 On this episode of Skeptico, a rebroadcast of an interview I recently did with two Brainiac tree huggers from Vermont. Oh, I hope you love these guys as much as I do because you're gonna hear a lot more of Vermont's Skeptico. We don't need much of an introduction on this one. Stick around for my chat with Dr. Rob Williams and Brandon Zolino from Plan V TV. Welcome to Plan V TV, the show about Vermont independence. I'm Dr. Rob Williams, the publisher of vermontindependent.net. And with us today in studio and virtually, this is so exciting, we have Brandon Zolino in studio. And all the way from sunny San Diego, we have Alex Securis, who is the host and founder of the incredibly popular and controversial Skeptico podcast and the author of this book, Why Science is Wrong About Almost Everything. Welcome to the show, Alex. Thanks, Rob. It's super exciting to be here. I was just saying, I had a great email exchange with Brandon. I'm psyched for that. And then I went to your site and we have all these connections with Wim Hof and breathing. So it's super exciting. And I love the vibe you guys are putting out. It just couldn't be better. So so many things to talk about. Oh, so many things. And so let us over the next hour, Alex and Brandon, we will conspire together this conspiracy we call conversation. And of course the Latin root of conspiracy conspire means to breathe together. So we're gonna do this in studio. We're gonna do this virtually. It's so exciting. And I just have to say before we get to Brandon's opening salvo, I love the fact that Rupert Sheldrake, the maverick British biologist, wrote the forward to your book, Alex. I have enjoyed Sheldrake's work for years. His theory of morphic resonance just blows my mind. And I just couldn't be, couldn't be more pleased that you and Sheldrake have been in communication. He seems like a righteous dude. Well, we shall talk about Rupert coming up on his 80th birthday here. And a true giant. But if you read the forward that he wrote, we had to negotiate. Well, I know, and I've heard you talk about navigating your forward with Rupert. And yes, I'm sure we'll touch on that. But let's just jump right in. Why science is wrong about almost everything, Skeptico, Brandon, start us off. Okay, Alex. In February, you celebrated the 15 year anniversary for your groundbreaking podcast Skeptico in which you explore the tipping points of science and spirituality with leading researchers, scientists and philosophers. Your exploration runs the gamut of topics from near-death experience research, remote viewing, psychics and mediums to neuroscience, quantum physics, Christianity, UFOs, yoga and conspiracy. But at the end of the day, you nearly always return to the place where it all happens, consciousness. Along the way, you have arrived at provocative realizations regarding some of the most deeply entrenched paradigms in science. It's your paradigm busting background that we'd like to focus on today. Namely, the methods or principles that you employ that have helped guide your journey and avoid cognitive dissonance along the way. If you could begin by telling us a little bit about what drives you in this project, how it began and what a few of the high points have been, then maybe we can go from there and transition into discerning and scrutinizing information as you were recently discussing with Richard Cox. Wow, beautiful, I love it. And so many points. Gosh, I can't, I can't. We've talked for hours on that, but there's so many points that are near and dear to my heart because I think anyone who enters into this journey of like, again, I really have a vibe with you guys. I love what you're doing. I mean, you're taking responsibility for, first, you're taking personal responsibility for what you know. What you know, what you believe to be true. You're saying, okay, I am responsible for that. It's like a little thing that tweaks me is when people, you'll engage with them and then they'll get to a point and they'll go, oh, that's above my pay grade. If it's above your pay grade, you are surrendering your intellectual sovereignty to someone who's gonna come along and tell you just what the heck it is and you gotta do it. You gotta take the jab, you gotta wear the mask, you gotta stand up straight, you gotta not burn fuel, whatever it is. Eat your broccoli. Eat, yeah. Don't, don't get in that cold. Eat the bugs. Eat the bugs. Eat the bugs. Ooh, eat the bugs. Yeah, a little reference to Snowpiercer there. Yes, what a movie, huh? What a movie. Yeah, incredible. So when you give up that, in my mind, you are giving up that intellectual sovereignty and it's really tough for people to grapple with that because they go, well, what do you mean? I'm not a virologist, how would I ever know that? You don't have to be a virologist, you just have to be committed to following the data wherever it leads to a point where you feel solid in what you know and never getting to that point of saying, well, that's above my pay grade. I can't handle that. That's exactly what they want you to do because then they are the ultimate authority. What do you guys think about that? Go ahead, Ron. I really appreciate what you just said. And to Brandon's question, you're giving us a couple of tools right away, Alex. One is to take responsibility for your own intellectual journey and sovereignty, right? And number two, as I've heard you say many times on Skeptico, follow the data wherever it leads. I would just say that I try and sort of align my journey with three tenets. One is curiosity. A second would be compassion. And a third would be courage. And all of that is wrapped in a healthy dose of what I try and practice as humility, not pretending for a moment. And this is hard in the academy where I tend to hang my hat from time to time. It's hard in the academy to admit that you don't know something. But nothing could be more important than acknowledging the importance of humility. And that opens up the doors for all of these other qualities. Brandon, how would you respond to that? Yeah, I mean, I think I've always tried to comport myself with an openness to the possibility that I'm going to be wrong fundamentally about what it is that I believe. It's important to be able to take a position on something. You can't make it through life without taking positions on things. But at the same time, you never know if the position that you've taken is the wrong one. And you have to be open to accepting that you could be wrong. And I think, for me, I think the question boils down to it's like when we find ourselves operating within a false paradigm, it seems that often we're either unaware of the falsehood of a crucial presupposition upon which the paradigm is built. We don't think to question it. Or more damningly, we're unwilling to question it. Alex, do you actively re-examine or maintain an openness to question presuppositions that guide your analysis? Yes, but I would kind of add one other thing that I think is key there. And it's hard for a lot of folks, a lot of normies, hate that term, but we all know what it means to really wrap their head around, is on one level, we all understand that we might be deceived. We go to the car dealership to get the new truck and it's like, we know the deal. We know that, you know, all the things, we know that. But when