 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about making our puzzle pieces fit. It's almost like a reflection in the external world from an internal experience. I've heard many people and I resonate with this that when they have psychedelic experiences or near-death experiences, it almost feels like they're given this internal map or this internal puzzle and they want to find all the pieces out here that match up with that internal puzzle. That's Andy Rouse from the Deep Share podcast. I have a great chat coming up with him. We did kind of a swap cast thing and I thought it was great. So we're gonna do it again. I think we left some really intriguing loose ends that we'll might tie up in the future. But in the meantime, we rolled right into this one. So I don't think much of an introduction is necessary. Here we go, Andy from Deep Share podcast. I'm probably gonna rattle your cage at some point. Maybe you'll rattle mine. But what I really hope is that you'll kind of fill in some gaps for me because this is- Vice versa. Vice versa, my friend. So I sent you this survey and you were nice enough to fill it out and your answers are quite brilliant. And I'm not just saying that. Very, very deep. I'm like, man, I knew I was gonna like this guy. I really liked that. Yeah, I've been thinking about having this conversation with you for quite a while because out of the plethora of amazing people that we all get to talk to in this community, what I really admire about you is your drive to, you just never let anybody off the hook about certain things. And I love that because I tend to be a little non-confrontational and I need a little bit of influence to really get my confidence about me and be like, hey, listen, I need to ask that again because you're still really not answering my question. You know what I mean? And I really admire that about you. Well, I do know what you mean, but it's tricky, isn't it? Because- It is. Yeah. You don't wanna cut off a conversation entirely. You don't wanna like alienate someone. You don't wanna be a prick. But sometimes that's what's needed, right? I listened to a great conversation that you had. Well, it was starting to be a great conversation from like, man, this was back in like 2014, I think, with that neurobiologist. What was her name? I can't remember off the top of my head, but she made a million excuses how nothing was working and she just had to cut off the conversation and you were drilling her. You were quoting her own book and she couldn't back up what she was claiming. It was just classic. Well, there's so many jumping off points for that, because like one of the things about like that interview and what people have kind of said about Skeptico and there is some truth to it because it always happens for all of us. It's like, hey, the guys on my team, I'm gonna kind of treat them one way and the guys on the other team, I'm gonna go for blood. When she's on the other team like that, which she is, materialist, scientist, really kind of clueless in my worldview, she needs to be confronted with, hey, this is a reality that you have to accept, you have to at least deal with. Right, right. Can we pause for one second? Sure, no problem. Sorry. No worries. I'll take that time to introduce the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the deep share. This morning I have Alex Sakeris from Skeptico with me and I've been waiting to have this conversation for a while. Alex is the author of Skeptico, of course. He's also the author of Why Science is Wrong about almost everything. It's a pleasure to have him here because I've been following his work for so long and he's interested in so many of the topics that I find fascinating like near-death experience, extrasensory perceptions and experiences of that nature. But Alex is interested in a lot of different topics. As am I. So we're probably gonna get into a number of different things that don't necessarily relate to near-death experience. But as I've told him off the air, I think it's natural for us to talk about the very material conspiracy theories that we get into and find interesting. And it naturally moves us towards that more personal conversation about consciousness. So yeah. I hope you guys have a great time listening to this conversation with me and Alex and Alex has returned, has managed to rally in the puppy. I am so sorry, man. Oh, no worries, no worries. Okay, you have the ability to edit that back into. You know what? I took the time to just give a little intro and honestly, that's another thing I don't even normally do. I like barely give intros just cause I caught up in the moment. So yeah, who's perfectly timed? So yeah, welcome to the deep share, Alex. I appreciate you being here, man. Thank you, Andy. I think we're gonna have a great conversation and a kind of silo-free conversation. That's what I was leading up to in what we were talking about before cause one of the things that, the way I put it is, right? And you understood right away cause you go, yep. And it's like, we wind up in our silos where we're just kind of talking to each other and everything makes sense and it's coherent. And then somebody comes in outside, you know? And like, so my thing, one of my things is UFOs and ET along with near-death experience, along with the out-of-body experience, along with evil and along with, you know, all that stuff. So every time somebody gets settled, I'm the guy who's going, wait a minute, you're in your silo. What happens when you come out of your silo and look at this other stuff? You're nodding, so you have- I appreciate that. Yes, I think, you know, subconsciously you probably influenced me in some way to take that approach confidently at times because it's, yeah, I kind of try to throw a wrench in the spokes. Well, I don't try to, but I have the wrenches and I have to throw them. You know, I'm sure you can relate to that because sometimes it's like, you know, well, I strongly feel that everyone in this community has a piece of the puzzle to offer but sometimes they don't even understand their own puzzle. I think a lot of us need each other to kind of shine the lights in different ways on each other's puzzle pieces to kind of see what that puzzle piece really means and where it really fits. You know, people say demons and angels, but then again, you could say depression or confidence. You know, it's a gradient of experience that the more we accept into the worldview, the more we can kind of see what's really going on. I try not to throw too much out. I want to keep as much in as possible and see where something might be more metaphor than dense physicality perhaps, you know, especially in this realm that we're talking about near-death experience and all that. If that made any sense, Alex. It makes total sense. The good side and bad side of that is it kind of does bring exactly what we're talking about into focus and in terms of the challenge there. Cause like I don't necessarily agree with what you're saying. I always come to, like one way I put it is like a litmus test, you know, like at every angle that you go down, you know, angels, demons, depression, you know, a litmus test. So I'm not quick to just brush past even the point that, well, everyone has a piece of the puzzle. No, no. Okay, okay. But where I think you're also going with that or where we can take it that I'd so totally agree with and this is where I need to grow is like you are a really cool dude. I can tell. No, I can tell. I'm listening, I'm reading these survey answers that you gave me and I'm like immediately, and you know this from kind of deep share, right? It's like, cause I've heard you say this that you have this cool community now, you know, you've built this cool community of people like, bro, I get it, you get me, I get you. Now that's how I immediately feel with you because, you know, I'm asking you a science and you go, it's a method, it's not a position statement. It's inextricably linked to scientific materialism. I'm like, bing already. Everything is consciousness, you write. That's what you wrote as an answer. The paradox somehow allows us experience. Brilliant. So I'm like, I'm all over this guy in terms of we're like bros. On the other hand, so I don't want to alienate you or piss you off because like you can be my friend, you know what I mean? But at the same time, if we're gonna talk about the box saga, I'm gonna go, man, that sounds like bullshit to me. Nice. Thank God finally someone that at least comments because it's either this is too weird. I don't even want to touch it or wow, this is really interesting and kind of just following along with what I'm saying about it. I would, yeah, that's a different thread altogether. But yeah, I am looking for debates about that because I don't like what I'm finding necessarily in some areas of that story. So I want to know what's going on there and why it fits so well in some places, you know? But again, that's another thread altogether but a great example that you brought up. And it's a great thread to go down because like we'll just go down it right now because your listeners know about it. And we'll just do a 30 second fly by is I'd say that the reason why it resonates the reason why it's true is because it's well crafted. It's kind of like Christianity. Why it fucking works so well as a social engineering mind control