#285 - Psychedelic Test Subject: Billionaires are Funding a Drug Fueled Holy War | Travis Kitchens

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Travis Kitchens was a psychedelic research subject for Johns Hopkins University who eventually uncovered a secret plan to revive religion with drugs. Travis is currently a freelance journalist who writes extensively on the history and philosophy of psychedelic research. He lives in Kentucky. SPONSORS http://evening.ver.so/danny - Get 15% off your first order. https://hims.com/danny - Start your FREE online visit today. https://shopmando.com - Use code DANNY for $5 off your starter pack. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Travis Substack - https://vegetabletelevision.substack.com The Most Controversial Paper in the History of Psychedelic Research - https://bit.ly/3WWoayH The Strange Case of The Immortality Key - https://bit.ly/42MzIIL FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Johns Hopkins' psychedelic study 08:22 - 'Robo-tripping' 17:00 - The Council on Spiritual Practices 25:30 - Can humans summon aliens? 43:33 - How the psychedelic renaissance started 56:11 - Did ancient mystery cults start Christianity? 01:01:25 - Graham Hancock vs Academia 01:11:30 - The fall of Christianity 01:20:47 - What happens to the brain on psychedelics 01:25:34 - MAPS 01:33:22 - The Catholic church is pushing drugs 01:38:10 - The Immortality Key: A New Reformation 01:42:59 - DARPA: Psychedelics on the battlefield 01:48:38 - Travis' weird email from Roland Griffiths 01:52:49 - MKUltra 2.0 01:57:36 - Reviving religion with Psychedelic drugs 02:15:16 - Secret unreleased psychedelic paper 02:24:33 - Who is funding psychedelic medicine research? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And it's not that so much I'm scared, I'm simply trying to report. When you have behavior scientists teaming up with venture capitalists in the Catholic Church, that's worth writing about. That's a story. The pews are empty out for a reason. You lied and covered up a scandal in which you destroyed people's lives. Now, let's try to rebuild it with psychedelic drugs. This is an insane idea.

• 0:26Danny Jones?

  What's up Travis?

• 0:27Speaker 00

  What's happening?

• 0:28Danny Jones?

  Thanks for coming, brother.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

• 0:30Danny Jones?

  Of course. Dude, your background is fascinating, how you got into journalism and how you got into this crazy, weird, long investigation on religion and psychedelic research and the psychedelic Renaissance and this stuff with the immortality key. For people who don't know who you are, just can you give us like a background on how you got into journalism and what happened with you being involved in that John Hopkins psychedelic study?

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I was living in Baltimore and, um, sorry, I was living in Baltimore and, um, my background is in engineering, so I was actually working at a local hospital, uh, installing and repairing medical equipment. And, um, I got into journalism because a friend of mine, Baynard Woods, uh, I'm, uh, he was an editor at the Baltimore City Paper, which is like an alt weekly. I'm guessing your audience knows what an alt weekly. Before, uh, the internet, all over the country, you'd have like the Tampa City Paper, the Philadelphia City Paper, the Baltimore City Paper. And alt weeklies were a place to where, uh, non-credentialed journalists could write about the local scene, local bands and all of this, you know, like the Village Voice is kind of the prototype. So the Baltimore City Paper is like legendary alt weekly.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  I met Baynard Woods and he said, "Hey, I've been writing this column on country and bluegrass music, but I, you know, they gave me a bunch of other work. Do you want to do it?" Uh, I was not a writer at all. In fact, I was making films at the time. And he said, or I said, "You know what? To hell with it. I love country and bluegrass." And I thought, "Why not? I'll try it." He, he thought I was a writer, I think. And I didn't say anything. So I was like, "You know what? I'll try it and if it sucks, they'll just fire me."

• 2:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Um, so I started doing that and then every now and then they, they would send me a different, um, assignment, you know, go to the museum and write this up, or go to a concert and write the concert up, or interview this person. And so I started being like, "Man, this is fun." Compared to film where you need a lot of money and four or five different people and all kinds of equipment, you need a pencil and a piece of paper or, or an iPhone and you're ready to go. Um, so I happen to live in Highland Town in East Baltimore. And Bayview Hospital is the site of the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Center. And so they advertised in the Baltimore City Paper. And so it was, there was like a novelty aspect when you write an article. You want to see your byline to me. It was like, cool. I wrote an article. Look, my name's in the paper.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  So I was down in Fells Point at Bertha's Muscles with my friend Bernard, who was the bartender down there for years and years. And I was flipping through the paper, looking for an article I wrote and I passed a page and it said, have you done psychedelic drugs? We will pay you to participate in a study looking into the effects of hallucinogens on mood and behavior. Something like that. And so I immediately called and some, you know, I was thinking, you know, the bureaucracy of Hopkins, you know, will they ever get back or will it happen? But somebody actually picked up and he said, yeah, why don't you come up here next week and we'll talk. And so I was like, okay, so I went up there and they did, you know, they do a physical. They give you a drug test and then they do essentially talk therapy before they let you know. They want to know about your background.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  They don't want somebody in a psychedelic study who has a history of mental illness. Uh, they don't want somebody who's a drug addict. Um, a lot of the studies are, they want people who are naive, meaning you've never taken a psychedelic drug. Uh, this study was the first one they had done to where they specifically wanted people with experience. And I'd already taken LSD, psilocybin, many other psychedelics. Um, and so I got into the study and that's how I really, I had already been interested in psychedelics. For a long time, uh, Terrence, you know, standard stuff, Terrence McKenna, uh, John C. Lilly, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, just the standard stuff that you can buy at a new age bookstore. That was my experience with psychedelics.

• 4:12Danny Jones?

  How old were you at the time?

• 4:14Speaker 00

  I was probably 25.

• 4:15Danny Jones?

  You were 25?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, uh, when I finally entered the study, I probably was maybe 28.

• 4:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? It took three years for the time you saw it?

• 4:23Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no. What I'm saying is, well, let's do the math. It was in 2014, so I was there, I was 29 or 30.

• 4:31Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  When I did the study.

• 4:32Danny Jones?

  And what was it like when you, so you, you applied for it and they brought you in and like, what was the process of, of being introduced into this?

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, okay. So like I said, they interview you and make sure that you're a good fit. And they say, okay, this is a guy we can have. Uh, these things are heavily screened, right? You can't be over 50. Uh, they want a particular kind of person because they want a particular kind of result, right? So this study was, there was a whole list of psychedelics. They didn't say this is going to be psilocybin. They said it could be psilocybin, it could be LSD, it could be ketamine, it could be DXM, it could be any of these things because it's double blind. And so that, that was the onboarding process. And then they just tell you, uh, show up at, I did it every Friday. You pick a day of the week. They, they run studies Monday through Friday and they said, you're going to start every Friday at 8 a.m. until it's over. And there's, I think there were six sessions and you're going to get

• 5:25Speaker 00

  one placebo. And so I started one Friday, you show up at 8 a.m. There's very strict instructions. You can have like a banana for breakfast, but you can't go out to Denny's and get a Grand Slam or Uncle Herschel's at Cracker Barrel. They want your stomach mainly empty so that the drug takes effect very quickly. If not, you may get there and then it, you know, 3 p.m. They're like, well, you know, you're still tripping. They're trying to, it's, it's hard to do because as you well know, it's hard to fit a psychedelic trip inside of strict lines of a business day. Like, well, you know,

• 5:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  It's wrapped up, kill the trip, you know? And so sometimes, you know, they, you know, one time I can tell you about, they had to kind of help me out of there because they, this was high doses of psychedelics. So one Friday, uh, 8 a.m., uh, yeah, I ate my banana and I, I would live so close, I walked up to Bayview Research Center. Now,

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Some people out there, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is the most prestigious medical institution in the country. The main, and it's a university, so downtown Baltimore, you've got the Homewood Campus. And then by my house in East Baltimore, which is actually Greektown, which is ironic considering the context here. But Bayview Hospital has the National Institute of Drug Abuse. They have the Joseph V. Brady Behavioral Biology Center, which is where we were at. Because remember, these are, people get confused. They think, these are studies in drugs. They're not chopping up mushrooms and looking at them and putting under microscopes. They're studying religion and they're studying human behavior. They're interested in the intersection of religion and human behavior.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  That's what the studies are looking at. They're looking into religious experience and mystical experience, though it's sold as a study looking into the effects of drugs.

• 7:08Danny Jones?

  Was there a point, like, at what point did you start to question the drive behind the study and the intention behind the study?

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Well, I got out of the study and like most people, you know, I had five very powerful experiences. Though I had done psychedelics before, I never had anything remotely close to what I would call a mystical, spiritual, or religious experience. Taking drugs in one of these studies with a particular playlist, blindfold.

• 7:37Danny Jones?

  Music playlist?

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Music playlist that's intended to drive a particular type of experience. They're trying to cultivate a very particular kind of experience. They're not going to let you pick the playlist, or just hang out and take drugs. It's not like going to Grateful Dead. So, they are masters at inducing a particular kind of experience that they believe is therapeutic, and then studying the effects of the drugs. So, when did I begin to question the aim of the study?

• 8:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and first of all, how long did you do, you did it for how long?

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Well, it lasted several months, because after one particularly powerful trip, it had weird effects on me, and Roland Griffiths said... Um, let's wait a couple of weeks and normally you do five in a row, five Fridays in a row. I ended up skipping a couple because of what happened in one session that was DXM.

• 8:22Danny Jones?

  What happened?

• 8:23Speaker 00

  DXM is uh, the active ingredient in Robitussin. And when my, I used to live in San Diego with a bunch of Navy guys, my brother was in the Navy, and they would do what's called robo-tripping. You just drink a bunch of Robitussin.

• 8:34Danny Jones?

  Familiar.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it gives you like a strobing effect and shit.

• 8:37Danny Jones?

  I've never done it, but I heard stories.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:39Danny Jones?

  It's popular down here in Florida.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  It is, yeah. It's popular everywhere. It's something kids can do, that, you know, go to the store and steal some Robitussin.

• 8:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Robo-tripping, baby.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Robo-tripping. So, um, they gave me a really high dose and it almost instantly after taking it, I laid down, I didn't feel good, and it just almost instantly popped me out of my body. And I kind of floated around the room and was seeing myself from different perspectives. And I could see the guides of the study and they were, I could, I felt like I could see them from outside of my body and I could hear them talking about me as if I wasn't in my body. And so it made my body feel very heavy and then it felt like my consciousness floated out of my body. And then what happened was at night, when I went home, I was having uh, sleep paralysis. That night I went home and laid down and in the middle of the night, you know, I lived in

• 9:32Speaker 00

  inner-city Baltimore, it's pretty wild, and I heard somebody knocking at the door. I mean, it was the middle of the night and I uh, couldn't get up. I tried to get up, but instead my, something like my consciousness or something went down to the door and I heard doo doo doo and I tried to get up, but my body wouldn't get up. This is a very common phenomenon, sleep paralysis.

• 9:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  And so I told them, because they called you the next morning like, hey, everything okay? And I was like, well, this thing happened and they said, okay, let me have Roland call you back. And then he said, you know what, let's take a week off just because that was kind of crazy. And it had other really interesting effects too. It made my vision better. Um, it had.

• 10:10Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 10:10Speaker 00

  It has really strange effects. There's not a lot known about it. Um, but they, they were doing psilocybin and DXM head to head.

• 10:17Danny Jones?

  And the D, so you're saying, so, so what about the DXM is so similar to Robitussin?

• 10:22Speaker 00

  That's the active ingredient.

• 10:23Danny Jones?

  That's the ingredient in Robitussin that causes the trip?

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Yep. And you can buy it if you go to, I hate to say this, but if you're an adult. And you want to try it, go to Amazon and you can buy pure DXM pills, as many as you want for like a penny each.

• 10:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  But don't do it, because I will say.

• 10:38Danny Jones?

  Do not do that, folks. Do not do that.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Don't do it, because at high doses, it can put lesions on your brain and turn you into essentially a vegetable. It's dangerous. Don't do it.

• 10:48Danny Jones?

  Holy shit. Okay, so psilocybin and DXM are the two drugs that you were given?

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 10:53Danny Jones?

  But did they tell you before they gave you that?

• 10:55Speaker 00

  No, it's double-blind, so not even the people giving it to you know it. It's extremely strict, so they have the pharmacy come up and they have no idea what it's gonna be. So they give you something and your guide's on it.

• 11:05Danny Jones?

  They don't even know.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  They don't even know. It's double-blind. They have no idea.

• 11:10Danny Jones?

  What do you think the difference was between the DXM and the psilocybin?

• 11:15Speaker 00

  A huge difference, because like I told you, the, I thought it was ketamine. You know, I had done different psychedelics before and I thought this is ketamine, because I fell down. I was on the bed and I felt like I was gonna go under surgery. I thought it was an anesthetic. And it's unlike psilocybin. I mean, you know, the psilocybin experience is there, followed a very kind of typical archetype. DXM doesn't do that. You won't get a mystical experience off of DXM.

• 11:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  It's more like ketamine.

• 11:46Danny Jones?

  And the DXM made your vision better, you said?

• 11:48Speaker 00

  The next day, I felt like, you know, I've worn glasses my whole life, since I was a little kid. I felt like my vision was so much clearer and so much better. If there's some link between that, I don't know, I haven't really looked into it, but they want to know. Look, you have to write a report after every session, and so I put that in there and everything else, because there were a number of effects that I thought, this is really bizarre.

• 12:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Like, I just didn't even have my glasses on and for a while, I just didn't even wear them.

• 12:16Danny Jones?

  With the whole, the whole thing combined, was there any sort of change you noticed in yourself? After the full experiment was completed, like, was there any sort of different outlook? Or any sort of different insight that you took from it?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Well, it gave me an enormous amount of enthusiasm, which is what the drugs do. It gives you an enormous amount of enthusiasm and the immediate thing that... Not everybody, but many, many people have is everybody else has to do this. Everybody, all we have to do is find a way to do it and then you get religion because that's immediately what I thought. So I was writing articles. You know, this is what we have to do. Everybody must do it. This is going to fix everything. I believed all of that.

• 12:57Danny Jones?

  Why did you believe that? Why do you think you believe that?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Because of the the nature of the experience, the nature of the experience gave me the idea that um, the problems in the world didn't result from any external political things or structures in the world. It had to do with a level of spiritual immaturity, I guess maybe you could say, but that the basic idea, which I wrote in an article, was um, that whatever limits,

• 13:25Speaker 00

  whatever obstacles were in my way as far as success and doing the things that I wanted to do and to feeling better were internal, were features of my psychology that could be worked out through one of these processes, through these drugs. So I felt that I had achieved new insight into myself and by achieving new insight into myself, I achieved new insight into the world. It gives you a completely different perspective. You might call a mythological perspective on the world. This is extremely common.

• 13:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  And so this is why when you have these experiences, you start reading stuff like Jung. You start reading stuff like McKenna, who was really a kind of an acolyte of Jung. Because you go, oh, this is a totally different way of looking at the world.

• 14:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  It's the left hand path. It's the esoteric path. So yeah, I definitely felt different. I had a different, I had an enormous amount of enthusiasm and I immediately said, this must be what's behind religion.

• 14:19Danny Jones?

  Long winter nights don't always mean better sleep. They often mean worse sleep. Shorter days, less sunlight and colder weather throw off your melatonin levels. But taking a melatonin supplement isn't the answer. Melatonin supplements contain doses that are way higher than the body naturally produces, leaving you feeling groggy in the morning. They also interfere with your body's ability to regulate its own melatonin production, making you dependent on it as it'll be harder to sleep without it. It can also help you fall asleep, but not stay asleep throughout the night. This is why I take Evening Being by Verso. They created a melatonin free. Drink mix with clinically studied patented ingredients. It's formulated to calm an active mind, help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and improve deep REM sleep, all without creating dependencies or causing morning grogginess.

• 15:03Danny Jones?

  I look forward to drinking Evening Bean every night because it helps my mind stop racing. I fall asleep faster. I don't wake up as much throughout the night and I wake up in a far better mood. And my wife appreciates that. Plus, it tastes great, which is why it has become my go to nightcap. Click the link in the description or head on over to ver.sodanny and use the coupon code Danny at checkout to save 15% on your first order. Again, go to ver.sodanny and use the coupon code Danny at checkout to save 15% on your first order. Thank you, Verso, for sponsoring this episode. Back to the show.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  And I went to, I asked Roland Griffiths, who was in the room. Roland Griffiths started the psychedelic Renaissance. No Roland Griffiths, no psychedelic Renaissance. He's a psychologist, was at Johns Hopkins. He died in 2023. But of course, you're at Johns Hopkins. You got Roland Griffiths, who's, you know, whoo. And so I immediately said, what's behind this? You know, what do these drugs do? I thought for sure he knew. And he said, we don't know. And I'm a OCD type researcher, reader, and I thought there must be an answer for this somewhere. Somewhere must know this sort of what it does from a scientific standpoint. And I did tell him and Matt Johnson, hey, I think this is what's behind religion. You know, I thought this was some great insight and I'm sure everybody says that.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  So Roland, you know, he didn't have much to say about it. Matt said, I don't think so. You should read Andy Letcher's book, Shroom. But I was convinced because I'm not from a, I'm from Kentucky. So I was around people who are religious, but I've never been religious. In this experience, I was convinced that, wow, this is totally supernatural. It's totally real. We don't understand it. What is this? So that was my immediate reaction was to start looking into the origins of religion, into the literature of the psychology of religion, because I wanted to know what we could find out about the drug and what we could find out about these experiences.

• 17:00Danny Jones?

  For people who may not know who Roland Griffiths, Griffiths, Griffiths, he said he was the, the guy who spearheaded the whole psychedelic revolution. Can you explain to people like how that happened and how he became to be?

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, what happened was in the 1990s, a guy named Bob Jesse, who's a computer engineer from Baltimore, he went to Hopkins, genius guy. He went out in the late eighties, he, he was an employee of Oracle, which is owned by Larry Ellison, it was a CIA contractor. It's their first customer was the CIA. Bob Jesse was the like vice president of marketing, he was very high up. He took MDMA to rave, he said, this is going to fix the world, we have to do it, it will usher into utopia. And he started to raise money for studying psychedelics, he held a bunch of conferences. And what they needed, what they did not have, they said, let's restart this psychedelic movement. Timothy Leary, he had ruined it with all these political antics and was being reckless.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  What we need is a scientist with a conservative reputation that can get the application approved to study them. Because there was an embargo on them, and if me or you would have said to the FDA or in the DEA, hey, we want to study psychedelic drugs, would you give us a little bit? And what do you think they're going to say? When Roland Griffiths, who had spent decades studying opioids and tobacco, he was, he was giving opioids to apes. So he's a behavior scientist.

• 18:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so he was at, he was at Hopkins his whole life, he was a very distinguished psychopharmacist.

• 18:24Danny Jones?

  Didn't he criticize like soda companies for putting caffeine in them?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  He did, he studied caffeine and he was on like Jihad against the, against the soft drink manufacturers. So they hate him and they actually published like hit pieces on him. But he was after them because they, a soft drink manufacturer said, we put it in there for, for flavor, but it has no flavor. So they were put, he accused them of putting it in there to addict the consumers. Right? And so he eventually became bored with studying opioids and tobacco.

• 18:53Danny Jones?

  That's interesting though, like wonder, like how did caffeine become such a common theme of soft drinks?

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Good question.

• 19:00Danny Jones?

  Like, cause the only reason I drink sodas is for the caffeine.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 19:04Danny Jones?

  Like, I don't drink a soda for the taste.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  That's what Roland said.

• 19:07Danny Jones?

  Right? If I want a mount- if I'm drinking a Mountain Dew, like, obviously it tastes great, but I'm drinking a Mountain Dew, cause I'm gonna get fucking jacked.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and so when this whole Four, a lot of the press around this came up, you remember when Four Loko, they were like demonizing it, cause it had alcohol and caffeine, and maybe somebody died of it?