we step into these other arenas a lot of times, we kind of let our guard down in a way that doesn't really make sense. We've just been kind of conditioned to kind of let our guard down. So another way that I really resonated with the first part of what, I hate resonate, why did I say that? But I really like the first part of what you said and I always relate this story because it's just like such a key moment for me that drives me. And it was, I was talking to Dr. Jeffrey Long who has compiled this huge and very, very important database of near death experiences. And he's a doctor, he's a cancer doctor in Louisiana and he deals with death and dying all the time. And he's also a scientist and a researcher and he's trained as a scientific researcher. Anyways, he had this colleague, if you will, the guy who was opposed to his work but said, hey, would you let me in the spirit of openness in the spirit of science have access to your data so that I can test my theory. Jeff Long being an open-minded, curious and if you know, humble guy, which he is, said yes. So the guy goes and he runs the thing and he comes back and he publishes a paper and he says, ah, this near-death experience science stuff, it's bunk. It can all be explained by REM intrusion, you know, like the REM sleep kind of thing. But here's the moment, here's the moment that I think we're all kind of will relate to is Jeff reads his paper and he goes, oh my God, he's right and he has that sinking feeling in his stomach like I'm an imposter, I didn't even know I'm an imposter but I have an imposter, I've been out, you know, like pumping all this stuff and it just, it isn't true. And then he dug deeper and the more he dug deeper, well, he didn't do this right and the more he didn't do this right, he didn't do this right. Well, of course that isn't true. So to me, that is the moment where I wanna be. That is the moment where the inquiry and the spirituality meet because inquiry to perpetuate doubt. Doubt is a spiritual place. Doubt is not being, doubt is humility. Doubt is the ultimate humility. So that's the place that I think to me answers the question, Brandon, what do you, I'm, you guys, maybe I've heard me that star. I mean, do you hit that moment? Do you guys relate to that moment of really having to doubt and then what do you do with that moment? Do you kind of head into the fire or do you back up and find a way to defend your beliefs and say, no, I can't be wrong? Well, I think the key there is you point out that he went in and he started digging and actually looking at the details and the methodology that was used to back up the propositions that made the grand claim that he was wrong because the devil's always in the details, particularly when we start talking about what fundamentals are, what fundamental assumptions are being made at an epistemological level, you know, down to or even like at an ontological level down to like what comprises the being of the world, you know, the fundamental presupposition that you seem to be making a lot is that consciousness is fundamental, not the material paradigm. And so a lot of Western science seems to be in this material paradigm. And when you're in that material paradigm, that kind of defines everything that you can build on top of it. And you can create an entire system of ideology and belief and it can all work internally, can all be internally consistent and right and the math can all work, but it can all be built on one fundamentally wrong assumption or misunderstanding. I love that. And let me just jump in for folks who are like epistemology, what's that? It's a term that we use a lot in thinking about what we know and epistemology, the way I think about epistemology is simply this, epistemology is the study of the nature and origins of knowledge. How do we know what we know? Or to put it another way, you know, what is truthful? And I just want to read piggybacking on Brandon's observations here. I think this is the nub, Alex, of your book. If I had to pick one nub, why science is wrong about almost everything? At the very end of the book, you write, science is wrong about almost everything because science is married to this absurd idea that you and I don't really exist. It says we're just an illusion created by this meaningless electrochemical reaction going on inside our brain. The denial of our consciousness anything more than the product of a biological robot turns out to be a big deal, not just philosophically, but experimentally. If we can't account for the effects consciousness might have in our experiments, if we can't measure consciousness, then we can't really measure anything. And I was skeptical of your book's title at first, Alex, because I hadn't read it. But by the time I got to that moment, I was like, ah, I see what he's up to here. And this makes, and I like the word resonate. This resonates with me, right? It literally sort of informs my limited understandings of, epistemologically speaking, of how we know what we know, and not only that, but why we're here, like how we came to be and what is our, you know, sort of these grand philosophical questions that we all struggle with. What are, we just threw a lot on the table there. Awesome, it's all really great stuff and it kind of marries what both of you said together, you know, that kind of quote. Is there, do we benefit by always looking for that kind of fundamental root assumption? And I would agree that that is, you know, it's always looking for that litmus test. That is the beauty of science. Science pushes us that way, whereas sometimes philosophy, especially the way it's practiced today can kind of pull us away from that, pull us away from kind of driving the flag, you know, that's how I say, planning the flag and saying, okay, this is it. This is the best I have right now. One of the things that is appealing to science is we can experimentally plant the flag and say, this is what we think is real. I'll tell you another story, a Rupert Sheldrick story, if you will, because when I first got to know Rupert, and I got to know Rupert right at the beginning, fortunately, when I was doing this, and he was doing this experiment that people might have heard about, dogs that know when their owners are coming home. So he is a biologist, Cambridge train, published in Nature, all the right credentials, and he gets interested in these things, like you said, morphogenetic residents and stuff. So he's like, hey, are these accounts of people being connected in some non-ordinary way with their dog, are they true? So he starts collecting all these stories. People start sending them all, yeah, my dog does that, yeah, my dog does that. And this one jumps out, because this woman was willing to kind of really go the extra mile to have the dog test. The dog's name was JT, and JT was really good at knowing when the owner is coming home. So Rupert, this is kind of, maybe Rob, you'd give this to like a freshman level kind of experiment. It's not a difficult test to do, to test whether the phenomenon that is claimed is true. You put a camera on the dog, you put a camera on the owner, and then you send the owner out, and you vary the times. You vary the times from very, you know, five minutes to sometimes they went as far as like overnight, you know? And you do it in a taxi cab, so they