project is because a lot of it is really solid from a spiritual perspective. But from a historical perspective it really kind of breaks down. And then from a mind control, how do I use this to kind of shepherd people into my little club? There's all these other things built then. So the fact that it's brilliant just for millions and millions of people it's still something they can't get over. They're like, no, but I had this brilliant spiritual experience through my practice of Christianity. I'm like, of course you did. Or like, if you say, you know, the box I get it really resonates and isn't this true and interesting? And what about the connection to language and sound like, yeah, yeah, all the guys not an idiot who put it together but that doesn't mean it's real either. Interesting. Yeah, well, I really appreciate that. And I think that maybe down the line somewhere if I were to do like a proper debate form with like notes and everything maybe you'd like to be a part of it. I don't know. I mean, it's kind of, it's a rabbit hole to go down even just to understand enough to debate it, of course. But yeah, I'm glad that you have that perspective because often I don't find that, you know? So it helps. Yeah, the language stuff in itself. Yeah, I think where it resonates for me is how it kind of... So let me put it this way. I do think something about it feels like it's the other end of the stick. Like you have this constant from a long time ago feud between this more natural way and this more artificial way, I guess you could call it, but they're both really the same people. It's almost like a family feud. And it's like, if the box saga has any truth to it, it doesn't mean that it's the way we should all be going back to by any means, but it would be the more naturalistic way. Like it's the heathen, the pagan, the worship of nature more than move on from that, expand out where build machines become the new thing. It's a very old versus new kind of mentality that I constantly see out there. But then again, that also feels like a Gaelian dialectic as well. I don't know, it's a big topic to get into for sure. Right, I mean, it kind of cuts both ways there. It's like the part you landed on on the end is kind of more what I was saying, right, Andy? It's like, yeah, it's picking up some themes, some metaphors, some archetypes that do resonate with us and have some deeper truth. But what does that mean in terms of inquiry to perpetuate doubt, you know, so Skeptico, that's my ethos, I didn't realize it even at the time that I named the show, but inquiry to perpetuate doubt, I want to be doubtful because that to me is a spiritual process. When I settle on something, when I know something. Ah, it's over, I've lost it. Exactly, it's over, I've lost it. I've lost it when I'm always reaching and for me, that's kind of a doubt, you know. So my point would be rather than to find the resonance with the box saga, well, yeah, there has to be some, otherwise I'm not drawn in. Right, right. But once I find the resonance thing, okay, how can I tear this apart? Right. Is there any one thing? Because all it takes is one thing, you know, that is an irrecoverable kind of falsehood, you know, and then you go, oh, okay. Well, I would just, to that I would say, the problem is a lot of the holes you could possibly find in something like the box saga would then have to be looked at with a keen eye too, because it's coming from, say, a Catholic-run society. And we know that they overran and destroyed so much of the world and strangleholded everyone into their belief structure at one point. Scandinavia included, especially, I mean, so I don't know, we'd have to really dig into the historical aspect of it, but along with the saga saying that this family took off and hid all of its treasures and this area of the world was destroyed by Catholics, does in a way fit with the historical narrative. Doesn't mean Heathens and Pagans are the good guys. I don't think any of these people are the good guys, because I tend to say the society wants you to lean on one wall or the other, because it's easy to do that. But the problem is we're supposed to be finding our own invisible balance beam, that there's good ideas on both sides of this divide and conquer shit that's been put in our faces, if that makes sense. The problem I have with that is I think if you run the Catholic timeline, I don't think it matches up with anything I've heard with the box saga. I mean, the Catholics were pretty good at recording their timeline and all the popes and all the writings and all the bishops and all the phony baloney bullshit that they were doing and you can match that right up to the box saga and it doesn't. I mean, it doesn't even close. Are we talking about the invasion of Finland and stuff like that? The dates are off? I noticed that as well. I did. Yeah, considerably. So, and then you have all this different, I was just talking to my buddy Al Borealis who runs Foran Borealis and he's a good guy and he lives way up in far Norway and he was chatting with somebody about the Norse mythology and the Norse religion, culture and stuff like that. And he was kind of laying a bunch of stuff cause he's really studied it. It's kind of second nature to him but he was kind of like, okay, you don't get it. It's like number one, there is nothing left in Norway cause as you've said, there's this kind of cleansing. But it's not just Catholic and then some of them go over to Ireland and Scotland and that, but Iceland is most, you know, preserved of that kind of thing. So once you start really breaking that down with scholars, the box saga has some huge holes in it that to me are irrecoverable that you just can't apply when the scholarship starts pulling it apart. You can't start plugging the holes with just, you know. The anecdote, perhaps. Yeah, or just, you know, I still like it, you know, cause it doesn't ring true but isn't cause, and this is really, you know, this conversation we're having right now is what's kind of really motivating me, pushing me in terms of us as a community, as truth seekers, you know. Oh, I still think we've lost our way in so many ways. Oh yeah. Lost our way and have fallen into, you know, kind of flatter science. You know, that's okay. You know, hey, everyone has an opinion. You know, I won't, I've been on a guy's show where I'm like, look, it's bullshit, right? You don't really believe in flat earth. You know, I've done a multiple shows where it's like, okay, you want to keep the options open. Number one, why do you want to keep the options open? And it goes back to the first thing I was saying, Andy, like, I do not want to piss you off so bad that like, you're like, fuck that Alex, you know what? Seriously, but cause here are the two kind of, like you were saying, walls that we're leaning on. One is when your uncle, Jerry, comes to Thanksgiving. You've learned, man, you just go, you talk about the weather or you talk about fishing. You know, you just don't talk about this stuff with you. It's going nowhere. It's just going to ruin your night too. You didn't get any information into any brains that we're going to hear it the right way. That's on one level. And on the other level is if we really were, like in the real world, like longtime friends for the longest time and had hung out and had done things. And I could totally trust you and you could totally trust me. And then we could have this kind of conversation, kind of Massachusetts style where we're just throwing down and go, come on, bro, you know that's a bunch of people. You know that. And you go, yeah, well, you got your shit too. You know, this and that. And then at the end, we could just, you know, like, okay, get on with it. But those are the two extremes, I think. I definitely want to be on the second one. But I understand the practical part of, you know, talking to somebody we've never met before. How do you get there? Or worse yet, you know, we're kind of letting our guard down. As you said, worse yet, you schedule an interview with someone. They've written a book or they have a presence. They're coming on your show. They do not want to hear, you know, Andy ripping them apart. It just doesn't work that way. No. And it's also like I said this on Twitter the other day about the saga, because again, I don't hold it to be true. I am very much like you where it's, I like to be open. I leave, I like to leave some, some wiggle room here to just pull out pieces of everybody's story and see where they went wrong or where some truth might lie or something like that. But I said the other day about the saga, like I want to have some like really intense researchers on that I really respect and be able to be like, hey, sorry, I don't want to talk about anything you're working on right now. Can I use your brain for two hours? And it's like, you can't really do that with someone you've never met, you know, maybe after like five appearances or something like, hey, can you help me out, man? Can you take a look at this for me? But even then it's hard because everybody's very busy and everybody's in their own silos kind of, you know, it's good to get out of the silo every once in a while, but we always kind of cycle back in every once in a while. Well, there's a reason why we're in the silo and it's sometimes it's a good reason. I mean, the reason why we're in