• 19:22Danny Jones?

  Alright.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  He got in on that wave, and there were articles about it, where he was admonishing them, saying, "This is bad," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And coffee, he didn't even drink coffee. They're saying, you know-

• 19:30Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe at some point, he started drinking coffee, but there was an interview with him during this, and he said he didn't drink coffee.

• 19:36Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Um, yeah. So, so Bob Jesse, who wanted to start this psychedelic renaissance, the computer engineer from Baltimore, he's out in Silicon Valley, a mutual friend introduces him to Roland, and he went, "Wow."

• 19:49Danny Jones?

  In the 90s.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, well, he started in 1993, Bob Jesse started the Council on Spiritual Practices, which was the working group that said, "Let's start a psychedelic renaissance." It was Bob Jesse, Jordan Peterson, before he was Jordan Peterson, Ralph Hood, Walter Houston Clark, famous psychologist, Houston Smith, they brought Albert Hoffman over, they published a bunch of books that I've written about, and Theogen's The Future of Religion. And a lot of this was trying to gather people to say, "If we're gonna start psychedelic research, we need to do it right. We don't wanna be painted with the brush of leery. We need to seem conservative, we need to seem serious, and we need to have our [BLEEP] together." This started in 1993, okay? He didn't meet Roland until 1999.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  But they, so what they did is they invited Roland out to California, and they said, "Hey, we wanna study psychedelics, uh, would you be interested in this?" Now, before they asked Roland, they asked Rick Strassmann.

• 20:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Yes, and he said, "No," because they, he didn't, they didn't say, "We wanna do psychedelic research," they said, "We wanna research mystical and religious experiences." Strassmann knows a lot about the history of psychedelic research.

• 20:58Danny Jones?

  He, uh, Strassmann, uh, reads Hebrew, right? I think he reads ancient Hebrew.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  He's got a book, DMT, and, about DMT and the ancient Hebrew prophets, so he probably does.

• 21:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  His books are great. I mean, the spirit molecule is a big massive classic that's translated into a dozen languages and sold a ton of copies and was sort of started. It didn't start the Joe Rogan podcast, but it was like a ma- major feature of the early podcast, all the stuff about DMT.

• 21:23Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:24Danny Jones?

  So, so what was, so the spiritual, spiritual practices organization?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Council on spiritual practice.

• 21:30Danny Jones?

  The council on spiritual practices and Jordan Peterson was a part of this?

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yep.

• 21:34Danny Jones?

  And their goal was what?

• 21:36Speaker 00

  To launch the studies at Hopkins. They said, look.

• 21:38Danny Jones?

  Launch the studies at Hopkins?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yes, they said, let's, let's figure out a way to study this at Hopkins and what altogether Peterson, you know, of course Peterson is a clinical psychologist who's in the Jungian tradition. So he's already into this shit and he's into psychedelics.

• 21:50Danny Jones?

  See, every time I hear him talk about this stuff on podcast, I mean, I've, I know he's done podcasts with Ruck and Mara Rasko and he seems interested in stuff, but he seems to be more ignorant of it.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  I know. Well, he's, yeah, I don't, I mean, my personal feeling of him is when he talks, it's so confused and convoluted that I can never really figure out what he's saying.

• 22:11Danny Jones?

  I agree. I'm, I feel the same way.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  I don't know what he's talking about, but, but.

• 22:15Danny Jones?

  I think his main message is that religion is a, a, a framework for society, right?

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that it's the operating system of the human mind.

• 22:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  He believes the mind is a myth generator and that the mind is, uh, that the, that religion and mythology is just the operating system of the mind. He's got a book about this big called Maps of Meaning. That's the biggest convoluted mess you've ever seen in your life. And I actually read it, but that, that, that book in nineteen, in the late nineties, his course called Maps of Meaning was the most popular undergraduate course at Harvard. That's how he became famous.

• 22:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  So this was his grand thesis. He was having mystical experience. He was at McGill, I think, and he was having, he claims to be having these apocalyptic visions. The world's going to end and he said, I have to stop it. And, uh, so he came up with this book, which he believed was going to guide humanity into the right way. So that they wouldn't all, you know, we wouldn't kill ourselves or something. It's quite strange, the, the book, especially you really only just read the intro. The rest of it is.

• 23:14Danny Jones?

  So like, are you saying, so we're saying like the human mind, the mystical mind, we like to fill in the gaps of shit. We don't understand with things like God?

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Uh, no, I think what he's, he's really just following Carl Jung and what he's saying is that, uh, the mind has to be oriented towards a fixed point and that there's a mystery surrounding our lives and that if you have, God is just kind of a fixed point, right?

• 23:37Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  And that, that, uh, it orients, uh, it orients society or the individual towards something, right? And so, you know, you, hi- hi- his stuff has just rehashed Carl Jung and Jung's, if you read one of his later, he wrote a book after World War II called The Undiscovered Self. Like, if you don't want to get into Carl Jung and wait, because he's got so much stuff, buy this little book called The Undiscovered Self.

• 24:01Danny Jones?

  Undiscovered Self?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and if you read it, you'll understand all of the psychedelic literature.

• 24:05Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Uh, because that's pretty much where all the ideas come from. And there's an article in it called Religion as, um, it's called Religion, it's about five or six essays, and it's called Religion as a countervailing force to mass-mindedness or something.

• 24:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, there was something I was talking about with Dennis McKenna a couple of weeks ago when he was in here, and I think it was a, it was, this was a Jungian idea where he said that the human, human consciousness is, um, it's like a giant archipelago where there is above the water, right? You see a bunch of little islands of individual people.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:42Danny Jones?

  And then below that, there's this giant, you know, volcano that's, it's all connected.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, like in that book, one of the, I'd say the key quote in the little Jung book is he said, "You can take away man's gods only to give him others in return." And the main point of the book is, once you take away God and you deconstruct that and nobody believes in religion, they're gonna replace it with a human figure, and that figure, he said, was Hitler and other dictators. So, he said, "The patterns of history will keep repeating themselves until you restore religion to its original integrity," and he believed you can restore the original integrity by reaching back into these ancient mystery cults and reviving them, and that this would restore Christianity, because that's the real roots of Christianity. And if you understand Jung, you understand McKenna, because it's just rehash Jung.

• 25:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Or his archaic revival.

• 25:30Danny Jones?

  I think people, a lot of people replace God with aliens.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  They absolutely do. That's the book we were talking cosmic.

• 25:36Danny Jones?

  Cosmic. Yeah, yeah. Cause American cosmic.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  They do. And there's tons of literature where, you know, Saint Paul had a mystical experience on the road to Damascus. People go, well, he was taking mushrooms and then he had a mystical experience and he saw the light. Then there's people, you know, you have doctors who have written, I've read dozens of these papers. No, he had a temporal lobe lesion and he had a seizure. And then you have the alien people and they say, no, it was a UFO and that's what the light was.

• 26:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  So it's definitely become, and you know, Jung's the one who started this UFO as a modern myth.

• 26:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  He wrote a little book that started people on this.

• 26:09Danny Jones?

  I had this dude in here, this gentleman in here, older man, uh, by the name of Chris Bledsoe. You ever heard of him?

• 26:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 26:14Danny Jones?

  He's a guy who lives in North Carolina. Um, I forget which part of North Carolina. I want to say it's near Goldsboro, maybe? No, maybe I'm wrong. Anyways, he lives in North Carolina and, uh, he was seeing these crazy orbs all around the sky and he's filming them all the time. And he was like showing, posting these videos on these, um,

• 26:36Danny Jones?

  what is the, the UFO, like the, the American, like UFO organization?

• 26:41Speaker 00

  MUFON.

• 26:42Danny Jones?

  MUFON. That's what it was. Thanks, Steve. So he was reporting on MUFON and showing these pictures and all of a sudden he gets visited by like CIA and people that are in NASA. Like legitimate people that work for NASA and the CIA, like this is documented.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 26:56Danny Jones?

  And they're becoming friends with him. They're befriending him. And then he gets John Alexander and, um, these, like these legendary, like remote viewing people from, that were like in the, uh, remote viewing program to like visit him. Like he has photos with all these people. They're inviting him to NASA.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  And what did they want?

• 27:15Danny Jones?

  According to him, they wanted to understand why he was seeing these things because they wanted to study them. They knew they were, these people believed they were aliens or religion or, and they wanted to understand why they were showing themselves to Chris.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  And he was taking pictures and uploading them to the internet?

• 27:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, they're all over. He has them all over his Instagram.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And you've seen them?

• 27:31Danny Jones?

  Uh, he, he literally came here to do a podcast with us and he goes to me and Steven, he goes, he goes, me and you, we can go out, we'll go to the beach and I can summon these things. He takes us out to the beach. Bro, he took us to the, you can find the, you can find the video, Steve. Um, he took me and Steven out to the beach the night before we did the podcast. Him and his daughter. And he's like praying to the heavens, like praying to God to bring these, these angels down to show us, right? Like, please show yourself to Danny. We're gonna do this podcast tomorrow and I want him to be a believer and understand this. And I, I, we, he brought his video camera. Men, if you've lost your hair, it doesn't mean you can't find it again. Try Hims Hair

• 28:12Danny Jones?

  Loss Solutions and find out why hundreds of thousands of happy customers have found their hair again. Got hair loss on your mind? Hims has your back and your scalp. They make it super easy to tackle thinning hair without ever leaving your couch. Here's the deal. Hims offers doctor-approved clinically-backed treatments like Finasteride and Monoxidil, the good stuff that's actually proven to regrow hair in three to six months. Whether you're into chewables, pills, sprays, or serums, they've got a solution that fits your vibe. No awkward doctor visits, no waiting rooms, just a quick few questions online and a medical provider will see if the treatment is right for you. If it is, they'll ship it straight to your door for free. No insurance, no problem. One low price covers everything,

• 28:55Danny Jones?

  from treatments to ongoing care. With hundreds of thousands of happy customers, Hims is pretty much the go-to for getting back to thicker, fuller hair and your confidence. Why wait? Hims has you covered, literally. Start your free online visit today at hims.com/danny. That's hims.com/danny for your personalized hair loss treatment options. hims.com/danny. Results vary. Based on studies of topical and oral Monoxidil and Finasteride prescription products, required an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. Make your hair great again with Hims. And literally, I shit you not, this fucking orb came out of the ocean and like moved

• 29:39Danny Jones?

  sideways, moved back the other way, and then disappeared again back into the ocean. And we got it all on video. I don't know what the fuck it was.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I very much want to see this.

• 29:47Danny Jones?

  He, we've got the video. He's gonna pull it up for you in a second.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  You haven't, did you, you thought through all the angles of it was some kind of magic trick?

• 29:53Danny Jones?

  Unless he hired somebody on a boat, I didn't, he didn't know where I was gonna take him.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:58Danny Jones?

  I just took him to a random restaurant on the beach over here. He did, he had no idea what restaurant I was gonna take him to. And unless he planted somebody with a boat with a drone with a lantern on it, like a, like, like 500 yards off the beach.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  And this was like a crystal ball type orb?

• 30:12Danny Jones?

  I don't know if you would call it a crystal ball. It was just a light.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  It was so far, it was beyond the horizon.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  And what do you think it was?

• 30:19Danny Jones?

  I have no fucking clue. I have no clue. I don't know. I don't know what to think it was. It was definitely, I know what it wasn't. It was not an airplane.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Well, if it came out of the ocean, it wasn't an airplane.

• 30:29Danny Jones?

  Right. It came off the horizon.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Oh, it came off.

• 30:31Danny Jones?

  Look at this video. This is insane.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  So we've got a few of them. One of these is the best one. I can't remember which. I think it's this one.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Do it one more time.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 30:42Danny Jones?

  See that thing flashing? That's an airplane.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Right on the water. Right on the water. Thank you. Thank you.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  If you could flash for us and.

• 30:54Danny Jones?

  So the contrast right there is the ocean that stops. You can see.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Right there.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Then another one picks up.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  It's still in the camera. It's still in here.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  That other one going.

• 31:04Danny Jones?

  Look, now it goes out. Yeah, it fades out. It fades out to nothing. And look at this one getting brighter.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 31:11Danny Jones?

  The up there is an airplane.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Somebody look through this. It's very bright. Thank you. Oh, you see it? It's right there. You see it?

• 31:22Danny Jones?

  Now watch. Now that one's gonna go out.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  I'm tracking it here. Do you wanna look? Yeah, can you still see it?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  I lost it.

• 31:30Danny Jones?

  So we saw air traffic coming in to go to Tampa Airport, right? There's planes. There was planes coming over the beach like landing on the airport. We knew what the planes were. These were nothing like the planes. They literally, they came up off the horizon, went one way. Sometimes changed directions, went the other way, and then just fizzled out to nothing.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  What was the distance since you can't tell from the video?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Whatever's.

• 31:49Danny Jones?

  It was way out past the horizon. It was like way, it was way far. I would say.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Three miles?

• 31:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah, maybe three miles.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  And before that happened, you sat there and watched him summon it?

• 32:00Danny Jones?

  We watched him. He was like saying, please, I even saw a shooting star go right above my head.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  And how long from him summoning it till it appeared?

• 32:07Danny Jones?

  I would say about an hour and a half, maybe. Maybe even two hours. So this is, this is how I, this is how I explain it. I'm like, yeah, something crazy. I saw something crazy I've never seen before. But at the same time, I've never sat and stared at the sky for two hours in my life. Right? So how often do you stare at the sky and see like this?

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 32:25Danny Jones?

  If you stare at the sky all night long, maybe you'll always see this stuff.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Okay, see, I was under the impression that he summoned it and then it just popped up. Cause I was saying if that happened, that's really something.

• 32:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, go to his Instagram, Steve. Um, yeah, so.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  And he wrote this book UFO of God. What's his idea? What does he say it is?

• 32:42Danny Jones?

  So his idea is he's been through, he's been through his life, his life has been like, he's been through the most traumatic experiences that I've ever heard of. Like, he's been through so much shit in his life. He was shot in the back by a shotgun hunting. He literally, there was a, there was a point in the book where when he was, when he was younger, his, his wife or his girlfriend and him were at a party. Um, or he was supposed to meet, he was working and he was supposed to meet his girlfriend at a party. And he was on his way there. He was late and, uh, on his way to the party or whatever. He was like really, really late. Uh, he saw a car that was completely rolled over on the side of the road

• 33:24Danny Jones?

  by this like curve or whatever. He went to go rescue the person. The person was covered in blood. The person died in his arms and he like called like, was yelling people to call the ambulance to come save this person. He couldn't even recognize this human being because it was like so destroyed. And he found out that that was his wife that died in his arms, but he had no clue. And he was late to the party. Um, the guy like went through, he's been through so much trauma in his life. He thinks that the trauma that he's been through is what opened up some, some portal in his head to see aliens. And now he, and he also reports in his book, seeing this lady, this angel lady that like floats and shit and talks to him. But anyways, this is what the orbs are.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  This is the guy, oh man.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  These are the, these are the orbs. I wonder if there's audio.

• 34:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's audio. Click the bottom right. There's a little micro, a little. He, you can, you can. Ah, right there. You can hear him like. Right there, watch.

• 34:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, tripod now.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  That's focused.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  According to the, what I can see.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  The 18th anniversary today. January 8th.

• 34:46Danny Jones?

  Look at another one, Steve, so you can show, show one that's like not as clear as that.

• 34:50Danny Jones?

  Try that one. Yeah, try that one.

• 34:54Danny Jones?

  Look at this.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  This is the Bigfoot Festival. We have, this is underneath the clouds.

• 34:59Danny Jones?

  Did he say Bigfoot? Oh my God, did he really say Bigfoot Festival?

• 35:05Speaker 04

  Keep an eye on it. It's gonna get brighter, I think.

• 35:09Danny Jones?

  What color are you getting off of it?

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Bright white.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Look at the bridge. This is the IR.

• 35:24Danny Jones?

  Can't keep it in frame.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  So has anybody you know tried legitimately tried to debunk him?

• 35:29Danny Jones?

  No, I've never heard anyone suggest, I mean, the, the most legitimate thing I've heard, and I don't know if you would even call this legitimate, but the, the.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Is that, uh, what's he got Limp Bizkit in there for? Is he one of his fans?

• 35:39Danny Jones?

  Is that really Limp Bizkit? Where's Limp Bizkit?

• 35:41Speaker 00

  It was Fred Durst.

• 35:42Danny Jones?

  Where was Fred Durst?

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Right there.

• 35:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, it is Fred Durst!

• 35:48Danny Jones?

  Alright, and you tell Chris Ice Jr. I said, "What's up?"

• 35:51Speaker 04

  I'll do that.

• 35:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, so his son, his son's in a metal band.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Really?

• 35:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, so his, his son, I think it's his son or his son-in-law is in a really big metal band, and they tour, I think they might have been on tour with them or something.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Wow, I like this guy, man.

• 36:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's a funny guy, he's a fun guy. But like, I, I don't know, I've been, could it be satellites, maybe? Like low orbit satellites?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  I don't think so. The video you showed before this one, it looked like one of those things you got at Spencer's to where you touch it and the ray goes over the, you, you ever, you remember those?

• 36:21Danny Jones?

  Mm-mm.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Well, they, there used to be a novelty shop in the mall called Spencer's, and you, it had all kind of, you know, shit novelty stuff, and it always had a ball and had a pink kind of, uh, electricity current going, and you would touch the ball and it would come up to your finger.

• 36:35Danny Jones?

  That's what it looked like, yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what it looked like. I mean, if that's legit, that's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.

• 36:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  But it's hard for me to believe that it is. I don't know what it could be unless it's some rigged up drone.

• 36:46Danny Jones?

  He thinks they're angels. He thinks they're angels. He thinks they're biblical beings.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  I like that he's the southern guy from.

• 36:51Danny Jones?

  I love that too.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  That's why I like it.

• 36:54Danny Jones?

  And he's a slow, has a slow southern drawl.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Well, people in the, you know, backwards place have been obsessed with the occult for a long time.

• 37:03Danny Jones?

  If this was just some random guy posting videos, I wouldn't even think twice about it. But the fact that he's got literal CIA people.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:10Danny Jones?

  And NASA people.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Oh, they're gonna wanna know.

• 37:12Danny Jones?

  Visiting him, taking photos with him, letting him publish his book with photos of them, talking about them. Some like, there's like secret aerospace engineers that had to remain silent, that'd come and visit him and like say crazy shit to him. Like, he's been through all kinds of weird, top secret shit.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 37:30Danny Jones?

  So why? I don't understand. That's just one of the most perplexing things to me about this story.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  I mean, of course, the government's gonna come and investigate if you have any kind of paranormal phenomenon.

• 37:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but they also, they also reinforce his beliefs. Tell him that, they're telling him what he's seeing is real.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, does he, is that documented or anything? But I mean, I'd hate to question people's integrity, but as a journalist, you gotta look in and look for written documentation. Or go talk to these people who supposedly told them. Cause I mean, as you know as well as I do, most of these things are hoaxes.

• 37:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Uh, but that orb was, I mean, that's pretty impressive video.

• 38:03Danny Jones?

  It's interesting shit.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  And the fact that you saw it, if, if you hadn't seen it, I would say this is a hoax, but.

• 38:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  But that is weird.

• 38:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that video that Stephen showed you in the beginning, we shot that the night before the podcast.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  The only explanation would be, and I don't know how realistic it is, is that somebody that he's in touch with through text message has got some rigged up drone flying it around. I don't know.

• 38:24Danny Jones?

  It was the ocean though.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:26Danny Jones?

  It, it was on the beach.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Doesn't make sense, yeah.

• 38:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It came from below the horizon.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  But see, if the government's interested in this, I can't imagine they didn't tell him to, you know, call your friends and then hit it with the butterfly net.

• 38:39Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly, exactly, right?

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Can we use these things for the military? How many of these, how many friends would you say you got?