can't detect the sound. And you like all the things that people would object to. Rupert Sheldrick figured out in the first five minutes, like anyone would, it's not that hard. He ran 200 trials. And again, hey, the statistics on this experiment, the methodology for the controls and all the measures are again, relatively simple, right? Since you have this variability in the length of the time that the owner is gone, all you have to do is look at how long the dog spends at the window waiting versus not waiting, and then you have your number, right? He does 200 trials. He gets an overwhelmingly statistically significant result. J.T. seems to know when his owner is coming home. If it's only 30 minutes, well, at 10 minutes before she's there, he's there. If it's two hours, it's not until an hour 50 that he goes to the door and he hangs out there and he's waiting. So again, this ties into some of the other points. So he publishes his work and he immediately gets a lot of pushback. This is probably 10, maybe even 15 years ago. I don't know. But there was this whole skeptical thing was more James Randi, million dollar channel and all that nonsense, total PSIAP, PSIAP CIA nonsense really is another topic for another time. But he has this guy in the UK, probably the most public psychologist on all the media and stuff like that. It'd be like, I don't know, not Dr. Phil, but yeah, even like Neil deGrasse Tyson only for psychology kind of thing. And his name is Richard Weisman. He says, oh, wow, this is just baloney. I'll show it. So again, he calls up the real scientist, Rupert, who's done 200 trials, carefully done. And he says, well, in the spirit of science, why don't you let me run the experiment? And Rupert goes, okay. As a matter of fact, I'll leave the whole setup right here. I'll leave the video cameras where they are. I'll do all the thing. Weisman comes in, he runs four trials. He changes the protocol to say that the only thing that counts is a wait of three minutes or more, which is just kind of random thing that he pulled out of the air. And then without consulting Sheldrick at all, he goes and publishes his work and makes a big public deal out of the fact that he's debunked this. And you all know this couldn't possibly be true. There can be no communication outside of our senses. And besides, you don't even, consciousness isn't even real. So this kind of extended consciousness stuff can't possibly be real, right? So I had both these guys on the show a long time ago. It was hard to get Weisman, had to kind of coerce him to get up. But we got him on and he really had to kind of cave in a way, he backpedaled. He never admitted that he was wrong. He just admitted that Sheldrick's data had to go forward. And I guess the reason that I, that touches on I think a couple of the points that we talked about. One, it's nice to get some closure that only science can do, you know? Like to Brandon's point, this kind of cuts through a lot of the BS where you say, okay, let me make sure I got this right. This guy ran 200 trials and this and this happened and he can show me all the trials and wow, even videotape and the dog really does that. And then this other guy just ran four trials and the dog actually, if you use the protocol that he was supposed to use, the dog does the same as in Rupert's data, but he changed it. So then, so you get the finality of the experiment, but then you get the deception. And that's what I think sends us in a different direction that isn't incorporated in anything we've talked about. They are trying to mess with us. They have another agenda. They are putting forth that agenda in a way that is intended to be secret, hard to figure out, contradictory, Intel, Co-Pro, all that stuff. So on the one hand, you could say that like some of this is like deliberate, like conspiratorial like machinations and deliberately framing experiments to return desired result, deliberately subverting the methodologies to return a desired result or deliberately playing around with control groups which has done a lot with vaccine science using like aluminum adge vans as opposed to using like an inert placebo and then like claiming that it returns a result that shows like a null effect or whatever. But on the other hand, is it possible that a lot of this is just a result of people being stuck within a dogma or being victims of some other psychological trap? Recently, Professor Williams published an interview with Matthias Desmet. Are you familiar with Matthias Desmet? No. He's a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. You probably heard the phrase circling around mass formation psychosis. Yeah, it's popular a few months ago. So interestingly enough, his thoughts regarding what he deems to be the mechanistic worldview run parallel with your central ontological proposition that consciousness is fundamental to being and that the opposite materials to ontology or consciousness is an epiphenomen of the brain relegating man to the status of biological robot in a meaningless world. It's exactly this materialist worldview, prominent since the enlightenment that Desmet claims leads to people feeling disconnected from the environment as well as feeling social isolation and loneliness and experiencing a lack of meaning making. He argues that this meaninglessness turns into a feeling of free floating anxiety, aggression and depression. Essentially unexplainable existential angst and lack of control. And then he goes on to sort of form this thesis that mass formation psychosis, which he characterizes as a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals' ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically can then take hold when that psychological state is exploited. And he goes on to state that this is at the root of totalitarianism and this type of population that's been kind of manipulated in this way exhibits a profound intolerance of dissident voices and a pronounced susceptibility to pseudoscientific indoctrination and propaganda. He states that rational argumentation has no impact on what a mass believes in and that once the attention becomes very narrow, the information situated outside the field of attention is not taken into account. So people who are very intelligent become seemingly very stupid. They become very susceptible to constantly repeated emotional messages and also strong visual stimuli images and visually represented numbers like graphs. So what do you make of this theory? Now that I've kind of summarized it for you and do you think that it explains some of the reactions of the scientific community over the years toward parapsychology and research into the extended consciousness realm? Is that like part of the picture? Or is it all conspiratorial or like, is it a mix? Or what do you think? I think it's a mix. What do you think, Rob? I think that you and Matthias Desmet should have a conversation, Alex. Yeah, his new book, as Brandon just mentioned the psychology of totalitarianism drops next week in the English translation. And it's being published actually by our most fearless independent publishing house here in Vermont, Chelsea Green. And this'll be, gosh, I think the fourth book now that they've published related to the COVID-topian situation of the past couple of years. But to bring it a little bit closer to