some of the silos we're in in terms of spirituality and in terms of extended consciousness and what that means is because we think there are some truths there that really kind of drive us forward in our life, you know what I mean? And people who are shut down from that or in a different silo, you kind of want to knock on their little glass window and go, come on out, there's this whole other thing because you will die and you will face whether or not there is anything after that and what that is and what that means and what that could have meant in terms of how you live your life. Yeah, I like the way you put that total regret or total jubilation, perhaps, one or the other, that ending circumstance that you know, I go down that pathway a lot. Oh, an interesting way to bridge from this box saga little tangent, we went down into what we were really gonna kind of get into was the reason that what resonates with me most about that saga is just the language because of a psychedelic experience I had long time ago that I came out of and everybody, even my friends tripping with me thought I was completely crazy and then I just forgot about it after a while but this saga reinvigorated the memory of coming out of an experience going, there's a hidden language inside of every modern language. There's some sort of phonetic connection that tells a sacred story that exists inside every one of us and then I found Joseph Campbell and the hero with a thousand faces and I was like, this is that other, this is someone else's puzzle piece talking about the same thing. Like, holy crap, there's this story that exists inside of, it was just, that's what resonated with me. So not that a lot of the factoids about saga necessarily have to be true, but that something there resonates with my spirit in some way, perhaps. Yeah, although I tell you, man, I would encourage you to kind of not tail off at the end there, because I don't think it's necessarily about your spirit there. I think what you're saying is it connects to an experiential truth that you had in this extended realm. So that's been my kind of mission, and it's like a personal mission of discovery. So the first thing is, does consciousness exist? Is that little voice inside your head, is that real? And I always point this out to people because I started this a long time ago and the popular, the most popular, it still is the predominant paradigm in science. Is that, no, that is an illusion, that is not real. That is an epiphenomenal, your brain, your brain is just this ball of jelly up there and it does this thing and you think that story is real, but it's not. That has been falsified scientifically and we talked 40 hours on that. But the next point that gets us to your thing. So now we're saying, not only is there this consciousness, not only is that story, that voice inside your head, not only is that real, but the voice can be outside your head and that can be real. There is some kind of extended consciousness that we always know when we're talking about angels and demons or for Christian or whatever. We always know there's this extended consciousness, but we weren't allowed to talk about it. And part of the way they mulled us is because they denied even consciousness. They even said even the voice inside your head isn't real and now you're going, whoa, Andy, you're telling me that you had some experience outside of your body and that's real and that's an experience. Oh, Andy, you are so stupid. Right. So that's where I kind of was kind of poking you a little bit in terms of tailing off and saying, you know, maybe you'd resonated me in it. No, man, you had a, maybe let's consider the opposite. Andy had a direct experience of knowing some super advanced knowledge that is out there in some other realm and you pulled that knowledge back and then that knowledge resonated with something else that you came across. Whether that is literally true or not in terms of the box out is another question, but that's how you get what I'm saying, you get the same. Yes, it doesn't have to even match up directly. It just, it relates, it directly relates. It's almost like a reflection in the external world from an internal experience. And honestly, you hit on a great point there because I've heard many people and I resonate with this that when they have psychedelic experiences or near-death experiences, it almost feels like they're given this internal map or this internal puzzle and they want to find all the pieces out here that match up with that internal puzzle. And it seems to be available. It seems to work. Like putting the solution first and then finding the parts that get there, it's incredible. But again, that can lead to bad thinking too because you can get hung up on a thought and want to prove it more than it should be proven. Absolutely, great point. Great point, I love the ping pong back and forth. It's gotta be both, man. Unfortunately, it has to be both. It's those two leaning sides, right? Exactly. And you know, so here's another, you know, ping pong paradigm flip. Is that extended consciousness realm more real, whatever that means real, than this realm, right? Cause immediately you're nodding your head cause you're like, yeah, that's what we keep hearing. Yeah. You talk to anyone who's had a near-death experience overwhelmingly like 90% off the charts. This is real. This is home. You're living the illusion. Psychedelics, you're living the illusion. That was real. Out of body experience. All sorts of different experiences. ET, you know, what does that mean when people have that experience? Okay, you know, this is, so think about that in terms of, so you have this extended consciousness experience like you did, it's profound, and it's true in a way that you just knew it in your, you can't say in your bones cause you're out of your body. Right. You knew it, you know, at a soul level. And now you're coming back and now you're trying to rationalize it. Just like you said, you're finding to fit those pieces together in an inferior form. Yes. We're coming back from the, I like to say it's like the ecstatic experience of non-ego or something along those lines. And we're coming back and we're explaining it to everybody and sharing those experiences with our egoic conscious linear mind. So we have this feeling of non-linearity and all that. And then you come back in and the only way you can describe it is using this inferior reduced form. I would say it's like a reduced form. I think illusion is a, can be a dangerous term. I wouldn't wonder if you would agree with that because, you know, again, trying to find that middle path always, there's a way to get spiritual and then get carried off by certain people's ideas that kind of say the body is meaningless. It's just this spirit, this inner gnosis that matters where I go more into the alchemical explanation of things. Like for instance, those people you mentioned in science, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, all these people that we used to kind of accept, I did blindly like 20 years ago for sure. I loved all of those guys. They're, it's like they're looking at a model of reality and going, yeah, see clearly this is how it works. And it's like, dude, that's made out of Legos. That's not the real thing. If that, does that make sense to you? Does that resonate? Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know wherever I was going with that, but it's just, it, yeah, it feels like we're kind of reduced here, but it's not that it's fake. It's not that it's an illusion. I think even the word Maya in Buddhism and Hinduism has been misappropriated to illusion when it really represents the appearance of what is real. So it's, you know? Let me quote from Andy in his answer to my survey question. Consciousness. Again, this is really, it's short, but it's really very profound. I don't wanna blow too much smoke. Everything is consciousness. And then what you added is the paradox somehow allows this experience to me. That is exactly what you just said there. Yeah, alchemical, yeah. It's like taking two polar opposites and creating this third what? What is this? Why are we here? What's happening right now? Do we hold on to it? What do we do? Poof. I don't know. And I, yeah, and not to cut you off, it's given me a lot of stress about afterlife, honestly. And I love symbolism and I love ancient religions and looking at all the comparisons and how they're different and how they're similar. But I often wonder, are they ever really talking about beyond conscious life? Are they talking about what's missing from our perception right now? That, you know what I mean? Heaven here, because on psychedelics especially, I see my desk, I see my computer, but much like that psychedelic art that's just been around forever, there's like more layers to it and it's beautiful and there's majesties everywhere. But it's not that it's anything different than what I'm seeing. I'm just seeing all of it if that adds up. Well, it does add up. It's just how you're gonna add it up. And here's a pivot that I think is kind of really interesting. So you take the psychedelic experience and it has all sorts of baggage associated with it and we all get that. So pivot to the near-death experience and let's see what that looks like compared to that. Because I think the parallels are just stunning. So people have