06:29.000 Has anyone done a documentary on it?

01:06:30.000 Oh, many.

01:06:31.000 Over the years, sure.

01:06:33.000 So when you're there, there's dudes sticking cameras in your face.

01:06:35.000 You have to have permission.

01:06:37.000 Everything is very regulated now.

01:06:39.000 And I understand they're buying land.

01:06:41.000 So I'm hoping they'll have some, because they've been, they'll have some infrastructure.

01:06:46.000 That's the way you said that, like somebody offered you a beautiful cake.

01:06:49.000 They're buying land.

01:06:50.000 Well, buying land is good for our community.

01:06:52.000 We should own our own places of attraction, because that is the way you gain.

01:07:00.000 Hippies.

01:07:01.000 Transformational power.

01:07:03.000 Power to transform.

01:07:04.000 You basically have land, a place, and you build that infrastructure.

01:07:10.000 How do you mainstream this culture?

01:07:11.000 Wow, look at the way it's structured.

01:07:14.000 Isn't that beautiful?

01:07:14.000 That's really cool.

01:07:15.000 It really is beautiful.

01:07:17.000 The center part is called the playa, and it's about nine feet across from end to end, like the big circle, the biggest...

01:07:25.000 Nine miles.

01:07:26.000 Nine feet.

01:07:27.000 Nine miles across.

01:07:28.000 And you can walk the whole way.

01:07:30.000 A lot of people have art cars.

01:07:31.000 That's nine miles?

01:07:32.000 Well, from edge to edge.

01:07:34.000 That's incredible.

01:07:35.000 Outer edge.

01:07:36.000 It's mammoth.

01:07:37.000 And the man is in the middle.

01:07:38.000 60,000 people.

01:07:39.000 Good run, Jamie.

01:07:40.000 60 to 80. And it's incredible.

01:07:43.000 And everybody takes care of each other.

01:07:45.000 You have to have your own food.

01:07:46.000 You've got to come in there with water, food, and everything.

01:07:49.000 And you're not allowed to pour or drop anything on the ground.

01:07:55.000 And they have full showers.

01:07:57.000 Brawner camp, you get foamed. 1.00

01:07:59.000 They have a big foam dome.

01:08:01.000 But you've got to collect all that water, and they collect them in these great big greywater tankers and take them away and bring in fresh water.

01:08:10.000 It's like they're practicing setting up a village of the apocalypse.

01:08:16.000 I'm telling you, this is the practice for that.

01:08:18.000 Refugee ready.

01:08:19.000 Yeah.

01:08:20.000 These people can go in, and in a week or two, I mean, the government, I mean, the army went in there to study this because they can do this.

01:08:26.000 In a couple of weeks, they put it all together.

01:08:29.000 Wow.

01:08:29.000 So it's very much apocalyptic preparation.

01:08:33.000 I think you would get a great benefit from seeing it.

01:08:37.000 I think I'd get material out of it.

01:08:39.000 You could.

01:08:40.000 You should.

01:08:41.000 Come be with our camp.

01:08:42.000 What is it?

01:08:43.000 It is the week that leads to Labor Day weekend.

01:08:49.000 What's that?

01:08:50.000 That's like the first Monday of September is Labor Day.

01:08:55.000 Oh, okay.

01:08:55.000 So it's the weekend before the Monday of Labor Day, and the temple burn is on Sunday night, and the man is burned on Saturday night.

01:09:06.000 So when the man is burned, 80,000 people come together to see it.

01:09:13.000 It's like everybody comes in a big circle around the man.

01:09:16.000 Where's the man?

01:09:17.000 There he is. 0.97

01:09:18.000 I think I'd be like, I gotta get the fuck out of here. 0.94

01:09:19.000 And you know what? 0.95

01:09:20.000 They have a thousand fire spinners around the man.

01:09:24.000 You have to audition to be a fire spinner around the man, but they have about a thousand of them.

01:09:29.000 And they're spinning whips, my friend Joe.

01:09:32.000 They're spinning...

01:09:33.000 Swords and poi and all kinds of hula hoops are on fire.

01:09:39.000 It's the most amazing thing.

01:09:41.000 And you go there on your art car.

01:09:43.000 You're not allowed to go in the playa at all unless your car is approved as an art car.

01:09:48.000 That means it has to be...

01:09:50.000 Show some art cars.

01:09:51.000 Art cars.

01:09:51.000 Art cars are incredible.

01:09:53.000 They've got big ships, like, rolling along the playa.

01:09:56.000 You know, they have gigantic three-story structures that move...

01:10:01.000 So they have to kind of be enhancing the environment.

01:10:04.000 They do, and they have to be art.

01:10:05.000 Whoa, look at that thing! 0.92

01:10:06.000 They have to be art.

01:10:07.000 And the reason why they even do them at all in one big way is so that you can get on the top of them, so that you can see over everybody else when you go to see the man, and you can see all these fire spinners that are all around this.

01:10:20.000 You want to be up high.

01:10:22.000 Jamie, go back to the dinosaur.

01:10:23.000 Your party is up there.

01:10:26.000 You've got your own DJ. Seriously, this car has got its own DJ. Hey, show our car.

01:10:31.000 The Mayan Warrior.

01:10:32.000 The Mayan Warrior.

01:10:32.000 Alex painted it.

01:10:33.000 And we're going to be on the Mayan Warrior this year.

01:10:36.000 So you take this thing back with you?

01:10:38.000 How does that work?

01:10:39.000 Yes, people pay year-round to park these things in Gurlach.

01:10:45.000 What's Gurlach?

01:10:46.000 Gurlach is the non-town.

01:10:48.000 It's like this town that grew up around Burning Man.

01:10:50.000 They have one store.

01:10:52.000 It's like you drive into this moon-like planet.

01:10:55.000 This place is where Wallboard...

01:10:59.000 Is made.

01:11:00.000 So if you peeled off the paper, that's what the playa is like.

01:11:05.000 And it's like a skin.