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 38:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 38:52Danny Jones?

  Anyway.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  And what was your impression of his uh, uh, personality? Just his, does he seem dumbfounded by this?

• 38:58Danny Jones?

  He, he seems very level headed. He didn't seem like he was, he definitely wasn't like trying to convince me of anything.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:07Danny Jones?

  He was just telling me like what he's been through and I think for him, those people in the government and the military confirming all this shit for him and like befriending him. I think makes him feel like, I mean, he's got some other stories where he was, he's literally at this party, this government party where the head of the CIA is there.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:30Danny Jones?

  And there's pictures with him in the head of the CIA and some guy apparently had like a, like passed out. And then Chris went to like heal him, like touched him and healed him back to life.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Okay, now we're getting into this.

• 39:42Danny Jones?

  He's got healing powers too.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:44Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Wow, this is some old timey southern shit.

• 39:47Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, bro. You gotta, you gotta read his book, man.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  I wanna meet this guy. Now, did you have, you should tell Pasulka to look into it.

• 39:54Danny Jones?

  They know each other. They know each other.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  I knew it cuz she loves eccentric people like that. Yeah.

• 40:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  She beat me to the punch cuz I wanna meet him.

• 40:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's an interesting dude.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  That's incredible.

• 40:06Danny Jones?

  So, I don't know. I don't know what those orbs are, but there's a, I don't know. I, I, I would love to talk to some of these people, these folks in the military and the CIA.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  What's the range on this thing? Is it like Bluetooth? Does it, how, could he call one over? What about if he wanted to send one up to the window?

• 40:22Danny Jones?

  He said they've come up, yeah. He said they come up like within 10 feet of him before.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  But what about, could he call one and like go down in Tampa to Danny's house and pop in for a minute?

• 40:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Or does he need to be within a hundred, within a mile of, of it? It doesn't have to be within a mile of him is what I'm saying.

• 40:37Danny Jones?

  No, his kids have done it without him. Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  This is insane.

• 40:42Danny Jones?

  It's crazy, man.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  I've gotta read this book.

• 40:44Danny Jones?

  It's crazy. I gotta get you in touch with this fellow.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  I'm telling you.

• 40:46Danny Jones?

  Maybe you guys could collaborate.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:49Danny Jones?

  How did we, how did we get on this topic in the first place? I don't remember.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 40:53Danny Jones?

  We're talking about God and UFOs and aliens.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Maybe that's what it was. Oh, well, no, you said that some people say that it's aliens, that Saint Paul or whoever.

• 41:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not only that, I think like some people replace their god, like the mystery of God with like extraterrestrials coming here.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely. They just graft that mindset. And that's what Peters, that's what we were talking about. That's what Peterson and them say. You're gonna, it's gonna be UFOs, it's gonna be God, it's gonna be science. You have a philosophy or a religion. The only thing is, do you know what it is or not?

• 41:24Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  You know? And so, yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, that was Jung's idea, that this is the modern myth. This is replacing, or this is just one cult that's popped up that's about religion. And you know McKenna looked into these UFOs too. He would speak at the conferences.

• 41:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he said he saw a UFO in Luxorera when he was tripping on mushrooms.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right. But he also said of the UFO conference, he went to him and he said, what sort of connects these people is a predisposition to gullibility?

• 41:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  So, I don't know, I'm not.

• 41:55Danny Jones?

  Are you familiar with John Mack, the Harvard psychologist?

• 41:57Speaker 00

  It sounds familiar.

• 41:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he interviewed hundreds of people who had abduction experiences.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 42:03Danny Jones?

  And he interviewed them and hypnotized some of them, I think, and tried to figure out what was going on with abduction experience. Because they were also similar.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. And those I've found convincing. Some writers that attributed that to, you know, mental psychological phenomenon. Because what you notice, look during the late 19th century when spiritualism was huge. Everybody, there was table tapping, "The ghosts are here." You see? I mean, there's all this phenomenon, and then all of a sudden it just goes away. You know? This is what Casodega is about. I was up in Casodega. This place is chalk for, a village full of people that are into every aspect of all of this shit.

• 42:40Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. We could go up there right now and I'd, you know, they healed me with crystals and they did, they did everything you can. I got the full package. I don't know, I couldn't tell anything.

• 42:50Danny Jones?

  There's a placebo.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  But it was fun. They're fun. But it's a camp to where you can be trained into the traditions of mediumship, psychic healers, crystal healing, telepathy, I mean, you name it. You could go up there and do it.

• 43:04Danny Jones?

  Man, I gotta hit that place up. I go, I go up to that part of Florida often, New Smyrna.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Oh, stop. Go in there. It's really cool.

• 43:10Danny Jones?

  Casadega.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  It's really cool. Yeah, this, there's been albums about it. It's very famous.

• 43:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? How long's it been there?

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Oh, over a hundred and fifty years.

• 43:18Danny Jones?

  What? Steve, pull up Casadega. I need to see this shit.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Pull it up. It's cool. Yeah, that band Bright Eyes, who I'm not a huge fan, but they-

• 43:25Danny Jones?

  Bright Eyes?

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:25Danny Jones?

  The emo band?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have a band, they have an album called Casadega about Casadega.

• 43:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's cool. Yeah.

• 43:33Danny Jones?

  Okay, so, so this study, this Johns Hopkins study-

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:38Danny Jones?

  Was supposed to be like an empirical, conservative, straight-laced, scientific study into what psychedelics were actually chemically or mechanically doing to the brain? Like how, like how, what is actually happening when you enter these psychedelic states, right?

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, we're studying, yeah, we're studying the science of spirituality, the science of these experiences.

• 44:04Danny Jones?

  And Roland died before this thing got published.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Well, he published many papers. The, what started the psychedelic renaissance is they started in 2000. Six years later, they published a paper. 2006, they published a paper said psilocybin can induce or occasion, reliably occasion mystical experiences. This was a detonator. It was the big bang of the psychedelic renaissance too. Because what, what they knew would happen is, once Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins published a study, what do you think's gonna happen? It's a green light for everybody all over the world. All they did is, that paper, they took it to their boss, scientist. Roland Griffiths said, "We can do this." It exploded. All over the world, they started studying it again.

• 44:40Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 44:41Speaker 00

  It was his reputation that allowed it. They weren't, most people who wanna study psychedelics are wacko birds. I mean, they're not gonna be the people you want to do it.

• 44:49Danny Jones?

  So, so people in different universities across the world or institutions can say, "Look, this legitimate guy, this scholar, published a paper, so that gives us license to do it, basically."

• 44:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 45:00Danny Jones?

  So we don't look like cuckoos.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  And then you get psychedelic renaissance, cuz I mean, right when he published that paper, NYU, Berkeley, everywhere. So now they're everywhere, all over the world. Without Roland, it, look, maybe it would've happened, but it would've happened much later. It was based on his reputation. And, and what- The idea was, and in every paper, new, Michael Pollan did a thing in New Yorker, Michael Pollan wrote a book about him called How to Change Your Mind. Uh, and the whole premise was, look, this ain't the old days. We've got a new guy and he's very conservative and he's not into this religious crap. He's gonna just study it straight up and he's gonna give us the answers. Well, it turned out that wasn't, didn't seem to turn out to be true.

• 45:35Danny Jones?

  So he was into the religious crap?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Well, he, I mean, if you look at, he was, but right before he died, he was on Oprah Winfrey and he sounded a lot like Albert Hoffman and, and Timothy Leary. I'm not Leary, but like Albert Hoffman, look, there's an ecological disaster enveloping the planet. Human beings are going to, he's saying this on Oprah.

• 45:51Danny Jones?

  So when you say religious bullshit with these guys, you're, what, what you're saying is they have a fundamental belief that psychedelics can change the world.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:58Danny Jones?

  And that everyone needs to take psychedelics to, to, to fix the ails of, and.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Instead of the UFO, it's the mushroom.

• 46:06Danny Jones?

  Ah.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  It's a belief in the powers of the mushroom. Take, okay, push aside God, push aside the UFO. We keep changing out that spot. Something has to take that spot. So what it is, is I think I told you before, all of this.

• 46:17Danny Jones?

  They're evangelists.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, essentially. Now, evangelist was, they called that article about role in the psychedelic evangelist. I was very surprised they did that. I wouldn't go as far as saying an evangelist.

• 46:27Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Some of them are, Leary is, many of the other people were. You could even say Michael Pollan was. I mean, he was going around giving speeches saying,

• 46:38Speaker 00

  that we need to do this.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Sorry. So when I say he was an evangelist, no, but there's, I mean, when you make a statement, a scientist saying, if, if we don't get these drugs.

• 46:55Danny Jones?

  Take some water. You good? Want another water?

• 46:59Speaker 00

  No, I'm good.

• 47:00Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  I mean, he, he was, you know, saying, look, there's an ecological disaster. Human beings are gonna kill themselves. The only interruption. The only thing we can do to stop this is we have to, on a global level. See, this is where you start getting into dicey territory. It's not enough for certain people to do it. Everybody's gotta do it. It's gotta be a global thing. And that's something he told me himself. This can't be just a few people taking it. Everybody's gotta do it.

• 47:24Danny Jones?

  It should be, it should be mandatory for, for people.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Well, I wouldn't use mandatory, because then you start sounding like Joseph Stalin.

• 47:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  That's the problem, but it's because as Rick Strassman says, what about if everybody don't want to get spiritualized? There's a lot of ornery people in the world that don't want to do it. Are they gonna have to do it? Because how else are you gonna do it? Because this is a fringe thing that not a lot of people are interested in. But once you have this belief that everybody's gotta do it, the only question is what? Distribution. How do you get it out there? Then you have the medical system and Medicaid, and you have religion. And so these become your two pipelines in which to introduce this drug into society on a global scale.

• 47:58Danny Jones?

  Medical religion, or, or the medical side and the religious side?

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 48:02Danny Jones?

  So, medical and spiritual.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, because, I mean, think about it. If you want people to do this, you can't say, we're starting a new religion and it's based on the mushroom and everybody should take it. They're gonna immediately write you off as a crank. So what you do is you need to give it scientific legitimacy. And so all the press during the psychedelic renaissance, based on tiniest amounts of evidence in studies of very small, heavily screened numbers of people are, this does this, it cures depression, maybe it'll save the world. So they had to give it a scientific validity, and that's through psychiatry. So the debates in psychedelics have always been which way do we go? There's two paths. Is it a religious sacrament? Or is it a medical cure?

• 48:42Danny Jones?

  And they're so tightly entangled, it's almost impossible to separate them.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Exactly. And if you go back to antiquity, it's wonderful. Why? Because medicine and religion are all intertwined in magic in a way that you can't tell anymore. So you can see the interest in reviving that. Because the hallucinian mysteries and mystery cults and all of these things are a mixture of all these things.

• 49:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  So there's a heavy interest in those, because why? It kinda lays a foundation for whatever it is you're trying to start with them now. You see?

• 49:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, so you do you do you think it would be a bad thing?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Or what?

• 49:13Danny Jones?

  If psychedelics became ubiquitous and the more people used them like let me give you just a crazy hypothetical example, so say if Trump and Putin and Xi Jinping all sat went together and did some ayahuasca retreat together. You think that would be a bad thing?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  Well, we are, we can, we don't have to speculate because they've been using it in Israel, Palestine, they've done, we've been doing things like this before, so we know what psychedelics do. But do I think that would be a bad thing? No, I'm for it.

• 49:39Danny Jones?

  Or people like them? I mean, do you think what was is a problem? What's the probability of it deescalating?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 49:44Danny Jones?

  A, a, a, a, a global nuclear war?

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Zero, because what we, Stan Grof, who knows, he's what, 90 something years old now, he knows more about psychedelics than anybody.

• 49:53Danny Jones?

  Who?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Stan, Stanislav Grof, G R O F, The Way of the Psycho, not the movie, he, old time, he's been studying psychedelics since the 50s. He's out and I think he's in New Mexico now, he's too old. He's the only person I've emailed and I got an email back, auto reply that said, I'm too old and retired from email. I was like, I was like, dude, this is the most bad. I know. Uh, he calls them non-specific, this is a, you know, definition a lot of people know, he calls them non-specific amplifiers of mental processes. They amplify what's already there. The idea that they're gonna reduce conflict is complete and total nonsense.

• 50:26Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Non-specific amplifiers of mental processes. If you give them to crazy people, they get more crazy. That's why they screen out people who are mentally ill.

• 50:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  What about, what about violent people?

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Violent people?

• 50:39Danny Jones?

  Makes them more violent?

• 50:40Speaker 00

  It would be a very bad, I don't know, we don't know, because you can't, all you would know, you can't do a systematic study, get a bunch of piss, or no, get some people in here and we'll poke them with a stick and then give them psychedelics. How are you gonna do a systematic study on that? But we do know, you can just look anecdotal evidence from around the country. You had an Alaskan Airlines pilot, he was trying to heal his depression, took a bunch of mushrooms with his buddy, got on the flight the next day, got into a depressive trip, tried to take the whole plane down, got charged with 84 counts of attempted murder.

• 51:06Danny Jones?

  This happened recently, right?

• 51:07Speaker 00

  It happened recently, you have, now, I think they're gonna have some leniency. I've, I just feel sorry for the guy. The other guy cut his penis off. The other guy in Oregon shot up a bunch of people at a mushroom fest or music festival. You don't know what it's gonna do. The effects are essentially unpredictable.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Okay, there's just no way around it. They're unpredictable. The way you try to give it the veneer of, um, that you can predict it is you have very small studies of heavily screened people and you give them, you know, the way, think about it. How do you study psychedelics? I think, I can tell you, if you're in a study, they give you drugs, you lay down on the couch, and when you wake up, they're all sitting there like, what happened? And then they have a few questionnaires, just like that. Well, now they're on an iPad, and they hand you a questionnaire and it says, uh, what happened during your experience? And then there's a, I wrote a long article about this. It's a questionnaire called a mystical experience questionnaire, and it has all the attributes of the experience that they believe these experiences have. Uh, you know, did you enter a time that was, did you enter

• 52:05Speaker 00

  a space that was timeless and spaceless? Check. Did you, this happened, did this happen? Did you encounter God? Check. And if you check thirty-two out of thirty-two boxes, they determine that you've had a full-blown mystical experience. And the, the, if you have a mystical experience, they say you have, there's more therapeutic benefits. All of this science of this is very, very shaky. So, returning to what you asked me before.

• 52:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  I just became interested in it because I did it, and I wanted to figure out what happened. And the more I looked into it, like, when I've, I became interested in that questionnaire, I went, they made me fill out these questionnaires afterwards. Who wrote it? So then I went and found him in Tennessee, and he's an expert on Appalachian serpent handling cults.

• 52:44Danny Jones?

  Who?

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Ralph Hood, who wrote-

• 52:46Danny Jones?

  Ralph Hood.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  He wrote the questionnaire.

• 52:48Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  So then I went, oh, wow, this is great. I mean, I'm a writer. So, right then, I went, this is fascinating. This is fascinating. There's something here. There's a story here, and it's not the one that I thought it was. And so that's why I kept going.

• 53:04Danny Jones?

  And why did these people bring in all of these, um, religious leaders from different, like, they brought in, uh, like, a Christian preacher, a Jewish guy-

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Muslim.

• 53:16Danny Jones?

  A Muslim. What was going on with that? And what were they looking for with those people?

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Because Roland Griffiths and the other people who started the Hopkins Program have a belief that all religions share a common core. And they get this idea from-

• 53:28Danny Jones?

  This is the perennialism thing.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  From perennialism. And so they wanted to test it out. So, think about this. This is why I'm writing about it. Nobody else is writing about this. It's the most amazing thing. There's this esoteric literature concerning perennialism and books written by all of this most colorful people. And they have this theory that's been around for a long time. And this at Johns Hopkins, our most prestigious medical institution, they're like, you know what, let's test it out and see if it works. Let's get them in here, let's give them the drugs, and let's see if they all check off all the boxes. And if they check off all the boxes, we can provide some empirical evidence proving that perennialism is true. And they see this as a way that we maybe could bring world peace and things and the type of things you were talking about.

• 54:09Danny Jones?

  So they're trying to find common commonalities between all of these people's experiences from different religions and different spiritual backgrounds?

• 54:16Speaker 00

  No, they believe that the origin of religion is drug-induced mystical experience or mystical experience through isolation, sensory isolation, prayer, all the different ways you can conjure a mystical experience. Because these same experiences happen naturally, right? So when you're validating the scale, they give it to people who've taken drugs, but they also give it to people who can conjure these experiences through prayer and through all kinds of different ways, right? Like you could start fasting today and you could like, you ever seen Orthodox Jews when they do this stuff? Start chanting prayer and they do this repetitive motions? You can conjure these type of trance states, all different kinds of ways without drugs, right? In the old, you know, you know Hillman, he studies people, you can read books, Gail and all these other people, they're a, they would go in caves. Why?

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Because it's dark. And you would cultivate a mystical experience in there. You know, there's recipes next to recipes for drug, drugged wine that you can make to, to trip. There are recipes for how to clear out a cave so that there's no snakes in there. You don't want to, you don't want to crawl into the cave trying to get Apollo or Zeus on the horn and sinks its teeth into your ankle. So you clear it out with smoke, then you climb in there and you take a couple swigs and then. Enter into the other realm.

• 55:31Danny Jones?

  Sensory deprivation tank.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 55:32Danny Jones?

  In a cave.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 55:34Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  All the stuff that's happening now, there's ancient analogues to it of ways that people were doing it before. Yulia Ustinova, who's a researcher who writes about these things. She's got one called Caves in the Ancient Greek Mind. If you're interested in this thread, she's in Israel. Buy her books, they're wonderful.

• 55:50Danny Jones?

  Caves in the Ancient Greek Mind?

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:52Danny Jones?

  Huh.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  She writes all about divine mania and Plato and the, the, she goes through all of this literature, much like Hillman does, and she finds these instances of people conjuring altered states of consciousness. And she's written a ton about this. It's, it's really interesting.

• 56:08Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:10Danny Jones?

  So, do you think that these ancient mystery cults had anything to do with the foundation of Christianity? Or do you think, do you think, I mean, do you think there is a link to some of these pagan drug cults and the shit they were practicing before Christianity came on the scene that spawned Christianity in a way?

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Well, I don't think there's any, there's no evidence that it spawned Christianity, but there's-

• 56:37Danny Jones?

  Or Christianity was a spinoff of those. Like they, they take, they borrow shit from those drug cults.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  People that study this for a living don't think so. But what they do admit, which seems really significant, is that they did borrow language from it. They are mysteries. Jesus was in some of this stuff, a, a, a hierophant, you know? He was portrayed, you gotta remember what they're pulling from. They're pulling from a vast literature to where Jesus is portrayed in all different kinds of ways. So, early Christianity was in this larger context next to these things. Whenever you're trying to recruit people for a cult, so Saint, Saint Paul, when you're trying to recruit people to your religion, and they say, "Look, we've got Asclepius. He heals people. He does all these things we like. Why would we come to your side?" Of course, they're gonna say, "Well, our guy heals too. What does your guy do?" "Well, we can do all that too, so come here." And they were, they absolutely were

• 57:26Speaker 00

  doing that. When it, like, the last major pagan god to fall was Asclepius. Asclepius, right? He was the healer, right? There were temples all over the Roman Empire in ancient Greece to where they would come in and they would give incubation therapy, which were- Basically drug induced mystical experiences. And there were also snakes in there. There were labyrinth snakes, all kinds of stuff. And Christian, that was the last pagan god that Christianity had to kind of topple before it of total and complete triumph.

• 57:52Danny Jones?

  Right, but it seems like Christianity like cherry picked a bunch of things from all these ancient myths and and mysteries like for their like, like the idea of Jesus, like the the God that dies and then rises again, right?