near-death experiences and as we know, the variety of these are just unexplainable and their weirdness is unexplainable and in some ways would seem to be irresolvable in the same way that psychedelic experiences are. I saw this, man, I saw this. Well, I saw this and like then we're gonna try and resolve those at some physical level. Well, that means that there's 17 million layers to reality and it's like, when I hear that stuff, it's like, here's a guy interviewed from a near-death experience. Love the guy, great guy, his name is David Ditchfield. Think about this, British guy, he's going to kiss his wife goodbye at the train. He leans forward, this is England so it's like Massachusetts, it's always raining, it's always shitty weather, except now you're probably going to weather now. Sometimes it's humid as hell, yeah. He leans forward, his coat gets caught in the doors and he is along for the ride as the train takes off. He's thrown under the train, the train rolls him over, he dies. Common misconception about near-death experience and not a good use of the term, because he is dead by any means that we're clinically talking about in terms of 50 or 100 years ago, when before we could do this resuscitation of bringing people back to death, he's dead, dead, dead, dead. Yes, yes. And he's dead for a while. In his experience, he meets Jesus and he's very clear about the fact that he meets Jesus. He develops these incredible abilities. Some people you hear develop psychic abilities and he does a little bit of that after his near-death experience, but he also develops these incredible artistic abilities. I see you have a keyboard in the background. Yes. This guy had no musical background. All of a sudden, he's writing symphonies and even had one performed at his thing, drawing these art pieces, these huge, large-scale art pieces. I'm not an art expert, I can't tell you, but they look pretty incredible to me. I couldn't do them. But Jesus is a central part of his experience. So I'm talking to him, I'm saying, David, I get it. A lot of people see Jesus. I gotta tell you, if you look at it scientifically, statistically, not everybody sees Jesus. Small percentage of people see Jesus. What are we to make of that? All the other parts of their experience line up. Oneness, love, God, connection, all that lines up, but some of them see Buddha. Some of them just see light. Some of them see energy. What do you make of that? I'm pretty sure it's Jesus, you know, and then I had this other kind of hypnotic regression and the woman who was regressing me said, hey, you were there with Jesus. I was like, hmm, okay. I said, how about this, David? I said, I've interviewed a lot of people with near-death experiences. And some of them have told me it was Jesus, but then when they thought about it more and as they lived their life, and some of them even had multiple near-death experiences, they said, yeah, it was Jesus, but there was something more. There was something more behind it. And then he paused for a second, he goes, yeah, I kind of get the sense that maybe there's something more. So back to switch over to our hallucinogenic experience. So you're presented with all these kind of things that like if you're not experienced, become the focus of it, you know, like all the lights and the colors and stuff like that. Yeah, the illusions are still in here too, yeah. And as you, some of them are in illusions because some of them are mixed in with like the deep knowing that you had, right? And same for David, you know, same for David. And when he came back with Jesus, he came back with some good shit. Yeah, damn right, yeah. But maybe there's more. So the trick there is back to what we're saying, not being stuck in the narrative, not being stuck in, I've now experienced everything. Let me come back in, proselytize and convert people and do everything. I love where we're going with this because it brought me to the thought of how, you know, it's the inner to the outer, the micro to the macro, how we're describing an inner experience. But we're also talking about society too, because a lot of times when we're talking about conspiracy theories and what the elites do, the big bad capital T, they, whatever that means, it's always that, well, there's always truth mixed in with the lies. And it's like, well, why does that keep reflecting consciousness's behavior? You know, when I had my psychedelic experiences, I found the conspirator and it was me. It was my surface level self. It was my ego, whatever, you know, discipline you want to pull from it was that word. It was that part of myself that couldn't face traumas that I dealt with. So I created patterns and walls, whatever. But it seems like it's such a very, you know, conscious experience going on here in the world when you see that kind of as above, so below structure of everything that almost, I call it fractal. I talk about fractal geometry a lot because not only is that a fan favorite of the psychedelic visual stimulus that occurs, but along with those visual cool hallucinations becomes a gnosis of a deep philosophy about reality and how everything seems to be fractal on some level that behind that Jesus or Buddha, there is this thing that exists that is just self similar on every level. And that's why people say, you know, God is everywhere God is within you or you can find God anywhere. It's why Terrence McKenna came back from a psychedelic trip saying a song is a song to us that made no sense. And it didn't have any profound impact on me. When he told it, everybody laughs in the audience because they get it that he's saying that literally the truth is within everything. It's just it's fractal and it could mean a million different things. I don't know, we kind of jumped around there. But I know spot on spot on it. Here's the dilemma we face. The reality that you're probing so deeply that few people are willing to go. Here's where I was going to go with that. Okay. The truth mixed with the lie thing that you said. Hey, if I'm a they and my job is fucking socially engineering people and you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall kind of thing, which is true too. We do live under the red, white and blue and all the shit that we've done, we own that to a certain extent and we own and have to own and have to acknowledge that people are doing mean, nasty, horribly evil stuff in our name. Yes. Those people have perfected misinformation, disinformation, mixing truth and lie. Bam, that's a recipe for what is most effective for to get this group from A to B. I am reluctant to connect that to the deeper experience that you had. I understand that at some level it all has to be connected, but I'm reluctant to go there because I hear what you're saying on a spiritual level, which is fantastic. Because what I hear you saying is, as soon as I start pointing at someone else, I need to do the old thing and look about. Yes. How is that? If I'm able to see that mean, nasty, evil shit, that means it's in me. If I'm able to process that DMT, that means that my body is capable of processing. Otherwise, if it was a total foreign substance, nothing would happen or something else would happen. So, but you get what I'm saying. I think I do, I think I do. So let me try to rephrase under the perspective you're going with. So it's like perhaps what I was experiencing and kind of mirroring out to the elites or whatever with my own inner behavior is just simply the ego or something. It's the bad behavior that I have, which can naturally be compared to the macro of the bad behavior that is in collective society. I was kind of saying, I was kind of saying something slightly different. Okay. Well, it's not contradictory. It's just that as we're trying to navigate this world, this space, and particularly what we're trying to do, you know, you and I, is we're trying to live in these two worlds. And I'm saying that I don't think right now, I'm willing to say that my feet aren't planted in two worlds, because that's how it seems to me. And the deeper spiritual understandings you came to about truth and lie, I think are beautiful, but I think they are separate from at least at this point, from my understanding of what that guy who's running these psyops, what he's doing. And so I just want to for a minute kind of remove the spiritual part of that and just look at the, if I was charged with doing that job and I was like into it and wanted to do that job, this is how I do it. I'd mix information with false information. I'd have exaggerated information. I'd somehow find like when I see people take off on Flat Earth or Tataria, I'd subtly kind of really promote that because that's going to divide this group in a way that they don't even realize because people are going to be forced to choose, you know, is it good? So there's all these techniques, plays in the playbook, part of the trade that when we shift over and we're talking about that, I think we have to kind of say, okay, I'm turning my back on the spiritual because I'm not assuming that these guys are working on that level, they're just doing their fricking job. Okay, okay, okay. I like this. I like where we're going here because, okay. So maybe it's more like what they're doing out there is simply influencing our personal consciousness to act in that way sometimes, you know? Maybe that's why I'm making that connection. But at the same time also, we kind of can go back to what we were saying before about how, you know, just because we can relate everything outwards to the greater fractal reality of spirituality or something like that, doesn't mean that we don't have to go to work tomorrow. Doesn't mean we don't have to deal with this physical situation. Then maybe when we take a big step back, it's this beautiful mosaic. But when you get up close, there's individual free will that's pushing and pulling and making their own decisions that impact everyone else and can really screw things up. Does that sound a little bit more on point? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's partly because I come at this from a business background in that, you know, that was my, that was my focus for my life. It's like, hey man, I want to make the dough, you know? So I was computer science guy and then I got an MBA and then I started a tech company. And I was all in it because I had the spiritual side of me and I was doing yoga, yoga nanda classes and all that. But to me, money was clarity. I would never have known my own bullshit unless I could get to some point where I like, okay, got that check. Now explore this other stuff. In the realm, the only way that I was able to be successful in business was by just doing the same thing that I do now, just learning shit, you know? I had the educational stuff but my real education came from books, from seminars, from YouTube's before there were YouTube's, you know? And I was always, and I had them in my cars, I was always listening to 10 times over and, you know, all the classic kind of ones. And I still do to this day because I love learning and I love staying kind of on top of my game. So where I was gonna take that is like, if you look at sales, training for lack of a better term, sales, self-help, stuff like that, there is so much of that. That is pure black magic, left-hand path. Yep. Jordan Belfort, go read Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street, go read his book on selling. It's one of the best books out there on selling. It is black magic. Now, you have to dive really deep into understanding what that means in terms of black magic or you're going to go down and think Damien Eccles is kind of a cool guy even though we raped and killed three little kids because he was following Alistair Crowley and thought that was magic. And so that's another, see I threw out a little grenade there and see if anyone would blow up on that. So, but I think it's kind of interesting, juxtaposing Damien Eccles and Jordan Belfort. And then, oh, here's the third guy I'll throw in. Gosh, I forget his name, but his book is Never Split the Difference. Never Split the Difference, negotiating as if your life depended on it, Chris. That's it. Chris Voss. Is that? Chris Voss, there he is. Interesting. I love this guy, I hate this guy. This guy is black magic. But check this out. This is, I want you on that wall, I need you on that wall stuff. Voss is an FBI negotiator. He opens up that book with a story of being in Manhattan. Two guys have robbed a bank, taken a dozen people hostage and are holding a gun to their head and saying get us a car, get us out of here or we're going to kill these people, right? Now, his job is to use his black magic to negotiate out of this situation. Do we want him to use his left hand past shit? We're like, yeah, man, those innocent people just showed up for work. They didn't deserve that. So do what you have to do, which we've told every soldier and how our country got to do what you have to do, Voss. But the point is, how do we understand that? How do we process that? And then how do we process Damien Eccles too? That was awesome, man, because you kind of paint the picture that this left-hand, right-hand path is kind of built into a lot of the everyday actions, the constant human behavior we see everywhere. I wonder if it can be split right down the middle in that case. We're all doing left-hand or right-hand path magic, probably both at times, without even knowing it, without having any background or education into magic or even thinking it's all hooey, we're still doing it. It's crazy. And to add a little bit of, I guess, bones to that, so it doesn't sound totally abstract. If you read Voss's book, the first thing he says is that, one, everybody talks too much in these situations, negotiating situations or selling situations. They're parallel. Talk too much. Silence, right? So, oh, well, that's not black magic. It's a technique. Now you apply it. The next, exactly, the next thing is empathetic questioning, right? So, and, but then he gets much deeper. So, you know, making that person feel heard, we've all heard of this stuff. Once you get into it deeper and deeper, you at some point have to acknowledge he's trying to manipulate consciousness in order to get to his end game in the same way that... For those out there that, you know, are into a lot of the topics I talk about, but maybe not the magic side of it, you know, this is a really important part that manipulation is literally, you're always after some goal in the material world, whether it's affection from someone that you don't deserve as you're treating them horribly, whatever the situation, it's a material gain in this experience. So you're literally doing magic, whether you believe in it or not, you're literally taking something that exists in the consciousness and bringing it into this world. And we're doing that all the time. And it's so subtle that it's just ignored, it's not believed in, it's laughed at. And like I said to you in that random little rant I sent to you, magic is always, you know, lightning coming out of sticks and stuff like that. It's this parody, because that way no one really recognizes what's happening all the time. My big thing a couple of years ago, I wrote this book, Why Evil Matters. My point with why evil matters was to really say, okay, consciousness is conspiratorial that scientific materialism insists that you, you know, that's just out the window. No one really believed that. But this extended consciousness realm now brings us to the real question we have in our life. How should I live my life? What is right action? Is there such a thing as right action? Hey, is the writer wrong? Hey, maybe, you know, it's all a relative kind of thing. And the way that I think what brings that into focus better than anything else is evil. And that's another one that immediately triggers people to go, no, there's no such thing as evil. Evil is a social construct. And it's what you define, you know, whatever you think it is, it is. And it's like, okay, let me tell you story from the book. Another FBI guy, I really not an FBI guy. How do you get, how do you do, how do you do that FBI thing? Oh my God, with, with J Edgar Hoover. I mean, I, people, I don't want to get taught, but I don't, anyone who says they're FBI, I'm like, J Edgar Hoover, man. How are you processing that? But I got this. So I interview this guy, he's an undercover FBI agent. It is difficult to become an undercover FBI agent, but it also takes a certain kind of person back Andy to what we're talking about in terms of, you know, who is that kind of person who can spin that magic? Cause that's magic too, right? You have to cloak yourself. You have to become that other character. And it's acting and is that magic? But this is even at a different level cause this is life or death. This guy's working with drug dealers, arms dealers, gang members, all this stuff. His last gig, he's infiltrating Nambla, you know, which South Park, it's funny, you know, ha ha ha. He's in New York on one of their field trips and they're in the old Toys R Us that used to be in Times Square and they're on the railing looking down at this 20 foot big carousel ferris wheel. And they're, these men are looking at these little kids and they're talking about what they want to do to these kids and it's not just sexual. They want to inflict pain because it's a power and it's a control thing. And he said, man, Alex, if I wasn't undercover, I would have picked him fucking up and thrown him over that rail and watched their head splatter. Yeah, as a father of a restraint that you'd have to have, oh my God. As a father. So, maybe not even. No, I get it. I get it as a father of four. But here's the point, is that evil? Yeah, allowing that. See, for some greater good, some abstract greater good. Well, I wasn't even going there, Andy. I was going to the first part because the people who are on the fence about evil, everyone I've talked to, they come right off the fence. They go, no, that's fucking evil. That's fucking evil. Somebody wants to do that to some little unsuspecting. No, I totally, I know. The stealing of innocence, yes. The removal of innocence is the, I think for some reason we could explore that for hours and hours as a root problem in society and civilization and history. In a way, it kind of rolls us back to the very beginning of this conversation. It's like, everyone has an opinion. Everyone's voice matters. It's like, let me anchor you now because I said evil and you said evil is a social construct. There's really no such thing as good and bad. Now I'm going to anchor you with that experience and you're going to come off of that bullshit, agnostic middle never hold stuff and you're going