01:11:06.000 You're not allowed to drop peanut shells or anything on the ground.

01:11:10.000 And you have to collect everything.

01:11:11.000 So it's extremely eco.

01:11:13.000 And you learn about saving water.

01:11:16.000 You can't believe how much you try to save water.

01:11:19.000 I love the Mayan.

01:11:20.000 That's beautiful.

01:11:21.000 There's the Mayan warrior.

01:11:22.000 Isn't it beautiful?

01:11:23.000 What did you use to illuminate it with?

01:11:25.000 There is.

01:11:26.000 All the painting is axes.

01:11:27.000 Well, just click on one and stick on it.

01:11:29.000 Stop flipping around.

01:11:30.000 Just go to one.

01:11:31.000 That will show the mask painting area that I did.

01:11:35.000 They put neon all over it, of course.

01:11:37.000 Yeah, how do you power that thing?

01:11:39.000 They do it.

01:11:40.000 They do it.

01:11:41.000 They all do it.

01:11:42.000 They all have to have light on it.

01:11:44.000 You can't even have a bicycle on the ply without LEDs on it.

01:11:47.000 But what is illuminating this?

01:11:50.000 For people listening alone, this thing is filled with beautiful lights and the flower of life is in one of them.

01:12:01.000 And what are the other ones?

01:12:02.000 The blue ones above the flower of life?

01:12:04.000 More flower of life.

01:12:06.000 You could also notice that there's a second story, and if you scroll down a little bit, you'll see there's a third story.

01:12:12.000 See those people up there?

01:12:13.000 That's royalty.

01:12:14.000 Those are the DJs and the royalty up there.

01:12:16.000 Royalty?

01:12:16.000 I'm just joking.

01:12:17.000 But really, it's like, you know, the people who own the Mind Warrior are up there, and they're best friends.

01:12:22.000 Oh, I thought it was yours.

01:12:23.000 Our friends.

01:12:24.000 Oh, no, no.

01:12:24.000 Alex painted it.

01:12:25.000 It was a commission.

01:12:27.000 Oh, so somebody owns it.

01:12:29.000 Listen to this.

01:12:30.000 They brought it from Mexico City on its own trailer.

01:12:34.000 They drove it from Mexico City to Cozum.

01:12:37.000 I would have thought there was a Trojan horse filled with Mexicans. 1.00

01:12:39.000 I'm serious.

01:12:41.000 If I was in the border patrol, I'd be like, everybody out.

01:12:44.000 Get out of there.

01:12:45.000 Well, it was all enclosed in this trail.

01:12:47.000 I was enclosed in the trail.

01:12:48.000 Oh, yeah, definitely enclosed.

01:12:50.000 Don't worry, we looked.

01:12:52.000 There's no Mexicans in here. 0.99

01:12:53.000 Sneak it across the border. 0.94

01:12:55.000 Aztec warrior Trojan horse.

01:12:57.000 Alex's collectors are probably...

01:12:59.000 You know, the most, you know, the most, well, meaning, you know, they have the most means of all Mexicans, I would say.

01:13:06.000 What are those stacks?

01:13:07.000 The stack things.

01:13:09.000 There's two stacks.

01:13:10.000 Yeah, it looks like cinder blocks.

01:13:11.000 Speakers.

01:13:11.000 Those are speakers?

01:13:12.000 Oh, Jesus Christ, you're going to go down.

01:13:14.000 It's a disco.

01:13:15.000 You're all going to go deaf. 0.98

01:13:16.000 You bring your own DJ, baby.

01:13:18.000 What if the music's annoying?

01:13:20.000 What kind of music are you playing? 1.00

01:13:21.000 Only cool shit, for sure. 1.00

01:13:24.000 We go to their parties. 0.99

01:13:25.000 See, these are people that produce our events in Mexico City.

01:13:29.000 And they sponsor us going down there and doing four events for a visit.

01:13:33.000 And we've done it a few times.

01:13:35.000 They'll do a workshop.

01:13:36.000 They'll do a day lecture.

01:13:39.000 And then they'll do an evening event.

01:13:41.000 And the evening event is an electronic dance music party at a big place.

01:13:46.000 And we're on stage painting.

01:13:48.000 So these are producers.

01:13:49.000 But they produce for bigger names than us.

01:13:51.000 I mean, way bigger.

01:13:52.000 But we do our thing down there.

01:13:54.000 And so you've got a bunch of bikes behind it as well?

01:13:56.000 Is that what that is?

01:13:57.000 Or is that people parking their bikes?

01:13:59.000 That's probably parking.

01:14:00.000 You know, they come up.

01:14:01.000 Hey, can we come up and have a ride?

01:14:04.000 Annoying!

01:14:04.000 You need a bike, too, though.

01:14:07.000 You've got to have one of these and a bike.

01:14:09.000 Some people have motor...

01:14:10.000 Well, they have to have a...

01:14:12.000 Well, I don't know.

01:14:12.000 When people find you're out there, though, don't they give you ear beatings?

01:14:16.000 Don't they find you and then go, Alex, Greg, I just want to tell you, man.

01:14:19.000 You have your goggles.

01:14:19.000 No, your goggles, your mask, your hair covered.

01:14:21.000 Oh, you're hiding.

01:14:22.000 You are completely enclosed.

01:14:24.000 You're pretty much.

01:14:24.000 Do you want to do that, though?

01:14:25.000 Don't you want to be open?

01:14:26.000 Why do you want to hide?

01:14:27.000 Well, we go in and we paint our mural.

01:14:30.000 That's when we see people.

01:14:31.000 We'll be findable there.

01:14:32.000 That's our station.

01:14:33.000 You can always come and find us at the foam dome at our 32-foot mural that we'll be painting.

01:14:39.000 The idea of wandering around with a gas mask on and goggles and headdress in the middle of a gypsum forest.

01:14:45.000 It's amazing. 0.99

01:14:46.000 It sounds so ridiculous. 0.98

01:14:47.000 Look at this guy. 0.99

01:14:48.000 That guy's got it down.