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, but a lot of the the foundation on which you can trace the foundations on which these ideas were built. So the idea of rising and dying gods is from James George Fraser's book, The Golden Bow, which is a very famous book. But when you look back at books like this, like The Golden Bow, a lot of it doesn't stand up to modern historical standards.

• 58:24Danny Jones?

  I'm sure you've heard me talk about Mando's whole body deodorant at this point. I never thought soap combined with deodorant would actually work, but it does. And it lasts for a long time, which is impressive, given how active I am. I keep one in my jujitsu bag, my gym bag, in my car for long road trips or surf trips. And I even keep one right here on the table in case Steven's cheesy, stinky feet start smelling during a podcast. What makes Mando so different? It's a cleansing bar and it controls your odor for 72 hours. And that's perfect for long hours at work or hiding from the feds. It's safe to use on your pits, package, crack and feet, and it comes in bourbon leather, clover woods, Mount Fuji and pro sport.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Oh Danny, but why should I use this over soap alone?

• 59:07Danny Jones?

  12 hours after a shower, the average man's grundle odor was a five out of 10. With Mando, it's a zero out of 10. Sniff on that, Steve. Mando is so good, you can now get them in Walmart and Target. But for the best deals, go to shopmando.com. Mando Starter Pack is perfect for new customers. It comes with solid stick deodorant, cream tube deodorant, two free products of your choice, like mini body wash and deodorant wipes and free shipping. As a special offer for our listeners, new customers get $5 off a starter pack with our exclusive code. That equates to over 40% off your starter pack. Use code Danny at shopmando.com. That's S H O P M A N D O dot com. Please support our show and tell them we sent you.

• 59:49Danny Jones?

  Smell fresher, stay drier and boost your confidence from head to toe. With Mando.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  The new James Fraser was Murch Elliot, who was an extremely important person in all of this literature. So what you're talking about, the rising and dying gods-

• 1:00:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, like Persephone.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's-

• 1:00:37Danny Jones?

  This is in Ruck's book.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Because he's drawing from this literature.

• 1:00:40Danny Jones?

  He's drawing from the book you're talking about?

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  Yes. No, you wouldn't have any of this stuff if it wasn't for Fraser's book. Everybody should go and buy it. It's very famous. The Golden Bow, B-O-U-G-H. And here's an interesting thing about it. You can buy the Oxford edition now, and there's a deleted chapter in it. Because when it came out, it caused a massive controversy. And the reason why is because there was a chapter that said, "Jesus is just a generic dying and wringing agricultural god." And people lost their minds within the academy. You know, you're still conservative Christianity.

• 1:01:09Danny Jones?

  Well, that just means it's true if they got rid of it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Well, not really. But they became very mad, and they deleted it. He agreed to have it deleted. But then you can buy editions now to where they put it back in.

• 1:01:18Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what you start to, what you have to do in order to make these structural comparisons, which you're talking about, "Well, this guy's kind of like this guy, this guy's kind of like this guy", is you have to take them out of their local context and saw off the edges of them to make it fit. So is there something to it? Probably. But also, if you go back and look at these, where these ideas come from, you often find that these people have motivations to do it. You see what I'm saying?

• 1:01:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but even Hillman and Ruck believe it, right?

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Sure, all kinds of people believe it.

• 1:01:50Danny Jones?

  These guys read these languages, right? Like Ruck-

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  But there's a lot of other people who read these languages. You can't just say, "I'm only listening to the people who say what I like."

• 1:01:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  The other people, I'll ignore.

• 1:02:00Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  What you have to believe in is a conspiracy amongst academia- Which Graham Hancock and other people's push, which is absurd. There is no conspiracy.

• 1:02:06Danny Jones?

  It's not that absurd.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Yes, it is.

• 1:02:08Danny Jones?

  I don't think it's that absurd because I've had, I've had, I've had, I haven't had Graham Hancock on here, but I don't know if you're familiar with the debate he did with Flint Dibble.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was great. He got demolished. Hancock was demolished.

• 1:02:19Danny Jones?

  I believe, I agree with you. I agree with you, but I also had Dibble in here.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Danny Jones?

  And he specializes in Athens and archaeology in Athens. And he has a little bit of classical Greek in his, in his background. And, and we were talking about Atlantis and he perfectly systematically dismantled the Atlantis theory.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Danny Jones?

  For me, like made perfect sense. I was completely on board with him.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Danny Jones?

  I thought it made perfect sense as well when he was debating Graham on his lost ancient civilization.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  That was ugly.

• 1:02:54Danny Jones?

  Although, although he did get a lot of shit wrong in that debate. There were some, there were some shit that where Flint exaggerated shit with 250,000 ships. There were, or there's a million ships. That was way the fuck off.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter because he was absolutely demolished and Graham Hancock's, if you look at the out, the implications of it, what Hancock said is, I believe all this stuff, but I don't have any proof, but you don't have any proof that it's not true. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The burden of proof is on the believer. I don't get to say, there's a teapot in the sky and it's there, but nobody else can see it. You gotta prove me wrong. Not the way it works. If you make claims, you have to prove them. And Hancock can't prove anything he says because he made it up because he's a fantasy writer. The books that Hancock writes are in a long tradition of Victorian literature of the same shit. UFOs mixed with mystery cults. He's building on Eric Von Donnican. You know his stuff?

• 1:03:43Danny Jones?

  I know Eric Von Donnican. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, like, so again, there, there are things in that podcast where Flint acts like what he does is, is clever, right? He, he got 90% of it spot on. I agree with him on it. But there, there were, to be fair, there were points in that podcast where he took things and said it as if it was gospel when he was completely wrong about it, right?

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  That doesn't make Hancock right. He's still bullshit.

• 1:04:07Danny Jones?

  It doesn't make, it doesn't make Hancock right.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  No, but I, I mean, I, I don't know enough about these topics in order to say he got it wrong, but I totally believe that he was wrong probably on multiple things.

• 1:04:16Danny Jones?

  So I think there's a psychological thing that happens with people like Flint, who have spent their entire lives as what him and his father and probably his grandfather, who knows?

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Danny Jones?

  Who in archaeology, in the, the academic part of this stuff. Drinking and eating the gruel, sludging through the mud, doing all the boring shit, reading all the boring shit. And then like, you know, next thing you know, you're 40 years old. No one knows who the you are. And you've been in the mud doing this archaeology your whole life. Then you have people like Graham Hancock who go on Joe Rogan, they make documentaries, they write all these books, they're making millions of dollars. Everybody knows who they are. And you're a fucking Flint devil. Nobody knows you from Adam.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:04:57Danny Jones?

  Right? It's

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  So you're saying he's bitter?

• 1:05:00Danny Jones?

  I absolutely, he's bitter.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  There's, there's, there's, there's, I'm sure there's something to that. But to us.

• 1:05:05Danny Jones?

  I'm not saying, I'm not, I'm not giving him a pass. I'm not giving Graham a pass because of that. I'm just saying you have to understand the whole dynamic of this thing.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  I know all that. And they do want to police their borders. As you say, look, what do you, what do you know? Get out of our business. This is our zone.

• 1:05:18Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  And they do want journalists who are gonna pay deference to them and say, look, well, they're right about everything. But it still doesn't change the fact that Hancock is completely full of shit and that he knows it. He's a wind-up merchant.

• 1:05:30Danny Jones?

  I think he believes a lot of the stuff he says. I, I think that, um, there's legitimate questions and, and some of this stuff. And also Flint gave him credit. He goes, a lot of the people I know in archaeology, they're legit archaeologists, they only got into archaeology because of Graham.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Because of him.

• 1:05:44Danny Jones?

  Because of Graham. I think it's the same thing with Hillman. I think the shit that Hillman says, I think he's inspiring people to prove him wrong and to learn Greek and to read these ancient languages and revive this shit.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um. Yeah, I think, I think there's something to that.

• 1:05:56Danny Jones?

  But so in that, in that Flint podcast, like he was really, really, uh, I was following him and I was agreeing with him and he was really laying it out in a very cohesive manner with all the stuff about Greek and Atlantis and, and how it's probably completely bullshit. And going back to Eric Von Dan again.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Danny Jones?

  But then I showed him these things.

• 1:06:16Danny Jones?

  These ancient, I don't know if you're familiar with these. These are like dynastic Egyptian, that's a 3D print of an Egyptian vase. That was, according to the academics and the Egyptologists, was created around the same time as the dynastic Egyptians, which was about

• 1:06:33Danny Jones?

  4,500 to 5,000 years ago.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Danny Jones?

  When they only had copper chisels and pounding stones to create things, right? And there's even depictions, there's like, uh, there's depictions, drawings and stuff on caves and, and tablets where they show how they made these. They show them like going like this on wheels and stuff. But.

• 1:06:54Danny Jones?

  This guy who lives down the street from here, Matt Bell, yeah, here they are. That's, that's how, that's how the Egyptologists believe that these were made, right? So these are made out of granite, the, some of the hardest, like rose granite and red granite, right? The hard, some of the hardest stones on earth. And he had these measured at a, on a, like a, a laser light scanner thing at some big aerospace company. And this vessel is, the ones that he purchased, the real ones from ancient Egypt are perfectly symmetrical within like one one thousandth of a human hair. Like impossible. It would had to have been made on a CNC machine today.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:30Danny Jones?

  Like on a computer and, and there's, it's impossible. Like how the fuck did they make these? And these handles are made out of granite and I asked Flint this. And like he creates this, uh, he, it's like this, to me, it's like a cop out. Where he says, oh, it's bullshit. Uh, people like him, uh, don't deserve to talk about this stuff or question this stuff. Because he's buying these vessels that are contributing to cartels that are selling them. And it's this underground black market and I don't want to be associated. I don't even want to be in the same room with one of these ancient relics.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  This is what Dibble told you?

• 1:08:04Danny Jones?

  This is what Dibble told me. And it's the same thing he's doing with Graham, trying to call him a right, oh, a Nazi.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  I see. I don't, that's the, my, would be my criticism of Dibble is whenever he turned it into a personal attack. That he's Nazi, right? So, now, look, he said that he didn't do that and I don't know. And I'm not interested enough to go and look into it. But I think he was saying because of some of this Victorian literature is, you know, has this romantic noble savage type of thing. And there's racism in it. That makes him racist. I do not believe for a second that Graham Hancock is racist.

• 1:08:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  Sorry, I don't.

• 1:08:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Do I think he's full of shit? Yes. Is, is Dibble a hundred percent right? No. And is he a, kind of have an annoying personality? Yes. I can see why people don't like him. It is an annoying personality of this guy, you know, Graham Hancock's got this cool thing going. It's kind of interesting and Dibble, well, you're wrong and then, and, and, yeah, that's kind of annoying. It is kind of annoying, but it doesn't change.

• 1:08:54Danny Jones?

  And when people come in here and they're unwilling or unable to say the words, I don't know. It's always.

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  It's a red flag. It's a red flag.

• 1:09:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's a red flag.

• 1:09:04Danny Jones?

  So, so, yeah, going back to, to Hillman and Ruck. So, I mean, these guys, you're saying because.

• 1:09:14Danny Jones?

  Um, just because Hillman and Ruck believe that drugs were everywhere in antiquity and probably had something to do with Christianity.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  No, well, go ahead, sorry.

• 1:09:22Danny Jones?

  You interviewed a lot of people who think otherwise, right? I mean.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  Well, you have to.

• 1:09:26Danny Jones?

  You have, you have to, right? And the most of these people that are saying otherwise are, are, are in universities and, and have

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Some of them.

• 1:09:34Danny Jones?

  They're professors of religious studies.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  Some of them, but you, you gotta take this on a case by case basis because when you're creating a conspiracy theory, you like things that are very vague. So they say, well, this academia, my experience has been totally different. Every single person I've contacted from Patrick McGovern to Jan Bremer, Bart Ehrman, name it, dozens and dozens of scholars over the years, Anne Taves, Hugh Urban, all kinds of people who study these things, everyone that I've reached out to, they're like, hey, how's it going? Sure, you can ask me questions. These people have no reason to talk to me. Why would, you know, they've, they're, they're always will, everybody that I've talked to has been totally willing to answer what were probably stupid, uninformed questions for me and were totally nice. I never sensed there was any conspiracy at all, but they, they're working in a, in a

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  discipline in which you lead with evidence and then come up with theories. You don't come up with a theory and then look for evidence. And I'm not, but let's be clear, I'm not accusing Hillman or Ruck of doing this. Carl Ruck has made an enormous contribution to the humanities. Without him, as Chris Bennett told me, you wouldn't be able to write a PhD thesis on these things. That, that he is a pioneer in this and it's, what he's done is enormously creative, but nobody's gonna be right. Everybody now that may seem right in 50 years, a bunch of it will probably be wrong. As Richard Noel says of this type of scholarship, we wash each other's diapers. They'll contribute a little bit, then the next generation, nah, that was a bunch of shit. You wash it off and you start again. It's a long process.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  What you have to be careful for is when people combine these things with political and theological agendas. I don't care that Graham Hancock's made a bunch of money. Great, wonderful. He's, he's very industrious. He's very creative. There's a lot of good things you could say about him, but I do think that he's taken his readers on a ride, but so what? I mean, they're fantasy books where you have a problem is a lot of these people think that it's real. But I don't, unlike Dibble, I don't think there's some nefarious thing with Graham Hancock, you know, like, oh, he's had some secret agenda. He's a, I don't believe any of that personally. That's just my opinion.

• 1:11:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  I think they're good fantasy books like Von Donnich and Von Donnich and stuff. You know, I just did magicians of the gods or something, same thing. I saw you got Jason Giordani. This is a genre of books that take aliens and mystery cults and there are thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds, thousands of them. You go to Inner Traditions, Baron Company, these books are unlimited. It's the same elements reworked and they're pretty much all the same and they make the same claims. Once you read enough of the books, you start to see larger patterns and you start to go, okay, I'm starting to understand this more. And of course, it all comes from the breakdown of Christianity, which we should talk about. This tradition of book goes, I thought it was from the 1960s.

• 1:12:14Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  You start, you find these books in going way back in the early 1800s and even in the late 1700s. Whenever you have Christianity breaking down, like around the time of Isaac Newton, people start looking for more scientific explanations for things. Okay. So then you get into the 1800s and you have what? The birth of psychology, anthropology and religious studies.

• 1:12:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Right. And what they're looking for is, well, initially like anthropology was they were looking for evidence that Christianity was true. Right. But essentially what you have, you probably already understand this. What happened were explorers were going all around the world. And they were finding other flood myths, other serpent myths, and they were going, hold on a second here. They got a flood myth? Well, you can imagine what people in the church thought. Well, this came after ours. This is just a copy of Noah's flood. This is just a copy of the book of Genesis. It must be because our story, many people today have a hard time believing that many people for a long time believed the Old Testament was literally true. That everybody was related to Noah, everybody was related to Ham, that was our ancient Ken folk.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  And if you could trace the lines on ancestry, it all goes back to them. Most people today, it's hard for them to believe that.

• 1:13:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Many, many people believe that for many, many years. That story started to break down when they started finding the other flood myths, the other serpent myths, and they went, oh, we got a problem. So the job of people in religious studies and all these different disciplines and mythologists like Ruck and them are in now was to try to figure out this relationship between the mystery cults and Christianity. Christianity, which came first? Did these primitive, what they thought of as primitive belief systems? Did they come first? Did we come first? And so you start this game of which is called mythography. And you have in Britain, what are called the Mythography Wars. This was like contemporary debates over, say, like the 1619 project or something. This is how hot this shit was in the 1800s. This was a major theme of intellectual life, maybe the, the primary theme of intellectual life.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  An obsession over the origins of religion, an obsession. You know, I thought before Nietzsche, God is dead. I thought that was kind of the beginning of it. That's the end of it. By that time, Christianity was basically dead. By the time of William, by the time of William, amongst intellectuals, by the time of William James in the late 19th century, the 1880s, he wrote his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, being contrary in saying, okay, amongst intellectuals, it's a fad to say religion is this primitive superstition. I'm going to look for something in psychology and biology that it may be inherent to, to who we are as people. Maybe you can't get rid of it. Maybe it's not a tale from a, from a earlier stage of evolution. Maybe there's something to it where you can't get rid of it. That's the tradition that we're in.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  The psychedelic literature and psychedelic studies are not a part of the history of science. They're part, now they are, but they're part of the history of religious studies. It comes out of these battles of which go back hundreds of years. Does that make sense?

• 1:15:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, kind of. Yeah, so the flood, yeah, the flood myths, I mean, that's, and that's something that Graham Hancock talks about too. That's one of his biggest questions is like, why are the flood myths everywhere? You know, and, and his hypothesis is that there was a cosmic impact at the end of the ice age. There was the younger dries, which, yeah, I think that's pretty legit, man. I like that theory. I'm a believer.

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  Now, hey, look.

• 1:15:30Danny Jones?

  And each their own. And then that, you know, it melted the ice caps. I mean, and that created a big flood that took out a lot of the megafauna in the North American continent.

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Danny Jones?

  Not so much in Africa, which why there's a lot of big megafauna there still.

• 1:15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Danny Jones?

  And none of here. Um, could be. And then that maybe that was something that was around the world, which which inspired those flood myths.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  Could be, any kind of large scale theory like that is probably gonna be is almost always wrong. Hmm. Uh, you need to think, people need to think on a much smaller scale, because then you have a chance of it be actually being true. Uh, when you're thinking of large scale, but what they are is a good, sometimes a good starting point. Maybe this happened and then you start working on other little elements of it. But here's what I would, what I was talking about, what you're talking about. Here's a book you should read. It's by Colin Kidd, and it's called, uh, The World of Mr. Causabon. And if you want to understand the tradition of literature this is in, this is the book you should read, because it goes into Graham Hancock's forebears and where he got all of these ideas.

• 1:16:30Danny Jones?

  Mr. Who? Causabon?

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  Causabon. He's a character in the novel Middlemarch. C.A.U.S.A.B.O.N. Yeah, Colin Kidd. It's a hilarious book. It's a short book, and everybody should read it who's interested in these topics, because what you get are the original Graham Hancock's. And you get also, uh, Carl Rux, the people before him, who were saying, you know, people even in the late 1800s were already saying, what if Jesus was a shaman? You started to get books like that.

• 1:17:00Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  Yes. And you started to get, like, there's a book, Cocklane and Common Sense by Andrew Lang, who was a, I think he was British, but he was a paranormal researcher, and he had what was called a predecessor to the drug theory called the hallucination theory of religion. And so they were already starting to figure out, like, hold on, the people in these books are all having visions, what's going on here? And at the same time, you had Havelock Ellis and other psychologists experimenting with drugs, and they started to put it together. They started to go, hold on a second, what if they were on drugs? Well, you can imagine how this went over. It's was taboo then, it's taboo now.

• 1:17:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  You see?

• 1:17:35Danny Jones?

  But it does make a lot of sense, though. Like, they're like.

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:17:38Danny Jones?

  A DMT experience is like dying. Like, there's definitely clear, I don't, I wouldn't have to read literature on it or hear other people's experience first.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Danny Jones?

  To have that myself. Like, I didn't experience that just because I read about it first. You know what I mean? Like, it didn't influence the way I, the way I experienced it.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Danny Jones?

  Like, it was definitely like a dying and being born again experience, for sure. And it was definitely like.

• 1:18:04Danny Jones?

  It was definitely like seeing God or meeting God or understanding like the creation, like you're flying through this universe, this like you're flying, like having the universe ripped open and flying through light arteries, you know what I mean? And seeing like the foundational creation of what we are. And it's like down to the very fiber of your being.

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Danny Jones?