home and maybe to piggyback on Brandon's framing here. And it sounds like you're not, we should have once you, if and when you have a chance, Alex, to kind of dive into mass formation and Matthias' book, maybe this summer, it'd be fantastic to have another conversation with you about it. Maybe we can get Matthias in a loop too. But I guess what I'm struck by in listening to Brandon and you talk here is, is there a conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory, but a conspiracy literally, are there people breathing together out there in the world who are waging a strategic war on consciousness? Right, so this is, and I love the breathing together deeper understanding of conspiracy. Yeah, can I piggyback on that? Yeah. Okay, so let me give an analogy to kind of frame my question. And I guess the question is, is there a war being waged on our understandings of consciousness and what's possible? That's perhaps a better framing. But let me give you an example. So we've been told now I think for 25, 30 years that carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide is not only a waste gas, I'm using air quotes for people listening, a waste gas, it is causing the demise of the planet. Now anybody who understands respiratory physiology and understands the basics of breath work will tell you that carbon dioxide is our body's most important respiratory gas and it appears in our bodies at 100 times the volume of oxygen, which of course provides energy to our cells and tissues and organs when we breathe oxygen in. So think about this for a minute. We're literally seeing a war being waged out there in the culture on our body's most important respiratory gas. It is our body's trigger to breathe. We breathe Alex and Brandon in the presence of carbon dioxide, not in its absence. So there's my analogy, right? We see a war being waged on carbon dioxide. Is there a war, and this is perhaps even more profound than waging a war on carbon dioxide, is there a war being waged on consciousness? Yeah, I love that. And I just don't know how we're gonna be able to tie all these things together. Sorry. I think the breath work thing is so tremendously important on a kind of direct experience level, you know, like people, and you know this because this is what you help people do. You can go show people or help people, coach people into breathing, and they will have an immediate physiological and mental response to that. And that's like a door to open up to all the things that you're saying. And then you're taking in this whole other level, which is I hadn't really contemplated before, but you could see me chuckling here. It's like, of course, of course, why didn't we see that until somebody points that out, we don't. So the second book that I wrote, and I'll show it, I'll tell you my sequence here. So why science is wrong about almost everything is if you can't measure consciousness, exactly what you picked up on, Rob and Brandon, you got it too, is that if you're gonna run an experiment and if you're gonna, the simplest experiment you can do, you say, hey, what temperature does water boil at? You go, oh, that's easy. It's 212 degrees or it's 100 degrees Celsius. And you go, okay, but you forgot one of the controls. What altitude are you at? And you go, oh, yeah, that's right. If you had different altitude. So now I've opened you up to the idea that there are different variables that you have to control before you give your pad answer. And then as you, I appreciate you reading that quote, say, okay, what if I was to experimentally demonstrate that consciousness, that little voice inside your head could actually, is it a wave? Is it a particle kind of thing? That observation that consciousness could play a role in our physical world, right? Would we then have to at least consider the possibility that just like altitude, now we have another variable in our experiment and that variable is consciousness. And then I could wrestle you to the ground because I could show you the best parapsychology experiments and I could show you Dean Raiden who we could talk about his transhumanism craziness, but replicated 50 times in labs across the world. Six sigma result, I could beat you into the ground of saying, this is some of the most reliable science you can count on and it will tell you conclusively that there is more. There is that effect that I'm talking about. So now I would, and this is building on what you said, Brandon, in that this is the sequence of the stack that I would build. I would say therefore, then you must put an asterisk by every freaking experiment you ever do. If it doesn't factor in consciousness because consciousness is now in the game. It's been proven experimentally, it's in the game. We can't exactly say what it is, but it's in the game. But that's book number one. Book number two is why evil matters. And here's the, because this to me answers your question, Rob, which is if you start thinking about this and you go, okay, yeah, consciousness, it is in the game, it is in the mix. Now you are also forced to consider what I always call extended consciousness. And that's just to kind of differentiate between, you know, when you talk to the normie materialistic scientists, they have an idea what consciousness is and think, okay, what about extended consciousness? What about this guy over here? What about after death experience, out of body experience? What about hallucinogenic experience, all that stuff, shamanic experience? And they go, why don't I, would you at least agree that those non-ordinary experiences are being reported? Let's put him in this category called extended consciousness. And now when we look at that extended consciousness experience, the question that comes to me, the bottom line question is really for all of us, the question is, who are we, why are we here? And that translates at some level to, is there a moral imperative? Is there right and wrong? Are there actions that are wrong? And to put it in simple terms, I'll put the term evil on it. And without naming what's evil, what isn't, the question I was trying to get to is, does evil matter? Does the question of whether or not there is this moral imperative, whether that could possibly exist, does that matter? I think it matters fundamentally because if we answer that question with that, oh, okay, I am now open to the possibility that there is a right and wrong. And that maybe, then I'm in the soup. And the story I always tell with this, and it's the opening story from that book, is I interviewed this guy, FBI agent, undercover FBI agent. I told the story a million times, I gotta tell it again for you guys. He had infiltrated Nambla, the pedophile group for trying to get little boys and all that horrible stuff. And he said he was on like an undercover project with him and they had gone to New York City and all these men, these pedophiles, wanted to go to Toys R Us back in the day when it was in Times Square and they had a huge carousel inside. And these guys are leaning over the rail and they're looking at these little boys and little girls, but main little boys. And they're saying not only the things that they wanna do, the horrible things that they wanna do sexually, but they're saying that the pain they wanna inflict and the amount of control and dominance they wanna