01:14:49.000 I like that.

01:14:50.000 They dress up.

01:14:51.000 That guy owes rent, for sure.

01:14:54.000 Some of these people are extremely wealthy.

01:14:56.000 Look at Brawner.

01:14:57.000 Some of them.

01:14:57.000 A few.

01:14:57.000 These people.

01:14:58.000 No, tons.

01:14:59.000 This is, I would say, the highest end festival I've ever been to.

01:15:03.000 That guy doesn't have any money.

01:15:03.000 That guy's definitely broke.

01:15:04.000 Guaranteed.

01:15:05.000 Are you kidding me?

01:15:06.000 You know how much that costume costs?

01:15:08.000 Do you want Exactly!

01:15:09.000 He'd be saved up all year, and now he's empty.

01:15:12.000 Look at that guy.

01:15:13.000 It looks like the alien that they found in the movie Alien, the guy that's in the chair.

01:15:17.000 The guy from Google comes to this.

01:15:19.000 Oh, the guy from Google.

01:15:20.000 Who's that?

01:15:21.000 Young people.

01:15:22.000 The children of the inventors, you know.

01:15:25.000 You sound like a spokesperson for this.

01:15:28.000 I love it.

01:15:28.000 I don't go everywhere either.

01:15:30.000 This will be our fifth time.

01:15:32.000 Jamie, go back to that one. 0.98

01:15:32.000 The girl that's got that blue one above there, the blue light one, that seems like some industrial strength gas mask type shit. 0.98

01:15:38.000 You don't have to have a gas mask. 0.91

01:15:40.000 You have to have a particle mask.

01:15:42.000 What about your eyes?

01:15:43.000 Because it's dust.

01:15:43.000 You have to have goggles.

01:15:45.000 You have to have goggles.

01:15:47.000 It's better if you do.

01:15:48.000 I sense your enthusiasm. 1.00

01:15:50.000 I appreciate it, but fuck that place. 1.00

01:15:54.000 Oh, well. 1.00

01:15:56.000 I have had a good time there.

01:15:57.000 We went there when Xena was 14. It was the first time we went.

01:16:00.000 We were invited.

01:16:01.000 Every time we've gone, somebody's brought us.

01:16:03.000 Xena, your daughter?

01:16:04.000 Xena's our daughter.

01:16:05.000 She lives in Hollywood.

01:16:07.000 She was 14, and we were there.

01:16:10.000 Will Smith goes to Burning Man.

01:16:12.000 Everybody goes to Burning Man.

01:16:13.000 A lot of freaks use it like Mecca. 0.99

01:16:17.000 You go once. 0.93

01:16:18.000 It's a hajj, you know, if you're a freak. 0.77

01:16:20.000 Well, you don't go to the hajj every year.

01:16:23.000 We've been to five times.

01:16:24.000 It seems like this is a great idea in a shitty spot, and this could be recreated somewhere habitable.

01:16:30.000 How about that?

01:16:30.000 No, it's perfect in so many ways.

01:16:33.000 Here's the reason.

01:16:35.000 It's an art.

01:16:37.000 That's what it is.

01:16:38.000 And so they make a sculpture and they put it on the bare ground.

01:16:41.000 It's like going into a white gallery.

01:16:44.000 Right.

01:16:44.000 You know, it's like going into like a whiteout and then you put an object there and frankly you've got a lot of space around it.

01:16:51.000 Okay.

01:16:52.000 So you can really look at amazing sculptures.

01:16:54.000 You should see Burning Man's sculpture.

01:16:56.000 It's about seeing the art.

01:16:58.000 That's right.

01:16:59.000 So, you know, it's not for everybody.

01:17:01.000 It's inhospitable.

01:17:02.000 But I think that it's an extraordinary...

01:17:07.000 Psychedelic outgrowth of psychedelic visionary culture.

01:17:10.000 I'm totally joking around, obviously, when I'm mocking it, but that's my nature.

01:17:15.000 Now look at this.

01:17:16.000 Alex, look at this guy.

01:17:17.000 I've seen fire before.

01:17:18.000 And you know, we have a sculpture at Cosm that was on the play.

01:17:22.000 It's a two-story sculpture at Cosm, and we're getting another one.

01:17:27.000 They don't know what to do with them afterwards.

01:17:28.000 They want some place to put them.

01:17:30.000 Will Cosm has 40 acres, so we're going to end up with probably more.

01:17:34.000 So they're going to ship Burning Man sculptures out?

01:17:36.000 No, we do that.

01:17:37.000 Oh, you're going to ship them?

01:17:38.000 They give it to us.

01:17:38.000 We pay for the...

01:17:39.000 That's amazing.

01:17:40.000 Now, look at that.

01:17:40.000 Whose is that?

01:17:41.000 And it probably lights up at night.

01:17:43.000 That's incredible.

01:17:44.000 And you go out there and you just visit all these sculptures.

01:17:47.000 It's nine miles of sculpture.

01:17:48.000 You ride your bike from sculpture to sculpture.

01:17:51.000 Many of them, most of them, are interactive.

01:17:53.000 So you can go inside of them.

01:17:55.000 You can climb up in them.

01:17:56.000 Sometimes they have swings.

01:17:58.000 And a lot of them have fire coming out.

01:18:00.000 That's incredible.

01:18:00.000 That's beautiful.

01:18:01.000 You can light things on fire there.

01:18:02.000 That's what makes it so exciting, too.

01:18:05.000 That's really pretty.

01:18:06.000 Oh, this is the Belgian waffle.

01:18:08.000 Oh, here's Kate Roddenbush.

01:18:09.000 That's Kate Roddenbush.

01:18:10.000 We have a Kate Roddenbush sculpture at Cosmo.

01:18:12.000 A what?

01:18:12.000 Kate Roddenbush.

01:18:14.000 She does laser-cut, cold-rolled steel sculptures that are interactive.

01:18:19.000 Like, they're pods.