  It seemed, it is to me at least, it seemed like a very-

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  Sure, a lot of people it is. And but you know, Rick Strassman has said, what about if it just amplified pre-existing beliefs, the drugs? Because you can cultivate these experiences. People have them naturally all the time, but we don't know. Remember in the spirit molecule, it's like, well, maybe some of the DMT is leaking out of the third eye. Nobody knows. So people do have these experiences naturally. There's a record going back thousands of years of people cultivating them. In Christianity, you don't have to look much further than the New Testament. The origins of Christianity are in the Pentecost. You have all of these people who, were they on drugs? We don't know. Maybe, I don't see, there's probably no way to find out. But we know they were experimenting with altered states of consciousness. And you, where I'm from, you have people doing the same thing now. They're called Pentecostals. Some of them, you know, you go to a serpent handling church down in Eastern Kentucky,

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  they're playing music, and it's all starts, it's like jazz. It all starts impromptu. It's not like a concert, somebody starts one thing, then somebody starts another. You're almost on some like hillbilly John Coltrane stuff. Then somebody gets out the fire, you start burning, then they pull out the snakes. And you're creating this disorientation that leads to altered states of consciousness. And if you walk into one of those churches, people are hopping in down and going buck wild.

• 1:19:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  And then you have Pentecostals that don't do serpents, that run the holy rollers.

• 1:19:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  So the many New Testament, well, New Testament scholars have argued that this is, the early Christian communities were doing this. Okay? So were some of them also using drugs? Probably. Probably. But what this turns into amongst the public is, they were all on drugs, Jesus was a mushroom, and I got cold on-

• 1:20:07Danny Jones?

  Jesus was a mushroom.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the Allegro stuff.

• 1:20:09Danny Jones?

  Allegro, oh yeah, I'm familiar with it.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  The Allegro stuff. So-

• 1:20:11Danny Jones?

  And he ties the connection of the mushroom, basically how it's not- It's not pollinated like a normal plant is. It's just it comes out of the ground through the mycelia from the rain and the rain is the sperm of God and the mushroom is like a is like the virgin.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  Well, the mushroom is a the

• 1:20:28Danny Jones?

  Or not the virgin, but the like the immaculate conception.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  Well, it is literally the the sexual organ of the mycelium. It literally is the sexual organ of the mycelium. That's what it is. That's what the mushroom is. It looks like a sexual organ because it is one.

• 1:20:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  That's what it is.

• 1:20:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  Right? A da or a da whatever deer eats the mushrooms. It goes a few miles. It takes a shit. The spores land. A few days later, a mushroom comes up. The cap explodes. Spores spread it by the wind, spread everywhere else. It's really bizarre.

• 1:20:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  And so then you think about how bizarre these studies are at Hopkins. You have this mushroom. You give these people this mushroom and then scientists are like, hold on, maybe this is the origins of religion. The whole thing is bizarre and it has and people are not covering it. I don't think people are really appreciating that fact of just how strange it is.

• 1:21:14Danny Jones?

  It is very strange, dude. So we have no, no idea. No scientists have any idea of what like chemically or mechanically is actually happening like like what are these pathways? Like

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  Well, they come up. Okay, now, you know, one of the paradigm, well, it increases neuroplasticity. They had this default merit mode network. That was the rage for a while. They discarded that. They put people in imaging machines. So you see colors. Okay, we don't know much. As Roland Griffiths said in my latest article, our ability to measure what's going on in the brain is incredibly primitive.

• 1:21:51Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  We don't know. He's he told me all we can do is start guessing at it and throwing different frames of reference at it. And that's what they've done with this religious thing because perhaps these psychologists like Jung and James, Jung and James, they've provided some of these, they pull in alchemy and all these other things to try to explain this process because we just have no idea. So no, there is no scientific explanation for it. None.

• 1:22:17Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:22:18Danny Jones?

  To me.

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  It is. And that's what drives my, even though I know and Roland said, look, we're not going to figure it out anytime soon. In your lifetime, Travis, ain't gonna happen. Not gonna figure it out. So.

• 1:22:28Danny Jones?

  So, yeah, that's built into what's built into the human psyche. If we can't even understand it with science, it has to be something that we don't it's some like, like, what if it is? We what if we are? contacting some other realm or some other like beings that are from a different plane of existence, right? Like, what if that's true?

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, in some of the criticism, you notice I put both sides. I put people who criticize this, and I put boosters like Ralph Hood that says, "The problem with psychedelic research is it's too conservative. We should..." He believes, Ralph, who helped design the Hopkins studies, who's the expert on serpent handling, he says, "We need to open up the possibility." The scientists are going, "Well, that's obviously delusion or mental illness. You didn't come into contact with anything."

• 1:23:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:23:05Speaker 00

  He says, "That's bullshit. That's anti-scientific. It's a bias against religion. We need to be open to the possibility that these are alternate dimensions. You can go and look at the shamans and they say, "How'd you figure out how to make ayahuasca? Well, the snake told me, or the jaguar told me." And everybody laughs, but we don't know where they got it from.

• 1:23:25Danny Jones?

  Right. To automatically dismiss that based on science is anti-scientific by definition.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  It absolutely is. It absolutely is. It's, and you know, William James said, "Well, it's fruits, not roots. Who cares where it comes from?" I mean, he didn't say, "If it helps people..." You know, pragmatism says, "If they thought they talked to God and that made them want to be a better person, who gives a damn if it's a delusion or not?"

• 1:23:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  They became a better person. The fruits of the experience. If it comes from drugs, good. But what I'm af- I think here's the major point with me and you. What I'm afraid is that novelty is being elevated above morality and that we're forgetting about the moral parts of this whenever, because it's so weird, because it's so new, because it's so like, "Wow, this is amazing. These experiences are amazing." We have to be careful when people are making moral claims that these drugs, which is a claim that Roland made and what they were looking into. They believe that these experiences transform people morally and ethically. And that's the basis of all of these wild newspaper claims and media claims. And it's the basis of The Immortality Key. Whenever he puts in the introduction,

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  he puts this conversion experience and says, "Look, these experiences change people for the better."

• 1:24:38Danny Jones?

  And that's only anecdotal is your point. That's not with everybody.

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  It's the sigh, yeah, it's, most of it's anecdotal because a lot of the books are what? They're just collections of conversion experience. They mirror early, they, they mirror kind of evangelical tent revivals. If you go to an evangelical tent revival where I'm from, they get people on stage who have been transformed by the Holy Spirit and by God and it totally changed their life. I was drinking, I got a DUI, ran somebody over, but now I have God and I've changed. It's identical to what you see with these pharmaceutical advertisements with psilocybin. You see, of I've been changed. What I mean by that is the

• 1:25:12Danny Jones?

  Are there pharmaceutical advertisements of psilocybin?

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  Well, the press is doing it for free for them. Yeah.

• 1:25:18Danny Jones?

  Right, the press, yeah.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, because they're using their, Bob, Jesse, other people, they're going in, but he's not going in the press, but they're pushing this narrative that it, that it has a medical application. So absolutely, when you get people from clinical trials and you pay them to go out and say positive things, it was pointed out in the New York Times, these are the same methods as a pharmaceutical company. Prozac, they did it with Prozac. They have a clinical trial participant, I'm healed, and then they pay them money and they go out and try to evangelize to other people to get on them. They use it on, they use it in advertising.

• 1:25:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, I'm aware of that, but I never, I never once thought that that would be applied to the psychedelic stuff.

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  It absolutely is. This is a lot of what I've been writing about and pushing back against.

• 1:26:00Danny Jones?

  So what about, are you aware of MAPS?

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:26:03Danny Jones?

  So what, so MAPS is?

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science. It was a, it's a, it's a organization started in the eighties by a guy named Rick Doblin. And actually, it came out of Earth Metabolic Services, which was some company started by Buckminster Fuller, and like Doblin bought it and then it became MAPS. But Rick is, is, well, I think he's from Boston, or maybe he's from Chicago, but he landed here in Sarasota, Florida and went to New College. He was like 35, still a student at New College. Uh, but he has been doing studies on mostly MDMA.

• 1:26:36Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:26:37Speaker 00

  For 40 years now. So he's not, um, really pushing psilocybin. He's an all over psychedelic guy, promoter of psychedelics, and they hold the, the biggest conference in the world there in Denver. Um, but he's mostly been into MDMA, which is a total different thing. Uh, the effects of MDMA are not correlated.

• 1:26:56Danny Jones?

  They're not psychedelic.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  Well, they're psychedelic, but they're very different from psilocybin. It's not correlated. They don't provide this mystical experience. You can get benefits from it without that.

• 1:27:06Danny Jones?

  So is MAPS doing the same thing?

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And they're all, they also have been, what their main strategy has been is using veterans. All the veterans you see, Rick Perry.

• 1:27:14Danny Jones?

  I've never heard a veteran talk about a negative experience with MDMA or psychedelics.

• 1:27:18Speaker 00

  No, no, even though you see in the news, the guy took psilocybin and went and shot, the veterans, two of them, went and did a mass shooting on them. And I'm not saying that would, that should be a scare tactic.

• 1:27:28Danny Jones?

  When was that one?

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  One of them was in Oregon at some kind of music festival and there's been several. It's, there's so much in the news. And it's hard to keep track of because of course the people in the industry, and somewhat rightfully so. Look, if a thousand people do it and one person goes nuts, it's not fair to define it by the one person.

• 1:27:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  It's not.

• 1:27:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  Um, but they're only highlighting the most positive experiences and where you get into trouble is when these people are being paid. And a lot of these organizations like Heroic Hearts and all of these other people, look, these people were genuinely probably healed by it. But then they're become part of a larger plot by people who have financial interest in these things. To, some of them just wanted to pass through the FDA, but other people, they're, they've got nonprofit companies where they're making money and they're promoting themselves. And it's a massive, entangled landscape that we wouldn't know about if it weren't for a few people, including myself, that have reported on it.

• 1:28:21Danny Jones?

  Who, how much money could there possibly be to make from pushing psilocybin? Right? Like, like, like all the big pharmaceutical companies, they don't, they don't do any of that stuff.

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  They've all, oh, they absolutely are interested. Yeah. Johnson and Johnson's, Spravato is, they own ketamine, they're making billion. I don't know. You could look up, how much money does Spravato make? They're absolutely studying psychedelics right now. Compass Pathways, Johnson Johnson, MAPS, and they want to patent particular variations of the drugs.

• 1:28:48Danny Jones?

  Johnson and Johnson does?

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  Johnson and Johnson's.

• 1:28:50Danny Jones?

  Can you find this, Steve?

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  They sell, just look up Spravato. It was just.

• 1:28:53Danny Jones?

  Spravato?

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  That's a ketamine, uh, I think it's a nose thing.

• 1:28:57Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to have prescriptions, but they, oh, of course. It's a massive gold rush to try to figure this out. Now, look, maybe they won't be able to make any money off of it because you can grow it naturally, but they obviously want to.

• 1:29:12Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Specific revenue figures for Spravato are not, for Spravato are not publicly disclosed, but its high cost suggests significant earnings.

• 1:29:20Speaker 00

  They're making a fortune off of it.

• 1:29:22Danny Jones?

  Wholesale, uh, cost of Spravato can range from 590 to 880 per dose, with each treatment costing around a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars without insurance. Given its high price, uh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, um. There's no generic alternative. Spravato likely generates substantial revenue from its manufacturer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson.

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  Now, look, this is the only psychedelic that, that.

• 1:29:52Danny Jones?

  What is in it?

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Ketamine.

• 1:29:54Danny Jones?

  It's just ketamine?

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  It's just ketamine. I think it's a nose spray, isn't it?

• 1:29:59Speaker 00

  I thought you might have some.

• 1:30:00Danny Jones?

  See if you can find anything juicy on Spravato, Steve.

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

  Well, you know, and here's the thing with ketamine. They start advertising this, giving it to people. And during the, um, COVID, where people were staying at home, people were depressed, people got hooked on it. I mean, it's addictive.

• 1:30:12Danny Jones?

  On ketamine?

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  Yes, on ketamine. And there was a great, there was this amazing New York Times story to where.

• 1:30:18Danny Jones?

  There was more drug overdoses, I think, in, in human history than during the pandemic. There was like more than ever.

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, and people dying of alcoholism and stuff. It's a horrible, it's almost criminal. But, um, what it does, what it can do, if you keep taking, because obviously you reach a tolerance and you gotta keep taking more and more. So what can happen is you can lose control of your bowels sometimes and people, people wear diapers. So in the New York Times, you had people 25 years old, 28 years old. These are all people in New York City. Well, this cures my depression and, you know, I do have to wear a diaper forever now, but at least I'm not depressed. It was just, yeah.

• 1:30:54Danny Jones?

  What? From Spravato?

• 1:30:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and other, I mean, you can buy, there's all kinds of telehealth companies to where that provide this shit and, uh, that you just zoom with them and they say, okay. And then they send it to you. They have to have at least a rubber stamp of, yep, we talked to them and they seem depressed. So there you go. And people take it. So it's not very well regulated. But after this actor died, the guy from Friends.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone and including dental, vision and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone and including dental, vision and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is,

• 1:32:00Speaker 05

  every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  Matthew Perry? Math- no, Matthew-

• 1:32:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, I know who you're talking about.

• 1:32:21Speaker 00

  Well, when he died, now there's a huge backlash against it because he died-

• 1:32:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, because he was on it?

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  Because he was on it.

• 1:32:26Danny Jones?

  Oh shit.

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  Somebody gave him a big dose and then he, I think he drowned in his-

• 1:32:30Danny Jones?

  It was, I think it was in Orlando, wasn't it?

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  No, he was in LA.

• 1:32:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay. Oh, yes. Yes, I remember that now.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Danny Jones?

  It was a different guy who died.

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  So you gotta be careful of exaggerating the therapeutic benefits and downplaying the risk. But, and you know, we need to be honest. Striking the right balance there is extremely hard because there is taboos against these drugs and people don't like you pointing out these type of things because they, "Hey, we're just now improving their reputation. Let's get this stuff through and then we'll start talking about this."

• 1:33:00Danny Jones?

  I think the pushback comes from this being like federally illegal, right? When there's so much other shit these pharmaceutical companies push that are way more fucking dangerous.

• 1:33:11Speaker 00

  Sure. They passed, if I remember correctly, the FDA approved OxyContin and said there was less than 1% chance of addiction.

• 1:33:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Speaker 00

  Then how many million people did it?

• 1:33:20Danny Jones?

  Right. That's what the Sackler family said. Like they're, like that, yeah. Some of this stuff is sinister compared to psychedelics or marijuana, you know, or even like DMT, which there's like literally- If you want to really get scientific, there's DMT in a fucking plant, right? There's DMT in every living animal on earth. So like, the fact that you can make this shit illegal when it's, if you want to put it on a scale of how dangerous it is, it's way lower than some of this shit that's federally legal and prescribed by doctors on the regular.

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent.

• 1:33:51Danny Jones?

  So I think that's where most of like, these people kind of get jihad about it, right? And they want to push it and it becomes like the, it becomes their identity.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  Yes, and there's also a financial incentive. We're in America. You never forget about that. There's a financial incentive. They want to make money. The stocks are out there. Every time something bad happens, when the FDA approval happens, the stock slumped, something good happens, they go up.

• 1:34:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Um, I'm not against that. I'm not against making money, but I don't think you need to lie in service of it. And the medical industry here is so corrupt.

• 1:34:21Danny Jones?

  It's terrible.

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

  It's horrible. And the FDA, yeah, I mean, some people say, see, the FDA said it's dangerous. Well, just like you, I don't give a damn what the FDA says. We know they're corrupt.

• 1:34:29Danny Jones?

  Right. Right.

• 1:34:31Speaker 00

  You know?

• 1:34:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's definitely, you know, there's nuance and everything. You can't broad brush this stuff by saying it's just good for everyone and you, and you know, everyone needs to take it. And then another thing that is scary, which I didn't even realize, because we had this conversation on the phone the other day. And, you know, one of the things that you're afraid of is that if churches or, or preachers are given, or can whoever they are, the heads of these religious institutions are federally licensed to handle and distribute these drugs. I thought initially, I'm like, okay, that's sounds great, right? Maybe you give these people drugs and you know, it's going to make, make it everything better.

• 1:35:16Danny Jones?

  But you pointed out that when you make these people who are already like, you're having these people that are going to church and, and being preached on by these, you know, the, are connected to God. And now you inject hallucinogens to them and psychedelics to these people who are able to put you on psychedelics, which you're already probably vulnerable if you're there in the first place, but now if you're on psychedelics, you're Becoming way more vulnerable and imagine the control that these people would have. If not only these people are subscribing to this religion and believing that you are connected to God. But now you put them under the state, a trance, right? Like, I can see how that would be a very slippery.

• 1:35:59Speaker 00

  You could radicalize them even in this. And it's not that so much I'm scared. I'm simply trying to report when you have behavior scientists teaming up with venture capitalists in the Catholic Church. That's worth writing about. That's a story. And so is it, do I think it's a bad idea? I don't, don't sound like a good idea, but I'm just trying to keep people of abreast of, hey, these are some extremely interesting things that are happening. Um, and the responses been people are like, wow, I didn't even know this was happening. What the Catholic, you know, the Catholic Church might be interested in psychedelics. Um, so yeah, I don't think it's a very good idea, but you know, I'm not a Catholic, so they're not going to give it to me.

• 1:36:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  They're not going to have any control over me, but as someone pointed, Matt Johnson pointed out in my article. When you set up a situation where someone is claiming they have direct access to God or the sacred. And you put minors around them, just get prepared for what you, they, they didn't need psychedelics to, how many people, millions of people?

• 1:36:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  And now we're going to reap, the church is failing for a reason. I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's bad.

• 1:36:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  I'm simply saying it's emptied out. The pews are empty out for a reason. You lied and covered up a scandal in which you destroyed people's lives. Now let's try to rebuild it with psychedelic drugs. This is an insane idea. This is an insane idea. A new reformation. And so that's been the center of my inquiry of new reformation. Interesting. So, okay, so there's going to be, nobody likes you looking into the origin of their religion. And if they're starting one, they're never going to say, this is a new religion. They're going to say, no, this is an old one. We're starting it back up. Right? Um, they like especially a startup religion. They wanted to get down the road and already, you know, going before you start looking into its origins, right? People in Scientology would prefer you don't write books. And in fact, they, let's just say discourage people from writing about them. We're in Florida.

• 1:37:42Danny Jones?

  That's discouraging. Oh, they're in 10 minutes from here, the, the headquarters. Yeah, the flag building is like 10 minutes from here.

• 1:37:48Speaker 00

  Wow, I want to see it. But you can see, they don't like people looking into. The origins of the original, why? Because they want the founder to be mythologized so that you don't know much about them, right? Because if you look into L. Ron Hubbard, you're gonna go, this guy's a crank. This is full of shit. So what I've been trying to do is look at all the intellectual cultural currents and all of the books that are tied up in this philosophy and these ideas and trying to pull them apart and illuminate them so that people can understand some of the figures involved with this. Even more so than saying, this is wrong, this isn't wrong. I've been more interested in, in the field itself, like, what does Rick Strasman think of the New Reformation? What does Carl Ruck think of the New Reformation? Carl told me, as people who read my new article in Reason will see, in his words, it's suspect and potentially

• 1:38:32Speaker 00

  dangerous for the Catholic Church to endorse psychedelics, because what he said and what he believes is that the Church has been the cause of global conflict for millennia, in his words, and that they're going to try to indoctrinate people into the Church to swell their ranks, and it could create more conflict. It could radicalize people into the religion even more, and it could intensify the conflict. And this is what's hap- but what nobody talks about is that these drugs are being deployed on the battlefield.

• 1:39:01Danny Jones?

  And they're being weaponized. That's the thing we haven't even talked about yet.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:39:04Danny Jones?

  Since the Cold War, they've been weaponized with shit like MKUltra and all this other shit.

• 1:39:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:39:10Danny Jones?

  Like, you can absolutely, there's been studies on how you can break down the human mind and mind control somebody, create a Manchurian candidate, or whatever. I mean, Charles Manson, have you read Chaos, that book Chaos?

• 1:39:21Speaker 00

  That's a, a, dude.

• 1:39:22Danny Jones?