have. And the FBI agents telling me this story, he says, it's the closest I ever came to kind of breaking undercover because I just wanna pick up these men and throw them over the rail. And we all can feel that, especially any of us who have kids can feel that. And the question I always bring to people is, okay, forget all that. Now back to this thing, do you think there is such a thing as good and bad? Is there such a thing as evil? Without judging how it came and all the rest of it, is that potentially evil? And it goes, oh, yeah, that's evil. You win. Yeah, I don't know if I heard you say this, but there are certain principles that when they are shared, not only cross culturally, but also cross temporally, that's something that we can point to and say, okay, this is potentially a universal truth. And I think something like that, like it's easy to define what is good and what is evil when we think about things in terms of that. Like it's very, very difficult to say that this is just like a product of our culture. Like this is something that I think we can universally recognize is an evil. And we can go from there and kind of build a moral system from that. It gets a little bit more nebulous the farther away from that we go. But I'm thinking, like getting back to the conspiratorial conversation. So hold on, let me, okay, sorry, sorry, tie it together. No, no, no, no, I'm interrupting you, so don't apologize. But I want to tie that to conspiracy and I want to tie it to the totalitarian kind of thing. That's where I was going. Oh, I love it. So do it, please. Go baby. I want to start with evil. I want to start with spirituality. I want to start with that little voice inside my head. Who am I? Why am I here? And I don't want to be knocked off that block until I'm firmly established in the idea that I am more than that little voice in my head. That's my spirituality. And that I am good fundamentally that divine light, whatever that is, non-religious, whatever, there is, the light is always shining and it's always coming through me. I'm blocking it, I'm screwing it up, I'm doing everything to deny it, but it's always there and the goodness is always with me. Now from there, can I understand people who have blockages that cause them to do very destructive things to other people? Can I understand evil? Can I understand deception? Can I understand totalitarian states? I can now begin to understand all those things, but I have to be grounded in the reality, the reality that there is a good, that the light is always shining and it's always shining through me. Beautifully said. Yeah, absolutely. So with consciousness being fundamental and with there being experimentally verified, this extended consciousness realm, would you say that that indicates that like your consciousness, your individual consciousness is part of something greater? Is that something that you would, do you think that that follows because your consciousness is able to reach out and touch objects that are at a distance, that we kind of have this like sort of quantum spooky effect at a distance going on with consciousness? And do you think that that realization that your individual consciousness is part of something greater? Do you think that is sort of the foundation to build like a moral system upon? And do you think that that's something that if more people were in that paradigm versus the mechanistic paradigm as described by Desmond or just calling the physicalist or materialist paradigm that has resulted in the 21st century in this kind of existential angst and lack of meaning that we have, do you think that we would be living in a different world if we were more in the former paradigm versus the latter? See, I like the way you're kind of traversing that territory now, because now we're talking about it differently. There's a leap because what you're describing, again, it goes back to the very first kind of ontological, epistemological kind of thing you were laying out in terms of there's some things that you can prove experimentally, but really, let me kind of switch gears for a little bit. We have to understand that experimentally when we show that consciousness is the asterisk in all our experiments, we have more or less obsoleted science. Science is, science's greatest accomplishment is to show that it is incomplete, that it will always be incomplete because consciousness is fundamental. That's the implications of that. And then the further leap that you're, I like your reluctance, your reluctance to go there because the evil leap is the good leap, right? Let's make that clear. The reason to focus on evil is because it focuses that there's something else. If there is a moral imperative, then there is good, then there is light, but we don't know that experimentally and we've already obsoleted the science so we can never know that experimentally. What we can do now is use a different set of tools. Again, as you point out, and I want to pull Rob into this because I want to understand, I want to talk about breathing and the connection between Wim Hof and yoga. And I read Wim Hof as a very spiritual man too. And I love the way he lives in these two worlds. He doesn't talk about that. He doesn't lead with that. He leads with have this experience and see where it gets you kind of thing. And I love that. But where I thought you were going Brandon was kind of, can we make that leap? Can we make that leap? And then you talked about the cross culture, cross time, just published an interview or maybe I'm going to publish it today with one of my favorite guys, Dr. Gregory Shushan. He is Oxford train, College of London train, super scholarly, all that stuff. Cross culture, NDEs throughout history. And it's extremely, extremely compelling evidence of exactly what you're saying that would kind of close that gap to say I can have confidence that there is more, that there is something to this goodness. You know, like one of the things he said in there, he says, you know, of all the accounts we've read, both contemporary and historically, there's never a account where someone has a near death experience and is told to go back and do a school shooting. You know, that hasn't popped up at anyone's near death experience. Love that. I'm just, to both of you, just a question as I've been listening to this really exciting conversation. Are either of you familiar with Andrew Lobachowski's work? It's called political ponorology. I'm not. Ponorology is the study of evil, believe it or not. And the subtitle of this book, political ponorology says it all, a science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes. I think Alex and Brandon, both of you would really find this book really insightful. It's not an easy lift, but it's a much neglected, but I think super important book, because he gets at a lot of these questions. And Alex, I think what I hear, and Brandon too, what I hear you both saying is, you know, science is useful as far as it goes. But it cannot claim to be as you quote, the ethnobotanist, the brilliant and amusing Terence McKenna in your book here, Alex. The epigraph to chapter nine, science, this is Terence McKenna now, the great sort of researcher of hallucinogenic medicines and way ahead of his time, I think. Science has great pretensions about itself. It basically regards itself