01:18:20.000 You sit in them.

01:18:21.000 They're real comfy.

01:18:22.000 They're cozy.

01:18:23.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:18:23.000 This is amazing. 0.71

01:18:24.000 Yeah.

01:18:25.000 We're looking at, for people who are listening, we're looking at this...

01:18:27.000 How about Mars One?

01:18:27.000 Look at Mars One sculptures on the planet.

01:18:29.000 For people that are listening, we're looking at this geometric object that's...

01:18:35.000 Circular, but it's got squared edges.

01:18:37.000 What would you call that?

01:18:38.000 What is that?

01:18:39.000 A hex?

01:18:40.000 What is that?

01:18:41.000 It is a sacred geometric form, and these guys are from San Francisco.

01:18:51.000 We know these guys.

01:18:54.000 Whatever this geometric form is...

01:18:56.000 Are they the ones making my chandelier?

01:18:57.000 Yes, yes.

01:18:58.000 They're making my chandeliers for Entheon.

01:19:01.000 I'm going to have chandeliers where they turn, and the light falls on people.

01:19:08.000 It's environmental.

01:19:09.000 What is it?

01:19:09.000 It's called, Jamie.

01:19:10.000 Fest 300, a sneak peek at the coolest art coming to Burning Man.

01:19:14.000 Oh, honey.

01:19:15.000 Look at that.

01:19:17.000 So you can see this online if you go Google it.

01:19:21.000 It's really stunning, this image.

01:19:24.000 Okay, so there's a magazine that has a bunch of these images.

01:19:26.000 Oh, God, that's amazing.

01:19:28.000 That's cool.

01:19:29.000 Almost worth going.

01:19:30.000 Yeah.

01:19:32.000 Maybe if you bring a big tour bus.

01:19:34.000 Yeah.

01:19:35.000 Well, we bring an RV. You don't want to come, Joe, without an RV. You want to come with an RV. Well, thanks for telling me.

01:19:41.000 I was ready to hike.

01:19:42.000 Are you kidding?

01:19:43.000 No, we don't camp.

01:19:44.000 How long does it take to get out there?

01:19:45.000 Where is it?

01:19:46.000 Let's see.

01:19:47.000 Tens of thousands of people do camp.

01:19:48.000 Nine hours from here.

01:19:49.000 Where is it?

01:19:50.000 It's Black Rock City out in... 0.99

01:19:53.000 It's about an hour from Reno.

01:19:54.000 It's in Nevada.

01:19:55.000 It's in Nevada.

01:19:57.000 Yeah.

01:19:57.000 It's probably got a lot of nuclear energy out there.

01:19:59.000 Mm.

01:20:00.000 God knows.

01:20:01.000 Right?

01:20:01.000 That's where they do those tests.

01:20:02.000 You ever see that animated GIF? It's like a little movie of all the nuclear tests that they've done in Nevada.

01:20:09.000 Shit. 1.00

01:20:10.000 Ooh. 1.00

01:20:10.000 Might explain a lot. 1.00

01:20:12.000 Yeah.

01:20:12.000 Explain a lot about what's going on out there.

01:20:14.000 Hundreds of them.

01:20:16.000 They did this thing from like 1940, whatever it was, the time when they detonated the first atomic bomb to present.

01:20:24.000 It's the bottom of a sea that once was.

01:20:27.000 It's made of crushed shell.

01:20:30.000 And, you know, it feels like sand, but if you walk on it, you won't be able to use your feet in the middle of the winter.

01:20:37.000 What?

01:20:37.000 What I'm saying is it lasts.

01:20:39.000 What does that mean?

01:20:40.000 Moisture out of your feet.

01:20:41.000 You won't be able to use your feet in the middle of the winter.

01:20:43.000 What does that mean?

01:20:44.000 They're cracking.

01:20:45.000 They're cracking.

01:20:45.000 Even in the middle of winter.

01:20:47.000 I did it once.

01:20:47.000 I'm just telling you.

01:20:49.000 I had to walk back from the man to our camp without any shoes because I lost my shoes.

01:20:55.000 And I walked back through.

01:20:57.000 And it feels like sand at first.

01:20:59.000 But then it's like knives.

01:21:03.000 Like little tiny little knives.

01:21:04.000 They're like shells.

01:21:05.000 It's like crushed shells.

01:21:06.000 And it messed up your feet?

01:21:08.000 And all winter I was dealing with cracked feet.

01:21:10.000 Happy Playa feet.

01:21:12.000 See, you have to wear boots and really cover up.

01:21:16.000 And it gets to be like 110 degrees in the day and 40 degrees at night.

01:21:20.000 Sounds like you're trying to keep me off.

01:21:22.000 I know, I know.

01:21:23.000 Trying to keep me off the Playa.

01:21:24.000 There's too many things.

01:21:25.000 Well, we're building a place at COSM that is going to house some of the sculptures and have little sculptural areas.

01:21:33.000 And we have these Small gatherings by comparison to that.

01:21:38.000 They'll never be huge like that, but hundreds of people will gather.

01:21:42.000 So it can still feel kind of tribal and community-oriented.

01:21:46.000 But, you know, a lot of the same music is enjoyed.

01:21:49.000 We always have fire circle and we always have fire spinning.

01:21:52.000 We actually teach fire spinning at COSM. Do you worry about that getting out of hand?

01:21:57.000 Like fire?

01:21:57.000 All that fire spinning around?

01:21:59.000 Those people are the most cautious.

01:22:01.000 And we also have a relationship with the fire department there in our town.

01:22:06.000 We have a sheriff on property.

01:22:08.000 At each event where there are, you know, large numbers of people.

01:22:15.000 And so we, you know, safety first.

01:22:17.000 But there's ways of doing it.

01:22:19.000 So when do you anticipate this entire thing, the entire COSM? We should tell everybody that means Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

01:22:28.000 That's what COSM stands for.

01:22:30.000 And when do you anticipate that being fully operational and in action?

01:22:37.000 Well, right now it is open.