  Excellent book. Like, they've been studying this stuff in the context of war, right? So imagine if you, holy shit, man.

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  So this is what's happening, Danny, is if you read their literature, you don't have to make anything up, just read their book, and they say, Western civilization is failing.

• 1:39:41Danny Jones?

  Whose book? What are you talking about?

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  Well, if so-

• 1:39:43Danny Jones?

  What, by the, by the way, what, what do you, what is the New Reformation?

• 1:39:46Speaker 00

  Oh, this is-

• 1:39:47Danny Jones?

  By definition.

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  There's a book called The Immortality Key, that's kind of a blueprint for the psychedelic Renaissance of what's happening.

• 1:39:53Danny Jones?

  Right, yes.

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  In the first chap, there's a foreword by Graham Hancock, then there's introduction called A New Reformation, which lays out, uh, uh, his vision, the author's vision, Brian Marrescu, for what he calls a new reformation, which is to rebuild the Catholic Church by incorporating a psychedelic sacrament. And the idea is that this will revitalize Western culture because it's collapsing and dying of a spiritual crisis, et cetera, et cetera, et

• 1:40:16Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:40:16Speaker 00

  Do you see what I'm saying?

• 1:40:17Danny Jones?

  I understand now.

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so what you see is this playing out in real life that you see psychedelics being deployed on the I think I sent you those two articles in the New Yorker had one article, then the Ryan Grim at the Intercept had a really interesting article that was called psilocy- or no, it was called ibogaine versus meth. And on the Russian side of the Ukraine war, they're all loaded on meth. On the Ukraine side, they're all taking ibogaine, which is a very powerful psychedelic. And he was chronicling this drug-

• 1:40:44Danny Jones?

  Right now?

• 1:40:45Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, and the and the New Yorker article is about the same thing because they believe that psychedelics-

• 1:40:50Danny Jones?

  Steven, pull this up, bro.

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, put, put, uh, intercept ibogaine and it'll pull up. It's amazing.

• 1:40:57Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

  They believe that it increases-

• 1:40:59Danny Jones?

  All the Russians are on meth?

• 1:41:00Speaker 00

  Read it hard enough.

• 1:41:01Danny Jones?

  The casualties are way higher on the Russian side.

• 1:41:03Speaker 00

  Well, and that's normal, though, because Syria, they're all on, they were all on meth.

• 1:41:06Danny Jones?

  Well, the Nazis were on meth, too, right?

• 1:41:07Speaker 00

  And the Nazis were all on meth, yeah. Well, you gotta keep them going, you know?

• 1:41:10Danny Jones?

  Right, right. And so were the, um, um, Pearl Harbor, the kamikazes.

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  Go down a little bit to where the real article's at. There it is.

• 1:41:18Danny Jones?

  There you go.

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  There's right down there. There it is.

• 1:41:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, this is it? Okay.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  Oh, it's behind a paywall.

• 1:41:23Danny Jones?

  No, it's not. You just gotta close that. Right?

• 1:41:29Danny Jones?

  Enter your email. Just enter your email.

• 1:41:30Speaker 00

  Ukrainian military is experimenting with ibogaine, a psychedelic drug banned in the US. Now, this is fascinating. Do you see this? To do so, it is partnering with founder of the Yippee movement, Irvin Dana Beal. Now, I, he got thrown in prison.

• 1:41:43Danny Jones?

  Okay, scroll up, scroll, hang on, scroll up real quick.

• 1:41:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Danny Jones?

  Okay, let me see the headline. The Ukrainian military is experimenting with psychedelic drug ibogaine to treat traumatic brain injury. Okay, Ukraine is working with the founder of the Yippee movement to provide ibogaine to soldiers on and off the battlefield. Scroll down. Okay, what were you pointing out?

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  Well, uh, to promote battle readiness, uh, they said it increases spiritual resilience so that you, and it kind of puts you in this heightened-

• 1:42:13Danny Jones?

  Ibogaine's most famous American patient may well be Hunter Biden, who has battled his own drug addiction with help of ibogaine treatment, um, at a Mexican clinic. At low doses, Bell, Beal, whatever, how you spell that.

• 1:42:26Speaker 00

  You gotta get it, you should get it, it's Dana Beal, you should get him on here. I have his phone number.

• 1:42:30Danny Jones?

  Dana Beal? Oh, really?

• 1:42:31Speaker 00

  He's old timey Yippee guy, so they were like anti-war, um- Uh, you know hippie like Abby Hoffman types and he is convinced he's a big marijuana activist who's been to prison a dozen times over this, but he's the one Rick Doblin got of maps got him the Iva game and he brought it in because it's illegal and he brought it into Ukraine and provided it to the military and when he got back, he was doing a bringing marijuana somewhere in Oregon and got thrown in prison and I contacted him after I read this article and I wanted to ask him details about this to write an article and it about two weeks later, the phone rang from a prison and it was him and he's a wild dude.

• 1:43:09Danny Jones?

  Is he in prison right now?

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  No, I think he's out.

• 1:43:12Danny Jones?

  Where is this, where is this guy?

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  I think he's in New York. I'll give you his phone number.

• 1:43:15Danny Jones?

  I gotta get him here now.

• 1:43:16Speaker 00

  Oh, he's, he's an interesting guy.

• 1:43:18Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they're using this on, and if you look at the New Yorker article on the same thing, they think that you remember Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory?

• 1:43:26Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 1:43:26Speaker 00

  Okay. You know how he said, okay, maybe it, maybe it, uh, part of the theory is that it increases hand eye coordination. It makes you a better hunter.

• 1:43:34Danny Jones?

  Edge detection.

• 1:43:35Speaker 00

  Edge detection, all of these attributes. Well, who do you think's interested in that?

• 1:43:38Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:43:38Speaker 00

  The military. So what I'm trying to report on is that we're in this utopian mindset. Oh psychedelics, they'll do all these things, but they're always going to be used for the op, the opposite thing too. And we need to be prepared. Aldous Huxley says in Brave New World, "The cost of liberty is eternal, the price of liberty and freedom is eternal vigilance." And so I've always took that to heart. You need to be vigilant. Don't get caught up in the sales promotion. Oh, we're all going to heal each other and then there'll be a utopian cult and all war will end. Bullshit. Bullshit.

• 1:44:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:44:15Speaker 00

  This is what's really happening. Is it all bad? Is this a condemnation of the whole movement? No, there, there are legitimate medical aspects, but we should also be asking, uh, what else are they going to be used for? One reason is just because it's interesting.

• 1:44:28Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:29Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:44:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  I never thought about using this on the battlefield. But there's a new article out called, it's on some religious website and it's called, do psychedelics fix a broken brain or something? And it's about, part of it's about John Lubecki, who's an Iraq war veteran. And he's talking about using MDMA and he said, I'm on the front lines. But he's, he's an American GI who went over to Ukraine to try to help him because he hates the Russians and believes in this war. And he said, a lot of the people that have trouble sleeping because they have PTSD, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, man, I'm over here on the front line, sleeping like a baby because I've been healed through psychedelics.

• 1:45:03Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they have this usefulness and if you think about it overall, this is really could lead to an intensification of war. Because during the Iraq war, you can look up these numbers. There was a lot of articles during the Iraq war of how much Prozac in antidepressants they were sending to the front line because my brother was over there a long time. They kept extending your service date. Well, you'll go home in September. Well, now it's going to be March. Well, actually it's going to be the summer. And people are naturally depressed because it was horrible because all the things that were happening. So now they're thinking, well, that's SSRIs, those didn't work that good. What about if we can send them over there? You can extend the length of time to which they're there. The, you know, you don't have to worry about, maybe not worry about shell shock. So you're, it's what, one member of the military, and this, you can find this too.

• 1:45:47Speaker 00

  He called it, we need to have sophisticated understanding of psychedelics on the battlefield to get a leg up on the enemy because it, it, it results in what he called increased lethality. It makes the fighting force more lethal.

• 1:46:01Speaker 00

  So what you see is, I was joking.

• 1:46:03Danny Jones?

  How would it make him more lethal if you're?

• 1:46:04Speaker 00

  By all of the things I just told you. Increase in hand eye coordination. So you have, if you're in the jungle or in the desert, this is an advantage.

• 1:46:12Danny Jones?

  Right. But you would have, there would have to be like a very fine line you can't cross, right? If you're, if you're taking psychedelics to where you don't want to be like tripping too hard.

• 1:46:20Speaker 00

  That's why they're spending millions of dollars.

• 1:46:21Danny Jones?

  Like microdosing or something.

• 1:46:22Speaker 00

  The government in DARPA is dumping 50, 60 million dollars into this. Of what, of what we know, they're dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into this.

• 1:46:30Danny Jones?

  Type in DARPA and psychedelics, see what comes up.

• 1:46:35Speaker 00

  In 2020, they put 23 million into it. That's in a Nature article, which is a very prestigious journal.

• 1:46:40Danny Jones?

  In 2020, they put 23 million.

• 1:46:42Speaker 00

  23 million, so you know it's more than that now.

• 1:46:44Danny Jones?

  DARPA is exploring ways to remove hallucinatory side effects from psychedelic medicines while retaining their therapeutic benefits.

• 1:46:53Speaker 00

  Now, do you see this? DARPA's granted 27 million to UNC Chapel Hill. I think that's David Nichols, the chemist David Nichols, who made a lot of the psilocybin for Hopkins and made all of the MDMA for the MAPS trials. He makes a lot of these drugs and he works for DARPA. Yeah, you should have him on too. He's from Kentucky. He's another part of the...

• 1:47:09Danny Jones?

  What's his name?

• 1:47:10Speaker 00

  Dave Nichols, N I C H O L S.

• 1:47:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, really interesting guy. Knows a ton. He's a chemist and his son also does this and he speaks up a lot and he knows a ton all about the chemistry side and everything else. He knew, I think he knew Albert Hofmann. He knows all this.

• 1:47:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, why wouldn't DARPA and the mil... Like, that's such a silly thing to overlook. Why wouldn't they be dropping millions of dollars into this stuff? If you can chemically enhance cognition and effectiveness on the battlefield with drugs, why the wouldn't you spend a ton of money on it?

• 1:47:47Speaker 00

  If these things provide general optimization, of course you're gonna want it for the military.

• 1:47:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:47:53Speaker 00

  What about if the other, you know, what about if the Russians get it or the jihad gets it and they're all hyped up on ibogaine and we don't have any? Well, they might get us, you know?

• 1:48:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  So, it's moving in all kinds, but imagine, this is now when our understanding of it's very primitive. What about when the science keeps developing? Because they've got, our best people are working on taking the trip out. Our best people are working on amplifying the good effects, getting rid of the bad effects. So, we're moving in. Shayla Love wrote an article, psychedelic journalist, she's at The Atlantic now, I think. She wrote an article called "The Psychedelic Drugs of the Future Are Ones You've Never Even Heard Of." At some point, this stuff we think of as gonna be looked at as primitive. They're building novel compounds all the time, but who knows what they might do.

• 1:48:37Speaker 00

  But you can see a brave new world type scenario developing. It could go one way or it could go the other and very likely, like all other things, it'll be a mixture of good and bad.

• 1:48:46Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:48:48Speaker 00

  But this, I, I think it's important to bring this up, not as a scare tactic, but simply to say, look, you may need to balance out or temper all of this utopian thinking with the realization that there are other things happening.

• 1:49:00Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:01Speaker 00

  Because a lot of, you know, there's just too much, the, the, the, the coverage of psychedelic research has been extremely bad.

• 1:49:08Danny Jones?

  Hmm, and one sided.

• 1:49:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:49:10Danny Jones?

  Well, not necessarily one sided, but it's been like a one front thing.

• 1:49:13Speaker 00

  It has, and now it's entering, as many people point out, it's now it's in, it can't, well, nothing in this country can be balanced. It can't be balanced, like we're talking about now, there's good and there's bad. It's either all the way good, and now it's in a negative cycle. So everybody's, it's bad, it doesn't work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:49:28Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right. That's Twitter for you.

• 1:49:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it can't just be balanced. So I think hopefully we're moving towards somewhere where it might be balanced.

• 1:49:39Speaker 00

  You know, people like Rick Strassman, I think Rick has been better than anybody as far as the major psychedelic researchers, who has always been honest and candid about the dual nature of these substances and that we ought to be careful of conflating science and religion. That you, you should be very weary when, or very leery when someone says, oh, we found the answer to all our problems. That's not what science is supposed to do. It doesn't pride itself on finding answers.

• 1:50:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08Speaker 00

  Hey, can I walk out that door for a second, grab my phone?

• 1:50:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:10Speaker 00

  I want to show you one thing you'll find interesting.

• 1:50:14Speaker 00

  This was an accidental send from Roland right before he died.

• 1:50:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, is this what you, I think you sent me this, didn't you?

• 1:50:19Speaker 00

  Did I?

• 1:50:19Danny Jones?

  Correspondence with, can this, can this be on the show or no?

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 1:50:24Danny Jones?

  Correspondence with Travis after 70 minute, after a 70 minute call, he's well intentioned, but his objectives are unclear and he may be prone to take extreme positions. I will not pursue Roland.

• 1:50:38Speaker 00

  Isn't that an odd text? He accidentally sent it and then he sent back a thing saying, oh, I was just taking personal notes over our phone call, that was nothing.

• 1:50:46Danny Jones?

  What did he mean by that?

• 1:50:48Speaker 00

  By that? Well, I mean, what didn't you read it as it's it's signed at the bottom, right? You see? I will not pursue.

• 1:50:56Danny Jones?

  Obviously, it was.

• 1:50:57Speaker 00

  It was meant for somebody else, right? He said it was a personal note. So who was it to?

• 1:51:01Danny Jones?

  Bullshit, yeah.

• 1:51:02Speaker 00

  And why is he tracking a clinical trial participant? And who's he sending notes to? And why? That's weird.

• 1:51:08Danny Jones?

  That is weird.

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  Isn't it weird?

• 1:51:10Danny Jones?

  Did you ask him what he meant by that?

• 1:51:11Speaker 00

  Yes. He said, oh, it's just a form of personal.

• 1:51:14Danny Jones?

  Can we talk about this? This isn't being the show or no?

• 1:51:18Speaker 00

  Whatever you think.

• 1:51:19Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:51:19Speaker 00

  I'll leave it up to you. How about that?

• 1:51:20Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:51:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:21Danny Jones?

  Yes, it will be the show.

• 1:51:26Danny Jones?

  So you asked him about it? What did he say?

• 1:51:29Speaker 00

  Uh, he said it was just a form of personal note taking. Now, do you want me to tell the story? Because what I just said, I would prefer not to be on the show.

• 1:51:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:37Speaker 00

  Do you want me to talk about it again?

• 1:51:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What was the context of that? Why did he say that?

• 1:51:41Speaker 00

  Because we had been emailing back and forth and he was upset with me and then he called me. He said, can I call you? And I said, sure. And so he called me and we had a rather emotionally potent conversation

• 1:51:59Speaker 00

  to where he was just, he did not want me reporting on the program. He didn't like what he was simultaneously. He said, I'm astonished by your level of research. That was his word. At the same time,

• 1:52:13Speaker 00

  he thought that it was threatening their objectives, as you saw in the email. His intentions are unclear. I think he's well intentioned. I think he's what is it? He's well intentioned, but his objectives are unclear and he may be prone to extreme positions. I said, thank you for my first book blurb,

• 1:52:34Speaker 00

  which I will now call extreme positions. Um, I don't know. It's very weird. I mean, science, I mean, you can, if you know of another example of scientists doing that, I don't know, except for maybe pharmaceutical companies to where they want to control what's said about the drug.

• 1:52:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:49Speaker 00

  You know, they don't want you saying, but, but the funny thing is I've written a lot about this and I've never said anything bad about my experience because my experience was good. At, at, under the clinical trial, it didn't heal any ailment, but it was fascinating. But, but again, on the Groff thing, it just amplified the way I already was. I was just a more extreme version of the person I already was.

• 1:53:08Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:53:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, my, how, I had-

• 1:53:09Danny Jones?

  Only when you were, only when you were under the influence of it, or do you think-

• 1:53:12Speaker 00

  No, long after.

• 1:53:13Danny Jones?

  Did it had a perpetual effect?

• 1:53:14Speaker 00

  It had a major perpetual effect because for a year after, you're still feeling the effects or six months to a year and you change the sails of your life. I became obsessed with studying this, which perpetuates and keeps determining the course of your life. Because even after the enthusiasm wore off, hell, I was knee deep into this research project. I mean, if you go to my house now, there's thousands of books, many of them rare books on medicine and psychedelics. And I became obsessed because I thought, you know, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm an engineer by trade, right? That's what I went to school for. That's what I've mostly done in healthcare and IT networking. And so I, in what I do, there's always an answer. You can always trace some, reverse engineer something back in order to find the problem. I'm trained in troubleshooting medical devices. That's what I did.

• 1:53:57Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:53:58Speaker 00

  Okay. Um, so I've tried to reverse engineer it and look back where all of this came from to see, what is this program? What are they doing? You know, what, what is this all about? Where do these ideas come from? So, you know, so I don't know with the text message. I don't, I don't, I mean, the email. I don't know. I find it odd, but I don't know.

• 1:54:20Danny Jones?

  Based on everything we know about MKUltra in the 60s, the 50s and 60s and 70s, do you, I mean, do you think it's unreasonable to suggest that they're still doing something that we don't know about today?

• 1:54:30Speaker 00

  Oh, I think they are, but there's a recent article that talks about how now the CIA is mostly, it just came the other day. This, uh, head of the CIA said, we can't compete with Google. We can't compete with Palantir. We can't compete with Thiel and Musk and all these people. So they said-

• 1:54:44Danny Jones?

  They're going to recruit them.

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  We're working now, the spy agencies work directly with these massive corporations who are hoovering in data and we now know data is worth more than oil.

• 1:54:53Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:54:53Speaker 00

  And so the way they're doing it is going to be different. They're not going to be like, okay, uh, guys, it's MKUltra. To let's start it back up. They're doing it in a different way. And this is another, this is what I've been looking into too. Who are these people? Some of them are very odd characters.

• 1:55:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, you know, Google was literally created and incubated under the umbrella of the CIA and NSA.

• 1:55:17Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:55:18Danny Jones?

  Like Sergey Brin, there's a great article on this on Substack. I forget the name of them guys, uh, the guy who did it. He did a series on it. On basically how Sergey was being visited at Stanford by multiple CIA people. And NSA people, and he was getting their, his funding from them directly for the cert, the, their search engine.

• 1:55:40Danny Jones?

  Whatever it was called, the, the, the name of the software that made the search engine work. And some of the other fundamental mechanisms of Google itself.

• 1:55:48Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:55:49Danny Jones?

  So if they were involved in funding it and creating it, why wouldn't they have just full control of it? Like this is a, this is a big difference between.

• 1:55:55Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:55:56Danny Jones?

  No, this isn't it.

• 1:55:57Speaker 00

  The psychedelic Renaissance came out of Silicon Valley by a guy who worked at Oracle. Oracle was the CIA kind. That's what it is. Look up Larry, look up Larry Ellison CIA and you'll see.

• 1:56:07Danny Jones?

  Larry Ellison was the guy who was just talking, there was just a huge thing that came out with him recently where you're talking about AI, right? Him and, um.

• 1:56:14Speaker 00

  Probably.

• 1:56:15Danny Jones?

  Him and Sam Altman together.

• 1:56:17Speaker 00

  Probably. Yeah, he's, he's extraordinarily rich.

• 1:56:20Danny Jones?

  What was the thing? What was that recent news about Larry Ellison? He was talking, he was standing right there next to Trump, giving a speech. Can you find that, Steve? Anyways, but like.