to go, okay, I get it. Yes, yes, that is evil. Everyone says that. And what they don't realize, as soon as you have anchored that and driven that stake in the ground, now you're playing in a different field. And it's the one that we've been talking about here. Like, so what does that really mean now that there is evil and what if we connect that with what we said that, hey, this extended consciousness realm, that seems real too. So is there evil there and there's evil here and there's good and no, no, I'm ready to talk. You don't know, I'm ready to talk. Hell yeah, man, yeah, this is a lot. This is a lot to unpack. But so I would like to clarify, because I tend to generalize too much sometimes, I would like to rewrite what I said about everybody has their puzzle piece that matters. I would like to say that everyone that's in this line of questioning and everyone that's pursuing wisdom and we may be off here and there. Maybe I'm talking about our community perhaps or even the listeners, people that are asking these questions and going against what society would like them to do and they're taking that route of asking weird questions and finding, seeking. I would say that each one of us is doing that because of something inside that tells us we have to go against this grain. And I think that's the puzzle piece I'm talking about. So no, someone in my life that I won't name that doesn't like any of this stuff yet, their puzzle piece, they probably don't have one or it's been disintegrated or maybe they traded it for something. But yeah, I would like to clarify that and maybe scale it down a bit that there's those among us that have this innate feeling that we need to search for something I guess and others that don't. I know that that doesn't really necessarily respond to everything you said, but you said a lot there. But that's just to kick it off a little bit. Well, I'd also tie it back to, and we said this before I'm not against everyone has a puzzle piece because on some level from a spiritual perspective, like we were talking about it's undeniable. I mean, everyone has a puzzle piece for their puzzle. Sometimes it gets destroyed when their children or trauma, all that. Or it was all these analogies we could do. Or it gets hidden and then their job is to rediscover it. And you could say all this. But I don't want to demean that or sound like I'm being demeaning because the part that we connected with at the beginning is that the spiritual journey sounds trite. But it's ultimately it's true. Everything we run across it. So I'm on this spiritual journey. You're on the spiritual journey. And the person who's clueless, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson is on a spiritual journey. And you know, that's one of the things that that's one of my other kind of pet peeve little pet projects right now is rich spiritual lives. How does this world look like if we accept this kind of obvious fact once you process it is we're all living rich spiritual lives, right? So that guy who was looking at that kid, he's living a rich spiritual life. That's his voice, the voice inside. He's got the same voices, not the same, but he has the voices and he's wrestling with them. And he's going to ask his wrestling with them. And Bill Gates and they're not just and yeah, they're human, totally. But where I think we need to go with that is they're leading rich spiritual lives. This that implies this extended consciousness realm that like you tapped into with your experience, like you already said this, so I'm just going to kind of bring it back to the surface. Is your understanding that that extended realm that you were in is somehow gone, shut off from you now that you're back, or is it still connected to you in some way? Oh, yeah, I guess. Well, the way it felt to me was that it faded. Like it was like, OK, we're going to we're going to go back into the shadows now, but it's always here. It's always around you. It's constant. It's like, Terrence, I'll bring him up again, because you know how you said you were always listening in the car. Man, I spent my entire 20s just doing my job and listening to endless lectures from people I wanted to hear about. And Terrence was one of them that I just happened to have like 15 hours of lectures. And he once said about how someone came in the room during the middle of a DMT trip, and it kind of sent his consciousness right back to normal, everyday reality, kind of trying to address this friend that walked in. But the elves were still hanging from the curtains. And they were going, oh, sure. You know, it's like, of course, it's a reflection of how he felt was on their faces and everything. And it's always there. It's always a part of us. And yeah, that's where my questioning has been a lot lately in regards to near-death experience and stuff like that. Because again, for some reason, unlike some of my friends that would take the same damn bag of mushrooms with me, I had this profound perspective given to me that directly relates to a lot of what I hear from a lot of the great people who have written about near-death experience and stuff. So maybe I just need to go back into those realms again and refresh myself. Maybe my ego will get slapped around like you thought this was just inside your head again. How long have you been away from this place? Come on, maybe a refresher. This is why people meditate, right? Keep that state of mind more and more present in their lives. I've heard that before. Maybe it works. Well, it's interesting what you're saying because you're talking about the integration process. And then you're also talking about the fact that whether you integrate or not, you're integrated. You know what I mean? So I was like, yes. Isn't that such a common theme in near-death experience where they say, all these rules, all these spiritual, all you have to do this or you'll never escape, you just wake up. Like I've heard that so many times from people on my show, on your show. And it's like, man, that throws a wrench. And it really does, you know, it speaks to the question you had before, like, is there a right way to live or not? Because a lot of near-death experience would come back and say, relax. It's okay. Just experience this, which that has implications into good or evil, I would say. And on the other end, it's like, no, no, no. You have to ascend to this level of consciousness before you die or else you're screwed. It's a very dualistic, again, very divided, conquer, kind of setup. And I'm in it. You're in it. We're all kind of in this like, where is our invincible balancing beam on that issue? And, oh my God, it's difficult, it's difficult to navigate. And, you know, to bridge into something new that you and I kind of wanted to talk about Taktaria and Flat Earth a little bit. And again, it's always the same conversational in some way. That cognitive dissonance, you know, that divide and conquer line of, let's get them to, you know, question one or the other. You know, or, you know, round or flat, you know, there's good reason to question NASA, the funding behind it. There's good reason to question the people that started it and all the establishment that surrounds it. And there's so much good reason to question NASA directly. But there's a lot of reason to hold on to certain things. You know, I tend to say these, they, they don't like to create. And every religion has written that about the pieces of shit in society. They don't like to create. They lob onto what's already created by the creative. They wouldn't be able to come up with some fake universe. I don't think, I don't think they would be able to come up with some amazing mathematical alignment with Earth and the planets and this and that. They're not creative enough to come up with that. I don't think. I think if anything, they have to skew or whatever as much as they can that already exists. And that's kind of an extreme opinion, but. I don't think it's extreme. It's almost like, so in this other discussion that we're going to kind of switch to, what I'm kind of advocating for is science. Okay. So. How dare you? Well, as you, again, as you answered, you know, with my favorite, it was my answer, but you picked my favorite answer because you know, what is science? And you said it's a method. It's not a position statement. It's a stepping stone. It's a tool. Yes. So we've been kind of conditioned, especially lately. I mean, the most kind of in your face, kind of grotesque example of it was with the pandemic where they said, you know, this is science. This is overwhelming. This should end any scientific debate. I actually did a show on the phony mask science and a guy from Yale University who was part of the study actually was quoted as saying that in the Washington Post, this should end any scientific debate. This is nail in the coffin research. This is the antithesis of the scientific method. Yes. Who says this should end scientific debate. Your spider sensey should immediately be going off, but I digress. So when I kind of started Sceptico eons ago, my first, I was drawn to the guys who were doing science, you know, like the parapsychology people, because I was interested in this question of consciousness and the parapsychology people or the people who are doing like the ESP experiments, you know? I'm like, okay, is there anything to that? You know, that would