01:22:40.000 We're open like four days a week so that people...

01:22:43.000 We have an ongoing stream of people who just are visitors, and there are small art exhibits that are on display now.

01:22:52.000 We're working on Entheon.

01:22:53.000 That's where the grand exhibit will be housed, and the exhibit that we had on display for five years...

01:23:00.000 In the city, that is not currently on display.

01:23:03.000 The sacred mirrors are not there, but they will be in the new space.

01:23:07.000 And so the new space, as we said, we're thinking we'll open sometime in 2017, probably toward the end of the year.

01:23:15.000 And then, as we can, we will build the outside of it, you know, the sculpture.

01:23:22.000 It's just a matter of how many years it's going to take.

01:23:25.000 It's going to probably take a few years.

01:23:27.000 You could win the Power Bowl Lotto.

01:23:29.000 Yeah.

01:23:29.000 And then you would be able to do it real fast.

01:23:31.000 Massive donations can come in.

01:23:32.000 All these things can happen.

01:23:33.000 You're much more likely to get donations.

01:23:34.000 Yes.

01:23:35.000 All these things can happen.

01:23:36.000 I mean, the Kickstarter thing...

01:23:38.000 Look, Joe, you were really helpful to us when the last time we did the podcast, there was definitely a Rogan bump that happened to the Kickstarter that took us to a new level.

01:23:53.000 Well, the good news is that there's probably like...

01:23:57.000 How many more million people listening now?

01:24:00.000 How many years ago was it that you guys came on last year?

01:24:03.000 2013. So, that was, we were getting probably like 4 million downloads a month.

01:24:08.000 Probably triple that now, I'd say.

01:24:10.000 At least.

01:24:10.000 From what it was three years ago.

01:24:11.000 At least triple.

01:24:12.000 And then with the YouTube.

01:24:13.000 Yeah, plus the YouTube, yeah.

01:24:14.000 So, it's probably like, we're in the neighborhood of 30 million downloads a month.

01:24:18.000 Well, thank you for joining us and being a temple builder.

01:24:22.000 Joining us?

01:24:23.000 Temple builder? 0.90

01:24:24.000 You are.

01:24:24.000 You're helping us build this temple, Joe.

01:24:25.000 Sounds like you're implicating me in something.

01:24:27.000 I am.

01:24:27.000 I totally am.

01:24:28.000 I think that...

01:24:30.000 There's going to be a lot of people that are excited about it.

01:24:31.000 I think the idea behind it is beautiful.

01:24:34.000 The idea that you guys are leaving it for the community and building it for the community is beautiful.

01:24:38.000 And that's one of the best arguments for religion that I've ever heard.

01:24:43.000 And best arguments for having a religion be tax-exempt that I've ever heard.

01:24:47.000 I mean, you guys are literally doing it for other people.

01:24:49.000 You're doing it for everybody.

01:24:51.000 It's awesome.

01:24:51.000 And, you know, your artwork, I'm just a huge fan of what you do, and I just think that the design itself is literally, like I said, probably the coolest building on the planet.

01:25:01.000 And it's a real, I mean, what you're doing is essentially an extension of the great works of all these, you know, when you're talking about the Sistine Chapel, or if you're talking about the Egyptian pyramids, or any of these sacred sites that exist all throughout the world, you're doing a modern version of that,

01:25:17.000 and it's amazing.

01:25:18.000 It's really, really cool.

01:25:19.000 Alex's 50 greatest works, I think, will be on view there in their original form.

01:25:25.000 Not Giclee's, but the actual paintings that Alex stroked with his own hand.

01:25:30.000 And some of them have become really iconic to people.

01:25:33.000 There are a lot of people out there that have Alex's posters and t-shirts.

01:25:37.000 Oh, I have a bunch.

01:25:37.000 And Giclee's and everything.

01:25:39.000 But to see the originals, that's a study for other artists.

01:25:43.000 What is a Giclee?

01:25:44.000 That's like the prints that a lot of people have, the limited edition prints that they have of paintings that wonderful, labor-intensive art is made.

01:25:53.000 I've never heard that word.

01:25:54.000 You ever heard that word?

01:25:54.000 It's a print.

01:25:55.000 Limited edition prints.

01:25:56.000 I've never heard it.

01:25:56.000 I've read it.

01:25:57.000 I thought it was a gleeky or something.

01:26:01.000 Well, you know, the other thing about Anthion is that it's going to display the work of the international visionary art movement.

01:26:08.000 And these are, I mean...

01:26:12.000 If you liked my stuff, you should see some of the young people that are making art out of their journeys now.

01:26:19.000 They're evolving beyond my work.

01:26:23.000 Also, I think they're building an encyclopedia of these dimensions of altered states that people can say, It was something like that.

01:26:34.000 Well, it's very specific in that if you go back before the 1960s and you look at the art, it really didn't represent the trips.

01:26:42.000 It just didn't.

01:26:43.000 And you look at it now, there's a giant body of art that represents these psychedelic trips that really didn't exist before.

01:26:51.000 So, in a lot of ways, it is a quiet new chapter in the world of art that one day I think people are going to look back on.

01:27:01.000 Once we realized the ridiculousness of the prohibition on drugs, especially on psychedelic drugs, non-toxic, non-problematic, as far as health repercussions, and you wonder, what was it about our restrictive society that put this sweeping,

01:27:18.000 comprehensive ban on psychedelic substances in 1970, and what were the ramifications?

01:27:23.000 What were the consequences of society?

01:27:26.000 So, you know, there was no organic.

01:27:28.000 There was no eco.

01:27:30.000 There was no eco-careers.

01:27:32.000 There was no, you know, save the planet talk.

01:27:37.000 Climate change, we never heard about that growing up.

01:27:40.000 Well, there was people that were talking about it, and there were certainly people that were recycling and composting and doing things along those lines and trying to leave a smaller footprint back then aware of it.