• 1:56:30Speaker 00

  Of course you have, you know, Roland Griffiths would compare psychedelics to nuclear power in their, how powerful they are. Do you think the government's gonna just let, oh, we're just studying this over here. Don't worry. No, they could, foreign governments are interested in this. You must be involved in what's happening. It only makes sense for national security. And like you're talking about the birth, you know, the birth of the internet and the birth of psychedelic, if birth of psychedelic research are intertwined at Stanford, right? There's a great book about this. You should get him on. It's, the book is called What the Dormouse Said. It's an incredible book about the entwined origins of the birth of the internet and psychedelics.

• 1:57:04Danny Jones?

  What the Dormouse said?

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  It's called, yeah, which is a line from Jefferson Airplane, you know, feed your head or great, who's Grace Slick? Is that Grace Slick? You know that song Jefferson Airplane, feed your head?

• 1:57:16Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:18Speaker 00

  You know what it is.

• 1:57:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I know what song you're talking about.

• 1:57:21Danny Jones?

  Trump's AI deal fueling early cancer detection from Oracle's Larry Ellison.

• 1:57:27Danny Jones?

  Trump said this project is the largest AI infrastructure by far in history and Elon hates these guys.

• 1:57:34Speaker 00

  Well, they're his competitor.

• 1:57:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:57:36Speaker 00

  He wants to his business to do all the work.

• 1:57:39Danny Jones?

  Well, Elon's doing it open source. These guys want to make it and then they also uh, OpenAI, they're Sam Altman's trying to take it private, trying to make it from being a open source nonprofit to a private company.

• 1:57:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:56Danny Jones?

  Uh, so they're trying to do, one of the most exciting things we're working on, again, using these tools that Sam and Masa are providing is our cancer vaccine. Ellison said during a news conference with Trump in the Roosevelt Room. Uh, Ellis is that early cancer detection can be provided with simple blood tests. Artificial intelligence can leverage and look at the blood test to find that cancers that are seriously threatening. So they can take your blood and they can put it, process it through like DNA sequencing and find out what cancers you're predisposed to and then um, create a custom tailored vaccine for you to avoid cancer.

• 1:58:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:31Danny Jones?

  That sounds promising.

• 1:58:33Speaker 00

  Could be. It might be like old Elizabeth Holmes.

• 1:58:35Danny Jones?

  What could go wrong?

• 1:58:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's him.

• 1:58:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's crazy, man.

• 1:58:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Danny Jones?

  Um, okay, going back to um, the immortality key and what we were talking about with this new new reformation.

• 1:58:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:53Danny Jones?

  Um, so I reread the immortality key again over the last couple of days, trying to get a good gist of what um, what it was about and I've only got about halfway through it. So I probably missed some of the key parts where where you're you're basically saying that what the the goal behind that book, Immortality Key by Brian Marrescu is to merge psychedelics with religion or with the church and to try to revive Christianity and Catholicism by infusing it with psychedelics and getting these people.

• 1:59:31Speaker 00

  That's what he argues in the introduction. Yes. He said he premise, the premise is this. He says, look, the world is in chaos. The United States, we've got deaths of despair, opioid addiction. He paints a picture of Armageddon.

• 1:59:43Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:59:43Speaker 00

  And then like.

• 1:59:46Speaker 00

  Let's say a medical ad. He says, "We found the cure." Go to Roland Griffiths, they cut to Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins. He's discovered the origin of religion. He has a Johns Hopkins clinical trial participant saying, "I was healed. There was this miraculous healing." And then he combines Roland's research with this search for the origins of religion, and then also adds in a bunch of psychedelic scientists who are interested in pushing this through the medical system. So it's essentially selling psychedelics as a cure for not just medical problems, depression, mental illness, but also this, the same old utopian stuff that, you know, Albert Hofmann and other people were pushing. You know, Albert Hofmann was, he's really kind of following Albert Hofmann. If you, Albert Hofmann

• 2:00:31Speaker 00

  discovered LSD.

• 2:00:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Speaker 00

  Right? He's a chemist from Switzerland.

• 2:00:34Danny Jones?

  I'm familiar with him from The Road to Elusus.

• 2:00:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, fascinating guy. And in that book, he, he had a rap that he did, different variations on his rap, but he gave this kind of rap all the time. The world's coming doing it. He was what Jonathan Ott, who translated, you know Jonathan Ott, psychedelic researcher?

• 2:00:52Danny Jones?

  I'm familiar with him.

• 2:00:52Speaker 00

  You should get him on here. But he, um...

• 2:00:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think like a bunch of people have told us we need to get him.

• 2:00:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's, I can't get his email address for the life of me, so I don't know how you get ahold of him. But he just popped up. There's a new lecture by him that's amazing. He's in Basel, actually, talking about Albert Hofmann. Anyway, Ott described Hofmann in this lecture as an ecological fanatic who didn't like people. He loved nature. He was very pagan. If you look at pictures of him, he owned this huge strip of land in the mountains of Switzerland, and he thought that industrial civilization was destroying the planet. And so he saw his drug as something that could resolve this. He thought it would revive the ancient mysteries and that it would magically, you know, heal the world and fix the world by fixing the root of the problem, which he believed was human psychology.

• 2:01:40Speaker 00

  And so Murezku, really, he's following in that tradition. And what he did is kind of dumb it down and turn it into a commercial sort of Hardy Boys mystery. If you, overall, it's kind of like a drug advertisement.

• 2:01:52Danny Jones?

  It's like the Da Vinci Code for trying to uncover this ancient, uh... Chemical evidence of the ergot fungus that's grown on wheat or barley that in these vessels that were found in Elusus, right, to say to to support his hypothesis that basically it's it's it's it's confirming and kind of building off of Ruck's Road to Elusus with with Hoffman and Wasson, trying to just do a deeper dive on what the actual science is behind that. Can we evaluate? Can we confirm that they were mixing psychedelics with this wine that they were drinking and finding God this way?

• 2:02:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:33Danny Jones?

  Which is fucking fascinating. I mean, it is fascinating.

• 2:02:36Speaker 00

  It is. And all the work on ancient, what it is, think about it this way, the book, the the story that most people have clung on to is essentially a literature review. It's taking Ruck's work and Wasson, The Road to Elusus, and it's looking at updated research using the work of mainly Patrick McGovern, who's the author, he's at University of Pennsylvania, he's a chemist, he's the one who pioneered this study of finding little objects like this, scraping them for residue and chemically analyzing them.

• 2:03:00Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:03:01Speaker 00

  That he's the, his work is the basis of the book. His books are Uncorking the Past and his other book's called Ancient Wine. It's on Princeton University Press. Everybody should go out and buy it. You should have Patrick on. He's a fascinating dude. So Brian is writing this book. He tells Patrick what he's doing and, you know, McGovern's mentioned in the book over 70 times. It's largely based on the updated, the updating of of Ruck stuff is mainly using two things. McGovern's work on ancient wine, mixed with the work of Roland Griffiths. So you see, he combined all of these things together.

• 2:03:34Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:03:35Speaker 00

  Right. But yeah, so the middle of it's like a literature review. It's bookended by an introduction and and an outro that are really trying to sell Hopkins research and psychedelics as some kind of medical cure. He says, look, let's revive Elusus, let's turn it into this chain of mental health clinics of, and they, you know, let's get the government to pay for it. And it'll cure people of all these different diseases. That's what the book argues.

• 2:03:58Danny Jones?

  Now, is there, is there any, and I didn't, I can't remember from the book, but is there, did we ever find any sort of hard evidence of psychedelics in these vessels? Or that, is there any hard evidence that there were psychedelics used in Elusus?

• 2:04:13Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:04:13Danny Jones?

  There's none.

• 2:04:14Speaker 00

  None, zero.

• 2:04:15Danny Jones?

  Other than the texts like Hillman would claim and that Rock would claim.

• 2:04:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:04:20Danny Jones?

  Right, there's no hard evidence though.

• 2:04:22Speaker 00

  None, and they would say, look, you don't, they would say it's a bias to demand this type of scientific evidence. They would, that's what they say. This is a bias. We don't need, we don't need that hard scientific evidence. That's, there's just certain people who, science is now become the standard of believability in evidence. And so, people like McGovern and other people, I'm maybe biased in this way a little bit too. I will kind of want evidence. But if you read these texts, and if you read about the ancient mystery cults, even reading like Walter Burkert, who rejects the drug hypothesis, and you even read the people who reject the drug hypothesis. And, I mean, it does, if, if you look at the descriptions, it does seem like it's psychedelic drugs. There's no doubt about it.

• 2:05:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:03Speaker 00

  But they want to take it a step further. Hey, is there any physical evidence? Because you're finding these vessels all around the world, South America, here, there, Telluride and Israel, and you're finding drugs everywhere. You're finding, Hillman was talking about, there was this, what was that vessel that he found? That had human bodily fluids mixed with drugs?

• 2:05:20Danny Jones?

  University of Tampa. It was an Egyptian mug, the god, from the god of Bess or something like that.

• 2:05:24Speaker 00

  I sent him that article, yeah.

• 2:05:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and they actually, um, they found like vaginal mucus.

• 2:05:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:05:33Danny Jones?

  In this mug.

• 2:05:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:05:34Danny Jones?

  And when was that mug from, Stephen? Did they date it? I think they dated it in that article. Oh, here it is. That's the mug right there. That's the god of Bess. And go down, tell, let's see when they say it was from. Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:48Speaker 00

  Fifth centuries.

• 2:05:49Danny Jones?

  Sixteen, uh, okay, the vessel is the shape of Bess played an important part of the cult as a way from the 16th century BCE to the 5th century CE. This particular example dates the, uh, Palamaic Roman period, from which the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, when produce such objects peaked, when the production of such, such objects peaked. And then go down to where it says what was actually found in it.

• 2:06:19Speaker 00

  Psychoactive drugs, human blood and other-

• 2:06:21Danny Jones?

  There you go, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They found evidence of human blood, bodily fluids such as oral or vaginal mucus and breastmilk.

• 2:06:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so morning, you had more, I think Pogarm and Homiler is morning glory seeds, right? I think that's what it is.

• 2:06:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Traces, okay.

• 2:06:36Speaker 00

  So here you have scientific evidence of what Hillman's been talking about for a long time, right? Uh, that you have these strange concoctions that you find in these ancient medical books. Now you find a mug with it in it, and I'm sure this is going to keep happening. I am, I think if you compare Hillman's work to the immortality key, you see something interesting. In Hillman's work, it's abs, most people would find absolutely revolting, wild and crazy.

• 2:06:59Danny Jones?

  Disgusting.

• 2:06:59Speaker 00

  What you see in the immortality key, and I've talked with Hillman and all these, and Rock and people about this, you see a kind of advertisement for a more modern new age sort of, you know, wellness, Michael Pollanized, Oprahfied, uh, wellness center that there, that him and his associates are interested in making, apparently.

• 2:07:19Danny Jones?

  And in your, in your Reason article, you claim that some of the people that Brian interviewed and used for the, the research behind the immortality key is people like Ruck or like Hillman. They were not, um, he, Brian did not explain to them his, his hypothesis or his-

• 2:07:42Speaker 00

  Wasn't his hypothesis, his-

• 2:07:43Danny Jones?

  His motivation or his spin on the book.

• 2:07:46Speaker 00

  They didn't know about a, a new reformation. All, they didn't know about the pharmaceutical stuff. All they knew about was, look, I'm going to diligence Ruck's theory. Is it true or not? I'm going to go out and I'm going to look for evidence and if it's, if there's no evidence, I'll say there's no evidence. If there is, I'm going to say there is. They didn't know about all of these other things. They didn't know about the new reformation and you can imagine Ruck and Hillman with the way they are, whenever he found out, what, we're rebuilding the church, it was all, the, the thrust of the psychedelic literature from Hoffen to McKenna. I mean, look at McKenna's stuff. He wrote, uh, on, I sent you that.

• 2:08:18Danny Jones?

  McKenna was very anti-Christian.

• 2:08:19Speaker 00

  All of them are. The whole point of psychedelics was to debunk Christianity and to dissolve it and get rid of it. After we debunk it, get it rid of it. They want to destroy it.

• 2:08:27Danny Jones?

  And you can tell by talking to Hillman that he very much has disdain for religion and Christianity.

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  So you can imagine his surprise whenever you open up the book of which, as in his words, the immortality key is peppered with his research and anybody who knows his research can read the book and see he's only cited once. There's a short discussion of a paper.

• 2:08:44Danny Jones?

  Of Amen?

• 2:08:45Speaker 00

  Of Amen. It's called, um, Smashing the Victorian Lens. It's probably his best paper, Hillman's best paper, Smashing the Victorian Lens.

• 2:08:52Danny Jones?

  I haven't even seen that.

• 2:08:53Speaker 00

  He talks about it in there for a paragraph or maybe two, but his research is much more prominent in the book than that would lead you to believe. The witches and all of this stuff. Uh, so yeah, they were definitely surprised. Right when the book came out, I had already known Ruck. I'd already known all this literature.

• 2:09:07Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:09:07Speaker 00

  And Ruck, um, introduced me to Brian through an email. And so I was like, oh, cool. New book coming out. This is gonna be amazing. Maybe this stuff will become more popular. This is great.

• 2:09:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:17Speaker 00

  And then when the book came out, I didn't read it at first, but Ruck and I wanted to interview them about it, talk to him about it and they were like, you know, kind of like what?

• 2:09:26Danny Jones?

  You wanted to interview Ruck and Hillman about it?

• 2:09:28Speaker 00

  Well, I wanted to talk to him about it. Hey, what's going on? Are you happy? You know, isn't this amazing? These subjects are getting out there. What do you think of the book? And they him-hawed around about it and about, you know, they, where I expected to find jubilation, I found, eh, I don't know.

• 2:09:43Danny Jones?

  That's interesting too, right? Like the, the, the foundational beliefs and values and ideologies of the people like Ruck and Hillman. You know, and it's, it goes to even like biblical scholars, like lots of biblical scholars are religious and believe in are Christian. And they're kind of like, they're going to school and studying this stuff and it's supposed to be scientific, but they're also looking at stuff that only, uh, bolsters their beliefs they already have. And on the opposite side, you have people like Chris, uh, like Ruck and Amen, who are like very anti-Christian and anti-religious, but they're both looking at the same texts and both coming up with their own. Amen, to his credit, he says he's not trying to.

• 2:10:27Danny Jones?

  Get to the intention of the author. He says that he's only trying to say what the texts say. Like he, he, when I asked him about it, he's like, no, I don't, I don't care what the intention of the author was. I don't care what their ideas were. All I want to understand is what the texts say and what the context of it was.

• 2:10:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, the context is what really matters. And I want to be careful about painting with a broad brush of saying, well, Rock and Hillman are anti-Christian. It does sound like that.

• 2:10:52Danny Jones?

  There obviously is a, a whole group of classical scholars that are anti-Christian.

• 2:10:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And Rock, I don't know if Carl would say he's anti, maybe he would, I don't know. You could ask him, but I don't, but yeah, it's there. With Hillman, it's, let me just say this, with Hillman, it's much more overt. He's very clear about his motivations and how he feels about modern Christianity and the Catholic Church. I mean, he wrote a book on the Catholic Church called Ritual Child. I mean, come on.

• 2:11:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:20Speaker 00

  Um, so when you have motivate, you know, yeah, that's what's motivated the literature. Then you have the immortality key come out and it's, hey, let's, you know, and then he's meeting with the Pope and handing him the book. This is, this is extraordinary.

• 2:11:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Can you explain that part of it? Like, how did he, how did Brian get into meeting the Pope? And who was involved in going to meet the Pope? And what were the motivations behind that?

• 2:11:43Speaker 00

  Good question. I'd love to hear Brian tell the story. It was referred to in documents that were leaked to me as the holy meeting. And so I'll go, wow, a holy meeting. And then somebody sent me a photograph of him handing the book to the Pope. And I went, wow, this isn't just talk, but it actually happened.

• 2:11:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:58Speaker 00

  And so all I know is that him and Richard Rohr, who I think is like a liberal Catholic theologian and popular writer who's, I don't know, he's old. I think he's in his eighties. They went and met with the Pope and they, I maybe discussed Thomas Merton, who's a, you know, Catholic mystic, who I think he was French, but he lived in Kentucky, down around Maker's Mark, down around Loretto. And so what was discussed? I'd love to know. Maybe Brian will come on and tell you about the new reformation in the holy meeting. I, I, I.

• 2:12:27Danny Jones?

  So, so Brian is, claims that he's Catholic.

• 2:12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Good Catholic boy. He was trained by the Jesuits. He get, try, gives the impression that he's a Jesuit, but he's not. He's never said, I'm a Jesuit, but he talks a lot about how his mentality and approach was shaped by his early Jesuit training. I guess he went to a Jesuit high school in Philadelphia.

• 2:12:45Danny Jones?

  Okay. So that would explain that then. And but he's never tried psychedelics.

• 2:12:50Speaker 00

  He says.

• 2:12:50Danny Jones?

  I understand. I understand why he would lie. I mean, if if if that's a lie, I understand that lie because he wants to maintain credibility and not have to be, you know.

• 2:12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. When people aren't forthcoming about.

• 2:13:01Danny Jones?

  Which is unfortunate.

• 2:13:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, when people aren't forthcoming, you have to start. You have to use other. You have to start gathering evidence and information and start putting together a coherent picture and saying, what's going on here? I mean, they put up a statue for the immortality key in Silicon Valley. That was Elon Musk, brother Kimball Musk, and Steve Jervitson, who's high up at Tesla and it looks like Elon Musk, right hand man. They're very much enthusiast of this book. They erected a statue at Burning Man, celebrating Brian in the book.

• 2:13:29Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:13:30Speaker 00

  They're. Yes. And they're heavily invested in the money side of psychedelic medicine. They're funding a lot of it. They want to turn it into a medicine. So you already see there's theological entanglements, financial entanglements. You know, Brian's very involved in the marijuana business.

• 2:13:44Danny Jones?

  Is he really?

• 2:13:45Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, he was the executive director of Doctors for Cannabis Legalization.

• 2:13:50Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:13:51Speaker 00

  And I was told that he's also financially invested in hedge funds and in marijuana. And I don't know, Denver, California, or something. I haven't looked closely into it. So we know there are financial motivations. We know there are theological motivations with the new reformation. So the question is, yeah, what is going on? That's what I've been trying to figure out.

• 2:14:10Danny Jones?

  Have you asked Brian directly?

• 2:14:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, he didn't want to talk that much. He he didn't. Yeah, he didn't want to talk about it. He answered some of my questions and didn't answer others.

• 2:14:20Danny Jones?

  What? What? What? What did he say?

• 2:14:23Speaker 00

  Well.

• 2:14:23Danny Jones?

  What was his reaction?

• 2:14:24Speaker 00

  Uh, but to what?

• 2:14:25Danny Jones?

  To to all this stuff.

• 2:14:26Speaker 00

  Well. As far as the new reformation, he didn't give me any information on that. He just said, I'm a guy who wrote a book and, you know, what you see is what you get. He didn't. I didn't get any information from him. He there was no information on what's going on. He didn't say, this was before I knew about the Pope stuff. He didn't say, well, here's what I'm doing, and there's going to be a holy meeting, and then we're going to get it in there. He he very much wanted to separate himself from psychedelic research, that he didn't have anything. He doesn't have anything to do with Johns Hopkins. He told me, I've never been to Johns Hopkins. I don't really know those people.

• 2:15:01Danny Jones?

  Which he, which is obviously not true, because you found out he does know those people.

• 2:15:03Speaker 00

  Exactly. Exactly. And the Religious Studies paper that we were discussing. Earlier that where Roland Griffiths and Bob Jesse and others got at Hopkins, all these religious leaders, Muslims and Christians and Jews and gave them psychedelics. In the first paper, which Roland approved, they cite the immortality key. Later, after a big fight over this, he took it out. So we know they knew each other. We know they were involved. He uses his research in the book. I mean Roland's research is a major plank in giving it scientific credibility. But no, I got, the answer to your question is I didn't get really any information out of him. He didn't really want to talk about the things that we're talking about.