really kind of, kind of answer this question in a way. So I got into that and I knew science kind of, but I didn't, you know, I had to really sharpen my skills. I had to understand how you put together a good experiment, what good controls will look like, what fake science looks like, even the stuff that we're inundated with all the time. It's an approach, it's a discipline that gives us a different perspective. The person, and it's much more of a, also what I'm kind of comfortable with from a business standpoint, from a business standpoint. You know what? You make the sale and you cash the check or you do not. There is no in between. It's, did you fucking get paid? That is the answer. So science in some ways is the same. You know, if you got a no result like, I don't know, I thought I was just in for it, didn't come out, I'm like, okay, great. Throw that in the scrap heap. It's try again, you know, you can try again, but no, that's, you know, so did you control all the variables? Did you get a statistically significant result? So, and I'm not saying that always directly applies to the stuff we're talking about, but I think that method that we're talking about, the scientific method has to be applied here. So NASA, all that stuff, got it, understand, agree. You know, why haven't we gone back? Have we ever felt, you know, all that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That as a scientist, that is noise that I want to get out of the signal. Signal is satellites. The signal is Sputnik, 1955. Go listen to Eddie Bravo and his other guys. I love Eddie Bravo. It's fantastic, genius in so many ways, right? I don't know if he really believes this shit or what, but it's like, satellites are held up by helium. It's like, this is like, or Elon Musk, again, I'm not a big Elon Musk. Hey, how come, you know, when he said to Flat Earth, he goes, how come there isn't any Flat Mars Society? Because we look out, we see Mars, we see it's around. Oh, well, yeah, it doesn't pass any kind of scientific reasonable, I should look at it for more than 30 seconds. And what our community has done is kind of elevated this openness to non-conforming ideas. We've opened that lens so far that we've lost the ability to discern. And I think the way to return to that discernment is through the scientific method. And it's brutal, but it's the way to really kind of discern and cut through shit. And you touched on a really good point that in recent years we've been made to, or just willingly have learned to distrust science. And I always use throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I sound like a broken record, but that's what a lot of people do a lot of times with science is like, it's all fairly, what else are they lying about? And I do that too, often I get that and I do it with history and I do it with technology, a lot of different subjects. But again, I go back to that thing where I don't think they're that creative one, but also for me with the Flat Earth particularly, it's like I really hold dear to that as above so below principle. And I know that part of my community even thinks that sentence is some satanic thing. And that's a problem too. But sticking with this, the as above so below, you look at the subconscious realm, you look at brains compared to galaxies and you look at all that self-similar behavior throughout everything and it's beautiful. It makes up this beautiful existence that we're a part of, but Flat Earth will throw out not only space, but also the subatomic world, all electron microscopes, that's all fake. That's all just silly stuff that they're throwing in our faces. And I'm like, come on. These levels of reality that exists within us as fractal is just, I mean, that's kind of a weird way to say it, but you can see this self-similar pattern, at least I did, even inside myself with behaviors and situations in my life from the past, repeating themselves in bigger and better ways or worse ways, depending on what I was in control of. Negative or positive doesn't matter with things that go outwards through our lives on every level. This as above so below is such an important thing to me at least and to others that that's where I fall with the Flat Earth because I can get behind stuff that I don't understand scientifically and go, hey, maybe I don't know what a scientist would say to that. I don't know if the pilot's just lying because you have a camera in his face. Oh yeah, Flat, totally. Yeah, we all know it up here. Maybe he's trolling you. I don't know. I'm not going there, but I can go with what I feel inside and it's that flowing self-similarity that happens in reality. But I don't know, what would you say to that? I'd say a bunch of different points. No. I'm all over the place, Alex. No, no, no, no, no, it's good stuff. So I'm making notes here because I want to kind of respond. I think one of the things that's kind of difficult for all of us in this community is we understand the value of this conspiratorial, paranoid paradigm that we're in and we're like fucking a right that is right because they are lying to us and it's provable over and over and over again. That is important to hold on to. And I think that that's part of the rub here, right? Is because now you're really, it's back to this two worlds, like a foot in both worlds, you know? And like now we have two different, another two worlds. One world is the conspiracy world. It's like, think conspiracy first, right? We get that first, right, yeah. Exactly, even, beyond question, think conspiracy. Think someone's, someone's, someone's walking in. Exactly, I don't want to say that. Yeah, look at that. It's built into society, come on. Exactly, it's built in. So I think that conspiratorial perspective is kind of essential. The foot, the other foot though is I need discernment and I need rapid discernment. Flat Earth doesn't just, doesn't deserve more than 30 seconds of my time. And when it, when it takes more than 30 seconds of my time to kind of understand that, then the question becomes back to the conspiratorial part. Why is that being perpetuated? What, what might I look at in terms of why that exists? Why I've been doing this show for 15 years. I've never had more people contact me like, oh, you should do a debate on Flat Earth. Something out there in the ethers is trying to get this bubbled up to the top because it, it just throws shit on our whole community that there's the people out there that actually believe in Flat Earth. When you talk to any normies, and most people in our lives are normies, if you mention Flat Earth, you are, it is done, is a done kind of thing. So, and it should be because it's, it doesn't deserve serious scientific thought. And then number two, I guess is, I think it's important, this is my kind of personal hobby of yours, but to plant the flag, to plant the flag and not keep all doors open. Well, you know, I don't know, it could be, you know, maybe there's a chance, I don't know. No, plant the flag and say, no, it's ridiculous bullshit, but I get it. I get it in the realm of the conspiratorial realm, but yeah, that one doesn't pass that test. And then the last one I wanna throw in, which is kind of unrelated to that, but I wanna get it out there and maybe it'll spark a more discussion. I also like the as below so above because, which is implied in what you're saying as above so below, but where as below so above gets us is as we're talking about, like, you don't think there's evil? Shit, just look down here. You don't have to contemplate demons and all the rest. Just look here. Yes. Oh, might that also be reflected? Of course, because the two are synonymous, but anyway. So, well, they're on the table back to you. Well, you know, okay, so this brings me to a very weird kind of point, maybe hard to even get out, but there's a lot of gatekeeping in the spiritual community, of course, too. I would point to a place like Gaia TV is really interesting for a lot of information. And then there's a lot of, they really want us to feel like we're all superheroes and we're gonna be transcending into different forms of physicality. And it's a really, it's convoluted in my opinion. There's a lot of convolution, spirit guides versus archetypes, versus feelings, what is it? Does it matter to discern or is it just a perspective thing? You know, it's very convoluted in there and it's hard to kind of dissect on, again, how do we bring it back down to baseline? How do we, what should be thrown off the table and what should be kept on? You know, can we call it Satanist? Can we call it Luciferians? Because of course in physical reality, they have those silly groups, but then do we take it to that next level where it's demons and it's angels or is it just that's a perspective of something that's just naturally occurring in this experience of duality? I mean, whether we can point to, you know, humans making the decision to have divide and conquer, put into the society to fuck people up or if it's literally the forces of the universe, like, you know, Yin and Yang describe it perfectly and the opposite is seated in each side. You know, it's, I said this on a couple of podcasts now and I like to sound like a broken record sometimes, I guess, but it's important to say that like, it feels like anyone that gets really behind the curtain and gets to see what the evil that's going