01:27:50.000 But as far as a gigantic global conscious movement and also the urgency that's attached to it today where people are stepping back and they're looking at islands disappearing and, you know, they're looking at the rising sea levels and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is real.

01:28:05.000 This is actually happening inside of our lifetime.

01:28:08.000 There's a lot going on that I think...

01:28:13.000 We're in the middle of.

01:28:15.000 And I think this visionary art that is going on right now, we're sort of in the middle of that.

01:28:20.000 I think as we look back on it, or as people past us look back on it, they're going to say, this is a very specific era.

01:28:26.000 This was an era...

01:28:29.000 Go back and look at religious history and you look at the enlightenment, you look at the various styles of art that's connected to religion or cultural change.

01:28:41.000 You see these big shifts.

01:28:42.000 I think the visionary art of psychedelics is a big shift.

01:28:46.000 It's huge.

01:28:47.000 I think that it's showing that the big news today is the sacramental Sort of reformation, you know, that there's a return of the sacrament to the West.

01:29:05.000 It's been demonized and hidden for thousands of years.

01:29:09.000 Now it's back, and you're not going to get rid of it.

01:29:13.000 Now it's here because we need it.

01:29:15.000 There's nothing that's going to turn consciousness around toward a sacred planet that wants to save itself from self-destruction like psychedelics.

01:29:27.000 There is no greater prescription for soul medicine than this is the stuff that is curing All of the traumatic stress of the vets, you know, marijuana is leading the way in the medicinals and opening the door literally for the sacred drugs,

01:29:48.000 the return of the sacred drugs.

01:29:50.000 We don't even have a context established in America, but it's beginning.

01:29:56.000 You know, the UDV church won their right to use the sacrament.

01:30:00.000 The Native American church has peyote. 1.00

01:30:04.000 There is legal precedent for religious use already, as there has been throughout history, except for the last couple thousand years.

01:30:15.000 Well, in this country, as you were talking about with MDMA, I mean, just really the last few decades, and 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, I bought that stuff online, like in 2001 or something like that.

01:30:29.000 You could just order it from some chemical company.

01:30:31.000 They sent you a bottle of it.

01:30:32.000 You'd get the whole world high.

01:30:33.000 I remember that.

01:30:34.000 Yeah, it was great times.

01:30:36.000 Yes, it was.

01:30:37.000 And somehow, we've got to find a way to incorporate these sacraments.

01:30:44.000 Well, I think they're being incorporated.

01:30:45.000 I think one of the things that you said that you just sort of glossed over, but it's incredibly important, is that marijuana is the door opener.

01:30:51.000 Marijuana is the guy that you let into the party that has the magic dust, and he went, whew, and he blew it on everybody.

01:30:56.000 Because once that gets in, and especially edible marijuana, because edible marijuana is a psychedelic drug, and many people don't know it, and that's one of the reasons why when people eat brownies or something, they'll say, oh my god, someone laced the brownie.

01:31:11.000 No, that's what it is.

01:31:12.000 That is the most potent form of marijuana, is the edible form of marijuana, and it is very visionary, especially in high doses.

01:31:19.000 It's incredibly introspective, acid-like in a lot of ways.

01:31:23.000 You know, you get a perspective that is life changing and shifting and it's one of those directional shifts where even if it's a small degree of change over the course of the rest of your life that small degree of change could equal a very large shift in the direction that you're going as you continue down your path that slight turn to the right will make a huge difference five years from now ten years from now I think marijuana becoming legal in Colorado and we are seeing not

01:31:53.000 just the positive Benefits in terms of the community.

01:31:57.000 You're looking at people that are making way more money than they've ever made before.

01:32:03.000 You're looking at housing prices, real estate prices going up, people having a new sense of community where they're like, oh, there's others like us.

01:32:12.000 It's like a magnet for freaks.

01:32:14.000 And they've all flown into Colorado and set up shop there.

01:32:17.000 It's fascinating.

01:32:19.000 I did a show there a couple months ago at the Belco Theater, and it was amazing.

01:32:24.000 It was like, this place has changed in a year!

01:32:27.000 I recorded my last comedy special about two years ago, two years in August, in Colorado, and then I did the most recent one about six months ago in Colorado, the most recent show that I did there.

01:32:39.000 And I could feel the shift when you're driving down the street.

01:32:43.000 You see the difference.

01:32:44.000 There's pot everywhere.

01:32:46.000 There's people smiling.

01:32:46.000 The lowest incidence of drunk driving they've ever recorded.

01:32:51.000 Lowest incidence of violent crime.

01:32:53.000 Everything is dropping.

01:32:54.000 Suicide rates.

01:32:55.000 Yes.

01:32:56.000 And half.

01:32:56.000 Yes.

01:32:57.000 And money.

01:32:58.000 The money that the state is making is insane.

01:33:01.000 They literally have a surplus of taxes.

01:33:03.000 It's an attractor.

01:33:04.000 They've made more money from taxes from marijuana than they did from alcohol for the first time ever.

01:33:10.000 No one's ever done that.

01:33:11.000 And you've got this happy community.

01:33:13.000 And now Seattle has entered into the mix.

01:33:15.000 Now Washington, D.C. is entering into the mix.

01:33:17.000 In November, California is going to vote on it.

01:33:19.000 I guarantee it's going to go through.

01:33:20.000 You think?

01:33:21.000 Yeah.

01:33:21.000 Oh, yes!

01:33:22.000 Of course it is.

01:33:23.000 How could it not?

01:33:24.000 Just try to send a little blessing New York way, okay?

01:33:26.000 Because New York is so far behind.

01:33:28.000 I'm so ashamed of us.

01:33:30.000 Come on.

01:33:30.000 We've got to move that direction.

01:33:32.000 And our people will just love it so much.

01:33:37.000 I think that just the...

01:33:39.000 The ideologies that were in place that stopped it, they're eroding.

01:33:44.000 Those people are too old.

01:33:45.000 They're too out of touch.

01:33:46.000 They don't understand the mindset of the young people.

01:33:49.000 And they've really underestimated the power of this movement.