• 2:15:44Danny Jones?

  And he never said anything, never reached out after the articles were published or anything like that?

• 2:15:49Speaker 00

  No, never. He didn't really want people writing about it in that way. He likes people that take it at face value because he's pushing himself as the representative, like the new Ruck, like the flame has been passed from Karl Ruck to me. He's trying to create that impression, which obviously isn't true. That's my interest in this. I'm talking to Karl and I'm looking at the Joe Rogan podcast and all this other stuff. And then you talk to them and you go, hold on, there's two different stories here. Which one's true?

• 2:16:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:16Speaker 00

  And how is this entangled with the Hopkins project? Because the center of my investigation is the project at Johns Hopkins.

• 2:16:22Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:23Speaker 00

  Right? So when this research is being used for a new reformation, I go, well, hell, I gotta look into this too. What's going on? And then I read the book and I go, wow, this is fascinating. Rebuild the Catholic Church. And this, you know, I've had people tell me, oh Travis, this is nothing. It's just self-promotion. Right? It seems to have gone a lot farther than self-promotion. If this is self-promotion, it's quite elaborate.

• 2:16:45Danny Jones?

  Hmm. What is that paper that you were citing that had never, that has never been released or is never going to see the light of day?

• 2:16:52Speaker 00

  That was the Religious Studies.

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  That was the one with all the religious folks?

• 2:16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me tell you what happened. So Roland gets diagnosed with cancer. They're putting the finishing touches on this paper, which he believes is going to be the magnum opus, proving that psychedelics are the common core of all religions. What happened was a controversy happened at Johns Hopkins.

• 2:17:12Speaker 00

  His protege, Matthew Johnson, was accused of a whole bunch of stuff. Bullying, yelling at colleagues, bullying at colleagues. And when Roland was dying, he had to appoint a new director. Well, he naturally appointed Matt because he was his protege. He'd been working with him for 20 years. He personally groomed him to be his replacement. He puts Matt in charge of the Hopkins Psychedelic Research Center. Other people are mad, who basically are mad that he got the job and that are jealous and that maybe they have some, you know, I don't know what their resentments were, but they were mad about it and didn't want him to be the director. So they made up a bunch of stuff. They, and Roland said, Matt, we gotta let you go. And it created this massive controversy.

• 2:17:57Speaker 00

  And that controversy led to the New York Times expose called The Psychedelic Evangelist, which exposed everything that was happening behind the scenes. If that would not have happened, the paper would have been released. And we would have said, wow, they've proven that psychedelics are the common core of all religion. But because of this controversy that happened at Hopkins, all of these details, people started talking about what was going on and they went, this is not what you think it is. Behind the scenes, this is a push to incorporate psychedelics into religion. They were taking clinical trial participants like me, paying them to go out and start religious organizations and try to recruit people into it. Wow. And this was being paid for by the heir to the UPS fortune. His name's T. Cody Swift.

• 2:18:40Speaker 00

  And he wasn't just funding it and funding all of these groups by clinical trial participants. He was also working on the study. So the funder of the study was working directly with the volunteers in the study. Oh, wow. And if you believe Matt Johnson, they were shaping, trying to shape their beliefs and saying, well, you know, when you only rated the experience as a four, you maybe, could you bump, wasn't it really a five? Could you maybe bump it up a little bit? They were giving them spiritual literature to more and more try to convince them that this, join the movement. And so if you read that Times investigation, obviously, these are major ethical transgressions. And so you start to get a picture of some, of what really looks more like a religion than a scientific study. Wow. Right?

• 2:19:25Speaker 00

  That's so crazy, man. Yeah.

• 2:19:29Speaker 00

  The reason why this information hasn't gone very far is because you can see it's convoluted. People who are doing these things, they're not just gonna come out and say, "We're starting a new religion. Who wants to join?" You see, it's extremely complex. And Bob Jesse was clear from the beginning of starting these studies, "Look, science is what has credibility these days. We have to push this through science." But he said, he said in a lecture, he said, "It's inevitable that it will turn into a new religion centered on psychedelics." So you've asked me before, "But isn't that the good thing?" I don't know. I'm simply saying it's happening. I don't know whether it's good or bad. Now, it is odd that the people that are demonizing the old religions are also starting their own.

• 2:20:06Danny Jones?

  That is odd, right?

• 2:20:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, some people have called it Scientology with drugs.

• 2:20:13Danny Jones?

  That's a funny way of putting it.

• 2:20:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. A lot of this information came out because one of these organizations that they started called Legare, which is a Christian missionary organization. One of the people that worked for it, there was a, his name's Joe Welker. There was a, he became unsettled by what was happening, and he left the organization and leaked a bunch of emails and told what he knew and said, "There's something going on here that people need to know about." And he published a, he published a series on Substack called The Psychedelic, or The Psychedelic Religion of Johns Hopkins. I can't remember the title, but Brian was involved in that. And the interesting thing about that is all the stuff about Brian, a couple of weeks after it was published, all those parts disappeared. But I'd already printed them out.

• 2:21:01Danny Jones?

  How, what do you mean they disappeared?

• 2:21:04Speaker 00

  They disappeared from the internet. They're no longer there. If you go look at it now, he doesn't mention him. But Substack has this nice feature that it's a newsletter service, meaning when you hit publish, it sends the email to your mailbox. So you have an original record of the original documents. So I looked and I go, "Hold on, there's a bunch of pieces missing now. What happened?" I went back to look at it. This is interesting. All of the references disappeared. So I went back to the original emails. A bunch of it had been deleted.

• 2:21:30Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. There is, there are people don't want you talking about this. They do not want you. Hence my little message over there. They don't want you talking about it. And it's most people you can dismiss, but I did the trial. I know more about this than most people do. I've been studying it for 10 years, really intensely, the scholar literature, and I not only did the clinical trial, and I've met most of these people and talked to them. So it wasn't so easy for them to dismiss me and say that, well, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Well, I do know what I'm talking about. I did the trial. You didn't. You know, and it also came out, we should say that Roland was himself was using psychedelics during these trials.

• 2:22:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:22:11Speaker 00

  While he was studying and studying them, he was also had also been taking them himself at his house, which he even admitted on the Tim Ferriss podcast convinced him that it was true, that this must be true. All of these ideas are true perennialism psychedelic theory of religion.

• 2:22:26Danny Jones?

  Hmm. The perennialism idea is very interesting.

• 2:22:29Speaker 00

  It is, isn't it?

• 2:22:30Danny Jones?

  How like, I think the way you described it, how like everyone speaks a different language, but the fundamental archetypal stories are all the same, just like it like presented in different packaging.

• 2:22:42Speaker 00

  Yes. And you know how they came to these conclusions? I'll give you a very, very short summary. The literature that they're reading, what happened, Danny, is people like Murcha Elliott and Jung, what they did is take all of this information on old mystery cults and old religions from all around the world, all the different pagan religions, all the different primitive religions, and they synthesized them. They took reports of mystical experiences from all over the world. They synthesized them into one generic and said, these are the basic features. These are the basic features of this mystical religious psychedelic experience. They synthesized them. Do you see what I'm saying?

• 2:23:14Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:23:14Speaker 00

  And then.

• 2:23:16Danny Jones?

  But like they cherry picked their certain things.

• 2:23:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:23:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:19Speaker 00

  Yes. What they're doing is using all of this literature on religions essentially to create a new religion that they believe is a universal religion. And the way that they've done that is by citing literature in the in which we know that those people, rather than providing accurate information about all these different religions, were leaving out the parts, and they said it themselves, the parts that don't fit and that don't share the common core, we just kind of push that to the side and take an eraser and take that off in order to create this universal religion, which they believe couldn't replace all of these other religions. You see, so what you see is the buildup to a new universal religion. And here's what I think your audience should, it should impress upon them.

• 2:24:01Speaker 00

  You know, one of the books that has influenced them is a book called Global Mind Change by Willis Harmon. Um, who was at Stanford, one of the early psychedelic researchers. Much of this stuff was funded by the CIA and

• 2:24:13Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:24:13Speaker 00

  Yes, he was an electrical engineer and a teacher at Stanford. And he was involved early, early on with psychedelic drugs and he was a major enthusiast. Really interesting guy, really good guy, but he wrote a book called Global Mind Change. And so really, I think the worrisome part about this, because some aspects, like you say, but that's kind of sounds good. Some of it is interesting, some of it does sound good, but the scale is a serious problem. Anytime you're talking about a global mind change, I don't want that. I'm not interested in that. Change to what? What are we changing to?

• 2:24:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:43Speaker 00

  What, because everything is very vague. Well, Rick Doblin says we're all going to get spiritualized. What does that mean?

• 2:24:49Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:24:50Speaker 00

  What about if you don't want to get spiritualized?

• 2:24:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:55Speaker 00

  So

• 2:24:55Danny Jones?

  I can see how, I, I mean, it's easy to see the good, the goodness of it all. I mean, from an

• 2:25:01Speaker 00

  Good intentions.

• 2:25:02Danny Jones?

  From an

• 2:25:02Speaker 00

  Good, good Well, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? This is why, this is why Huxley said, the price of liberty and freedom is eternal vigilance.

• 2:25:12Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:25:13Speaker 00

  You see, you can't just believe what people, you know, I was taught early on. You don't allow institutions to self define themselves, all of them, or you know, Name a corporation, well, we're just trying to help. No, they're not. They're trying to make money.

• 2:25:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:26Speaker 00

  That's what they're trying to do. And you got to also know that though they may have very good intentions. Uh, what about if there's things they're not thinking of? So when we all participate and we all give our part of the conversation, they may say, hey, we never thought of that. And then it becomes a more constructive thing rather than they're bad, they're evil, let's demonize them. I don't want to be a part of that.

• 2:25:47Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:25:47Speaker 00

  I want to illuminate the ideas that are driving them. And so in my latest article and many of my articles, what you see is just little profiles of the different figures and their ideas. I try to focus on who are the people that came up with these ideas? What are the ideas? And how is that playing out in the world today? Who are the people like Brian? That are acting on these ideas?

• 2:26:08Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:09Speaker 00

  Because that's fascinating, because this is esoteric and magical literature that you have people with enormous amounts of money like Elon Musk, they're the ones funding all of this. They're the ones funding all of the psychedelic research. Really? Silicon Valley is the one. Elon is? Well, uh, his brother, Kimball Musk and the people around him. Yes, absolutely. Uh, one of the biggest one is the psychedelic science of found psychedelic science collaborative funders or some PSFC or something. It's in Silicon Valley. They're the main ones that are pushing this and funding the projects. They get together and they say, um, you know, what, what should we fund? What's the strategy to push this through? Hmm. You see? So yeah, it's all Silicon Valley money. No question. There you go.

• 2:26:51Danny Jones?

  What is this, Steve?

• 2:26:52Speaker 00

  That's it. Man, good job.

• 2:26:54Danny Jones?

  Psychedelic science funders, uh, collaborative.

• 2:26:58Speaker 00

  Look at the team.

• 2:26:59Danny Jones?

  PSFC is a community of philanthropists dedicated to supporting psychedelic medicine and science. Oh, wow. Who, is there like a, oh yeah, let's see the team.

• 2:27:09Speaker 00

  See the team.

• 2:27:09Danny Jones?

  The board. There you go.

• 2:27:10Speaker 00

  You got Bronner, the soap man.

• 2:27:12Danny Jones?

  David Bronner, Graham Boyd, and, uh, yeah. Michael Cotton, Joe Green.

• 2:27:19Speaker 00

  Jervetson, you see Genevieve Jervetson. She's, she's been very involved in trying to push MDMA through, uh, the FDA process, but her husband, Steve Jervetson, very nice guy. Um, I've, while I emailed with him a little bit, he was always very polite.

• 2:27:33Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:34Speaker 00

  Uh, he was, they were the ones who erected the Statue of the Immortality Key at Burning Man. Uh, but they're also heavily involved with this and this is all about funding psychedelic research. And there's obviously a for-profit thing in mind, which is not, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 2:27:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:47Speaker 00

  Um, it's just, yeah, this, that's who's funding it. These are the people who's funding it. This is just some, some of the people. There's more people, but.

• 2:27:55Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. What is that? Can I see the statue? Let's see what the, the immortality key statue looks like.

• 2:28:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. It was Burning Man 2023 or 2024.

• 2:28:03Danny Jones?

  And you said there's one erected in Silicon Valley?

• 2:28:06Speaker 00

  No, it was just the Silicon Valley people who put it up.

• 2:28:10Danny Jones?

  Of this?

• 2:28:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, go to the top article. Yeah. They're the ones who designed it.

• 2:28:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's a big chalice.

• 2:28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there were drones spelling out, you must die before you die to die if you want to live forever, whatever.

• 2:28:20Danny Jones?

  That's incredible, man.

• 2:28:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:28:24Danny Jones?

  With the key in the side of it. That is awesome.

• 2:28:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:28:30Danny Jones?

  That is pretty insane, man.

• 2:28:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's pictures of Jervetson and Musk and Murrescu all in front of it.

• 2:28:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, with the, is that Greek shit on the bottom of it?

• 2:28:39Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:41Danny Jones?

  Wow, the Chalice to Elucis.

• 2:28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. You can see all of this is part of this new.

• 2:28:48Danny Jones?

  I'm sold, brother.

• 2:28:51Speaker 00

  Bring on the new reformation.

• 2:28:53Danny Jones?

  Bring it on, baby.

• 2:28:54Speaker 00

  Let's, what are we reforming? We need reform, bring it on. Um, yeah.

• 2:28:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and then like, you know, what happens when the government gets control of it? You know, and the government, like.

• 2:29:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:29:05Danny Jones?

  It's one thing making it just legal, and it's another thing when the government gets its hands on it.

• 2:29:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and behavior scientists trying to engineer all of this.

• 2:29:13Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:29:14Speaker 00

  You gotta be.

• 2:29:14Danny Jones?

  And what does the world look like with one religion, a one world religion?

• 2:29:18Speaker 00

  I don't want to live in it, because you look, in one sense, it's a rather banal point. All, all, there's a common chord to all religions. Well, you could also, there's a common chord to all music. The human mind and somebody had a rock or a guitar, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:29:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:30Speaker 00

  There's a common chord to Led Zeppelin.

• 2:29:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:32Speaker 00

  And Tupac, it's called blues, big deal.

• 2:29:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:29:36Speaker 00

  I like the differences, personally. I like those little differences. I like little, small, local places. So I don't like their global mind change. I don't like their new reformation. I don't like things that are big. Large-scale ideas often have large-scale bad results. That's called the Soviet Union, the Nazi Party.

• 2:29:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:29:52Speaker 00

  It's not a good idea. When you're mixing futurism with occultism, brain scientists, billionaires who want a global mind change.

• 2:29:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:00Speaker 00

  This is ripe for journalistic inquiry.

• 2:30:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:03Speaker 00

  You see?

• 2:30:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I like what you're doing, following the money, because usually following the money is gonna, is gonna, is gonna lead you to the intentions behind this stuff.

• 2:30:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:30:11Danny Jones?

  And the truth of what's going on.

• 2:30:13Speaker 00

  And you know, unfortunately, one of my weaknesses is the money thing, because I have no interest in business. So I hope somebody else gets on this that's better at tracing money, because when I start looking into it, you talk about a ball of yarn. It is the most convoluted, convoluted shell game you've ever seen in your life. If you're trying to figure out who's funding a lot of these studies, you look into USONA, the Hefter Institute, there are people who are doing this.

• 2:30:33Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:30:34Speaker 00

  I mean, you can never, and I've interviewed some of these people. Oh, you talk, it's like trying to get something out of a mob boss. You ask them a question, they just sit there like this. They don't want to talk about it. They don't, you know, it's very, it's odd.

• 2:30:47Danny Jones?

  When you interview people for this stuff, do you, do you usually meet them in person? Or do you often just do it over the phone or email or?

• 2:30:53Speaker 00

  Uh, oftentimes I'll do it on Zoom, sometimes on phone if they don't want to do Zoom, but I prefer to do it in person, but it's not, you know, it's not always possible.

• 2:31:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:03Danny Jones?

  Wow, man. This has been crazy. This has been a mindfuck of a conversation and this super interesting stuff. Um, so thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

• 2:31:13Speaker 00

  Thank you. It's an honor.

• 2:31:15Danny Jones?

  Um, what, what else do you have like in the pipeline that you're interested in looking at and, uh?

• 2:31:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm going to put together so that I draw the parameters of the psychedelic Renaissance 1993 to 2023. So the start of the Council on Spiritual Practices to the death of Roland Griffiths. So I'm eventually put together a kind of alternative history, an alternative to the Michael Pollan book of, of what, what I've found out. So eventually I'll put that together. I mean, it's 10 years of research and it's now, you know, well over a hundred, maybe a couple hundred interviews. So eventually I'll put all of these articles together and try to iron them into a book and then I'll be out of it. I've spent a lot of time looking into this stuff and so I'm interested in a lot of other things and I'm involved in a lot of other things, but that's probably what I'll do. But I am going to keep chasing this because what happened, Danny, was every time I thought the story,

• 2:32:04Speaker 00

  I had gotten a book contract, a book contract here was, and it just kept, the story kept going. Every time I'm like, well, it's over, something would happen. I thought it was over last year. Then you got the Pope thing and I'm like, wow, what? This story, it's in, we're witnessing, I think, the birth of a new religion. I really believe that.

• 2:32:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that reminds me. Has Brian ever publicly talked about his meeting with the Pope? Or is he trying, has that been a secret?

• 2:32:28Speaker 00

  It's a secret. Well, I'm not going to say it's a secret, but he hasn't talked about it. I don't know. I think it was a secret, but I don't know. I mean, again, you could ask him about the holy meeting, but no, it was never anything published about it. And that was, I didn't publish everything that I had. That was just part of it.

• 2:32:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:32:45Danny Jones?

  And it's all, it's all in that article on Reason. Can you bring up that article? Is it, it's on the Reason website?

• 2:32:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, Reason.

• 2:32:51Danny Jones?

  What's the name of the article?

• 2:32:53Speaker 00

  Uh, there's two. One's called the strange, the strange case of the immortality key. And the other one's called the most controversial paper. The most controversial research paper in psychedelic history may never see the light of day.

• 2:33:06Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you will find something if you look on Reason. Okay, go to Magazine. Go to the Magazine tab on the top. Okay, go to Current Issue.

• 2:33:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:17Speaker 00

  Okay, go down a little bit, just a tiny bit.

• 2:33:18Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:33:19Speaker 00

  Okay, a little bit more.

• 2:33:20Danny Jones?

  Right there, there it is.

• 2:33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:33:23Danny Jones?

  The most controversial paper of psychedelic research may never see the light. Can you click on it? There you go. That's it.

• 2:33:29Speaker 00

  This is it. Now, this will go to, I think, next week. This will be, by the time this airs, I think it will be pushed out to the general public and there won't be a paywall.

• 2:33:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:33:36Speaker 00

  But I would ask people to, to read these articles, go back and just read all my reporting on the psychedelic Renaissance. And I think you cumulatively, you will see a completely different picture from that which the media has presented. And it's all, um, it's not speculation, it's just reporting.

• 2:33:53Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. It's beautiful, man. Um, and how can people get, get in touch with you?

• 2:33:57Speaker 00

  Uh, they could email me, but other than that, I don't use social media.

• 2:34:00Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:34:01Speaker 00

  kitchens dot travis at gmail dot com. Email me.

• 2:34:04Danny Jones?

  Okay. Beautiful, man.

• 2:34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:07Danny Jones?

  All right. Well, thanks again for coming, man.

• 2:34:09Speaker 00

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:34:10Danny Jones?

  We gotta get you on a flight.

• 2:34:11Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:34:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's been fun.

• 2:34:13Speaker 00

  See you.

• 2:34:14Danny Jones?

  Goodbye, world.

• 2:34:15Speaker 05

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too.

• 2:35:00Speaker 05

  So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.