on, it's almost like, oh, it has to be done. Oh, or else it all falls apart or something like that. This push and pull of these opposing forces, back to alchemy, perhaps, that these two opposing forces kind of create this middle ground of even being able to hear to talk to each other. I don't know, that's kind of wild. It's a little psychedelic, but maybe we'll just like to throw things at you and see what you can do with it. I'd like that. I'm still stuck in the multiple worlds thing. Okay, let's clarify. No, no, no, no, I'm not opposing what you're saying. I'm just saying in parallel to that, I think the thing that trips us up, Andy, is we're always forced to, like you say, wake up and oh, shit, hit the alarm clock, but I gotta get my ass to work. This is the best route. This is the best way to go and traffic is bad and the bridge is closed. All that shit. That's a different world, you know? And so we're always in these two different worlds and we have a different set of tools that work in one world and in another world. And what we're bringing to the table is saying, in that world of hit the alarm clock, avoid the bridge traffic, you also gotta worry about these fucking guys who are trying to jab in the arm in order to, that you never thought that was part of the alarm clock world. And that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing in the spiritual world. Like I don't wanna start making that connection right off the bat and say, well, they're trying to jab you in the arm because spiritually there's a, like I'm open maybe, but the first part I wanna process is, yes, the bridge really is out just because they haven't done the maintenance on it. That isn't a conspiracy, but the jab in the arm that they're trying to do to my kids at school without my consent, yes, that is a conspiracy. So I can navigate the whole thing and then we can have a discussion about my trip. Yeah, okay, I like that. And now I'm guilty of desiring that integration. And I think, now that you put it this way, it's a really, it's a good thing to play with because it's like, you can get lost in integration as well perhaps, where, and maybe that's something that they would look forward to, just confusion by a simple suggestion, right? And I've pondered why psychedelics were used for so long because a suggestion, I can see that, but man, if a certain percentage were having my psychedelic experience, none of that brainwashing bullshit was even real. And I would have been laughing at them. Oh, maybe they just get shot in the head of three times after that. But, I had a hard time understanding. I gotta jump in there because that to me is like a super, super interesting point on a bunch of different levels. So you go back and you look at the psychedelic experiments and you look at the MK Ultra thing. And one of the things that pops out to me, again, I don't know this for sure, but if I'm gonna put on that rational in this world, avoid the bridge hat, I go back to your point, Andy, is like, they're not that fucking smart. So like, they really thought, they didn't know. They were like, oh man, we'll be able to mind control people. We'll be able to suggest things. They didn't, they really believe just like people brought up in certain kind of crazy religions like Scientology or Mormonism or Catholicism, then they have these beliefs, say that throw a grenade out there, see if anyone, see if it goes up. Yeah, so maybe, yeah, maybe just simply to, because I will say, I guess I answered my own question about why use psychedelics is that, at a young age or an untrained mind is gonna be in a world of chaos after something like that. If you don't have some sort of person to kind of be like, well, to help guide you back in some cases, not a guru necessarily, but it took me a long time to reintegrate into reality because I didn't know, my whole world had been thrown upside down when I started doing psychedelics. I spent a lot of time reading dead people in bookstores because I didn't have a lot of people around me to bounce ideas off of. But yeah, I guess it could just be used in that way to cause the confusion they love to create, perhaps, you know? Well, and I think we're saying the same thing, but it's like, it could be used that way because they really were dumb, they really were dumb, and that there was probably a community in there that, because as soon as people start using this, and this is back to Terence McKenna, it's like, hey man, when these mushrooms grow out of the decal pasture, there's no controlling what's gonna happen. So like you said, some people have the bag of mushrooms and they have one experience of it, but you got a bunch of mushrooms growing out there in the field and people eating them up. There's gonna be some people that are gonna wake up. And the same thing I think is true with Sidney Gottlieb, just because he doesn't get it, doesn't mean that some of those people didn't get it. Right, okay, I like that. Where it's again, it's that mixture of intent and mistake or unknowing. Yeah, like Ken Keezy once said that LSD, to describe LSD it's, we opened up a door, or the government opened up a door, they saw something in it, they didn't understand, they put people in that room to see what it was. Those people came out and wouldn't listen to anything the people putting them in the room said anymore, and they said, okay, let's close that door and close it up forever. So in a way that kind of speaks to that ignorance, that fear or ignorance that, okay, let's shut the friggin door. I don't know what we just did to society, but then of course you can go into how the 60s and the psychedelic revolution was a way to discredit a real movement. So that's a whole another, that's an intentional side of it perhaps. Plus you can go into the pharmacological work in Pompeii, the city that was covered by, I think you know where I'm going with this. And they look in the medicine chest and ooh, there's cocaine, there's cannabis, and there is, I forget, you probably know, the name of the fungus that grows in the wheat. All the air got in LSD? Yes, yes, so they find air got, like all these things are preserved, right? So it's like, again, that's classic us to think, we opened the door, you know, this swish, fuck dude, we didn't open no door. Somebody was brushing their hands in the wheat field and brought it up to their face and something happened thousands of years ago, which is what Terrence McKenna has said, it is undoubtedly true. And so anyways, I'll throw that on the table. Man, we could go in a lot of places from here, we've been going for a while and I, man, I would just love to have you back sometime to have more of these, this is great. I don't know where we would, where would you like to go from here? Because we've covered so much ground. You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to put this out on my channel too. This is great, because this is such an interesting discussion. And then I think you and I ought to huddle and talk about doing, maybe even like a mini series on this, because I think it's so critical to this, because there's a lot of different ways to slice it, I think that would, that does lead down, you know, the river, you know, they kind of merge at some point. And we didn't quite get them to merge all the way. But I think it's, there's a potential there to do so. I would be totally open to that. I'm sure the audience would love that as well. So yeah. So for now, we'll wrap up, you know, any last words before we, you know, have you plug your show and everything? Last word really is, I'm just really excited about this, because the grenades went off and it was just like I was hoping for at the beginning, like no one ran, you know, jumped out of the foxhole. You didn't jump out of the foxhole. It's like, no, that's what you think, you know, you think that, okay, great. Let's dive into it and hash it out. At its core, I really, really like where you're coming from. So I want to go on that journey with you. Cause we all know, especially in our community, that's what keeps bringing us back to this community is, these are the people we do want to go on the journey with. Cause there's a lot of other people in our life who are like, oh man, just put on the freaking ball game cause I don't even want to. Yeah, if you can't, you know, it's like building a house. If you can't get the foundation with a relationship going, then all the other layers are just going to fall apart. So yeah, we're finding a lot of common ground in this community. I love being a part of it. And, you know, when I took psychedelics and had those crazy feelings, I didn't have a community like this. So it's great that it's expanding. I'm so glad that I got to have you on and we got to know each other and, and they, yeah, further work ahead. I appreciate it and I would love to do that. So without further ado, Alex for anyone that doesn't know at this point in the game, please let them know where they can find you. It's skeptical and it's with a KO on the end and you'll find it and you'll like it or not like it. And that's the way it goes. Damn right. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the deep share with Alex Icarus and go check out his books, check out all of his shows. And yeah, you will hear from us again. So until then. Absolutely. Take it easy. Fantastic, man. Really enjoyed it.