01:33:54.000 This is a wave, and you can't suppress it anymore.

01:33:57.000 It's a movement of people that are upwardly spiraling.

01:34:00.000 They're people that are healthy, beautiful, positive, ecological, save the planet, educated, more thinking people.

01:34:08.000 It's such an attractor.

01:34:09.000 Yes.

01:34:10.000 And so everybody wants to be part.

01:34:11.000 They wonder, what is that?

01:34:13.000 It can have a power.

01:34:14.000 It's what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about plant intelligence.

01:34:18.000 There is an intelligence in marijuana, an absolute, undoubted intelligence.

01:34:23.000 And it exists, I think, in all plants.

01:34:26.000 It exists in...

01:34:26.000 It does, but...

01:34:27.000 ...and funguses as well.

01:34:28.000 Not all plants are mirroring systems inside of...

01:34:33.000 The human body like cannabis.

01:34:35.000 Right.

01:34:35.000 Since it was probably the original or one of the original cultivated plants, I think that humanity over the millennia worked out a symbiotic relationship with this plant and so we have the endocannabinoid system.

01:34:51.000 Yeah.

01:34:53.000 And I would say that probably many of our health deficiencies are because we're not getting our cannabis THC deficiencies.

01:35:04.000 The AMA in the 30s went to Congress and said, please don't make cannabis illegal.

01:35:14.000 It's in half of our medicine.

01:35:17.000 You know, for 87 years it's been part of the American pharmacopoeia.

01:35:21.000 Please allow us to continue to use it.

01:35:24.000 No.

01:35:24.000 It was struck down.

01:35:26.000 And so it's been repressed since then.

01:35:29.000 And a lot of it has just been pure racism, actually.

01:35:32.000 That's the cause of it.

01:35:34.000 Well, that was what those recent papers were released about the Nixon administration.

01:35:37.000 It's one of the ways they demonize the black rights movement, civil rights movement, and also the anti-war movement, is they attacked marijuana and they attacked psychedelic drugs.

01:35:48.000 And that was the reason why they passed that sweeping legislation in the first place.

01:35:52.000 It was just to be able to have a reason to arrest those people.

01:35:55.000 They knew they could attack the communities, and in attacking those communities, the best way to do it was to go after the drugs. 0.84

01:36:01.000 Nixon hated them, and Nixon was a traitor to America.

01:36:08.000 Nixon was probably, with Bush, one of the worst we've ever experienced. 0.98

01:36:14.000 And through his hatred and venom, we have the drug war that now for over 40 years, we've just been laboring under the boot of a fascist traitor that once resigned from office. 0.97

01:36:29.000 He was. 0.96

01:36:29.000 He was, you know, impeached, really. 0.96

01:36:31.000 But I wanted to go back to what you were saying about fungus, because people sometimes ask, what is LSD? What does it look like?

01:36:40.000 What is it?

01:36:41.000 And I wanted to mention that recently there's microscopic images of, well, what it is, is it's fungus growing on rye.

01:36:51.000 So there's these microscopic images that you can call up and look at that see the LSD. It looks like a field of little tiny mushrooms.

01:37:01.000 That's all.

01:37:01.000 Just microscopic.

01:37:03.000 Well, you remember the revelation that they had a few years back when they were trying to figure out what caused the Salem witch trials, and one of the leading theories was that they had had a late frost, and the late frost had caused These funguses to grow on bread,

01:37:23.000 ergot to grow on bread.

01:37:25.000 And that when that happened, these people were experiencing very acid-like effects from eating bread.

01:37:31.000 And they started freaking out and blaming people for it and thinking that they were being possessed.

01:37:35.000 And it was a whole wave of paranoia that came from that.

01:37:38.000 It's unbelievably fascinating when you think about it that way.

01:37:42.000 It really is.

01:37:43.000 It's actually to be cured from ergotism.

01:37:49.000 This Bishop Flaubert.

01:37:52.000 He was responsible for Chartres Cathedral.

01:37:55.000 Like a thousand years ago basically prayed to Mary and said, if you'll cure me of this ergotism, which is very dangerous but it leads to many visions, I will build you the most beautiful temple ever built.

01:38:12.000 And so he was cured and he did found a shark cathedral, but as a result.

01:38:17.000 So that's one of the cool things about ergotism and ergot.

01:38:21.000 But the coolest thing is definitely LSD and Hoffman's ability to stabilize that.

01:38:28.000 Yeah.

01:38:29.000 And then, so basically the coolest thing about the psychedelics to me is that they, and the science that has been done, is the Good Friday experiment and Roland Griffith's work And that has basically given us the best evidence for the existence of God because 65% of people who take psilocybin in a safe setting and they're spiritually inclined will have a full-blown mystical experience.

01:38:57.000 That's now science.

01:38:59.000 It's proven.

01:39:00.000 So a majority of people who take a psychedelic basically in a positive setting and they don't, you know, they're not pre-schizo themselves, you know, not a borderline personality if you're stable.

01:39:14.000 Pre-schizo, yeah, that's important to put out, you know, because I think that a lot of people think that psychedelics are for everybody, but unfortunately there's some folks amongst us that have a very difficult time with just regular stable sobriety.

01:39:27.000 And mental issues, you know?

01:39:29.000 But I think in the end, they're going to, with science, medicine and science, I think what's going to be found out is that these psychedelics are going to cure schizophrenia.

01:39:39.000 I really think that when they use it properly, because that's what the science is doing now, they're experimenting with With schizophrenics?

01:39:47.000 What science is being going on?

01:39:49.000 I'm not sure if there's any studies with schizophrenics, but because it mirrors schizophrenia, it may be...

01:39:56.000 I don't know.

01:39:58.000 I think that research will be done related to all kinds of...

01:40:03.000 Psychological illness.

01:40:05.000 But anyway, it's curing so many things that can cure cluster headaches.

01:40:10.000 And the studies are, you know, like Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, all the big universities that MAPS can get funding for.