as a meta theory capable of passing judgment on all other theories. These theories are supposed to submit themselves to science to be told whether they are right or not. And we could also insert the ethical and moral frame there, whether they are good or evil. And then the last thing I'll say is, I'm reminded too of, I think it was Alexander Solzhenits and the great Russian philosopher and writer who said the line between good and evil runs through the heart of us all. And so this notion of evil and good being sort of constantly in dialogue with one another, both at a civilizational level, but also I think at an individual level within us. And I think, you know, religions have been invented by team human for a number of different reasons, an obvious one of which is they offer us ethical, an ethical frameworks for which to make sense of the choices that we make, breath by breath, Alex, that define us as we move through the world, you know. Yeah, it's so interesting. Jump in either. Do a little riff on William. Sure. How he fits into that. Because I think, I reference him all the time in some ways that people don't exactly connect to, but I think it connects to this in some ways. Yeah, so for folks who don't know, Wim Hof is now 63 years old living in the Netherlands. He is a three things about Wim. One is he is a super human athlete. I think he holds 27 now, world's records for feats of human endurance, most famously swimming under an ice glacier, longer on a single breath than any other human. Second, he's subjected his own body and his own method which I'll tell you about in a moment, to the rigors of lab science. And he has proven in the lab with scientists what the mystics I think have understood for a long time, which is we humans are capable by cultivating a conscious, there's that word again, conscious strategic awareness of our breathing. We are capable of influencing not only our immune system but our autonomic nervous system, which science claimed to be impossible until about 12 years ago when the experiments began at Radbud University in the Netherlands. And finally to your near death experience point, Alex and your section in this book about that was so fascinating. Wim suffered horrific personal tragedy at the age of 38. His own, his first wife took her own life and left him with four little children. And the way Wim tells the story in his grief and suffering and to navigate this tragedy, he returned to the cold and he returned to the breath which he had been experimenting with for many, many years and credits the now famous Wim Hof method with literally saving his life and his family's life after that horrific experience. And this was, gosh, almost 30 years ago for him now. Wim is a seeker, he is a spiritual quester, he has put together in a very neat three pillar package what we call the Wim Hof method. I think a powerful protocol for cultivating consciousness within us to this point and kind of staving off what Alex, I think you so beautifully criticized in your book which is this notion that we're just lumbering robots, we're flesh and blood meat puppets. And the method is very simple. Number one, we practice mindset and commitment through pillar number two, daily hormetic breath work, aggressive breath work. We light our inner fire with the breath as to use the tumo, the ancient tumo practice of inner fire. And then number three, we go into the cold. We were talking about this offline, Alex. We go into the cold, cold showers, ice baths as a hormetic tool to cultivate psychological resilience as well as resilience of mind and body. So that's the Wim Hof method and Wim would be the first to say, nature, I'll do my best Dutch accent. Nature, nature, Alex and Brandon, nature is our greatest teacher. Nature is, and then James Nestor who just wrote this beautiful book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, who's a Wim Hoffer and very interested in breathing and really has put breathing back on the map. Maybe more than any other human other than maybe Wim. James Nestor likes to say the further we get from nature, the sicker we become. The further we get from nature, the sicker we become. And this of course ties directly back into consciousness because when you are awake and alive and breathing and moving through the world, you recognize through the power of our breath that we are not only in this beautiful dance with Team Human, all of us together, we're conspiring, we're breathing together, but we're actually in this stunningly beautiful dance with the rest of living creation. And it's happening 20 to 25,000 times a day. Every time we inhale and we exhale, we are, whether we realize it or not, we are in this reciprocal dance of gratitude with the rest of living creation. And it is overwhelmingly beautiful and it makes me cry. Oh, that's so cool. So there's so many points to riff on there. And so my experience with when I first encountered him was one, you know, skeptical. And then the more I looked into it. You're not the only one, yeah. I was also drawn to it though because I've been a long time yoga practitioner, you know? And my experience with yoga was I did it for years and never really understood the breath thing, you know? And then once I got turned down to Pranayama and then also just how my breath could be operating inside my practice, just on a regular basis, it really changed things a lot for me. So I was very open to that. Now, the key, and I was also open to meditation, the turning point, I always remember from Wim and no one ever, I know I heard this, you know? It's almost almost like you remember you heard it. But when I heard Wim say, I hate the frickin' cold, I was like, oh, this is a yoga thing. And that is my experience with like the ice bath. I do the breathing every day, wouldn't miss it. It's an experience, you know, there's all that thing, but the ice bath is such a more profound experience because every day that little voice is yammering in my head saying, you don't have to do it today. You earned a day off, it's a skip day, it's a, whatever. And it's such a practice, it's such a, it is so physically challenging because it's cold every frickin' day. Wim said, I hate the frickin' cold, I hate the frickin' cold, I live in San Diego. I don't wanna say I'm not in a battle with that yammering voice inside my head, I'm not. I am, that's the other thing, eight ball from my other yoga master, Mickey Singer who wrote, who wrote a couple of books, a very famous guy, love the guy, but that voice inside my head is like the eight ball, it just comes up with stuff because you turn it and you ask it questions. I am in control, I have the sovereignty, I can go to the cold. And what I love about Wim too is once I understood him as a yogi and I started looking at him as a yogi and I started listening to what his yoga experience, here's a guy 16 years old, he's creating his own yoga books, tearing out, cutting out pictures and pasting them and writing stuff, that is so cool. So to me, and this relates in a way to our earlier conversation of like, love Gregory Shushan, dear death experiences across time and across culture and this proves it. I also like, we all do, we're drawn to people who are inspirational and we draw from them power and insights and they are the giants that we stand on the shoulders of. Wim