01:40:18.000 They're funding all that.

01:40:19.000 Well, MAPS is really fascinating and amazing, and what they've done is just add an actual intellectual perspective on psychedelic drugs, an undeniably researched, really well-documented perspective that's so important.

01:40:36.000 I mean, when I had...

01:40:39.000 My first experiences with MAPS, I remember thinking like, thank God there's someone like this out there.

01:40:46.000 Someone like Doblin out there, Rick Doblin, who has taken the super intelligent approach to recognizing what these substances are and what are the positive benefits are and how can you get these things slowly but surely through the legal system.

01:41:00.000 And that's what they're doing now with MDMA. That's what they're doing now with the studies that they're doing on soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and all sorts of other people too, police officers, anybody...

01:41:11.000 Rape victims. 0.79

01:41:12.000 Rape victims, yeah. 1.00

01:41:13.000 Violence victims.

01:41:14.000 Exactly.

01:41:14.000 I think that's...

01:41:16.000 It's so important.

01:41:17.000 It's just...

01:41:18.000 These are...

01:41:19.000 Really beneficial things that we're being denied, and we're being denied by people who haven't experienced them, which is the most ironic aspect of it.

01:41:26.000 It's like someone having penicillin, but they won't let you try it, because they don't use it themselves.

01:41:31.000 And we know that such things as Ibogaine exist.

01:41:36.000 There is a way to interrupt opioid Addiction and the addiction process.

01:41:42.000 This is a potential cure for the many millions of people who are currently opiate addicted.

01:41:53.000 Ibogaine therapy has been working out miraculous results for people.

01:41:58.000 It helps them turn around their lives and to stop needing the junk.

01:42:04.000 In two to three days.

01:42:06.000 Yeah.

01:42:06.000 One treatment.

01:42:08.000 It's literally miraculous.

01:42:10.000 We know it exists.

01:42:12.000 The Department of Defense ought to be using it for our poor vets that have returned from an unrighteous battle. 1.00

01:42:20.000 The whole cause of their suicidal behavior.

01:42:23.000 I believe, is because they were told to go into an unrighteous battle.

01:42:30.000 It was a war waged on lies, and only to create, basically to kick a hornet's nest, you know, to keep endless war going.

01:42:42.000 It's working pretty good.

01:42:45.000 Well, post-traumatic stress disorder, what's really fascinating about it is that there's this reaction to stress, to intense stress, traumatic situations, and that your body has this almost this Intense anticipation of a constant battle of constant stress and that that can be interrupted and that this is there's really no other method I mean you can go to therapy all your life and slowly perhaps slowly erode the memories of this and give

01:43:15.000 yourself some psychological tools to manage these experiences But as far as like something that can sort of stop it in its tracks There's never been anything that's demonstrated that has the power of psychedelics The post-traumatic stress disorder studies are showing that 85% of vets that have it and are otherwise untreatable are having success after one treatment.

01:43:39.000 And MAPS got a grant to do a second and third trial.

01:43:44.000 That means the people, the 15% who didn't You know, really feel a relief from post-traumatic stress disorder, get a second turn and a third turn.

01:43:54.000 So it's amazing.

01:43:56.000 It's amazing.

01:43:58.000 It's not just the substance, but it's the psychological therapy relationship.

01:44:03.000 It's also the reset.

01:44:04.000 The reset.

01:44:05.000 The control, alt, delete for the mind.

01:44:07.000 The resetting of the consciousness.

01:44:09.000 That I think so many of us operate on momentum.

01:44:12.000 We operate on the momentum of our past.

01:44:14.000 And that's all we know.

01:44:15.000 And it's sort of the...

01:44:18.000 We're connected to that momentum like a safety blanket.

01:44:21.000 Like, we believe that this momentum equals the future.

01:44:24.000 And it's very difficult to get out of those grooves that are so deeply carved in our consciousness.

01:44:30.000 That's right.

01:44:30.000 And almost nothing does it.

01:44:33.000 But MDMA will allow you to get that distance.

01:44:36.000 And for you, in order for you to...

01:44:44.000 You know, the psychologists basically say that you have to be able to look at your subjective state from another objective observation on that subjective state.

01:44:57.000 And so that's literally what's happening with the MDMA. You're distanced from it.

01:45:05.000 You can look at your behavior or what happened to you with more dispassion.

01:45:12.000 You can have compassion on yourself and start to forgive everyone involved.

01:45:21.000 It's miraculous and life-changing, which then leads to new neural growth.

01:45:27.000 In both psilocybin and MDMA, they've been charting that there is new neural pathways.

01:45:34.000 Not only does it just feel it that way, but it literally is that way.

01:45:40.000 It is changing your mind.

01:45:41.000 It's changing your brain and your mind.

01:45:45.000 All right, folks.

01:45:46.000 The Kickstarter.

01:45:47.000 Tell people, Jamie, put that stuff up on the screen.

01:45:49.000 Show people how to get to it.

01:45:51.000 And if you could give out the URL. BuildEntheon.com.

01:45:57.000 BuildEntheon.com.

01:45:58.000 E-N-T-H-E-O-N.com. 0.66

01:46:02.000 BuildEntheon.com.

01:46:03.000 923 backers.

01:46:05.000 Look at this, folks.

01:46:08.000 $122,626,000 is already pledged.

01:46:15.000 Bam.

01:46:15.000 Yeah, it's coming.

01:46:16.000 Great rewards.

01:46:17.000 Wonderful art.

01:46:18.000 Great rewards.

01:46:19.000 And we will put this up on Twitter today, and we'll put it up on Facebook today, and we'll let everybody know.

01:46:25.000 What's up?

01:46:26.000 Thank you, Joe.

01:46:27.000 You guys are awesome, too.

01:46:29.000 I appreciate you very much.

01:46:31.000 Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back tomorrow with Allison Rosen.

01:46:34.000 Take care.

01:46:35.000 See you soon.

01:46:36.000 Bye-bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 10, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #797 - Alex & Allyson Grey

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