off is such a person. So I learned, Wim is always teaching me lessons. I just, every time I go into the cold, Wim is teaching me lessons. How was that experience for you guys? Can I just, yeah. Look at the word you just used, inspiring, Alex, right? Conspire means to breathe together. Inspire means literally to breathe in the life-giving energy of another. When we say someone is inspirational, that's what we mean. It's like I can breathe in this person's energy and it infuses me with life. Think how powerful that is. Now let me do my best Wim off on the cold thing, right? The cold, Wim likes to say, the cold is a teacher. I'll translate, the cold is a teacher. The cold is, the cold is merciless yet righteous. Yes, right. The cold is merciless yet righteous. And you're absolutely right. The cold is a unique, hormetic tool and by hormetic tool, hormesis is the biological concept that simply means voluntary stress, regularly applied to build resilience of body and mind and spirit. So when we voluntarily go into the cold or when we voluntarily lie down on a yoga mat and breathe three or four rounds of tumo, hoff style breathing. When we volunteer to do that, we are literally sort of cultivating this conscious, again, conscious capacity as humans to optimize ourselves. And in so doing, that begins to ripple out into our lives and inspire and as we conspire with others, we inspire others and are inspired by them. And that's why Wim I think is so magnetic. Everyone who meets him, I haven't met him yet, I will. But everyone who meets him says, he is a whizzy wig character. What you see is what you get. He is an authentic human across the board, warts, faults, virtues, world records. And that's all we can be at the end of the day. It's like all we can be is who we are showing up in real space, wrestling with good and evil and cultivating this conscious capacity to try and be the best humans we can be. And it begins, I think, with the breath, because the breath is the most elemental thing that we do. All right, awesome. You just really love that. You know, Rob, I'm not super familiar with the Wim Hof, but hearing you talk about the cold, it strikes me that we talk about cold as if cold is a thing. But cold is just an absence of heat and an absence of, because heat is energy. So does that have to do with kind of like putting yourself sort of in isolation from like standard, like the energy that you would typically experience like everyday life? Such a cool question. I've never thought of that. But my immediate, I guess my immediate reaction to that question, well, first of all, you can go into the cold with other humans. And that's a different experience because you will find inspiration in the conspiracy in the cold, right? Just like when you breathe in the presence of other humans, even a yoga class, let's say, it's a different experience when you're together exchanging that energy, those electrons, right, with one another. But gosh, so yes, the cold is an absence of heat and what it does, hormetically, I mean, there's all kinds of neurophysiological things going on and psychological things going on, but you're actually, your mind and body and spirit are cultivating a new energetic presence in the cold to hold that absence of heat and energy at bay. You're expanding outward from within? Yeah, it's an amazing thing. Like, and Alex, you may have had this experience. When you get into, it's easiest to witness this in an actual ice bath with cubes, right, or whatever. When you get in the ice bath and you're up to your neck in ice and you're breathing long, slow exhales. The ice begins to breathe with you. And your body very quickly builds, especially if you don't move at all, your body builds this thermal heat cone around you to protect you in the ice. And then that heat cone, it's so cool, it begins to expand outwards. And so, when I do trainings with groups of humans in the ice, we have to keep feeding, we have to keep feeding ice into the barrel, of course, because every human that comes in builds that thermal cone of energy, expands it outward and the ice melts, right? So it's like, oh, we got to dump more ice, why? Because humans are resonating in the ice and they're holding heat and energy and they're expanding their capacities through this hormetic practice. I'd never thought of it that way before, but that's what's going on. Do you ever go out, you're in Vermont. I mean, I just imagine, you know, you guys going out in the woods and doing it out there. Yeah, I live, and Brandon too, we live in a beautiful river valley named after the Mad River, the Mad River Valley. And right about now, Alex, it's getting a little too warm. Summer is about to be here. It's, the water is still cold, but it's not quite as cold as we like it to be if we're looking for a warm mesus, but, oh yeah. So when you come visit us, have you been to Vermont? Has he been to Vermont? No, I would love to. Oh, you've got to come. And when I come to San Diego, so my business partner at our Peak Flow Breathwork startup, Lindsay Trubiot lives up in Encinitas just north of you. Awesome, great. So I'm in San Diego quite a bit and she has a super cool ice rig and sauna. So if you can spare a few hours, come on up and we'll have some ice bathing. But yeah, I mean, and it brings us back around, I guess, I know we can talk for hours. We should probably wrap it up. I just feel like we're warming up. We're warming up here, but, but this question, like central to your work, Alex, and I hadn't fully appreciated until this conversation, I think with the three of us. Central to your work is the importance, I think the vitality of humans cultivating conscious awareness of our consciousness. Yes. At a time when there is a war, I think we probably all agree that there's a war being waged on the notion of human consciousness and what it can do for us. I pull up on that though. I pull up on that a little bit because the playback and forth that I really love and I think has parallels with the work that you're doing. And we should find a way to expand this conversation not only as once not enough, but you guys are special people and the dialogue that you're creating is just fantastic. And I wanna find a way to continue it on a regular basis, whether it's part of your project or part of my project or whatever. But what I was gonna say is the interesting interplay for me is kind of the classic, it almost sounds trite, but when we point outward, you know, we have three fingers pointing back to us. When we point outward and someone is trying to, is in a battle to kind of control consciousness like that. Yeah, I meet that guy every fricking day. When I go into the right, you're nodding your head. I meet that guy every day. And that's why I go into the cold. That's why I go there, right? I can't do it nearly as well as you do. That was good. But once we understand that, I think it gives us, in my opinion, it gives us a better position to understand why Bill Gates is doing such horrible things and why he was on Epstein's plane so many times and why, you know, like one of my things is we're all leading rich spiritual lives. That doesn't mean we're all leading good spiritual lives, but we're all leading rich spiritual lives. And the yammering that's going on in our head, imagine the yammering that's going on in the head of that person who is the serial killer, you know, and we're all that, you know. So we've gone really broad in this conversation. I'm wondering like as we wrap up, can we maybe narrow it down to like a few things that we could focus on as we move forward and we try to like discern information? And I know you're fond of saying follow the data. And there's a funny meme that I've seen circulating recently that's, I keep following the data and I wind up at the money. And so I think Qibono is another like useful tool like who benefits. I think like that's something that we can always ask ourselves like when we're trying to discern information, like, okay, what is the data saying? Follow the data where that leads, but also who benefits from this result that's being returned? And could that be influencing what I'm reading? Do you have any other insight as to like tools that we can use like any kind of mental like gymnastics that we can do to kind of work our way through the, you know, the minefield that is 21st century intellectual life? Well, the one thing I'd key off of is the very first thing you said in that Brandon is, you know, oh, we're too broad. Now we have to go, you know, down to the microscope telescope kind of thing. And I'd say, yeah, that is a problem, but we have to embrace it because that's what we always have to do, right? We have to go down and then we have to step back and look a bigger picture. So, you know, follow the money, you know, who benefits is awesome. But then we have to juxtapose that with the fact that there are people that are clearly beyond that in a way that money couldn't possibly in any kind of rational logical way be a factor. You know, you have billions of dollars or trillions of dollars that doesn't probably play out. And then I think there's also the paradigm thing. And then there's also the cycle, all the psychological factors. And then there's all the totalitarian social factors. So I think it's always, you know, changing our level of focus. And I would add that at the end, it's how do I live, how do I make decisions that are better for me on my spiritual journey so that I can then make it better for my family, not be such a jerk to my wife, stop making all the mistakes I make with my kids, and then maybe even reach out to people in my community, my neighbors, you know what I mean? Well, and the word spirit, the word spiritual, like the word pranayama, which you used earlier, Alex, the notion in ancient Sanskrit, I believe, of the breath. I think the Indian yogic tradition is the oldest, I think that we know of historically that cultivated kind of an awareness of breath and thus consciousness, right? Spirit means more or less kind of the same thing. So to live a spiritual life really kind of means, I think, to live kind of a consciously breath-focused life, if I'm getting that correct. And maybe I will close, just picking up on your point of a second ago, Alex, I agree with you, it's not that there's an external war being waged on the notion of consciousness alone. That may be true. But we all, as individuals and collectively, I think, struggle with acknowledging the role that consciousness plays in how we live our lives, mind, body, spirit, you're right, it's easy to point out at Bill Gates or Jeffrey Epstein or, you know, insert your demon of choice here. Air Schwab. Air Schwab, the Schwabians. But at the end of the day, our first and most important responsibility, it seems to me, as members of the team human tribe, is to take responsibility for our own cultivation of consciousness, as you were just saying, and that will ripple outwards into our marriages and families and communities. Just one other thought. I've been in conversation with Matthias Desmet, who's a very busy fellow these days, and I'm gonna ask both of you here to send me your mailing addresses when we hang up, and I'm gonna see if I can get you both copies of his new book, because it's a really important book. And Alex, Brandon knows this, but his book aligns beautifully with what you've been up to. He really, you know, his book is a critique, a historical and psychological critique of the materialist scientific paradigm, and his concept of mass formation is but a single chapter in a much larger and beautifully written, I think, book. But I asked him, I said, so you're talking about mass formation, Matthias. What role does information play? Information. To Brandon's point of earlier, a couple of times about data, graphs, charts, words, phrases, right? And Matthias said, you know, I don't know, but it's an important question. I've been, for another project, I've been deep down the rabbit hole with the guy who invented cybernetics, Norbert Wiener. Right. And he, again, we could talk for an hour about him, but he saw all this coming in the 1950s and 60s. He played a central role in inventing cybernetics, you know, human feedback systems, et cetera. And then he... And then he got pulled under into the machine. Well, he stepped back from all of that because, right, cybernetics fell into some pretty interesting hands, did it not? Anyway, so, and there's a lot of parallels, I think, between cybernetics and consciousness and breath work and breathing and good and evil and all of this. But I guess we have to leave it here. I'm gonna stop talking. Brandon, any final words? And then Alex, any final things to leave us with? Alex, it's been a pleasure. Usually I listen to you in audio form, so it's cool to see your face. And thank you for joining us. Thank you guys. It's a very exciting, just invigorating the energy of this conversation. I just want to keep it going. We have to do more. This is what I always call a level three conversation. And we just don't get those enough. And that's my reluctance with reaching out to authors. It's creating the right dynamic where we can really get past you. Love the book. People go buy the book. Now, let's talk about what you're doing. Yes. And that's where we were able to jump immediately. This content, this hour content is gonna be super dense. I'm gonna put it on on my channel, but this is the conversation, the dialogue I want to engage in. So I thank you guys so much for doing it and let's find ways to do more of it because there isn't this kind of stuff out there enough. Completely agreed. Well, Brandon, Alex, thank you both. I'll do a quick sign off and we'll keep the conversation going offline and return as soon as we can make that happen. Thanks so much to you both. You've been watching Listen to Plan VTV, the show about Vermont independence. I'm Dr. Rob Williams, joined in studio with Brandon Zerlino and our very special guest all the way from San Diego, Alex Sekaris, the Skeptico podcast and why science is wrong about almost everything most provocative book among others. Find him online to learn more. Thank you so much for watching, for listening and remember V for Vermont. Thanks again to Rob and Brandon for having me on Plan TV. As I mentioned, I wanna do more with these guys. This is such a great conversation. Such a great dialogue. So I already have one interview scheduled with Rob and then a couple other ones that we talked about we might do jointly. So I hope you're as excited about doing that as I am. Let me know. Reach me on the Skeptico forum. Until next time, take care and bye for now.